No Mardi Gras for the Dead

by D. J. Donaldson

Elbows on her desk, she closed her eyes, put a hand over them, and tried to concentrate. DA.

  DA.

  God, this was hard.

  Colada, as in pina colada, an unlikely choice, but she wrote it down just to have something on the paper.

  DA.

  Ramada. That went down under colada, though it seemed equally useless.

  Armada. She was rolling now. Four stupid words in a row.

  DA.

  Soda. Baking soda. Toothpaste could have baking soda in it. She looked to the left of the DA and mentally measured off the space needed to complete the phrase. There was definitely room for baking soda.

  Soda. I was on my way downstairs to get a diet soda. Had that old rascal…? To do a number of things… A number…

  She turned the tube over and inspected it carefully but found no numbers. The end had been crimped and rolled up several times. She unrolled it and there it was, pressed into the soft material of the tube: EX720Y8932, a lot number.

  She lugged out the phone book and looked up the number of the information service of the public library. A pleasant librarian’s voice answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve got a tough one for you,” Kit said. “Can you tell me what companies made a baking soda toothpaste between ten and twenty years ago?” Her estimate of twenty years as the maximum period of interest was purely a guess.

  The librarian took Kit’s number and promised to get back to her. Ten minutes later, she did, with the news that Procter & Gamble was a likely candidate, and she even provided a corporate phone number.

  At Procter & Gamble, she talked to six people before finding someone who had knowledge of what the company had been making during the period in question. “What color’s the tube?” he asked.

  Kit looked at it again. “I think the tube was white. The logo—at least what’s left—was mint green lettering in an oval with a red background.”

  “Doesn’t sound like us. What’s the lot number?”

  When she read it to him, he said, “Sounds like a Hoch-Matthis number, hold on—”

  Hoch-Matthis? That was a new one, but Kit supposed it was one of those corporations that owned a lot of subsidiaries—diversified, so that when folks got afraid to eat hot dogs, the lawn furniture division could take up the slack.

  Her contact came back on the line with the Hoch-Matthis phone number and a name to ask for. But when she called, she got a busy signal. Since the phone was already in her hand and she needed to kill a minute or so, she called her answering machine and signaled it to give up her messages. There was only one.

  “This is John Tully. Please give me a call when you can. Seven-eight-three, five-four-three-two.”

  Kit jotted down the number on her list of words ending in DA. John Tully was one of the charter members of the Greater New Orleans Rose Society, a group Kit had recently joined. What could he want?

  She tried Hoch-Matthis again, but the line was still busy.

  John Tully was a retired setup man for the Upton Corporation. When Kit had asked him what a setup man did, he had told her that he did setups for the night shift. Kit had nodded knowingly. Since he was retired, he might be home now. She tried his number and got him on the fourth ring.

  “John, this is Kit Franklyn.”

  “Kit. Yeah. Kit Franklyn. How are you?”

  “Fine, John. You called?”

  “I called? Yeah. Yeah. I called. Wonder if you’d do me a favor?”

  “If I can.”

  “Louisiana Rose Society is havin’ a contest to find a new rose with the best fragrance. I’ve got some contenders I’ve developed, but they allow only one entry per person. So I’d like your opinion on which one you think is best.”

  “Be glad to help. How about I drop by around… four o’clock?”

  “Yeah. Four o’clock. That’d be good. You know where it is?”

  “No.”

  Tully gave her the address and directions, thanked her, and hung up.

  This time, her call to Hoch-Matthis went through. The contact Procter and Gamble had suggested was a good one. “Could be one of ours,” he said. “Gimme the lot number.”

  She read him the number and he put her on hold. About the time she began to think he’d forgotten her, he came back on the line. “I sure wouldn’t use that toothpaste,” he said. “Our records indicate a production date for that tube of August 8, 1962. With a shelf life of three years, you’re about what… twenty-seven years too late for that tube.”

  Twenty-seven years… long enough for the killer to be long gone, maybe even dead himself.

  Armed with a pretty good fix on the time of the murder, Kit decided to use that to screen anyone who might contact her in response to the picture she was going to give to the paper. She’d say the body had been there at least ten years. That would both eliminate some calls and get people to thinking beyond the recent past.

  *

  * *

  On the way to John Tully’s, Kit remembered that she was out of heartworm pills for Lucky. She made a small detour past the vet’s to pick some up.

  Tully lived in a 1920s brown brick bungalow with a front porch enclosed by old black screening that would have made Kit think the occupant was retired even if she hadn’t known him. When she tried the porch screen door, she found it locked. Fortunately, the door fit so poorly that her knuckles made quite a rattle, bringing Tully without much delay.

  Under six feet tall and reasonably trim, Tully was dressed in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, baggy Levis, and blue deck shoes. Kit didn’t know his exact age, but considering his appearance, he couldn’t have been having any trouble getting the senior citizen’s discount at restaurants. He had thin white hair and pale lips that were almost the same color and texture as his face, giving him the appearance of a fading photograph. His most distinctive feature was a vine-shaped pattern of congested blood vessels on each cheek.

  He unlocked the screen door and pushed it open. “Hello, young lady.”

