Beau’s gold Chief Inspector’s badge is clipped to his canvas belt just in front of his holster. He takes off his vintage, extra-dark Ray Ban Balorama sunglasses – circa 1977 – as he steps up, nods at the officers and moves through the gate, spots two women up on the wide gallery.
He doesn’t know the one on the right, a redhead in her mid-twenties. The one on the left is NOPD Superintendent Janet Féroce. Both tap down their sunglasses to gleek him over the top. The chief wears jeans with a white blouse, the other woman in a yellow sundress.
The mansion’s cut glass door opens and two large black men in white bring out a metal gurney with a body bag atop. Coroner’s Office Investigator Sam Jones follows them out. Sam pauses next to Beau as the gurney passes, tells Beau the body in the bag appears to be a natural.
“Catch you at the autopsy.” Sam yawns and follows the gurney out to a white coroner’s office van.
Natural death.
Beau takes out his Moleskine notebook and Zebra stainless steel ball point with blue ink. He goes up nine brick steps to the gallery and Féroce steps close and takes off her sunglasses.
“Didn’t take you away from mass, did I?”
Féroce stands a few inches shorter than Beau. She’s a thin woman in her early forties with an angular face surrounded by thick, dark brown hair and brown eyes darker than Beau’s pale brown eyes.
“Meet Claire,” the chief says as the other woman steps up. A pretty woman, her dark red hair long and curly. She’s petite, maybe 5’4” with skin almost too pale. She takes off her sunglasses, her blue-green eyes red-rimmed.
“That was her grandfather on the gurney.”
Beau nods and Chief Féroce introduces him and spells Claire’s last name for him – D’Loup.
Loup means ‘wolf’ in French.
Claire’s eyes start to fill. “We always have breakfast together before going to 10 o’clock mass. Every Sunday for the last nine years. I found him – ” Her voice chokes off.
“So you don’t live here.” Beau writes in his notebook.
Claire digs a Kleenex out of her small purse.
The chief picks up the story. “Mr. D’Loup was reclusive. Lived here alone. Elderly. In his nineties.”
Claire touches Beau’s arm.
“Albert. His name was Albert. 94 years old. He was independent. Still drove his car. He was born during the First World War.”
She pulls her hand away quickly, backs up to the open door.
“Did you call Homicide?” Beau asks the Chief.
“I called you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Loud voices turn both to the street where a heavy-set sergeant tells the two patrol officers something about them making a career of this case.
The Chief pats Beau’s back. “Drop by my office tomorrow morning. 9 a.m.” She smiles and Beau’s not sure if that’s a good thing. “I’ll leave this to you.”
“One question?”
“Go ahead.” The smile is still there.
“What brought you here?”
“Claire invited me to join them. I was walking my whippet.”
Why does that sound sexual?
Beau glances around. No whippet.
Féroce nods to the pale blue house next door. “I live right there.” She moves to the steps, looks back. “We both discovered the body. Mr. D’Loup and I spoke a number of times. We share the same lawn man.” She puts her sunglasses back on and moves to the gate which the sergeant opens for her. Beau notices both yards looked well-trimmed.
He turns back to Claire who stands there looking like a puppy lost in the rain.
“Hey!”
It’s the sergeant calling and Beau looks down at him.
“I’m taking these two.”
“Not yet. I need them.”
He’d worked with Sergeant Alvin Dokes a few times. This was the Second District, after all. Dokes lets out a long breath.
“I was afraid of that. Don’t keep them forever. We have calls piling up.”
Beau waves the patrol officers forward. They are young, probably rookies. The black officer’s name tag reads BROWN. The white boy’s tag reads MURPHY.
Wasn’t there a TV show called Murphy Brown?
Typical NOPD. District Captains relished nothing better than pairing up officers with names like Frost and Snow, Lemon and Macarte, Leopold and Loeb, and now Murphy and Brown.
Beau points to Murphy. “I need the license plate number of every car parked in a three block radius.”
“Why?”
