I had no way to alert other units that I’d found the suspect; my portable radio was breaking up. But still I chased him. He stayed about twenty yards ahead of me, and my breath came in short heavy gasps. We ran past the point where time ceases to be measured in minutes or seconds. The noises of the neighborhood receded. Occasionally I caught glimpses of red lights revolving against the white backdrop of a house; other units were looking for Jeffery Lewis Moore, too.
When I rounded the front corner of a house and he was halfway under the porch, his feet digging the dirt for traction, his breathing as loud and desperate as mine, I wasn’t surprised. In this neighborhood they all crawled under houses; it was merely a matter of staying close enough behind them so you knew which house when they did it.
What I didn’t expect was Jeffery Lewis Moore backing out and coming up with the gun in his hand. And it wasn’t the gun that scared me so much—I was wearing my vest, and only 17 percent of shots fired at less than ten feet in a crisis situation ever hit their target—it was the knife in his other hand. It was a BIG knife. But even a pocket knife would have terrified me.
Guns put holes in you, but you can live from a gunshot wound. Knives hurt; they open you up. They slice, slice you open and cut deep. Cut things off. Knives bring a long pain, lots of blood. Johnny knew this cop in New Orleans who was convinced he’d die if he ever got shot. When it happened, a gunshot wound just where arm meets shoulder, the cop died. “Not lethal, Katie, understand?” Johnny said. “He died because he believed he would.”
I know it’s a weakness, but that’s how I feel about knives.
So here’s Jeffery Lewis Moore with a gun and a knife, and me with no way to call for help. You might say this is stacking the story against him, but you can’t go against absolutes, and this is the way it happened.
“You fucking move I’ll blow you away,” I screamed in a voice that probably carried more shrillness than authority.
He didn’t listen. They’d always listened before, believed what I said. The cursed command, the gun, the badge, the woman on the other end of the gun always stopped them. He didn’t stop. He grinned, that’s what he did. He grinned a shaky grin and raised that knife. He took a half-step forward.
“Stop!” I yelled, several times. I quivered like a hummingbird; all the air going in and out of my body traveled through my mouth. But he kept coming with that funny little grin, the one I see in my dreams, and I was screaming my voice hoarse—my voice has never been the same—screaming at him to stop or I’ll shoot, and then it was time. It was him or me, and the gun had become as scary as the knife. And when he was near enough, when he took the step that brought him into lunging distance, when I could smell his fear, when his eyes changed from brown stones to deep pools of reflected light, when he whispered low, “Come on,” a coarse sugar whisper, I shot.
I shot twice like they taught us at the range: quick and tight, arms extended, left hand supporting the right. Aimed for the chest, the kill zone, saw him take the bullets, jolt several steps back from the impact, saw the ragged rose petals of blood bloom and spread. And his eyes, those deep brown pools went even wider, and the light rushed in. He stumbled forward, dropping gun and knife; he stumbled forward into me, his blood soaking my hands and uniform. I caught him in my arms and dropped with him to the ground.
One time a bird hit my car. I was driving back from the country, windows all rolled down. The bird came from nowhere; I had no time to avoid its flight. There was a thud on my windshield, then a smear of blood and yellow fluid, a rush of feathers. And something moved through me—a warm sweeping light of energy moved through my body. Then it was gone, and I was left light-headed and dizzy but with something new inside.
The same thing happened when Jeffrey Lewis Moore died. The gurgles of blood and air stopped, his arms, chest, legs ceased convulsing, and what was left swept through my body in a warm shuddering rush and came to rest in my lungs.
That’s where he’s been ever since. Internal Affairs cleared me. Everyone agreed I’d shot in self-defense. It wasn’t my fault, no other choice; that’s what the Weapons Review Board said. I gave them the absolute facts: The suspect was armed with a gun and knife, and I was in fear for my life. It comes with the badge, this possibility of killing. And I’m fine about it. Really, I am. I’m back out on the streets, not in the neighborhood I live in, but I’m working.
