AHMM, Jan-Feb 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

And Bobberts smiled, even though he was shaking. He smiled and reached for his sister, and hugged her, even though it was a baby thing to do.

  And nobody said nothing, nobody except Gramps, who said, “We got hot cocoa in the car,” like it was a reward.

  And maybe it was.

  Like smiling against his dad's leg, and hugging his sister, and being really, really glad that nobody said nothing about the knife, lying bloody and broken in the snow.

  Copyright (c) 2006 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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  21 Steps by O'Neil De Noux

  Detective John Raven Beau watched two coroner's assistants carry the black body bag down the steps from the victim's front porch, down the brick walkway, through the black wrought-iron gate, to the white Coroner's Office van parked against the curb. They slid the body bag into the back and slammed the door.

  Beau, standing six two, a lean one-eighty pounds, was thirty, a square-jawed man with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. The long sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up on his muscular forearms, his light blue tie loosened, and his nine-millimeter Beretta Model 92-F was snug in its black canvas holster on his right hip. A gold star-and-crescent New Orleans Police badge was clipped to his belt above the left front pocket of his navy blue suit pants.

  "I was up on the pole all morning,” said the man standing next to Beau. His name was Jerol Philiber, forty-eight years old with short black hair, skin as dark as oak bark, standing six feet even, weighing two-twenty, and wearing a blue denim work jacket and denim pants.

  Beau copied Philiber's pertinent information in his notes, taking it from Philiber's driver's license and Community Cable-TV ID card, before handing them back to the cable installer.

  "We're rewiring this whole part of St. Charles Avenue,” Philiber volunteered. “I'm still not finished. Been here since six a.m."

  Beau looked at the telephone pole ten feet from the victim's front gate, then up at the wires above, green metal box open where Philiber was working.

  "Noticed her front door was cracked open,” the cableman went on, Beau jotting quickly to keep up, letting the man talk. “When I came down for lunch, I saw the next-door neighbor in her front yard and started to ask about the house, but she ran inside like I was the bogeyman."

  Beau looked into Philiber's eyes. Neither man said it, but the elderly woman neighbor was probably frightened by the large black man.

  "She called y'all, and I told the uniformed officer about the door."

  Beau had already interviewed the first officer on the scene, who had knocked on the door, rung the doorbell, and gone inside with the neighbor lady. It took him eleven minutes to find the eighty-year-old victim's body in the hall closet.

  "You said you're from Homicide. I take it she didn't die a natural death."

  Beau nodded, still looking in the man's eyes. Philiber didn't look away, didn't even blink.

  "Hey!” came a voice from the porch. Crime Lab Technician Ned Howland stood at the top step, evidence case in one hand, keys in the other. “Want me to lock the door?"

  Beau raised a hand over his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight. Although it was early winter and cool in New Orleans, it wasn't cold yet, especially beneath the strong sun.

  "Hold on a second,” Beau called back and crossed the brick walkway to the steps, counting them on the way up. Twenty-one concrete steps led up to the porch, which was actually a gallery with an overhang above supported by wooden columns and decorated with gingerbread trim. White, the entire house was painted white, even the window frames and door trim.

  Howland handed the key chain with its two silver keys to Beau.

  "Dusted them?"

  "Of course.” Howland picked up his camera case with his free hand. “Not a thing."

  They'd found the keys inside the door, sitting in the lock. Beau carefully locked the half glass front door, checking the lock, which worked fine, then followed Howland down the steps.

  "Can you leave me some evidence tape?” Beau asked as they moved through the gate. Howland stopped, reached into his evidence case, and tossed a partial roll of yellow-and-black plastic evidence tape, which wasn't adhesive tape, but an unbroken roll of plastic.

  Beau closed the gate, tied the end of the evidence tape to the fence post next to the gate and extended the tape across the gate to the next fence post, leaving the roll next to the fence as he stepped back to Philiber, still standing on the sidewalk.

