“No, the other guy didn’t go away. He told you he’s with the FBI, didn’t he? Well, the FBI doesn’t ever go away, Gunn. You’re going to have to tell one of us. Him or me.”
“Well, Bobbie had nothing to do with it. You’re just looking for someone to blame.”
“Blame for what?” April asked.
“I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not stupid. You think Bobbie killed Dr. Dickey the way they say he killed that patient last year, but he didn’t have anything to do with either one.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do you know the things you know? I
“Sure. Except it doesn’t work that way in homicide investigations.”
“I know how it works. Something bad happens and somebody has to take the blame.
“Who’s her? Dr. Treadwell?”
“Yeah.”
“She have it in for Bobbie?”
“How would I know? I’m only in Personnel.”
April checked her watch. It was eleven-thirty. She was due to meet Mike and Daveys at one. This plump little lady was in trouble up to her pale blond eyebrows. April had a feeling Gunn knew every single answer, but she’d have to get all tangled up in lies before she’d start telling the truth. She said, “It’s nice and cozy in here, Gunn. Do you mind if I take my jacket off?”
Gunn shrugged her square shoulders. “Do what you want; you will, anyway.”
“Not necessarily.” April unbuttoned her jacket and the navy blazer under it, revealing the scarf tied around her turtleneck. It was silk, one of the fake Chanels she’d bought on the street in Chinatown. The scarf had big gold chains and buckles on a blue background. Sometimes the chains looked like handcuffs to her. Tension pinched the muscles in her neck and shoulders. She took out her notebook and flipped over pages until she came to a clean one. Somebody had put Boudreau’s file back in the personnel drawer—somebody who wanted it to be there but not readily visible. Now what kind of person would do that?
Gunn snuffled into a sodden wad of paper towels. “Bobbie is a great guy,” she sobbed.
April watched her blow her nose and waited.
“He was a Lieutenant in Vietnam.”
“Really,” April murmured. “That must have been some time ago.”
“Yes, he was, little Bobbie Boudreau, a Cajun from Louisiana. You know what a Cajun is?”
April inclined her chin.
“French-Indian. There are a lot of them in Louisiana. Some kind of mixture. They speak a funny French the real French can’t understand at all. Have you heard of voodoo?”
“Voodoo?” April blinked. She’d heard of voodoo practiced in the big cemeteries in Queens. Kids dug up the graves because there was a market for the skulls.
“Yeah, black magic.” Gunn’s bleary eyes drifted across the room to a white mask on the wall. Ribbons dangled from it.
“Uh, does voodoo have something to do with this case, Gunn?” The mask didn’t look as if it had come from Haiti to April. It looked more like the ones she’d seen in Italian restaurants.
“Bobbie thinks maybe he was tainted by voodoo back when his Daddy got the cancer.” The old woman shook her head solemnly. “That visiting nurse he liked so much died, too.”
April inhaled. What did this have to do with anything? “So what happened to him—Bobbie, I mean?”
“He went into combat
April nodded solemnly. Who didn’t?
“So I guess he was used to the blood or something because he was real good at it.”
“Used to the blood?”
Gunn shook her head again. “I told you. He was very close to that visiting nurse. He went around with her sometimes, helped her. He saw a lot of sickness and blood.”
A lot of sickness and blood.
“I guess it made him want to help people.” Gunn was defensive now. “No good deed goes unpunished,” she insisted.
April’s watch told her she’d been there for seven minutes. A car horn sounded out on the street.
“Where is Bobbie?” she asked.
Gunn blew her nose again. “How should I know?”
“You know a lot about him. You must spend a fair amount of time together. He sounds like a close friend of yours.”
“I know him. He’s a good man.” Gunn sucked in her lips, sullen.
April changed the subject. “What happened to Bobbie in Vietnam?”
“Oh, he was in an advanced MASH unit. He had a lot of bad experiences.”
“People dying all around him? Missiles exploding? Drugs? What—?”
“Doctors practicing their specialties on soldiers who didn’t
“How does all this fit in, Gunn?”
“You wanted to know about Bobbie. I’m telling you about Bobbie. The Captain of his unit was ordered to take a hill. They took the hill. The Captain lost an arm. His face was burned to a crisp. They lost thirty men. The next day they were ordered to give the hill back for reasons that were never explained.”
“What about Bobbie?” Time was ticking away. April could feel him lurking out there somewhere. The story about the MASH unit didn’t ring true, but April didn’t want to challenge it.
“The new Captain had been in charge of body count—that’s the number of enemy killed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When he took charge of the unit, he started making up numbers.” She snorted. “Some place for a moral kid. Everybody high on marijuana and opium, and drunk all the time. Bobbie was having nightmares, waking up screaming. They were making up numbers of enemy dead. And this Captain was a cardiovascular surgeon. He wanted to try new techniques out on his patients whether they needed the surgery or not.
“Marine came in, just a kid from Iowa. The Captain wanted to do some real dangerous surgery Bobbie knew the kid didn’t need. He told the kid to refuse. The kid was scared but insisted the doc would never lie to him.”
Gunn stared into the deep abyss that was Bobbie Boudreau’s life in Vietnam. “It must have been terrible. The Marine died in surgery, and later that night there was a fight. One of the male nurses fragged the Captain.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know, a dirty trick, I think. Threw a live hand grenade into his tent and blew him away.”
There was a powerful old furnace in the brownstone. April felt the heat penetrating all around her. She removed her silk scarf. There was a dirty trick in Vietnam and the Captain died. A dirty trick on a ward a year ago and a patient died. A dirty trick last week and Harold Dickey died. What about Clara Treadwell?
“Gunn, did you know Ray Cowles?”
Gunn shook her head. She seemed bewildered by the question.
“Gunn, you’re going to have to tell me where Bobbie is,” April said softly.
“But Bobbie didn’t do it. He wasn’t the one. He got a bum rap. The MPs that investigated didn’t like him. He was a Catholic, a Cajun. He talked funny. They were prejudiced against him, you understand?”
April didn’t respond.
“They went to the real killer, who was crazy. They asked him what happened and he said he saw somebody French cursing the Captain after the Marine died.” Gunn’s eyes were wild now. “He killed himself, shot himself in the head.”
“Who did?”
“The real killer. There was no murder trial because there were no witnesses, but Bobbie was finished for
