by Tami Hoag
He waited for an answer, barely breathing, listening for any sound of movement inside the house. Nothing. He banged on the door again. “Sheriff’s Office!”
Nothing.
He tipped his head at Stokes and murmured, “Go around. See what you can see.”
Stokes ducked past the window and slipped over the porch railing, disappearing around the side of the building. He came back half a minute later and peered up at Nick through the railing.
“Somebody’s back in the kitchen cooking breakfast.”
“What?”
Stokes shrugged. “If I’m lying, I’m dying. There’s a dude in the kitchen cooking breakfast.”
Nick banged on the door a third time, irritated. “Sheriff’s Office! Open the damn door!”
Stokes jogged back down the side of the house and came back, shaking his head. “He ain’t coming.”
“What the hell?”
Temper snapping, Nick jogged down off the porch and made his way to the back of the house, Stokes on his heels. A matte black jacked-up four-by-four truck sat parked in front of a shed that looked about to fall over. The back porch was crowded with junk and garbage cans. A rat leapt off into the weeds, squealing as Nick pounded up the steps and banged on the back door.
“Sheriff’s Office! Come to the goddamn door!”
He caught a glimpse of the guy through the window. He looked on the hard side of middle age with the start of a potbelly stretching a dingy wife-beater. A cigarette dangled from his lips.
Nick grabbed his badge on the ball chain that hung around his neck and held it up in his fist, tapping it hard on the window. “Come to the door! I need a word with you, sir!”
The man startled then backed away, out of sight.
Nick glanced at his partner. “What the fuck is with this guy?”
Stokes shrugged, taking his position at the far side of the door, banging into a rusty barbecue grill.
Nick flexed his hand and repositioned it on his Glock, ready for whatever might come through the door.
They waited. Just when he was about to tell Stokes to go cover the front door, the back door finally opened.
“Put your hands where I can see them and come out the house!” Nick ordered.
“I ain’t done nothing! Why the hell you after me?” the man said loudly as he pushed open the screen door with his hip and stepped out with his hands in the air.
Nick put him in his late fifties, early sixties. He had a head of thick but receding silver hair that grew sparse on the right side of his skull where he had been severely burned. The ear had been melted down to a crescent-shaped nub of cartilage. The flesh around it and down the side of his neck was red and shiny, roped with keloid scars. The tightness in the skin pulled down at the corner of his right eye and at the corner of his mouth—something he tried to hide with a mustache and goatee.
“Roddie Perez?” Stokes said uncertainly, lowering his weapon.
Perez scowled at him, emphasizing the length of his lined, weathered face. His eyes were a bright, crystalline blue. He looked down his considerable nose at Stokes. “What? You worked your way through ever’body in the parish and come back to trump up some more charges on me?”
“Nope,” Stokes said. “Just your dumb luck, Roddie—me knocking on your door.”
“You know him?” Nick asked, stepping forward.
“Yep. I helped Roddie here take a vacation on the state back in the day when I was a dope cop,” Stokes said. “What was it? I get my scumbag drug dealers mixed up. You were cooking up crack cocaine—or was it meth?”
“It wadn’t nothing,” Perez said belligerently. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Says ninety-nine percent of dirtbag felons,” Stokes pointed out.
“Why you didn’t come to the door?” Nick asked irritably. He lowered his weapon but didn’t put it away. “We been knocking for five minutes. What took you so long coming out? You cooking drugs in there now? You had to go flush something?”
Perez turned toward him. “Cooking my breakfast,” he growled, his voice low and rough with the corrosion of five decades of cigarettes. “I didn’t hear no knocking. I’m deaf in one ear and can’t hear out the other.” He turned so Nick could see his left ear and his hearing aid. “I had to put my ear trumpet in. See?”
“What happened to you?”
“Explosion at work, cleaning chemical tanks at Tri-Star refinery.”
“Freebasing cocaine, more like,” Stokes said.
“I don’t need to listen to you running your mouth like a bad case of diarrhea,” Perez said. “And I sure as hell got nothing to say to you.”
