Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  She started to pull away and Vogel said, “I thought we’d go to K-Paul’s, so you better wear comfortable shoes. You don’t mind waiting in line, do you?”

  “For food like that? No problem,” Kit said.

  As she watched Vogel grow smaller and smaller in her rearview mirror, Kit felt a twinge of guilt mixed with anticipation.

  *

  On the roof of the automotive museum, there were six huge plywood pictures of odd-looking cars missing enough paint to give the impression that the business was doing poorly. Kit got the same feeling from the number of cars in the parking lot; one from Texas and one from Iowa.

  Just inside the door was a room that smelled of old seatcovers. It was full of things only people on vacation would buy: miniature license plates with “Bob,” “Nancy,” or some other name where the number should be; postcards showing a picture of the roof display (minus the peeling paint); and bumper stickers saying “I’ve been to the Old Car Museum in New Orleans, La.” The walls were covered with bright prints of old cars in stained wooden frames. She couldn’t see the cars themselves because they were on the other side of a curtained doorway with a sign over it that said ADULTS 2.50, CHILDREN 1.00, S. GROSSMAN, PROP.

  Beside the draped doorway was a glass case filled with yellow T-shirts. Behind the case, a thin black man with hair like cotton operated an ancient, silver cash register from a tall stool.

  “Is Mr. Grossman in?” Kit asked.

  Without replying, or changing his blank expression, the man on the stool pushed an ivory button on the wall behind him. Presently, a short man with a thatch of fading red hair and a face dotted with age spots came through the drapes.

  “Mr. Grossman?”

  “All day today and probably tomorrow too,” he said, glancing at the black man as though checking to see if his employee still thought the line was as funny as ever. If he did, he didn’t show it.

  “Mr. Grossman, I…”

  “Call me Shami,” he said. “Ain’t that some name for a guy who owns a car museum? Course it ain’t c-h-a-m-o-i-s, like the rag you use to wipe a car off. It’s S-h-a-m-i.” Grossman’s upper and lower teeth were blunt and broad, as though he had purposefully had the ends ground off.

  “Shami, I’m Kit Franklyn, from the Orleans Parish medical examiner’s office. Do you have one of these cars in your collection?” She handed him the pictures.

  “You betcha!” he said. “It qualifies on two counts. Not only was it made by the company with the shortest life in automotive history but it got the worst mileage of any car ever made. Kinda makes you think the two facts were related, don’t it?”

  After she explained the reason for her visit, Grossman said, “Let’s go have a look at her.” But as she parted the drapes, he touched her arm. When she turned, he pointed at the admission prices and gave her a contented smile. She thought about getting a receipt, but figuring it was worth $2.50 of her own money, didn’t bother.

  The display area was partitioned off into a multitude of rooms by black drapes on cables suspended from the ceiling. A yellow arrow on the floor pointed the way through the maze. With Grossman in the lead, they passed a row of cars with thin little tires that looked as though they were mounted on wagon wheels, Grossman talking all the while.

  “Used to be you could tell one car from another. Now, they all look alike. It’s this preoccupation with efficiency. Why can’t you have efficiency and style?” He shook his head and sighed. “Until a few years ago, you could make a statement about yourself by the car you drove. Your car could… whaddya call it… be an extension of your personality. People who couldn’t afford anything else could have a car that made them feel special. How’s anybody gonna feel special now?” Grossman suddenly veered from the direction indicated by the arrow. “We go this way. Pretty soon every car that’s made will get a hundred miles to the gallon and they’ll all be khaki-colored. Here she is.”

  He had stopped in front of a white car loaded with chrome. Through the windshield, she could see the familiar oval rear window with its two porthole companions. She walked around it, looked inside at the black vinyl seats and artificial burlwood inset on the dash, and imagined the driver of the car that went off the Huey P. Long bridge, staring at the road through bloodshot eyes, his will destroyed.

  “All that chrome was a good idea,” Grossman said. “You know, like a return to the fifties. Everybody’s into nostalgia these days.” A wistful look came into his eyes. “If only it woulda got better mileage.”