Still, sometimes when I sit alone in the hallway of my house, Jeffery Lewis Moore shimmers to the surface and sweeps through my body. His presence is here, in the back of my skull, tucked inside my brain. There is a piece of him inside now, and I can’t deny him his right. Sitting in the long carpetless hall, the lights off, just the two of us, Jeffery Lewis Moore whispers low into my ear. “Come on,” he says, “come on.” And I lean into myself, waiting for him to say more, but there is just silence, and I am left wondering how dead we ever really are.
TASTE, TOUCH, SIGHT, SOUND, SMELL
I tell the rookies, when I train them, that the biggest mistake they can make is to think they know it all. “You never will,” I say, “trust me. I’ve been working this job six years, and I still learn something new every day—a technique, an insight into human behavior, the way the law works, even the limitations of my own body.”
They always nod quickly, their bodies tense with anticipation and often just a touch of fear. I’ve learned to read the topography of their fears: some have none and they scare me; some have a panicky fear and they scare me too; but most rookies have a controlled fear, a minuscule flutter just under their cheekbone or along the smooth column of their neck that acknowledges their own mortality. I’m glad to see that fear. I tell them to honor it but don’t let it stop them from doing what needs to be done. Without that finger of fear, you make mistakes. Without fear, you can die quickly in this job. There’s a fine line between courage and stupidity.
I watch their faces and think how impossibly young and un-weathered they are, how much the job will change them. Sometimes I want to say, “No, don’t do this.” But it wouldn’t do any good. I know. They remind me of myself, many of them, when I was fresh out of the academy and thought I knew everything.
And so for the few months they ride with me, I teach them the way my training officer taught me: the practical skills, the necessary skills, the investigative skills, the life-saving skills.
The academy can do only so much.
For instance, they try at the police academy to prepare you for the sight and smell of death. They distribute autopsy and crime scene photos, selecting the worst of the worst for our careful perusal: dead children, brutalized men and women, swollen corpses, shattered body parts. It is like nothing else you’ve ever smelled, they tell us; it will cling to your uniform, stay in your hair. They offer us countermeasures: cigar smoke, a washcloth doused in cologne, coffee grounds, an oxygen mask.
We wrote it all down carefully. We had to; they checked our notes every week.
When I graduated from the Baton Rouge Police Training Academy on a humid August day, one of two women in a class of thirty-nine cadets, I was assigned to uniform patrol on the day shift out of Broadmoor Precinct. Johnny Cippoine, my training officer, laughed hard from the belly when I slid into the passenger seat of his unit and said, “I’m ready!”
“Let’s take it slow, Joubert. Ever written a traffic ticket?”
Within two weeks I was standing at the back of a trailer off Airline Highway with Johnny, staring at a day-old dead body slumped headfirst into a toilet. The tentative morning light was dirty and gray, and the smell of rancid meat, rotten bananas, and the bitter tang of weeks-old oranges thickened the air. The rooms we had passed through were crammed with musty, stained furniture. The body’s ninety-two-year-old senile husband sobbed beside me, holding my hand in a bone-crunching grip. When was I supposed to scoop coffee grounds, wet a washcloth, strap on an oxygen mask?
I didn’t gag, I didn’t throw up, I didn’t even grimace, although it took all my willpower not to react t
o the smell. I studied my cuticles for a long while after we drove away, pushing each smile of skin firmly back down from the nail with my thumb.
“Be careful with your heart on this job,” Johnny said. “And get used to the stink of death, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He was right. I’ve seen only one cop, a detective on the bomb squad, haul an oxygen mask out of his unit to work a body. The department doesn’t issue oxygen masks to uniform patrol. Coffee grounds, which they told us should be stuffed up our nostrils, aren’t used by any police officer I’ve ever met. Vicks VapoRub, smeared liberally around the nostrils, is often passed around at autopsies, but then autopsies allow that luxury of preparation. And, truth be told, it cuts the odor only somewhat.
