There was an explosion in the media, the likes of which had never been seen before in New Orleans. It started the morning after the Exposition Boulevard Murder. The newspaper ran an electrifying headline that Saturday morning which read: Co-ed Mutilated In Audubon Park. Below the headline was a college yearbook picture of Lynette. It was the kind of neat headline that grabbed your attention. It was the worst news article I’ve ever read.
Mark saved it for me. He gave it to me at the office on the Monday morning after the murder. The article told a story of how a ‘terror-filled young woman’ was chased through the park as she vainly attempted to get home from a date. It told of how the killer had attacked her from behind and had slashed her back with a ‘huge butcher knife’ and then raped her. Then it made up the rest.
It told of how a weeping boyfriend had found her and called the police and how an exhaustive search of the park had surfaced no clues, and how the killer was still at large, ‘Lurking in the city’s shadows’. The article ended with the information that the police were holding Lynette’s boyfriend for questioning.
“Where do they come up with this shit?” I asked Mark.
“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” Mark responded, “Check out the article on page two.”
I turned the page and there was a half-page layout on Lynette Anne Louvier, daughter of one of the leading families of New Orleans. The article had more college pictures of Lynette, with statements from classmates and friends and one interesting old neighbor who had heard howling at the time of the murder.
“You see that old bitch?” Mark pointed to the picture of the old-lady neighbor. “I woke her up on my canvass, she didn’t hear shit, she’s seen too many fuckin’ werewolf movies.”
Over the space of one weekend, the media had grabbed the city by the throat and choked it with gut-wrenching headlines. Not to be outdone, the television stations paraded somber anchor-person preaching about the plight of the city. And there were mini-cam reports from Audubon Park and Exposition Boulevard, where equally concerned reporters told and retold the grisly details of the murder, each time adding nothing to the story except misinformation.
The reports had an immediate effect on New Orleans. The City That Care Forgot did not suddenly start caring, it just went ballistic with worry, gripped in a vise of fear. The ever present, dutiful media played it to the hilt. They had a hot story, one of the hottest ever, and they milked it for all it was worth.
One enterprising television station sought out the opinion of the common person. On Monday morning, a little blue-haired lady was interviewed while leaving the D. H. Holmes Department Store on Canal Street. Mark and I watched her on the TV in Mason’s office. We watched the woman tremble as she was interviewed by a pushy reporter.
“What do you think about the murder?” The reporter asked the blue-haired woman.
“Murder?”
“The co-ed mutilation murder, tell me, are you afraid to shop downtown?”
The old lady’s bulging eyes blinked in the ogle-eyed camera lens as she answered through quivering lips, “Oh, yes, terrified.”
It was a public service. The public had right to know. So with painstaking detail, the television stations reminded each and every woman in New Orleans that they might be next, that they were not safe in their own city, in their own homes – and the only way to learn more about this was to stay tuned for details following the next commercial. And then some cutie-looking girl came on the air, dressed in tight white shorts to sell the latest tampon product. Television was about as subtle as gonorrhea. While the girl in the white shorts was telling us that her tampon was so comfortable, the camera zoomed in on her ass and crotch as she climbed a tree, to show us that not only was the fucking tampon comfortable, nothing leaked. I’m not fuckin’ kidding. That was the commercial.
Another television station made a personal plea to the killer to turn himself in and they would guarantee he would be treated fairly. Which meant that if he turned himself in to the police, he was in fucking trouble.
Another station hired a psychic, and a different station – not to be outdone – hired a retired police captain from Las Vegas to aid in the search for the killer. He showed up at the New Orleans International Airport on Sunday evening in a polyester leisure suit and held a press conference next to the baggage-claim area.
“What we need here is a coordinated effort, to bring the local jurisdictions together and get to the root of the problem.” The root of the fucking problem was the fucking maniac.
But the topper came from the newspaper again. They didn’t want to be outdone and so they had to package their product in a neat, catchy format. They gave the killer a name. In the Monday morning paper they called him The Slasher and in an instant, the mother fucker had a moniker to rival Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Hillside Strangler, and all the other scumbags who preceded him into infamous stardom. He had a catchy name and a secret identity that all famous villains had since Doctor Doom fought the Fantastic Four and Doctor Octopus tangled with Spider Man.
The Slasher, catchy nickname. Only he wasn’t a slasher. He was a fucking stabber. He was a plunger of knives. But I guess calling him The Plunger didn’t have the proper romantic flair, nor did it stir up the frenzied fear that the word Slasher created.
That sensational headline brought forth an immediate result. On that same Monday following the Exposition Boulevard murder, the mayor called a press conference to announce the formation of a Task Force. We watched the conference on the twelve o’clock news in Mason’s office. It looked like a fucking convention of assholes all patting themselves on the back and pontificating about how they were going to end this ‘crime wave’.
