He was young and clean-cut, but she’d have felt the same gratitude if he’d looked like Quasimodo.
“You really shouldn’t be out alone around here.”
“Point taken,” Kit said, breathing hard.
“Where are you going?”
She almost said the aquarium but saw what was coming. Imagining what her mystery caller would think if he saw her arrive in a police car, she said, “The Hilton on Poydras.”
“Come on, we’ll take you. And another word of advice… get some training in self-defense. Mace won’t do you much good if you can’t deploy it.”
At the Hilton entrance, she thanked the cops and went inside, staying just long enough for them to get out of sight. When she’d come in, the doorman had managed to keep any sign of curiosity off his face. On her way out, he didn’t.
“None of your business,” she said, stepping into the street.
She checked her watch: 12:55. She felt moist and clammy from all the walking and the air conditioning in the patrol car and the hotel, but she ignored it and moved faster, past the World Trade Building and beyond, past the entrance to the Algiers ferry, down the sidewalk to the green glass aquarium, which sat on the bank of the Mississippi like a huge lipstick.
The aquarium entrance faced the river, across a brick promenade. She reached it hot and sweaty, only to find no one waiting. Her eyes swept the promenade, searching each of the benches that surrounded the small trees spaced over the brickwork. A quarter of a mile away, she could see the illuminated spire of the St. Louis Cathedral. Out of the corner of her right eye, she detected movement behind the largest of three metal sculptures that projected from the bricks like shark fins. She moved closer and saw that it was only a couple kissing.
Too late. He hadn’t waited for her. She’d let him get away again.
Her gaze drifted across the river, to the lights on the cranes at the Algiers iron works. Then she had a thought. He’d said to come to the main entrance of the aquarium, which didn’t necessarily mean he was planning to arrive as she did, from some other location. He might have been there already. She walked to the doors of the darkened aquarium and gave one a pull. It wasn’t locked.
Inside, it was cool and the overhead lights were turned way down, so that she could barely see. At the rear of the huge entry, the interior of the building was divided by a square column that rose from the floor almost to touch the ceiling far overhead. As her eyes adapted to the dark, she could see that the column was actually a metal sculpture, worked to look like fish scales. At its base was a pool. Probably during the day, water cascaded over the scales and was recirculated from the pool.
“Anyone here?” she said meekly.
For an answer, there was only the faint whoosh of the air conditioning and the intermittent sound of water gurgling down pipes. Ignoring the wide stairs with yellow railings to her right, she cautiously moved deeper into the building. “Hello… anyone here?”
Her course took her to the right of the fish-scale sculpture, where she paused and stared into the yawning black space beyond. “Helloooo.”
Slowly, she moved forward, entering a less expansive passage, fancifully imagining herself descending into the bowels of some creature that had been lying in the dark with its mouth open—the sound of moving air its lungs, the gurgle of water its kidneys.
A huge porthole appeared in the wall to her right. Through it, she saw dim shapes slipping by, seemingly suspended in air. She moved along the wall, finding comfort in the touch of her fingers against the cool cement. The passage curved to the right and within a few steps she could no longer see the front entrance when she looked back. Abruptly, the wall opened onto a vast space bounded by a transparent barrier that hardly seemed there at all. She paused in awe, then moved forward until she stood in front of an extraordinary view eerily illuminated by scattered red night-lights affixed to manmade shapes that rose from the floor beyond the barrier, to crisscross in the gloom and pass out of sight far above. A massive torpedo shape glided between her and one of the lights, its sleek outline topped by a triangular dorsal fin. Higher up, another light winked out as a second, larger shark slipped by.
Disoriented by the darkness on her side and the size of the great tank, Kit’s mind began playing tricks on her, making her feel that in the dark corners of the tank, the world on the other side of the glass and hers were joined. Shivering at the illogical but all too real sensation that one of the fearful fish might be circling her, she glanced over her shoulder, into her own watery gloom, whose tidal currents nudged the prickling hairs on the back of her neck.