“We treat every death as a homicide until we prove it isn’t.”
“Oh. OK.”
Beau tells Brown to follow him and turns to Claire.
“Show me where you found him.” He looks over his shoulder at Brown. “Don’t touch anything.”
“As if,” goes Brown.
Claire steps into the foyer and Beau follows, calling the crime lab on his radio.
Beau stops immediately as Claire moves past a huge spiral staircase and into a hall. In the room on their right Beau spots sofas covered in boxes, a tunnel through four foot stacks of books and magazines. On their left there’s a room with wide tables, a desk and bookshelves filled with books all the way to the high ceiling. Cardboard boxes cover the tables and are stacked under them.
“My grandfather was somewhat of a hoarder.”
Somewhat?
Beau follows Claire down the hall and through a door on the right that opens to a kitchen with a counter on the left and a nook with a table that sits four. He looks to his right through a door to a formal dining room with two crystal chandeliers hovering over a long table covered with boxes.
“He was reading his morning paper.” Claire points to an overturned chair next to the table in the kitchen nook. A newspaper lies on the table. She nods to the counter. “He fixed coffee but hadn’t had a cup yet.”
A Mr. Coffee machine sits atop the counter with a full pot of coffee and two empty cups in matching saucers next to it. Both have a drop of water inside as if they’ve been freshly rinsed. He looks at the carafe again and sees it holds ten cups but only has eight cups of coffee. Maybe he only made eight? Beau notices the plug-in wall sockets. So that’s where the scents come from. The foyer and hall smells flowery, the kitchen like a grassy meadow.
Beau spots Brown checking out Claire. She’s a pretty woman from every angle. Some faces are nice – head on and some are nice in profile. This girl’s a looker with a soft, shyness in her eyes. At least that’s the way she looks to Beau whose been wrong about women more than correct. Her shyness could be a cover. After all, she’s a redhead.
“You said something about mass the last nine years?”
“Yes. Immaculate Conception on Baronne Street. Only church that still does the mass in Latin.”
Immaculate Conception Jesuit Church. Beau was there not long ago. 8 o’clock Sunday mass meeting the La Cosa Nostra boss on another case. Pretty church.
When the crime lab tech shows up, Beau pulls on a pair of surgical gloves, along with Brown. Claire steps over for a pair. He doesn’t tell her she doesn’t need them. It’s only for people who have never been here before but he doesn’t stop her.
“Body was found here.” Beau points to the table and asks for the coffee pot and cups to be dusted for prints, the doors as well as he checks the back door. Locked.
“Wait. Swab the interior of the coffee cups first and get a container for that coffee.”
“Plan on getting caffeined-up?” The tech chuckles.
“Let’s analyze it all.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Chief Inspector.”
Claire leads them back to the foyer.
“Front door was locked?”
Claire nods, brushes her long hair away from her face again. “And the alarm set. My grandfather was the cautious type. Made sure his alarm was always on. He’d have to deactivate it each time he opened a door.”
“You check upstairs?”
“Should I?”
>
Beau asks Brown to check all the windows downstairs and see if anyone’s hiding in a closet then join them upstairs.
Three of the four bedrooms on the second floor are filled with boxes, books and magazines stacked atop the beds, pictures in large frames – black and white scenes. Street scenes with old cars and trains, people in clothing from the early 20th Century.
“Europe.” Claire says as they stand over a 24” by 24” photo in a mahogany frame lying on a bed.
She points to a distant object in the picture, a giant archway.
“Brandenburg Gate. This is Berlin.”
Photos of castles line the walls in the hall connecting the rooms. The largest bedroom must be the master bedroom as the room has no boxes and the large, unmade bed looks as if someone just climbed out of it.
“My goodness.” Claire stands in front of a dresser, her head moving from side to side before she eases over to a painting on the wall left of the dresser. “Can you open the curtains?”
He moves the long curtains aside, sees they hide French doors that open to a small balcony overlooking a well-kept backyard. He checks the doors. Locked.
