Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) (2 page)

There’s the sweet cologne again.
Lilac
? Lilac mixed
with the acrid smell of burned gunpowder.

The front half of his head is bald, his feet shadowed by the
frame of the taller man. His shirt is button-front, half open over a t-shirt.
He stands with the poise of a thoughtful animal, glancing back into Luis’ room,
then his head tilts to peer back up the stairs. Erratic shimmers bounce off a
cross swinging from his neck to join the religious harangue blasting from the
room.

The siren’s wail grows louder and louder, boring through the
night like an auditory searchlight.

The men stare together back through the Luis’s door, then up
the stairs, then the TV light discloses two stone faces turned toward each
other.

“Vamanos,”
the older instructs calmly, sending the
younger down the steps with the point of the pistol, the human voice discrete
and chilling against the insentient backdrop of the audio clamor.

The younger shrugs, glances back into the room, shrugs
again, then turns and lopes down the lower staircase. The moon tilts up toward
her again, toward where she sits parasol-armed with her lips pressed closed,
her jaws clenched and breathless.

She feels her heart hammering in her chest and in her raised
thighs, hears its muffled pounding in her ears. She can’t squeeze her hands
around the umbrella any tighter, a bitter bile has gathered in the back of her
throat.

He raises the gun arm and takes a small step toward her,
leaving the light for the dark of the upper staircase . . .

” . . . today’s reading is familiar to all who call
themselves Christians, my brethren. And in this immoral world we must live in
to receive our final reward . . . a world rife with perfidy that extends even
into the highest offices of our land, the message of comfort amidst danger has
never been more relevant . . . never more needed. Read with me brother and
sisters, open your books to the wondrous, healing poetry of the 23rd Psalm.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .”

The Good News blasts up the stairs, its consoling fabric
rent by the ever growing siren swallowing everything in its path. He’s in front
of the light, only an outline against the pastel jumble of light behind him,
the moon is dark. She sits stone-still as the ink-blot figure’s left arm raises
the pistol and moves it deliberately back and forth, watches the malevolent
black point try to find her.

Then it stops.

She longer hears the TV screed or the howl of the wolf. She
drops her head into her knees with her eyes squeezed shut and her teeth clamped
and waits for the explosion.

“Ven! Ven Tio!”
Comes from the dark behind the moon,
the arm moves hesitantly, the gun barrel searching again.

She opens her eyes and peeks between her knees, watches as
the contour of his arm finally drops slowly,
slowly
, down to his side.
Still staring up the stairs, he steps back into the light. She sees his
narrowed eyes, his lips pursed under the mustache gash, sees his single knowing
nod.

After a century-long pause, the gun stays down and he whirls
to follow his partner and his silhouette melts into the cave of the lower
stairway.

She twists her head toward Brian’s door. Though granting
herself a tiny breath, she still sits like a tombstone, her heart still raging,
her ears straining for the sound of car doors slamming,
begging
for the
sound of an engine starting. But the thunderous preacher and the insatiable
siren overpower all else.

The tocsin still waves, but it’s stationary now. The wolf’s
at the door.

A loudspeaker squawks:

“TWO SEVENTEEN DAUPHINE! THIS IS THE NEW ORLEANS POLICE!! WE’RE
RESPONDING TO AN EMERGENCY CALL. OPEN THE FRONT DOOR IMMEDIATELY. EVERYONE
INSIDE THE HOUSE STEP OUT TO THE PORCH. AND I WANT TO SEE YOUR HANDS!”

After only a moment’s pause the loudspeaker clicks back on:

“NOW . . . FOLKS, DO IT RIGHT NOW!!”

She glances at Brian’s door again but senses no movement
behind it. She lets go of her knees and releases her muscles enough to allow
her to stand. Her legs feel leaden, like they belong to someone else.
Half-collapsed against the rail, she paces down one slow step at a time,
clutching the umbrella in both hands, ready to stab its ferrule tip. She hears
strident voices from the front of the house cut through the revolving
electronic wail.