  “Have you ever been in this car with the windows closed?” Kit asked.

  “Sure. From time to time, we move everything around. One month, we may feature hood ornaments and we’ll put all the cars with fancy hood decorations in one place. Or we may line up the twenty worst gas guzzlers in history, or…”

  “What’s the longest time you ever spent in this car with the windows rolled up?”

  “Twenty minutes maybe.”

  “Do you know your blood type?”

  Grossman looked puzzled. “Type O.”

  His answer shattered Kit’s hopes. According to Freddie Watts’s employee, Watts had been working inside the car for only a few minutes before he drove off in it. As a type O, Grossman should have been affected by twenty minutes exposure… unless of course her whole theory was worthless. In a last attempt to salvage her foundering hopes, she said, “Is the interior of this car all original?”

  “You betcha! I bought it from a friend of mine in Chicago who’s a fanatic about keeping his cars clean.”

  With his answer, Kit’s only lead now evaporated completely. Mustering a brave face, she thanked Grossman and left.

  *

  David arrived for their date that night with an armful of groceries. He whirled past her and set everything down in the kitchen.

  “What’s all this?” Kit asked.

  “A domestic demonstration,” David said, spreading things out on the counter. “I’m cooking dinner.”

  “Then I’m leaving,” Kit teased.

  David pulled out her gadget drawer and rummaged around till he found a corkscrew. “You’ll be sorry if you do,” he said, twisting the screw into the cork of a long-necked green bottle. “The menu tonight is flank steak medallions, asparagus with hollandaise, a tossed salad, bananas flambé, and to start…” The cork slipped from the wine bottle with only a tiny squeak. David looked crestfallen.

  “Jake’s Discount Liquors, right?” Kit said, forgetting for the moment how Grossman had blown her car theory.

  David unrolled a package of white butcher paper with two flank steaks inside. “Why were you so interested in that ’Rock-A-Bye-Baby’ case?” he said, reaching into the cupboard for a plate.

  “I thought it would help me unravel some cases of my own.”

  David scored the steaks with a knife and began cutting them into strips. “And did it help?”

  “Yes and no.”

  He stopped cutting and looked up.

  “I thought it was leading somewhere, but this afternoon things just played out.”

  “I’m sorry it wasn’t more useful,” David said, rolling a strip of steak and a piece of bacon up together. “Tell me about it. Sometimes an outsider can bring a new perspective to a problem.”

  “I’d rather just let tonight be a little vacation from it.”

  All through dinner, David watched her intently to see what she thought of his effort. But Kit carefully kept any telltale sign from her face until he brought in the bananas flambé and lit them. Then her eyes gave her away.

  “Pretty good, huh?” David said, giving her a generous portion.

  Tasting them, Kit nodded. “Pretty good,” she agreed.

  Later, sitting together on the sofa, David proposed a toast. “To Greek men who can cook.”

  Kit touched her glass to his, beginning to feel the effects of the liquor she had already consumed.

  “I sense that there was a hidden purpose in this display of culinary perspicacity,” Kit said, hiccou
ghing.

  Perspicacity? David thought. She had totally misused the word. He took her glass and put it on the end table. “I think you could use some coffee,” he said.

  “And he makes coffee too,” Kit said with a slightly goofy look on her face.

  The coffee brought her back from the brink on which she had been teetering.

  Head cleared, she said, “I didn’t know you could cook like this. How many other talents do you have that I don’t know about?”

  David’s face glowed. “Hundreds,” he said. “This is merely the tip of a great iceberg of untapped potential. In short, I’m a great catch. Look at the facts. I’m well-off financially, I’m reasonably good-looking…”

  Kit put her hand out and tilted it back and forth. David grabbed it. “And I know what you like,” he said, kissing his way from her fingers to her ear. “You smell good,” he whispered, trailing kisses down her neck.

