A Quiet Vendetta (5 page)

‘So you got any smartass questions for me?’

‘Ritual or psycho, whaddya reckon?’

Cipliano hesitated. ‘This is criminal psychology you’re talking here. I’m a coroner, but from what I can see—’ He shook his head. ‘This is not my field. I can’t give you anything other than a hunch.’

Verlaine nodded. ‘So give me a hunch.’

Cipliano shrugged. ‘I’d say you have someone who did this for someone else maybe—’

‘Why for someone else?’

Cipliano was quiet for a moment. ‘There’s a mentality, a thinking pattern, always some sense of motivation back of these things. If they run into a serial there’s always a common thread, and usually it’s not until the third or fourth killing that you find it. Then you look back and see that common factor right the way through, like it’s an embryonic thought, something that grows, like he’s testing something out, putting something there, getting whatever kick he gets out of his own reasoning. He gets a bit adventurous, embellishes the original idea, really makes it obvious, and that’s when it comes to light. That’s when you have the trademark. This one . . . well, this one’s different. If you had a psycho working for himself he’d have maybe left the vic where he killed him, perhaps cut the body up and distributed it someplace. The psycho thing is all about showing everything for the world. Here he wants the thing seen, but he hides it first. He wants it known, but not immediately . . . almost like it’s a message to someone perhaps.’

Cipliano scratched the back of his head. ‘The majority of actual psychopaths, serial killers, they have the desire for others to share in what they’ve done, for others to understand, appreciate, sympathize. It’s an explanation. The killing is an explanation for something – guilt, sadness, rejection, desperation, anger, hate, sometimes just as simple as getting mom and dad’s attention. Your man here, he beat the shit out of the vic because he wanted to, but I think the heart was something else entirely. I think the heart was cut out and then left in the chest because he wanted someone to know something. Then you have this shit with the quinine. I mean, what in fuck’s name was all that about?’

Verlaine shook his head.

‘You gotta understand, I don’t really know a thing about this, right?’ Cipliano grinned and winked. ‘All of that I just told you could be complete bullshit and I’m just making out I’m smart. You go check on your prints, and let me know who he was, okay?’

Verlaine nodded. He turned and started towards the door.

‘Hey, John.’

He turned back to Cipliano.

‘Thing to remember, however bad it might get, is it’s never as bad for you as it is for these poor suckers.’

Verlaine smiled. It was a small mercy indeed.

The image of the constellation drawn on the victim’s back haunted Verlaine’s thoughts as he drove back to the Precinct House. It was a twist, perhaps significant in the fact that quinine was used, perhaps in the constellation itself. It would all start to open up with the identification of the body. And, figuratively speaking, that was where it had ended as well.

He pulled into the car lot back of the Precinct and went up the steps into the building. Duty sergeant at the desk told him the captain was away for the rest of the day; also told him there’d been one message left for him.

Verlaine took the piece of paper and turned it over.

Always
. A single word printed in the duty sergeant’s neat script.

Verlaine looked at the sergeant.

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Some guy called up, asked for you, I told him you were out and about someplace. He was quiet for a moment, I asked him if there was any message and he said that. Just one word. “Always”. And then he hung up before I had a chance to ask him who he was.’

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Verlaine asked.

‘If you wanna go there that’s your choice, John.’

‘Seems to me I don’t have a choice, right?’

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders again.

‘Can you call Prints and ask if they have a make on my trunk vic?’

The sergeant lifted the receiver and phoned through. He asked if they had an ID, and then nodded and held out the receiver towards Verlaine. ‘They wanna speak to you.’

Verlaine took the handset. ‘Yes?’

He was silent for a moment, and then ‘Okay. Let me know if anything comes up.’

The duty sergeant took the receiver and replaced it in its cradle.

‘Security tagged,’ Verlaine said.

‘Your prints?’

Verlaine nodded. ‘It’s come up as a security tagged print.’

‘No shit! So it’s a cop or somesuch?’

‘Or federal or military or CIA or National Security Agency, who the fuck knows.’

‘Christ, you got yourself into a wild one there, John Verlaine.’