In the weak light of the middle landing she stops and makes
herself look into the room, then she stifles the retch that jags from her
stomach to her throat. By strength of will she forces her legs to hold her
upright.

A body lies crumpled in front of the TV, most of its head
blown away. What’s left is a gaping mask of blood and blackened flesh, gray
pieces of brain. She can see teeth. Only where it is and the familiar
paint-splattered sweatshirt allow her to recognize this
thing
as Luis,
though the gray of the
Saints
shirt is now soaked with scarlet.

Another shudder rakes her, another stomach retch. She clasps
her hand over her mouth to hold back the need to vomit, turns to step down the
same steps the two men fled down just seconds ago. In the closed air of the
lower stairway she blinks from the gunpowder, detects another trace of lilac
laced in the acid.

At the bottom floor, shards of white light streak through
the windows like surgical tweezers, revolving red paints the green walls of the
entry way from green to red, green to red, green to red, green to red. With the
front door ajar, the siren is deafening.

She steps gingerly out the door, still holding her guard.
Now
she’s
the actor, taking a far more brilliant stage.

“RAISE YOUR HANDS!”
The command bellows from behind
the white blinding bier.

“THROW DOWN THE WEAPON! NOW!”

Weapon?

“NOW! DROP IT NOW!!”

She pitches the umbrella down the front steps like it had
shocked her, raises both her arms in the same motion. She concentrates to keep
her legs from buckling, they feel twice their normal weight. Aftershocks course
through her as she squints into the blank bright hell; beginning at her jellied
knees, they rise to seize her chest and throat.

“Please! Come up . . . please. We need an ambulance . . . I
was the one that called. There’s a man hurt up here . . . hurt bad.” Her words
slur from her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, the zinc taste is
sickening: It tastes like blood.

“Some men were here . . . two. They just ran out.”

She nods vaguely down the street.

“My boy’s still up there . . . my son.” She struggles not to
cry and gestures through the door with one hand.

“KEEP YOUR HANDS UP!”

“We don’t have any weapons.” She draws a deep breath. Her
voice collects and comes out a little stronger.

She thrusts her chin toward the wailing police car. “Can you
turn that thing off? Please?”

Only thinking of Brian upstairs alone keeps her upright.

Ignorant of the real-life drama unfolding around him, the TV
minister has reached his own climax, an organ and choir join on cue, their
hopeful chorus falls out the open front door to join the night’s bedlam.

The noise stops but the red strobes still spin, spitting out
crazed patterns of light and shifting shadows.

One cop crouches around the back of the police car, his
uniform alternating between blue and red. With both fists clutching a pistol
beaded right at her, he duck-walks lower than the hedge to the fence-break. He
glares up at her, then at the sidewalk. Kicks, then kicks again. His head
shifts back up to her, the gun still pointed at her chest, but now held only in
one hand.

“‘Lax, Ed,” he coughs over his shoulder, then groans as he
straightens and lets the pistol fall to his side. His eyes stay fixed on her
while the other cop stays hunkered behind the car with a short-barreled shotgun
leveled at her. “Jest a umbrella.”

“OK, little lady . . . it’s OK.” The duck-walker looks up
and gestures with his open non-gun hand, his voice now gentler. “You safe now.
You safe. Why’ont you come on down here?”

*** *** *** ***

They watch from a corner with Luis’ TV still on; a tanned,
toothy man framed by blue water and a high-end yacht harbor is making a
vigorous, gesturing point on its screen, but the sound is off and no one’s
watching. Brian waits upstairs with a female officer behind the closed door of
his own bedroom.

