Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  “Looks like he bit down hard, let loose for some reason, then got a grip he liked better, and—”

  “Lord. Where’s the piece he bit out?”

  “Took it with him.”

  “What… in his hand… a damn souvenir?”

  “Possibly. But maybe he had to take it with him.”

  “Had to? Why would he have to?”

  “’Cause he swallowed it.”

  Gatlin’s arms fell limply to his side. “Jesus. You stay awake nights trying to think of ways to gross me out?”

  “From the relative lack of blood in the wound, and the yellow color of the skin around it, it’s clear that he didn’t go for her throat until she was dead.”

  “Didn’t want to move in before it was safe, I guess. She get to him at all?”

  “Don’t think so. No skin under her nails.”

  “Too bad. It’d help if he had some nice deep facial scratches. Something for his friends or the people he works with to notice. Anything distinctive about the teeth?”

  “Not really. I’ll make up a transparency that we can use as an overlay for when you get a suspect or…”

  “Or we get another victim?”

  “Let’s try to keep a good thought about that.”

  “Didn’t you once tell me you can sometimes get the blood type of a biter by typing his saliva?”

  “That was a long time ago and I didn’t think you were listenin’.”

  Gatlin feigned a look of hurt innocence. “Andy, you know I hang on your every word.”

  “Which I guess is why we nearly got struck by lightnin’ the last time we went fishin’ and I said there was a storm comin’ and you said there wasn’t.”

  “Jesus, so I was wrong once. Dwell on it, why don’t you. So, can we get his blood type?”

  Broussard shrugged. “Maybe… maybe not. ’Bout eighty percent of the population secretes blood-group antigens into their body fluids, includin’ their saliva….”

  “That’s good.”

  “It can be… if the killer was a secretor and the girl wasn’t, which statistically isn’t likely, and if the killer’s salivary amylase hasn’t digested the antigens were hopin’ to find in his saliva.”

  Gatlin’s face clouded up. “Suppose they’re both secretors but have different blood types?”

  Broussard stuck out his lower lip and nodded. “Yeah, that could be helpful. Been my experience, though, that when you really need for two folks to have different blood types, they usually don’t.”

  “Jesus, I don’t think I can stand all this optimism.”

  “Guess maybe I am takin’ the short view. Probably because I want him caught so much.”

  “Didn’t I read somewhere that you can get DNA fingerprints from semen?”

  Broussard shifted his lemon ball to the other cheek. “For an old stone, you’ve still got some keen edges. What you say is true enough, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up there, either. Her underwear was in place and undamaged….”

  Gatlin raised his eyebrows and rocked his head up and down with understanding. “Yeah, diddlers usually don’t put things back when they’re through with them. When’ll we get the lab report? I don’t want to start working my deev list if she wasn’t done.”

  “Sometime this afternoon.”

  “Too long, but I guess that’ll give me time to write up what we got so far, check out our shoe print with some athletic stores, and maybe talk to some of the people who knew her.” He sucked his teeth in thought. “Could be this was a contract job made to look like a nut did it just to fool us.”

  “Pretty convincin’ act.”

  Gatlin took a last sip of his coffee. Outside, thunder rumbled overhead. The sound called a similar noise from Broussard’s stomach.

  “Interested in some breakfast?” Broussard asked.

  “Where?”

  “Grandma O’s, of course.”

  Gatlin looked at his watch. “She open this early?”

  “No. But we’ll go around back and knock. I expect we can get her to rustle us up somethin’.”

  “She still make her customers eat everything on their plates?”

  “Ever know a grandmother who didn’t?”

  As they walked to Gatlin’s Pontiac, the pewter sky that stretched overhead like a shroud made it seem that the city had turned in on itself, as though ashamed for spawning Paula Lyons’s killer.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kit left Shreveport at one o’clock with nothing settled. Was she going to follow David or not? She still didn’t know.

  David Andropoulas, assistant DA for the city of New Orleans, the man with whom she’d been living for the last six months, had suddenly announced he was taking a similar post in Shreveport and wanted her to come along.