‘Verlaine said nothing. He looked at the sergeant and then turned back towards the rear exit of the building.

‘You gonna head down to Evangeline, gonna go see Always and find out if he knows anything?’

Verlaine slowed and hesitated. He shook his head. ‘Right now seems the only direction to take.’

‘Suit yourself, but take care, eh?’

‘Call me on the cellphone if Prints come back to you with anything more, would you?’

‘Sure John, sure. You figure you should take someone with you?’

‘It’ll be alright,’ Verlaine said. ‘Me an’ Daddy Always haven’t crossed paths for a few years.’

‘Don’t mean he’ll have forgotten you.’

‘Thanks,’ Verlaine said. ‘That’s very reassuring.’ He walked on to the rear door and returned to his car.

The rain came as he pulled away from the car lot. By the time he reached the junction it was flooding down in torrents. Verlaine drew to the edge of the road beneath the overhang of a tree and prepared himself to wait until the worst had passed. Down across the sidewalks, petals of wisteria and magnolia, mimosa and Mexican plum littered the way like confetti, scattered pockets of white and cream, yellow and lilac-blue.

When the rain lessened he began moving again. He took the longest route out of Orleans, left across the south-west limits, noticed a highway sign jutting from the ground –
Don’t Take A Curve – At Sixty Per – We Hate To Lose – A Customer – BURMA-SHAVE
– an artefact from some bygone age. The further he drove the more the city dissolved away into nothing. The colors were vague and deep, shades of bruising, of bloodshot eyes and wounded flesh. Where he was headed, a small town called Evangeline, was a place to leave, never a place to arrive in or be born into, but to escape from as soon as age and ability permitted. There were dreams, there were nightmares, and somewhere in between was reality, the truly real existence one found not by listening but by looking, by following these strange-colored threads, vague lines that ran from circumstance to coincidence, and from there into the indelible effects of brutal humanity in its most merciless forms. People like the heart-killer were everywhere: standing in stores, waiting for trains, leaving for work, looking no less human, no less real than ourselves, carrying with them the perfect privacy of who they
really
were, their imaginations running riot with the colors and sounds of death and sacrifice, of some urgent necessity to enact their irrevocable maniac nightmares.

The glades unfolded as Verlaine drove, a demarcation point more of sound and smell than vision, for here the undergrowth began to drift from the verges into the road, the hot-top worn and beaten, here and there broken up and allowing small stripes of vegetation to creep through. The air seemed closer, harder to breathe, and the shroud of trees provided a cover that daylight found hard to penetrate. The heat held the rain up, evaporated a good deal of it before it reached the ground, and the mist hung like a pall over everything. The sound of the engine was swallowed, and Verlaine – feeling for perhaps the first time the full weight of his present situation, its possibilities, its potential repercussions – sat uneasily in the driving seat. He slowed the car some and eased through the beginning of this shifting, ever-changing country like someone invading a private and personal territory. He was thankfully unfamiliar with this land, the rise and sweep of verdant plantations, the gaps between the solid ground where the earth would swallow you effortlessly in mud and filth and depthless suffocation. Walk out here with uncertain feet, and those feet would walk you quietly to your death. No-one was ever heard out here; however loud they screamed, that sound was snatched away and evaporated by the heat, the solidity, the thick atmosphere. People died out here like it was one moving, living cemetery, and there was no retrieval for burial or cremation. Once this land had you, well, it had you for keeps.

Verlaine’s mouth was bitter and dry. He thought of wharfside bars, of cool lemonade, of sweet Louisiana oranges from the French market along North Peters and Decatur.

He drove for close to an hour, and as he felt the beaten dirt road dip beneath the wheels of the car he also felt the intuitive awareness that something was close. He slowed the car, rolled it leftwards and stopped it beneath a deep overhang of head-height branches. But for close inspection – cover afforded by the mist, the trees themselves – the car was almost invisible. Verlaine thought for a moment about what he was doing, whether he would walk out there and never find his way back. As he exited the vehicle his heart hung in his chest like a fist of tense muscle, beating only because his brain dictated it. His pulse was shallow, his head tight and giddy, his hands shaking. He felt nauseous, a little overwhelmed. He felt watched.

