AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Hell if I know. He's been in there two or three days. No air-conditioning either."
"What's his race?"
"I don't know. I haven't been up there. Check it out if you want to. Take your handkerchief with you."
Halfway up the stairs the odor hit me. It was rotten and acrid and sweet at the same time, reeking of salt and decay, fetid and gray as a rat's breath, penetrating and enveloping as the stench of excrement. I gagged and had to press my fist against my mouth.
Two paramedics with rubber gloves on were waiting patiently with a stretcher in the tiny living room while the scene investigator took flash pictures in the bath. Their faces were pinched and they kept clearing their throats. An overweight plainclothes detective with a florid, dilated face stood in the doorway so that I couldn't see the bathtub clearly. His white shirt was so drenched with sweat that you could see his skin through the cloth. He turned and looked at me, puzzled. I thought I might know him from my years in the First District, but I didn't. I turned up my badge in my palm.
"I'm Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish sheriff's office," I said. "Who is he?"
"We don't know yet. The landlord's on vacation, there's nothing in the apartment with a name on it," he said. "A meter reader came up the stairs this morning and tossed his cookies over the railing. It's all over the rosebush. It really rounds out the smell. What are you looking for?"
"We've got a warrant on a Haitian."
"Be my guest," he said, and stepped aside.
I walked into the bathroom with my handkerchief pressed over my mouth and nose. The tub was an old iron, rust-streaked one on short metal legs that looked like animal claws. A man's naked black calves and feet stuck up out of the far end of the tub.
"He was either a dumb shit that liked to keep his radio on the washbasin, or somebody threw it in there with him," the detective said. "Any way you cut it, it cooked him."
The water had evaporated out of the tub, and dirty lines of grit were dried around the drain hole. I looked at the powerful hands that were now frozen into talons, the muscles in the big chest that had become flaccid with decomposition, the half-closed eyes that seemed focused on a final private thought, the pink mouth that was still locked wide with a silent scream.
"It must have been a sonofabitch. He actually clawed paint off the sides," the detective said. "There, look at the white stuff under his nails. You know him?"
"His name's Toot. He worked with Eddie Keats. Maybe he worked for Bubba Rocque, too."
"Huh," he said. "Well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, then. What a way to get it. Once over in Algiers I had case like this. A woman was listening to this faith healer while she was washing dishes. So the faith healer told everybody to put their hands on the radio and get healed, and it blew her right out of her panty hose. What'd y'all have on his guy?"
"Assault and battery, suspicion of murder."
The scene investigator walked past us with his camera. The detective crooked his finger at the two paramedics.
"All right, bag him and get him out of here," he said, and turned to me again. "They'll have to burn the stink out of this place with a flamethrower. You got everything you want?"
"You mind if I look around a minute?"
"Go ahead. I'll wait for you outside."
Propped against the back corner of the closet, behind the racked tropical shirts, the white slacks, the flowered silk vests, I found a twelve-gauge pump shotgun. I opened the breech. It had been cleaned and oiled and the cordite wiped out of the chamber with a rag. Then I unscrewed the mechanism to the pump action itself and saw the sportsman's plug had been taken out so the magazine could hold five rather than three rounds. On the floor was a half-empty box of red double-nought shotgun shells of the same manufacture as the ones that had littered the floor of Annie's and my bedroom. I rolled one of the shells back and forth in my palm and then put it back in the box.
The detective lit a cigarette as he walked down the stairs into the yard. Afternoon rain clouds had moved across the sun, and he wiped the sweat out of his eyebrows with the flat of his hand and widened his eyes in the breeze that had sprung up from the south.
"I'd like for you to come down to the District and file a report on your man," he said.
"All right."
"Who's this guy supposed to have killed?"
"My wife."
He stopped in the middle of the yard, a dead palm tree rattling over his head, and looked at me with his mouth open. The wind blew his cigarette ashes on his tie.
I decided I had one more stop to make before I headed back to New Iberia. Because of my concern for Alafair, I had given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a wide berth. But as that Negro janitor had told me in high school, you never let the batter know you're afraid of him. When he spreads his feet in the box and gives you that mean squint from under his cap, as though he's sighting on your throat, you spit on the ball and wipe his letters off with it. He'll probably have a change in attitude toward your relationship.
But Mr. Monroe was to surprise me.
I parked the truck in the shade of a spreading oak off Loyola and walked back in the hot sunlight to the INS office. His desk was out on the floor, among several others, and when he looked up from a file folder in his hands and saw me, the skin around his ears actually stretched across the bone. His black hair, which was combed like wires across his pate, gleamed dully in the fluorescent light. I saw his throat swallow under his bow tie.