He gave Nick the stink eye. “Nor you, either, whoever you are. I’m gonna have my breakfast. Y’all can just go piss up a rope.”
“Entertaining as that might be, I need to ask you some questions about your neighbor,” Nick said. “You can eat your breakfast and talk, or we can take a ride to the law enforcement center and you can talk to us there. Your choice. Wait long enough, and I’ll choose for you.”
Perez looked from one to the other and back, his mouth turning down in a hard horseshoe of a frown.
“Is there some reason you don’t want us in your house?” Nick asked. “Something in there you don’t want us to see? You might as well know I’m coming back out here with a warrant either way.”
“You got no probable cause to come in my house,” Perez challenged.
Nick arched a brow. “Really? Are you a lawyer now? Did you take up the law at the University of Angola Penitentiary?” he asked sarcastically. “I don’t know many ex-con lawyers who spend their free time cleaning out chemical tanks at the oil refinery.”
Perez narrowed his eyes and then sucked a wad of mucus out of his sinuses with a rude noise and spat on the rotting porch deck in the general direction of Nick’s boots.
“There was a crime committed at your neighbor’s house last night, and there’s blood all over your front door,” Nick said. “Me, I don’t even have to ask you nice. I could put you in cuffs right now. I got half a mind to.”
“You better think twice, Roddie,” Stokes cautioned. “Nicky, he’s cranky in the morning without his coffee.”
“Then I might as well have my egg scramble then, hadn’t I?” Perez grumbled.
They went into the kitchen that smelled of sour garbage and boudin sausage. Perez picked up his smoldering cigarette in one hand and a spatula in the other. He stirred his egg scramble in a cast-iron skillet—eggs and sausage and green peppers and onions, all of it flecked with the black crud from a pan that hadn’t been properly cleaned.
Nick’s upper lip curled in distaste as he took in the state of the place. He couldn’t tolerate a dirty kitchen. He saw it as a reflection of a man’s inner life. Chaos and filth were the interior of Roddie Perez.
“You haven’t asked what happened, Roddie,” he said, prowling the room like a restless panther, taking in every grungy detail—the film of grease on the cabinets, the dirty linoleum floor. The counters were piled with dirty dishes and canned foods, half a loaf of Evangeline Maid bread left open. A wicked-looking butcher’s knife lay on a cutting board along with the remains of a green pepper and the fatty aftermath of cutting up the sausage.
“You haven’t said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s blood on my front door? How’d that get there?’ Is that because you already know? Or are you just a strangely uncurious man?”
Perez dumped his breakfast onto a plate and ditched his cigarette butt in the skillet. “I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it,” he said, turning around to face them. “Maybe after you introduce yourself.”
“Me?” Nick stepped close enough that Perez had to lift his plate and pull it tight up against his chest. “I’m your worst fucking nightmare if you don’t start to answer some questions. That’s who I am.”
Pere
z glanced at Stokes as he fell into a chair at a tiny kitchen table layers deep in clutter, making himself at home. He set his hat toward the back of his head at a jaunty angle.
“How well do you know your neighbor—Genevieve Gauthier?” Stokes asked, flipping open the cover of a Penthouse magazine.
“Don’t know her. Never heard of her.”
Nick took a step back to lessen the pressure and crossed his arms, settling in. “You got a beautiful young woman living next door to you, and you would have us believe you have never seen her?”
Perez shrugged and forked up some eggs.
“What about the little boy?” Nick asked.
“What boy?”
“You’re keeping your nose clean, Roddie,” Stokes said. He tossed the magazine aside and helped himself to an open bag of Manda’s Hot & Spicy Pork Cracklins. “You got no desire to see the inside of a prison again.”
“I done chopped enough sugarcane for the state of Lou’siana to last me a lifetime,” Perez said. “I ain’t going back to the Farm.”
“Where were you last night between, say, ten and two this morning?” Nick asked. He scowled at Stokes as he offered the bag of cracklins.
