AHMM, Jul-Aug 2005 Read online

  Carné's friend was too intoxicated to do anything but blink at them.

  "Glad y'all came back,” Carné said. “I got somethin’ for y'all.” He stood and led the way through the warehouse to a rear stairwell and up to the second floor. He waited for their flashlights before leading them through the warehouse back to the front where a homeless woman sat in the corner near a vacant, eyelike window.

  "This here's Tammy Grimes of the Tallahassee Grimeses. She saw the whole thing."

  Tammy stood and folded her arms across her chest. She was about five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds, with short salt-and-pepper hair and a well-weathered face, deep-set eyes.

  Beau introduced himself and Jodie.

  Tammy's eyes were red rimmed and she shook as she stood.

  "There's nothing to be afraid of,” Jodie said.

  "I saw,” Tammy said, leaning against the wall. “Sittin’ up in that windowsill last night.” Her lips quivered. “Saw the girl. Saw the man hit her.” She seemed to prefer talking to Jodie, so Beau eased toward the window and kept a lookout for MacDonald, listening to Tammy's story as Jodie wrote it down.

  Tammy spoke in short sentences, blinking wildly, shaking as she spoke. Jodie had to ask some questions three times to get an answer. Tammy had spotted Wendy coming up the lane, saw those hot pink shoes. He must have been waiting for her because the big man stepped from the shadows in front of her. They talked quietly at first, then louder. Tammy couldn't hear what was said, but the man became angrier. Eventually, the girl moved around him and continued walking. He kept up and they stopped again just across the lane. She could see Wendy's face. The man had his back to Tammy. The argument picked up again and Wendy bowed her head as if crying. The man suddenly picked up a brick and slammed it against the girl's head and she collapsed immediately and didn't move.

  The man ran into the building but came right back with some things and dropped them next to where he'd dropped the brick. Could have been papers. Then he picked up her shoe and went into the building, but he looked around first and Tammy thought he might have seen her.

  "What did he look like?” Jodie asked.

  He was big and wore dark clothes and white tennis shoes. Tammy couldn't see his face at that distance. “I was gonna leave town, but Andrew talked me into stayin'."

  "Did you see us last night?” Jodie asked.

  "No. I took off soon as the man went in the building."

  Carné moved next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I asked her today at The Wings of the Dove, knowin’ she likes this place, and she tol’ me."

  They moved downstairs and waited just inside the warehouse, in the dark, the detectives watching out for MacDonald, a shaky Tammy right there to say if it was him.

  At eight o'clock, Jodie asked Beau if he'd eaten today.

  "Nope."

  It was her turn to get supper so she went out the back of the warehouse, around the block to their car and returned with food for four. Burgers.

  "Jesus, not Wendy's or McDonald's,” Beau said.

  She'd gone to Bud's Broiler, New Orleans's own hamburger chain, and even brought chili-cheese fries with their soft drinks.

  "Hope Barq's is all right,” Jodie said, passing out the drinks. It was “the root beer with bite” and nobody complained.

  MacDonald came home just before midnight and Tammy let out a gasp. She couldn't be sure, but she was pretty sure that was him. Beau gave them each a ten with his business card. Tammy had already promised to continue staying at the Y.W.C.A., at least for the time being.

  "We're not supposed to pay witnesses,” Jodie whispered.

  "I'm not paying them. I'm giving money to the homeless."

  They went down to the doorway and waited until the light went on in MacDonald's apartment before crossing the lane.

  Jodie looked back. “What was that smell?"

  "Stink bug."

  "I mean the man, he reeked."

  "I know. Just like the aroma of the wild Cajun stink bug.” Beau gave her a straight face.

  "You are so bizarre sometimes."

  Beau knocked loudly on MacDonald's apartment door.

  "Who is it?"

  "Police,” Jodie said.

  MacDonald opened the door with a ready smile, only it looked plastered on.

  "May we come in?” Jodie said.

  "Sure.” He opened the door wider, with only a slight hesitation, closing it behind them. It was the same layout as Berger's, only more cluttered. The detectives moved to separate areas of the living room, glancing around as MacDonald stepped to his sofa and offered them seats. Jodie sat in the love seat, across from the sofa. Beau remained standing.