From the dash he had taken his gun; he headed on foot the way he’d been driving, sticking to the boundary of the road, careful not to miss the verge and wander into the glades.

Verlaine heard the sound of voices before he saw the house. Imagery again, strange and anachronistic, as he turned through dense branches, through the grasping fingers of thorned and flowered trees. He stopped at the edge of a fence that ran as far as he could see in both directions. He stood there immobile, right within the heart of Feraud family territory, and his heart thudded noisily.

Approaching a turning in the road he found an unlocked gate and, passing through it, he started up the driveway towards the vast frontage of the wooden house. Painted yellow some eternity before, the woodwork had not so much surrendered its color to the heat as absorbed the quality of the environment into itself. It was shadowed and oppressive in some way, the gaudiness of its age-old decoration at variance with its soul. Here was the seat of jurisdiction for this territory; here was the Feraud family with all its many tentacles; here was Daddy Always, the head of this dynasty.

By the time he was twenty yards from the house he could see men standing along the veranda, could hear their voices more clearly, French dialects similar to those found in the wharfside bars, in the Creole gambling haunts, around the cockfight arenas in the harbor houses by Toulouse and Bienville. These men carried carbines, and handguns in belt holsters; they laughed like men with careless minds and careless trigger fingers, absent of compunction, remorse, reason, or responsibility to any law but their own. These men belonged to some bygone age. These men were not the impulsive gun-happy teenagers and gangbangers that Verlaine collided with in his usual line of work.

The hairs on Verlaine’s neck rose to attention, his stomach tightened, he felt pearls of sweat break from his hairline and start down his brow.

When the men saw him walking towards the house they fell silent. They stood motionless, almost to attention. They would know who he was. No-one but cops came down here in a shirt and tie. They knew well enough not to cause trouble unless it was started by someone else. They would think nothing of killing him, he knew that, but he would have to give them ample provocation first.

‘
Attendez!
’ a voice barked somewhere to Verlaine’s right.

Verlaine stopped walking.

A man appeared, armed much the same as those on the veranda. He ambled from the trees and came towards Verlaine as if he possessed all the time in the world.

‘
Vous attendez
,’ he said again as he neared. ‘You are police, no?’

Verlaine nodded.

‘What is it you want here?’ the man asked, his accent thick, his tone threatening.

‘I came to see Mister Feraud,’ Verlaine said.

‘You did, eh?’ the man said, and smiled. He turned towards the veranda. His attention seemed to be held for a moment, and then he turned once again to Verlaine.

‘He asks you to come?’

Verlaine shook his head.

‘So he is not here
peut-être
.’

Verlaine shrugged. ‘If he’s not here I’ll come back another time.’

The man nodded and looked down. He appeared to be considering his options.
‘Vous attendez ici
. I will see if Mister Feraud is in.’

Verlaine opened his mouth to thank the man but he had already turned and started walking towards the house. Verlaine watched as he reached the veranda, shared some words with another man by the door, and then passed inside.

He seemed to be gone for an eternity while Verlaine stood on the driveway with a dozen eyes watching him intently. He wanted to turn and run.

Eventually the man returned. He again spoke to one of the men by the door, and then he raised his hand.

‘
Venez ici!
’ he shouted, and Verlaine started walking.

Daddy Always Feraud was as Louisiana as they came. A lined and weathered face, creases like ravines running from his eyes, his mouth, the edge of each nostril. His eyes were like washed-out riverbed stones, almost transparent, piercing and haunted. He sat in a deep blue leather armchair, his legs crossed, in his right hand a cigarette. He wore a cream three-piece suit, and held in his left hand a panama hat which he waved every once in a while to cool himself. His hair was fine silver, combed neatly back, but for one unruly spike that protruded from the crown where he had leaned against the chair. He watched Verlaine as he walked towards him from the doorway of the room. His eyes were distant and yet possessive of an expression that said he’d seen too much for too long to let anything slide by. Bruised light filtered through ceiling-high windows graced with the finest organdy curtains. The old man did not speak, and at each shoulder stood two other men, as still as cigar-store Indians, men that could only have been his sons.