Three minutes later, she was standing in the doorway of a large room filled with huge books in individual cubicles that ended chest-high in tilted work surfaces where the books could be examined. Here and there, people sat in uncomfortable-looking chairs at long wooden tables, writing reports. Off to the right was a small cluster of computer stations that appeared to be available for use by anyone who felt so moved.
Inside, at a desk to the left, was a heavyset woman with beautiful olive skin. Dressed in an expensive green silk dress with lots of gold jewelry at her throat and wrists, she looked as if she didn’t need this or any other job. Kit explained what she needed and the woman patiently showed her how to use the big books, calling her “hon” at least four times and frequently touching her arm. The clerk spoke with the accent of a native New Orleanian where words with an or sound are pronounced aw.
“Nawmally, hon, you’d start over there, but in yaw case…”
In her case, since she had purchased her house so recently, Kit was instructed to start at the computer by entering her name. A succession of screens showed a variety of information regarding her purchase of the property: the sale price, legal description of the property, the seller’s name, and, finally, what she was actually looking for, a pair of three-digit numbers separated by a slash mark—what the woman had called the COB number, which was simply the book and page number where she would find information about the previous sale of the property.
She left the computer and roamed the rows of books until she found the one she was looking for. She pulled it from its cubicle and plopped it onto the tilted reading surface, where she turned to the page the computer had given her. There she discovered that the person who had sold her the house had bought it eight years earlier from someone named Hataway at a fraction of what she had paid for it. Once pleased with the purchase price, she now felt she should have dickered harder. Noting the COB number of that transaction, she went looking for the next book.
Hataway had held the property only six years, having bought it from someone named Marzoni. Another COB number.
Marzoni had kept it for nine years, buying it from a woman named Guillot in 1968. That COB number led her to the discovery that Guillot had bought the property in the fifties, well before there had been any body under the grass in the backyard. Now, all she had to do was find… Shirley Elizabeth Guillot.
On the way back to the hospital, she imagined Shirley Elizabeth Guillot, her hair hanging in greasy tangles, her eyes wide and round, shining with a demented light as she choked the life from… a prostitute?
The image vanished. It was a song with all the wrong notes, like a child banging on the piano. Still, there was no one she wanted to talk to more than Shirley Elizabeth Guillot… no one, that is, until Margaret told her upon her return that she had taken a call from a Lily Lacaze, who said the picture in the paper was a friend of hers that had disappeared in the early sixties.
So nervous that she misdialed on the first try, Kit called the number Lacaze had left. The phone was answered by a hoarse female voice with a death rattle in it that made Kit glad bacteria and viruses could not travel through telephone wires.
“Ms. Lacaze?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Kit Franklyn…. You called me about the picture in the paper.”
“Then why weren’t you there? Person puts their name in the paper and wants help, they should be there when a person calls.”
“I am sorry, but I had to do something important.”
“And this ain’t important? ’Cause if it ain’t, I got other things I could be doin’.”
“No, please. The errand I had to run involved this case. I assure you, right now, this is my top priority.”
“There a reward for information? ’Cause I’m used to gettin’ paid for my time.”
“Well… I suppose if your information is good, I could manage something, say”—Kit grabbed a number out of the air—“twenty dollars?”
Lacaze snorted. “Oh yeah, I can see this means a helluva lot to you. Make it fifty and we got a deal, and even then I wouldn’t be doin’ it if it wasn’t for Francie.”
“Francie?”
“That’s her name… the girl in the paper. Christ, don’t you pay attention?”
“How will I know that… Francie is really who we found?”
“I got a picture of her. You can judge for yourself.”
“When can we meet? My office is in Charity Hospital.”
“Two o’clock. Only I ain’t goin’ in Charity Hospital. I’ve known too many that have gone in there with a little case of the clap and come out feetfirst.”
“How about Grandma O’s restaurant? Do you know where that is?”
“I know where everything is. Two o’clock. If you’re late, you can forget it. How will I know you?”
“I have long auburn hair and I wear it pulled back from my face with combs. By two o’clock, there probably won’t be many people there. How will I recognize you?”
“I’ll be the one says, ’I’m Lacaze.’”
Lacaze hung up without saying good-bye, and Kit turned her attention back to Shirley Elizabeth Guillot. Tired of getting out the phone book and putting it away, she had left it on her desk. Now, she flipped to the G’s: Guerro… Guidry… Guillard… Guillot.
Lord.
There were three columns of Guillots. She ran her finger down the list of names… no Shirley. But there was an S. Guillot, meaning that it was most likely a woman. She entered the number and let it ring a long time. Just as she was about to hang up, a shaky little old lady’s voice answered, hardly the voice of a murderer.
Kit told the old lady that she was trying to find Shirley Elizabeth Guillot so that she could be given her share of an inheritance a distant relative had left her. Kit felt ashamed at being such a liar, but she couldn’t tell the old lady the real reason she was calling. It all fell apart, though, when the woman said her name was Sarah.
