“Oh, gross,” Helene said.
Broussard pointed at her. “You stay here. Don’t move until we call for you.”
She fished in her pockets for her cigarettes. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
Poole stuck his head in the doorway and sniffed. He turned back to Broussard, frowned, and nodded at the same time.
Angie and I came up beside them.
“Bloaters,” Broussard said. “Anyone got cologne or perfume?”
Angie and I shook our heads. Poole produced a small vial of Aramis from his pocket. Until then, I hadn’t known they still manufactured it.
“Aramis?” I said. “What, they were out of Brut?”
Poole raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Old Spice, too, unfortunately.”
He passed the bottle around, and we each applied it liberally to our upper lips. Angie doused a handkerchief with it as well. Nasty as it smelled as it scorched the insides of my nostrils, it was still preferable to smelling a bloater without anything at all.
Bloaters are what some cops, paramedics, and doctors call bodies that have been dead for a while. Once the body’s gases and acids have been allowed to run rampant after rigor mortis, the body will bloat and balloon and do all sorts of other really appetizing things.
A porch the width of my car greeted us. Winter boots caked with dried salt sat stuck to last February’s newspapers beside a spade with gashes in the wood handle, a rusted hibachi, and a bag of empty beer cans. The thin green rug was ripped apart in several places, and the bloody footprints of several cats had dried into the fabric.
The next room we entered was a living room, and light from the windows was joined by the silver shaft from a TV with the volume turned down. The inside of the house was dark, but gray light came in from the side windows, filling the rooms with a pewter haze that didn’t do much to improve the squalid surroundings. The rugs on the floors were a mismatched shag, patched together with a drug addict’s sense of aesthetics. In several places, you could see the tufts rising in ridges where the sections had been cut and placed side by side. The walls were paneled in blond plywood, and the ceilings flaked white paint. A shredded futon couch sat against the wall, and as we stood in the center of the room, our eyes adjusting to the gray light, I noticed several sets of sparkling eyes brighten from the torn fabric.
A soft electric hum, like cicadas buzzing around a generator, rolled out from the futon, and the several sets of eyes moved in a jagged line.
And then they attacked.
Or at least it seemed that way at first. A dozen high-pitched meows preceded a scratch-and-scramble exodus as the cats—Siamese and calicoes and tabbies and one Hemingway—shot off the couch and over the coffee table, hit the shag carpet sections, burst through our legs, and banged off the baseboards on their way toward the door.
Poole said, “Mother of God,” and hopped up on one leg.
I flattened against the cheap wall, and Angie joined me, and a hunk of thick fur slithered over my foot.
Broussard jerked to his right and then left, whacked at the hem of his suit jacket.
The cats weren’t after us, though. They were after sunlight.
Outside, Helene shrieked as they poured through the open doorway. “Holy shit! Help!”
“What I tell ya?” A voice I recognized as the middle-aged lady’s yelled. “A blight. A goddamned blight on the city a’ Charlestown!”
Inside the house, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the tick of a clock coming from the kitchen.
“Cats,” Poole said with thick disdain, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
Broussard bent to check his pant cuffs, dusted a wisp of cat hair off his shoes.
“Cats are smart.” Angie came off the wall. “Better than dogs.”
“Dogs get the paper for you, though,” I said.
“Dogs don’t scratch the shit out of couches, either,” Broussard said.
“Dogs don’t eat their owners’ corpses when they’re hungry,” Poole said. “Cats do.”
“Ugh,” Angie managed. “That’s not true. Is it?”
We moved slowly into the kitchen.
As soon as we entered, I had to stop for a moment, catch my breath, and suck in the cologne on my upper lip with flared nostrils.
Angie said, “Shit,” and buried her face in her handkerchief.
A naked man was tied to a chair. A woman knelt on the floor a few feet away from him, her chin to her chest, the straps of her bloody white negligee hanging down to her elbows, her wrists and ankles hog-tied together behind her back. Both bodies had thickened with gas and turned the white of volcanic ash after blood stopped pumping through their veins.
