I smiled and shrugged.
Gwendolyn Stewart was tall, big yet muscular, and always had flawlessly applied makeup from Merle Norman, where she often visited when a shift was slow, dragging me along occasionally to check out the latest lipstick that she swore would bring out my eye color or the perfect blush to highlight my cheeks. She usually bought the lipstick or blush. But Gwen was persistent.
She’d been on the department twelve years, just two more than me, and was close to making corporal. She tended to be aggressive on calls and with people in general, which landed her in more fights than anyone else on our shift, except perhaps Doug Ledoux. She loved jewelry—diamonds in particular—and wore the biggest-assed diamond studs I’d ever seen on anyone who wasn’t a socialite. She was a lapsed Catholic, her favorite expression was some variation on the word fuck, and she’d been married three times, the last time to an insurance adjuster. I didn’t have high hopes for the marriage, and neither did she.
“Shoney’s or IHOP?” I asked.
She waggled a piece of paper at me. “HQ gave me a 52 already. On the fuckin’ interstate.”
“Later then.”
She snorted, said “Sarah” again. I knew her snorts well; she had three of them. This one meant, roughly translated, “Everyone but us is a dickhead.” I have to admit, the sentiment frequently seemed apt.
We’d been night-shift partners over two years now, the first all-female uniform team working out of Highland Precinct, a sprawling area, bordered on one side by the Mississippi River, that incorporated the state university, estates that had been in the family for generations, rural homesteads, middle-class subdivisions, and the Bottoms—a high-crime, low-income neighborhood nestled right up against the precinct’s back door. We shared a distaste for overblown authority, petty rules, panty hose, wool, and okra. She sometimes frustrated me beyond reason, but she was loyal and funny. And I trusted her without reservation.
Back in the precinct, Sergeant Mosher tapped his thick but well-manicured finger on a felony theft report I’d written the day before. “Forgot to sign it,” he said, pushing it toward me.
I handed it back signed and dated.
“Noticed your ticket count was down last month, Jeffries.”
I’d been working under Mosher for the last year, and I liked him as much as you can like a sergeant. He didn’t crowd me often, so I nodded.
“I’ll take care of it. Sir.” Don’t ever let anyone hand you any crap about cops not having ticket quotas. They are the great invisible rule on any shift.
I was almost out the door when Davy, the day desk officer, called my name. I wasn’t fond of Davy. He was terrified of the streets, so he claimed a bad back. This from a man who ran a bush-hogging business on the side.
“Check this out, will you?” He handed me a call slip with a name and address. “Lady says there’s something funny going on at her neighbor’s. Wants to talk to an officer.”
“You’re an officer, Davy. You talk to her.”
“Jeffries, she wants to see an officer.” He grinned, and my stomach lurched at the sight of his broken-post teeth stained yellowish-brown deep at the gums. I resolved, once again, to stop smoking. Soon.
“Send it to HQ.”
“You’re here. I’ll call and tell ’em you’re taking it.” Davy grinned again. “Unless you got something better to do.”
I stared at a water stain on the wall above his head, thinking how tired I was of Davy, how he’d never pull this on a male cop, thinking how much I’d like to slap him silly. I took a deep breath and let what I thought was my better sense prevail. Davy was such an easy target.
“Define funny,” I said.
“Huh?”
“‘Something funny’ at the neighbors. Can you be slightly more specific?”
He sighed and tugged his shirt down at the waist. Working the desk, Davy had gotten a little chunky. “She’s worried.”
“That’s a start.” I nodded encouragingly.
“Something about not seeing her neighbor for several days. Something about the back door.”
“You’re good on those details, Davy.” I smiled sweetly, a smile that anyone who knew me recognized as the opposite of sweet. “So funny really means suspicious?”
“Look, Jeffries, you gonna take this, or you want me to pass it on to Mosher?”
“I’ll handle it, Davy. You sit tight.”
Which is where, many days later, my what-ifs took me back to: sloppy attention to paperwork, my own damned sense of superiority, and letting Davy needle me into taking a call that should have gone through HQ dispatch. It didn’t make what came to happen any easier to understand, and I’ve never denied my own culpability. But it was a starting point.