Faced with an awful alternative, Kit called in a favor she was owed by someone in the utilities offices, who verified that the old lady’s account was indeed in the name of Sarah Guillot. Thinking that the Guillot she was looking for might not even have a phone, she got her contact to check for any billing to a Shirley Guillot. That, too, proved fruitless.
She drummed her fingers on the desk. Her hand went to her hair and she began to twirl it with her fingers, a habit she had tried to break, as it tended to make her hair curl up on one side.
An idea.
She hadn’t checked all the Guillots in the phone book. She turned to the listings for the small towns surrounding New Orleans. Delacroix, Jesuit Bend, and Lafitte had no Guillots at all. Lake Catherine had two, but no Shirley. Nor did she pick up anything in the listings for St. Bernard and the misplaced suburb of Detroit, Yscloskey.
There was only one thing to do—call every blessed Guillot in the book, most of whom wouldn’t even be home during the day. She flipped back to the front of the phone book, sighed at how many there were, and began: Aaron Guillot, 728….
There was a knock at the door and Broussard stuck his head in. “I just got a call about a hangin’, a teenager. You interested?”
Faced with the formidable task before her, which likely was going to be a huge waste of time, Kit would have accepted any offer to do something else. But this was actually important, a case that might illustrate some of the points she was planning to make in chapter eight of her book.
Today, Broussard had driven his red T-Bird. As they drove, Kit was once again struck by how odd it was that such a big man would have a passion for such small cars. He was so tightly wedged against the steering wheel, she imagined that his shirts wore out in a narrow band across the belly long before the collars frayed.
“How you doin’ on that skeleton?” he asked, glancing at her.
“Oh yeah, thanks for the tip.”
“What tip is that?”
“You think I don’t catch you at those little games you like to p
lay? Diet soda… a number of things to do….”
Broussard chuckled, a sound like a timpani drumroll. “So, I need to work on subtlety?”
“I’d prefer that you simply tell me if you have an idea that’d help.”
Broussard chuckled again and unbuttoned the pocket on his shirt. He fished out a lemon ball and popped it into his mouth. “I didn’t forget you,” he said, pointing to the glove compartment. “In there.”
The glove compartment held a cache of lemon balls individually wrapped in cellophane, his response to her unwillingness to accept naked ones from his pocket, which often came mixed with lint and other debris and which he’d touched with hands that had been God knows where. Though she already had a large collection of them in her handbag, and was just as unlikely to eat these, she took two and put them with the others.
Broussard changed lanes without looking. “You were about to tell me what you’d accomplished.”
Kit brought him up-to-date and said, “And now I’ve got to go Guillot by Guillot through the phone book.”
Broussard fell silent and his finger went to the bristly hairs on the end of his nose, a sure sign that he was working on her problem. Eventually, he glanced at her and said, “Want a suggestion?”
“I’d love one.”
“I once had occasion to look through the conveyance books for some property I was thinkin’ of buyin’ and it seems to me that every entry included either the initials or the name of the notary involved in the sale.”
“So?”
“If it was just a notary, I’d say, ’so nothin,’ but the notary in a real estate deal is usually also the lawyer who drew up the papers. Wasn’t that true at your closin’?”
“Who knows. Isn’t that why you hire lawyers in the first place… so you don’t have to worry about that stuff?”
Broussard clucked his tongue and shook his head as though she was a real sad case. But she was too excited by his suggestion to fight back. “So you’re saying that the lawyer who handled the paperwork when Guillot bought my house might know where she is.”
“And he might not. Real estate law is such a specialty they could have met for the first time over that one deal and he never saw or heard of her again.”
“Hey, this was your idea. How come now you’re arguing against it?”
“I don’t want you blamin’ me if it doesn’t pan out.”
“No deal. That’s the risk that comes with butting in.”
They rode in comradely silence until Broussard turned into a subdivision that had been around long enough for the one tree in each yard to look like more than a stick. They followed the winding street to a modest little brick house that had been built many millions of times in this country and that she had seen at least six times since leaving the highway.
There was a motorcycle and a silver car in the carport. The vinyl roof of the car was coming off in strips, like one she had seen peeled by monkeys in a drive-through game preserve in Florida. Behind the silver car was an NOPD cruiser and, behind that, Gatlin’s Pontiac. A car she recognized as belonging to Jamison, the police photographer, was parked next to the curb. Across the street, a woman with twins in a double-seated baby carriage and another woman carrying an umbrella to keep the sun off the baby strapped to her back exchanged views on what was happening.
Somehow, Broussard got out of the car and went around to the trunk for his forensic kit. They went up the driveway and down the short sidewalk to the front door, which was manned by a perspiring cop fanning himself with his hat. “Bedroom to the right,” the cop said without being asked. “An’ it ain’t pretty.”
They stepped into the living room, where a gray-haired woman sitting on a sofa against the wall to their left had her arm around a woman who was sobbing quietly into her hands. Broussard identified himself and Kit followed him hesitantly into a hallway to the right, mentally preparing herself for what she was about to see.