This room seems starved for air, as if the covered heap in
its center had gulped it all. It’s jammed with people measuring and taping and
examining things; one man sprinkles powder on flat surfaces from a metal
shaker, then bends over and stares through a thick magnifying glass fastened to
a chain around his neck. Others talk quietly into cell phones and jot down
notes and murmur to each other in low tones, poke at ordinary objects as if
they were out of place, use tweezers to hold up tiny things and squint at them,
all of them moving around a pair of violet and yellow florescent lights set up
on tripods. A mahogany-skinned woman bends over a table spread with the
contents of Luis’ billfold like she’s reading Tarot cards.

Bodies are moving purposefully in every direction in the small
enclosure, but somehow they avoid running into each other in some kind of crude
cop choreography. None of them seem to notice the overpowering
iron
stench. A pony-tailed heavyset man in bib overalls flashes bursts of light at
the round chars on the pillow lying next to the head of the body, the
black-bellowed machine snicks and whirs as he pockets the photos it spits out
without looking at them. With the pillow flipped over by the latexed hands of a
helper, the fat man leans closer and shoots the erose crimson stains on the
other side. A woman in polished combat boots and a military-looking jump suit
takes measured backward paces, narrating into a microphone sticking out from
the video-cam pressed into her eye.

Wearing blue surgical garb that covers even his shoes, an
older man steps around fluids pooled noxiously on the wooden floor; Luis is
draped with a light green sheet already ruined by splotches of red. A
sweat-shirted woman gets up from a lap-top open on Luis’ coffee table and
raises a window. A sanitized version of the room glows on her computer screen.
The furniture shapes and dimensions are there, his sprawled arms and legs are
accurately depicted in the chalk-gray lines. But the screen doesn’t show his
blown-apart face or the seeping blood, the machine can’t reproduce the reek of
the room.

Wearing a snug-fitting blue civilian suit with all three
buttons employed, the questioning cop leans forward on small splayed feet,
studying her face as she vacantly observes the chaos swirling around them. The cop
rocks back and forth, taking notes on a pad swallowed in his freckled left
hand, a black homburg sits squarely on his head. He’s shorter and she watches
the bobbing top of the hat.

It bobs at the heap. “‘Xactly who is he?”

She gazes balefully at the lump that used to be Luis. Her
eyes well and she inhales sharply, then she stops.

She asks wearily, “Can we go outside?”

The convulsions have slowed but not stopped. She grimaces
around the room.

“The smell . . . do you mind?”

They start down the steps, backing against the handrail to
dodge more suits and uniforms speaking in grim homicide tones discordantly
interspersed with casual co-worker banter.

Her cop ignores their greetings. She ignores their measuring
stares.

“Luis Rodriguez,” she murmurs over her shoulder as they step
into the yellow light of the front porch.

A phalanx of crazy-parked government vehicles with radios
scratching like a third-grade orchestra wrap white and red and blue beams over
the tree-trunks and neighboring houses. At their heights the strobes reach the
intertwined limbs of the trees to form a Faustian arboreal canopy over Dauphine
Street, the sky and stars above it are concealed.

“Luis . . . he was Luis Edmond Rodriguez,” she sighs with
her arms hugged around her, pronouncing
Edmond
with the correct Hispanic
accent, the cold damp of the concrete seeping through her socks.

He’s a redneck Colombo, one eye hidden under the narrow
rolled brim of the hat. “‘Preciate that,” he grunts from over the notepad he’s
holding like a schoolboy. Across Dauphine the revolving beams pass over knots
of gawkers standing behind police barricades. People she’s never met are
staring and talking to each other about her, jabbing fingers at her and her
home.

“Now, Hon,” he sucks his teeth and taps the wire spiral with
the pen, twists his head up to reveal a single pale-blue eye as big and flat as
a saucer.

“Who’re you?”

The gunmetal gray cylinder slid into the umbra and snapped to
a stop like a chambered bullet, the clang hung in the air like smoke over a
smothered fire. The entire wall was made up of identical square lockers.

“Polvo a polvo. . . ceniza a ceniza.”

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes . . .” Her lips brushed
Brian’s ear as she whispered. Sitting erect in a pressed white shirt and somber
tie next to her, he kept his eyes fixed on the ceremony like it was a
performance, nodding a vague understanding of her translation. In the flat
morning light his hair shined a deep shade of auburn.

