A Quiet Vendetta (2 page)

The Examiner man walked down. Early forties, name was Jim Emerson; he liked to collect baseball cards and watch Marx Brothers movies, but the rest of the time he crouched near dead bodies and tried to put two and two together. He looked as lazy as the rain, and you could sense in the way he moved that he knew he was unwelcome. He knew nothing about cars, but they’d run a sheet through come morning and they’d find – just like the carboy had figured – that this wasn’t no ordinary automobile.

Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, built by Ford as the XM in ’56, released commercially in ’57. V8, 290 horsepower at 4600 revs per minute, Merc-O-Matic transmission, 122-inch wheelbase, 4240 pounds in weight. This one was a hardtop, one of only sixteen thousand ever built, but the plates were Louisiana plates – and should have been on a ’69 Chrysler Valiant, last booked for a minor traffic violation in Brookhaven, Mississippi seven years before.

The carboy, released without charge within an hour and a half of his report, had stated emphatically that he’d seen blood on the back seat, a real mess of it all dried up on the leatherwork, clotted in the seams, spilled over the edge of the seats and down on the floor. Looked like a sucking pig had been gutted in there. The Cruiser wore a lot of glass, its retractable rear window, quarter-lights and sides designed to permit full enjoyment of the wide new vistas open to turnpike travellers. Gave the boy a good look at the innards of this thing, because that’s what he’d figured was in there, and he wasn’t so far from right.

These were the Chalmette and Arabi districts, edge of the French business quarter, New Orleans City, state of Louisiana.

This was a humid August Saturday night, and only later did they clear the sidewalks, haul out that car and lever the trunk.

Assistant Medical Examiner Emerson was there to see a can of worms opened right up, and even the cop who stood beside him – hard-bitten and weatherworn though he was – even he took a raincheck on dinner.

So they levered the trunk, and inside they found some guy, couldn’t have been much more than fifty years of age, and Emerson told anyone who’d listen that he’d been there for three, perhaps four days. Car had been there for three if the boy’s observation was correct, and there were sections of the trunk’s interior, bare metal strips, where the man’s skin had adhered in the heat. Emerson had one hell of a job; eventually he decided to freeze the metal strips with some kind of spray and then peeled the skin away with a paint scraper. The trunk vic looked like mystery meat, smelled worse, and the autopsy report would read like an auto smash.

Severe cerebral hemorrhaging; puncture of temporal, sphenoid and mastoid; rupture of pineal gland, thalamus, pituitary gland and pons by standard dimension claw hammer (generic branding, available at any good hardware outlet for between $9.99 and $12.99 depending on which side of town you shopped); heart severed at inferior vena cava through right and left ventricle at base; severed at subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary. Seventy percent minimum blood loss. Bruising to abdomen and coeliac plexus. Lesions to arms, legs, face, hands, shoulders. Rope burns and adhesive marks from duct tape to wrists, left and right. Rope fibers attached to adhesive identified beneath an infrared spectraphotometer as standard nylon type, again available from any good hardware outlet. Estimated time of death Wednesday 20 August, somewhere between ten p.m. and midnight, courtesy of New Orleans District 14 County Coroner’s Office, signed this day . . . witness . . . etc, etc.

The vic had been beaten six ways to Christmas. Tied at the wrists and ankles with regular mercantile and hardware nylon rope, beaten about the head and neck with a regular mercantile and hardware claw hammer, eviscerated, his heart cut away but left inside the chest cavity, wrapped in a regular sixty percent polyester, thirty-five percent cotton, five percent viscose bed-sheet, dumped in the back seat of a ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, driven to Gravier Street, moved to the trunk and then left for approximately three days prior to discovery.

There were interns to see to the arrival of the body at the Medical Examiner’s office, to watch over it for the couple of hours before it was moved to the County Coroner for full autopsy. Fresh-faced they were, young, and yet already beginning to get that world-weary edge of madness in their eyes, the kind of look that came from spending your life moving the dead from the scene of their misfortunes. They kept thinking
This is no work for a human being
but perhaps had already joined that happy, foolish crowd of folks who believed that, if they were not there to do these things, then no-one else would take care of them. There would always be someone to take their place, but they – in their infinite and very mortal wisdom – could never see them. Due, perhaps, to the desperation of looking.