Because a dead body does smell. And it is unlike anything else. It is not enough for me to tell acquaintances and strangers who push for more that this smell is beyond words. So for those who push, for those who need to slow to ten miles per hour to see the bloody, mangled body parts on the interstate, I say: Imagine the smell of rancid hamburger. Now multiply that one pound of meat into 150 or 220 pounds of rancid meat. Then increase the smell by fifty for every twenty-four-hour period that passes—unless it’s the dead of summer, then triple or quadruple that sum. This is rancid meat with maggots and rotting, seeping body fluids. It is a dead body. And it is unlike anything else.
I quickly became a semiexpert on dead body smells; I could often determine how long someone had been dead simply by the stench. I worked with one cop who’d bet me, as we entered a hallway or room and caught the first unmistakable whiff of death, how long the body had been a body.
A body newly dead has a sweet thin smell to it, a gentle sigh of a smell if the death wasn’t gruesome, although some suicides have that same sweetness. Sometimes there is the acrid cutting edge of gunpowder that bites the eyes, the nostrils, the throat. Violence has a heavy smell that lingers for days—a taste as well—and a presence, thick and gray and swirling. A burned body is the most nauseating: bitter and permeating; not much remains to deal with, though flakes of skin come off and attach to your arms, clothing, face, hair. With most bodies, there is the smell of urine and feces; what they don’t tell you, what the movies and TV never show, is that at death, bladder and bowel control ends, the muscles relax, and any waste matter left in the body comes out.
As a body settles, fluids build up and are released. The optimum time to work with a body is before these fluids seep out. As rigor mortis sets in, the body swells into large dark blisters (much more quickly in the relentless Louisiana heat), and eventually the skin pops. Then smell becomes a taste. I wasn’t prepared for the taste of death, how it would coat my tongue and throat and lungs. Smoking cigarettes didn’t help; neither did scalding coffee or the most corrosive alcohol I could think of, straight gin. I would taste death for days after contact with a body.
The only consistent concession I see cops make, at least the plainclothes detectives, is removing their suit jackets around the really noxious bodies. My first encounter with this was in the middle of an aggressive, sweltering Louisiana summer afternoon. I smelled the body as I walked up the outside stairwell of a run-down apartment complex off Flannery Road. Three days, I figured. Turns out I was short by a day.
“Something died in there,” the manager told me.
“Yes it did.”
“Maybe an animal? A dog or something?” His voice had more hope than I’d expect from someone his age.
“Maybe.”
The body lay in the back room, sitting up in bed. No signs of violence or forced entry. The body was so deteriorated I couldn’t tell if he was originally black or white; actually, it was tough to figure out if “he” was a he or a she from the bloating and disfiguration.
I notified the dispatcher, requested a Homicide detective, an ambulance, the coroner, an assistant DA. Detective Ray Robileaux, a short, intense man I’d worked a few calls with before, arrived first, took off his coat, and handed it to me.
“Hold this,” he said, then went inside.
I’m standing there holding this man’s coat, and I don’t know why. I thought, What the fuck, I look like his wife? and followed him in. He was puffing away on a cigarette asking me questions about the scene, and I was responding, my voice funny-sounding because I’d shut off my nose and closed my throat to a slender cocktail-straw opening to cope with the smell.
Suddenly Robileaux noticed his coat in my hand. He started this high-pitched scream of words: now he’d have to get it dry-cleaned and why the fuck did I think he’d asked me to hold it?
“Uniform isn’t around to hold coats for fucking detectives,” I snapped back.
He paused in midstep, tucked his tongue between his teeth, then laughed. “You got some cojones, Katie Joubert.”
But uniform patrol doesn’t have the option of removing at least some of our clothing to work a body. On those days, at the end of shift, I make a beeline for my house, strip, and let the shower—as hot as I can stand it—and a pitted bar of rosemary soap rinse away the exterior vestiges of death. I lather my hair twice, massage in conditioner, slather vanilla lotion over my whole body afterward, apply perfume to all my pulse points. I put on a dress and let my hair fall down the middle of my back.
“Whoo boy, what the hell you been doing?” Johnny asked the first time I worked a body after we got married. “You smell like the whole goddamn perfume counter at Goudchaux’s.”
