smiling.
Dressed quickly. Didn’t shave, didn’t shower. More than likely there’d be a mess of shit to wade through. You got used to it. Perhaps you
Heat had been angry the past few days. Closed you up inside it like a fist. Hard to breathe. Sunday morning was cooler; the air lightened a little, the feeling that pressured storm clouds could break through everything now dissipated.
Verlaine drove slowly. Whoever had died was already dead. No point in rushing.
He felt it would rain again, that lazy, tail-end-of-summer rain that no-one took a mind to complain about, but it would come later, perhaps during the night. Perhaps while he slept. If he slept…
Away from his apartment on Carroll, heading a straight north towards South Loyola Avenue. The streets seemed vacant but for a thin scattering of humanity’s lost, and he watched them, their tentative advances, their laughing faces, their hungover redness that spread from the doorways of bars out onto the sidewalk and into the street.
He drove without thought, and somewhere near the De Montluzin Building he hung a right, and then past Loew’s State Theater. Twenty minutes, and he stood at the Loyola end of Gravier. Down here there were mimosas and hickory trees, the branches chased of bark, the remnants of their pecan yield stolen weeks before by grimy thieving hands.
Verlaine looked away leftwards, away from Gravier, through the wisteria that had clung to the walls along this street since he could remember, their pendent racemes like clusters of grape hanging purple and delicate and sweet with perfume; past the grove of mimosas, their cylindrical heads like little spikes of color through the burgeoning light, out towards Dumaine and North Claiborne, the hum of traffic just another voice in this start-of- day humidity. Down among the water oaks and honey locusts, you could hear the cicadas challenging the distant sound of children who ran and played their catch-as-catch-can games on the sidewalks through air that sat tight like a drum, like it was waiting to be breathed.
He knew where the car had been, it was evident by its absence, and strung around the missing-tooth gap were crime scene tapes fluttering in the breeze. The body was found here, some guy beaten to death with a hammer. Ops told him as much as they knew on the phone, said he should go down there and see what he could see, and once he was done he should drive over to the ME’s office and speak to Emerson, check the scene report, and then on to the County Coroner to attend the autopsy. So he looked, and he saw what he could see, and he took some shots with his camera, and he walked around the edges of the thing until he felt he’d had enough and returned to his car. He sat in the passenger side with the door open and he smoked a cigarette.
Forty minutes later, the Medical Examiner’s office on South Liberty and Cleveland, back of the Medical Center. The day had grown in stature, promised a clear azure sky before lunch was over, promised a mid-afternoon in the late eighties.
Verlaine felt his head stretching as he walked from the car, trying to stay close to the store frontages beneath the awnings and out of the sun. His shirt was glued to his back beneath a too-heavy cotton suit, his feet sweated inside his shoes, his ankles itched.
Jim Emerson, youthful despite entering his early forties, Assistant Medical Examiner and very good at it. Emerson added a certain flair and insight to what would ordinarily have been a dry and factual task. He was sensitive to people, sensitive even when they were rigored and bloated and shattered and dead.
Verlaine stood in the corridor outside Emerson’s office for a moment.
Emerson rose from his desk and reached out his hand. ‘Short time, plenty see,’ he said, and smiled. ‘You up for the trunk job?’
Verlaine nodded. ‘Seems that way.’
‘Nasty shit,’ Emerson said, and glanced to the desk. Ahead of him were three or four pages of detailed notations on a yellow legal pad.
‘A surgeon we have here,’ he went on. ‘A real surgeon.’ He looked back at Verlaine, smiled again, nodded his head back and forth in a manner that was neither a yes nor a no. He reached into his coat pocket, took out a packet of bad-smelling Mexican cigarettes and lit one.
‘You looked at the body yet?’ he asked Verlaine. ‘We sent it over to the coroner a couple of hours ago.’
Verlaine shook his head. ‘I’m going there in a little while.’
Emerson nodded matter-of-factly. ‘Well, sure as shit it’ll spoil your Sunday lunch.’ He returned to sit at his desk and looked over his own notes. ‘It’s interesting.’
‘How so?’
Emerson shrugged. ‘The car maybe. The thing with the heart.’
‘The car?’
‘A ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser. That’s over at one of the lock-ups. Helluva car.’
‘And the vic was in the trunk, right?’
‘What was left of him, yes.’
‘They got an ID?’ Verlaine asked.
Emerson shook his head. ‘That’s your territory.’
‘So what can you tell me?’ Verlaine reached for a chair against the wall, dragged it close to the desk and sat down.
‘Guy got the living hell knocked out of him. Smashed him up with a hammer and cut his freakin’ heart out… like the betrayal thing, right?’
‘That’s just rumor. That’s a rumor based on one case back in ’68.’
‘One case?’
‘Ricki Dvore. You know about that one?’
Emerson shook his head.
‘Ricki Dvore was a hustler, a druggist, a pimp, everything. He shipped liquor back and forth out of Orleans with his own trucks, stuff that was stilled someplace out beyond St Bernard… place has grown since then though. You know Evangeline, down south along Lake Borgne?’
Emerson nodded.
‘Stilled the stuff down there and brought it in in trucks, regular-looking artics with tanks inside the bodies. He gypped some dealer, someone from one of those crazy families down there, and one by one his wife, his kids, his cousins, they were all beaten on somehow. Three-year-old daughter lost a finger. They sent it to Dvore and he just kept on screwing up. Eventually they dragged him from his truck one night, cut his heart out and sent it to his wife. Cops had Christ knows how many people answering up for that, more crank calls, more confessions than anything I’ve ever heard of. They didn’t have a hope; case folded within a fortnight and stayed that way. They never found Dvore’s body – weighted down and sunk in a bayou someplace I’m sure. They just had his heart. That’s where the whole thing about betrayal and cutting out people’s hearts came from. It’s just a story.’
‘Well, whoever the hell did this, he left the heart inside the chest.’
‘Seems to me we go with the car,’ Verlaine said. ‘The car is good, strong. Maybe it’s a red herring, something so out of character it’s designed to throw the whole pitch of the invest, but it’s such a big part I somehow doubt it. Someone wants to throw the course they do something small, something at the scene, some minor fact that’s so minor only an expert would recognize it. The guys who do that kind of thing are smart enough to realize that the people after them are just as smart as they are.’
Emerson nodded. ‘You go down to the coroner’s office and take a look yourself. I’ll get this typed up and file it.’
Verlaine rose from the chair. He set it back against the wall.
He shook Emerson’s hand and turned to leave.
‘Keep me posted on this,’ Emerson said as an afterthought.
Verlaine turned back, nodded. ‘I’ll send you an e-mail.’
‘Wiseass.’
Verlaine pushed through the door and made his way down the corridor.
