Murder in the Rue St. Ann (21 page)

His car was parked right in front and all of his lights were on. He was definitely at home.

What the hell, I thought, as I lit another cigarette. Smoking was the least thing we had to worry about right now, and he’d have to understand I had to smoke during this conversation. Hell yes, it was a crutch, but at least I knew that. I got out of the car and leaned back against it, watching his windows.

Nothing was moving up there.

Maybe he was just watching television.

I tossed the cigarette into the street and walked up the driveway. I paused at the foot of the wooden stairs and looked down into the flowerbed.

Right off the paved walkway was a footprint in the soft dirt.

Quit delaying and get up there, I said to myself as I knelt down to get a closer look at the footprint. It was a normal sized foot, probably about a ten and a half, but what was unusual was that it was several inches deep. The ground was soft, but dry, so whoever left it had to be pretty heavy. The tread looked to be from a sneaker. I looked around the bed and couldn’t see another one. I stepped up onto the front step and looked at it again. It was just off to the side of the stairs. I’d missed the walk and put my right foot into the flowerbed myself a couple of times when I’d come down in a hurry.

I shrugged. Probably from a gardener or something. I started climbing the steps, my heart pounding in my ears. My palms were sweating. It was almost like walking the last mile, I thought, and laughed out loud. Don’t be stupid—everything’s going to work out just fine.

My heart stopped briefly when I reached the top of the stairs.

In front of the door sat a green glass vase with bullet-headed roses and baby’s breath. He’d either not answered the door or not taken them into the house.

Not a good sign.

Of course, he could just not be at home. But Paul would never leave all the lights on. 
We all have to do our part to conserve energy
, his voice echoed in my head. He’d lectured me about it all the time. He used to walk around behind me shutting off lights in my apartment when I left a room. And his car was sitting right there on the street.

I knocked on the window pane set in the door. “Paul?” I could hear the television in the background.I leaned over the railing and tried to see in through the living room windows, but the stained glass was too dark. “Paul?” I called again, reaching into my pocket for my keys. Sure it was an invasion of privacy, I thought as I went through them to find his apartment key, but he’d given me the key of his own free will, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he given me a key to let myself in? It was rationalizing, but I didn’t care. Something was wrong, something seemed off.

The deadbolt turned, and with a start I realized I’d locked it.

Paul never in a million years would leave his door unlocked.

This was not good, not good at all. The hair on my forearms stood up.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was freezing in there, like the air conditioner was set on fifty or something. I could hear it running. “Paul?” I called out again, louder, over the television. I could hear canned laughter. It was one of those stupid sitcoms where the husband was a fat loser pig of a man with a gorgeous, sexy, and intelligent wife.

Which happens all the time in real life, right?

I stepped into the living room. I could sense the stillness beneath the sound of the television. No sign of life anywhere, everything in its place as usual, nothing out of the ordinary…but the print over the fireplace was gone.

“Weird.” I said aloud, and turned to look for the other print. My blood ran cold.

It was leaning against the wall.

Paul’s face had been completely blacked out with such angry strokes that in a couple of places the pen had pierced the print.

“PAUL!” I screamed, running into the bedroom.

The room was empty, but the bedclothes were rumpled. There was a wet stain in the center of the bedspread. I walked over to it, careful not to touch or disturb anything. My stomach quaking, I leaned over and sniffed the spot, then touched it with my finger.

It was semen.

I stumbled back out of the living room, my heart pounding, my head screaming
crime scene, crime scene, don’t touch anything, get out of here
.…

I pulled out my cell phone when I got to the kitchen, fumbling through the speed dial till I found the one for Venus Casanova.

That was when I noticed a reddish brown puddle on the linoleum.

Blood.

Oh sweet Jesus
.

Paul’s blood.

I shivered, staring at the pool of blood.

“Casanova.” She answered.

“Venus, this is Chanse MacLeod. You need to get over to Paul Maxwell’s apartment.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” I tried to catch my breath. “But I think something’s happened to him.”

“Go outside and wait for the squad car. I’m on my way.” She hung up.

I looked back into the living room, at the print.

Paul’s head, completely blacked out.

A pool of sperm on his bed.

A puddle of blood in the kitchen.

I walked out and sat on the top step and started shaking. I tried to light a cigarette. It took me a couple of tries. I stared up at the stars in the cloudless sky. I took deep breaths.
Logical explanation, there has to be a logical explanation
, I kept saying like a litany.
He’s okay, nothing’s happened to him
.

And then I started to cry.

Fortunately for patrol cop Sean Mallory, it’s against the law to strike a police officer. Within a few minutes of meeting him, I was tempted to knock out a few of his teeth.

I was sitting on the bottom step of Paul’s staircase, on my third cigarette when the patrol car came swooping up, sirens blaring and lights flashing. You’d think this would bring the neighbors to their windows to see what was happening, but twenty years of an ever increasing crime rate has deadened New Orleanians to the sound of police sirens. Two cops got out and approached me. One was an older black man with gray at his temples and in his mustache, and a bit of a belly. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked.

I gave it to them as briefly as possible, and the black cop, whose name was Stallings, went up to poke around in Paul’s apartment, leaving me down with Sean Mallory, his partner.

“You know we can’t file a missing persons report for twenty four hours.” He said in a thick yat accent. He was a little under six feet tall, and couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and fifty pounds, and even that had to be mostly bone. He had short red hair, very pale skin covered with greenish-tan freckles, and crooked teeth. Acne scars pitted his left cheek, and a couple of large pimples were scattered across his forehead. His thin lips were chapped. His uniform hung on him like a tent. He didn’t look any older than fifteen.

