Murder in a Minor Key (26 page)

“I hope you do,” I said. “If you need all these boxes, you must sell a lot of snakes. Who buys them?”

“All kinds of people. Individual collectors, pet shops, voodoo temples, zoos. I got a website. Starting to get some business from there, too. Plus, I sell the venom to hospitals and drug companies.”

“What kind of snake do you sell to the voodoo temples?”

“Constrictors,” he said. “The hand-raised ones are easy to handle, as you saw.”

I was quiet for a minute, thinking. “You mentioned venom. What kind of venom do you sell?”

“Mostly rattlesnake,” he said. “They’re in the back.”

We walked into the last room. It must have been a kitchen at one time; an old sink stood alone on one wall. An oilcloth-covered table and two chairs were set up nearby. One shelf on the wall next to the sink held a few dishes and glasses. Above it, another shelf displayed a dusty collection of rattles, snakeskins, and reptile skulls. A narrow staircase led to the second floor. Straight ahead was a large picture window that overlooked an L-shaped enclosure that ran the width of the back room, and extended halfway down one side of the house. Ten-foot-tall chain-link fencing was covered with a fine metal mesh that reached across the top forming a roof for the area. Twined about large branches set on the ground, curled up in each corner, and slithering in and out of old automobile tires scattered about the area were dozens and dozens of rattlesnakes.

“Got close to a hundred of ’em by now,” Pinto said, stripping off his denim shirt and hanging it on a peg. The sleeves and half the sides of his T-shirt were torn off, revealing the myriad tattoos Doris had mentioned, covering his biceps, shoulders, and torso. They were all pictures of snakes. “Don’t like to wear sleeves when I’m playing with them,” he said. “Got one caught up a sleeve once, and damn near killed me. Got plenty of scars to show for it.”

“You’re going to play with them?” I asked, incredulous.

“They like it. Gives ’em a little exercise.”

Pinto picked up a long stick with a forked end, and opened a storm door leading to the pen. Most of the snakes shrank back out of his way. He used the stick to toss several others aside, and to pick one off a branch and set it down in front of him. Resting the stick against the side of the house, he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and dangled it in front of the snake like a matador with a red cape. The snake reared back, struck at the handkerchief—the white cloth fluttering up and out of the way—and flopped down on the ground, recoiling again and readying for another strike. Pinto danced around the snake, forcing it to turn and follow the handkerchief to strike, each time coming closer to the steel toe of Pinto’s boot. The snake tired before the man did, and while a series of rattles sounded around the pen, the other snakes stayed away from their keeper.

“Are they all the same kind?” I asked, relieved, when he’d come back inside and locked the door behind him.

“They’re all rattlers, but there’re many different kinds,” he said, pulling on his denim shirt again. “That little guy over there, hanging from the fence, that’s a western pygmy rattlesnake. The one I played with and those three in the corner are eastern diamondbacks.”

“Do you have any canebrake rattlesnakes?”

“Most of these are canebrakes,” he said. “They have a tendency not to move too quickly, so they’re easy for me to hook. Trapped one in a cemetery for the city last weekend.”

“I heard about that,” I said. “Is that usual? Have you caught many in the city?”

“Lots of snakes in the city these days because of the drought,” he replied. “Don’t usually see a canebrake out of the country, but there’s always a first time.”

“Would you recognize a snake you’d caught before?”

“You mean can I tell them apart?” he said, waving his arm toward the collection of snakes in his enclosure.

“Can you?”

“Not really. Even though their markings are different from snake to snake, it’d be like recognizing one sparrow over his brother.”

“Have you sold any canebrakes recently?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sold one last week.”

I pulled out the picture of Wayne that I’d cut from the newspaper and showed it to him. “Did you ever sell a snake to this man?”

“I was gonna say he doesn’t look familiar,” he said, hesitating.

“But he does?”

“I don’t know him, but I’ve seen this picture before.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “It was in Monday’s paper. You must have seen it there.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t read the paper. But there was a guy in here on Saturday asking the same questions you are. He showed me this picture.”

“What did he look like?”