They listened as the Hispanic priest admitted in his first
words in English to “ . . . having never had the opportunity” to meet the
deceased young Catholic before closing the ritual by touching pious fingers to
his forehand and the brocaded shoulders of his vestment. A plastic covered card
identified the newly stocked compartment as assigned to store the earthly
remains, the
dust
repository of:

Luis Edmond Rodriquez

b1975 d2004

Luis’ slope-shouldered mother shuffled away between two
erect younger women, their mourning dresses gradually dissolving into the
morning gauze. None of his brothers had been able to make it.

Laid down between rows of buff granite and marble
mausoleums, Mary and Brian’s path to the bus stop led them in the other
direction, Brian’s eyes appeared to take some interest as she told him what she
knew about the edifices of the netherworld high-rent district they were walking
through, how the structures were raised up from the ground to resist the
reality that New Orleans is actually a swamp, lying less than level with the
neighboring sea. Hoping he might have questions, she read the names and dates
chiseled over some of the portals, the rich tenants dried up one or two
centuries ago.

Right in the middle of one of her explanations he looked
away and began humming a tune she recognized from years ago and
Sesame
Street
, the first voluntary utterance she’d heard from him this morning.

She sighed inwardly and left him alone with his regression.

They strolled without her doing any more talking as she
tried to add their monthly living expenses. Then she subtracted Luis’
contribution, trying to ignore the pangs of pain and guilt inherent in the
process of the survivors . . .
survivors
. . .returning to the business
of life.

It was a walk filled with worries. She worried about her son
humming quietly next to her, worried she was leaning on him too much for his
age, worried she was telling him too much, or maybe too little. The truth of it
was: what more
could
she tell him? She worried that they were going to
lose their home, the home she’d worked so hard to provide, the first place
they’d lived that fairly merited the sobriquet of
home
. How could they
afford it now?

She tried to focus on her son and herself, consciously
separating out her own confusion and remorse about poor dead Luis. Nothing
could be done for him now, she clenched her teeth and reminded herself sadly.
It was, as they say,
just the two of them now
. And she was the mother.
She was the
grownup,
the saddle of responsibility lay squarely on her
back. Her most,
their
most immediate problem was money. She clenched her
jaws and berated herself for not being more of a
saver
, for not putting
more aside in preparation of her mother’s oft-stated forecast of that “rainy
day that comes for everybody.”

They didn’t come much
rainier
Mary thought bitterly,
gazing up at a dry flint sky.

She might convince
Maison’s
manager to pay her for
the missed hours under these circumstances.
Might.
But her main income,
her tips for the shifts she’d missed, that was money lost forever and could not
be replaced. And the heartless bills would keep coming.
And now, without
Luis’
. . . She stared down the winding footway ahead and her concentration
broke.

Two suited figures loitered at an intersection between a
matching pair of pillared burial mansions, men obviously waiting for something.
Their suspicious deportments and folded wallets they held at their sides ready
to point at civilians oozed cop.

Even at this distance, from his rounded slouch and snug
fully buttoned suit, and especially from his plumb-perched homburg, she
recognized the homicide detective from Sunday night’s horror. She hitched a
step but kept walking towards them; slower, though, her heart quickening as she
clasped Brian’s hand tighter. For the thousandth time since Sunday she
wondered: why would anyone want to kill Luis.

“Miss Wilson? Mary Catherine Wilson?” The straight-up
hatless one held up his badge at her eye level, thrust it too close and dropped
it too soon for any hope she might actually look at it. He offered no eye
contact. “Special Agent Armand Ruggle . . . Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Good morning.” He was a big man, speaking a clipped monotone through bloodless
lips without making eye contact. “I have some questions I need to ask you.”

As he spoke a bird screamed from a row of trees, its cry
splitting the humid blanket of air like something had made it mad, the crier
itself remained hidden.