  Kit rocked her head back, enjoying the smell of his aftershave and the touch of his skin against hers. Her hand went to the back of his neck. His lips grazed her cheek and came to a stop on her mouth. She let herself go, let the tide of desire blot out everything else. His hand cupped her breast and she sighed into his mouth. They pressed against each other, her hand exploring him. Tearing himself free, he pulled her to her feet and they went to the bedroom.

  *

  The next morning, with David gone, Kit reflected on the previous night over a fresh cup of coffee. It had been enjoyable, no question about that, but still no bells. She thought briefly of her upcoming date with Al Vogel. Thankfully, David had a big drug case pending and would be tied down all weekend. There had been no need to tell him about Al. Idly, she wondered what Vogel would be like in bed, then her mind brought her back to reality, to those perplexing suicides and her shattered theory. Feeling unable to get her mind on someone else’s problems, she called Ida Swenson at Happy Years and coaxed her into saying that no harm would be done by canceling that day’s counseling visit.

  For more than a week now, there’d been no sign of the dog that had run into her house and she no longer looked for him before opening the door. It was a habit she had discontinued too soon. Today, he was waiting. Experienced now, she got the ham out much faster than last time. But he was more experienced, too, and was not quite so eager to chase it. He stopped at the threshold and looked at it draped over the creeping evergreen on which it had fallen. She gently helped him toward it with the side of her shoe and followed him out.

  Later, at the office, she recounted to Charlie Franks the results of her visit with Grossman.

  “… so when he said the interior was all original and he hadn’t been affected by being in the car, there didn’t seem to be any point in pursuing the matter.”

  “That’s not all.” Franks shuffled through his “to be filed” box and pulled out a piece of paper. “This came in yesterday afternoon’s mail.”

  The letter he handed her bore the return address of the medical examiner’s office in Boston. The message was short. They had experienced no increase in murder-suicides over the time span specified in Franks’s letter of inquiry. She tossed the letter onto Franks’s desk. “I’m sure glad I didn’t say anything to Broussard about those cars.”

  “What cars?” Broussard said from behind her.

  Too surprised to think of an effective way to parry his question, Kit reluctantly related everything that had happened since he had first scoffed at her suggestion that the Hollins and Watts cases were part of a larger pattern. While she talked, he worked the lemon drop in his mouth from side to side and occasionally rubbed the short hairs on the tip of his nose.

  “… and then the final blow came when the Boston M.E. said they hadn’t been having a similar increase in those kinds of cases.”

  With arms folded across his chest, Broussard leaned against the wall and caressed his nose for a very long time. Then he said, “How many cases was it where kiddy songs were involved?”

  “Four, counting Shindleman.”

  He lapsed back into thought and mulled her story over awhile longer. “… And three Escadrilles,” he said abruptly.

  “No, just two.”

  He shook his head. “There was also one in the Hollins’s driveway. Two could be a coincidence. Three may be somethin’ more.”

  “But the car at the museum…” she began.

  “Potentially explainable. How’d you like to take a look at the two Escadrilles in police custody?”

  “I’d like it.”

  “Charlie, Phil Gatlin is waitin’ for me near the Tulane campus. We’ll be there for a few minutes, then we’re goin’ to the impoundment station.”

  *

  Fifteen minutes later, Broussard’s yellow T-Bird came to a stop in the driveway of a dirty stucco story-and-a-half on Magnolia Street. Phil Gatlin was swinging back and forth on the porch, smoking a cigarette, and blowing smoke rings toward the beaded ceiling.

  “Sorry to have taken so long, Phillip. Where’s the body?” Broussard asked.

  “Rec room in the basement,” Gatlin replied, throwing his cigarette to the cement and grinding it underfoot.

  They all went inside where, at the bottom of a flight of stairs off the kitchen, they found the body of a man dressed out in a first-rate Dracula outfit. There was an ugly kitchen knife protruding from his chest. Next to the body was another knife, heavy-handled and masculine-looking. Near the victim’s outstretched left hand was a claw hammer.

  “What’s with the costume?” Broussard said.

