Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  “Fascinating stuff,” Guidry said. “But if you’ll forgive me for saying so, not very applicable to these French Quarter murders. What do you think of the guy that did that?”

  When she had first met him in Broussard’s office, Guidry had seemed morose and passive. Now there was an energy about him that took ten years off his age. Before Kit could reply, Broussard said, “Come on, Henry. You don’t want to dwell on such sordid things as that. Tell us about the time you put a five-hundred-pound pig in the principal’s office. I never did know the details of that caper. How’d you get him up the stairs?”

  “Jesus, Andy. That was so long ago, I don’t think I can remember it all.”

  “Try.”

  Guidry rolled his eyes in thought. “It was the weekend before… no, after the Bristol game….”

  The net result of the evening was that Kit found Guidry to be a likable man. But he did have an uncommon interest in the subject of murder.

  *

  Ordinarily, she could hear Lucky’s paws on the door even before she opened it. Tonight, though, all was quiet. When the lights came on, she saw Lucky on the sofa with his head under a pillow, which could mean only one thing. “All right. Show me,” she said sternly.

  Whimpering, head down, Lucky led her to the bedroom, where she found her new box of face powder upside down on the carpet. Crossing the room in two strides, she snatched the little dog up and cradled him in her arms so she could look into his face. “What am I going to do with you, you little varmint?”

  He blinked and cowered so helplessly when she said “varmint,” that she had to forgive him. After the mess was cleaned up, she went into the living room and flicked on her answering machine. To her surprise, it contained one of the last voices she expected to hear.

  “Kit, this is Teddy… Teddy LaBiche. Was in town for a few hours and thought we might get together. Sorry I missed you. Now that I know your number, I’ll call ahead next time.”

  “Nuts,” Kit said aloud. She plopped down on the sofa and took Lucky into her lap. “An alligator farmer,” she said, scratching the dog’s neck. “I’m attracted to an alligator farmer who takes you dancing in a pickup truck. What am I doing?”

  *

  In the heart of the French Quarter, Melanie Conroy glanced around her at the empty tables. “Where do you suppose all the customers are?”

  “Probably the rain,” Del Ferris replied, running a toothpick up and down the crack between his lower front teeth.

  “Let’s just split it three ways,” Roy Hanover, the other man that had made the trip, said, studying the bill.

  Del wiped the toothpick on his napkin. “What difference does it make. It all goes on company cards. Just take care of it.”

  While they waited for the waiter to pick up Roy’s card, Del rubbed his hands together. “Well, what now? There’s a lot of the evening left.”

  “I don’t know about you two, but I’m going back to my room,” Melanie said.

  “And practice?” Roy said in a smirking tone.

  “Maybe you two have forgotten,” Melanie said. “The Filmore account is worth a million-two a year, and for that we need to be letter-perfect tomorrow.”

  Del turned his palms to the ceiling. “Hey, I’m ready.”

  “Me, too,” Roy added.

  “You better be. ’Cause if either of you leaves me hanging out there naked tomorrow—”

  “Naked,” Del said. “Sounds interesting. Why don’t we pursue that thought for a few minutes.”

  “Cretins,” Melanie said, thrusting back her chair and stalking away.

  Word was that the CEO at Filmore had been considering changing agencies. So everything had to go smoothly tomorrow, and even that might not be good enough. In her room, Melanie practiced her presentation twice, complete with easel and graphs, watched TV for awhile, then turned in early.

  *

  Several blocks away, it started as it always did—with an olfactory hallucination, at first faint and then full-blown, the smell of a grass fire. Then the headache, beginning as a dull pressure in the back of his head that slowly spread in all directions until the pain drove him to the floor in agony. Pain. There was nothing else in his world now but a white suffocating blanket of pain.

  Reluctant seconds passed into plodding minutes as he lay on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest, his hands and arms clasping his head, unable to form any kind of thought, a creature linked to the present only by unendurable pain.

