A Quiet Vendetta (4 page)

It was gone lunchtime and Verlaine hadn’t yet eaten a thing. He stopped at a deli en route, bought a sandwich and a bottle of root beer. He ate while he drove, more out of necessity than any other consideration.

Twenty minutes later: New Orleans Police Department Vehicle Requisition Compound, corner of Treme and Iberville.

John Verlaine stood with the criss-crossed shadows of the wire mesh fence sectioning his face into squares, and waited patiently. The officer within, name of Jorge D’Addario, had stated emphatically that until he received something official, something
in writing
, he could not permit Verlaine entry to the compound. Verlaine had bitten his tongue, called the duty sergeant at the Precinct and asked him to have Captain Moreau call D’Addario at the pound and make it official. Finding Moreau took a further twenty minutes. Verlaine sat in his car, drank the rest of his root beer, smoked his last cigarette, and finally D’Addario opened the gate and waved him through.

He walked between the rows of symmetrically parked cars, took a wide berth on a boiler-suited black-faced man chasing a fine blue line through the chassis of a Trans Am with an oxyacetylene torch. Copper-colored sparks jetted like Independence Day fireworks from the needle-point flame. Down a half dozen, right, and through another alleyway of vehicles – a Camaro S/Six, a Berlinetta, a Mustang 351 Cleveland backed up against a Ford F250 XLT, and to his left before the Cruiser a GMC Jimmy with half the roof torn away, giving the impression of a can of peas opened up with a pneumatic drill.

Verlaine paused, stood there ahead of the Mercury Turnpike, the yards of burnished chrome, the mirrored wheel shell standing out from the trunk, the indents and dual fresh-air vents, the double tail fins and burgundy paintwork. Sure as shit wasn’t no ordinary car. He stepped forward, touched the edged concave runners that swept from the tail to the quarterlights, leaned to look along the base of the vehicle, its white-wall tires muddied a little beneath the chrome underslung chassis and overlapping arches. Requisition Compound wasn’t the place for such a car as this.

Moving to the rear of the vehicle, Verlaine took a pair of surgical gloves from his pockets. He snapped them on and lifted the trunk. The night before, a dead guy had been found in there; now it smelled like formaldehyde, like something antiseptic tainted with decay. The image of the body he’d stood over in the autopsy theater crammed into this space was as clear as ever. His stomach turned. He felt the root beer repeating on him like cheap aniseed mouthwash.

He went back and fetched his camera from his car. Took some snaps. Looked inside the back of the Cruiser, saw the thick lake of dried blood across the leatherwork and down onto the carpet. Took some shots of that. Finished the film and rewound it.

Fifteen minutes and he was walking his way out of the compound; paused to sign the visitation docket in D’Addario’s kiosk at the gate, turned his car off Iberville and headed back to the Precinct House to check the status of the fingerprint search.

Verlaine, perhaps for no other reason than to kill a little time, took the long route. Back of the French business quarter, along North Claiborne on St Louis and Basin. Here was Faubourg Treme, city of the dead. There were two cemeteries, both of them called St Louis, but the one in the French Quarter was the oldest, the first and original burial ground dating back to 1796. Here were the dead of New Orleans – the whites, the blacks, the Creoles, the French, the Spanish, the free – because they all wound up here, every sad and sorry one of them. Death held no prejudice, it seemed. The graves did not reveal their color, their dreams, their fears, their hopes; gave merely their names, when they arrived and when they departed. Crosses of St Augustine, St Jude, St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of travelers who loved nature, who founded the Franciscans, who begged for his meals and died a pauper. And on the other side were the believers, the gris-gris crosses marking their passage into the underworld. Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, R.I.P. Haitian cathedrals of the soul.