They both look at the painting now – a 36” square oil in an ornate gold-leaf frame. Five cowboys sit around a campfire at night in the painting, two with metal cups in hand, a third with a brown liquor bottle, the other two looking out at the night, one with a Winchester 30-30 rifle in hand, the other with his right hand resting atop his six-shooter in its holster.
Claire peers close and points to the lower corner.
“This is a Remington. I hope it’s not a copy.”
She moves to another painting, also a 36” oil in an almost matching gold-leaf frame. It’s a good depiction of a Native American with long black hair and wearing a well-worn blue US Cavalry blouse and bear claw necklace around his neck. He sits atop a pinto pony on a crest before a vast plain.
“Pawnee.”
“You sure?” Claire glances back at Beau.
“A Sioux recognizes an enemy. These guys helped the cavalry conquer my tribe, the Sioux, and our cousins the Cheyenne.”
“You’re Sioux?”
“Only from the waist up. I’m also half Cajun.”
Her eyebrows lower for a moment before she turns back to check the marking on the painting of the Pawnee.
“I think these could be early Frederic Remingtons.”
“Valuable?”
Claire raises her iPhone and takes pictures of the Remingtons. “If they’re genuine they’re worth six figures.”
Damn.
Beau steps closer to the Pawnee, examines the deep lines in the man’s face and the scar above his right eye. This painter was damn good.
“I thought Remington did sculptures.”
Claire moves to a small statue atop a table in the far corner, turns to him, her lower lip quivering. “I think this is a Camille Claudel.”
She lifts the statue to look at its base. It’s bronze, maybe 12 inches tall, a nude woman leaning forward, long hair covering her face.
“Camille was Rodin’s student, model and lover.” She looks up at Beau.
“You’ve heard of Rodin.”
“Shortstop. Yankees, right?”
She blanches and he smiles. “I know. The Thinker.”
She examines the sculpture in her hands. “Camille suffered from paranoia and was diagnosed schizophrenic and lived the last thirty years of her life in a psychiatric hospital. The press said her family committed a sculptor of genius to an asylum and the doctors tried to get her released but her family refused.”
Brown steps in and Claire looks up, adds, “Her brother was the poet Paul Claudel.”
Her face grows a little red and she looks at the statue once again.
“You know a lot about art,” Beau says.
“I’m an associate professor of Art at Loyola.” She puts the sculpture down carefully, lets out a long breath as she pulls her hair back again. “I had no idea my grandfather had this art up here. I’ve never been above the first floor.”
They head up to the third floor, Beau asking, “Y’all never talked about art?”
“No. He talked about the old country mostly. Germany.”
“D’Loup is French, isn’t it?
“Our real name was Wolfschlucht. Means ‘wolf ravine’ in German.”
The third floor hall is crowded with framed pictures leaning against the walls, some small, some huge, all with black and white pictures. More European scenes.
“My grandfather was born in Bavaria in 1916. When his father brought the family here to America in 1917, he changed the name to blend in with the French names in New Orleans.” Claire turns back to Beau as they step into one of the four upstairs bedrooms.
“General Pershing Street was Berlin Street before World War I.”
The upstairs bedrooms are crowded with paintings, none that the associate professor thinks are valuable, and more framed pictures and boxes with vases of different sizes stacked on them. Beau asks Brown to check the closets as he bends over to look under a bed. More magazines.
On their way back down the stairs, Claire says she needs to call an art expert, especially about the Remingtons and the possible Claudel sculpture. Beau waits until they are in the foyer to tell her, “I’ll contact you after the postmortem exam in the morning.” He passes her a business card, writing his cell number on the back. She takes the card and tells him her cell number, correcting herself twice and asking him to read it back.
“You OK?”
She takes in a deep breath, nods, looks away.
“You’re gonna be OK here by yourself?”
She tries to smile, her lower lip shaking.