“I don’t shop at Goudchaux’s,” I said, and then I told him about the body, an elementary teacher two days dead, strangled, laid out on her bed as though she was taking a nap, still wearing her bra but no underwear. We suspect the boyfriend.
The next week, he came home with a gift basket full of perfumed oils, lotions, and soaps. “All natural,” he pointed out shyly, “just like you like.” It took me three years, but I finished off every item in that basket.
I don’t use the washer and dryer at home for uniforms that are drenched in the smell of death; I worry that some lingering residue might attach itself to my other clothes. Some officers claim that digging a hole and putting the clothes in the ground for several days cuts the odor. I’ve never tried this; the thought of burying my uniform is too painfully absurd. Kean’s Dry Cleaning has a special deal for uniforms that have done the death beat: two washings, a steaming, and a buck-fifty off the regular price. So I take my uniforms, tied up in a white plastic bag, to Nancy at the Kean’s on Government Street, and she returns them three days later starched and hanging in clear plastic.
But I imagine I still smell it, that the fibers have absorbed something holy and horrible that no amount of washing can erase. It’s only recently that I’ve realized I have absorbed it. This smell, death, it is a part of me, as pure and real and present as any memory of the child I once was.
Almost every morning of my childhood I awoke, reluctantly coming to consciousness, soothed by the warm, drowsy smell of yeast and flour and sometimes cinnamon. I would lie there in bed and hold an image of my mother downstairs, still in curlers perhaps, up since 5:00, now reading the Boston Globe and drinking her coffee while the morning’s bread rose and turned golden behind her. And from the bathroom that adjoined my room came the squeak of flesh on porcelain, the lazy lap of water as my father, dozing, dreaming of his boyhood, shifted in the bathtub.
My mother baking for her family in the quiet of their slumber; my father distant in his memories, immersed in water: this is how I woke nearly every morning in my parents’ house.
Fall in Massachusetts: burning leaves, roasted chestnuts, Indian summers, baked beans simmered slow and long, the salty bite of distant ocean in the air, and a crispness I’ve never found in the Deep South. That brilliant splash before the winter retreat when the world was swirling, crackling leaves waiting in some pile to embrace me. The wet, hungry earth; the sharp, sweet grass and mulch. In the winter, the world out my window had no smell but cold. It was a glittering fairyland of black and white—sparkles and snowflake patt
erns and frost and fluffy waist-high snow draped on trees, fences, my mother’s garden.
During the spring and summer, our house stayed fragrant, full of flowers and cuttings: pine, wisteria, pansies, forsythia, violets—always something from outside, from one of my mother’s greatest loves, the garden. She would often pinch loose the petals of a rose or peony, snap a twig of French lavender or basil and crush it in her hand, and say, “There, smell.” And we did, my brother and I; we smelled the dirt and warmth of her hand. Years later I would yearn for this tenderness at times of terror: inching through a dark building, talking down a suicide, alone in a house with a burglar twice my size. Suddenly, irrationally, I wanted her hand there, cupping my chin, the feel of her roughened moist flesh, the gritty soil full of mystery and promise.
As I grew older, into the double digits, I sought time alone in the house, without brother or parents. I prowled from room to room, standing in each doorway for a minute or so, taking it into me—the sight, smell, feel of each room, as though this absorption could somehow help me read and correct the increasingly strange and distant interactions between my mother and father, between my parents and myself.
I would stand in the semidarkness of my parents’ two-room closet. First my father’s side, carefully leaning into the sleeve of a coat: scratchy deep wool, anonymous cleaning fluid, and a hint of the lemony sting of 4711 cologne that he wore. I’d finger through his ties, inspect the rows of shoes gleaming with polish, brush my hand along the line of belts, count the change scattered out across a shelf.
Then my mother’s side. Burying my face in her clothing, pulling it close around me, I inhaled the lingering trail of Chanel and her own sweet musky scent mixed with the undertone of tears that always nestled in the dip between her collarbone and neck. I stood here the longest, as though by fragrance alone I could understand her better.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 2