He reached Barrera at Canal by the Trade Mart Observation Tower, asked himself why he was driving so far out of his way, shrugged the question away. He was now ahead of the French Market beyond Vieux Carre Riverview. A good couple of miles of warehouses interspersed with clam joints, jazz clubs, bars, restaurants, diners, sex shops, a movie theater and the landing jetties for the many harbor tours. Despite the heat the streets down there were busy. Groups of Creoles and blacks stood aimlessly at corners and intersections, hurling arrogant and playful remarks at passing women, flying the finger at compadres and amigos, drinking, laughing, talking big, oh so very big, in this smallness of life. Daily you could find them, nothing better to do, persuading themselves that this was the good life, the life to live, where things were easy come easy go, where everyone who wasn’t there was a jerkoff, a dumbjohn, a turkey; where the duchesses sailed by, their hands on the arms of trade, making their way to some seedy Maison Joie down the street and back of the next block, and these corner-hugging, street-smart hopefuls were wise to their act and knew not to say anything whatever the trade looked like, for a duchess with a stiletto heel to your throat was no cool scene. Here, the air was haunted forever with the smell of fish, of sweat, of cheap cigar smoke passing itself off as hand-rolled Partageses; here existence seemed to roll itself out endlessly from one dark and humid dream to the next, with no change to spare but daylight in between. Daylight was for scoring, for counting money, for sleeping some, for drinking a little to prep the tongue for the onslaught that would come later. Daylight was something God made so life was not one endless party; something, perhaps, to give the neon tube signs a rest. Places such as this they held cock fights; places such as this the police let them. In the guidebooks it suggested you visit these parts only in groups, directed by an official, never alone.

Verlaine crossed the junction of Jackson and Tchoupitoulas where the bridge spanned the river and joined 23, where 23 crossed the West Bank Expressway, where the world seemed to end and yet somehow begin again with different colors, different sounds, different senses.

He arrived unnoticed at the Precinct House – the place was almost deserted – and checked status on the prints. They had nothing yet, perhaps wouldn’t until someone pulled their finger out Monday morning and got the hell on with what they were paid to do.

It was gone five, the afternoon tailing away into a cooler early evening, and for a little while Verlaine sat at the desk in his office looking out southwards to the Federal Courts and Office complex back of Lafayette Square. Beneath him the street slowly emptied of traffic, and then filled once more with the hubbub of pedestrians making their slow-motion way to Maylies Restaurant, over to Le Pavilion, life traveling onwards in its own curious and inimitable way. A man had been butchered, a brutal and sadistic termination, his savaged corpse parked in a beautiful car in an alleyway down off of Gravier. They were all fascinated, horrified, disgusted, and yet each of them could turn and walk away, take dinner, see the theater, meet their friends and talk of small inconsequentialities that possessed their attention to a far greater degree. And then there were others, among whom Verlaine counted himself and Emerson and Cipliano, perhaps themselves as crazy as the perpetrators, given that their involvement in life was limited to tracing and finding and sharing their breath with these people – the sick, the demented, the sociopathic, the disturbed. Someone somewhere had taken a man, hammered in his head, bound his hands behind his back, opened his chest, cut away his heart, driven him into town and left him. Alone. That someone was somewhere, perhaps avoiding eyes, avoiding confrontations; perhaps hiding somewhere in the bayous and everglades, out past the limits of Chalmette and the Gulf Outlet Canal where the law walked carefully, if at all.

Verlaine, already weary, took a legal pad, balanced it across his knee and jotted down what he knew. The time of death, a few facts regarding the condition of the vic, the name of the car. He drew the constellation of Gemini as best as he could recall, and then stared at it for some time, thinking nothing very much at all. He left the pad there on the desk and called it a day. He drove home. He watched TV for a little while. Then he rose and showered, and when he was done he sat in a chair by the window of his bedroom dressed in a robe.

The warmth of the day, the way his mind had been stretched by its events, took its toll. A little after ten Verlaine lay on his bed. He drifted for a while, the window wide, the sounds and smells of New Orleans drifting back into the room with the faintest of breezes.

You had to live here to understand, you had to stand there in Lafayette, out in Toulouse Wharf, there in the French Market as you were jostled and shoved aside, as the ripe odor of humanity and the rich sounds of its brutal rhythms swarmed right through you . . .

You had to do these things to understand. This was the Big Easy, the Big Heartacher. New Orleans, where they buried the dead overground, where the guidebooks recommended you walk in groups, where everything slid over-easy, sunny-side down, where the Big George fell on eagles nine times out of ten.

