He looked in the closet, and there was the corpse, sitting on the floor, its back against the left wall, ankles crossed, knees spread apart, arms dangling on each side, head drooped.
“It’s Walter Baldwin, the guy who rents this apartment,” Gatlin said, holding back. “Apartment manager says he was a salesman for Crescent City Bar and Restaurant Supplies.”
Broussard made a cursory inspection of the body with his penlight, then came back into the room.
“What do you think?” Gatlin asked, his words muffled by his tie.
“I can’t examine him in there in that position. We’ll have to get him out. But first, I want to look around.”
To the right was a kitchenette with a sit-down counter separating it from the living room. There was dried blood on the linoleum floor and in the sink. Crossing to the hall-way beside the closet containing the corpse, Broussard followed a blood trail to the bathroom, where he found blood in that sink, as well as on the floor around the toilet and in the toilet.
From there, the blood led to the only bedroom. As Broussard appeared in the doorway, the CO2 in his breath and the heat from his body roused Walter Baldwin’s killer, the third time that morning it had gone on alert. The first was when Gatlin and the cop had come into the room; the second, when Jamison, the photographer, had entered. Both times, because of poor position, it had been unable to take advantage of their presence. But now it was better placed—poised on a leaf of the artificial fig next to the dresser, where it waited, body erect, front legs lifted.
Broussard moved into the room and the killer’s photo detectors went wild. It hadn’t fed in days.
Broussard studied the blood on the floor by the bed, then passed between the bed and the dresser. The killer raised its front legs a tiny bit higher, muscles tensing. But the object of its excitement didn’t pass quite close enough.
On the other side of the bed, Broussard picked up a bloody pillow, stripped off the case, and folded it on the covers. “I want to take this with me.” As he headed back to the doorway where Gatlin waited, he brushed against the artificial fig.
“Could all this blood have come from one person?” Gatlin asked.
“A little blood often looks like a lot of blood,” Broussard replied. “But this is a lot.”
“I couldn’t check him very well, either, in that closet, but I didn’t see any wounds.”
“Right now, I’m thinkin’ there aren’t any.”
“So what happened?”
“Let’s get him out where we can see better.”
They went back into the living room, where Broussard bagged the bloody pillowcase. Meanwhile, Gatlin slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket. He then leaned into the closet, grabbed the corpse by the ankles, and pulled him into the room.
“Hope all this exertion isn’t too much for you,” he said to Broussard, letting the legs drop. “God, I hate this part of the job.” Being a good Catholic, he crossed himself for saying the word God.
The corpse was clothed in an open-necked white dress shirt and slacks, both crusted with dried blood. And the body was quite swollen, so that its half-closed lids were stretched to tenuously thin membranes over the protruding eyes. Between the lips they could see the tongue, turgid and alien. The skin of the face was marbled with green and purple. Between buttons, the shirt gaped over the distended chest and abdomen. One bloated hand lay palm up, the other palm down. Noting on the latter an unusual discoloration in addition to the marbling, Broussard knelt for a closer look.
“What do you see?”
“Extravasated blood under the skin.”
“Extravasated?”
“Leaked . . . from a vessel.”
“Which means what?”
The things Broussard had seen in the last few minutes existed in his mind encased in a gossamer bubble that shifted and glinted with iridescent hues. Floating nearby was the bubble containing the autopsy results of Jack Doe. The two bubbles touched and bounced gently in opposite directions, but remained close enough to each other that they could easily touch again, perhaps with different results.
“I’m not sure what it means yet,” Broussard said. He shifted his attention to the corpse’s face and noticed a few blisters where the epidermis was beginning to slough, a post-mortem event. Rigor had long ago departed, so there was no resistance as he turned the head toward him and then away as he checked in and behind the ears for wounds. Finding none, he inspected the clothing for evidence of bullet or knife tears and again found none. He lifted the corpse’s right arm and looked at Gatlin. “Grab his wrist and help me turn him over. And get a good grip, or you might pull his skin off.”