  Gradually, as the raging fire in his brain waned, his senses returned, sharpened now, making colors brighter, sounds louder, and smells… He lowered his knees and dropped his arms to his side, absorbing the sounds and smells around him. A fly buzzed against the window. Over the sound of its wings, he heard its legs drumming against the glass. From the corner came the roar of a cockroach nibbling the glue off the edge of a stamp on an old envelope. As his chest rose and fell, he could feel the ebb and flow of the air in the room as it nudged the hairs on his arms.

  His nostrils began to flare in rhythm to his thudding heart, drawing in a thick soup of odors so vivid, he could taste them, could hear them, could see them mingling and swirling: the pungent smell of pasteboard from the collapsed boxes on which he lay, the soft caress of oak and the shrill voice of glass from the makeshift walls, the bitter taste of steel. It was all mixed-up; odor was color, color was sound. And cutting through it all, like church bells crashing into each other, were odors from the street, each tone a hammer blow to his head, which had begun to ache again.

  He staggered to the window, opened it, and looked out. In the street below were two umbrellas, and under them the bells… clanging. Across the square, more bells… so loud… hurting. Hurting. And under the pain was anger for the hurt. Red anger that bubbled and churned.

  He wanted to stop the bells from ringing, stop the hurt. But the ancient region of his brain, the part buried deep under the origins of true thought, warned him to wait. There were too many of them still around. He must wait, must tolerate the pain until later, when he could move through the streets unseen. Then the anger could pour out. He could make the bells stop ringing. And when they stopped, the pain would be gone. But it was hard to wait. Hard. There was so much pain now, and the anger was pushing…

  A pigeon on the ledge below the window lifted into the air and headed for the dormer roof. As it passed, his hand shot out and caught it in mid-flight. It was not a large bell and its death would not silence the others, but it was something.

  *

  Melanie Conroy was awakened a few hours later by a dream in which her material had somehow gotten out of order and she had sounded like a blubbering ass trying to apologize for it. Unable to get to sleep again, she finally threw back the sheet and put on her running shoes and spandex jogging outfit. She should have known that skipping her run would only make her more antsy.

  Having arrived late in the day, she hadn’t seen the Times Picayune warning for people to travel in groups in the Quarter or avoid it altogether. Had the night clerk not been in the toilet and therefore away from his post when she passed, he would have warned her not to go out.

  Running in the rain was nothing new to Melanie. It was all a matter of discipline. If you could be deterred by a little rain, how could you expect to handle true adversity?

  From her hotel on St. Louis, she went south to Decatur, then turned left and jogged past Jackson Square to St. Ann Street, where she again bore left and continued on past the old Pontalba apartments, stoically running in the light rain rather than using the balcony-protected sidewalk that ran the length of the street. At the end of the apartments, she continued to circle Jackson Square by going left on Chartres, a course that took her past the Presbytere. Impulsively, she turned into the well-lit alley between the Presbytere and St. Louis cathedral, skirting the scaffolding against the Presbytere’s west face.

  Unaccustomed to the humidity, she slowed to a walk as she came onto Royal and looked at the sky in pain as her lungs cried
for air. The street was not as well lit as the others had been and she soon saw why: two burned-out streetlamps in a row. Nervous at being alone in such a dark place, she began to walk toward the lights a block away.

  Over the squeak of her shoes against the wet pavement, she thought she heard a noise behind her. She stopped and looked back down the street, searching the darkness. But nothing stirred. There was no sound except her own labored breathing and the music of water trickling down drainpipes. About to turn and begin walking again, she saw something a dozen doors behind her… movement in the deep shadows.

  Her eyes strained to see. It was there and it wasn’t… a shape close to the ground or not there at all. She couldn’t be sure. Still needing air, she turned and began to run as fast as she could. Giving in to the fear was like opening a sluice gate, and dread quickly consumed her. She could feel the thing behind her moving faster, so bold now that it had left the shadows, getting closer; she imagined it barely a reach away. She wanted to look back but was afraid of what she would see. A scream bulled its way into her mouth and pushed at her lips. The light ahead seemed to be getting no closer.