The man had taken a large blast to his chest that had demolished his sternum and upper rib cage. By the size of the hole, I had to assume the blast had been unleashed from a shotgun at close range. And unfortunately, Poole had been right about the feeding habits and questionable loyalty of felines. More than just buckshot had chewed into the man’s flesh. Between the damage wrought by the blast, time, and the cats, his upper chest looked as if it had been pushed open by surgical shears from the inside.
“Those aren’t what I think they are,” Angie said, her eyes on the gaping hole.
“Sorry to inform you,” Poole said, “but those are the man’s lungs.”
“It’s official,” Angie said. “I’m nauseous.”
Poole titled the man’s chin up with a ballpoint pen. He took a step back. “Well, hello, David!”
“Martin?” Broussard said, and took a step closer to the body.
“The same.” Poole dropped the chin and touched the man’s dark hair. “You’re looking peaked, David.”
Broussard turned to us. “David Martin. Also known as Wee David.”
Angie coughed into her handkerchief. “He looks pretty tall to me.”
“It has nothing to do with his height.”
Angie glanced at the man’s groin. “Oh.”
“This must be Kimmie,” Poole said, and stepped over a puddle of dried blood to the woman in the negligee.
He lifted her head with the pen, and I said, “Christ almighty.”
A black wound cut a small canyon across Kimmie’s throat. Her chin and cheekbones were splattered with black blood and her eyes looked upward, as if asking for deliverance or help or proof that something, anything, waited for her beyond this kitchen.
Her arms bore several deep cuts, thick and caked black with blood, and holes I recognized as cigarette burns dotted her shoulders and collarbone.
“She was tortured.”
Broussard nodded. “In front of the boyfriend. ‘Tell me where it is or I cut her again.’ That sort of thing.” He shook his head. “This kinda sucks. Kimmie was all right for a cokehead.”
Poole stepped back from Kimmie’s corpse. “The cats didn’t touch her.”
“What?” Angie said.
He pointed at Wee David. “As you can see, they feasted on Mr. Martin. Not Kimmie, though.”
“What’s your point?” I said.
He shrugged. “They liked Kimmie. Didn’t like Wee David. Too bad the killers didn’t feel the same way.”
Broussard stepped up beside his partner. “You think Wee David gave up the goods?”
Poole lowered Kimmie’s head gently back to her chest, made a tsk noise. “He was a greedy bastard.” He looked over his shoulder at us. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but—” He shrugged.
“Wee David and a previous girlfriend broke into a drugstore a couple of years ago, raided the place for Demerol, Darvon, Valium, whatever. Anyway, the cops are coming and Wee Dave and his girl go out a back door, have to jump down to an alley from a second-story fire escape. The girl sprains her ankle. Wee Dave loves her so much he unburdens her of her supply and leaves her there in the alley.”
First Big Dave Strand. Now Wee Dave Martin. Time to stop naming our children David.
I looked around the kitchen. The floor tiles had been torn up, the pantry shelv
es swept clear of food; piles of canned goods and empty potato-chip bags littered the floor. The ceiling slats had been removed and lay in a pile of white dust by the kitchen table. The oven and refrigerator had been pulled away from the wall. The cupboard doors lay open.
Whoever had killed Wee David and Kimmie seemed to have been thorough.
“You want to call it in?” Broussard said.
Poole shrugged. “Why don’t we poke around a bit first?”
Poole produced several pairs of thin plastic gloves from his pocket. He separated them and passed a pair each to Broussard, Angie, and me.
“This is a crime scene,” Broussard said to Angie and me. “Don’t queer it.”
The bedroom and bathroom were in the same state of distress as the kitchen and living room. Everything had been overturned, cut open, emptied onto the floor. Given the houses of other drug addicts I’ve seen, it wasn’t noticeably worse than most.
“The TV,” Angie said.
I stuck my head out of the bedroom as Poole came out of the kitchen and Broussard exited the bathroom. We joined Angie around the TV.
