Gator Aide (16 page)

The next day I decided
it was time to pay Jake Santou a visit. He’d finally left a message on my machine. Two little sentences. “See you’re out. I’ll call back.” I wasn’t holding my breath. Or as Terri was fond of saying, “By that time, you’ll be old and grey and your boobs will have fallen down to your knees.” My vanity had assumed he’d have called before now. And though I hated to admit it, I’d been thinking about him in those moments before I fell asleep and immediately after waking up. During my days in the bayou, and my nights alone in the marsh.

I’d expected him to keep me posted on any new information he’d dug up on the case. The fact that I’d heard nothing from him until now had me puzzled. While I wasn’t expecting Hickok to throw any clues my way, I’d hoped for more from Santou. But I had another reason for stopping by. I wanted to snoop around Valerie Vaughn’s apartment. I’d had no opportunity to do much of anything besides examine Hook the other night, and while I’d picked up bits of information about Valerie from Trenton and Marie, I wanted to get a feel for who she was on my own. In order to do that, I needed a key.

Fighting my way through downtown traffic, I circled the precinct three times with no luck. The streets were packed as usual, without a parking space in sight, forcing me to cram my VW into the first illegal spot I could find that wasn’t already taken. I walked inside, the squad room buzzing with activity. Men in blue hurried past as I headed toward the detective division. Hookers on their way to and from jail glanced at the clock in annoyance as their working hours ticked away. A battered transvestite screamed at his pimp, swaggering in a black cowboy hat and snakeskin boots, while a druggy sat trembling in a corner, drenched in cold sweat as he moaned aloud. I entered the detective division, where garbage cans overflowed with torn pizza boxes. Phones rang incessantly with no one in sight. Spotting Santou’s name on a door, I peeked into a cubbyhole with walls the color of week-old oatmeal. The stench of fried food and hot sauce clung to a sparsely furnished room, the wooden desk and chairs looking like rejects from Goodwill. Stepping inside, I walked over to the desk, where a sack of McDonald’s French fries lay next to a cup of coffee, the creamer floating on top in tiny white curds. A blue plastic bottle of Mylanta sat nearby. A poster of skeletons dancing down Bourbon Street decorated one wall, while on the other side of the room hung a corkboard covered with papers. Wandering over for a closer look, I saw it was the schedule of a man who never went home but spent twenty-four hours a day on duty. Tacked next to it was a list of Santou’s cases. Arranged in numerical order, Valerie Vaughn rated a ten. Rock bottom, along with the notation L.P., standing for low priority. I was about to shuffle through a pile of papers on his desk when Santou walked in the door, his head hanging down, absorbed in his thoughts. Halfway across the room he sensed he wasn’t alone. His body jerked, and his hand automatically reached for the gun at his waist.

“A bit jumpy today, Santou?”

An ancient window fan creaked irregularly, like an old man drawing his last breath. Stale air circulated around the small room, making it seem even hotter than it was outside.

“Jesus Christ, Porter! You scared the hell out of me. Don’t you know better than to do something like that?” Pushing a thick lock of damp hair off his brow, he stared at me for a moment before attempting to smile.

“Sorry I haven’t been in touch,
chère
. But I’ve been bogged down pulling all-nighters on duty. I’m juggling so many cases these days that I’m having a hard time keeping them all straight.”

Although I had hoped for a warmer greeting, he at least was letting me know up front what I had already gathered from the papers on his board. He’d done nothing on the Vaughn case so far.

He rubbed his eyes as he sat behind his desk and took a sip of cold coffee. “Man, I could use a break. What’s say we put all this behind us and run away for a while? Maybe spend a week south of the border.”

“I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s go someplace where the temperature falls below ninety degrees.”

“You’re on,
chère
." Santou crossed his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Now all we have to do is find the time. I’ll show you my calendar if you show me yours.”

“It’s a deal.”

There was no doubt in my mind that this was not a man to get involved with. The problem was, the process had already begun. What made him attractive was exactly what I knew would be nothing but trouble. Dark and brooding, Santou had a melancholy that I found irresistible. It was the last thing I needed to drown myself in.

“At the moment, I’m here about something else.”

Santou’s eyes burned through me, burrowing past all my good intentions of not getting sucked in further. “Denial’s bad for the soul and other parts of the body,
chère
.”

