Down on the Pontchartrain

by O'Neil De Noux

  Cover Photo of Katrina Damage Copyright 2005 © John Datri

  Down on the Pontchartrain

  O’Neil De Noux

  Copyright 2012 © O’Neil De Noux

  Monday, 22 August 2005

  The call comes over my portable police radio just as I step aboard Sad Lisa – Headquarters calling for Homicide … a signal thirty … parking lot … West End Park. I can’t help thinking this is what I get for trying to knock off early on my squad’s last night before we switch from the midnight shift.

  Moving to the side of my houseboat, I look across the 17th Street Canal at West End Park. Don’t see much beyond the low sea wall except the rear of the elevated wooden restaurants and the tops of oak trees bathed in soft-yellow streetlight. I glance at my watch on the way back to my unmarked Chevy parked on Orpheum Avenue alongside Sad Lisa. It’s five a.m. exactly. I lock my briefcase in the trunk but only after taking out my notepad and ball point pen, tucking them into the pocket of my navy blue suit coat. The night air is still clammy, still hot from the day’s heat.

  My sergeant calls me on the radio as I start across the new pedestrian bridge connecting Bucktown, where Sad Lisa is permanently moored, to Orleans Parish. I tell him I’ll be at West End Park in two minutes. You see, it’s my turn. I’m up for the next murder.

  The new bridge is red brick with an iron railing painted dark green, about fifteen feet wide and maybe forty yards long, rising in the center to allow small boats from Lake Pontchartrain. A brisk breeze blows from the lake; and I watch waves slap against the rocky shoreline. They’re not rocks actually but large concrete blocks lying at odd angles, keeping the lake from eating away the land. I lick the salty mist from my lips. A large orange cat, perched on the bridge railing near the base of the bridge glares at me with yellow eyes as I pass.

  Can’t miss the crime scene – two New Orleans Police cars, red and blue lights flashing, headlights illuminating figures standing next to large live oak and a figure on the ground. Three other police cars are also there, Levee Board cops and a Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s unit, drawn to the crime scene, like bugs to a light bulb.

  Stepping up, I recognize the big cop just as he turns his flashlight my way and announces, “Well, it’s Sioux time ladies and gents!”

  I shake my head as I move through the assembled officers.

  Sidney Tilghman, a sergeant now, continues my introduction. “This here’s Homicide Detective John Raven Beau whose daddy hailed from the swamps of Vermilion Bay and his momma from the Dakotas. Don’t remember which one.” Tilghman sidles next to me as I ease to the right to let the dim streetlight illuminate the body. “How you been old buddy?” he asks. “See you’re still skinny.” Tilghman has put on a few pounds, more than a few in a couple years. We’re both thirty but he looks more than a couple years older, with a hint of gray in his curly hair.

  We were on the same platoon back in the Second District, the uptown police, both patrolmen before he made sergeant and I moved to the land of murder, suicide and other negligent homicides. I shrug and turn to the other officer, a tall, thin woman with coal-black skin, large brown eyes and hair parted in corn-rows. Her name plate reads: S. Panola.

  At six-two, I’m a good four inches taller than Officer Panola. I nod toward the body and ask her, “Shine your light on it, OK?”

  She nods and focuses her bright flashlight on the dead woman lying on her side beneath an oak at the edge of the parking lot. The victim’s skin glows pallid white. Over the radio, I hear a crime lab tech is in route, as well as another homicide detective.

  I list the victim’s vital stats in my notes: white female, about thirty, tallish, maybe five-ten, thin build, light brown hair styled short, brown eyes, tattoo of pearls around her neck, tattoo of a heart on left forearm. Body pierced with four earring holes in each ear. I describe the silver and gold colored earrings as well as the stainless-steel rod piercing the right side of her nose. Clothing: green tie-dyed blouse ripped in front, long tan skirt, brown sandals.

  “He looks even more Sioux from the side,” Tilghman tells the Levee Board cops. “You know. The profile.” He starts talking about my hawk nose and slightly protruding brow, next will be my straight brown Sioux hair and how a former girlfriend told the guys, outside the district station, of all places, how she liked to trace her fingernails along my square jaw line.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” I snap.

  “Not really.”

