“Not much. Seems that our esteemed colleague isn’t swayed by statistics.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. He’s a fine fellow in many respects and I’d stack him up against the best medical examiners in the country… when he’s the one with the hypothesis. But he’s got a blind spot for other people’s ideas. If you’re the one to suggest a possibility, it takes twice the evidence to convince him than it would if he had the idea. It’s a problem he’s well aware of. That’s why he won’t talk to anyone about a scene until he’s examined it himself. He doesn’t do it willfully, it’s just something he can’t help. Let him chew on it awhile. That’s what I do.”
“Would it be possible to check with some other cities to see if they’re having similar experiences? If they are, that would be more proof that there’s a real phenomenon taking place.”
“I know the homicide files are computerized in L.A., New York, and Boston, so it should be an easy matter to get their data. I’ll send the letters off this afternoon. Ought to have an answer in a week, two at the most.”
“Have you got a hematology book I could borrow?”
“Sure.”
Alone in her office, Kit looked up “Blood Groups” in the index of Franks’s book and turned to the appropriate page. A small table there showed the percent distribution of each of the major blood groups in different races. While there were minor racial differences in the distribution of the four primary blood types, the bottom line was that A and 0, the two types found in eighty-five percent of the population, occurred in nearly equal numbers.
She closed the book, convinced that the absence of blood type A in the recent rash of murder-suicides could not be a random event. She got Franks to pull the files on all cases the computer had categorized as probable suicides for the last three years and began reviewing them. Since they included copies of the police reports, there was a fair amount in each file to read. If these cases were related in some way, as she felt sure they were, there must be a clue somewhere in the files.
Three hours later, with all the cases reviewed, she still had not found the thread she was searching for, and she had begun to think that maybe none existed. There was a knock on the door and Broussard leaned in. “The police forensic lab is havin’ an open house to show off their new mass spec. Let’s walk over and see if they’ve got anything good to eat.”
Weary of the files and pleased that he had thought of her, Kit pushed her chair back and stood up. “What’s a mass spec?”
He was still trying to describe it as they left the hospital’s cool interior and set off down the hot sidewalk toward the Criminal Justice Center two blocks over on LaSalle. She had just about decided that he wasn’t too clear himself on the nature of the thing when an apparition stumbled out of an alley and turned to face them. He was without shoes or socks, and a wide expanse of shirtless skin showed from between the lapels of his gaping sport coat. One hand held a whiskey bottle loosely by its neck, the other was all that was holding his pants up. He glared at her and Kit’s steps slowed.
“Tell me I’m imagining this and he isn’t really there,” she breathed.
Broussard put his hand in the small of her back and urged her on. “Just act like you don’t see him.”
She pretended to look at the cars in the street, the Coppertone billboard on the roof of the Mutual building two blocks ahead, and the litter in the gutter. But she was actually watching him. As they neared, he tensed and she was sure he was about to spring; instead, he abruptly turned and shuffled back into the alley.
She sighed with relief.
“Local color,” Broussard said.
The Justice Center extended over a square city block. It housed the city and parish courts and attorneys, the holding cells for prisoners facing arraignment, and the central offices of the city police, including the forensic division. Completed a year earlier, it still looked fresh and new from the sidewalk. Inside, it was aging rapidly. The tall weeping figs in their washed-gravel containers showed the yellowing evidence of continuing neglect, and cups and papers littered the soil around their roots. To the left of the elevator, there was a long meandering slash in the wall covering, and on the right, an obscenity, originally written in lipstick now cleaned away, was still legible.
Forensics was on the sixth floor where, under a picture of a microscope tipping the scales of justice in the favor of law and order, they had set up a long table covered with a white cloth. From the color of the contents of the crystal bowl on each end, there were two kinds of punch—red and yellow. A long plate of finger sandwiches flanked by silver bowls of nuts rounded out the consumable part of the festivities. The punch was being dispensed by a young woman with cover-girl eyes and a wide red mouth.
Suddenly everything disappeared in a blinding light. When it cleared, there was a grinning mug in its place.
“Lord-a-mighty, Raymond,” Broussard said. “Give somebody a warnin’ why don’t you.”
“Candid shots are always the best,” the grinning face said. “When people know they’re gonna have their picture made, they get tense and don’t look natural.”
The man with the camera appeared to be in his early fifties. He had a bland flat face with the eyes right on the surface. Kit recognized him as the photographer at the Hollins and Watts cases. He turned to her and said, “I’m Ray Jamison. Haven’t I seen you a couple of times in the field?”
Kit introduced herself and said, “I was at the fire in Algiers and I was there when they pulled that car out of the river a few days ago.”
“So what are you? Medical student? Writer? M.E.-in-training? Lady with an odd hobby?”
“Would-be suicide investigator.”
“Why do you say, ’would-be’?”
“There’s Phillip,” Broussard said, touching Kit’s arm. “I’ll be over there with him.” He patted the photographer on the shoulder. “Good seein’ you, Ray.”
“So why’d you say, ’would-be’?” Jamison asked again.
Kit wished she’d been less candid. She had no intention of discussing her career problems with someone she’d just met.
