Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  Art Meloy was taking the few minutes before dinner to spray some Ansar on a patch of weeds where his lawn ran beside the Hollins’s driveway. When Barry got out of the car, Meloy suggested they play some golf on Saturday. But Barry paid no attention. He walked toward the house, still whistling the same song, a few bars at a time, followed by a short interval while his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Meloy shrugged and went back to his weeds.

  Barry went in the front door and through the den to the kitchen, where he heard Mother Keltner and Lila in the pantry. He walked over, shut the pantry door, and turned the key in the lock. “Pop goes the weasel.” He hadn’t blinked since the music began, and there were now tiny hemorrhages in the whites of his eyes. Hearing the shower running in the upstairs bathroom, he picked up a chair from the breakfast table, went up the stairs, and wedged it under the bathroom doorknob. “Pop goes the weasel.” Then he went into the garage, got the gasoline for the lawnmower, and took it back into the kitchen, where he drenched the walls and floor. He proceeded from room to room, methodically wetting all the rugs and draperies. In the den, he poured the pungent fluid over his football-watching chair with the diligence and care of a fine craftsman whose reputation rides on the thoroughness of his work. “Pop goes the weasel.”

  He rattled the gasoline can against his ear. Satisfied that there was enough left, he took the gun-shaped cigarette lighter from the drawer next to his chair and placed it on the table. Deliberately, he upended the gas can and played the spout over his clothes. The tune in his head blocked all other sensation, and he neither felt the cold liquid that plastered his clothes against his skin nor smelled the heavy fumes that filled his nostrils. He sat down, picked the lighter off the table, and pushed back so that the hidden footstool under the chair slid out. With his feet up, he waited for the tune loop in his head to roll around again to the chorus. When it got to the next “Pop,” he pulled the lighter’s trigger!

  He continued to whistle until the flames burned away the flesh on his lips. For a few seconds longer, there was just the sound of rushing air. The superheated smoke in his next breath cooked the delicate lining of his lungs and then he heard the tune no more.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Ummmm.” Eyes closed in pleasure, Kit Franklyn pressed the back of her head deeper into the down pillow as David Andropoulas, assistant DA for the city of New Orleans, ran his tongue slowly up her thigh. She buried the fingers of both hands in his thick black hair and pulled him upward. Then the phone rang.

  “Aggggh. Don’t answer it,” David pleaded, his lips moving against her hot skin.

  “Have to.” She pulled herself into a sitting position and plucked the receiver from its cradle. “Hello.”

  “This is Andy Broussard,” a resonant voice said. “If you’re free, I’ll take you on a call.”

  “I’m free.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Her “thanks” was cut short by a click as her new boss, the chief medical examiner for Orleans Parish, hung up.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you,” David whined.

  “That was Broussard. We’re going on a case.”

  As she slipped from under the sheet, David grabbed for her and missed, his fingers grazing the firm flesh of her flank. “Five more minutes,” he pleaded.

  “Can’t.” She turned on the light and picked up her panties from the chair where he had thrown them.

  Lying on his belly, David watched her silken triangle disappear behind the pink nylon. It was so like her, he thought, not to turn her back or insist on dressing in the dark. With her auburn hair free from the tortoiseshell combs she always used to hold it primly back from her face, she looked positively smoldering.

  He very much approved of the way she downplayed her looks in public, wearing lip gloss instead of lipstick and doing little to call attention to her large brown eyes or hide the sprinkle of freckles on the bridge of her nose. He had liked her natural look from the moment he saw her, but more than anything, it was her self-assurance that had first attracted him eighteen months ago when they both were campaign workers for an ultimately unsuccessful candidate for Congress. The sweet body he had discovered later was pure lagniappe.

  “How can you just shut your feelings off like that?” he asked, throwing his legs over the edge of the bed.

  She shrugged into her bra, pulled her dress on, and padded into the bathroom to fix her face and put the combs back in her hair. “It’s called discipline. You ought to try it.” In the mirror, she could see David leaning against the doorframe, his arms folded across the fur on his chest.

