Sleeping With the Crawfish

by D. J. Donaldson

  “Not that I’m interested in defending them,” Kit said, “but I can sort of see it from their perspective. Most of the people at Agrilabs didn’t know what was happening behind the scenes. And Woodley sure wasn’t going to put me in a sensitive position. I suppose Tabor felt safe with me because even if I did manage to capture an incriminating conversation from Woodley’s phone, I didn’t have any way to play it back.”

  “Yeah, and look what happened,” Gatlin said. “It was just greed. Instead of using their heads and closing down when all the signs pointed in that direction, they just couldn’t do it.”

  “Did you know Tabor had a daughter?” Kit asked. “He showed me her picture at the firing range—a beautiful kid, deaf from birth. And now her father is going to prison, maybe worse. She didn’t do anything wrong, but she has to pay, too.”

  “The ripples created by evil acts touch many shores,” Broussard said.

  Gatlin looked at Broussard and blinked. He pointed at him with his chili spoon. “That’s just what I was gonna say.”

  “Anybody tell you how the governor got involved?” Broussard asked.

  “He and Woodley used to be fraternity brothers in college. And remember, we’re talking a billion dollars.”

  “Who owns the mansion where they held that last meeting?” Kit asked.

  “A guy who also owns a big local car dealership,” Gatlin said. “Used to be a major supporter of the governor until our esteemed leader did some things the guy didn’t like. Then he turned on him. He was the one providing a lot of the funding for Woodley’s research.”

  “Sounds like he has enough money that he didn’t need to be involved with those miscreants,” Kit said.

  “Had money,” Gatlin said. “He recently lost a lot of it on some bad investments, so he was ripe for picking.”

  “What’s happening with the sheriff in Courville?” Kit asked.

  “Probably heading for a vacation at Angola.”

  Broussard shook his head at what people will do for money. “You question them about Anthony Hunter? I’ll bet he discovered the same substance Woodley did.”

  “He did. So . . .” Gatlin drew his index finger across his neck. “That’s the kind of thing that’d happen to me. If I discovered something that could make me rich, it’d be about two days before half the city stumbled onto the same idea.”

  “But that’s the way science works,” Broussard said. “When the database reaches a critical mass, the next step becomes almost inevitable, which means simultaneous discoveries are common.”

  “I guess that explains why Woodley recruited somebody at NIH to watch out for competition and alert them,” Gatlin said.

  “Who was that guy?” Broussard asked. “Another fraternity brother?”

  “Just someone Woodley knew. The story they told him was that all he had to do was lose the grant application so Hunter would miss one grant cycle. They didn’t tell him Hunter was to be killed. When they did it, they tried to make it look like a heart attack so there’d be no investigation of the death. In addition to all the other advantages of that, the guy at NIH wouldn’t get nervous.”

  “Didn’t he think Hunter’s death was quite a coincidence?” Kit observed. “Dying like that right after being brought to the group’s attention.”

  “He wanted to believe it was just that, a coincidence,” Gatlin said. “And the way it was done made that possible. Then Andy proved it was murder.”

  “So everything began to unravel,” Kit said.

  Gatlin sucked his teeth. “That billion dollars made everyone want to hold it together.”

  “The whole enterprise was doomed from the start,” Broussard said. “I’m surprised they couldn’t see that.”

  “What do you mean?” Kit said.

  “Too many people involved,” Gatlin replied, enjoying the opportunity to supply Broussard’s punch line. “Bags of crap that big always spring a leak.”

  “But I think we can be proud of ourselves for the role we played in bringin’ ’em down,” Broussard said. “A real team effort.” He looked at Kit. “And I wouldn’t mind keepin’ that team intact.”

  “I’m no good at this. I made so many mistakes. For days, I carried a useless gun around, thinking it could protect me. I—”

  “I didn’t say it was a flawless performance. Look at me. Does this face look like I didn’t make any mistakes? Life is imperfect. We all fall short of the ideal. But the best of us compensate, keep diggin’, and finally find a way.”

  Kit could sense he was getting very close now to a direct compliment, was about to say she was one of those people. She waited eagerly for his next words.

  “So if you wanted to, you know, come back to work, I wouldn’t mind.”

  As usual, he couldn’t give her what she needed. Almost choking with disappointment, she pushed back her chair and stood. “I have to go now. I’ll talk to you both later.”

  “You haven’t finished your lunch,” Broussard said.

  “I’ve had all I wanted.”

  “Well, it’s my treat.”