Reluctantly, Gatlin did as he instructed, and together they got the body onto its stomach, which, Gatlin noted with disgust, caused an evil-looking fluid to issue from its nose and mouth.
After inspecting the back of the corpse’s head and neck and his clothing, Broussard struggled to his feet, breathing heavily. “I can’t be a hundred percent sure until I get him in the morgue, but nobody’ll be more surprised than me if I find any evidence this was caused by external trauma.” He made a sweeping gesture at the carpet. “All this blood came from his stomach— vomited up. For example, over here.” He led Gatlin to an asymmetric sunburst. “This blood spattered so much because it came fast from a source at least four feet high. These two oval areas where there’s no blood are where he was standin’, so the spatter hit him instead of the carpet. There’s so much blood because he didn’t die right away. This went on for quite a while. In the later stages, I also think he was bleedin’ from his rectum. If it wasn’t for that blood under his skin, I’d suspect a massive ulcer or ruptured varicose veins in his esophagus.”
“Could he have been poisoned?”
“Rat poison comes to mind.”
“Is that likely? Rat poison is generally only available in solid bait form. You can’t lace a drink with it or hide it in food very easily. And this doesn’t look like a suicide.”
“The main ingredient in rat poison’s also available medically as a blood thinner.”
“Are we talking horse or zebra?” He was referring to the adage that if you hear hoofbeats, you should be looking for horses, not zebras.
Reflection on the question reminded Broussard that the anticoagulant they were discussing probably wouldn’t produce the kind of sudden catastrophic events that had apparently happened here, but it would cause symptoms that developed so slowly there’d be adequate warning something was wrong. He therefore said, “Zebra.”
“Why didn’t he call for help? The phone’s working.”
“He was probably disoriented.”
“Why’d he get in the closet?”
“I dunno. But he was still vomitin’ blood when he cleared out those clothes.”
“Because of the blood on the sport coat and the jacket?”
“Yeah.”
“Can we get outta here?”
In the hall, they pulled off their rubber gloves and put them in a plastic bag Broussard provided.
“How long you figure he’s been dead?” Gatlin asked.
“Hard to say. From the temperature in the closet . . . four or five days.”
“That squares with an appointment book I found in his briefcase. It lists all his calls for the month, and there are check marks by each address until one o’clock last Tuesday. The apartment manager also says his car hasn’t moved from the lot since then. That’s six days. If he was sick in there for a day or two before he died, we’re in your time frame. That reminds me, I found some bloody Kleenex in his car. Want a look?”
“Not necessary.”
Gatlin sucked his teeth. “When I die, I hope there are some people who care enough about me to miss me before somebody starts complaining about the odor.”
“Seems like little enough to ask. There’s nothin’ more I can do here.”
“You go on, then. I’ll call the wagon and we’ll hold the scene until you finish with him. And just for t
he hell of it, when the odor clears, I’m gonna look around for that zebra.”
As Broussard went down the apartment steps, he reflected on how he could go for months without encountering any real problems in either his work or his personal life, because both were under control. His accumulated forensic experience and knowledge made for few surprises at the autopsy table, and his lack of family meant no miscarriages, no relatives to bail out of jail, and no kids on drugs. As for finding his body, unless he was on vacation when it happened, Charlie Franks, the deputy ME, or one of the secretaries would realize something was wrong when he didn’t show up for work. So that was pretty much covered, too.
But once in a while, despite his best efforts, problems cropped up, and contrary to the laws of probability, they tended to cluster. Take, for example, Jack Doe. That case comes in on Thursday and now, four days later, another very odd one he didn’t understand. But of course, he hadn’t done the autopsy yet or given Toxicology their shot.
As he approached the T-Bird and cast an admiring eye over it, he saw something drooping behind the front bumper. Kneeling for a closer look, two things happened simultaneously: He saw a twig caught in the car’s undercarriage and the seat of his pants gave way.