“I’m new at it. That’s all I meant.”
“No, I think there’s more to it,” Jamison said slyly.
She suppressed the impulse to tell him to mind his own business and instead took advantage of his inability to see Broussard from where he stood.
“Oh, sorry, Dr. Broussard wants me. Nice to meet you.”
At her approach, Phil Gatlin paused in mid-sentence.
“Go on with what you were saying,” Kit said.
“I was just asking Andy why forensics sends out Christmas cards. I can understand why businesses do it, but why does forensics do it? They afraid I’ll take my ballistics work to another firm?”
Before either of them could reply, they were joined by an angular woman in a tailored gray suit that she wore over a white shirt and tie. Her short hair was nearly the same color as her horn-rimmed glasses. She had probably never been pretty.
“So glad you all could come,” she said.
According to Broussard, she was Beverly Delong, director of the whole forensic division.
“Where’s the new machine?” Gatlin said.
A crimson blotch appeared on the woman’s neck and spread upward to her face. Her eyes blazed with indignation. “Fields are plowed by machines,” she said. “A mass spectrometer is a scientific instrument!”
Gatlin drained his glass and set it on the table. “If I wasn’t afraid you’d quit sending me a Christmas card, I’d tell you what you could do with your instrument,” he said, and headed for the stairs.
“Peasant,” Delong said under her breath.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Broussard said. “He’s havin’ personal problems.”
Delong made some noises that presumably meant she was offended, then said, “Actually his question about the new instrument was a good one. We should see it now.” She tapped on a punch bowl with a knife from the table
. “May I have your attention everyone.”
The murmur of conversation stopped.
“If you’ll all follow me, I’ll show you the reason for this celebration.”
Kit stopped to snatch a sandwich and brought up the rear of the small group following Delong down the hall. They convened in a simple room that contained a long gray rectangular object slightly taller than anyone present. It had an instrument panel with a few dials and switches and a TV screen above a writing surface. It looked far less complex than Kit had expected.
Jamison took a few pictures of it, then turned his camera on the people jammed in the doorway. Delong told what the instrument could do, how fast it could do it, and how much it had cost. When she asked for questions, a hand went up in the front.
“How do you justify spending that kind of money on new equipment when our salaries are so far below the national average?”
Delong looked surprised and started to sputter. Finally, when she was able to put a complete sentence together, she said, “Al, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss that.”
“Why not?” the voice said.
An embarrassed silence filled the room as the crowd waited for the little drama to play out. Kit went up on her toes to get a look at the person who had asked the question, but was thwarted by Broussard’s back.
“I’d be happy to discuss the matter with you later in my office,” Delong said through a clenched jaw. Shifting to a happy tone, she said, “Thank you all for coming. Do stay and help us finish the refreshments.”
The crowd filtered back to the food and Kit drew Broussard aside. “Who asked the pointed question?”
“Al Vogel. He’s the forensic fabric expert.”
“For how much longer, I wonder?”
“Oh, he’s too good to fire. That’s him over there.” He nodded toward a dark-complexioned man in a white lab coat filling his plate from the refreshment table. Kit was surprised to see that she recognized the face. It was the fellow who had been sitting behind David at the Rialto. And she felt now the same interest she had then.
“Well that was certainly an inexcusable performance,” a breathless voice said from over Kit’s shoulder.
Broussard introduced her to Gil Bertram, forensic expert on glass fragments and cigarette butts.
He was a slight man whose face was mostly cheekbones. From beneath a mustache that looked as though he had glued a caterpillar on his lip, a thin cigar protruded from a wide fishlike mouth. He removed the cigar from between his lips and held it in one hand while supporting his elbow with the other. “It’s not that I don’t agree with the point he made,” Bertram said. “It’s just the way he went about it. Beverly was exactly right. Dirty linen should be washed in private, not flapped in a guest’s face. Please don’t think too badly of us, will you?”
Bertram seemed so concerned that Kit assured him she would put the matter out of her mind. Broussard said something similar and Bertram floated off, presumably to extract the same pledge from others.
“And they really solve crimes here?” Kit said.
“Remember the promise you just made,” Broussard cautioned.
“Sorry.”
From out of the corner of her eye, Kit saw Vogel coming their way.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Bertram thought I was out of line in there.”
“Hello Al,” Broussard said. “Actually, he thought you had a good point.”
Vogel looked at Kit and jerked his head in Broussard’s direction. “Ever the diplomat. That’s why everyone loves the man. Hi, Al Vogel, dissident,” he said, offering Kit his hand.
Vogel’s grip was firm and warm. He held her hand a trifle longer than was necessary and their eyes locked. His were a compelling pale blue that made her feel that she was on a high mountain looking into a clear limitless sky.
“We’ve met somewhere,” he said, releasing her hand.
“We didn’t actually meet. I saw you in the Rialto about a week ago.”
“Of course. You were wearing a black dress with white pinstripes.”
Flattered that he remembered her so well, she looked at Broussard. “Here’s someone else with an eye for detail.”
After learning her name and where she fit in, Vogel said, “Well, I guess I’ll have to be real careful what I say, you being a psychologist and all. Wouldn’t want you to learn all my secrets.”