  No discussion about it before he’d accepted, just a pronouncement—a done deal. At first, she’d been so infuriated at his selfishness, she’d let him leave and hadn’t answered his letters or calls for several weeks. But gradually, as she grew tired of eating alone and having no one to turn to in the night, she had relented and agreed to go up there and take a look. David had been overjoyed, even lined up a job interview for her as editor of a clinical psychology journal, a job that, from the comments of the interviewer, she could have if she wanted.

  And it wasn’t as though she couldn’t do some good there. The journal operation was a mess, the other employees playing to their weaknesses instead of their strengths. That girl with the sharp eyes, Laura something, was a natural proofreader but had no feel whatever for layout. The slim brunette with the classy wardrobe was a born second in command. And they were letting their contributors get away with murder—no uniformity in submission format, no…

  But how dull that job would be compared to what she did now. Was it murder? Suicide? An accident? Big questions. Important questions. And she was a part of it. Then, too, there was Broussard. In the year since he’d hired her, she’d grown quite fond of the old pathologist, not to mention the fact he’d saved her life that time in the swamp. If that didn’t earn someone’s loyalty, what would? And there was her book on suicide, nowhere near finished. But as compelling as the reasons were for staying in New Orleans, Kit still felt drawn to Shreveport. Glands she concluded, bearing down on the gas.

  It had been raining off and on, mostly on, in the whole state for nearly a week and the water stood a foot deep in what were once fields of cotton and sugarcane. At the moment, it was not raining, but the sky looked very somber and full of more water. Off to her left, she saw a train unable to proceed because the tracks ahead were completely submerged. Everywhere, the floodwaters were being plied by white egrets apparently enjoying the extension of their feeding grounds.

  At 5:10, Kit left the interstate at the Bayou Coteau exit. In the passenger seat was a bottle of champagne with a pink bow on it, an anniversary gift for Claude and Olivia Duhon, old friends of Broussard who lived in Bayou Coteau. Before Kit had left for Shreveport, Broussard called the Duhons and alerted them to her arrival. It had been arranged that she would spend the night, something she’d been reluctant to do until Broussard told her what a grand old home the Duhons had.

  From the largely treeless, marshy landscape on both sides of the road, the occasional shack on stilts, and the seedy little groceries advertising HOT BOUDIN AND CRACKLIN—whatever that was—on hand-lettered signs, it was hard to believe the area could boast of anything grand. But a few miles farther, the marsh on her left gave way to dry land that soon became populated with huge twisted live oaks heavily draped in Spanish moss.

  Up ahead, the road turned gently to the left. As she came out of the turn, she saw something that brought her foot onto the brake. On the marshy side of the road, a guy in a straw hat was working the bayou with a long pole. On the other end of the pole, something was throwing water and mud everywhere. Beside the man with the pole, a thick-bodied fellow with a beer belly that made his shirttail dangle in front of him like a tablecloth watched the action, his hands in his back pockets.<
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  Kit parked on the opposite shoulder, nose-to-nose with a red pickup, and reached for the lip gloss in her purse. Watching herself in the rearview mirror, she freshened her lips and reset the combs that held her long auburn hair away from her face. Though she personally didn’t like the sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose, men seemed to find them appealing. They had certainly told her so often enough. Satisfied that she was presentable, she opened the door and stepped out into humidity so oppressive it was like a hand in her face.

  Giving the two men a wide berth, she crossed the road and edged into the weeds that bordered the bayou, so intent on seeing what was going on that she failed to notice the mosquitoes that rose from the weeds and settled on her white slacks.

  The end of the pole was held fast in the saw-toothed jaws of an armored horror that should have been a fossil in some shale bank rather than a living nightmare that you could find not six feet from a paved road. A thick tail whipped into the air and lashed the water, sending up an explosion of mud and duckweed. Its ugly head and huge brown body began to roll, thrashing the water into a frothy soup.

  Wondering why the savage twisting hadn’t ripped the pole from the hands holding it, Kit forced her eyes from the great alligator and sent them along the pole until they found the answer. The pole was in two sections, one telescoped inside the other so that the end in the alligator’s mouth could spin harmlessly.