In the direction she had come, something moved—or was it merely an illusion? Her eyes strained at the darkness, trying to see what was or wasn’t. Deciding that she had imagined the movement, she turned back toward the tank and took a sharp breath. A huge shape was coming directly toward her. Half-believing that it might be able to reach her, she took two steps backward. At the last moment, it turned to avoid the barrier and her brain struggled with what she saw, unable to assemble the image into meaning. Then in one horrible second, the chaos cleared.
The shark had a human leg in its mouth.
11
“The divers got him out… at least what’s left of him,” Broussard said to Gatlin. “You want to have a look before they take him away?”
Gatlin shook his head. “You tell me what I need to know.”
“His left arm from the shoulder down and everything below the sternum are missin’.”
Kit was sitting on the brick wall around the pond at the base of the fish-scale sculpture, beginning to recover from the shock of what she’d seen. Broussard’s description of the body set her progress back.
“You need the rest of him?” Gatlin asked.
“Not really. No reasonable way to get it, anyway. We don’t even know which fish took part.”
Took part. Took parts, Kit thought, her mind’s uncontrolled wordplay making her stomach even sicker.
“Who was he?” Gatlin asked.
“Aquarium director said his name’s Paul Jarrell. He was the senior saltwater aquarist, but he’d been doublin’ as freshwater aquarist ’cause they’re shorthanded. You ready to see the layout above the tank?”
“Yeah. Be there in a minute. Let’s get him loaded.”
Broussard walked back to the spot where Kit’s emotions had been thoroughly scrambled less than an hour earlier. The two men who had come to transport the remains to the morgue were standing in front of the big Gulf of Mexico display, whose lights were now on. Inside the tank, remorseless sharks patrolled the underpinnings of a mock oil rig as if expecting another treat. “You can take him now.”
“After this, I ain’t ever goin’ swimmin’ again,” one of the transporters said as they all went back to the entrance.
“I may not even take a bath,” the other one added.
Broussard and the transporters went up the stairs and walked past the upper reaches of the fish-scale sculpture to where the remains of Paul Jarrell lay on a stretcher, a sheet clinging wetly to his abbreviated shape. Off to one side, their backs to the stretcher, the aquarium director, the night engineer, and a uniformed security guard were talking quietly. A few feet away, Jamison, the police photographer, was fiddling with his camera.
Back downstairs, at the entrance, one of the cops who had been the first to arrive came in and called Gatlin aside. “Lieutenant, my partner and I gave that woman a ride to the Hilton about fifteen minutes before we found her over here. Obviously, she lied to us about where she was going.”
“I’ll be sure and point that out to her. Thanks.”
Gatlin and the cop watched the stretcher bearers bring the remains down the stairs, both men noticing how there didn’t appear to be much under the sheet. Kit did not look at all. The cop went back outside and Gatlin said, “Doc, you interested in the tour?”
Had the entire body been out of the building, she might have felt a little better, but most of it was still back there—in the belly of animal
s that little kids would be looking at happily the next day. She didn’t want to see that, but she definitely wanted to know how Paul Jarrell had gotten into the tank. She rose and followed Gatlin up the stairs.
They encountered Jamison coming the other way.
“Where you going?” Gatlin asked.
“To get a few shots of the front of the tank.”
“What have you taken so far?”
“Just the body. The divers are getting dressed, so I’m gonna have to wait a few minutes before I can get into the room over the tank.”
“Okay, but come right back up.”
Gatlin and Kit had already met Lester Thomas, the aquarium director, and the two men with him, so no introductions were necessary. Thomas was probably in his late thirties. He had a high forehead, soft brown hair, and an ill-advised beard and mustache that reminded Kit of Bermuda grass not getting enough sun. His white shirt was misbuttoned.
“I want to see where he went into the water,” Gatlin said to Thomas. Gatlin gestured to an open door. “This it?”
Thomas nodded.