  Longing for her old life and wishing she wasn’t so damned incompetent, Kit went to her car, started it, and joined the traffic on Tulane Avenue.

  At Broussard’s table, Gatlin rubbed his big mitt over his face, fuzzing his eyebrows. “Don’t you know anything about women?” He gestured to Broussard’s visible injuries. “Look at you—of course you don’t. Saying you wouldn’t mind having her back—that was so lame. She was waiting for you to tell her how well she’d done. And you know, she really was a formidable adversary. You could have pointed out how she saved herself when her car went into the bayou, how she was alert enough to see the hearse that brought Cicero’s body back to Courville, how she saved herself from that freezer by breathing on the heat sensor, how she dealt with that guard dog, how she—”

  Broussard lifted a limp hand in surrender. “I get the picture.”

  “And you should have said you wanted her back.”

  “She knows that.”

  “Women need to hear that stuff.”

  “I meant to say it, but it just wouldn’t come out.”

  “Broussard, you’re a sorry case.”

  “I suppose you could have done better.”

  “Couldn’t have done worse.”

  “Okay, you’re such a paragon of sensitivity, say something nice to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been friends for thirty years and you’ve never said anything nice to me. So do it now.”

  Gatlin’s face flushed. “Don’t be crazy.”

  “See, you can’t.”

  “I could . . . if I wanted. I just . . .”

  “Then do it. What’s so difficult?”

  “It’s a dumb—”

  “Hey, anybody in here own an old Pontiac or a ‘57 T-Bird?” a guy yelled from the doorway. “’Cause a kid just poured gasoline on ’em and set ’em on fire.”

  Gatlin jumped to his feet and started for the door, but Broussard grabbed his arm. “It’s a trick, engineered by Grandma O to get even for our pelican prank.”

  Gatlin hesitated. “You sure?”

  “Why else would it only be our cars on fire?”

  “That’s right.” He went back to his chair.

  The guy who’d brought the bad news left and ran back toward the parking lot, joined by a few curious customers. Knowing Broussard couldn’t expect him to say something nice with his mouth full, Gatlin hurriedly picked up his sandwich and took a bite. Broussard also returned to his food.

  A minute later, they heard the distant sound of a siren. Gatlin put his sandwich down and listened. “It’s coming this way.”

  “Got nothin’ to do with us,” Broussard said.

  The siren grew louder and Gatlin jumped up. “Look at that.”

  Broussard turned and saw billows of black smoke boiling past the front window, near the parking lot. He threw his chair back and bolted for the door, Gatlin close behind.

 
; They piled out of the restaurant and ran for their beloved automobiles, charging through the black smoke with abandon. The sight greeting them when they emerged from the smoke brought them to a standstill, their jaws agape.

  The billowing black cloud was coming from a smoke bomb on the sidewalk under the front window. In the parking lot, Bubba Oustellette was cranking a siren whose sound was muffled with a big towel. Seeing them, he stopped and sheepishly pointed behind him. “She made me do it.”

  Towering over Bubba like an unbottled genie, the sun glinting off the gold star inlay in her front tooth, was Grandma O, grinning hard.

  WHILE THE POLICE WERE saving Kit from Tabor, the loose section of ceiling in her apartment had finally fallen, covering everything in plaster dust and soot. The plasterer had put the finishing coat on the repair just before Kit had left to meet Broussard and Gatlin at the restaurant. After leaving them, she’d intended to go home and take another crack at cleaning the place. Instead, she found herself getting off the elevator on the floor of Charity Hospital housing the ME’s offices.

  In truth, this section of the building was a dreary place. Because of perpetual dampness, the wall across from the elevator would never hold paint for more than a couple of weeks, so it usually looked as if it had psoriasis. In summer, the monstrous air handler hanging from the ceiling clattered so loudly, you could barely talk in the hall. And the floor was a patchwork of unmatched tiles. Who would want to spend their time here?

  She walked down to her office and unlocked the door. Opening it, she was met by the sweet smell of fresh paint. She flicked on the lights and saw that the drab off-white she had lived with for two years was gone, replaced by a bright parchment color.

  Everything else was just as she’d left it. She went to her desk and sat behind it, remembering what life had been like before she’d had to leave. There had been moments she’d been frightened out of her mind, others when she’d been repulsed at something Broussard had shown her. Mostly, it had been a time of fulfillment, growing from the knowledge she was doing important work with people she respected and, in Broussard’s case, even loved. She was as aware of the positives in her behavior over the past two weeks as Gatlin was. She just couldn’t give them the same weight, which left the scales tilted to the negatives. If only she could come back.

