Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  Ten minutes later, at the bridge, she saw a small cluster of people, a tow truck, and an assortment of cars, including Broussard’s yellow T-Bird, on a grassy spot at the end of a dirt road leading to the river’s edge. On the highway, two policemen were making life difficult for the curious.

  “Keep it moving… You! Yes, you! Get that thing out of here. Come on; come on. Let’s go.”

  As she drew near the cop on her side, she rolled her window down and leaned out.

  “You can read about it in the papers, lady,” the cop said sharply.

  “I’m with the medical examiner’s office.” She pointed to the dirt road. “Can you get me down there?”

  “Got any ID?”

  “None that will satisfy you.”

  He looked hard at her for what seemed like an awfully long time, then yelled at the other cop and together they opened a path in the traffic. Her little Nissan took the rutted road badly, and by the time it had jiggled and bounced her to the water’s edge, she didn’t like the car quite as much as she had.

  Phil Gatlin was there and, along with Broussard, he was watching a police boat work its way across the river. In the boat’s stern she could just make out two men hanging on to a line playing out from a winch.

  Hearing her swish through the dry grass behind them, Gatlin and Broussard turned around. From the look on Gatlin’s face, Broussard hadn’t yet told him who she was.

  “Phillip, this is Kit Franklyn, my new assistant. Kit’s specialty is suicide.”

  Gatlin put out a huge hand at the end of a wide forearm. “Never knew a lady before whose specialty was suicide,” he said, shaking her hand as gently as King Kong ever held Fay Wray. With all the lines in his face, he reminded her of a worried Robert Mitchum.

  “Somewhere out there in all the mud, catfish, and garbage, there’s a school bus and a car,” Broussard said. “The car ran down some pedestrians back up the road. You probably saw that on your way here. Then it tried to ram a school bus on the bridge. Both of ’em went over the edge.”

  It was a long way to the bridge from where they were standing, but when Kit looked up, she thought she saw a gap in the steel meshwork of the rail. She pictured herself plunging off the bridge and somewhere in her pelvis she felt a muscle contract. Gatlin moved downriver.

  “Somebody saw the car plow into that crowd and then leave the scene. They followed the car to the bridge and saw what looked like a deliberate attempt to ram the bus head-on,” Broussard said.

  “Could it have been some kind of dizzy spell that waxed and waned?” Kit suggested.

  “If you had a dizzy spell and ran over some people, I think you’d stop the car and help the injured when your head cleared. Whoever was behind the wheel of this car had a clear enough head to drive a half mile in a normal manner after he hit those folks.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. More likely a suicide involvin’ a man angry over somethin’ and not satisfied to die alone. One determined to take as many people as possible with him. That’s why he waited for the school bus.”

  “God, I forgot about that. How many kids were in the bus?”

  “We think it was empty.”

  “That’s a break.”

  “Doesn’t do much for the dead at the bus stop.”

  “Looks like they got something,” Phillip shouted, his hand shading his eyes.

  The police boat had hoisted a red flag. The vessel made a wide turn and headed for shore, stopping about fifteen feet out. An unshaven man in jeans and a gray T-shirt got out of the tow truck and waded to his knees to catch the steel cable that was tossed to him. He fastened it to the winch on the truck and cranked up the engine. As the winch groaned and the cable strained, Kit thought of what Broussard had said about the case likely being a suicide. Would he be willing to change his mind if she found no evidence of a suicidal personality? She doubted it. She found herself hoping that the autopsy would disclose a heart attack or a brain tumor, anything to shift the responsibility for this one away from her.

  The winch continued its tortured labor and almost imperceptibly it began to gain ground. The object on the end of the cable was moving. Unexpectedly, with the sound of a rifle shot, the cable parted and the end attached to the winch sliced through the air in a curving arc. To Kit, it all seemed to be happening in slow motion. She could see the ruptured end glinting in the sun as it traveled a course that would intersect the spot where she stood. It was going to hit her.

  She was jolted backward and the world turned upside down. Seconds later, she felt as though a great weight lay upon her, and the right side of her face felt as though it had been filleted. She couldn’t move and, for a terrible moment, she was sure she was paralyzed. She let out a small cry. Her ear! She could see one of her ears! Then she realized it was not her ear, it was the ear of someone on top of her, someone whose sharp whiskers were still pressed against her cheek.

  Breathing heavily, Broussard struggled to his feet and offered her his hand. “Didn’t think you were gonna duck in time,” he said apologetically.

  “Neither did I,” she replied, looking at a small sapling that had been sheared off its trunk by the cable.

  Broussard brushed himself off and picked a piece of chaff from his hair. “Guess you weren’t lookin’ at the wallpaper,” he said.

  It was a nice way of saying she had picked herself a pretty stupid spot in which to stand. From now on, she was definitely going to be looking at the wallpaper.

  The tow truck driver spliced the broken cable with four U bolts, and in less than ten minutes, the car that had gone off the bridge was leaking water onto the bank. Jamison, the police photographer, appeared from somewhere and circled the car, clicking pictures as he went. While he was taking one from the rear, the tow truck operator climbed up on the hood, wiped the windshield on the driver’s side with a rag, and looked in.