  Jodie took out her credentials and introduced herself, then asked MacDonald where he'd been.

  "Walking. I went for a long walk. Kinda upset about Wendy."

  Jodie stared at him until he started up again. “I spent the day walking up Magazine, looking in antique shops and bookstores. Ate at Bud's Broiler. You can check."

  Bud's Broiler? Beau couldn't even look at Jodie. He spied a pile of dirty dishes stacked next to the kitchen sink, an empty pizza carton on the table, and something in the kitchen sink. He inched that way. Whatever it was, it was soaking in suds.

  "Antique stores don't stay open until midnight,” Jodie said.

  "I've been up and down the streets. Just too upset to stay indoors.” MacDonald noticed Beau near the kitchen area and stood up. “Would you like some coffee or something?"

  Beau stopped his inching and said, “No. We went by the Coliseum today. Didn't remember Young Frankenstein was that funny. ‘Put ze candle back.’”

  MacDonald nodded.

  "Frau Blucher and the horses.” It was Jodie this time.

  "Yeah."

  "The ending,” Beau said. “What the monster gave Gene Wilder in the end. Always gets the big laugh."

  "Always,” MacDonald said, sitting back down nervously.

  "Did it get a big laugh last night?” Beau was being so damn obvious.

  "Yep,” MacDonald said.

  Beau pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat as he said, “Last night, when you came to our office, you remember the first thing you told me?"

  "Not exactly.” MacDonald looked at Jodie. “I was pretty upset."

  "You said, ‘Y'all left a note on my door.’”

  "Yeah?"

  "Where's the note?"

  MacDonald stood up, looked around and said, “I must have thrown it away. Is it important?"

  Beau stood and pointed to the trash can in the kitchen. “You threw it away here?"

  "Uh, no. At your office, I think."

  Jodie took out her radio and called the Bureau for the desk sergeant. It took a minute for him to get back to her. Trash cans were being emptied as they spoke. She told him to hold all the trash from Homicide in a big bag for her.

  MacDonald was paying close attention to her, so Beau stepped to the sink and saw a pair of white tennis shoes soaking in grayish, soapy water. He leaned close and sniffed. No smell of bleach, thankfully.

  "Something wrong?” MacDonald called out.

  "What's with the tennis shoes?"

  "I'm washing them. I stepped in dog mess."

  So he put them in the kitchen sink? Nice and sanitary. Beau moved back into the living room and asked, “What did the note say, exactly?"

  "Uh, it said your neighbor's been killed and come to police headquarters.” He wasn't looking at Beau when he said it. He was looking at the door. Beau moved in front of him and asked him to stand up.

  When he did, Beau patted him down, telling him, “Don't try anything. It'd be foolish if you did."

  "But you arrested Berger. You found evidence, didn't you?"

  Beau cuffed MacDonald and led him out.

  On their way out, Beau pointed to the warehouse across the lane. “See the vacant windows? Someone was sitting up there last night when Wendy came home. Saw the whole thing."

  MacDonald started bre
athing heavily.

  * * * *

  It was time to stare at the Art Deco vulture again while MacDonald stewed in the interview room and Jodie typed out the search warrant to secure the tennis shoes. They'd already gone through the trash from the office. No note. Beau waited until Jodie left for the judge to go in with his blank videotape, notepad and pen, waiver-of-rights form, and two cups of coffee.

  Soon as the preliminaries were finished, the reading of rights and getting MacDonald's background information, Beau went over the part about the movie again, pinning MacDonald's story on tape before telling him what the manager said.

  "You didn't stay, did you?"

  MacDonald's face reddened.

  "We can go over it again and again, but you lied about the movie. What else did you lie about?"

  "I don't..."

  Beau pointed to the camera. “Don't you see, the more you lie the more the jury isn't going to believe anything you say. There was blood on your tennis shoes, wasn't there?"

  MacDonald looked at his hands clasped atop the small interview table.

  "You know we can find the most minuscule particles of blood on those shoes or in the water. You've heard of DNA fingerprinting. We find Wendy's blood on your shoes and you know what that means."

