Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (5 page)

With a sneer, Bailey shot back, “Maybe your boy didn’t
do it.” He glared at Patric. “Then you tell me, how did
John Roney get the screwdriver from Catfish Lube?”

“John Roney could have picked it up anywhere. Besides,
he was in the room with A.D. when we found them. And
there was blood on his hands.”

I looked around for my old man. He was slumped on a
vinyl couch, his head cocked back on the back of the couch,
his mouth gaping open. Passed out. I held up my hands in
an effort to gain everyone’s attention. “Listen, folks. Listen
a minute.”

They paused.

“Let’s all just take it easy. We aren’t going anywhere.
Let me try to contact the state police.”

“Just how you going to do that?” Ozzy sneered.

All of our lives, Ozzy had tried to bully us because his
pa was the rich one in the family. Even at forty-one, he
still tried, and still without success. “Don’t fret, Ozzy. I can
do it.” I studied the faces around me. “Don’t get your hopes
up, folks. They’re not going to come out here until the
storm passes.”

From the back of the parlor, a voice called out. “Why
can’t they come out here in a boat?”

A chuckle of derisive laughter echoed through the room.
George Miller replied. “Because there ain’t no boat going
to fight those four-foot waves out there.”

As if to punctuate the remark, a blast of wind struck the
house, rattling the windows and sending vibrations through
every stick of wood in the mansion.

The various branches of the family separated, seeking the
security of closer kin. They gathered in the corners of the
parlor, in the dining room, the kitchen, the living room,
the library, and even at the top of the broad stairway leading
to the second-floor landing.

For whatever reason, fortuity, fortune, or fate, my cell
phone connected with its server. I contacted the Lafayette
Police Department, and they passed word to the state police.

Fifteen minutes later, the Lafayette Police Department
called back. I took the message, thanked them, and punched
off.

“What did they say?” Bailey Thibodeaux asked.

“Like we said, they’ll be out after the storm. They said
to keep the scene pristine.”

Uncle Bailey snorted. “What’s pristine?”

I suppressed a grin. “Undisturbed, Uncle Bailey. They
don’t want us to move anything around.”

A murmur ran through the crowd.

Bailey grunted and turned to his sister, Iolande. “What
about A.D.? He’s going to be stinking in a couple days.”

The murmur grew louder. “We could bundle him up and
put him out in the shed with the generator,” Ozzy suggested.

Patric shook his head in disbelief. “That’s the dumbest
thing I ever heard, boy. Why, the animals, they’ll have him
carried off before morning.”

“Then what do you suggest, Uncle Patric?” Sarcasm
dripped from Ozzy’s words.

Patric scratched his gray-shot hair and wrinkled his nose.
“Hadn’t thought on it, but maybe we could put him in the
bathroom and seal the door.”

lolande snapped at him. “Don’t be stupid. The smell, it
stay in that room like skunk. Never it come out.”

“Stick him out on the porch,” Aunt Marie suggested.

“That ain’t no better than the shed,” Uncle Patric responded.

For the next five minutes, the family tossed suggestions
around and argued among themselves. Men got nose to
nose, pulling apart only to take a drink of beer or what
moonshine they had managed to salvage.

When it appeared they might settle on wrapping A.D. in
a sheet like a mummy and dangling him from a tree limb
well above the ground, Leroi leaned over my shoulder and
whispered. “We got to do something, Tony. I never cared
for A.D. He cheated everyone in the family, but he’s entitled to some respect. Even if he was no good,” he added.

Janice nodded. “He’s right, Tony. These people are
scary. Do something.”

I tried not to laugh at her consternation. Meeting an entire family of Cajuns in the middle of a family fais do do
is quite a cultural shock for someone from her strata of
society. For a refined and proper lady accustomed to daylily
shows and country clubs, a visit to Whiskey Bend among
the cypress knees and Spanish moss was like moving to
another planet.