Face flushing, he pulled the twig loose and stood up, then walked around to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door to shield him from anyone watching. He probed the rip and his fingers found only air where there should have been fabric.
Problems in clusters—that’s the way it worked.
Sliding into the little car, he wondered what was going to happen next.
6
Broussard drove home and went directly to the bedroom, where he changed pants. He folded the ripped pair and put them in the dresser drawer with his Ralph Lauren pajamas so he’d see them every morning and be reminded that they needed to be dropped off for repairs.
Rat poison was certainly a zebra. Even so, he decided to get a definite answer to that possibility before he started the autopsy. To do that, he called the office and had Guy Minoux paged.
“Guy, this is Andy. There’s a partially decomposed body comin’ in any minute. . . . Yeah, I wish he’d been found sooner, too. His name is Baldwin. I’d like you to get your fluids and send ’em over to Toxicology for a routine drug screen and also ask ’em to check specifically for warfarin. . . .” He spelled out the main ingredient in rat poison, then added two other anticoagulants, coumarin and heparin, spelling those as well. “I don’t need the routine screen right away, but I’d like the others stat. The vessels and heart are probably gonna be so full of gas you won’t get anything from ’em, so take a sample of chest fluid. That’ll contain blood that leaked from the decomposin’ lungs.”
Guy protested that he already knew all those things and Broussard apologized before hanging up.
It was too late now to make the dish he’d planned for breakfast, so he decided to stop by Grandma O’s, even though she wasn’t open yet, and see if she’d be willing to whip him up some eggs Oustellette.
When he arrived at her restaurant, there were no lights on, but shading his eyes and looking inside, he saw Grandma O on a ladder, dusting the stuffed pelican on a shelf over the bar. He rapped on the glass and got her attention. A minute later, she turned the key in the lock and opened the door.
“Did you purposely wait until Ah got up on dat ladder before you knocked or do you jus’ naturally have bad timin’?”
“Naturally bad timin’.”
She grinned, showing the gold star inlay in her front tooth. “Well, Ah won’t hol’ it against you. Come on. . . .”
She stepped aside, but her black taffeta dress stuck out so far, he couldn’t help but brush it as he went in.
“Lemme guess,” she said. “. . . You got called out early an’ didn’ have no time to eat.”
“Can’t keep anything from you.”
“Dis ain’t exactly da firs’ time dis has happened. How ’bout some eggs Oustellette, debris, a nice loaf of French bread an’ applesauce, an’ a hot cup of chicory coffee?”
“I’m in your hands.”
“You go on to your table and Ah’ll get started.”
“His” table was the biggest one in the place, in the rear, by the kitchen doors. No matter how busy the restaurant was, that table was always reserved for him and sat there empty and waiting. He’d told her not to do that, but she wouldn’t listen.
The kitchen doors banged open and Grandma O appeared carrying a big round tray. “You start on dis,” she said, setting out before him a plate, some silverware, a steaming cup of coffee, and a basket containing a sectioned loaf of crusty French bread and a little dish of applesauce, “an’ dose eggs’ll be jus’ a few minutes.”
Broussard picked up one of the bread slices, broke the crust so he could roll it out, and slathered it with applesauce. Then, he put the bread on his plate, slid his chair back, and slinked to the kitchen doors, hoping to see through the little window in them just what it was she put in those eggs.
Rising to his full height, he looked through the window and into the kitchen, where he saw off to the left the big restaurant range but no Grandma O. Suddenly, a flyswatter smacked the glass, making him jerk backward in alarm. One of the doors opened and there she was.
“Ah had a hunch it was ’bout time for you to try an’ steal mah recipe again.”
“I don’t know what came over me,” Broussard said. “Every-thing went black and when I woke up I was lookin’ in the window.”
“You keep tryin’ to get mah recipe, things’ll go black for good,” she said, waving the flyswatter at him. “Ah tol’ you Ah’d give it to you on your eightieth birthday.”
“Suppose I don’t live that long?”