  MacDonald started breathing heavily again.

  Beau softened his voice. “You know what that means, don't you, Freddie?"

  MacDonald nodded slowly.

  Beau moved his chair to the side of the table to close the distance. “I'm telling you the truth, Freddie. We have a witness who saw it all from that warehouse window."

  MacDonald put his elbows up on the table and covered his face with his hands.

  "You didn't plan it to happen, did you?"

  Beau asked the question three times before MacDonald let out a high-pitched gasp.

  "It just happened, didn't it?"

  MacDonald nodded and then sat up straight, staring into Beau's eyes for a pulse-thundering minute before he said, “It was ... an accident ... really."

  Sometimes it came that easily.

  * * * *

  It was four A.M. when they walked MacDonald into central lockup. Beau handed the booking officer the paperwork while Jodie called over the duty Assistant District Attorney to explain they needed to talk about Alvin W. Berger.

  First time in her career she'd arrested the wrong man for murder and she needed to see the D.A. and duty judge first thing in the morning.

  On their way out a half hour later, Jodie told Beau, “Good work on the confession. Nothing like a confession to get the D.A. salivating."

  Beau remembered another line from Young Frankenstein, something about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. MacDonald was no lunatic, but his confession, dripping with concern for what happened to Wendy and how it was an accident, was nonsensical. He never admitted putting the shoe in Berger's apartment, never admitted planting the shirt, looked very foolish on the tape when Beau asked how he knew about “evidence” against Berger.

  Beau remembered the question he put to Jodie earlier at Starbucks, asking if she'd ever worked a case where someone framed someone, pinning the rap on someone else and how she'd seen it in the movies and on TV dozens of times but never in real life.

  They stepped out into a typical warm spring night. The humidity would be back by morning.

  "This is cool,” Beau said.

  "Won't be after the sun comes up."

  "No, I mean cool. Just like the movies, killer pinning the rap on someone else and we figured it out."

  Jodie laughed and it sounded nice, echoing off the concrete walls of the parish prison.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Copyright © 2005 by O'Neil De Noux.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Crooked Lake by Rob Kantner

  It started out as an average morning at the White Rose New Ethyl station. Outside, Main Street traffic was lighter these days, the down-city people having closed up their cottages and gone home for the season. Inside, at the oblong chrome table by the big dirty window behind the service counter, Nooch Nord, fresh from his first fishing trip of the day, sat across from me, semi silent in white-haired, squinty-eyed benevolence, dressed in his usual bib overalls and ball cap, smoking a Lucky. Hervie McGriff was there too, rotund and jolly in his greasy twill, drinking his own evil coffee in between trips outside to pump gas. To my right slouched Chas Herbst, sleek, tanned, with the racehorse good looks and reckless all-seeing eye of the Navy fighter pilot he had been—like us, in no hurry to start his day's work. As for yours truly, I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and listened to the chatter, hoping for a quiet day. With the summer people gone there should be fewer speeders, less noise complaints, hardly any drunk drivers, and hopefully no fist fights at the Pink Palace.

  So I wished. I needed an easy day, because my bum leg was giving me more hell than usual this morning.

  Burning down cigarettes, sucking down coffee, against the backdrop of “Baby Love” from the eight-transistor radio on Hervie's counter, we were talking, of course, about the war. Hervie vigorously pressed his case for dropping “the big one” and turning the bad guys’ land into a parking lot. Chas, more book-learned and considerably to the left of us (which figured, him being a squid), was openly questioning the credentials of our president—especially some loose-cannon Texan—taking us to war when, unlike the four of us, he himself had never seen combat. Nooch, whose long Marine Corps career had begun as a rifleman in Nicaragua, interjected an occasional syllable. They'd just about straightened it all out when Hervie, ever watchful of his gas pumps, nudged me.

  "Here come old Big-Time,” he murmured.

  I turned to see Bill Leavitt saunter through the never-closed White Rose door in shorts and madras shirt and sockless brown loafers, preceded by a cologne cloud that was perceptible even in the smoky stink of the filling station office. “Morning, fools,” he boomed, the usual big salesman smile on his angular face as he strode over to us, collaring a chair as he came.