“Right here at home in my own bed,” Perez said.
“You didn’t see anything going on next door?”
“I wadn’t looking. Can’t see that house from this one, anyway.”
“You didn’t hear anything?” Nick said, glancing out the window to confirm Perez’s words. Through the curtain of trees and scrub, he could see a bit of yellow siding, a glimpse of a window toward the back of the house.
“What would I hear? I take my hearing aid out to sleep.”
“So you didn’t hear anyone banging on your door in the middle of the night?”
“I didn’t hear you banging on my door just now, and I’m wide awake.”
“And you didn’t hear Sheriff’s Office cars rolling in there with sirens screaming?” Nick asked, moving again.
Eyes narrowed, Perez watched him as he chewed his breakfast and swallowed. “I’m beginning to think you’re the deaf one here, Detective Whoever You Are. No. I didn’t hear no sirens. I was A-SLEEP!”
Nick looked down into the open trash can beside the stove, his gaze zooming in on a wad of paper towels half hidden by the slimy plastic wrap from the sausage—Comeaux’s Cajun Wild Pork Boudin.
“You have an accident, Roddie?” he asked.
“What?”
“There’s bloody towels in this trash you seem never to remove from the place where you prepare your food,” he said with disgust. “Where’d this blood come from?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nick took a step toward him. “Let me see your hands.”
“Why?”
“Let me see your hands.”
“I don’t have to show you nothing,” Perez said belligerently. “I know my rights.”
His rights. The image of the dead boy flashed through Nick’s brain. This piece of shit had rights, but a seven-year-old innocent child was dead. His temper snapped like a dry twig. He snatched the plate out of Perez’s hands and flung it aside like a Frisbee. It smashed as it hit the wall and fell to the floor.
“Show me your goddamn hands!” he shouted, lunging at the man.
Perez leaned back, trapped against the counter, holding his hands up in front of him, yelling, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m half past sick of your shit, that’s what! I been up all night looking at a dead child, and you’re gonna stand here giving me a fucking attitude? The hell!”
Perez looked to Stokes, his eyes wide. “Do something!”
Stokes dug another cracklin out of the bag and munched on it, unconcerned. “I ain’t your friend, Roddie. What do I care if Nicky here beats the ever-loving shit out of you? No doubt you have it coming for one reason or another.”
He got up lazily and tossed the bag on the table, making a face. “These cracklins are stale, man.”
He sounded far away, like a voice from another room. Nick’s attention was focused on Perez’s hands—weathered and battered and cut—a couple of old cuts, a couple of fresher cuts on both hands.
It was common for the hand to slip on the knife during a stabbing, common for assailants to cut themselves—often badly. Were any of these cuts fresh enough? Deep enough?
“How’d you get those cuts?” he asked, looking the con hard in his crystal-blue eyes.
“Working with sheet metal!” Perez said indignantly. “I didn’t kill no child!”
It might have been a plausible excuse. Or not. If he had attacked the Gauthier boy and cut himself in the process, his blood would be at the scene—provided Kemp hadn’t fucked up the collection of it. His blood would be mingled in the blood on the front door as well.
Without a word, Nick stepped back and turned, leaving the room.
“Where’s he goin’?” Perez asked.
Stokes shrugged as Nick stalked past.
“Where you goin’?” Perez called after him. “You can get your goddamn warrant before you look through my house!”
Nick paid no attention. The house was laid out the same as the Gauthier floor plan. From the kitchen he went past a dining table heaped with unfolded laundry and unopened mail. A laptop computer sat open on one end of the table. Beyond the dining area was a ratty-looking brown plaid couch and a fancy black leather reclining massage chair. A huge new flat-screen television took up most of one wall.
These things Nick noted in passing as he looked for any sign of blood inside the house. If Perez had come into the house bleeding, he might have touched the inside frame of the door. He might have touched the light switch or dripped blood on the floor.