“Normal-looking white guy. I didn’t notice anything unusual about him.”

“Can you describe him at all?”

“Average height, average build, brown hair. That’s all I remember.”

I wondered if Detective Steppe had been here before me. I would have described him as heavyset, but who knew what Pinto considered “average.” “Was he a policeman?” I asked.

“Didn’t say. Didn’t look like a cop, though,” he said. “Dressed too nice for that.”

It was another late evening when I finally closed the door to my hotel room. The bed had been turned down, and the French doors were secured; I checked, a habit I’d gotten into even though I rarely opened them. Detective Steppe had met me at The Blazer Pub, a neighborhood bar across the street from St. Louis Cemetery Number One. He’d been annoyed that I’d planned to go by myself, and had gotten there early to greet me with a scowl and a lecture.

“This is not a neighborhood for you to be wandering around after dark,” he’d scolded.

“I’m sure I’m safe here with you,” I countered.

“What if I hadn’t been able to get here?”

“I would have asked the bartender to call a cab for me when I was ready to leave.”

He shook his head. “I can’t get used to these modem independent women,” he said, giving me a wan smile. “I was raised to look after females, open doors for them, worry about their safety.”

“I still like to have doors opened for me,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me any more than you would your male friends.”

“I’ll try to remember that.” He took a sip of his beer, studied me over the rim of the glass, and said, “The word came down from the top.”

“What word?” I asked.

“To close the case. It came straight from the superintendent, who got it from the mayor.”

“Amadour himself?”

“Sounds that way.”

“Well, that’s a surprise, isn’t it?”

“I knew it had to be something like that,” he said. “Everyone hopped to it so quickly. It couldn’t have been a decision made in the district. It had to come from higher up. And it came from as high up as you can go.”

I wondered what the mayor’s rationale might have been. He had close ties with Wayne’s sister. Was he protecting Clarice again, as he had when he cautioned me not to tell her about my suspicions? And why? Did he not want her to know that Wayne might have been murdered? Or did he suspect she might have a motive for killing him herself?

“Listen,” Steppe said, “I’m exhausted. They’ve got me running around like a headless chicken. What are we doing here? You’re not planning a trip to the cemetery tonight, are you?”

“No, but Wayne may have been here before his trip,” I said, explaining about finding the matchbook among Wayne’s personal items. “Didn’t you see it?”

“I knew there was a matchbook,” he said. “I saw it when one of the other guys emptied Copely’s pockets into the evidence bag.” He shrugged. “I figured I had time to examine all his stuff later on. After the ruling, I went to find the evidence bag, but it had already been sent to the mortuary with the body.”

1 looked around the pub. It was definitely not one of New Orleans’s more elegant establishments. The smell of spilled beer and stale cigarettes pervaded the air, and the room was dimly lit, except for the area behind the bar. It would have been easy to miss a customer, especially if there had been a crowd on Friday night. We approached the bartender. Was he on duty last Friday night? Yes. Did he recognize this man? I showed him the picture of Wayne that had been in the
Times-Picayune.

The bartender studied the photograph and rubbed his chin. “I might have seen him.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“We don’t get a lot of Anglos in here,” he said drolly. “I was on the late shift. Seems I remember two white guys. They left shortly after I came on.”

“What time would that be?” Steppe asked.

“Around midnight.”

“What did the other man look like?” I asked.

“Medium height, jeans, T-shirt, baseball hat.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about them?” I asked. “Were they arguing? Did they seem angry with each other?”

“Just the opposite, I’d say. Your friend here was pretty drunk,” he said, tapping Wayne’s picture. “He could barely stand up. His buddy had his arm around him and helped him out.”

“You’re sure it was this man?” I asked.

“Short guy, shaved head. Yeah, it was him.”

“Just great,” Steppe muttered on the way back to my hotel. “He was drunk. Maybe he did stumble on a rattler and get himself killed.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Wayne didn’t drink.”

“Well, he did Friday night,” he said, yawning, as we pulled up in front of the Royal.

