Cajun Nights

by Don Donaldson

  “Halloo, Phillip,” Broussard said, spotting his friend. “Never thought I’d see you this early.”

  Phillip pulled the baggie from his pocket and they met at the foot of the front steps. “Found this next to the tree behind that wall.” He held the bag up for Broussard to see.

  “Looks like plastic from a taillight.”

  “Yeah, broken on a low branch on that watchamacallit tree back there.”

  “Crape Myrtle.”

  “What?”

  “The tree. It’s a Crape Myrtle.”

  “Oh, right. Guess these’re not from any of your cars then?”

  Broussard shook his head. “No.”

  “How about a gardener’s car or truck?”

  Broussard thought for a moment about Bubba’s truck, but that had been left in the driveway while Bubba fixed the window. “Couldn’t have been the gardener. He drives an old Chevy pickup that’s had broken-out taillights for years. Besides, he knows not to be drivin’ over the property.”

  “Did it rain out here Monday?”

  “Like to wash me away. That’s a good point. No mud spatters on the fragment…”

  “Means it’s pretty recent.”

  “That’s another reason it didn’t come from the gardener. He hasn’t been here since the rain.”

  Phillip jiggled the fragment up and down. “I think your would-be assassin left it.”

  “Kind of amateurish thing to do.”

  “Probably didn’t even feel it happen. Guess I’ll go on over to Crescent City Industries a little later and see if Bert Weston has a busted taillight. How long you gonna be gone?”

  “Be back sometime this afternoon. Hard to say for sure when. You know how trials go.”

  “Don’t I though. But then, that’s why you make the big money.”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, Broussard grinned, not at the joke but at what it told him about Phillip. He fumbled in his pocket for a lemon ball. “I’ve got to hit the road,” he said, slipping the candy between his cheek and gum. “Good huntin’.”

  *

  Kit woke at seven-fifteen to a stiff neck and the sound of the weatherman saying how hot it was going to be again today in the southeast. Her first clear thought was that perhaps it had been a hired killer and not Bert Weston himself who had rigged her refrigerator and Broussard’s air conditioning. If so, that would mean the police could follow Weston till their tongues touched their shoes and it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on a contract that had already been let. Suddenly she wanted the whole thing over. Once it was announced to the press and there was all that publicity, there would be no point in killing anybody.

  There had been only one response to her ad for Lucky and that was from a woman who thought Kit wanted to buy a dog with Lucky’s description. The little animal was now too rambunctious to be left alone indoors, so she took him to a nearby vet and arranged to board him there until she could figure out what to do with him. She should have just handed him to the girl and left without looking back instead of following her to see where he would be kept. The cage was terribly small for such an active dog and he looked so sad there behind the bars. As she walked to her car, she couldn’t forget the hurt in his liquid eyes. No! She couldn’t keep a dog; she didn’t want a dog.

  At the hospital, she went first to the Biomedical Photography division, viewed and accepted the film of the mouse experiments they had put together, and returned to her office with it. A few minutes later, Broussard called from Hammond to tell her not to worry about anything, that Phillip was not only already at work on their case but was certainly back in form. He reminded her to nudge Vogel, then hung up before she could convey her doubts about the usefulness of any detective’s services. So that everything would be in order for an announcement of their findings, she spent the next hour drafting and polishing a press release, planning to add Vogel’s data later. Then she set out for the Justice Center.

  *

  As Phil Gatlin put his hand on the doorknob of Gil Bertram’s lab in forensics, he was pretty sure he knew what Bertram would say. After finding no damage on Bert Weston’s car in the CCI parking lot, he had checked with motor vehicles to see whether they had any other car registered to Weston and found they didn’t. In almost any other circumstances, he would not have confronted Weston this early in the investigation but would have watched from the fringes of the man’s life, waiting for him to do something meaningful. But this was different. Two lives were being threatened and he had agreed with Broussard’s suggestion that he show himself now to throw a little scare into the suspect. In fact, Weston had acted more angry than scared, demanding to know why his whereabouts for the last three days were being questioned. Having shown himself to Weston was going to make things more difficult than they already were. All he had to work with was a piece of taillight and the stone Broussard had given him. The faint hope he’d held for the stone had been dashed when no prints were found on it. And he never had any illusions about the usefulness of the taillight fragment. Still, he had to give Bertram a shot.