“No one thought to touch it.”
“Probably because it’s on,” Poole said.
“So?”
“Kind of hard to hide two hundred grand in there and keep all the parts working,” Broussard said. “Don’t you think?”
Angie shrugged, looked at the screen, watched one of Jerry Springer’s guests being restrained. She turned up the volume.
One of Jerry Springer’s guests called another guest a ho’, called an amused man a dirty dog.
Broussard sighed. “I’ll get a screwdriver.”
Jerry Springer looked at the audience knowingly. The audience hooted. Many words were bleeped out.
Behind us, Helene said, “Oh, cool. Springer Time.”
Broussard came out of the bathroom with a tiny screwdriver with a red rubber handle. “Miss McCready,” he said, “I need you to wait outside.”
Helene sat on the edge of the torn-up futon, eyes on the TV. “That lady’s yelling ’cause of the cats. She said she’s calling the police.”
“You tell her we are the police?”
Helene smiled distantly as one of Jerry’s female guests threw a lopping punch at another one. “I told her. She said she was going to call ’em anyway.”
Broussard brandished the screwdriver and nodded at Angie. She shut off the TV in mid-bleep.
Helene said, “Damn.” She sniffed the air. “Smells in here.”
“Want some cologne?”
She shook her head. “My old boyfriend’s trailer smelled worse. He used to, like, leave dirty socks soaking in the sink. Now that’s a smell, lemme tell you.”
Poole tilted his head as if about to say something, but then he glanced at her and changed his mind, exhaled a loud, hopeless sigh.
Broussard unscrewed the back of the TV, and I helped slide it off. We peered in.
“Anything?” Poole said.
“Cables, wires, internal speakers, a motor, picture tube,” Broussard said.
We slid the casing back on.
“Shoot me,” Angie said. “It wasn’t the worst idea of the day.”
“Oh, no.” Poole held up his hands.
“Wasn’t the best, either,” Broussard said out of the side of his mouth.
“What?” Angie said.
Broussard flashed his million-dollar smile at her. “Hmm?”
“Could you turn it back on?” Helene said.
Poole narrowed his eyes in her direction, shook his head. “Patrick?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a backyard behind here. Could you take Miss McCready out there while we finish up in here?”
“What about the show?” Helene said.
“I’ll fill in the blanks,” I said. “Ho’,” I said. “You dirty dog,” I said. “Bleep,” I said.
Helene looked up at me as I offered her my hand. “You don’t make sense a lot.”
“Whoo-whoo,” I said.
As we approached the kitchen, Poole said, “Close your eyes, Miss McCready.”
“What?” Helene reared back from him a bit.
“You don’t want to see what’s in here.”
Before either of us could stop her, Helene leaned forward and craned her head over his shoulder.
Poole’s face sagged and he stepped aside.
Helene entered the kitchen and stopped. I stood behind her, waited for her to scream or faint or fall to her knees or run back into the living room.
“They dead?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Very.”
She moved into the kitchen, headed for the back door. I looked at Poole. He raised an eyebrow.
As Helene passed Wee Dave, she paused to look at his chest.
“It’s like in that movie,” she said.
“Which?”
“The one with all the aliens who pop out of people’s chests, bleed acid. What was it called?”
“Alien,” I said.
“Right. They came out of your chest. But what was the movie called?”
Angie made a run to the local Dunkin’ Donuts and joined Helene and me out in the backyard a few minutes later, while Poole and Broussard went through the house with notebooks and cameras.
The yard was barely a yard. The closet in my bedroom was bigger. Wee Dave and Kimmie had placed a rusted metal table and chairs out there, and we sat and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood as the day bled into midafternoon and the air chilled—mothers calling for children, the construction crew using mortar drills on the other side of the house, a whiffle-ball game in progress a couple of blocks over.
Helene sipped her Coke through a straw. “Too bad. They seemed like nice people.”
I took a sip of coffee. “How many times did you meet them?”
“Just that one time.”
Angie asked, “You remember anything special about that night?”