  “I just did. Can’t say I care for it.”

  “Don’t be so immature.”

  “Why is it immature to want to keep doing something you enjoy?”

  “If you had your way, we’d spend most of each day in bed.”

  “Shows I’m healthy.”

  “Oversexed more likely.”

  “I will always consider it one of Nature’s greatest perversities,” he said, “that women were made so undersexed that when one with a reasonable appetite comes along, we say she’s a nymphomaniac and we send her to a shrink… to a psychologist or psychiatrist for help.”

  David’s use of the word shrink did not escape her notice. He had never said so directly, but she was sure that he thought very little of her profession. His ill-chosen word smothered any regrets she had for running off. She touched a finger to a tin of lip gloss and ran the finger around her mouth. “Stick to legal opinions, counselor,” she said, cleaning her finger with a tissue. “At least there you know what you’re talking about.” She threw the tissue into a hammered brass wastebasket and brushed past him. “… And put your clothes on.”

  He followed her into the bedroom. “Did I miss something here? Why are you so sore all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t have time to talk now. Broussard will be here any minute.”

  “Later then… over dinner.”

  She looked at the ceiling. “I have no idea how long this will take.”

  “Look, it’s…” David picked up his watch from the nightstand. “It’s three-thirty. Say we make it for eight. That’ll give you over four hours. If you see you can’t make it or you finish earlier, call me at the office. I need to make up for taking the afternoon off, so I’ll just work until I hear from you.”

  “Fine.”

  Outside, the humidity hung so heavily in the June air, it was like breathing molasses. Her town house, one of fifteen comprising the small rental community called Givenchy Village, was the first one on the right. The rest curved around the parking lot in a gentle half-circle. They were all structurally the same; two-story stucco with a red tile roof, but each one was painted a different pastel color. The young willows that lined the sidewalk shaded the doorways but little else.

  In addition to David’s Plymouth and her Nissan, there were only three other cars in the parking lot, all belonging to residents. So far, no Broussard. She put a hand to her hair and found it already warm to the touch. Even in the dappled shadows of her willow, it was extremely uncomfortable and she hoped for a short wait.

  A few minutes after David’s departure, a red ’57 Thunderbird came down the drive and pulled up in front of her. Despite her belief that Broussard could never fit in such a small car, there he was, beckoning to her from behind the wheel.

  The old medical examiner was not so much driving the car as he was wearing it, his great bulk appearing to have been poured into the seat as a liquid that had then set up, encasing the steering wheel in flesh. He showed her the fat fingers on one hand and flexed his bushy eyebrows in greeting. With her legs barely inside, he threw the car in reverse, made a tight turn, and shot up the drive. She had known him for less than six hours, the time that had elapsed since he had hired her as the country’s first suicide-research investigator attached to a medical examiner’s office.

  It was her job to compile a psychological profile of the decedent in all cases where the physical
evidence did not allow the examiner to determine whether death was accidental or suicide. The position had been created as a one-year experiment. If it proved useful, there was a good chance the administrators of Orleans Parish would make it permanent. Even with the drawback of an uncertain future for the job, she had found it hard to believe that Broussard had been willing to hire someone whose doctoral degree was so fresh it had not yet come back from the place that laminates them onto wooden plaques. From her view, it was a great opportunity to study the suicide mentality firsthand. Maybe even write a book about it.

  As they drove, she pretended to watch the road, but was actually studying her new employer, who wore a short beard and mustache the same color as the unruly thatch of grizzled hair on his head. Through the beard and under layers of padded flesh, his features were delicate and his skin boyishly smooth. A clump of gray hairs guarded the entrance to the pink ear facing her.

  Had she not seen the glass canister of lemon balls on his desk, and had there not been a marble-size bulge in his rosy cheek at this very moment, she might have been willing to concede that his weight problem was “glandular.” But with the evidence, she concluded that, like David, he was undisciplined. Broussard’s weakness, however, was food. And on that count, she was close to the mark, for Broussard really enjoyed only three things in life—his job, good food, and old T-Birds.