  The lights in the lab were out and Bertram was hovering over a sheet of plate glass set up on cement blocks. He was concentrating so much on aligning a headlamp fragment in the beam of the fiber-optic light source hanging from the ceiling that he didn’t hear Phillip enter.

  “Interesting case?” Phillip inquired.

  Bertram stepped on a floor switch and the lights came on. “Hey, Phillip. You know me. I think they’re all interesting.” He slid his thumb and index finger down his mustache as though he was afraid it was coming off. “What brings you to these hallowed halls?”

  Phillip produced the baggie. “What can you tell me about this?”

  Bertram’s long veined fingers put a jeweler’s loop in his eye, and he briefly examined both surfaces of the fragment in the bag. Shaking his head, he handed it back. “Plastic is a lot like glass, give me two pieces and I can tell you if they came from the same object, providing the original wasn’t too big. But as far as telling you anything useful about the origin… What can I say… a taillight from any of a dozen different makes. There’s just too many common suppliers of components these days to draw meaningful conclusions from something like this. Get me a piece of plastic from a suspect’s car to go with it and I’ll be able to do something.”

  *

  While one elevator took Phillip to the squad room on the eighth floor, Kit stepped from its companion into the hallway in forensics. When she arrived at Vogel’s lab, the place was empty. A beaker bubbling over a Bunsen-burner flame said he would soon return. The main lab was a long rectangle that ran parallel to the hall. Nearby, on a bench against the wall to her right, three lamps were trained on a Plexiglas chamber that held a small piece of unfamiliar fabric resting on a Plexiglas cylinder. The chamber was connected by a rubber hose to a pump that filled the room with a rhythmic asthmatic wheeze.

  At the far end of the lab, there was an open doorway between a double sink and a stand-up workbench. Thinking that Al might be in the adjoining room, she called his name but got no response. As she wandered in that direction, she saw the thermos she’d given him the previous day sitting on the sink drainboard. It had to be Broussard’s thermos because it was the same olive green and still bore the red tape Al had wrapped around it.

  Since he’d taken the trouble of resealing the thermos, she surmised that Al must have used only a portion of the contents in whatever tests he was running and that the remaining pieces were still inside. But when she got closer, she noticed something odd. When he had taken the thermos from her the previous day, he’d sealed it before writing “Danger, Do Not Open,” on it with a felt-tip marker. He had scrawled the warning hurriedly and the tail of the “g” in “danger” and the lower part of the “p” in “open” had run off the tape onto the thermos. Now, presumably after having been opened at least once, here was the tape positioned exactly as it had been originally, with the parts of the “g” and “p” on the thermos perfectly
aligned with the parts on the tape.

  This could mean only one thing. With only a few hours left before he was to make his report, Al had not yet opened the thermos.

  Confused, Kit wandered about the lab, her senses sharpened. Against the back wall was a low bench that Al was using as a desk. On it was a technical journal lying on its back, its pages open. When she got closer, she saw something so startling, she could scarcely breathe.

  Nestled in the groove between the open pages was a pen… a pen with BANK OF SPECULATOR written down the side in white letters. Vogel must have been in her home! He had been the one that rigged her refrigerator! But why?

  The pump that had been wheezing away suddenly stopped and Kit froze, the pen still in her hand. She turned and her saliva suddenly tasted like brass. There, standing by the pump, was Vogel. He reached over and turned off the Bunsen burner.

  She took the opportunity to reach behind her and put the pen back on the desk.

  “Didn’t expect to see you until later,” Vogel said. “I’ve still got seven hours before my report is due and it’ll take at least that long to finish.”

