Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  “Death. You will die.”

  “How extraordinary. I’ll die. Surely the media will find that such a remarkable event, they’ll converge in droves to this establishment and interview you extensively for your views on the matter.”

  “Is that your purpose then, to starve yourself to death?”

  “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is? What would you propose to do about it?”

  “Why, try to talk you out of it, of course.”

  “You say that like it’s the only rational thing to do. Tell me dear, why do you feel so driven to meddle in the one thing above all else that should be left to individual discretion?”

  “Because such a decision is contrary to the human spirit.”

  “Wouldn’t the mere fact that someone chooses such a course negate your argument?”

  “Not when the decision, as it always is, is made by a mind temporarily disturbed by stress, grief, or depression.”

  “Let me see if I have it straight. Whenever the decision to end one’s life is dictated by temporary brain malfunction, you have the right, in fact the moral duty, to intervene. Is that correct?” Kit nodded reluctantly, knowing she was being led down the garden path. “And how can we tell when a brain is malfunctioning? Why, whenever suicide is seriously contemplated. I’m afraid, my dear, that you have never come to grips with why you feel compelled to involve yourself in the most private of acts. You simply are unable to accept a decision that repudiates your own values.”

  “Surely life is always preferable to death.”

  “It all depends on the life you’re talking about.”

  Early in the conversation, Kit had considered showing the old lady some inkblots to get her talking, thinking that a clue as to why she was starving herself might emerge. Now, that didn’t seem like such a good idea. It would be like showing a physicist how a yo-yo works. Kit was not accustomed to being debated so capably by anyone at the home. Most of the clientele had long ago given their brain over to keeping track of their bowel movements and committing to memory every pain and twinge so that they would have something to talk about. It was hard to imagine Minnie doing that. But right now, Kit would have traded Minnie for the worst of them. They were dull but easy to control. Kit was clearly not in control of this interview. Maybe a tough approach would shift things her way.

  “Minnie, earlier I said you would die if you persisted in starving yourself. That wasn’t entirely correct. Because before that happens, I’ll see that Dr. Peeples straps you to your bed and feeds you through a tube in your arm.”

  “That would be illegal,” Minnie said haughtily.

  “It most certainly would not,” Kit replied, trying to sound as though she knew what she was talking about. “Who told you it was illegal?”

  “Mr. Graybar. He was a lawyer before he retired, you know.”

  “Real estate law, I believe.”

  Minnie’s proud demeanor collapsed. “Then he may be misinformed? Oh dear.” The old woman dropped her eyes and the debate was over. “I’d like to go now and think about this.”

  “You do that Minnie. And we’ll talk again next week.”

  After Minnie left, Kit did nothing for a full minute but enjoy the way she had turned the tables on the old girl. Maybe now Minnie would start eating. She wrote optimistic paragraphs in both files and was putting them away when a different interpretation of her discussion with Minnie suggested itself, one that could have disastrous consequences. She added three sentences to what she had already written in Minnie’s folder and underlined them.

  Before leaving, she stopped at Swenson’s office to report the results of her two interviews but found no one in. Eager to get on with her investigation for Broussard, she decided not to seek the woman but instead tore a page from the pink memo pad next to the telephone and jotted down the words, “Extremely important that you read latest entry in Minnie’s file. File is in my desk, K. F.” She put the message on top of a neat stack of papers and placed a stapler on one edge to hold it in place. Then she called Broussard on Swenson’s phone to see what they had learned about the previous day’s victims.

  So far, all they knew for sure was that the name of the dead schoolteacher was Thad Rentdorff, he was single, and he taught at Craigmont High. That was the school she passed every time she went to the home, and it was only fifteen minutes away.

  CHAPTER 4

  Craigmont lay atop the crest of a small hill that paralleled the street. With its Palladian windows and ornamental pink stonework, it was too pretty to be a school. It looked more like a French palace. Inside, classes were changing and the lockered hallway was choked with noisy teenagers. There wasn’t room between them for another notebook, let alone another body, so Kit decided to wait for it all to clear. In two minutes, it was a different place; quiet and empty, like a palace ought to be. She found the administrative office a few doors from the entrance.

  Behind a long wooden counter she saw three desks to the left of a door with the faded word “PRINCIPA” on it, the L having worn off before the other letters. The two most distant desks were facing the far wall, implying that visitors were of no concern to the occupants. The other desk faced forward and it was from here that a woman in a baggy flowered dress and brown Hush Puppies came to inquire as to her business.

  “Mr. Callicot, please,” Kit said, reading the principal’s name off his door.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No. It’s about Mr. Rentdorff.”

  The woman’s mouth pursed. “Ohhh, Mr. Callicot is not very happy with Mr. Rentdorff. He didn’t call in sick and his first class was half over before anybody realized he was absent. And no one answered at his home. Is he ill?”

  Kit hadn’t anticipated that she would be the bearer of the bad news, and she had no intention of telling more people than necessary. “Would you just tell Mr. Callicot I’m here please?”

  The principal’s office was pretty much standard issue, right down to the American flag on a pole in the corner and the unfinished picture of Washington that schools always have on the wall. Behind the desk, a black-and-white picture of a football team in a thin gold frame hung above a lacquered wooden paddle with “The Voice of Reason” stenciled on it. She had time to see all this because Callicot had yet to look up from his work.