  “Christ! Take a look at this,” he exclaimed.

  Everyone crowded around, and soon they were all trying to talk at the same time. Kit had overdone her new respect for winch cables and was nearly forty feet away. Curious as to what could produce this kind of excitement in such veterans of mayhem, she walked to the car, squeezed between two uniformed policemen, and saw what had caused the stir. The corpse was smiling!

  CHAPTER 5

  Kit walked slowly along the cement steps that lined Lake Pontchartrain’s New Orleans shore. Overhead, the cloudless sky made the calm water of the shallow lake deceptively blue. In the water above the first submerged step, she could see small fish that darted into deeper water at her approach. It was early and the benches that dotted the wide grassy strip that ran beside the steps were empty. Except for two figures on the steps ahead and some robins scratching under the big fir trees along the lake, the place was all hers.

  She could not remember a worse time in her life. The autopsy had produced no explanation for the vicious behavior of the man who had gone off the bridge, and four days ago, she had set about her investigation of the case. It had ended just like the one involving the fire. A series of events had occurred for which there was no discernible cause. Fred Watts was not suicidal, or if he was, had done a helluva good job of keeping it to himself.

  She drew near the two figures on the steps, a little boy about seven and a man in his early forties, just as the boy jerked on his cane pole and hauled a flopping silver fish onto the steps. The boy and the fish scuffled briefly. The fish lost.

  “Look what I caught,” he said, pointing his prize in her direction. The fish made soft croaking noises, and the boy put its mouth to his ear and giggled. “It talks,” he said happily.

  Kit walked on, the child’s joy making her own problems seem even worse. What had caused Barry Hollins to kill himself and his family? Why had Fred Watts driven into a crowd of innocent people and then tried to kill himself in a head-on collision with a school bus? The great psychologist who was going to write a book on suicide couldn’t do a thing with two of her first th
ree cases. And then yesterday, she’d learned that Minnie Mrocheck was in the hospital in a coma… from an overdose of sleeping pills. Kit angrily kicked a pinecone into the lake. She had anticipated that Minnie might try something like that, had even put it in her report the previous week. But Swenson claimed she’d never gotten the note telling her to check the file. Damn it! Something that important shouldn’t have been left to chance. She should have spoken to Swenson personally instead of leaving a note.

  The turn of events at the home along with the results of her investigations for Broussard made her feel utterly worthless, and she had gone to the lake to consider her options… one of which was to resign from the medical examiner’s office and give up her efforts at the home. For all she knew, Shindleman might this very minute be standing naked on the roof at Happy Years.

  In one sense, her difficulty in dealing with what she perceived as failures came from her profession. All the ego-defense mechanisms people unconsciously use to survive bad times were well known to her and were, therefore, unavailable for her use. She was forced to view all her actions in the glaring light of objectivity.

  Then too, there were her years of growing up. Years when everything she wanted seemed to come without effort. Good grades, lots of friends, college scholarships, all were a normal part of life for her, and they went unquestioned and unexamined, like the money her father had sent her each month when she was still in school. It was just the natural order of things. Working mothers, lawyers with divorce papers, fractured bones, and tight budgets were concerns other people had to contend with. In her view of the world, trapeze artists were born to do triple somersaults, and concert pianists inherited the genes for long fingers and musical ability. The role of pain and frustration in human achievement had escaped her notice, and she, therefore, felt that her failure to prevent Minnie’s suicide attempt and her inability to explain Broussard’s cases simply meant she was unfit for the work.

  Even if she and David hadn’t argued at the Rialto, her deep-seated desire to avoid any hint of a clinging-vine personality in her own makeup would have prevented her from looking to him for solace. Thus, her desolation was all the worse because she had to bear it alone.

  Around nine o’clock, with the decision to resign still on her mind, she went to her office in Charity Hospital to put the final touches on her report for Broussard. There she ran into Charlie Franks, the deputy medical examiner.

  “Want to see something interesting?” he asked, obviously pleased with himself over something. The gaps between Franks’s teeth made him resemble a carved Halloween pumpkin.

  “Sure. What have you got?” she said, more brightly than she felt.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Franks was lanky and built like a hammer, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the waist. He walked with a peculiar rocking gait that made Kit feel like she was on a ship listing from side to side. To all outward appearances, he was an extremely dedicated employee who worked seven days a week. But Kit had learned that it simply took him three times longer than necessary to do anything—mostly because he was one of those people who just couldn’t sort out the priorities in life. He spent so much time cataloging, cross-indexing, and rearranging his reprint collection that he didn’t have time to read any of the papers in it. The joke around the office was that he proofread even the things that came off the Xerox machine.

  He was a hit with Broussard, though, no small part of that being his willingness to do all the floater autopsies. It wasn’t that Franks enjoyed working on partially decomposed corpses pulled from the local bayous. It was just that because of some childhood accident, the details of which no one seemed to know, he had lost his sense of smell.