“The bartender didn’t come on duty till midnight,” I said. “He never actually saw Wayne drinking, just saw the effects of what he thought was alcohol. Maybe Wayne was drugged. When do you get the toxicology reports back?”

“That’s a real long shot,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m bushed. Can we talk about this in the morning? Why don’t I come by about seven. I’ll buy you coffee and we can go over everything we’ve got.”

The red light was flashing on my telephone when I entered my room. It was Doris reminding me she would need the dictating machine back in the morning. Hers was the only call. So far, I hadn’t received any communication in response to my announcement in Charlie Gable’s column that I was pursuing the recordings of Little Red LeCoeur. It was disappointing.

I took my flight bag from the closet, put it on my bed, unzipped the side compartment, and pulled out the minicassette. I plugged in the dictating machine and slipped in the tape. The high, eerie voice filled the silence, whining about Wayne never learning.

“I’ve warned you before. I know where you are, where you go. You can’t escape me now. I’ve been sharpening my blade for you.”

I took the little pad beside my phone and wrote down the full message. Something was bothering me, and it was more than the description of the torture the caller was threatening.

I listened again, cocking my head for any nuance I might have missed the first few times. My eyes fell on my flight bag. That’s it, I thought. In David Stewart’s story, the ventriloquist changed his real voice when he was working with the dummy. Had Wayne’s tormenter changed his voice? It would have been easy to record the message in advance, altering the voice, and play it into Wayne’s answering machine when he wasn’t there. I rewound the tape and pushed PLAY. This time I rotated the speed knob, slowing down the tape while the caller was speaking. With each fraction of a turn, the voice got lower and lower, until the caller drew out the words in a slow, measured beat. It was a man’s voice. It was a voice I knew.

Chapter Nineteen

Steppe called early Wednesday morning to cancel our appointment. He was exasperated. The department was sending him to a conference in Baton Rouge, and he wouldn’t be back till Friday.

“Never went to one of these things before,” he complained. “Seems to me they’re trying to get me out of town.”

We agreed he would call and leave his telephone number while I was at the mayor’s party, and we would confer after the funeral Thursday when he had a break in his schedule. We hung up, and I thought about Steppe’s suspicions. If the mayor and the police department didn’t want Wayne’s death investigated, he might be right; they could be moving him out of the picture. What will they do about me? I wondered.

The sky was overcast when I exited the lobby of the Royal Hotel. The lowering clouds and the still air increased the impact of the humidity, making it feel even hotter than the ninety-degree temperature registered on the thermometer. True to their word, Beatrice and Napoleon occupied the driver’s bench of the white carriage parked in front of my hotel. They sat, heads together, speaking quietly. Spying me, Beatrice put on her top hat and straightened her white sundress. Napoleon had forsaken any part of his clown costume, and wore baggy khaki pants and a Little Red LeCoeur T-shirt. How appropriate, I thought. He’d fitted a baseball cap over his black curls, and turned the brim to the back.

“Where are we off to today, Mrs. Fletcher?” he asked as he handed me into the carriage.

“That depends on how good your map-reading skills are,” I said, unfolding the crude chart I’d found among Wayne’s papers.

Napoleon glanced at the map and started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“We’re vibrating together, you and me. You asked if I knew about Little Red LeCoeur, and his recordings.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I know someone who does.”

“In the French Quarter?”

“No, ma’am, but not too far.”

“And who would that be?”

He grinned. “Can’t tell you just yet.”

“Is this a map to where this person lives?”

He nodded.

“Do you know how to get there?”

He looked down at the map and nodded again.

“Do you think this person would talk to me?”

“Just leave it to me, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat next to Beatrice. He whispered something to her, and she slapped the reins on Keats’s rump and we moved out into the line of taxis and other traffic attempting to negotiate the French Quarter. Napoleon pulled a cellular phone from his front pocket and punched in a number. His voice was too low for me to hear, but he seemed satisfied with the conversation.

I smoothed out the folds of the blue paper on my lap and studied the abbreviations and initials along the network of lines that filled the page, trying to decipher what Napoleon had seen so easily. But my knowledge of places in New Orleans, much less outside the city, was limited, and the map kept its secrets from me.