When the hubbub quieted, I said, “I’m not any kind of
expert, and I’m not trying to be, but I have been around
police and their procedures for the last few years. We can
do some of their work for them. Maybe enough so when we move Uncle A.D., we won’t destroy any pertinent information.”

“Yeah?” It was Ozzy, his usual, sarcastic self. “What
about Pa? What are you going to do with him?”

“Simple. After we take care of business up there, we’ll
place him in a sheet and put him in the freezer.”

“But, he’ll freeze up solid,” Ozzy retorted, alarmed.

“Not for two or three days. Maybe the state police will
be here by then.”

“The freezer will be ruined,” exclaimed lolande.

“I’ll buy another freezer,” Janice quickly offered.
“Gladly.”

Bailey waddled forward and looked down at Janice as if
she were some sort of curious specimen. “You that rich girl
Tony goes with?”

Intimidated, Janice backed up a step and nodded briefly.

Bailey shrugged. “Fine with me.”

“Hold on, Uncle Bailey,” said Ozzy. “Let’s hear what
else Detective Tony has in mind.”

I glared at my sneering cousin. I resisted the urge to pop
him across the bridge of the nose. Maybe later. Maybe
later.

“Yeah. What else you got in mind, Tony?” Patric took
a step forward.

“All right. Normally at a police scene, nothing is moved
until everything is measured, marked, and photographed.
Now, I suggest that is what we do. Two or three of us can
go up there and do the necessary work. Did anyone bring
a camera?”

In one corner of the parlor, a Broussard held up her hand.
“I did. A digital. I’ve got some extra disks.”

“Fine. With the digital, I can send pictures to the police
if they want them.”

I expected some argument, especially from the Idiot, but
he nodded in agreement along with the others. “All right,”
I said. “Who wants to go up to A.D.‘s room with me?”

“I’m sure going,” Ozzy said.

Leroi and Giselle stepped forward. “We’ll go if you can
use us.”

For a moment, I stared at them. Something seemed different, and then I realized Giselle had changed tank tops.
The first was red; this one was green.

I shrugged it off. With the humidity outside, our women
changed into dry clothes several times a day at these shindigs. The men just sweated, tolerating the shirt plastered to
their skin. “We need a tape measure and some chalk or
something to outline the body for the photographs.”

Pa was still on the couch, passed out. Even from where
I stood, I could see the blood on the fingers of his left hand
and on the soles of his shoes. That was the man we were
going to take into our home? I didn’t think so.

Outside, the wind increased, howling around the exposed
eaves. Rain battered the storm shutters, rattling them in
their frames. A square foot of shatter resistant glass had
been set in the center of each shutter, providing a faint glow
of outside light as well as permitting us to peer into the
storm.

I looked outside. Although it was only late afternoon, the
sky was dark as night.

I led the way to the third floor. Opening the door, I
turned on the light. The smell of blood and stale whiskey
enveloped me like a thick fog. In the middle of the room,
A.D. lay on his side beside the poker table. Congealed
blood had pooled about his head and shoulders.

A set of bloody footprints led to the door, then faded as
they proceeded down the hall. “Pa’s,” I said, gesturing to
the prints.

Ozzy started to push past me into the room, but I stopped
him. “Not yet. Pictures first from this perspective.”

“Huh?”

Giselle spoke up. “You heard him. Pictures first.”

I snapped three or four from left to right, catching the layout of the room. I repeated the procedure from the opposite side of the room.

Taking care not to step in the blood, I photographed the
body from several angles, too absorbed in my job to pay
attention to Ozzy. I should have realized how flaky he was,
but I didn’t.

“What do you want me to do with this?”

I turned to him and froze. He held the screwdriver in his
hand. “What the-what do you think you’re doing with
that?”

He shrugged. “It’s the murder weapon. I didn’t want it
to get lost. There might be fingerprints on it.”