  I turn to Officer Panola and ask, “No purse?”

  She points to a red Nissan parked just beyond the police cars. “In her car.”

  “You still carry that Bowie knife?” Tilghman asks.

  “It isn’t a Bowie knife,” I tell him, then ask Panola, “Who found the body?”

  “It’s big as a Bowie knife.” Tilghman again.

  Officer Panola tells me a co-worker found the body and points to her police car where I see a figure seated in the backseat. “Both start working at five. Clean the restaurant before the cooks come in.” She’s looking at her notes now. “Victim is Monique Lewis, spelled like Meriwether Lewis. Witness is Shameka Johnson.” She spells out Shameka for me. “When Shameka arrived, she saw Monique’s car but couldn’t find her in the restaurant so she stepped out, figuring Monique was taking a smoke and found her. Didn’t see anyone else around. Went back in and called nine-one-one.”

  Panola looks up at me and I ask, “Where’s your partner?” NOPD beat units are usually two-man cars. I look over as another NOPD car joins us.

  “He went home sick. Sarge came along in his unit.”

  Tilghman puts a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Come on. They don’t believe you carry a back-up knife, instead of a pistol.” He nods toward the Levee Board cops and the two JPs.

  Jesus! I reach under my coat to the scabbard and pull out my black Obsidian hunting knife, sharpened on one side only, like the true plains warriors of my ancestry. I slap the buffalo bone handle in Tilghman’s open hand. “Don’t drop it.”

  While the men gather around, like kids leering at a new toy, I ease Panola closer to the body and ask her to focus her flashlight on the victim’s neck. We both go down on our haunches.

  Red marks ring her throat, bluish bruises across her larynx. Her neck seems distorted, swollen, her tongue purple and protruding, a line of blood seeping from her mouth. Death by strangulation. Three of her fingernails, painted light purple, are broken. I find one a couple feet from her, the other a little farther away. Can’t find the third. Looking closely, I see they are real fingernails, not the glue-on type.

  “She put up a fight. Probably scratched him.”

  I stand and Panola follows and wavers, so I take her elbow.

  “You all right,” I whisper.

  She nods.

  “No ligature,” I tell her as she stands more erect, and I let go of her elbow.

  “Huh?”

  “No ligature mark. A rope or like instrument wasn’t used. Someone used their hands to strangle her.”

  “Damn.”

  “Exactly.”

  I step back and snatch my knife from one of the Levee Board cops who’s trying to cut a strand of hair with it. Two pair of headlights close in on us, a crime lab van and another unmarked Chevy. I slip my knife back into its scabbard.

  “She’s a granola girl,” Tilghman announces, looking at the victim again.

  “Granola?”

  “Yeah. Tie-dyed blouse. Tattoos. Body piercings. West Coast Oregon sandals. She’s a new-age hippie.”

  “Oregon sandals?” I shake my head.

  “Birkenstocks,” Panola tells me.

  I’ve heard of that brand name.

  “Granola girl,” Tilghman repeats. “Eats roo
ts and stuff. Granola.”

  “Can you do me a real favor?” I ask my old friend.

  “Sure.”

  “Go canvass. Take those two with you.” I point at the two newly-arrived NOPD guys. “Check if any of these restaurants have outdoor surveillance cameras but leave Panola with me. I’ll need her and her flashlight. Go see who’s out there, maybe saw something.” I wave at the line of restaurants, the dark parking lot and the park beyond. “Keep a eye out for a broken purple fingernail.”

  “A what?”

  The second homicide detective moves through the cops. Mike Borgo, who came to our squad earlier this week, a rookie detective without a permanent partner at the moment. Been bouncing from scene to scene to get a grasp of what we do. He nods at me and I ask him to get the names of all these cops, which will run the JPs off pretty quickly.

  Then I give Borgo the run down on the body and the witness in the car. Borgo’s in a black suit, stands about five-ten, husky, a big boned Sicilian with brown eyes even lighter than mine, a thick mane of blackish hair and a matching moustache.

  “Damn,” he says. “Strangled by hand. See this often?”

  “Nope.”

  Panola gives me a weak smile.

  “Which restaurant?” I ask.

