refilling the pretzel dishes while humming “Achy-Breaky Heart.”
Alex thought about how he'd alienated Dr. Desinor; he thought about how he'd alienated others recently, including, to some degree, his partner, Ben, whom he hadn't wanted to trust with the truth about his nightmares- and now he knew why he'd waited so long to even mention them.
“ See the Department shrink,” Ben had advised.
He had told Ben to go to hell, so Ben, being the wise guy that he was, took his partner's problems to Jessica Coran!
Christ, everything was scfewed around. He thought about pulling himself off the Hearts case, putting in for some time off, getting the hell out of New Orleans altogether, taking his father up on the offer of a fishing expedition, renting a house boat maybe, lying in the sun for days on end.
“ Where would you go if you did?” Ben had earlier asked.
“ Don't know… maybe the peninsula. Anyplace with lots of water, sand, sun, someplace where they've got only one cop, and he rides a bicycle.”
“ No cops, huh?”
“ No cops.”
“ You trying to tell me something, pard?”
“ No cops.”
Maybe the notion wasn't so wild after all, he now thought.
Just then Big Ben rushed into the bar, his eyes darting in every direction until he nailed his partner at the phone, where he was about to dial his father, make plans. “We got a call, Alex. Could be another vie.”
“ Oh, Christ… where? “East Canal Street apartment, just above Robert E. Lee Boulevard.”
“ Indoors, you mean?”
“ Indoors.”
“ Thank God for small favors. The usual M.O.?”
“ That's the message received, yeah.”
“ Better get the hell over there.”
“ I brought the squad around.”
Stubby, watching and listening from behind the bar, shouted to the retreating figures as they barged out, “See ya later, fellas. Don't go wearin' your hearts on your sleeves.”
22
Man with the head, and woman with the heart.
Sincebaugh and deYampert uneasily stepped into a completely new yet familiar, expected nightmare at 34 East Canal Street, which was in an older section of the city where unkempt, weedy courtyards dominated along with boarded-up windows and going-out-of-business signs. The streets here were dirty and narrow, but quaint with cobblestone pathways. Here the old stone buildings had French windows that cranked by hand and hung out over the street, black wrought-iron gates in sad need of repair about each front and rusted-out terraces leaning out overhead. Sincebaugh thought that while it was not the loveliest area in the city, neither was it the most squalid. The racial mix here was predominantly black, Cajun and Spanish, and if you blinked you might see the ghost of a Conquistador standing in one of the dark courtyards.
Neighbors had heard nothing, seen nothing. The entire scene reminded Sincebaugh of the Murders in the Rue Morgue, down to the dapper little man with mustache and suspenders who called himself the superintendent and who had discovered the body when, after two days, he had not seen Miss Marie Dumond, a light-skinned mulatto/Cajun, in or out of the building. When he'd begun to notice a foul odor coming from within, he'd used his pass key and found the blood-spattered scene. Even then, perhaps due to the hysteria that overtook him, he still had no clue as to the true nature of his tenant.
Lying half on, half off the bed was a young man. Mademoiselle Dumond was no more a woman than deYampert, although he was far prettier and frailer. The corpse was a man whose fine features and torn underclothes marked him as extremely interested in his own feminine side: He was a cross-dresser.
Eyes closed in what seemed a peaceful sleep were at horrid odds with the mutilation played out over his body. The chest was splayed open as if some enormous bird of prey had settled atop him and begun ripping with talons, painting the bedclothes and walls with his blood. In fact, there was a message scrawled across one wall in blood, presumably in the victim's blood, presumably penned by the killer-a sure departure from the monster's earlier M.O. as he'd not left anything of himself behind before, save the now-familiar calling card.
The two cops stared at the blood message for some time before turning away, each recalling how the beheaded victim of two days before had turned out to be a copycat killing. Over the bedposts the letters, snaking trails of dripping blood, formed three words:
Queer of Heart
This was an absolute departure for the usually reserved, cautious killer, sending a warning signal that this again could be the work of a fiendish copycat killer, another mooncalf altogether. But peeking out from the victim's rib cage, deep in the heart cavity where the large red organ was missing, was the familiar doily card displaying a bloodied, fouled queen of hearts. It seemed to leer up at them in a mocking fashion as if miming a single word: Gotcha.
“ I thought you said she… he… was a woman?” Ben teasingly asked the superintendent, desperately seeking a way to lighten the moment when the super had crept in behind them, curious as a muskrat and about to lose his lunch.
The man was dumbfounded. “But she… she was a woman.”
“ Not anymore,” Ben said in his driest tone as he removed the bloodied sheet farther down the torso to reveal the young man's severed private parts.
“ Oh… my dearLordy God' n Heaven 'bove Jesus,” moaned the super.
“ Don't need to ask if the husband did it, do we?” Sincebaugh said to Ben, eliciting a belly laugh from his partner, further disturbing the superintendent. Others from the building had begun to jam the doorway, so Alex shouted for the uniformed officer there to keep everyone out.
“ Let's start the routine, Ben,” Alex said.
Both men knew the importance of the appearance of dedicated police work, even if they also knew that usually nothing came of the measures they took at the scene. Ben dispatched two uniformed officers to do a neighborhood search for any discarded knife or hatchet that might have been carelessly tossed away by the killer- doubtful since this had not occurred in any of the previous Queen of Hearts killings. This in essence meant the uniformed cops had to sift through trash cans and in sewer grates, a task few but rookies threw themselves into.
A second pair of uniforms were sent out to canvass the building, asking questions about the deceased and his relationships to others. Since he was a transvestite, Alex held out little hope that others in the building had much to do with him or that he actually had a family that kept in touch. Later, after all the canvassing, Ben and Alex would ask the officers who did the initial legwork if they had spoken to anyone who had seemed unusually rattled or nervous, or seemed to have known more about the victim's personal habits than the super obviously did. Such steps would build public confidence in the Department, if nothing else, to show that they were moving on the case.
Interviewing witnesses was a contradiction in terms on such a closed-door homicide as this, an oxymoron. If you interviewed a witness in a case of out-and-out brutal murder carried out in such a cold-blooded, calculated fashion behind closed doors or in a dark place, you were in effect interviewing the killer or killers, the only witness being the killer. Still, someone might have heard something, might have seen a stranger in the hallway, on the front doorstep. Dusting for prints would likely reveal nothing useful; even if a usable print were found, if it didn't match one on file with the Department or the FBI, it remained useless until an arrest match was made. Still, if a print were