  A streetcar rattled along the neutral ground in the center of St. Charles Avenue, curious faces looking toward Beau and the bright evidence tape. A little girl with a ponytail waved and Beau waved back and smiled. The girl ducked back in shyly.

  "I see you have a way with the fairer sex.” Philiber was trying to be friendly.

  "Only the ones who don't know better. Did you see anyone else around this morning?"

  "Guy in a red car parked right where your van's leaving.” Philiber pointed to Howland's Crime Lab van as it pulled away from the curb. “Opened his hood and worked under it before going up the steps and ringing the bell."

  "He go in?"

  "Nope. No answer, so he left. Came straight back to his car, tinkered under the hood for a minute, and got the car started and drove off."

  Beau got a description of the man: white male, late twenties, tall, thin, with short blond hair. Car was a late-model red Olds or Pontiac.

  "You see anything else?"

  "Nope."

  Beau thanked him and Philiber climbed back up the pole to finish his work, while Beau walked next door to the elderly lady who had gone into the victim's house with the reporting officer.

  Louisa Smith, seventy-one years old, with thinning gray hair and a face lined with deep wrinkles, preferred speaking to Beau through a latched screen door. Her house was only a one-story brick home, looking like a track house from the suburbs, sandwiched between the larger homes along the 7800 block of St. Charles.

  Understandably frightened, she spoke in a low voice, Beau having to pull the words from her. She knew the victim, but not well, didn't even know her last name, just knew her as Lily.

  "She has a twin sister in California."

  Beau had found the sister's name and number in Lily Chauchoin's address book, had already spoken with the sister, who'd told him about Lily's life.

  "She didn't come outside,” Louisa said. “She had her groceries delivered."

  "From where?"

  "DiMarco's Grocery. Around the corner."

  Beau knew the place. A neighborhood grocery store still hanging on against the supermarket chains.

  "Did you see anyone around Lily's the last couple days?"

  "That big man on the telephone pole."

  "Did he go near Lily's house?"

  "No. I been watchin’ him."

  "You see anyone else?"

  "Just the boy with the red car."

  Yes, she saw the blond guy go up the steps to Lily's front door and saw him come down a minute later, then drive away. No, she knew of no suspicious characters around the neighborhood.

  "I wonder who'll move in there now,” Louisa said, moving to her left to look at the steps next door. “Some people think it's an antebellum house. But it was built after the Civil War."

  "How do you know that?"

  Lily had been talkative once, years ago, long before she became a “recluse,” as Louisa described her.

  "Your accent,” Louisa said as Beau closed his notebook. “It isn't ... I thought you were ... Mexican."

  "I'm half Oglala."

  "Huh?"

  "Lakota.” No way that would register, so he relented, telling her the name the enemies of the Lakota, including the white man, gave to his mother's tribe. “Sioux. I'm half American Indian."

  He thanked her and turned away.

  "What's the other half?"

  "Cajun. That's the accent you're hearing."

  She didn't look like she believed a word.

  Beau canvassed bot
h sides of the house with the twenty-one steps, learning nothing of value. Returning to Lily Chauchoin's gate, Beau was approached by a newspaper reporter and a television reporter who was hurriedly trying to get her cameraman set up.

  "No comment,” he said, ignoring their questions as he untied the evidence tape, went in the gate, retied the tape, and climbed the steps, counting them again, like a mantra. He'd already checked the outside of the house with the crime lab technician, finding all windows locked, the back door locked, nothing amiss. He'd checked inside but wanted to take his time in a longer, second search.

  Looking down from the gallery, he noted on his notepad, “lawn care.” Someone was taking care of the lawn, which appeared freshly cut. The banana trees and azalea bushes along the sides of the house were well tended, as were the camellia bushes in the front yard.

  Beau unlocked the front door and went in. He finally recognized the smell. Vanilla. He'd seen candles dotting the living room, small scented candles in glass cups. Standing in the foyer, he looked at the living room on the left, formal dining room on the right, stairs leading to the bedrooms upstairs.