  She points to the nearest, Maxim’s Crab Claw Restaurant. The crime lab tech arrives with his camera case and evidence bag. I nod to the body, telling him about the fingernails and then point to the victim’s Red Nissan. Borgo will assist him with the measurements, triangulating the body’s position to fixed objects, the oak tree, light posts while Panola and I go speak with our witness.

  Shameka Johnson is twenty-two, five-four, one-twenty pounds, brown and brown with caramel-colored skin. She wears a dark green sweat-suit and jogging shoes as she sits with her feet up on the seat, knees pressed to her chest, arms holding them close. In a quivering voice she tells me how her boyfriend Eddie dropped her off at Maxim’s and drove away right after. I get his name and contact information for follow-up. They live together on Mazant Street.

  The restaurant was locked but Shameka saw Monique’s car so she went in but couldn’t find her, came back out and found her. No, she saw no one in the area. She knows very little about Monique except she was single, liked boys all right, toked an occasional joint. She knew no one who would have done something like this and no suspicious people in the area. Both had been working for Maxim’s for only a few months. Monique about three months. I list the name of the boss, cooks, everyone she can name.

  “What now?” Borgo asks as the strobe from the crime lab’s camera flashes behind us.

  I point to the car just arriving. “Those’ll be the cooks for Maxim’s. You know what to do.” I remind him anyway to get their IDs, alibis, check for scratches, how well they knew the victim, if they know who would’ve done this, suspicious people in the area, the usual.

  I stretch the kinks in my back as the sky is now purple and pink in the east. Two brown pelicans glide over the lake, dipping toward the water beyond Maxim’s. Standing next to me, Panola tells me she’s part Choctaw, on her father’s side.

  I nod and say, “Panola means cotton in Choctaw, doesn’t it?”

  She’s surprised and gives me a shaky smile. “It sure does.”

  We go back to make certain the crime lab tech photographed the fingernails before dusting them for prints (partials more likely) and that he doesn’t leave them by mistake. As the crime lab finishes, the coroner’s van arrives and the coroner’s investigator pulls on a pair of rubber gloves to touch the body.

  “Doesn’t appear to be a sex crime,” Panola says. “Maybe he knew her.”

  “Could be a sex crime,” I tell her. “Whatever enraged the killer could be sexual. A sexual hatred. He might have been interrupted before finishing. We have no idea if he knew her. Not yet.”

  “Only he knows why,” Borgo adds.

  I go on, “We don’t focus on why she was killed. We establish what happened, when, where and most importantly, who. Who is she, and who did this. Sometimes we find out why. Sometimes we don’t.”

  After the tech dusts the Nissan for prints, we pull out Monique Lewis’s purse, securing her driver’s license for the coroner for identification purposes before they take her body. We also secure her apartment keys. Monique lived on First Street, right in my old beat in the Second District.

  •

  Officer Panola’s shift ends at seven, and she and Tilghman depart. So do the NOPD men. The Levee Board cops and JPs long gone. Borgo and I finish up with the three cooks. All have alibis and seem genuinely shook. None has a scratch mark. We focus our interest on the cook who hasn’t shown up for work this morning. Cedrick Smith lives in the Sixth Police District, better known as the Bloody Sixth, where there are more murders than the rest of the city combined. Smith is described on the police computer as “black male, thirty-eight, five-nine, one-eighty, no tattoos, scars or marks.” A convicted felon, Smith is also a registered sex offender on parole after serving ten years of a twenty year sentence for violating Louisiana Revised Statue 14:43 – simple rape.

  Before departing West End Park, Borgo and I go over the canvass notes. Two fishermen had been located, identified and interviewed. Both saw a jogger in the area, a white male in a gray running outfit. A six year old son of one of the fishermen thought he saw two joggers, both white males. The license plate numbers of all cars parked in a two mile radius is added to our notes.

  At six thirty-two, Levee Board cops had stopped a jogger with gray clothing along nearby Lake Marina Drive, securing his pertinent data and checking to make sure he hadn’t been scratched. The man lives at the Lake Marina Tower, one of the new high rise Condo complexes overlooking the lake. He’s a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard named Bruce Addams.

  “What now?” asks Borgo.