With a look of practiced dexterity, the bigger cop thumbed a
card out of his little wallet with one hand and pressed it at her, still
managing to keep their eyes from meeting. She squinted down at it numbly, then
took a steadying breath and dropped the card into her purse without ever
releasing Brian’s hand.

The agent’s other arm stayed pinned to his side, its hand
stuck awkwardly into the pocket. His suit hung tarp-like over his large trunk,
his tie shined in places and there were spots. In the filtered morning light
she saw tiny clumps of whiskers sprouting between the bumps on his face.

“You’ve already met Detective Sherry here,” he dourly
flicked his badge at the homburg but didn’t look at Sherry. “New Orleans PD . .
. homicide. You talked to him at the crime scene. Sorry to intrude this
morning, but the Bureau’s in this case now and we’ve got business to attend
to.”

To Mary, he didn’t really seem that sorry.

“And we lost track of your whereabouts . . .” Agent Ruggle
shot a dark look at Detective Sherry who first looked away, then smiled and
winked mischievously as he caught Brian staring up at him.

Agent Ruggle grunted impatiently and showed no notice of the
boy.

“Yes,” she answered through a grave nod, trying to look
businesslike. “We’ve been staying with a, uh, staying with a friend. I, uh . .
.
we
couldn’t go back there . . . back to there, after what happened.”
She glanced at her son, her voice faltered and she felt her eyes welling. She
sucked in a breath. “What is it that you need?”

They agreed to meet at the main downtown police station on
Chartes Street. After taking the time to confirm the arrangements in some
detail, and making sure she wrote them down, Agent Ruggle decided that the
detective should accompany her “to provide whatever assistance you might
require.”

Despite Mary’s assurance that they didn’t need
assistance
,
the agent directed the detective to stay with her until the afternoon’s
scheduled ‘interview.’ She considered refusing for a moment, then relented. By
riding with the cop they’d save bus fare back to their temporary residence in
the Quarter, a second floor walk-up looking over Ursulines, just three blocks
from Jackson Square.

*** *** *** ***

“So . . . how’s it goin’ with you folks? You know . . .
really?
”
Detective Sherry asked from behind the wheel, his eyes bouncing around under
the hat brim. The more open eye found hers from a confidential backward nod. He
murmured with his face toward the dash, the police radio covering his words.
“How’s
he
takin’ all this, hon?”

She kept her own voice low and her face straight ahead.
“Thank you for asking.” She shrugged. “I guess we’re doing about as well as we
can.”

She turned toward the driver and added under the squawking
of the radio. “He hasn’t said much . . . uh, anything, really. He’s always been
quiet . . . now it’s like he’s kind of in a shell. I’m hoping the funeral . . .
going to the cemetery and all will make him want to talk. That’s what you’re
supposed to do in a situation like this, right? Talk? Try to get them to talk?
Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Sherry looked blankly ahead, the hat tilted over a tiny
shrug.

“I was thinking about getting a book . . . something on how
you’re supposed to handle something like this . . .” her voice fell away as the
radio quieted and she looked out the window, softly cracking her knuckles in
her lap.

“Got a grandson looks ‘bout his age. Nine?”

“Eight. He’ll be nine in December,” she responded louder,
twisting in her seat to include her son in the conversation.

Brian returned his own shy smile, then looked down with his
hand tucked like Napoleon under the seatbelt across his chest and resumed his
little sound effects, returned to his own world.

Detective Sherry looked straight ahead and muttered as if he
was talking to himself. “Sure hate to think of mine goin’ through somethin’
like this . . . at his age. Pretty hard to handle somethin’ like this, guess
for everbody, you know?”

She looked away, then turned to look at Sherry. “So what’s
this FBI guy want to know I didn’t already tell you?”

He rubbed his chin and the hat rocked back and forth
doubtfully.

“C’ain’t say I rightly know.”