  The walls were lined with cardboard boxes stacked up to three feet, each filled, some with magazines, some with books, some with lampshades and other odds and ends. He followed the narrow path through the boxes into the dining room where the long mahogany table was almost completely covered with boxes. The end nearest the kitchen was bare, enough for one person to sit and eat.

  Beau inched his way through the kitchen to the back steps and down into the first floor of the house, which served as a basement—because of its high water table, no one had underground basements in New Orleans, the only major American city built below sea level atop a vast marsh. He could barely make his way through rooms cluttered with old furniture and more boxes.

  It took Beau an hour to check out the lower rooms, sifting through the accumulations of the eighty-year life of Lily Chauchoin, who had once been a princess at the Krewe of Momus Mardi Gras Ball, who had also graduated from Newcomb College, long since a part of Tulane University, who had taught at Sacred Heart Academy down St. Charles Avenue for forty-two years, according to Lily's lone sister.

  He found a picture of Lily's husband upstairs in the master bedroom, a black-and-white photo in a wooden frame on the end table next to the double bed. The picture showed a plain-faced man in khakis. Lily's sister had explained that he was airborne, killed in Korea when the Chinese overran his outfit, November 1950.

  Lily's jewelry box, overturned on the dresser, was dirty with black fingerprint powder, as were the drawers the burglar pulled out, tossing Lily's clothes across the floor. Lily's dresses, yanked from their hangers, littered the closet floor, as well as a dozen shoe boxes and shoes, mostly black and brown.

  When he spotted the broken glass box under the bed, he knew he'd have to call the crime lab back to take a picture and dust it for prints. Nothing picked up fingerprints better than glass.

  He found a color photo of Lily's son, who looked a lot like his father, only he was in fatigues and wore a helmet. Beau could see jungle in the background of the photo. The son was killed at Da Nang during the Tet Offensive, 1968.

  Beau realized when he saw the son's room that it hadn't been disturbed, except for dusting, since the sixties, that the entire house had an old feeling. He went back through it and found nothing new, as if the house and its contents had been frozen in time. No microwave in the kitchen, no answering machine next to the phone, no home computer, no VCR.

  He found hundreds of food coupons carefully clipped from the newspaper, generic drugs in the medicine cabinets, Lily Chauchoin's well-worn clothing, old sofas, mismatched lamps. Beau went back to Lily's purse, which he'd found in the kitchen cupboard, behind a can of flour.

  He found nine dollars in cash and a checkbook but no credit cards, no bank debit card. Thumbing through her checkbook confirmed what Beau suspected. Although she lived in a large house on one of the most exclusive avenues in uptown New Orleans, although she kept the exterior of her home immaculate, even the lawn, she had little money for anything else. He carefully put everything back in the purse and put it back where she'd left it.

  In the closet where Lily's body was found, Beau discovered another piece of glass, rectangular in shape. As he called Howland back to the scene, he bent over and saw the glass was actually the lid from the glass box upstairs.

  After photographing them, Howland lifted three partial prints from the glass box beneath Lily's bed and one excellent thumb print from the glass lid from the closet. Beau thanked him for coming back so quickly.

  "It's what I live for,” Howland snarled, then smiled. “See you at the autopsy."

  DiMarco's Grocery, along the first floor of a two-story wooden building painted pale blue, sat at the corner of Hampson and Burdette Streets. The smile on Sal DiMarco's face disappeared when Beau told him what had happened. Sixty-six years old, five seven, a hundred and forty pounds, with thick gray hair and a matching mustache, Sal's eyes teared up and he had to take a seat.

  Beau leaned against the counter and accepted a Coke from Sal's son Joe, who was missing both hands and used old fashioned metal hooks, instead of prosthetic hands.

  "Was a firefighter,” Joe explained. “Lost both hands in a fire back in ‘61. In the French Quarter, thought we'd lose an entire block, but only lost two houses and two hands."

  Joe delivered Lily's groceries. His last delivery was three days earlier. Lily would call in her order and he'd deliver it, but never went inside. Lily always met him on the back porch, always paid with cash, and always carried her own stuff in from the porch.