“Yes, I know.” I decided against telling him I was an ex-cop.

“Maybe your friend”—extra emphasis on ‘friend’—“just went away for a while. Did you check to see if he took any clothes or a suitcase?” He was smirking at me, which was when I started wondering how my fist would feel against his mouth.

“And he just happened to leave a puddle of blood in his kitchen before he left.” I lit another cigarette. “And blacked out his face in a picture. And jacked off on his bed, for good measure.”

“Queers do funny things sometimes.” He smirked. “Who knows why they do what they do?” His tone was condescending. He obviously had been picked on a lot in high school and had got even with the world by becoming a cop—the kind who wishes it was still okay to beat confessions out of suspects. He got off on the power the uniform conveyed. By the time he was thirty his file would be filled with allegations of excessive force and civilian complaints. No doubt he’d be bounced from the force after shooting a suspect in ‘self-defense.’

“Yeah, right.” I muttered.

I heard the heavy footsteps of Officer Stallings coming down the stairs behind me, so I stood up. Immediately, Mallory’s attitude shifted and his facial expression changed. “What’s up, Ted?”

“It’s definitely blood.” He scratched his head. “I think we’d better call in THE LAB.”

Mallory didn’t like the idea, and was about to say something when Venus Casanova’s white SUV pulled up.  She got out and walked up the driveway with an air of authority Mallory lacked. “Thanks, guys,” she said, dismissing them with a wave of her hand. “What did you find?”

“There’s blood on the kitchen floor, all right.” Stallings replied. “And there is a print in the living room with the face blacked out. And what appears to be sperm on the bed.”

She nodded, and motioned to me. “Come with me.”

I followed her up the stairs. Venus is tall, an inch or two over six feet, and always wears heels to add a few more inches. She carries herself with an air of regal authority which demands respect, which she accepts as a matter of course. She played scholarship basketball at LSU, and has kept her long frame in excellent shape since. She is not a woman to fuck with. She looked like she could kick your ass with one hand while talking on the phone. The calves beneath her long skirt were muscular. She motioned for me to stay outside on the porch while she walked in and headed for the drying blood. She  knelt down and stared at it for a few minutes, then looked around the rest of the kitchen. I stood there, finishing my cigarette, while she went into the living room. A few minutes later, she came back out. “Okay, it looks odd, but there could be any explanation. He could have cut himself and called an ambulance.”

“And only bled on the floor.” I flicked the butt into the driveway. “And cleaned up the rest of the kitchen while he waited. And for good measure, blacked out his own face in a print, and took the other one to the hospital with him just in case. Maybe he fell off the bed when he was beating off?”

“Don’t be a smartass, MacLeod. I’ve had a long day, okay? The lab will be here in a minute—I just called in for them.” She folded her arms. “Did you check to see if his suitcases were here? If any of his clothes were missing or anything?”

“No—once I found the blood I got out of there.” I shrugged. “Besides, his car is still here.”

“Couldn’t he have taken a cab? To the airport?”

“Venus, you’ve seen the place.” I leaned back against the railing. “The fucking place is spotless—no dust anywhere. He wouldn’t have gone anywhere without cleaning up the blood, if he had cut himself. And there is a print missing.”

“He could have gotten rid of it since you were here last, couldn’t he?”

“What about the other one? With the blacked out face?”

“He could have done that himself. There’s really not a lot to go on here.”

“But you went ahead and called in the lab—“ I cut myself off in mid-sentence. She wasn’t looking at me, avoiding my eyes. That was not like her. Venus was a great cop, one of the best on the force. She didn’t bullshit, she didn’t play politics, she spoke her mind, regardless of how much shit it might bring down on her from above. “Venus, why were the charges against Paul dropped?”

“The powder residue—” She still wouldn’t look at me.

“Yeah, Loren told me about that.” Something was starting to stink. “Just because it was on the wrong hand, the DA decided to drop charges? It was a slam-dunk and you know it—he easily could be ambidextrous. It’s flimsy, Venus, very flimsy. What the hell is going on?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“You do think something’s happened to him, don’t you?”

She bit her lower lip before saying, “It wouldn’t surprise me—and that’s all I can say.” She reached out and touched my arm. “Look, Chanse,  go check his closet and see if any clothes are missing, and  give a statement to Stallings, okay? And then forget about this.”

“I can’t, Venus, you know that.” I replied. My heart was starting to pound. “He’s my lover, for Christ’s sake.”

“Stay out of it, Chanse, let us do our jobs.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I could feel my temper starting to rise, and I swallowed to fight it down. I walked back into the bedroom, and using a paper towel, opened the closet door. His clothes were organized by color and style. Sweaters, dress shirts, T-shirts, jeans, dress slacks. I swallowed, I couldn’t tell is anything was missing, but his suitcases were still in the closet. Unless he’d put clothes in garbage bags, he hadn’t taken anything with him.

I finished giving Venus my statement right after the lab arrived, promised to come down and sign it in the morning, and got into my car. I lit another cigarette, sat there for a moment, then began pounding on the steering wheel until my hands hurt.

Something was very wrong.

I started up the car and drove the few blocks over to Paige’s. She lived in a carriage house behind a big yellow mansion on State Street. Her car was parked on the street. I parked behind her and got out. As I approached, I could hear a Cher CD blaring from inside. I pounded on the door. A few moments later the door swung open. She was wearing a sweatshirt with Tennessee Williams’ face on it and a pajama bottoms. Her hair was messy,  her eyes bloodshot. I could smell the delightful odor of marijuana. “What?”