He kept his eyes on the road, guiding the car carefully,
braking and turning frequently in the short narrow blocks lined with cars on
both sides, the streets crossed everywhere by herds of rubbernecking,
jaywalking tourists. He snickered and a shy smile lighted under the hat. “Think
them letter-boys think they oughtn’t let us cops in on too much, you know? We
locals
bein’ so corrupt ‘n all.”

He smiled wider and shook his head, then gestured a hand off
the wheel and continued more soberly. “This down ‘round here’s kinda a tough
area, hon. You two bein’ careful?”

His eye flipped to the back seat, his voice low and
conspiratorial. “Ain’t that friendly down here no more. Not like the old days,
you know?” On
old days
his face softened for an instant, then the hat
bobbed again and he grunted. “Must have somethin’ to do with narcotics though.
That Ruggle fellas parta what them boys like to call a strike force. S
trike
force
. Sounds kinda like the army, eh? Think they like that military kinda
stuff. Feds been runnin’ a corruption and drug operation down here last coupla
years . . . runnin’ it like a three ring circus, y’ask me.”

He paused and took in a breath, looked away and muttered
like he was talking to himself. “Once ‘em letter boys get started . . . don’t
seem no stoppin’ ‘em.”

*** *** *** ***

Mary looked around the kind of room most people worked all
their lives to avoid. But Detective Sherry looked as comfortable in it as a
farmer on his front porch after supper. The air seemed curiously brown. Rows of
pictures of dead-panned men and a few mean-looking women scowled from a framed
bulletin board covering the top half of one end wall. A carved crescent moon
wrapped around the spokes of a sheriff’s badge hung over the single door, it
looked like an unfinished amateur woodworking project. For some reason, they’d
painted the room the color of liver. The stains on the liver were exposed by
light falling like dirty snow from a florescent fixture hung over a conference
table. One of the bulbs flickered periodically like it was trying to confess.
The smell of burned coffee was so strong it almost made her eyes water, the
offending urn sat in a corner next to stacks of stingy-sized Styrofoam cups on
a wheeled metal table.

Mary and Detective Sherry sat on the same side of the long
table, talking small while they waited on the federal government.

“So how long ya been livin’ in the Easy, Hon?” His homburg
occupied the seat on one of the other chairs like it belonged there, the spiral
pad stuck out of its hatband. With two Bics protruding from its breast pocket
the detective’s blue jacket slouched across the same chair’s back, fitting it
about as well as it fit its owner,

Sherry leaned back with his hands joined behind his head;
his pant legs were a little short and exposed hairless white ankles under
droopy black socks, his collar loosened from a creased red neck. Sets of
wrinkles that began in the corners of his eyes suggested he might smile a lot;
patches of rose on his nose and cheeks suggested he might drink a lot.

“Hey, Sherry!” A fat uniformed cop called into the open
door, not seeing Mary. “Hear the one ‘bout the priest seein’ the whore puttin’
a wad of cash in the plate? Whoops!” He grimaced as he stepped further into the
room and saw Mary. “Sorry. Have to tell ya later . . . it’s a good ‘un.”

Sherry’s face reddened a shade deeper and he looked at Mary
under innocent arched brows.

“I moved down after Brian was born, that was up in Kansas
City,” she said. “I’m uh . . .
we’re
from Kansas City I guess you’d say.
It’s been about eight years now.” She sat back reflectively. “Just the two of
us. We came down for a, uh, for what I guess you’d call a fresh start. I fell
in love with New Orleans . . . with the
Easy
,” she smiled and faintly
mimicked his accent. “After I came down here when I was in high school. We had
a field trip, my art class came down and I just loved it.”

“How ‘bout the dad?” Sherry asked after a pause, his fingers
pianoing against the side of his head, gazing at her through a single,
concerned blue eye. His hair was a sandy shade of red, cut to the same
undecided length all the way around. His voice lilted from high to low then
back to high, his short sentences came in a song-like rhythm. “He still in the
picture? You know . . . the dad?”