  Her eyes moved farther up the pole, to the primary reason she had stopped. He was wearing a stylishly shaped straw hat with a black band, a pale blue short-sleeved shirt of brushed oxford cloth, and khaki pants, all of which were well decorated with mud and duckweed. Below the brim of his hat, she saw a head of short black hair sharply defined by a fresh barber line. His features were delicate and refined and he had an elegance about him that transcended the mess the alligator had made of his clothes.

  While sweat trickled into Kit’s bra and crept down her back, the alligator continued to roll. After several minutes of this, it suddenly went limp and released the pole. The two men pulled the animal partway onto the bank and then the one in the straw hat came toward her.

  “She’ll stay quiet like that for at least an hour,” he said, rubbing some duckweed from one forearm.

  Kit’s eyes went to his fingers. No ring. “Why will she stay quiet? What did you do to her?”

  “Just wore her out is all.” He offered his hand. “I’m Teddy LaBiche.”

  “Kit Franklyn,” she said, taking it. He had cool gray eyes and was wearing a wonderful cologne. Kit was dimly aware that the man behind him was giving them a disgusted look. “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

  Teddy pointed at the pickup, which bore a picture of a baby alligator emerging from an egg. Under the egg, it read BAYOU COTEAU ALLIGATOR FARM.

  “We’ll use her as a breeder. Mostly, we collect our eggs from the wild, but that gets to be pretty expensive and it’s not reliable. Are you interested in gators?”

  “Very much,” Kit said quickly, interested more in Teddy LaBiche than in dirty brown reptiles.

  “Maybe we could get together and trade notes. Are you staying nearby?”

  “With the Duhons.”

  Teddy’s lips parted in a grin that showed strong white teeth. “Around here that doesn’t say much. There are at least six Duhons within a mile of where we’re standing.”

  “Claude and Olivia.”

  “Now that helps.”

  “Do they live nearby?”

  “We don’t tend to business, we’re gonna lose this gator,” the fellow with the big gut shouted from where he was leaning on the truck.

  Teddy ignored him. “Straight ahead two miles. When you hit the town square, keep to your right and look for Rue Patoit. The Duhon place is at the end of the street, about a quarter of a mile from the square. You can’t miss it; theirs is the only house on Rue Patoit.”

  These were facts already in Kit’s possession, but she allowed him to relate them anyway, liking the sound of his voice, especially the way he said Rue Patoit with a slight French accent.

  “There’s a dance tonight in Boudreaux,” Teddy said abruptly. “Would you like to go?”

  As much as she was attracted to him, Kit’s internal warning system would not permit her to accept a date with a man about whom she knew nothing. Still, no sense in slamming the door.

  “I don’t think that would be polite. I should stay in and visit with the Duhons.”

  Teddy grinned. “I’m not doubting your conversational ability, but I’d have to guess that about nine-thirty tonight, Olivia, bless her heart, will start to nod in her chair. And if you look closely, you’ll catch old Claude yawning in his throat. By ten, you’ll be talking to the walls. They’re just not night people. So I’ll be by at ten.”

  “How do you know so much about them?”

  “Been friends for years. And I know they’ll be happy that you found something to do that will let them go to bed without feeling guilty. As for that other problem—”

  “What other problem?”

  “The one that I saw in your eyes a minute ago. You ask Olivia if I’m okay, and if she doesn’t put your mind at ease, call me and cancel. She has my number. Deal?”

  Kit’s warning light grew dim and began to flicker. It was good to be careful. But it was also important to know when you were overdoing it. As her resolve began to crumble, she reminded herself that a woman should never appear too eager. Holding a man off awhile was the best way to encourage him. So she was surprised to hear herself say, “How should I dress? I’m traveling light and don’t have much choice.”

  Teddy grinned. “Believe me. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”

  It was only after returning to the car that Kit felt the itching. Lifting her slacks off her shoes, she saw that her ankles were peppered with mosquito bites.