The complainant, Doris Whitehead, lived in an older part of the city, near the Mississippi River levee and the railroad tracks. It was a run-down area with small houses on large lots crowded with pecan, oak, and cypress trees. Some of the houses had been slave quarters originally.
This time of morning a pinkish-gray fog hovered near the river. The sun was an eggshell orb already burning through the haze. There was a peaceful hesitancy to the morning, a rare and appreciated beauty. It was another plus to the job, seeing the city in all its various guises. Sometimes, I could love it.
As my tires loped over the railroad tracks, I thought of the skeleton woman. A year ago we’d found the remains of Val, a young coed, in the high grass down the bank from the tracks, near the university golf course. She’d been missing over four months. Went out for her regular jog early one morning and never came back. That’s one of the downsides to working the job for ten years: your landmarks are crime scenes, and everywhere you turn, memories shimmer to the surface momentarily whether you invite them or not.
There was just enough left of Val’s remains to tell she’d been sexually assaulted. That the perp had smashed in her head with a large metal object. Probably she died instantaneously. Probably. But that didn’t ease the thoughts of what came before. That’s what always froze me, set icy hot caterpillar nerves restlessly stirring; it’s what I tasted. The just before.
Death is disgusting no matter the context. It rips the fabric of what is. Whether it’s an elderly woman dying peacefully in her sleep surrounded by those who love her, a young boy killed in a drive-by shooting, or a drug addict dead from an overdose, death is singularly ugly. And sooner or later, whatever your personality or disposition, the exposure to death wrings life—that stuff that makes us who we are—from those who deal with it regularly.
I’d tried various ways to tame death, to compartmentalize the sheer human misery I dealt with day in and day out. Alcohol helped. So did sex. But then Tracy Skinner told me about the group—an informal gathering, she said, nothing religious, just a moment of acknowledgment—and invited me to join. The skeleton woman was my first.
We gathered at the site the night after Val’s body was found. One o’clock in the morning with a cloud-soaked moon and the deep smell of wet mud and rotting grass drifting off the Mississippi, nine off-duty female cops picked our way carefully through tall weeds, one flashlight leading us to the edge of the golf green where we stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and stood in a circle. Marge, the responding officer, spoke quietly about the scene, described it in detail. And then for five minutes no one spoke, as we each, in our own way, honored the dead girl.
What happened next startled me. I’d only intended to wish Val’s soul a safe journey, to swear we’d find the scum who did this. But standing there, shoulder to shoulder with those other women, the night air lapping against my skin, her terror inhabited me. I could have reached out a finger and traced her figure against the splotchy sky. I saw her hands raised, felt the raspy, acid gasps on my neck, heard the tumbled “nonononono”; his hands were on my breasts, the sexual stink of his body clung to my face. For five minutes, all my carefully constructed defenses collapsed, and I panicked silently, completely. Then I went home and threw up.
I shoo
k myself away from the memory as I drove past the vet school and turned left onto River Road. There were goats in many of the wide yards, a few cows and horses. The lots became larger, the houses smaller, and the grass higher until I reached a small paved road that turned away from the river. I drove slowly, looking for the address Davy had given me.
A woman in her midsixties dressed in a faded denim skirt, purple LSU T-shirt, and white high-top tennis shoes stood at the end of one of the driveways. I stopped the unit so my open passenger window was even with her.
I leaned partway across the seat and nodded hello. “Mrs. Whitehead?”
“Doris. It’s Jeannette next door,” she said, her arms folded tightly against her chest. The woman’s gray hair was chopped short, and her forearms were thick and corded with old muscle and fat. I looked in the direction she’d tilted her head toward, but I couldn’t see a house for all the trees and underbrush.
“I’m Officer Jeffries. What seems to be the problem?”
“Haven’t seen her in several days. I always see her leave for work; she passes right by my house, comes home this way too. She works ’cross the river at one of them refineries, regular like. But her car’s in the yard.”
“You’ve been over there?”