  “Of course,” Kit said. “My morning was rather light and I was passing by anyway…” Christ, I’m rambling, she thought. She wanted desperately to run her tongue over her lips, which suddenly felt dry and cracked, but feared that it would look like a nervous gesture. The taste in her mouth seemed to be getting worse and her hands fluttered about, looking for a natural position. She pulled at her dress and stopped talking, not at all sure she had expressed anything coherent.

  Vogel moved toward her. “Go back to your office. I’ll call you when the tests are complete.”

  Liar! Kit thought. “I wasn’t trying to hurry you, just got curious is all.” She made a big show of looking at her watch. Jesus, what a bush move. “God, look at the time, I’m late for an appointment.” Even as she said it, she remembered telling him a few seconds earlier that she had a light morning. “Talk to you later.”

  When she had gone, Vogel leaned into the hall and his eyes followed her to the elevators. As she stepped inside and turned around, he pulled his head back and softly shut the door. Why had she been so nervous? He went to his desk, then moved through the lab looking and checking, touching everything. His eyes came to rest on the thermos. Instinctively, he studied it until he realized what Kit had seen. He began to pace. He thought, Why now, just when things were coming to a head, did this have to happen? It shouldn’t have worked out this way. So many things gone wrong. And none of them my fault. Up and down the aisle he went, thoughts whirling through his head. Broussard and Franklyn should be dead. But no, that’d be too easy.

  As he steamed past his desk chair, he caught it with the toe of his right shoe and kicked it into his path, where he struck it hard with his knees. He let loose an animal cry, more of frustration than pain, and sent the chair spinning against the far wall with his foot. Rubbing his knees, he tried to imagine himself in Kit’s place. What would she do now? Tell Broussard, of course. He flipped through his Rolodex. To the woman who answered the phone, he said, “Is Broussard there?”

  “I’m sorry,” she replied in a coldly official way that made it clear she wasn’t at all sorry. “He’s in Hammond this morning. May I give him a message?”

  His lips curled in a feral grin. “When will he be back?”

  “Probably not until late this afternoon. May I tell him who called?”

  He hung up without answering, his mind already at work on a solution.

  *

  While Kit walked briskly from the Justice Center to the hospital, she reflected on what had just happened. The fact that Vogel had not even begun any tests on the fabric samples was a shock, but not nearly as big as the jolt she’d received when she saw her pen on his desk.

  “Yes, he did leave a Hammond number in case of an emergency,” Broussard’s secretary said. “Would you like for me to try it?”

  “Please.” But before the other woman had completed the call, Kit said, “Never mind.” There was nothing Broussard could do from Hammond. Phil Gatlin was the one she should be calling. “I’ll just wait until he gets back,” she explained.

  In her office, she pulled out the phone book and looked up the number of the VC squad.

  CHAPTER 16

  Phil Gatlin was at his desk. Avis had just told him that no one named Weston had rented a car in the last week, nor had any recently been returned with a broken taillight. He ran his finger under the number for Budget Rent-a-Car, fixed the number in his memory, and was reaching for the phone when it rang.

  Even though he had spent the greater part of his life uncovering hidden vices in outwardly respectable people, Gatlin was shocked at what Kit told him. Vogel? It seemed unlikely. Why would he want to harm Andy and Kit? But apparently he had been in her house uninvited. It was something that had to be looked into.

  Berta in the parking office always talked into the receiver as though she was shouting out a window, a fact he remembered only after she had nearly broken his eardrum identifying herself. He asked her for the number of Vogel’s parking space, then held the phone a foot from his ear while she answered.

  The parking lot was a black asphalt inferno radiating heat waves that made the rows of cars look like the picture on a failing TV. By the time he reached space sixty-four, the moles on his back could be seen through his wet shirt. There was a white Cutlass with undamaged taillights in the space. A receipt in the glove compartment for a lube and oil change was made out to Vogel.

  Back in his office, he learned from motor vehicles that in addition to the Cutlass, Vogel also owned a black Ford Galaxie. Next to Vogel’s name in the phone book was an address not fifteen minutes away.