  Bayou Coteau was as lovely a little village as Kit had ever seen. In the center of the square was a large two-spired church whose pink stucco bore a faint green patina of moss. Scattered over the grounds were more bearded oaks. The two-story shops lining the square were also stuccoed and had lots of wrought iron and balconies. Between the shops, oak-lined streets identified by black wrought-iron signs bearing white gothic lettering radiated for short distances away from the square. The homes she could see dotting the streets were large wood structures with big porches. Most of the houses were painted in the traditional southern scheme: white with green shutters. And the houses looked as tidy as the shops.

  Seeing a drugstore, she pulled into one of the vertical parking places in front and went inside to get something to treat her bites. With that taken care of, she set out once again to find the Duhons.

  The oaks on Rue Patoit were even larger than those she had seen along the road coming in, their thick, twisted branches touching overhead like noble couples performing an ancient court dance. Kit let the car creep along the street, appreciating the quiet splendor. Could the Duhon home possibly measure up to its surroundings?

  Then she saw it; a huge colonnaded mansion sitting far back from the road. At the entrance to the grounds, she stopped the car and admired the oak alley that exactly framed the front of the house. Here, in addition to mossy beards, the branches of the trees were fuzzy with tiny ferns growing from the bark. It all looked organic and primeval, as though the house had not been built at all but had simply grown from seed. It seemed right that the approach to the house should be packed sand strewn with Spanish moss rather than asphalt.

  The house had nine columns on each of its three visible faces and was wrapped with wide upper and lower porches. As she neared it, Kit saw two figures off to her right, standing near a black-water bayou that ran parallel to the lawn. One of the figures had something white in one hand.

  In front of the house, the drive curved into a large flattened oval that took her to the front steps. The windows of the house were the kind that could be converted to doors by simply raising the lower sash. Up close, the house was not
as pristine as it had appeared from the street. A few of the shutters were coming apart and a large patch of stucco had fallen off one column, revealing to Kit’s surprise that they were brick not wood.

  As she got out of the car, one side of the double front door opened and a small woman with her gray hair pulled back in a bun came onto the porch. She was wearing a black dress that looked as though it had come from one of those shops that show them to you one at a time. At her throat was a string of freshwater pearls.

  Beautiful when she was young and beautiful still, Kit thought.

  “Welcome to Oakliegh,” the woman said, spreading her arms in a welcoming gesture. “You must be Dr. Franklyn.”

  “Please, it’s Kit,” Kit said, going up the steps.

  The woman took Kit’s hands warmly in her own. “I’m Olivia Duhon. Did you have any trouble with the roads being underwater?”

  “The ones I traveled were clear. But I saw some that weren’t.”

  “Yes, I know, its been a terrible summer. Do you have luggage?”

  “Just a suitcase, a small one… in the trunk. I can manage it.”

  “Nonsense. Martin will bring it in.” She glanced toward the bayou where Kit had seen the two men. “Ah, here’s Claude.”

  Like Olivia, Claude was dressed for company; pale yellow shirt, brown tie with a cream paisley print, and tan pants. Were it not for the crutches holding him up and the slit in his pants that allowed them to slide over the cast on his foot, Claude would have been fashion-catalogue material. A dozen yards behind Claude, Kit saw a man heading for the back of the house. This, she concluded, was Martin. He was carrying a dead chicken.

  “He won’t take it,” Claude complained to Olivia. “It’s almost like he knows it’s poisoned.”

  “Claude, this is Dr. Franklyn… Kit Franklyn, Andy’s friend.”

  Claude Duhon struggled up the steps and offered Kit his hand. His face reminded her of a mountain that had been worn away by wind and rain. There was strength there, and Kit felt that Olivia had chosen well.

  “Happy to see you. Sorry about blowing off like that. But there’s a gator down there somewhere that got my dog last week, and me not fifty yards away. It missed him the first time and while I was running to help, I caught my toe in a root and fell on my leg. Fool thing, really. Makes me sound positively doddering. We’ve been putting out poisoned chickens hoping he’ll take one, but he seems to know what we’re up to.”