  She opened the drawer where she kept the copy of the book she’d been writing on suicide. It, too, was still there . . . still unfinished . . . a dream unrealized. She picked up the first page, intending to read it, but then, fearing she’d see only childish prose and poorly thought-out ideas, she leaned over and let it slip from her hand into the wastebasket. With the first page in there, it seemed like the rest should follow. She took the remaining manuscript out of the drawer and held it over the wastebasket.

  But she couldn’t let go. All the work she’d done on those pages and the minuscule possibility she was being overly critical of herself, that somebody, somewhere, might find the work good, kept them in her hand. She put the manuscript back on the desk and leaned over to retrieve the discarded page. In doing so, she saw something else in the bottom of the wastebasket—a card, with Broussard’s handwriting on it.

  She picked it up and read the message he’d left for her along with the flowers the day she wouldn’t look at the new paint job.

  “There’s no one who can do your job better. Please come back. Andy.”

  Tears welling in her eyes, she slowly read those words again. Twelve words, added to the scale measuring her worth. But how much do words weigh? she thought.

  She propped the card against the phone and walked to the door. There, she turned and looked at the old venetian blinds over the windows, wondering if miniblinds came in parchment.

  About the Author

  Photo by Jennifer Brommer

  I grew up in Sylvania, Ohio, a little suburb of Toledo, where the nearby stone quarries produce some of the best fossil trilobites in the country. I know that doesn’t sound like much to be proud of, but we’re simple people in Ohio. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the U. of Toledo, I became a teacher of ninth grade general science in Sylvania, occupying the same desk my high school chemistry and physics teacher used when he tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to use a slide rule. I lasted six months as a public school teacher, lured away into pursuit of a Ph.D. by Dr. Katoh, a developmental biologist I met in a program to broaden the biological knowledge of science teachers. Katoh’s lectures were unlike anything I’d ever heard in college. He related his discipline as a series of detective stories that had me on the edge of my chair. Stimulated to seek the master who trained Katoh, I moved to New Orleans and spent five years at Tulane working on a doctorate in human anatomy. Stressed by graduate work, I hated New Orleans. When Mardi Gras would roll around, my wife and I would leave town. It wasn’t until many years later, after the painful memories of graduate school had faded and I’d taught microscopic anatomy to thousands of students at the U. of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis (not all at the same time) and published dozens of papers on wound healing that I suddenly felt the urge to write novels. And there was only one place I wanted to write about . . . mysterious, sleazy, beautiful New Orleans. Okay, so I’m kind of slow to appreciate things.

  Practically from the moment I decided to try my hand at fiction, I wanted to write about a medical examiner. There’s just something appealing about being able to put a killer in the slammer using things like the stomach contents of the victim or teeth impressions left in a bite mark. Contrary to what the publisher’s blurb said on a couple of my books, I’m not a forensic pathologist. To gear up for the first book in the series, I spent a couple of weeks hanging around the county forensic center where Dr. Jim Bell taught me the ropes. Unfortunately, Jim died unexpectedly after falling into a diabetic coma a few months before the first book was published. Though he was an avid reader, he never got to see a word of the book he helped me with. In many ways, Jim lives on as Broussard. Broussard’s brilliant mind, his weight problem, his appreciation of fine food and antiques, his love for Louis L’ Amour novels . . . that was Jim Bell. When a new book comes out, Jim’s wife always buys an armful and sends them to Jim’s relatives.

  My research occasionally puts me in interesting situations. Some time ago, I accompanied a Memphis homicide detective to a rooming house where we found a man stuck to the floor by a pool of his own blood, his throat cut, and a big knife lying next to the body. Within a few minutes, I found myself straddling the blood, holding a paper bag for the detective to collect the victim’s personal effects. A short time later, after I’d listened to the cops on the scene discuss the conflicting stories they were getting from the occupants, the captain of the general investigation bureau turned to me and said, “What do you think happened?” The house is full of detectives and he’s asking my opinion. I pointed out a discrepancy I’d noticed in the story told by the occupant who found the body and next thing I know, he’s calling all the other detectives over so I can tell them. Later, we took this woman in for questioning. I wish I could say I solved the crime, but it didn’t turn out that glamorous. They eventually ruled it a suicide.

  Forthcoming from Astor + Blue Editions including a brand new Andy Broussard/Kit Franklyn mystery