  However, when she concluded that his bow tie, mesh shoes, and the little black cord that ran from around his neck to the temples of his glasses were affectations, she was wrong. His choices in dress were strictly pragmatic. The cord allowed him to slip his glasses off when looking through a microscope and find them again when he was finished. Traditional ties would occasionally dangle in his work, much of which was conducted while bending over. Mesh shoes were the only kind that kept his feet from sweating. On another point, though, she was absolutely correct. He did spend far too much time rubbing his fingers over the bristly hairs on the tip of his nose.

  “How’m I doin’?” Broussard spoke in an effortless rumble with no corners and no edges, as though his words had been cooking all day over a low flame.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  He shifted the lemon drop into his left cheek. “You haven’t taken your eyes off me since you got in the car and I was wonderin’ what conclusions you’d reached.”

  “You sure you want to ask that of a relative stranger?” Kit replied. “Could be risky.”

  He glanced at her briefly, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You’d tell me the truth even though I sign your paycheck?”

  “Isn’t that one of my duties?”

  His whole body chuckled in an appreciative basso profundo that rattled the dash. “I withdraw the question,” he said.

  Now that he had broken the silence, she felt obligated to say something in return. “Do we know any details of this case we’re going to look at?”

  He turned left and headed for the Greater New Orleans Bridge across the Mississippi.

  “Cases,” Broussard said. “There’s two of ’em now. Got the second call just before leavin’ the office. Seems like the population of this city’s sole purpose for existin’ is to make my days last well into the night. Inconsiderate buggers. What was it you asked? Oh yeah, details. Just addresses, that’s all I want at first. Too much observer interpretation involved when someone tells you what happened. I want to be totally unbiased when I get my first look.” He unbuttoned the pocket on his white shirt, plunged two fingers and a thumb into it, and brought out three lemon balls and some lint. He held them out in the palm of his small hand, an appendage that she knew regularly handled human remains. “Care for one?” he asked.

  The answer came easily. “No thanks.”

  A short drive later, now in the Westbank suburb of Algiers, they pulled into a dirt driveway that led to a little gray clapboard house set up on cement blocks. In front of them was a police cruiser, and in front of that, a brown Toyota. Two other cars, whose make Kit didn’t recognize, were in the yard. Broussard eased onto the scraggly lawn, wrestled himself out of the car, and went inside, seeming to forget Kit completely. Figuring she was here to see what was happening, she followed him.

  The house was a typical shotgun: a long hall leading from the front to the back, doorways on either side. She found Broussard in the first room on the left, a large sitting area. He was peering closely at the right temple of a man with blank staring eyes who lay slumped in a straight-backed chair, his head cocked crazily to one side. Had it not been protected by a piece of clear plastic, the Oriental rug under the chair would have been ruined by all the blood.

  With her hand over her mouth, Kit remained in the doorway, her stomach doing greasy cartwheels. Maybe her suggestion that she accompany Broussard on a few cases to get the feel of things wasn’t such a great idea after all. It certainly wasn’t a necessary part of her job. As Broussard had pointed out in her interview, she would be working mostly from reports. Still, it was fascinating… in a morbid sort of way. In addition to Broussard and a pair of uniformed policemen, Kit saw two other men in the room. One was a sallow-complexioned fellow carrying a Polaroid camera. The other, a middle-aged hulk with tired eyes, was running a yellow tape measure from the back wall to the corpse. The man with the tape had a face as heavily lined as a dried apple and looked as though he’d dressed in the dark from a hamper full of dirty clothes. The photographer appeared to have been doing this sort of thing for a long time because he moved quickly around the room taking pictures with no instructions from anyone. Finally he told the fellow with the tired eyes what had been photographed and asked whether any other shots were needed. Receiving a shake of the head for an answer, he gave Broussard a thumbs-up sign and left, brushing Kit with his camera as he passed.