  Then with an unearthly growl, it was upon her, grunting… slashing…. Her clear screams soon became muffled as though she was drowning, as indeed she was… in her own blood.

  CHAPTER 8

  When Kit heard that the third victim was a visitor to the city, it became obvious the killer was choosing his victims at random and was not engaged in a moral cleanup campaign of the French Quarter. This fact galvanized her thoughts on the case. Bubba’s reference to the killer as an animal was closer to the truth than he knew. After an hour poring over some of her own books, a trip to the psychiatry section of the LSU library, and a visit to the public library, where she spent an hour reviewing the previous week’s newspapers, she was ready to tell Broussard and Gatlin what they were dealing with.

  Finding Broussard’s office empty, she asked his secretary where he was and was told he was in the morgue. Not a great fan of the morgue, she ordinarily would have waited for him to finish and come back upstairs. Today, that was impossible. She was simply too anxious to talk.

  Like an aging woman who has had many face-lifts, most floors of the old hospital didn’t look too bad if you were willing to overlook minor details such as suspended ceilings that cut across the middle of the glass transoms above the doors and the willingness of the maintenance crew to replace blocks of buckled floor tiles with whatever color they happened to have on hand.

  The basement, though, was a distinct step down, in more than direction. The elevator opened onto a vending area with a bare cement floor and grim cement-block walls that had been painted a dingy ivory color in an attempt to brighten the place up without buying a real light fixture to replace the naked bulb in a wire cage overhead. Even the vending machines looked tired. Kit thought she heard one sigh as she pushed through gurney-scarred double doors that sternly warned away all but authorized personnel.

  The hall to the morgue was a dim tunnel served by more caged bulbs. At the end of it, behind a pale green door, she found Broussard, dressed in a plastic apron and looking at the face of a corpse through a camera viewfinder. There was a flash and a whir as the camera delivered an undeveloped picture.

  “Is that the latest one?” Kit said, hanging back.

  “Latest one to come in, but not the one you mean,” Broussard said, lowering the camera. “When I first got started at all this, I thought there’d be busy times and slack times. But all we’ve had so far is busy. I’m still lookin’ forward to slack.” He took the picture from the camera and glanced at it. “Come here; you should see this.”

  He motioned her over to the body, which she approached slowly and carefully, trying to decide how well prepared she should be. As it turned out, there wasn’t much to see. The body was that of a slim, unshaven male with no visible wounds but with a series of raised welts on his forehead.

  “What do you figure was the murder weapon?” Broussard asked.

  Kit shrugged, wondering how she would be expected to know.

  “I’ll give you a hint. It was a blunt instrument. About as blunt as they come.”

  She was about to suggest that the welts might be bee stings, but his hint took away even that glimmer of a thought. “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe this’ll help.” He went to the sink and took down a small framed mirror hanging above it. He gave her the picture he had just taken. “Hold the picture up toward me.”

  She did as he asked and he held up the mirror.

  “Now, what was the murder weapon?”

  She studied the corpse’s face in the mirror. Suddenly, she saw what he was after. In the mirror, it became clear what the welts spelled out. “Holy Bible,” she said aloud.

  “Exactly. He was killed with one of those Bibles with raised letters. Probably died of a brain hemorrhage.” He put the mirror back on the wall and put out his hand for the picture. “And there is no joy in Mudville, for mighty Casey has struck out.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe that the guy who wrote those lines and the one who did that”—he jerked his head toward the body—“are members of the same species. Well, what brings you down here? Must be somethin’ important.”

  “I know what’s loose in the French Quarter. It’s going to take a little explaining, so I’d rather tell you and Gatlin at the same time.”

  “We’d better get hold of him then.”

  They had to wait a few minutes for the dispatcher to relay a message to Gatlin and for him to get to a phone. Broussard took his call.

  “Phillip, Kit says she has something on our killer and wants to talk.”