“Went up to the porch and knocked. Couldn’t see nothing. She’s always been meanin’ to give me a key but never got round to it.” She shook her head once. “I’m not a worrier, understand? But this is strange. Haven’t seen her since the ruckus couple days back. Not like her, not at all.” The woman’s voice was firm yet soft. Her southern gravel reflected a long-time cigarette smoker and the skin around her nose a bit of indulgence in hard liquor.
“What ruckus is that?” I asked.
“It wasn’t much. He’s always hollering at her, regular like. Nothing strange ’bout that. ’Cept I haven’t seen her.”
“She lives with somebody?”
The woman nodded. “Her husband, Vince. Truck driver. Must be doing a route, his rig isn’t there; but this isn’t like Jeannette not to be passing by. She’s a nice woman.”
I took it from her intonation that Vince was not a nice man.
“Well, I’ll go take a look, ma’am. You’ll be here awhile?”
“Yup, I’m retired. Taught fifth-grade math.”
I started to put the car in gear, then remembered Davy’s comment. “You mentioned something funny about a door over there?”
For the first time the woman’s eyes shifted away from me, and she rubbed the palm of her hand hard against her right ear.
“Flies,” she said.
“Flies?”
“There’s flies all over the back screen door and some of them windows.” She spoke so softly I had to lean toward her. “Jeannette keeps a clean house.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“You’ll come back and let me know?” She put a hand on my car. “Whatever?”
“Yes, ma’am. Whatever.”
“Her last name’s Durham,” the woman said. “Jeannette Durham.”
Jeannette’s house was a small, sagging clapboard, with faded blue paint, sitting in a stand of magnolia and oak trees. I parked a good thirty yards back from the house on the shell driveway and put myself 10-7, on the scene, with HQ dispatch. I unsnapped my holster and kept my hand on the butt of my gun as I walked slowly, my footsteps crunching louder than I liked, the portable radio on my hip crackling faintly with transmissions. I stopped once to briefly touch the trunk of her car—closed and locked—scanned the interior—clean—and then touched the hood—cool.
There’s always something faintly eerie about approaching a house this way with so many unknowns. Especially during daylight when everything appears normal, or at least what we perceive as normal, as safe. You get a hundred calls about someone missing or something not right, and the person almost always shows up, the mystery is no mystery at all. It tends to breed cynicism, a lackadaisical approach to the myriad calls you answer day after day. And then there’s that exception. Someone says something like “flies,” and your heart lurches.
The woman was right. There were an inordinate number of flies clinging to the screens on the windows at the rear of the house and side door. But even without the presence of flies I would have known something was wrong. After a while you can read the stillness, taste the texture of the air. Every sense processes a dozen different impressions that the brain computes and analyzes into one single pronouncement: something is wrong. It’s what most cops live for, whether we like to admit it or not, that feeling of something gone wrong.
I hesitated only a moment, considering whether to call for backup. This seemed pretty straightforward: something was dead inside.
Blinds were drawn over all the windows except in the front, and the two doors were locked. But screens are ridiculously easy to pry off with a pocketknife, and people are generally lax about locking their windows, especially this far out of town. I got lucky on the third one off the front porch.
As I eased the window sash up, I smelled what the flies already knew: dead flesh. It is a distinct smell, thick and lush with the ecstasy of rot. It settles on your skin like a fine sheen of sweat and requires discipline to hold your imagination in check.
I stood there for a minute, listening. Nothing. Technically, I knew, I should announce myself. Not for my well-being, but for the protection of any civilians who might be inside—that was the official department reasoning. The department didn’t want to get sued if you entered the wrong house, arrested the wrong person, shot someone you shouldn’t have. You might get hurt, but God help you if a civilian did.
Some rules, however, are stupid.
Placing both my hands on the windowsill, I scrambled through the open window, very ungracefully but quietly, and sprawled on the wooden floor, gun in hand, and listened again. Past the wheeze of my own breath, past the slight buzz of flies, past the subtle sighs of a house in a morning breeze—searching for a rustle, a scrape, a sense that there was someone else here besides me and whatever lay dead in this house.