  She cleared her throat, and he said, “Just one minute. Please find a seat.” And he still hadn’t looked at her.

  Find a seat. It was such a typical teacher’s phrase that she had to smile. As the seconds ticked by, she began to get the feeling he had hastily pulled out a stack of papers and begun writing on them just so she’d have to wait. A way of setting the pecking order straight. A heartbeat before she expressed a sharp sentiment about his rudeness, he looked up, put his pen in the polished wood holder in front of him, and said, “You have a message from Mr. Rentdorff?”

  It was the first crew cut she had seen in years. With his rough-hewn features and a nose that looked as though it had healed poorly after being broken, he might have stepped right off a marine recruiting poster. We need a few good men with no neck. Probably a former coach, come up through the ranks. “I’m Dr. Franklyn, from the medical examiner’s office.” Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have used the “doctor” designation, but she felt he needed to hear it. “Mr. Rentdorff’s body was found late yesterday at his home.”

  “Guess I can’t fault his excuse for not calling in then, can I?” the man said as calmly as if she’d said Rentdorff had come down with athlete’s foot. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure, but we think it was suicide.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “There was a gun next to the body.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought he’d use a gun. Seemed more the poison type to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A gun is a man’s weapon. Rentdorff was a wimp.” Seeing the expression on Kit’s face, he said, “Well, he was. Always whining about how unmotivated his students were and how p
oorly he was paid. He took every act of nature that interfered in any way with his plans as a personal attack, as though when it rained, it only rained on him. Sometimes it was all I could do to keep from kicking his butt. His students were the rowdiest in school. Kids who were no problem in other classes went wild in his. He had this talent for generating contempt in everyone around him. We’re better off and so’s he for what he did.”

  Look who’s calling someone else contemptuous, Kit thought angrily. He had told her exactly what she wanted to know, but in such an unfeeling way she felt an irrational desire to strike back on Rentdorff’s behalf. Suppressing the desire to taunt Callicot with what she knew about the exam papers, she said, “Did you notice anything different in his behavior recently?”

  “Now that you mention it, he seemed almost normal the last few weeks. I mean I actually saw him smile a couple of times. The change was so obvious that one of the other teachers asked me if I’d given him a big raise. A raise! That’s a laugh. My foot in his behind is the only raise he deserved.”

  This last comment gave her all she needed. It was a classic suicide. A morose, depressed personality suddenly seems to have solved his problems. Then a few weeks later, he kills himself, his apparent cheerfulness arising from the fact that he had not only made the irrevocable decision to take his own life, but had the plan completely worked out down to the exact day he would do it. She thanked Callicot for his time and left, pleased that her first report to Broussard would be so clearly correct.

  *

  John Griffin wiped his forehead with the back of a greasy hand and looked at the clock. The woman whose car he was working on would be back any minute, and he still had to put in the new plugs and figure out what was wrong with the brake lights.

  He looked for his boss, Freddie Watts, and saw him out by the pumps, closing the trunk on a Volkswagen bug. The scene brought back memories of a day six years ago, and he smiled.

  He had known nothing about cars then but had lied and told Freddie he’d worked for two years in a station in Florida. Then the first day on the job, he’d spent ten minutes looking for the radiator on a VW minibus. Boy did he feel stupid when the owner came out of the john and told him it didn’t have a radiator. That and the amount of time he’d spent wandering around cars searching for the gas cap made it pretty clear that he didn’t know anything about being a station attendant. But Freddie had kept him on and gradually taught him to be a passable mechanic. Hell of a guy, that Freddie.

  At the pumps, Freddie carefully ran his squeegee as close to the edge of the windshield as he could. With his fingernail and a paper towel, he worked at a stubborn bit of dried insect until the driver told him to forget it. When he went inside to put the credit slip in the cash register, Griffin leaned into the office. “Hey boss. Can you give me a hand for a few minutes? The owner of this buggy will be here any minute, and I haven’t had a chance to work on her brake lights yet.”

  Freddie pushed the register closed and went into the work bay where he opened the car’s front door and lay across the seat with his head under the dash. When he found the fuse box, he snapped off the plastic cover and rose up for a look. Before he could accomplish anything, his stomach muscles cried out in agony and he dropped back to a more relaxed position.

  As he lay there, he began to think that maybe his body was trying to tell him to give it up. Sell the damn station and retire. Put an end to the dirty fingernails he could never get clean, the scraped knuckles, and the dirt in his hair. The thought of putting all these things behind him was satisfying and he began to sing softly. “… She cut off their tails with the carving knife, three blind mice.” Saliva ran into his throat, and he began to cough. Sitting up, he coughed some more and put his hand to his neck. His mouth was filling again. He was about to say something to Griffin, who was in the office reading about sparkplug settings, when suddenly it didn’t seem important anymore. “Three blind mice.” That was more important.

  He slid out of the car and slammed the hood. Griffin came out of the office just as Freddie backed the car out of the garage and caught the edge of the tire display, sending its contents bouncing and rolling over the pavement.