  Broussard covered the mouthpiece. “Where?”

  “My office,” Kit said.

  “Her office, in… thirty minutes? Right. See you then.”

  *

  Kit had only one extra chair, so she borrowed another from Charlie Franks, the deputy medical examiner, then spent the next thirty minutes rearranging the chairs and pacing the room. How would they take what she was going to tell them? More specifically, how would Broussard take it? Would he give her that compassionate paternal look that said he didn’t believe a word she was saying but was willing to keep quiet and let her make a fool of herself? God, how she hated that look. Then she toughened. Well, if that’s what he thought, he’d be wrong. He’d simply be wrong.

  The two men came in together, as intimidating a mass of male protoplasm as she had ever seen in one place.

  “Hullo, Doc,” Gatlin said. “Andy’s call gave me a real lift. I saw myself coming out of the property room this morning and I didn’t look at all well. The pencil pushers weren’t losing much sleep when the victims were ‘strippers and panhandlers,’ as the chief called them, but the one this morning got their attention. Not only was she ‘one of us’ but she was from out of town. When street people get killed, we’re ‘concerned.’ But kill a tourist… Hey, now we’re talking outrage.” He looked at Broussard. “You know that footprint we found? It’s from an Elan athletic shoe… made in England… ten years ago. Looks like our boy doesn’t do much walking.”

  “Or he had a good supply laid away,” Broussard said.

  “Or that.”

  “If you’ll both have a seat, we can begin,” Kit said.

  Gatlin sat down, took a small spiral notebook and a pen from his shirt pocket, and crossed his legs. Broussard sat with both feet on the floor, arms crossed over his belly. From the bulge in each of his cheeks, he had helped himself to a couple of lemon balls just before leaving his office.

  Kit had considered standing while she spoke—for the psychological edge that would give her over her seated colleagues—but decided that simply being behind a desk was enough.

  “In 1781, the mangled body of a small boy was found on a wooded lane near Caude, France. A short while later, the retarded son of the local silversmith was caught in a nearby forest, his hands covered in blood, shreds of human flesh in his clawlike nails. In court, he confessed
not only to the murder of the boy but to several others. The lawyer retained by his father explained that the defendant had committed these acts under the influence of certain spells he’d been having in which the odor of the victims had made him so angry that he couldn’t stop himself from savaging them.

  “In autumn of 1848, someone entered a cemetery near Paris and tore several corpses to pieces. At first, authorities thought that it was done by animals, but footprints in the fresh dirt clearly showed that it had been a man. That same winter, it happened again. In March 1849, a spring gun set up in a cemetery that had been the site of several corpse mutilations went off during the night. Those who had set the gun rushed to the scene and saw a man in military dress leap a wall and disappear. From blood that they found on the wall the next morning, they concluded that the man had been wounded. A search of the military installations near the cemetery turned up a young officer named Bertrand, who was suffering from a fresh gunshot wound. At his court-martial, he confessed and recounted the first time he had done such a thing.

  “It was a few years earlier, in February, as he was walking in the country with a friend. It had begun to rain and he and his friend had sought shelter under a tree in a nearby cemetery. While waiting for the rain to let up, Bertrand noticed a fresh grave that had been only partially filled in. A pick and shovel in the dirt beside the grave suggested that the rain had driven off the men who had been working on it. When the rain slackened, Bertrand made some excuse to get rid of his companion and he returned to the cemetery, dug up the corpse, and in his own words”—Kit looked down at the white card on which she had copied the quote—“ ‘tore it in pieces without well knowing what I was about. I then went away in a cold sweat to a small copse of trees, where I lay completely exhausted for several hours, taking no precaution to shield myself from the cold rain that was falling. This condition of complete prostration followed every attack.’ ” She looked up. “Bertrand returned to the same grave two days later, dug the body up with his hands, ripped it into even smaller pieces, and rolled among the fragments. He said that if he hadn’t been caught, he thought that eventually he would have moved on to living victims.