“You keep doin’ what you were doin’ an’ you won’t. Now, siddown.”
Chuckling, Broussard went back to his table. They’d been playing this game off and on for years and it was still fun.
While Broussard waited for his eggs, across the river, in his dresser, Walter Baldwin’s killer emerged from Broussard’s torn pants and began to explore. It moved across the right lapel of his pale blue pajamas and paused on the label, its body covering the R in Ralph Lauren. Hungry and thirsty, it could do nothing about the former, but the latter was no problem. From a gland in a protrusible mouth part, it secreted a tiny salt crystal that quickly absorbed water from the air. Drawing the salt droplet into its mouth, its thirst was satisfied. Turning, it moved toward the rear of the dresser and up the back panel into the dresser carcass, looking for a way out.
GRANDMA O PUT BROUSSARD’S eggs and debris in front of him, then sat down herself with a cup of coffee.
“You ever fin’ out who dat fella was dat had his attack in here las’ week?”
“Not yet, but Kit worked on it over the weekend. Maybe she came up with somethin’.”
Grandma O’s dark eyes clouded. “Ah got a bad feelin’ ’bout dat man. If she didn’t learn anything yet, you should tell her to give up.”
“Be better if we could turn the body over to his relatives. . . .”
“Ah don’ think so. In fact, Ah’m feelin’ uneasy right now.”
Broussard stopped eating and looked at her with concern. “What do you mean? Upset stomach? Have you got a fever? Did you get that gamma globulin shot?”
“Not dat kinda uneasy. . . . Worried . . . about Kit. You know how she is . . . pushin’ and pushin’ sometimes ’till she gets in over her head.”
“I know.”
Broussard had been trained in one of the best forensic pathology programs in the country. And he read constantly to keep his knowledge up-to-date. In all that professional reading, it was cause and effect. This kind of bullet causes this kind of wound, unless it ricochets. . . . A wound from a double-edged knife has two crisp edges. . . . Uninflated alveoli in the lungs of a newborn fished from a bayou means the child had never taken a breath—therefore, no homicide.
But being born and bred in bayou country, where every
body knows not everything can be measured and weighed, he appreciated the value of a hunch. He played them himself, usually to good advantage. And when it came to hunches, Grandma O had a surprisingly good record, too, so he generally listened when she had one, although it wasn’t always easy to understand what her hunches meant.
“An’ Ah’m worried ’bout you, too,” she said.
“Why me?”
She shook her head and stared at her coffee. “Ah don’ know. But Ah think dere’s trouble comin’.”
“I ripped the seat out of my pants this mornin’. Maybe that’s what you’re sensin’.”
“Dat’s not it.”
Broussard dressed another piece of bread with applesauce. “You never answered me about that shot.”
“Ah don’ get sick, so it’s not necessary.”
Knowing it was no use to argue with her once her mind was made up, he let the subject drop. He tried then to move the conversation into a more upbeat area while he finished his breakfast, but she was hard to move.
As he left, she gave him a parting instruction. “City boy . . . you watch out for da small things.”
In this he needed no instruction, for he had always believed that it’s not the big thing that pushes you over the cliff, but the untied shoelace.
Broussard’s first act upon reaching his office was to call Toxicology. As expected, they’d found no warfarin in Baldwin, no coumarin, and only physiological levels of heparin, a substance the body normally produces.
He turned next to the bloody pillowcase he’d brought from Baldwin’s apartment. He cut a piece from the stain, slipped it into a test tube with some distilled water, and shook it gently. After several minutes of this, he put a sample of the liquid from the tube on a glass slide, coverslipped it, and placed the slide on the stage of his microscope.
Taking off his glasses and letting them dangle against his chest by the lanyard at the temples, he looked into the eyepieces and touched up the focus, sharpening the blurred strands dominating the field into fibers from the pillowcase. Amid the fibers, he saw many distorted red cells and a few white cells. He also saw many large patches of cells attached to one another—epithelial cells, from the look of them.
Louisiana Fever Page 7