  With Griffin calling out to him, Freddie headed east, eyes fixed on the road, body rigid. Saliva began to run from one corner of his mouth and he swallowed hard. “… Three blind mice. See how they run.” The song had become everything to him. He needed nothing else. Not that new oscilloscope, not another work bay, not anything. The song was enough.

  At the first intersection, where there was a small knot of people queuing up for the silver-and-blue bus that could be seen above the cars three blocks away, he turned the wheel sharply to the right. Most of the crowd didn’t see him, and the few who did, stood rooted in disbelief as the car jumped the curb. Watts never even felt the impact. “… Did you ever see such a sight in your life?” He swallowed hard, and more saliva came.

  He guided the vehicle back onto the street and proceeded east. A cabbie, unhappy with the way he ignored the stop sign at the Huey P. Long Bridge interchange, flashed him the bird. By the time he was well onto the bridge, the scleras of both eyes had become pale pink as a curtain of blood spread over them.

  “… Three blind mice.” Cars going in the opposite direction passed without incident, but when a school bus appeared in the oncoming lane, Watts aimed his car directly at it. The driver saw what was happening and swerved to the left. Freddie tore out the guardrail on one side a fraction of a second before the school bus went through on the other. The bus hit the water upside down. Freddie’s car fell without flipping, and when it hit, his head snapped forward, displacing his first two cervical vertebrae just far enough to sever his spinal cord.

  *

  “Cause of death was a through-and-through gunshot wound that entered on the right side, penetrated both ventricles, and exited on the left,” Broussard said into the telephone.

  While he talked, Kit sat clutching her reports on the two cases she had been assigned, grateful for the delay, however brief, of the moment she would have to let go of them. Trying to relax, she studied the picture on the wall behind Broussard’s desk. The sepia photograph of a negligee-clad young woman seated at a vanity wasn’t particularly attractive, and she wondered why he’d chosen it. Then she saw for herself. Hidden in the figure, so that it wasn’t apparent at first, was a leering human skull.

  “By itself the second bullet would not have caused death… That’s right… Exactly… Anytime.” Broussard hung up and scrabbled for a lemon ball in the glass fishbowl near his desk calendar. With the candy tucked safely into his cheek, he said, “Let’s see what you’ve got for me.”

  She handed the two files across the desk and waited nervously while he read them. He rolled the lemon ball from side to side in his mouth and nodded while reading her report on the schoolteacher. He winked at her when he put that file down and picked up the other. He rolled the lemon candy but did not nod at the contents of the second file. And why should he? She had followed every lead the police had given her and some they hadn’t. She had talked to relatives, employers, neighbors, and friends, and still could not find even a hint of a suicidal personality in Barry Hollins. She knew that Broussard was convinced it was a case of murder-suicide, and she was more than a little upset that she had not been able to verify that. Thus, as he read the second report with no expression on his face, she felt he was trying hard not to show his disappointment.

  Finally, he put the report down and said, “Babe Ruth struck out over thirteen hundred times. But nobody remembers that. They only remember that he was the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball. Bein’ one for two at this stage of your career is not bad.”

  Kit gave him a wan smile and nodded weakly. Having always found sports analogies juvenile, she found no solace in this one. “If no one knows how many times Babe Ruth struck out, how do you know it?” she said.

  “I read it in a book. Now stop feelin’ sorry for yourself. You made a thoroug
h investigation and that’s all anyone could ask. Go on home and forget it.”

  But she couldn’t forget it, and it was still on her mind when she put the key in the door of her town house. If he really thought she hadn’t screwed up, he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to make her feel better.

  As the door opened, a small dog she had never seen before dashed past her legs and was inside before she was. He sat up and examined her with his head tilted to one side. Kit’s heart melted at the sight of him and she forgave him instantly for barging in uninvited. He barked sharply three times in greeting, and she bent to scratch his head.

  Before she could touch the gray curls that hung over his brown eyes, he darted away and began to race around the room. Each time he encountered it, he went onto the sofa instead of around it. Sitting up was cute, scrambling over the furniture was not. With a piece of ham from the refrigerator held close to the floor, she coaxed him from his game and sent him charging through the open door by flinging the meat into the parking lot.

  Sighing in relief, she shut the door, put her back against it, and closed her eyes. A sharp kick of each foot sent her shoes flying. The first message on her answering machine was from David: “I’m sorry for what I said the other night at dinner. I really do have an explanation. Give me a call, will you? And we’ll talk it over.”

  The next voice was Broussard’s. “If you’re still interested in what it’s like in the field, meet me at the foot of the Huey P. Long Bridge as soon as you can.”

  When leaving, she opened the front door just a crack and peeked through it. There was no sign of the little dog. Fearing that he might be hiding close by, she slipped out quickly through the smallest possible opening.

  It was four-fifteen and South Claiborne was beginning to fill with rush-hour traffic. Thirty minutes later and she would have been hopelessly mired in it. A half mile from the bridge, traffic came almost to a standstill as drivers and passengers twisted in their seats to see why there were three ambulances at the Carrolton intersection. Kit had no better luck than anyone else at seeing through the large crowd that had gathered.