Helene sucked some more Coke through the straw as she thought about it. “All those cats. They were, like, everywhere. One of them scratched Amanda’s hand, the little bitch.” She smiled at us. “The cat, I mean.”
“So Amanda was in the house with you.”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “Sure.”
“Because earlier you weren’t sure if you’d left her behind in the car.”
She shrugged again, and I resisted an urge to reach out with both hands and slap her shoulders back down. “Did I? Well, till I remembered the cat scratching her, I wasn’t sure. No, she was in the house.”
“Anything else you remember?” Angie’s fingers drummed the tabletop.
“She was nice.”
“Who, Kimmie?”
She pointed a finger at me, smiled. “Yeah. That was her name: Kimmie. She was cool. She took me and Amanda in her bedroom, showed us pictures of her trip to Disney World. Amanda was, like, psyched. Everything on the ride home was, ‘Mommy, can we go see Mickey and Minnie? Can we go to Disney World?’” She snorted. “Kids. Like I had the money.”
“You had two hundred thousand dollars when you entered that house.”
“But that was Ray’s deal. I mean, I wouldn’t rip off a nut job like Cheese Olamon on my own. Ray said he’d cut me in at some point. He’d never lied to me before, so I figured it’s his deal, his problem if Cheese finds out.” Another shrug.
“Me and Cheese go way back,” I said.
“That right?”
I nodded. “Chris Mullen, too. We all played Babe Ruth together, hung on the corner, et cetera.”
She raised her eyebrows. “No shit?”
I held up a hand. “Swear to God. And Cheese. Helene, you know what he’d do if he thought someone had ripped him off?”
She picked up her soda cup, placed it back down again. “Look, I told you, it was Ray. I didn’t do nothing but walk into that motel room with—”
“Cheese—and this was when we were kids, fifteen maybe—he saw his girlfriend glance at another guy one ni
ght? Cheese shattered a beer bottle against a streetlight and slashed her face with it. Tore her nose off, Helene. That was Cheese at fifteen. What do you think he’s like now?”
She sucked on her straw until the air rattled the ice at the bottom. “It was Ray’s—”
“You think he’ll lose any sleep killing your daughter?” Angie said. “Helene.” She reached across the table and grasped Helene’s bony wrist. “Do you?”
“Cheese?” Helene said, and her voice cracked. “You think he had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”
Angie stared at her for a full thirty seconds before she shook her head and dropped Helene’s wrist. “Helene, let me ask you something.”
Helene rubbed her wrist and looked at her soda cup again. “Yeah?”
“What fucking planet are you from exactly?”
Helene didn’t say anything for a while after that.
Autumn died in technicolor all around us. Bright yellows and reds afire, burnished oranges and rusty greens painted the leaves that floated from the branches, collected in the grass. That vibrant odor of dying things, so particular to fall, creased the blades of air that cut through our clothing and made us tense our muscles and widen our eyes. Nowhere does death occur so spectacularly, so proudly, as it does in New England in October. The sun, broken free of the storm clouds that had threatened this morning, turned windowpanes into hard squares of white light and washed the brick row houses that surrounded the tiny yard in a smoked tint that matched the darker leaves.
Death, I thought, is not this. Death is directly behind us. Death is the grungy kitchen of Wee David and Kimmie. Death is black blood and disloyal cats who feed on anything.
“Helene,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“While you were in the room with Kimmie looking at pictures of Disney World, where were Wee David and Ray?”
Her mouth opened slightly.
“Quick,” I said. “Off the top of your head. Don’t think.”
“The backyard,” she said.
“The backyard.” Angie pointed at the ground. “Here.”
She nodded.
“Could you see the backyard from Kimmie’s bedroom?” I asked.
“No. The shades were drawn.”
“Then how’d you know they were out here?” I asked.
“Ray’s shoes were filthy when we left,” she said slowly. “Ray is a slob in a lot of ways.” She reached out and touched my arm as if she were about to share a deeply personal secret with me. “But, man, he takes care of his shoes.”
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