  We nodded, smiled, edged chairs around to make room for him. Bill sat, changing, as always, the atmosphere in the filling station. He could not help being the odd man out. Nooch was my uncle by marriage. Chas's grandpa and mine were some kind of shirttail second cousins with at least one “removed” in there somewhere. Hervie and I had served in the same unit till I got shot up and sent back. And Chas's baby sister and Nooch's daughter were sisters-in-law. In the complex network of our tiny community, a cluster of bright lines, ordinary lines, dotted lines, and rumors, Bill “Big-Time” Leavitt didn't fit. Not anywhere.

  And I had plenty of reason to dislike him. He'd been married ten years to Maura Coltson, and the thought of them together made my heart hurt like my leg. But I had no animosity toward him, not a drop of it—not then, not even later. I swear it.

  "They put me on second shift again,” Bill said, rubbing a big hand across his flattop.

  "Vaughan's?” Nooch grunted.

  "That's a bitch,” Hervie said, making his odd slantways grin. The driveway hoses binged and he trotted out to top off Missus Drake's Fairlane.

  "Still running grinders and polishers?” Chas asked.

  "Sparkin',” Nooch intoned.

  "Beats hell out of working the drop-hammers,” Bill said, sounding mighty blue-collar for a guy who, down-city, had owned a used car dealership and advertised on the TV as “Automo Bill.” He lit a Benson & Hedges—where he bought those I couldn't tell; no one sold them around here—as some Bobby Vinton song came on the radio. “I'm still on piecework, though. What a drag."

  "Impecunious,” Nooch observed.

  Hervie bustled back over and sat. “Still buying that forty, Bill?” He looked at me. “Bill buying your forty?"

  "Well,” I said mildly, “I don't have the land contract back yet."

  "Paperwork,” Nooch grunted.

  "Now that you mention it,” Bill said, “Maura and me were reading it over just last night. I'm sending it to my
lawyer down-city."

  "Shyster,” Nooch remarked.

  "And maybe you can tell me,” Bill said to Chas, “what's going on with the well out at our place. Maura said she had to call you again."

  "Pressure switch is probably going,” Chas said easily. “I'll take care of it."

  "Reminds me,” I said at Chas, who was staring with appreciation out the window at a pair of lovely young things floating by. “I was clearing some brush out at the forty over the weekend. And guess what I found. An old hand-dug water well."

  "Really?” Chas said, looking at me. “Makes sense; somebody farmed that, I always thought."

  "Years ago, I b'lieve,” I agreed.

  "Kunkemoeller,” Nooch informed us.

  "Burned down, dint it?” Hervie asked.

  "Wasn't he the uncle of that girl, you know, lives over by Seiler's?"

  "Nope, that's a Henning you're thinking of. The younger one."

  "Anyway,” I said, “it's gotta be thirty, forty feet deep. Wood cover on it, half rotted out."

  "You don't want that,” Hervie said, serving up another helping from his ever-ready inventory of indignation.

  "No way do I want it,” Bill broke in. “You gotta fill it up,” he told me. “I'm adding it to the contract."

  That was Big-Time Bill, always negotiating for advantage. “What do we do?” I asked Chas.

  "That's no good,” Hervie said, in his argued-with tone.

  "I'll bring out a load of clean fill,” Chas told me, “plug it up with my backhoe."

  "Okay, whenever,” I told him.

  "Make it quick,” Bill said. “We want to close on this deal and start building. I promised Maura a log home."

  Only if you knew us, and knew us well, would you spot the slight grins, the almost imperceptible eye rolls, that passed among us. “It'll work out,” I said.

  "What about the stake survey?” Bill asked importantly.

  "Metes,” Nooch said.

  "Be done this week."

  "Bounds,” Nooch added.

  Bill rose, stubbing out his cigarette in the miniature truck tire ashtray with a hand that twinkled gold. “Okay, boys, you stay out of trouble, hear?” And he paraded out of the station, his shiny brown loafers scraping on the dirty vinyl floor.