  “We search for Cedrick Smith then go to the autopsy. But coffee is first on the agenda.”

  “All right. Where?”

  “My houseboat. I’m gonna need my car.”

  “Houseboat?”

  I tell him about Sad Lisa moored over in Bucktown. He knows how to drive over to Bucktown but it’ll take him a good ten minutes, skirting the marina to Old Hammond Highway to cross the 17th Street Canal into Jefferson Parish for a quick run up Orpheum Avenue into Bucktown.

  Crossing back over the pedestrian bridge, I see the lake’s calmed down, the gray-brown water not so choppy. White sea-gulls squawk overhead while pelicans are perched on the remnants of a restaurant battered to pieces by Hurricane Georges a few years back. Three cats prowl the bridge and I remember the feral cats back home, back along the swampland around Vermilion Bay. Like to see cats around. Cats mean less rodents.

  My Cajun daddy loved cats, put leftovers out for them. Occasionally, when a coon came for the leftovers, my old man would peek out of our Cajun shack on Bayou Brunet and shoot the coon with his twenty-two for our supper. He’d shoot the possums too, but we’d use that greasy meat for fish bait.

  I grew up in an old Cajun daubed house my great-grandfather built by hand, its walls filled with swamp mud to keep out the weather. We went hungry some nights, when the hunting and fishing weren’t good, feasting when it was good. We lived off the land, the great bayous, the brown water bay, the bountiful swamp.

  Once, when I was five, I heard the call of a swamp cat, a bobcat searching for a mate out in the marsh. The howl sent shivers through me and I ran downstairs to tell my parents there was a swamp monster out there. My daddy laughed and set me straight. Later, my mother mimicked the cry of the mountain lion for me and that astounded me. She could mimic any bird – cardinal, oriole, hawk, even the multi-calls of the mockingbird. But that was long ago, my father gone now, my mother back up in South Dakota with my relatives, the Oglala Sioux. You see, we’re direct descendants of Crazy Horse’s younger brother, Little Hawk. At least that’s what my grandfather tells everyone. To the Sioux, birth records go by word of mouth.

  I put on a pot of strong coffee-a
nd-chicory, warming milk for café-au-lait. Borgo arrives and I offer Hot Pockets, microwavable ham and cheese wrapped in a flaky crust. I’m so hungry, I eat two. Borgo eats four with three brimming cups of coffee. Looking around Sad Lisa, he tells me I must get plenty women with a set-up like this.

  “Not really. It’s old, creaky and drafty. Couple girls got sea sick when the lake got choppy and the canal began to rise and fall.”

  “Couple? Hope it was one at a time.” Borgo raises his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  •

  Cedrick Smith isn’t home. His neighbors say he lives there all right, but he stays with a woman back-a-town in the Broadmoor section, off Claiborne and Napoleon. That doesn’t narrow it down much, so we leave business cards and head for the coroner’s office.

  Getting there early, we position the black body bag containing Monique Lewis at the front of the line so she’ll go first. We picked coffee up from a nearby CC’s Coffee Stand, pretty good coffee-and-chicory, we wait in the hall outside the morgue with the reeking smells of formaldehyde, dried blood, and cigarette smoke.

  I put the pathologist’s findings in my notes. Monique is exactly five-ten in length (cadavers no longer have height, they are prostrate and therefore, long) and weighs one thirty-five. Cause of death, strangulation. Manner of death, homicide. The post-mortem exam confirms no evidence of sexual assault. Beneath Monique’s fingernails the pathologist finds blood and skin from her attacker. Monique has five additional tattoos and I list them.

  The crime lab tech, who arrives late, will rush the blood from under the fingernails for typing and DNA fingerprinting. I push him on the subject and he nods nervously. Late for the autopsy, he’s got a lot of catching up to do, starting with breaking out the Duraprint spray to see if he can get fingerprints from Monique’s neck. He tries but can’t.

  The Sioux believe in the spirit world, believe in vision quests, ghosts and communicating with the dead. My Cajun daddy believed in purgatory, heaven and hell, like a good Catholic. I don’t know what to believe, but I let my mind tell Monique Lewis, as I stand next to her body, that I am Sharp Eyes of the Oglala and I will catch who did this to her.