“Lester, I’m going back to my station,” the engineer said. “Anybody needs me, that’s where I’ll be.”
Thomas led the group into a long gray room whose floor was little more than a narrow path around the perimeter of the shark tank, which lay beyond a shallow connecting pool straight ahead. As Thomas took them around to the main tank, he explained that agitation of water in the shallow pool created ripples on the surface of the big tank so that viewers on the first floor couldn’t see above the waterline.
When they reached the main tank, Gatlin expressed the thought that had also occurred to Kit. “There’s no guardrail around this thing.”
“No,” Thomas said. “We’d discussed installing one, and probably now we will.”
Broussard stepped to the edge of the shark tank and looked in. Kit hugged the wall. While Gatlin wrote in his little black book, Thomas continued walking, toward the superstructure of the shark tank’s mock oil rig, a maze of gray pipes that extended from the water to the ceiling. He paused just shy of the rig and Kit thought he might go up onto a yellow metal catwalk that ran from the edge of the tank to its center. Instead, he looked to his left, into an alcove whose contents were hidden from the group, and said, “We got a lady here. So make sure you’re zipped up.” He turned to Kit and the others. “The divers,” he explained.
Two lanky young men in jeans and blue polo shirts with aquarium logos on them came out of the alcove. Both wore grim expressions and looked pale and shaken. “Hope I don’t ever have to do anything like that again,” one said.
“If you don’t need us for anything more, we’re gonna go get drunk,” the other one added.
Thomas looked at Gatlin, who motioned to the men with his black book and said, “You can leave.”
Everyone let them by and Gatlin walked back to where they’d been dressing.
“What would Jarrell have been doin’ up here?” Broussard asked.
“Any of a dozen things,” Thomas replied. “I’m surprised, though, that he wasn’t wearing his life jacket.”
“Life jacket?” Gatlin said, rejoining the group.
“Paul couldn’t swim. Crazy, isn’t it, for a man who spent his life working with fish?”
“Yeah,” Gatlin said, “downright loony. He always work at night?”
“Not always, but often. Some things can be done from the back of the displays, but he was reworking a couple of the Amazon rain forest exhibits. No way to get at them from behind. So they can be worked on only at night while we’re closed. When it comes to underwater landscaping, Paul is a… was a real artist. I don’t know what we’re going to do without him. Damn.”
“What’s wrong?” Gatlin asked.
“I just remembered, we’ve got five hundred school kids coming in tomorrow from Thibodaux.”
“So?”
“How’s it going to look if, when they’re all standing in front of this tank, a shark passes one of Paul’s sneakers?”
“You surprised the sharks went for him?” Broussard asked. “I imagined they’d be so well fed, they wouldn’t do somethin’ like that.”
“A shark is always hungry, or at least interested enough to take a bite. When we clean the tank, it takes three divers, two to do the actual cleaning and one to keep the sharks away. And night is our worst time for losing the tarpon in the tank to the sharks. You can’t imagine the headaches involved in running an operation like this.”
“Was Jarrell working alone tonight?” Gatlin asked.
“He shouldn’t have been,” Thomas said. “Bobby Poag, one of our junior people, was scheduled to help.”
“He did,” the security guard said. “At least for most of the evenin’.”
“Well where is he?” Gatlin asked.
“That’s what I asked Jarrell when I didn’t see Poag on my eleven-fifteen pass by,” the guard said. “Jarrell told me he’d sent him home. Said they were so close to bein’ done, he could finish by himself.”
Gatlin made more notes in his book and said to the guard, “When did you last see Jarrell alive?”
“Twelve-fifteen. I get around the whole aquarium ’bout once an hour.”
“Where exactly was he then?”
“Right where he was an hour earlier… at the piranha exhibit.”
“You notice anything about him tonight that was out of the ordinary?”
“Well…”
“What?”
“I ain’t one to speak ill of the dead, but he had alcohol on his breath. Never knew him to be a boozer, but he’d sure been at the grape tonight.”