I rose slowly, wishing simultaneously that I had the silent grace of a tracker, that the search was already completed, that I had a scanner to detect signs of life-forms, that I’d called for backup, that I was eating breakfast with Gwen.
It’s just like on TV, except you move slower and you don’t say a word. You hug walls, use a sweeping two-handed grip on the gun, keep your knees bent, and move heel to toe. You toe-push doors open gently and pray that if something moves you have time to say, “POLICE, FREEZE,” and make the right decision to shoot or not.
I worked my way back through the house toward the smell, doing my best not to contaminate the scene, noted the dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, the blood in the sink and bathtub, the reddish-brown smears on the hall walls, and the broken glass on the floor, until I came to the rear bedroom, saw her, checked the walk-in closet, and came back to the bed, looked down, and studied the remains of Jeannette, a nice woman who kept a clean house.
The most valuable aspect of SOP—standard operating procedure—is that while one part of your brain is reacting to and absorbing the scene or crisis, the other part of your brain is flipping through the index file of appropriate actions, accessing the correct ones, and activating the body until the rest of you can catch up. The longer you’re on the job, the less time it takes to catch up and the more likely you’ll react correctly.
I had the portable radio up to my mouth even as I began scanning the room, this time for evidence, for a sense of what went wrong here.
“2D-76 Headquarters.”
“2D-76.”
“Got a Signal 65 here. One female. Get me detectives, crime scene, coroner, DA, supervisor.”
“That’s a 10-4, 2D-76. EMS as well, 10-4?”
“10-4.”
I sighed. It was asinine to send out an ambulance on bodies that were clearly dead and had been for some time. But in their infinite wisdom, some higher-ups had decided that a uniform cop couldn’t de
termine for sure whether life had ceased, even with the obvious signs of rigor mortis and no pulse. So the med techs would come and say, “Nope, no pulse.” And the detectives would come and say, “Yep, she’s a goner.” The assistant DA would arrive and say, “Looks dead to me.” The crime scene guys would come and say, “Oh yeah, we got a ripe one here.” One of the assistant coroners would arrive and say, “Yes, she’s dead.” And we’d all stand around and watch the final indignities: the photographs, the fingerprints, the prodding and probing and scrapping and bagging—and some of us, the autopsy.
The house would swell with mostly men, and they would stare at her; there would be jokes and raunchy comments, and later bootlegged copies of the crime scene photos would be passed around in coffee shops and parking lots. The official photographs would be included in the packet of photos shown to academy classes to prepare them for their first dead body, a one-dimensional illustration without smell and taste and adrenaline kick of what one human being can do to another.
And Jeannette, whoever she’d been before, would gently disappear, the texture of a whole life vanished into a series of cut-and-dried reports, and she’d be referred to, for years to come by people she never knew, as “that woman who had the tennis racquet jammed up her vagina.”
After I replaced the two screens I’d popped off the locked windows, I sat on the porch steps and smoked a cigarette. I hadn’t been particularly interested in staying with Jeannette. There was too much residual terror in the back bedroom for my taste. I’d seen a lot of dead bodies in my day, women in particular: beaten, strangled, raped, shot, stabbed, some even tortured. But the level and intensity of violence here, the sheer horror of what had been done to her body, eclipsed anything I’d ever seen before. And I’d learned early on that hanging out alone with a dead body could play tricks with your mind, that the essence of the dead person could come to life and swirl around in unsettling ways.
The first time that happened was nine months after I’d joined the force. We were dispatched to a shots-fired call in the projects off Nicholson. I arrived with two other uniforms so quickly we could still taste the acrid bite of gunpowder. A white male lay crumpled on his side, almost in a fetal position, gun resting in his hand as though it was an orange he’d just selected for lunch. One officer went back outside to call for an ambulance and detectives, the other followed him, and I’m there, alone in the kitchen, standing over the body and studying his face, wondering how he could look so peaceful with half his head missing, when I swore he shifted, that something of what he’d been started to rise up off the ground and speak. I clattered back out the side door, down the steps, and stood in the yard taking deep gulps of air. The other uniforms laughed at me, but I wasn’t about to correct their notion that the body had made me sick.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 15