This was the heart of it, the American Dream, and dreams never really changed, they just became faded and forgotten in the manic slow-motion slide of time.

Sometimes, out there, it was easier to choke than to breathe.

Morning of Monday twenty-fifth. Verlaine woke with a head like a bruised watermelon. The sun had broken early and already his bedroom was like a sauna, the feeling in the air that here was a further reprise of the vicious summer New Orleans had somehow endured.

He rose, showered and shaved; he listened to KLMZ-Heavy Jazz out of Baton Rouge playing ‘Mama Roux’ and ‘Jump Sturdy’ by Dr John. Breakfast was two raw eggs whisked into a glass of milk, two cigarettes, half a cup of coffee. He was out by nine, back to Cipliano’s office by nine-forty, and already the traffic was choking up the atmosphere with its own inimitable brand of filth.

‘The heart,’ was the first thing the coroner said as Verlaine walked through the door. Cipliano spoke through a mouthful of something or other. He went through phases of chewing on things, had given up smoking some years back but never lost the need to have something in his mouth – licorice root, chewing gum, a toothpick, whatever.

‘This trip with the heart. Kept me awake last night. I come in this morning I got a leaper John, a fucking leaper waiting for me like I got nothin’ better to be doin’ with my day. Keeping me busy these bastards are, but what can you do, eh? Anyway the leaper can wait. Like I said, this whole routine with the heart is bugging the shit outta me. Used to be the case some years back, not so much now, but used to be that the families out here, the distillery and bootlegging families you know? They would hold their vendettas as close as their liquor. Tight families, inbred, screwed each other, their own kids and sisters, Christ knows what, little ’uns all ended up looking the same, always ugly, in features and temperament.

‘Anyway, as I was saying, there was a series of different incidents back in the late fifties and early sixties, maybe half a dozen or so, different things, hands cut off, eyes taken out, tongues snipped at the end so the guy couldn’t talk properly. Taking the heart was for a betrayal—’

‘Like the Dvore thing in ’68,’ Verlaine interjected.

Cipliano nodded. ‘Sure, the Dvore thing, but that was way after these. That was maybe the last of the line on this kinda thing. Taking the heart was for a betrayal, someone whom the betrayer counted close would have to do it, someone on the edge of the family, a cousin, a mistress, something like that. I’m not saying that this was the case here, but the fact that the heart was cut out is a similar sort of thing to what was happening back then. Usually you’d only get the heart back, the body would be filled up with stones and dumped in the glades or somesuch. Here you got the same sort of thing, but the heart is put back inside. It’s hard to tell on the blows as well. So many, and all coming at different angles, like whoever did this was walking around the guy in circles while he whacked him.

‘I went down to look at the car early this morning, and I figure that maybe the chest was opened up while the guy was on the back seat. And the way the blood ran off the seat was more like splashes, and that made me think that the body lay on the back seat all opened up for the world to see while the guy was driving down to Gravier. Maybe he figured to leave the body on the back seat, but when he got down to the parking lot and saw how well lit it was he decided to stick the vic in the trunk. There were no prints, gloves worn very tight, perhaps surgical, no grain. The sheet, rope and hammer were all like the first report said, standard hardware gear he could have picked up any place. Your guy is strong in the arms, a little under six feet though I can’t be certain of that. He . . . I say
he
because we don’t find many women doing this kind of thing, and also I can only reserve judgement on the possibility of your perp working alone. Whatever, right? Anyway, seems he carried the body out of the back seat, used the rear wing as support, and there are scratches that are consistent with those little rivets they put on denims. If that was what they were, if they were on the top corners of the back pockets and if your man was standing straight as he carried the body, then he’s five-ten, maybe five-eleven. There were no hairs or fibers that couldn’t have come from the back seat or the floor of the trunk, nothing there worth mentioning. You’ve got the killer’s blood type, if that was in fact his blood, and that’s pretty much all you’re gonna get out of me on this one.’

Verlaine had listened intently, nodding every once in a while as he tried to digest everything Cipliano was telling him.

‘You get a make on your prints?’

Verlaine shook his head. ‘Gonna go check again now.’

‘Christ, that crew of yours are a lazy bag o’ smashers, eh?’

Verlaine smiled.