“You sayin’ he was drunk?” Broussard asked.
The guard shook his head. “Didn’t seem to be. I mean the displays he was workin’ on don’t look like they been put together by a drunk. Then, too, he was workin’ with the piranhas and still had all his fingers….”
Gatlin looked at Thomas. “Did Jarrell have an office in the building?”
“First floor—want to see it?”
“Yeah.” Gatlin turned to the police photographer, who had returned from downstairs. “Ray, get all this, will you?”
They cleared the room and waited while Jamison blanketed it with snapshots. When Jamison emerged, Thomas locked the door and set off through the exhibits, motioning for the others to follow.
In the wastebasket in Jarrell’s tiny office, Gatlin found two small airline-type liquor bottles that had once held scotch. On the wall behind his desk was a full year’s calendar from Carolina Biological with cryptic notations scrawled in the squares for various dates. Kit checked the current date but found it blank. Next to the calendar was Jarrell’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology from Tulane. Under the degrees were two simply framed eight-by-ten aerial color photographs of a tropical island fringed by pale green water that deepened to cobalt blue farther out. Looking at them from a picture on his desk was a woman in her early forties.
“How old was Jarrell?” Kit asked Thomas.
He looked at the ceiling as though Jarrell’s resume was written on it. “Forty-seven—no, forty-eight. He had a birthday last month. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“Which reminds me—” Thomas said, “why were you in the building and how did you get in?”
“It’s a long story.”
Thomas looked at Gatlin. “Am I—whose… whose job is it in situations like this to tell his wife?”
“I can do it,” Gatlin said, “unless you’d prefer to.”
“No… no. I’d much rather you did it.”
“I’ll need his address and phone number and the same for Bobby Poag.”
“I’ll get them for you.”
“I also want to talk to that engineer for a few minutes.
Where is he?”
“In the west wing. I’ll show you the way.”
“And the displays Jarrell worked tonight. I want to see them.” Gatlin looked at Jamison, who was standing j
ust outside the door. “Ray, you can go. Thanks.” Then to Kit and Broussard, he said, “I won’t be long. Can you two stick around? We have things to discuss.”
*
* *
“Okay,” Gatlin said, over the sound of his Pontiac’s air conditioning. “What have we got here?”
From the backseat, Kit said, “Isn’t it obvious? We’ve got a murder. Jarrell calls me earlier, admits to witnessing the murder of Francie O’Connor…”
“Who?” Gatlin asked.
“Francie O’Connor. That’s the name of the woman we found in my backyard.”
“How’d you get her name?”
“A friend of hers saw the picture in the paper and identified her for me.”
“I thought you were going to keep me informed.”
“I was waiting until I had a little more to tell you.”
Gatlin leveled a finger at her. “Written report, on my desk by five o’clock tomorrow. Everything you’ve learned to date. You were saying?”
“Jarrell agreed to meet me at twelve-thirty, except that when I went to my car to come here, I had a flat, clearly arranged by someone who wanted me to be late, which I was, partly because of a cabdriver from hell who was acting so strange I had to bail out before getting here. That’s when the cops found me.”
“And when you lied to them,” Gatlin said.
“Of course. What was I going to do, pull up at my meeting in a cop car after promising I wouldn’t say anything? How much would I have learned if he saw me do that? So I had the cops let me out at the Hilton, then I came over here, and you know the rest. Obviously, Jarrell was murdered by someone who didn’t want me to talk to him.”
Gatlin looked at Broussard, who had been listening quietly beside him, a lemon drop in one cheek. “What’s on your mind?”
“When the divers were puttin’ the body on the stretcher, some foam came out of his nostrils. That’s a pretty good sign he was alive when he went into the water. I want to know his blood-alcohol level and the chloride content of the blood in his left and right ventricles. I also want to look at his brain macroscopically and microscopically.”
“Blood alcohol, I get,” Gatlin said. “What’s this chloride stuff?”
No Mardi Gras for the Dead Page 11