  In one hand, Tully carried a narrow wooden tray. The other, he offered to Kit.

  She hesitated, his rippled white skin, as usual, calling to mind the time Broussard had shown her how the skin on the hands of a corpse sometimes sloughs off like a glove with fingernails. Toughening, she took his hand, their previous greetings at Rose Society gatherings making the strength of his grip no surprise.

  “Good of you to come over and do this,” Tully said.

  “I’m flattered to be asked.”

  She followed him into the house, which was a shade too warm for her taste and smelled a bit like an old book. They were in a living room with furniture that looked as soft and lived-in as its owner. Apart from three or four days’ worth of newspapers scattered on the floor beside an easy chair, the room was neat, though Kit suspected that a good shake of the drapes would be something to regret.

  “Back here.”

  Tully led her to an interior hallway. On the way, she glanced into the kitchen and saw more newspapers, this time spread out on the kitchen table. On the papers was a mound of soil, some clay pots, and other potting paraphernalia.

  Tully took her to a room that most people would have used for a bedroom, but he had it filled with crudely made three-tiered planters with Gro-Lites at each level. Each tier was filled with trays of rose seedlings.

  “I figure I got about sixteen thousand plants goin’ right now,” Tully said proudly. “Ten in here and six in another bedroom in back. I was about to collect the ones we want when you knocked. Won’t take but a minute.”

  The seedlings were far too small to have flowers on them, but one planter contained much larger plants that were either in bud or already blooming. Tully moved around this planter like an aging bee, making his selections and putting them in the tray he was carrying. When he had chosen six plants, he came back to her. “Let’s go into the kitchen, where there’s more room.”

  “It must take a lot of time to care for so many plants,” Kit said, following him.

  “Tim
e? Yeah. It does that. But since I’m retired, I got the time.”

  In the kitchen, he put the tray on the table and looked at her with rheumy eyes. “And you know, it’s like havin’ sixteen thousand friends… friends that don’t ever want to borrow money or want you to take ’em somewhere… or want to talk when you want to watch the news.”

  As Kit listened to the old man rattle off the advantages of roses over people, she had the feeling that he would have traded all his roses for one friend who would want to borrow money, was always begging rides, and would talk during the news.

  Tully took the six plants out of the tray and arranged them around the edge of the kitchen table. “Time to choose,” he said.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Fullness of fragrance, agreeability, and staying power… how long the fragrance lasts after you come away from the flower.”

  “That’s a lot to think about.”

  “Just do your best.”

  Kit made the rounds of the six flowers, considered for a moment, then went back and sniffed numbers two and four again. “It’s close,” she said, “but I’d pick number four.”

  Tully grinned. “Yeah. Number four. That’s what I thought. Guess my sniffer ain’t gone yet. Say… I got a few more crosses ain’t bloomed yet. You mind comin’ back when they do and we’ll pit ’em against number four and see what happens.”

  “I can do that.”

  Heading home, Kit could not help but be struck by the way events had thrust the contrasting lives of John Tully and Victoria French under her nose: the ghost of Kit that would be or the ghost of Kit that might be….

  She dismissed the melodramatic analogy with a blink and a shake of her head. Still… there was her membership in the Rose Society. Could a bedroom full of rose seedlings be far behind?

  6

  The next morning, Kit anxiously unfolded the morning paper.

  There it was. DO YOU KNOW THIS GIRL? The quality of the reproduction was excellent and Kit was optimistic that it would jog someone’s memory. They even spelled Franklyn with a y instead of an i.

  After feeding Lucky, she got the new bottle of heartworm pills from the top of the fridge, unscrewed the top, and shook a pill into her hand. Instead of the red pill she was accustomed to, these were white.

  Ordinarily, Lucky liked his heartworm pill and would eat it from her hand as though it was dessert. But when she offered him this new pill, he sniffed it and backed away.

  “Come on, you little varmint, don’t give me a hard time over this.” She grabbed him and pulled him closer, his claws trying in vain to get a grip on the shiny linoleum. With one knee on the floor, she turned him around, pried open his muzzle, and popped the pill into his throat.

  “There, now,” she said, releasing him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Lucky blinked and looked at her in bewilderment. She scratched his neck and got to her feet. “You be good now.”

  Lucky followed her to the front door and watched sadly as she left for work. When she was gone, he trotted into the kitchen and went over to the fridge, where he made a little noise like a door latch catching. The pill clacked onto the linoleum and rolled against the counter baseboard. Before leaving to get his morning nap, he batted the pill around the floor, soon losing it in the space between the fridge and the counter.

  *

  * *

  Kit heard her phone ringing even before she could get her office door open. She dashed inside and snatched up the receiver.

  “Kit Franklyn.”

  “You the one lookin’ for information on that picture in the paper?” a male voice said.

  “Yes, do you know something?”

  “She sat next to me for six months in the shorthand class at the Eason Business School.”

  Kit’s heart was beating fast. “When was this?”

  “Back in 19… 80.”

  Kit wilted. “I’m sorry, but that couldn’t have been her.”

  “Why not?” The voice had a hint of anger in it.