  The vinyl seats on his own car seared the backs of his legs, and he had to wait for the air conditioner to cool the steering wheel before he could touch it. Thank God it was not his turn for night duty. After such a scorcher, the blood would flow in the city’s bars as freely as the beer.

  A short drive later, he paused, pulled to a stop, and studied the structure bearing Vogel’s address. Not much to look at, he thought. Or rather, not much to see. In typical New Orleans tradition, the exterior of the three-story house had gray cypress board-and-batten siding and shuttered windows that wouldn’t give a passerby cause for even a glance—the kind of house you could pass every day and never miss if someone moved it one night.

  Behind him, he heard the steady blare of a car horn. In the rearview mirror, an old lady with an immense wattle was pointing at the driveway he was blocking. Since he’d seen enough from this angle, he moved on, eased around the next corner and kept his eye out for an alley. There… Entering the alley, he pulled carefully past a garbage can that had been tipped over by a dog or a can-picker and began to count garages and yards. When he got to six, he stopped.

  The garage was much like the house—cypress board and batten, but showing signs of deterioration: battens missing, rotted places where the wood had turned black, green things growing in moist crevices. The matching fence was in even worse shape, leaning inward and outward like an abstract artwork. Legally he couldn’t enter the yard without a search warrant. But then, he really didn’t need to. His quarry would be in the garage.

  Forsaking the air-conditioned comfort of his car, he went to the garage and, with his cheek against the rough wood, set one eye to exploring the interior through a battenless joint between boards. At first, he could see nothing, but as his eye dark-adapted, the dim bulk of a car took shape. The interior of the garage was illuminated only by a single dusty window in the front, and because the hole through which he was looking was small, he could only see a little of the car at a time. That was enough, though, to discover that the left taillight was disgustingly intact. To see more, he shifted to his left eye and waited the requisite time for it to grow accustomed to the gloom. Suddenly, he stood up and threw a short punch at the air. The right taillight was smashed.

  He fingered the brass padlock on the hin
ged garage doors, looking for the manufacturer’s logo. The initials R.O.G. pressed into the lock’s base brought his lips up at the corners. It had been a long time since he had smiled and he was surprised at how good it felt. A Rock-of-Gibraltar lock. Christ, the guy might as well have secured the doors with a stick, he thought happily, slipping behind the wheel.

  An hour and ten minutes later, he was back, a search warrant in one pocket, a petty-cash slip for $2.32 from Gravois’s hardware in another. On the seat next to him was a brand new Rock-of-Gibraltar lock, still sealed in plastic. Snatching up the lock, he peeled the cardboard backing away and threw the lock into the glove compartment. It was not the lock he wanted but the key. The good old Rock-of-Gibraltar Company made very strong inexpensive locks that were impossible to pick, but they all opened with the same key.

  He was soon on his knees beside the taillight. From his pocket, he produced the baggie with the plastic fragment and tried to fit it into the part of the puzzle still attached to the car. It matched perfectly.

  *

  Two miles away, Broussard’s secretary relayed a call to Kit’s office.

  “This is Lieutenant Reynolds, state highway patrol,” a voice said. “We’ve got a body out here at the end of the dirt road near the abandoned church on Highway 8 and Dr. Broussard would like for you to get out here as soon as possible.”

  She made a quick call to David, told him that she wouldn’t be able to meet him at three o’clock as they planned, explained when he asked why not, and practically ran from the office. Broussard surely would not have anything more interesting for her than she had for him.

  She shifted impatiently back and forth from one foot to the other, waiting for the hospital’s old elevator. When it finally arrived and the doors clattered open, an unhappy voice from within said, “Dr. Franklyn. I’d like a word with you.”

  It was Bert Weston, wearing a look that matched his angry tone. She stepped back, afraid to get on with him. Vogel had become her prime suspect, but that didn’t mean Weston wasn’t also involved. They could be working together.