Behind me, Leroi muttered a soft curse. Giselle didn’t
mutter anything. She shouted. “Ozzy, you’re too stupid to
live.”

He grew defensive. “What are you talking about?”

I shook my head wearily. “There are no fingerprints on
it now, Ozzy.”

He looked at the screwdriver, then frowned at me. “Why
not?”

“Because, stupid,” yelled Giselle. “You wiped them off
with your own.”

Slowly, it dawned on the Idiot just what he had done.
He bit his lip. “Sorry, Tony.”

But Giselle wasn’t finished with him. “You should be,
you dumb-”

I interrupted her. “Hold it. That’s enough. It’s done. We
can’t do anything about it. Let’s just get on with the job at
hand.” I glared at Ozzy. “Put the screwdriver on the table
and just stand over there next to the wall and don’t do a
thing unless I tell you. You hear?”

He nodded, still holding the screwdriver.

“Put the screwdriver on the table, I said.”

Without a word, he did as I requested.

We measured and chalked, then photographed some
more.

I glanced at Giselle. “Who found him?”

“I think it was one of the Venables. Walter’s wife, Marie.
She saw blood on John Roney’s hand and shoes when he
sat on the couch, so she went up to see where the blood
had come from.”

I frowned. Patric had said Pa was in the room when A.D.
was discovered. Someone had his story wrong, either Giselle or Patric. “What time?”

“I don’t know. Around three or four.”

I studied the scene. “We saw A.D. downstairs about two,
so that means that somewhere between two and four is
when he was murdered.”

Ozzy sneered. “Brilliant, Sherlock Holmes.”

I shot him a hard glance, then pointed a finger at him.
“I’m going to tell you something, idiot boy. You make one
more sarcastic remark, and I’ll throw you through that window, storm shutter and all. You’ll have thirty feet to the
ground to think things over.”

He glared at me, but he kept his mouth closed.

I photographed the table on which the two played poker.
I noticed smeared blood spatters on the cards and tabletop.
On Pa’s side, a couple of the cards were damp. Around the
cards was the outline of a dried pool of liquid. I made sure
to photograph them at an angle that reflected the dried liquid.

When I was satisfied we had gathered all the data we
could, I spread a blanket on the floor and the four of us
placed A.D. on it. We lifted the blanket onto another blanket, and carried the bundle into the hallway.

I went back into the room and took more photographs,
this time without the corpse.

Back in the hall, I had Giselle go downstairs for more
help. “He’s a big man.”

Half a dozen men came up the stairs. “Be easy,” I said
as they started down the stairs with the body.

The irony of that situation was that each of the six had
been cheated by A.D., some more than once. I was sur prised they didn’t just simply roll him down the two flights
of stairs.

The chest freezer had been emptied. It was against one
wall in the pantry off the kitchen. The other three walls
were lined with shelves filled with a variety of staples and
canned goods. In one corner was a broom closet. The only
entrance to the pantry was from the kitchen.

We turned A.D. on his side and gently lowered him into
the freezer.

“Maybe we need to turn the temperature up some,”
Henry Broussard said. “We don’t want him hard as a rock.”
He looked around at me. “Why don’t you get on that computer of yours and get somebody to tell us what to do.”

I shrugged. “I’ll try. Right now, turn it to about thirtytwo.”

Bailey shook his head. “It’s just low, medium, or high.”

Leroi and I shrugged at each other. “Medium,” I replied.

Back in the parlor, the families had split into camps, each
camp having its own prime candidate as the murderer. Uncle Henry and his family gathered around the radio.

I decided to visit with each family, take whatever information they had, and then pass it along to the state police.

Just after I finished with George Miller and his family,
Ezeline Thibodeaux, Bailey’s wife, came down the stairs
carrying a gold money clip with the diamond encrusted
initials, A.D.T. She stopped in front of her husband. “Bailey, what were you doing with A.D.‘s money clip in your
suitcase?”