  “I can’t say, but it’s definitely not her.”

  “Yeah, well see if I ever do you a favor again,” the caller said, banging down the receiver.

  The phone went off again as soon as she cut the connection.

  “Kit Franklyn.”

  “Saw your name in the paper this morning,” a husky male voice said. “Kit. What’s that short for, Katherine?”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Kit… It makes me think of kittens and that makes me think of pussy…. I’ll bet you’ve got—”

  Kit slammed the receiver into its cradle, shuddering at the way the pervert on the line had blindly guessed that Kit was indeed short for kitten, a fact she kept from even her closest friends.

  After another half dozen useless calls, there was a lull that gave her time to consider how she might go about finding out who lived in her house at the time the murder had been committed.

  The old city directories seemed like a good place to start. She thought they were in the library but called to find out for sure, discovering that they were in the Louisiana section on the third floor.

  She dialed the forensic office and asked Margaret, the senior secretary, to screen any calls that might come in regarding the picture in the paper. She told her how to do it and punched in the code that would route all incoming calls to the other phone.

  The library was only a few doors from the hospital, but even with so short a distance, the hot sidewalks made her toes tingle and she arrived wearing a thin film of perspiration that turned to ice as she entered the well-cooled library lobby.

  The city directories were in the back, past the microfilm readers. She stood in front of them and scanned the dates…. The toothpaste had been made in 1962. She pulled out the directory for that year, sat down, and turned the pages until she found her street.

  Beside most of the addresses was a name and a bell in a circle, the latter indicating that the address had a telephone. There were also some letters and numbers she didn’t bother deciphering, because beside her address, there was only the notation “No return.” This apparently meant that the occupant had not returned the form the city had mailed out.

  Suddenly getting a distinct feeling that she was being watched, she looked to the right, where at a table six feet away, a swarthy weight-lifting type in a fishnet shirt was pretending to be deeply absorbed in the book in front of him. This was not an unusual occurrence. Throughout her life, men had been stealing glances at her and then looking away when she tried to catch them at it.

  She pulled down the directory for 1963 and flipped through it. No luck there either—still that useless entry, “No return.”

  The feeling of being watched came again. She looked quickly at the guy in the fishnet shirt, but he was too fast for her.

  Going back to work, she checked the directories for ’64 and ’65 but could find only “No return” beside her address. Whoever had lived there in the early sixties had not been very civic-minded. But had they also been a murderer?

  What to do now?

  She drummed her fingers on the directory in thought. Old tax records. Maybe she could get the owner’s name from those. But where were they? Obviously, it was back to her office and the telephone.

  After she had gone and the elevator doors had shut behind her, a figure approached the directories and pulled down the one for 1964. Pages were turned until the desired street was found. A finger ran down the addresses and stopped.

  “No return.”

  The sigh of relief was almost a moan. At the next table, the man in the fishnet shirt pulled his book closer, the better to concentrate.

  *

  * *

  Back at the office, Kit learned that in her absence there had been one call about the murder, but the caller had been way off on the timing. She got out the phone book again and turned to the blue pages of government listings. She ran down the entries until she found a number for the Bureau of the Treasury-Tax
Records, which was answered by someone who didn’t have a clue as to where the old tax records were but thought the assessor’s office would know.

  The assessor’s office believed that the Louisiana section of the library might know. This was getting ridiculous. She had just come from the library.

  The librarian at the Louisiana desk also had no idea where the old tax records were but suggested that she could track the previous owner of her house at the conveyance department in City Hall, where all the property-transfer information was kept. Too cautious to plunge into the heat outside without knowing with absolute certainty that she wasn’t going on a wild-goose chase, she dialed the number the librarian had given her for the conveyance department and got a very helpful woman who verified what the librarian had said.

  City Hall was on Perdido, two blocks from the library. Despite this modest distance, she arrived in the lobby breathing hard, her underwear clinging wetly to her skin. Ahead of her, a long-haired young man pulled at his sweat-soaked T-shirt and looked up at the older man walking beside him. “Summer sucks, man.”

  Kit had to agree.

  Checking the directory on the wall, she found no listing for the conveyance department. She looked around for help. There was an information booth in the lobby but it was unmanned. Though edgy from the heat and miffed at not having thought to verify the location of the conveyance department when she’d had them on the phone, she found the silver foil-covered suggestion box on the counter of the empty information booth an amusing touch.

  She could have sworn when she entered the building that the lobby had been full of knowledgeable-looking men in suits. Now when she needed one, they had all disappeared. Presently, the only sign of life was a long line of glazed-eyed citizens snaking through a door down the hall. She walked to that doorway and looked inside, but the clerk at the counter appeared too harried to bother.

  In desperation, she opened the next door she came to and barged in. The room contained a lot of empty desks and one of those suits that had gone into hiding.

  “Conveyance department?” he said. “It’s in the basement of the civil court building.”

  Before she could get too upset at having to plunge back into the heat and walk God knows how far to get to the civil court building, the suit said, “Just go down this hall, across the little drive, and up the first set of steps you see. Ask the guard inside how to get to the basement.”