  They went into his office, where he sat down at a computer terminal. “Ask me anything about homicides in New Orleans,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Make up a question that you’d like answered about murder in this city.”

  There was nothing particular that Kit was curious about, but she liked Franks and didn’t want to appear uninterested so she managed a question. “What percentage of murders are committed by women?”

  “Over what time span?” Franks asked, his fingers poised over the keyboard.

  She decided to make it challenging. “Broken down by years for the last five.”

  Franks’s eyes glistened, and the keyboard made busy clicking noises as his fingers flew over it. A few seconds after he finished, a bar graph flashed onto the screen with the data she had requested. He pushed a button and the printer on the adjacent table began to clatter. From the paper bail, a sheet appeared containing the diagram on the screen. Franks pulled it free and presented it to her.

  “No money necessary,” he said.

  She took the paper from him and examined it with a forced look of admiration.

  “Took me six months, but every case that’s come through here in the last ten years is in this baby’s memory. Come on, ask me something else.”

  She wanted to be alone with her own thoughts right now, but because Franks was so excited and proud of his accomplishment, she decided to humor him a while longer.

  “Make it a hard one this time,” he said.

  She thought a minute and said, “Show me a yearly breakdown of all cases classed as murder-suicide over the last ten years.”

  “Too easy,” Franks said as he worried the keyboard. When the data appeared on the screen, Kit saw something so surprising and unexpected that it completely changed her expression.

  “Look at that,” she said, pointing to the monitor where the data was displayed as before, in a bar graph.

  For the first seven years of the period, the bars were all about the same size, very short. In two of those years, there had been no incidents that fit the criteria. The last three bars on the page, though, dwarfed all the others.

  “I’ll be damned,” Franks muttered. “I never realized how the number of those kinds of cases was increasing.”

  “Can you do statistics on this thing?”

  “Sure. The numbers are pretty small, so let’s run the last three years against the previous seven.”

  A minute later, the results flashed on the screen, and they both searched eagerly for the p value among the other numbers.

  “Less than point oh-one!” Kit said enthusiastically, leaving a greasy fingerprint on the screen.

  “That’s better than I expected with n so small.”

  Kit was no longer a reluctant participant. Playing a hunch, she asked Franks whether he could break the data down into known and probable suicides, and silently blessed him for his methodical ways when he said he could.

  They discovered that during the first seven years of the period surveyed, almost all of those suicides were classed as known. To the contrary, much of the increase in the last three years could be accounted for by an escalation in the number of probables. She could not have been happier. The two cases that had so stumped her were part of a pattern. It wasn’t a question of her being unfit for the job, she had simply stumbled onto an unexplained behavioral phenomenon. For the next hour, they had the computer examine the data from every possible angle. She left Franks’s office with a thick bundle of fanfold paper, eager to get off by herself and assimilate the results.

  Thirty minutes later, she burst into Broussard’s office and showed him her findings. His response was disappointing.

  “I’m sorry to have to say this, because enthusiasm over your work is a commendable virtue, but I think in this case, it’s premature.”

  “But the statistics show…”

  He lifted a cherubic hand to ward off her rebuttal. “A good statistician can stand in the middle of a thunderstorm and prove it can’t possibly be rainin’.”

  “Didn’t you tell me, a few days ago, to always play the odds?”

  “I did. Now I’m suggestin’ you do it with a little healthy skepticism. You may be on to somethin’, then again, it could be nothin’. But for the moment, l
et’s assume the increases are real. What else do we know?”

  “Two things. For one, the increases appear to be caused by people with blood type O.” She looked expectantly at Broussard, hoping his eyes would light up and he would say something brilliant. But he just sat there, his fingers laced over his belly.

  “And?”

  “And we found a correlation between the probable suicides for the last three years and scleral hemorrhaging. Does that tell you anything?”

  “Not really. It’s a findin’ that can occur anytime there’s hypoxia. Certain poisons, inhalation of toxic fumes, a violent coughin’ spell, even a gunshot wound if it’s in the trachea. It’s fairly common. A correlation doesn’t mean much. Where would you go from here?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to think about it. After all, it’s only been about an hour since we generated the data.”

  “And you believe that the Hollins case and the Watts case are part of this pattern?”

  “The records show that the blood type of both men was O.”

  “So’s mine,” Broussard said. “… along with about a hundred and twenty million other folks in this country.”

  “Just out of curiosity, did either of those two have scleral hemorrhages?”

  Broussard looked at her sternly and she was afraid she’d gone too far, asking about something he had already dismissed.

  “No way to tell. The first body was burned too badly. But I would have expected it anyway. Toxic fumes, remember? With the one in the river, the water would have washed it away.” His face softened and he said, “I can see you’re very much taken with this theory of yours and I respect that. Nothin’ of value ever gets done without a champion behind it. So if you’d like to get into this, go on, and if I can help in any way, let me know.”

  “Fair enough.” She left Broussard’s office and found Franks waiting for her in the hall.

  “How’d he like our discovery?” Franks asked.