“Yes.” Her voice deepens. “I’ll be fine.” She extends her hand to shake. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
Officer Murphy steps up on the gallery and Beau takes the list of license plate numbers, asks the cops to hang around in the house for a while.
“That won’t be necessary.” Claire wipes her eyes.
“I’m sure they don’t mind hanging with a pretty girl for a while longer.” Beau steps out and off the gallery. He takes a few minutes to walk around the house, spotting nothing amiss. He peeks through the glass panes of a side door that opens to the garage attached on the left side of the house. A black car sits inside. Old model but he can’t tell the make. The garage door is locked.
He glances next door as he moves out to his SUV. Superintendent Féroce’s house is nearly identical except for the blue paint. A squirrel rushes up an oak tree in her front yard and Beau wonders why he’s spending so much time on a natural death case.
Could their meeting tomorrow morning be about this, or is there something else?
AS BEAU STEPS through the front door, Stella races up and chatters as she rubs herself against his left foot, moving between his feet to rub against his right foot and back again.
“Hey, Baby.” He bends over and pets her long coat and she chatters louder, then goes, “Arowl, Rowl, Rowl.”
He scoops her up and rubs his nose against the sides of her face and she nuzzles him back. Normally, Stella Blanche Beau – the pure-bred Turkish Angora blue cat he found in a rainstorm as a kitten – does not like to be picked up, even by the only man in her life. But these aren’t normal times.
“So good you came out, Baby.”
She’d been hiding in the bedroom Beau now shares with Jessie since the move from the only home Stella had known in her life, the rickety houseboat Sad Lisa, to this two story house made of wood and field stone, looking like a Swiss chalet near the end Saint Charles Avenue, a few blocks from Carrollton. Not far from the bend in the Mississippi River that gave the city one of her monikers – Crescent City.
“This calls for treats.”
He starts to carry her back to the kitchen but she wiggles and starts flopping so he puts her down. She follows him into the kitchen.
“Have you been exploring?”
She goes, “Rowl, Rowl, A
AArowl.”
“This place is immense compared to our little boat, Baby. I’ve been telling you that while you were under the bed.”
She’s been sneaking out from under the bed. Eating and drinking her water and using the litter box. Throwing a fit doesn’t include going hungry or not taking care of the business she needs to cover with litter.
As usual, Stella curls up next to Beau’s feet when he takes a nap later as the ceiling fan blows the cool AC over him as he tries not to see the head explode, the bloody brain matter splashing. He tries not to see Mike Agrippa’s red eyes staring at him, then the smile. Beau’s eyes snap open. Stella stirs, resettles. He closes his eyes and lets his mind flow back to the first time he spied Jessie crossing Magazine Street in that black mini-dress, the breeze lifting the skirt as she kept walking, like a leopard with a long, smooth gait and not bothering to brush down the skirt as she flashed her white panties. He settles back to let his mind run with Jessie –
THE SCENT OF spicy tomato gravy wakes Beau and he sees he’s slept three hours. Damn. He heads downstairs, glad to see Stella tagging along. Jessie Bella Carini turns away from the stove, brushes strands of her long brown hair from her eyes.
“The furry one left a present by the back door.”
Beau, who’s in his black T-shirt and gray gym shorts, steps up and kisses Jessie’s lips. She’s in a dark blue Ursuline Academy T-shirt and jeans. He steps to the back door where a dead mouse lies on its side. Stella moves over to her food bowl to scarf down some dried food.
“Didn’t realize we had mice,” Jessie says.
“Good girl.” Beau reaches down to scratch Stella’s head, picks up the mouse by the tail and starts for the kitchen garbage can and sees Jessie’s eyes wide now. In the bright kitchen, her eyes look even lighter green.
“I know. Outside.” He takes it to the outside can, comes back in to wash his hands.
“Did you eat?”
She turns on the oven when he says he hadn’t and a half hour later they’re at the dining room table with plates of her mother’s meat balls and spaghetti.
Jessie says, “At least you missed lunch with the dysfunctional Carinis.”
The Great Beau Page 2