  “Something going on at his fraternity,” Gatlin replied. “When he didn’t show up or answer the telephone, his roommate came looking for him. The kid was so shook up, I had the uniforms take him over to student health.”

  Exhaling loudly as if letting the air out of his legs, Broussard sank to one knee, raked the knife on the floor with his eyes, and said, “Looks like a bayonet.” He waved his hand over the body. “All this been photographed?”

  Gatlin nodded and Broussard’s stubby fingers began to unbutton the dead man’s shirt. Where the garment was not pinned to the body by the knife, he laid it back. There were two pieces of pine strapped to the man’s chest with duct tape. The tape ran in an unbroken line across the two pieces of wood. The knife rested neatly in the seam between. Broussard studied the bottom of the seam, then struggled to his feet. “An accident,” he said. “Stupid and avoidable. He was hammerin’ the kitchen knife into that board strapped to his chest when the board split. He’d tried the bayonet first but didn’t like it for some reason and switched knives. The bayonet had weakened the board and when he hit the kitchen knife a solid blow… Phillip, did you tell Jamison he could leave?”

  Gatlin nodded.

  “Would’ve been good to have some pictures with his shirt open before we move him.”

  “You’re sure it was an accident?” Gatlin said.

  “It’s the only explanation that fits the facts. He was left-handed and the hammer is on the left side of the body…”

  “How do you know he’s left-handed?” Gatlin interrupted.

  “His watch. It’s on his right wrist and has a band that buckles. Most people would have to use their dominant hand to fasten a buckle. That makes his the left.”

  Kit hadn’t even realized the man wore a watch.

  “Oh yeah, I did notice that,” Gatlin said unconvincingly.

  The clump of heavy footsteps was heard overhead and two men in white came down the stairs.

  “They told us it wasn’t an emergency,” a portly fellow with fine yellow hair said. “So we took another case first.”

  “You did right,” Broussard said. “There he is.”

  While the two men loaded the body, the others filed upstairs.

  When they reached the kitchen, Broussard touched Kit’s arm and whispered, “Wait for me on the porch, will you? I’d like a few words with Phillip.”

  Gatlin came up a few steps behind the stretcher. As he followed it out, Broussard said, “All throug
h?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long we been friends, Phillip?”

  “Long time,” Gatlin said, looking at Broussard from beneath eyebrows that had crept together at the question.

  “I figure maybe that gives me the right to talk to you straight out.”

  “About what?”

  “There was a time when you wouldn’t have let Jamison leave until every last thing was covered. And now you just walked off and left the hammer and that bayonet on the basement floor.”

  Gatlin grimaced and turned back toward the basement but was stopped by Broussard’s hand on his arm. “Phillip, I hate tellin’ you this, but instead of ’Slick,’ they’re beginnin’ to call you ’Slack’ Gatlin.”

  Gatlin looked at the floor. “You saying I’ve lost it?”

  “You’re just not usin’ it.”

  “I didn’t know it showed so much.”

  “It shows.”

  Gatlin’s shoulders slumped a little more. “It’s my daughter. I miss her so much I… I can’t concentrate.” He looked at his old friend from under eyelids that drooped sadly. “I go to bed early every night and sleep all weekend so I won’t have to think about it. Andy, she doesn’t know how dangerous the streets really are. I’ve tried to tell her. But you know kids, they don’t think parents know anything. And I’m afraid she might be…” He was unable to put into words the nightmare he carried within him for fear that saying it aloud might somehow make it true.

  “Phillip, I’m not gonna tell you I understand what you’re goin’ through, but I do know that what you’re doin’ is not helpin’ her. And it’s destroyin’ you. You’re no good to the department this way, and you’re no good to yourself. When Shelby comes home, she’s gonna need a stable environment. How can you provide that if you’ve lost your job?”

  Gatlin’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “They’ll carry you for as long as they can because of your record. But eventually they’ll have to let you go. Don’t let that happen, Phillip. Come to terms with it.”

  Gatlin looked at his friend and nodded. “I’ll try, Andy. I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER 10