He pulled the bottom of his T-shirt out of his pants and used it to protect the doorknob as he turned it and pulled the door open to scrutinize both sides and the edge. He saw nothing other than the blood smears on the outside of the door. No bloody hand had gripped the edge of the door to open it or grabbed hold of the interior door trim. The light switch and the switch plate cover on the wall inside the door were grimy with dirty fingerprints, but there was no visible blood.
All he had for his warrant was blood on the outside of the door. The victim had made no mention of Roddie Perez, either explicitly or implicitly at this point. It looked like she had come here in search of help and, finding none, had continued on down the road. Nick didn’t like the idea of Roddie Perez, a known felon with a history as a drug dealer, living next door to a murder scene, but there was no line on the search warrant affidavit for “I don’t like this guy.” He needed facts, not assumptions. Other than some paper towels in the garbage that may or may not have had blood on them, he had seen nothing inside the house to support his request for a warrant.
He had outfoxed himself pressing to come inside—a calculated risk that would now weigh against him. Swallowing back his frustration, he turned and faced the room. Perez had seated himself at the table and closed the laptop. Nick made a mental note of it but said nothing. He would now go to the office, write the affidavit, spend hours trying to get a judge to sign it—and possibly fail. The idea didn’t sit well.
Perez laughed out loud and slapped a big hand on the table. “You got nothing, Detective X!” He looked from Nick to Stokes and back. “Fuck y’all. And get out my house before I sic my lawyer on you!”
Nick walked over to the table, spun a chair around on one leg, and straddled it, resting his forearms on the back. He stared hard into the eyes of Roddie Perez.
“Are you listening to me, Roddie?” he asked. “Can you hear me all right? You with your bad ear and all? Do you hear me right now?”
Perez sobered, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. “I hear you fine,” he said, his voice a low growl.
“Good,” Nick said, nodding. “The name is F
ourcade,” he said. “You remember that, Roddie. Because if I find so much as a nose hair linking you to this murder—if I find so much as a flake of your dead skin at this murder scene—I will personally drive you right up to the gates of hell and deliver you to the devil, myself. Are we clear on that? Roddie?”
“Like crystal,” Perez said.
“Très bien,” Nick murmured on a sigh, rising. “Now, me, I’m gonna collect the evidence off your front door, then I’m gonna go visit Ms. Gauthier in the hospital, and see what she has to say about you, Roddie. Better hope for your sake you been a good neighbor.”
Perez said nothing.
“Don’t buy any green bananas, Roddie,” Stokes said as they started for the door. “If we find out you put a step wrong here, you’ll be a guest of the parish before you can eat them.”
Perez flipped them off with both hands as they walked out the door.
NINE
Where’s Papa?”
Annie glanced at her son in the back seat via the rearview mirror. Strapped into his booster seat, he was dressed for school in shorts and a purple polo shirt with a dancing alligator embroidered on it. He was a little carbon copy of his father, right down to the haircut—close-cropped on the sides, slightly longer on top with a razor-sharp part on the left. Going to the barbershop had become a monthly father-son ritual that was followed by lunch at Madame Collette’s diner.
“Papa’s working,” Annie said.
“Is he helping people?” Justin asked, walking his Captain America action figure along the car door.
“Yep.”
“We didn’t get to do our tai chi.”
“Not this morning.”
It was Nick’s habit to rise before the sun to meditate and work through his tai chi ritual to center himself. On days when Justin got up early enough, Nick included him in a few final easy steps at the end of the routine, patiently teaching his son the discipline of the martial art, which always ended with the two of them bowing to each other with great ceremony.
The sight of them on the front lawn as the sun came up, the mists rising off the bayou in the background, touched Annie’s heart in an especially tender place. She had never known her father. She had no idea who he was. Marie Broussard had taken that secret with her to her grave. Annie had never danced on top of her father’s shoes or squealed with delight as he tossed her up into the air. Uncle Sos had filled that void in her life, but as much as she loved him, it wasn’t quite the same thing as she had imagined having a real father would be. To watch her own child forge that bond with his father filled her with an overwhelming rush of love underscored by a faint ghostlike longing.