The Crime Scene Security Officer was the man who stood sentinel over the dead to ensure this mortality was not violated further, that no-one would walk through the spilled blood, no-one would move the torn clothing, the fibers, the fragments, that no-one would touch the weapon, the footprint, the microscopic smudge of vari-colored mud that could isolate the one thread that would unravel everything; selfishly, with some sense of internal hunger, he would clutch these images and visions to his chest. Like a child protecting a cookie jar, or candies, or threatened innocence, he sought to make permanent the very impermanent, and in such a way lose sight of the real truth of the matter.

But that would be tomorrow, and tomorrow would be another day altogether.

And by the time darkness edged its cautious way towards morning the people who had crowded the sidewalks had forgotten the story, forgotten perhaps why they went down there in the first place, because here – here, of all places in the world – there were better things to think of: jazz festivals in Louis Armstrong Park, the procession from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, St Jude Shrine, a fire out on Crozat by Hawthorne Hall above the Saenger Theater that took the lives of six, orphaned some little kids, and killed a fireman called Robert DeAndre who once kissed a girl with a spider tattooed on her breast. New Orleans, home of the Mardi Gras, of little lives, unknown names. Stand. Close your eyes now and inhale this mighty sweating city in one breath. Smell the ammoniac taint of the Medical Center; smell the heat of rare ribs scorching in oiled flames, the flowers, the clam chowder, the pecan pie, the bay leaf and oregano and court bouillon and carbonara from Tortorici’s, the gasoline, the moonshine, the diesel wine: the collected perfumes of a thousand million intersecting lives, and then each life intersecting yet another like six degrees of separation, a thousand million beating hearts, all here, beneath the roof of the same sky where the stars are like dark eyes that see everything. See and remember . . .

The image evaporates, as transient as steam through subway grilles or from blackened copper funnels projecting from the back walls of Creole restaurants, steam rising from the floor of the city as it sweltered through the night.

Like steam from the brow of a killer as he’d worked his heart out . . .

Sunday. A hard, bright day. The heat had lifted as if to make room to breathe. Children were stripped to the waist, gathered at the corner of Carroll and Perdido and spraying each other with water from rubber snaking hoses that traipsed from the porches of clapboard houses set back from the street, behind low banks of hickory and water oaks. Their squeals, perhaps more from relief than excitement, scattered like streamers through the low, heady atmosphere. These sounds, of life in its infancy, were there as John Verlaine was woken by the incessant shrilling of the phone; and such a call at that time in the morning meant, more often than not, that someone somewhere was dead.

New Orleans Police Department for eleven years, somewhere in amongst that three and a half years in Vice, the last two years in Homicide; single, mentally sound but emotionally unstable; most often tired, less often smiling.

Dressed quickly. Didn’t shave, didn’t shower. More than likely there’d be a mess of shit to wade through. You got used to it. Perhaps you
convinced
yourself you got used to it.

Heat had been angry the past few days. Closed you up inside it like a fist. Hard to breathe. Sunday morning was cooler; the air lightened a little, the feeling that pressured storm clouds could break through everything now dissipated.

Verlaine drove slowly. Whoever had died was already dead. No point in rushing.

He felt it would rain again, that lazy, tail-end-of-summer rain that no-one took a mind to complain about, but it would come later, perhaps during the night. Perhaps while he slept. If he slept . . .

Away from his apartment on Carroll, heading a straight north towards South Loyola Avenue. The streets seemed vacant but for a thin scattering of humanity’s lost, and he watched them, their tentative advances, their laughing faces, their hungover redness that spread from the doorways of bars out onto the sidewalk and into the street.

He drove without thought, and somewhere near the De Montluzin Building he hung a right, and then past Loew’s State Theater. Twenty minutes, and he stood at the Loyola end of Gravier. Down here there were mimosas and hickory trees, the branches chased of bark, the remnants of their pecan yield stolen weeks before by grimy thieving hands.
Pecan pie
, he thought, and smelled his mother’s kitchen, and saw through the window his sister, a cool flannel draped over her head, her thin sapling arms red with the sun, peeling, spotted with calamine and cocoa butter, and thought
If only we could all go backwards
. . .

Verlaine looked away leftwards, away from Gravier, through the wisteria that had clung to the walls along this street since he could remember, their pendent racemes like clusters of grape hanging purple and delicate and sweet with perfume; past the grove of mimosas, their cylindrical heads like little spikes of color through the burgeoning light, out towards Dumaine and North Claiborne, the hum of traffic just another voice in this start-of-day humidity. Down among the water oaks and honey locusts, you could hear the cicadas challenging the distant sound of children who ran and played their catch-as-catch-can games on the sidewalks through air that sat tight like a drum, like it was waiting to be breathed.