Her book was to be the most comprehensive ever written on suicide, and would even include the forensic details at suicide scenes. To write such details with authority, she had decided that she must see them, not just rely on Broussard’s descriptions. This decision was complicated by Broussard’s unwillingness to let anyone give him more than the most rudimentary details over the telephone when he was called out. Consequently, unlike this case, where suicide seemed a distinct possibility, there was usually no way to tell in advance whether she should accompany him. She just had to go along and take the useless along with the useful.
In these many trips, she had seen things that most people experience only through nightmares or Hollywood special effects. Despite her burgeoning experience with the dreadful, she had emotionally remained a novice, unable to adapt or accept these things as everyday events. It was therefore not surprising that when she got her first look at the body, she froze.
Dressed only in cutoff denims, he was almost kneeling, his body suspended from a rope tied to a chinning bar resting on crudely notched two-by-four supports. His swollen face was the color of a nearly ripe grape and his eyes were turgid and amphibious. For an instant, she was puzzled by the dark object between his lips, then realized it was his tongue. Pale over most of his body, his limp arms were also grape-colored from his elbows to the tips of his fingers, as were his legs from the knees down. It was the first hanging she had ever seen, but even if she had seen others, there was a twist to this one, because his fly was unzipped and there were pictures of nude women spread out on the carpet in front of him.
The room disappeared in the light from a camera flash, snapping Kit out of her hypnotic fixation on the body and making her aware that the buzzing in her ears was Phil Gatlin talking to Broussard. “Ambulance team took one look at him and left. Didn’t even bother cutting him down.”
Jamison, the police photographer, circled the pictures on the floor and got off another shot before Kit thought to look away. When her vision returned, she saw Phil Gatlin put on a pair of white gloves and gather up the pictures on the floor. With his path cleared, Broussard stepped up to the body and tried to lift its right arm, which resisted his efforts.
“I’m through, so I’m gone,” Jamison said, grabbing up his equipment bag from a chest of drawers.
Kit stepped inside the small room. As Jamison passed, he winked at her and said, “Y’all have fun.”
Gatlin acknowledged her presence with a faint nod.
“He’s been here awhile,” Broussard said. “When was he last seen alive?”
“Yesterday morning,” Gatlin replied. “His mother’s a rep for a local dress manufacturer. After they had breakfast together yesterday around eight, she left on an overnight sales trip. When she got back an hour ago, this is what she found. She said that thirty miles before hitting the city limits, she got the distinct feeling her son was in trouble. What do you make of that?”
“Good instincts,” Broussard said. “Just bad timin’. I take it there was no note.”
“Were you expecting one?”
“Doesn’t hurt to ask. It’s an accident, of course.”
“That’s what I thought,” Gatlin said. “But I figured you ought to have a look.”
Broussard motioned Kit over. “This is a classic case of sexual asphyxia, not a suicide. In some circles, it’s thought that partial asphyxiation heightens the pleasure of orgasm. This washcloth”—he pointed to something Kit had not noticed, a folded washcloth between the rope and the deep groove in the victim’s neck—“shows that he never intended to harm himself. The pictures were for stimulation.
“The hidden hook here is that even though it’s relatively loose, the ligature obstructs venous return from the brain, which is mediated by vessels that lie so near the surface of the neck they can be compressed by even slight pressure. So, even though the arteries lie deeper and are not affected by the ligature, circulation to the brain is still impeded. The victim loses consciousness, the noose takes his full weight, and he dies. Been more than one fooled into thinkin’ somethin�
�� like this was a suicide. Might be good to have a section on these cases in your book.” He looked at Gatlin. “Let’s get him down.”
Gatlin’s lined face twisted into a scowl. “Let the boys in the wagon do it.”
Broussard looked at Gatlin over the rims of his glasses. “If it was your son, would you let him hang till then?”
“Turn the screw, why don’t you?” Gatlin said. “Just a minute.”
He got a towel from the bathroom, went behind the chinning bar, and wrapped his arms and the towel around the body. He lifted and Broussard cut the noose free at the front of the victim’s neck with a pair of chrome surgical scissors from his bag. Broussard then moved the bar out of the way and picked the body up by the ankles. “Let’s put him on the bed.”
When the body was on the bed, Broussard went back to the bar and tied the cut ends of the noose together with a piece of wire from his bag and slipped the rope off the bar. Gatlin put the rope in a large Baggie while Broussard went into the bathroom and washed his hands.
“Why keep the rope if it’s an accident?” Kit asked.
“Because you can look stupid if you throw it away and something fishy crops up in the autopsy,” Gatlin said.
“Phillip, you gonna stick around till the wagon comes?” Broussard asked from the bathroom doorway.
“No. I’ve got an appointment back in town. The uniform outside can handle it.”
Passing through the living room, Kit glanced at the victim’s mother, who was now clinging to the other woman in such despair that Kit wished she had paid more attention to those lectures on grief therapy. Outside, the hot sun had shrunk the grass into thin spines, but Kit was so glad to be free of that house, she didn’t mind the heat. The cop who’d been at the front door was sitting in his cool cruiser with the motor running.
On their way to the subdivision’s exit, Broussard said, “Would you do somethin’ for me?”
No Mardi Gras for the Dead Page 6