  Broussard got down on one knee and, without touching it, flirted with the gun that lay next to the chair. With a stubby pencil, he made some notes in a small black book. The man with the tape then moved in and worked the area around the gun. It wouldn’t have seemed at all out of place for the corpse to have been in his underwear. But to the contrary, he was nicely dressed: short-sleeve tan shirt, brown pants, and a pair of brown loafers that were either freshly polished or new. All that could be seen of his tie was the knot because the rest was obscured by a wad of papers clutched to his chest.

  Broussard pulled gently on the arm that held the papers, inspected its underside, pressed on it with his fingers, and made more notes in his little book. He gingerly pulled one of the gore-soaked papers loose, looked at it, and gave it to Kit before beginning a stroll around the room. She took the paper reluctantly between her index finger and thumb. At the top, through the blood, she saw the words, “American History—Mr. Rentdorff.” The rest of the page alternated between lines of type and sentences written in an almost illegible scrawl with a soft pencil. The dead man was embracing a stack of exam papers.

  Broussard was acting like a nosy relative. He read from a newspaper lying on a trestle table badly in need of refinishing, looked at the thermostat on the wall, and wrote again in his little book. He motioned to the man with the tape. “I’ve seen enough. When his ride gets here, have ’em tell Charlie I want a rectal readin’ as soon as he can get it.” He propelled himself in Kit’s direction, sweeping his upturned palms through the air as though chasing a dog out of a flowerbed. “Time to go. We got another stop to make.”

  Kit reached the car first, dying to talk. She waited expectantly while her expansive colleague wedged himself behind the wheel, collected the sweat from his brow on the back of his hand, and wiped it across his trousers. She waited while he started the car and fiddled with the air conditioner. Finally, when she could wait no longer, she said, “What do you make of it?”

  He looked out the rear window and backed up. “Self-inflicted. I saw that right away. Blew his brains out around nine-thirty, shortly after breakfast. Gonna be a lot of people unhappy over this one.”

  “Who?”

  The steering wheel rubbed the
buttons on his shirt. “All the little yahoos that’ll have to write their American History exam over again because teacher got the first set too soiled to grade. Gotta hand it to him. He found a pretty creative way to thumb his nose at ’em. Wonder if he used that kind of imagination in his teachin’?”

  “That’s what makes it a suicide?”

  “Sometimes people who shoot themselves stand in the tub so’s not to make a mess on the rug. This one used plastic.”

  “What do you need me for? Sounds like you’re able to handle it all, including the psychology.”

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure it was a suicide. But I don’t like even a one percent possibility that I’m wrong. I’d still like for you to talk to his principal, the other teachers, the kids, and so on, and see if his behavior over the last few months fits a suicide. Don’t feel useless. They’re not all this clear. You’ll have to tell me whether it is or isn’t on some.”

  “How did you pinpoint the exact time he did it?”

  He looked at her and his eyes glittered. “Elementary, my dear Franklyn… You know, he never actually said that.”

  “Who never said what?”

  “Sherlock Holmes never said, ’Elementary, my dear Watson.’ He said, ’Elementary,’ and he said, ’my dear Watson,’ but he never said ’em together. Anyway, the deceased was in full rigor. With a room temperature of seventy-three degrees, rigor takes about twelve hours to develop. That alone would make it around five o’clock this mornin’ when he did it. But there was a half-eaten sausage and biscuit from Burger Delight sittin’ on the TV. While I’d never eat one myself, I know they serve ’em only for breakfast and they don’t open till seven. The biscuit was fresh, so he must have been alive when they opened. The mornin’ paper was turned to the TV schedule, where he’d circled the Larry Lambert program. You ever watch that thing? Seems like it’s always about sex. I’ll admit it’s an assumption that he waited till after that show to do it, but when they take his body temperature back at the morgue, it can be plugged into a formula that’ll help us determine the time of death.”