“A buddy from high school. He’s nineteen, never had a piece of pussy in his life. I think he might be a fag. I thought if I found him a girl I could turn him around.”
“So you were trying to cure your friend’s homosexuality,” Gaudet said, “by renting him a disease-ridden prostitute.”
Deshotels nodded, the irony apparently lost on him.
“Tell me about the gun,” Murphy said.
Deshotels stared down at his hands as he picked at the chipped Formica tabletop. “It’s just for protection. You know my neighborhood. Fucking niggers-” He jerked his face up at Gaudet, eyes wide with terror.
Gaudet shrugged. “I’m half white. I don’t much care for niggers either.”
Deshotels relaxed. “I bought it a while back, sometime after Doreen had the baby.”
“From who?” Murphy said.
“I got it off the street, paid some… some black dude fifty bucks for it.”
“Did you find your potentially gay friend a prostitute?” Gaudet asked.
Deshotels shrugged. “He whooped it up while we were riding around, even hollered at one skank, but in the end he chickened out, even though I offered to pay for it.”
“He must be a close friend,” Gaudet said.
Deshotels shrugged. “We were friends in school, been tight ever since.”
“You don’t mind that maybe he’s a fudgepacker?” Gaudet said. “Maybe you swing that way a little bit yourself.”
“Fuck that.” Deshotels shook his head. “I like pussy.”
“Tell me about the skank,” Murphy said.
“She was just a whore, man.”
“Where was she?”
“On Tulane.”
“Where on Tulane?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think,” Murphy said. “Think hard.”
Gaudet rocked forward in his chair.
Deshotels leaned away. “Next to criminal court.”
Murphy nodded in appreciation. “What did she look like?”
After another glance at Gaudet, Deshotels said, “Just a black whore, big tits, skirt up to her ass, heels.”
“So why didn’t you stop and talk to her,” Gaudet said, “if you were looking for a whore for your friend?”
Deshotels shrugged.
Gaudet leaned closer. “You said your friend hollered at her, right?”
“I told you, he wasn’t serious about it.”
“You mentioned the girl’s skirt,” Murphy said. “What color was it?”
“I don’t know. Some dark color. Black, maybe.”
“Was she short or tall?”
Deshotels’s eyes darted up and to his left.
A good sign, Murphy thought. Neurolinguistic programmers would say the kid was trying to recall facts, not make something up.
“I’d say she was tall,” Deshotels said, “definitely taller than the dude.”
“What dude?” Murphy felt his pulse quicken.
“She was standing next to some loser.”
The detectives looked at each other. Deshotels’s description of the prostitute matched the victim, and he had seen someone with her around the time the coroner estimated she had been killed. You didn’t have to be Sherlock fucking Holmes to figure out that this half-brain-dead meth freak might have gotten a look at the serial killer.
Murphy worked to keep his voice neutral. “Tell me about the guy she was with.”
Deshotels waved his hand in the air. He was smiling. “Fuck you, man. You’re trying to bait me with that gay shit again? I wasn’t looking at the dude. I was looking at the whore.”
“Don’t make me hit you again,” Gaudet said.
Deshotels quit smiling.
“What did he look like?” Murphy said.
Deshotels rolled his eyes. “He was an old dude, man, little shorter than she was.”
“How old?”
“Had to be like thirty-five, forty.”
“Look at me, Jonathan,” Murphy said. “I’m thirty-eight. Detective Gaudet is…”
“Thirty-five,” Gaudet said.
“Did the guy look younger than us, older than us, or about the same as us?”
Deshotels fidgeted in his chair.
Murphy realized they were probably taxing his mental capacity. “This is important, Jonathan.”
Deshotels threw his arms down on the table. “Younger, maybe. Not much, though. I’d say like around thirty.”
“Black or white?”
“White.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Man, I wasn’t paying attention to all that. I told you, I was looking to hook up my boy with some pussy.”
“Did you see his car?” Gaudet said.
“I seen lots of cars, motherfucker. It was a-”
Gaudet rocketed out of his chair and grabbed Deshotels by the throat. “What did you call me, you tweaked- out little cocksucker?”
As Gaudet squeezed, Deshotels’s face turned red and his eyes bugged out.
“Nothing, nothing,” the kid squeaked. “I’m sorry.”
The big detective held him for a few more seconds, then shoved him backward against his chair. “Next time you ‘motherfuck’ me, you’ll leave here in a goddamn ambulance. Understand?”
Deshotels clutched his throat with both hands as he gasped for air.
Gaudet sat down. “I said, do you understand.”
The kid nodded.
“Did you see the guy’s car?” Murphy asked.
Deshotels shook his head. When he spoke his voice cracked. “Guy looked like a dweeb. Lawrence yelled something at him, calling him a loser or something. I didn’t see his car.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“I don’t think so. I just saw him for a second, going past at like sixty.”
Gaudet eased his upper body forward across the table. “Think hard. Do you remember anything else about him that could help us identify him?”
Already pressed up against the back of his chair, Deshotels was as far away from Gaudet as he could get, but still he tried to put an extra couple of inches of space between them. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” Gaudet’s question came out as a growl, low and menacing.
“That’s all I know… sir.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Friday, July 27, 8:05 AM
Murphy barged into Captain Donovan’s office. “We have a witness and a partial description of the serial killer,” he said.
The captain lumbered to his feet. For once he didn’t yell. He seemed tired. “If I hear the term serial killer