“People always seem to feel that way when they find out what I do,” Kit said. “I think I’ll start saying I’m a dog groomer.”
“You strike me as someone who couldn’t shade the truth even a little.”
“You’re probably right.”
Behind him, Beverly Delong was staring coldly at Vogel’s back. She strode over and touched him lightly on the shoulder. “May I speak with you privately?” she asked.
Recognizing the voice, Vogel made an “oh-oh” expression for Kit’s benefit and said, “I’d like that, Beverly.”
He excused himself and followed Delong to an unoccupied corner of the room where, from the look of it, he was getting a good dressing down.
“Well,” Broussard said, “we’ve eaten their food… You tried it, didn’t you?” Kit nodded. “We’ve seen them fight and we’ve looked at their instrument. So I’d say we’ve gotten our money’s worth.”
The open house had briefly taken Kit’s mind off the pile of cases on her desk. Alone at home that night, she thought about them some more but could come up with nothing new. And that’s where the matter stayed for several days, a time during which Broussard assigned her an additional case that turned out to be a classic textbook suicide much like the schoolteacher, and during which David called every night to apologize, calls that she let her answering machine handle even though she was home.
*
On the morning of the fourth day, in a section of the city that never appeared on tourist brochures and never heard the clatter of horse-drawn sight-seeing carriages, Leon Washington and his friend “Burnt Larry” Brown were going fishing. Leon, a former LSU tackle, pulled up in front of Burnt Larry’s weathered gray shack and honked three times. The screen door opened and a slightly built man many years Leon’s junior, and hugging a bamboo thicket of cane poles, fought his way free of the house.
“Damn, you sure you got enough poles there,” Leon called out.
“Fishin’ license don’t say nothin’ ’bout how many poles you can put in the water,” Burnt Larry said with a lopsided grin. The other side of his face was marred by burn scars that looked like pink corrugated tin.
“Say what? If right now I gave you my license, you’d still only have one.”
Larry put his poles and cricket box in the back and slid onto the dirty blue vinyl front seat. “You don’t have to gimme your license,” he said. “Just show it to me.” They both laughed as Leon pulled away from the curb.
“Say man, where’d you get the wheels?” Burnt Larry asked.
“Police auction. It was in some kinda accident, but it runs pretty good.”
The engine backfired as Burnt Larry fiddled with the radio dials.
“It don’t work,” Leon said.
“How about the AC?” Larry asked, flipping switches and pulling levers.
“Dunno. Never tried it.”
“Damn! I bet you never even looked to see if it had a motor before you bought it.” Leon said nothing. Larry chuckled and poked him in the ribs. “You didn’t. You didn’t. I knew it.” While Larry slapped his hands together in glee and chuckled some more, Leon slid his free hand along the back of the seat and cuffed his friend playfully on the head. Larry slumped in the seat as though knocked unconscious, then sat up and put his hand over the air-conditioning duct. “Roll up your window. I think the AC is workin’.” Larry cranked up the window on his side and the plastic knob came off in his hand. “How much you pay for this thing?” he asked.
Leon rolled up his window and said, “You think anybody’d pick up a smartass hitchhiker carryin’ a bunch of cane poles?”
Leon put his hand out and tested the air-conditioner vent on his side. “Say, this is all right. It’s really puttin’ out.”
He pulled up at the stop sign at the corner of Chelsea and Highway 39, looked both ways, and eased out fifty yards in front of a Colonial bread truck. When he accelerated, a great billow of gray smoke rolled out of the exhaust and drifted over the truck.
With lips compressed into a thin line, the driver of the truck, a man who’d once given ten dollars to the Sierra Club, glanced at the car ahead, wishing he could wrap the offending tail pipe around the owner’s neck.
Leon had never owned a car without a visible exhaust, so it didn’t bother him.
The road ran parallel to the Louisiana-Southern railroad tracks and there was a very long train about a half-mile behind them. Up ahead, the road passed over the tracks. “Goose it, man,” Larry said, jerking his thumb toward the train when Leon looked his way.
When they were thirty yards from the crossing, bells began to clang and a black- and white-striped wooden arm descended to block the road. “Shit,” Larry said. “If that dude ahead of us wasn’t such a candy ass, we both coulda made it. Must be somethin’ wrong with that gate. Hell, it’ll be five minutes before that train gets here.”
“You want a…” Leon hesitated, losing for a moment what he was about to say. “You want some…”
“Say what?”
“You want a beer?”
“Sure, you got some?”
“In the trunk,” Leon said, handing Larry the key.
Larry went around to the back of the car and promptly dropped the keys. Inside the bread truck, which was right behind Leon’s car, the driver wondered what was going on.
Leon’s thoughts had shifted from beer to his mother, dead now, five years. How he missed her! Why he could almost hear her voice… no, he could hear it, singing the tune that had always made him laugh when he was little. All about ducks and chickens and cows. And she used to tickle him under the chin when she made the animal sounds. He liked that part best. “Here a chick, there a chick…” He laughed, and as he did, a spray of saliva speckled the steering wheel.
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