“What I want is a key and permission to enter Valerie Vaughn’s apartment.”

Santou’s scowl came back with a vengeance. “You aren’t going to find anything there. We’ve been through that place top to bottom. Besides, I could get in big trouble by giving you that key.”

“If you’ve already scoured the place, what’s the problem? It shouldn’t matter if I have a go at it. It’s not as if I’ll be messing up any crucial evidence—unless there’s something you’re not telling me. But then, we have an agreement, don’t we, Santou?”

I conveniently ignored the fact that I hadn’t yet mentioned my own visit with Dolores Williams, or what I had gathered from Trenton Treddell. I was learning that everyone had secrets to be kept until the proper time. If Santou had any information I needed, I wanted to have something of value to trade.

Jake sauntered over to the office door and closed it before sitting down again. Leaning forward, he kept his voice low.

“Word has come down from the top that Vaughn’s place is strictly off-limits.”

“That’s rather vague. What ‘top’ are we talking about? The mayor? The chief of police? Or does Hillard Williams have a say in all this?”

Santou ignored my questions. “All I can tell you is what I’ve been told. This has been deemed a sensitive case. Even I’ve been taken out of the loop on this one.”

Considering that the investigation was Officially listed as low priority, none of this made any sense. It also led me to believe that Santou wasn’t even coming close to telling me what he knew.

“Why should a stripper’s apartment be considered so sensitive? Does Hillard already have his hooks into the Department, even before election day?”

Santou rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, as if wishing this would all go away. I wondered if that included me. “You ever hear of scandal,
chère
? It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with why the girl was killed. But just maybe there’s some embarrassing material lying around. She was a hooker with a long list of interesting clientele. It seems she entertained a good number of our city’s high and mighty. I can’t see why reputations should be destroyed if these people weren’t involved in her murder. That includes Hillard Williams.”

His eyes were bloodshot as he put his hands down. Maybe he was being paid to keep off Hillard’s back, but I wasn’t.

“Since when did it become part of your job to play go-between for Hillard and the police? Did I miss something last week when we were at his house?”

A muscle twitched under Santou’s left eye as he reached for his coffee and finished it off, sour curds and all. I almost felt sorry for the man.

“Look, Jake. I don’t mean to accuse you of anything, but Hickok hasn’t given me any official word to get off the case yet. Besides, if the place was already gone over with a fine-tooth comb, what am I going to find? Someone’s toothbrush with a name tag on it?”

I felt sure that whatever incriminating evidence had already been found was long buried.

“Who’s handling this investigation now, anyway?”

Santou reached inside his desk and pulled out a roll of Tums. “All I can tell you is that nerves are on edge about this one. The captain is handling the case himself.”

Popping two of the antacids in his mouth, he followed it with a swig of Mylanta. Whatever pressure had been applied to Santou was beginning to show. Heavy lines under his eyes verified the fact that he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in the past week.

“Believe me
chère
, I don’t like this any more than you do.”

The fact that someone was working so hard to keep the lid on this case was all the more reason to get inside Vaughn’s apartment as soon as I could.

“I’d be coming at this from a wildlife end only, Jake. I don’t care who Valerie was sleeping with or who she wasn’t. But there’s something about that gator that’s been bothering me, and that’s what I’ll be searching for. I’ll be careful. I’ll be in and out without anyone knowing I was ever there. I’m good at this, Jake. I swear I won’t get caught.” I’d never done anything like this before in my life.

Against his better judgment, a smile began to pull up the corners of Jake’s downturned mouth. “I was right about you the first time,
chère
. You are a wolverine.”

Rummaging in his drawer, he brought out a key and slid it along the top of the desk. As I reached for it, his other hand came down hard on top of mine, his eyes locking in on me as he turned the intensity up.

“Whatever you find, I get. I’m as curious as you are to know what’s going down. I’m putting myself on the line for you. Just remember that when you’re in there, and don’t do anything stupid. If you get caught, so do I.”

I tried to slide my hand away, the key lodged securely beneath it. But Santou held me firmly in place.

“I’m trusting you,
chère
. I mean it; don’t disappoint me. I want anything you find reported to me. You got that? No secrets here.”

“No secrets.”