  "Do you know what drugstore she used?” Beau chided himself for not copying the names of any pharmacy from the prescriptions in Lily's bathroom cabinet.

  "Ours.” Joe explained they had a pharmacist in the back. “I offered to carry the stuff in every time, but she never let me. Rich people are sometimes odd. She was very quiet, never really looked me in the eye, but I liked her.” Joe, in his late forties, stood six three, two-eighty, balding, lifted his apron with the hook on his right hand and wiped tears from his eyes.

  "You're from Homicide?"

  Beau nodded, taking another sip of Coke.

  "She was murdered?"

  Beau nodded again.

  "This is horrible,” he said. “Absolutely horrible."

  "How long was Lily a customer?"

  Sal answered for his son. “Forty years. More. She used to come in till her son was killed in Vietnam. We been deliverin’ ever since."

  As Beau jotted the DiMarcos’ contact information in his notes, Sal leaned on the counter and asked, “Did Lily suffer?"

  Beau gave him the stare, the expressionless stare of his ancestors, those lean plains warriors who said little and showed no emotion in their faces, ever, even when dying at the hands of the white man.

  The old man's eyes became wet again.

  Beau thanked them for the Coke and left his business card, in case they heard anything. He spent the next four hours in a futile canvass of Hampson and the side streets around the house with the twenty-one steps.

  Standing in front of Lily's gate in his tan suit pants, badge clipped to his belt, Beretta in the new beige canvas holster on his right hip, Beau removed the evidence tape he'd forgotten to remove the previous evening. He slipped on his extra-dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. Time to canvass.

  Nine a.m., time people should be up. Beau had attended Lily's autopsy at six a.m., confirming the manner of death was homicide, the cause of death: asphyxia from ligature around her throat. The pathologist carefully removed the curtain cord from Lily's frail neck. Beau had already found the cord's source, a front room window. The pathologist set the time of death between four and eight p.m. the evening before the body was found.

  Beau walked over to Louisa Smith's small brick home and rang the bell.

  Louisa cracked open her door and peeked through the screen door. “What is it now?” She seemed more an
noyed than frightened.

  "I forgot to ask if you knew what lawn service Lily used?"

  "Lawn service?"

  "Yes, who took care of Lily's yard?” Beau moved to the side and pointed toward Lily's yard.

  "I've been using the same gardeners for twenty years, but Lily used people going up and down with lawn mowers. Kids sometimes. Men too, but nobody steady."

  Beau asked for the name of Louisa's gardener and had to explain he needed to speak with anyone remotely connected to the neighborhood.

  "Wait a second.” Louisa shut the door and came back a minute later with a card she pressed against the screen door and told Beau he could take down the information, but she couldn't understand why.

  The lawn service was in Metairie. Something to follow up later.

  "Have you seen anyone from the electric company, gas company, phone company around lately?” Beau had already made a note to check with those companies for any recent service in the area because you never knew, they may have a murderer working for them, or if they came around, they might have seen something.

  Louisa's eyes narrowed. “That man up on the pole yesterday."

  Beau leaned closer. “Are you all right, ma'am?"

  "Of course. Except for you bothering me."

  Beau thanked her again and she huffed, “With all Lily's money, I don't know why she didn't have a regular lawn man."

  He rolled his sleeves up and continued his canvass of Lily's neighbors.

  Three doors from Lily's house, at another white house, this one with twelve steps leading up to its front gallery, Beau found Sally Branson: forty-four years old, tall and thin, with light brown skin, hair cut in a short afro, brown eyes, and a ready smile. Sally wore a white maid's dress and white shoes.

  Her smile disappeared when she spotted Beau's badge. “I saw it on TV last night. Poor woman."

  Beau went through his questions, coming up with only one new piece of information. Sally didn't want to cast suspicions on someone who might be innocent, but there was a man who'd been going around, knocking on doors, asking about odd jobs.

  "What's he look like?"

  Sally described a white male in his forties, a little shorter than Sally's five ten, with short brown hair and tattoos on both arms.