He knew where the car had been, it was evident by its absence, and strung around the missing-tooth gap were crime scene tapes fluttering in the breeze. The body was found here, some guy beaten to death with a hammer. Ops told him as much as they knew on the phone, said he should go down there and see what he could see, and once he was done he should drive over to the ME’s office and speak to Emerson, check the scene report, and then on to the County Coroner to attend the autopsy. So he looked, and he saw what he could see, and he took some shots with his camera, and he walked around the edges of the thing until he felt he’d had enough and returned to his car. He sat in the passenger side with the door open and he smoked a cigarette.

Forty minutes later, the Medical Examiner’s office on South Liberty and Cleveland, back of the Medical Center. The day had grown in stature, promised a clear azure sky before lunch was over, promised a mid-afternoon in the late eighties.

Verlaine felt his head stretching as he walked from the car, trying to stay close to the store frontages beneath the awnings and out of the sun. His shirt was glued to his back beneath a too-heavy cotton suit, his feet sweated inside his shoes, his ankles itched.

Jim Emerson, youthful despite entering his early forties, Assistant Medical Examiner and very good at it. Emerson added a certain flair and insight to what would ordinarily have been a dry and factual task. He was sensitive to people, sensitive even when they were rigored and bloated and shattered and dead.

Verlaine stood in the corridor outside Emerson’s office for a moment.
Here we go again
, he thought, and then knocked once and walked straight in.

Emerson rose from his desk and reached out his hand. ‘Short time, plenty see,’ he said, and smiled. ‘You up for the trunk job?’

Verlaine nodded. ‘Seems that way.’

‘Nasty shit,’ Emerson said, and glanced to the desk. Ahead of him were three or four pages of detailed notations on a yellow legal pad.

‘A surgeon we have here,’ he went on. ‘A real surgeon.’ He looked back at Verlaine, smiled again, nodded his head back and forth in a manner that was neither a yes nor a no. He reached into his coat pocket, took out a packet of bad-smelling Mexican cigarettes and lit one.

‘You looked at the body yet?’ he asked Verlaine. ‘We sent it over to the coroner a couple of hours ago.’

Verlaine shook his head. ‘I’m going there in a little while.’

Emerson nodded matter-of-factly. ‘Well, sure as shit it’ll spoil your Sunday lunch.’ He returned to sit at his desk and looked over his own notes. ‘It’s interesting.’

‘How so?’

Emerson shrugged. ‘The car maybe. The thing with the heart.’

‘The car?’

‘A ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser. That’s over at one of the lock-ups. Helluva car.’

‘And the vic was in the trunk, right?’

‘What was left of him, yes.’

‘They got an ID?’ Verlaine asked.

Emerson shook his head. ‘That’s your territory.’

‘So what can you tell me?’ Verlaine reached for a chair against the wall, dragged it close to the desk and sat down.

‘Guy got the living hell knocked out of him. Smashed him up with a hammer and cut his freakin’ heart out . . . like the betrayal thing, right?’

‘That’s just rumor. That’s a rumor based on one case back in ’68.’

‘One case?’

‘Ricki Dvore. You know about that one?’

Emerson shook his head.

‘Ricki Dvore was a hustler, a druggist, a pimp, everything. He shipped liquor back and forth out of Orleans with his own trucks, stuff that was stilled someplace out beyond St Bernard . . . place has grown since then though. You know Evangeline, down south along Lake Borgne?’

Emerson nodded.

‘Stilled the stuff down there and brought it in in trucks, regular-looking artics with tanks inside the bodies. He gypped some dealer, someone from one of those crazy families down there, and one by one his wife, his kids, his cousins, they were all beaten on somehow. Three-year-old daughter lost a finger. They sent it to Dvore and he just kept on screwing up. Eventually they dragged him from his truck one night, cut his heart out and sent it to his wife. Cops had Christ knows how many people answering up for that, more crank calls, more confessions than anything I’ve ever heard of. They didn’t have a hope; case folded within a fortnight and stayed that way. They never found Dvore’s body – weighted down and sunk in a bayou someplace I’m sure. They just had his heart. That’s where the whole thing about betrayal and cutting out people’s hearts came from. It’s just a story.’