The jagged teeth of the key cut into my skin, and my heart beat rapidly at what I was about to do. The fact that Vaughn’s place had been gone over didn’t bother me in the least. Finding things that no one else ever could was a talent I’d developed as a kid, beginning with where the Christmas presents had been hidden.

Santou’s door flew open without warning, as if a sudden gust of wind had ripped through the precinct. Sliding my hand along the top of the desk, my fingers folded into a tight fist that I brought to rest in my lap. Following Santou’s gaze, I turned around to see Captain Conrad “Connie” Kroll standing directly behind me.

“Social hour is over, Santou. Unless this is police business, I want to see you in my office right now.”

A man who didn’t waste words, he glanced at me briefly. His eyes were weighed down with heavy folds of flesh that fell over the tops of his lids. The soggy nub of a burned-out stogie bobbed up and down from where it was held clenched between his teeth, and a buzz cut had left the top of his head looking like land only recently razed. At five feet six inches tall, his body was irregularly proportioned, with short arms, a longish torso, and a neck the size of a tree stump.

“Wrap it up on the double and save the broads for your time off.”

Kroll left the room having barely bothered to acknowledge me.

Santou popped another Tums into his mouth. “He doesn’t know who you are. Let’s keep it that way. It’s safer for both of us. Just get in and out of that place as soon and as fast as you can.”

An electrifying rush sped through me as I gripped the key to Valerie Vaughn’s apartment tightly in the palm of my hand.

I hadn’t been back to Vaughn’s street since the night of the crime, and for all my bravado, I wasn’t so sure how I felt about returning. Stopping at a small cafe directly opposite her building, I grabbed a cup of coffee and watched for a while in case anyone else might be making a visit. I tried to eat a Danish, but slides of Valerie lying in a pool of blood flashed through my mind in rapid succession. A full body shot detailed the mass of red lines that ran across her breasts, her stomach, down her thighs, and up her arms, flashing on to her hair as it lay in clumps of blood about her head. Replacing this with a close-up of her face, I panned in tight to focus on eyes wide-open in fear, hoping for an image that would tell me who her killer had been. But all I saw was pain and death. Part of the cherry glaze had fallen off the Danish onto my fingers. Looking at it, I began to feel sick and stopped eating.

After about twenty minutes, I gathered my courage and walked over to her building. My footsteps echoed dully on the cobblestone street. Ducking inside, I headed up the stairs to the second-floor landing. I felt as if lead weights had been tied to my legs, my steps growing heavier the closer I drew. Already in a knot, my stomach tightened even more as I was hit with a case of nerves. Moisture coated the palms of my hands, and my heart beat as fast as my legs shook, until I could barely stand. This was the way I had always felt before stepping onstage for a role. But in comparison, that seemed easy. This was for real.

Yellow police tape stretched tautly across the door, declaring the property out of bounds. Kneeling, I stared at the lock and inserted the key, holding my breath as I pushed the door open. Shimmying under the flimsy barricade, I crawled inside as the door closed shut behind me. The apartment looked the same as it had the other night. Except this time I was alone. I’ve always held the belief that dwellings retain the energy of the person who lived there, along with whatever events have taken place. Standing still for a moment, I felt the unsettling sense of a violent death hanging over the room like a heavy pall. Breaking into a cold sweat, I could almost hear the pounding of silence. The quiet was that foreboding.

“All right, Rachel. You’re playing a role. That’s all this is. The part of a detective who’s brave and smart and strong.”

I waited, but no image came to mind.

“It’s a role. It’s a role. It’s a role.”

Taking a deep breath, I decided I would be Valerie, simply going through my things as if in search of something missing. The problem was, I didn’t have any clue as to what that might be. I headed for the first thing I saw—an old writing desk with drawers. When I sat down in her chair, the wooden back lodged sharply between my shoulder blades, and I found myself wondering if Valerie had experienced the same sensation whenever she sat here. I opened the large middle drawer and rummaged through its contents: unpaid bills for body lotion, perfume, and lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. A smaller drawer contained stamps, envelopes, and a magnifying glass. Pushing my hand all the way to the back, I pulled out a photo of Marie Tuttle standing next to a dead gator three times her size. She smiled and rubbed its belly as if gently sending it off to sleep.