Headed by an Assistant Chief of Police, with functional leadership from our beloved Lt. Gironde of Homicide, the Task Force was assembled with much fanfare. Detectives where to be taken from each section of the Bureau and combined with follow-up officers from every district and officers on loan from the Harbor Police, the Levee-Board Police, the Mississippi River Bridge Police, not to mention the special agents from the FBI, who pranced around like well-dressed Yankees at a gathering of carpet-baggers.
Men who never left off the ‘g’ at the end of fucking. Men who never actually said, “Fucking.” They said, “Freaking.”
•
The only break Mark and I had in the entire month of March was when Mason turned off that television and announced that he was giving Boudreaux to the Task Force. “Let Boudreaux fuck them up a while,” Mason explained as he called Snowood in from the squad room.
Mason’s lean jaw cut a mean profile as he spoke. “Close the door,” he told Snowood as he entered. We all sat and waited for Mason, who looked more pissed off than I’ve ever seen him. “You guys are still the case officers. You work your cases and let the goddamn Task Force run around like a fucking circus,” Mason explained as he pointed his index finger at Mark. “I’ll run interference for you. We’ll let those idiots run down all the bogus leads.” He started rubbing his eyes very hard and then added, “With all this publicity, we’re gonna get swamped with a shitload of bullshit leads, we’ll feed it to the Force, let them run down the cuckoos.”
It was agreed. And so we took out our case notes and went over the details of Dauphine Street and Exposition Boulevard. Mark and I made up another list of what we would handle next and Paul sat eagerly at the edge of his folding chair. “I’ll be an assisting fool,” Paul said. “Just let me know what I gotta do.”
“Let’s hope that’s all you gotta do is assist,” Mason finished up. “If our killer strikes again, she’s yours, Country-Ass.”
•
When the killings first started, after the butchery on Dauphine Street and Bayou St. John, all I wanted was to get it over with, to stop him. I didn’t care if a railroad detective caught him, or even a goddamn school-crossing guard, so long as it all stopped. But that was until Lynette, until they assembled that damn Task Force. It was then that I knew I wanted him personally. I didn’t want anyone else beating me to him, unless it was my padna.
I went over my case notes on Exposition Boulevard carefully as I laid out a game plan. I had already checked out the classmates and neighbors and was more than halfway through the license plate numbers. I spent Monday evening at home with more coffee, carefully going over all the license plate numbers from all thee murders, to make sure no care had been around more than once. Then I went over Lynette’s address book carefully. I compiled a list of people I would talk to. I would personally interview everyone on the list. No phone interview would do, I wanted to talk to them in person, face to face. Then I would take on the people whose names were registered to the cares parked around Audubon Park on the night of the murder.
Before I turned in at three in the morning, I made note of my next step further down the line. I would have to get the records of all students and employees at Loyola and Tulane Universities.
•
We caught another Signal Thirty on Tuesday afternoon. A freshly buried body was found at a work-site along the river front in the Ninth Ward. Mark and I assisted Snowood at the scene.
The Ninth Ward was on the downtown side of the French Quarter, beyond the old Creole Faubourg Marigny and the lower class residential area known as Bywater. The body was found at a construction site next to the Industrial Canal, where a construction crew was driving pilings. The foreman found the body in a shallow grave. He was talking to a couple of uniformed officers when we pulled up.
I took a look at the body as it lay on its back, its arms and legs outstretched like a manikin in a permanent sitting position. It looked just like the bodies in Vietnam. In fact, the body was Vietnamese. I looked around at the work crew leaning against one of the warehouses, and most of them were Vietnamese.
“Remind you of anything?” Mark asked with a smirk on his face.
I looked over at the large frightened eyes of the workers and I was back in Bien Hua again, with Oriental eyes staring at me and Vietnamese jabbering in my ears as a couple of the workers started talking to Snowood.
“What the fuck they yakking about?” Mark asked me.
“I don’t fuckin’ know. All I learned in Nam was how to get home,” I answered, summing up my tour in one sentence.
We watched Snowood or a minute before Mark started laughing. “Look at Country-Ass over there.” Mark pointed to Paul, who stood towering above a shitload of yellow faces all jabbering at once. Mark’s laughter turned into a roar as he continued looking at Snowood. “You sure look fuckin’ silly!” Mark yelled to him.
Snowood glared at us and spit a wad of brown shit over the heads of the Vietnamese. “You boys know how much I hate fuckin’ foreigners!” he yelled back.
Mark was holding his sides. “I know.” Mark lasted another ten minutes, then took off and left me with Snowood who was glad to see him leave.
“Sometimes that boy is a fuckin’ pain,” Paul said as Mark drove off.
So we spent the entire day with the Vietnamese and with the foreman, who was not amused at all. I took names and addresses and as much information about the Southeast Asians as I could get, while Paul processed the scene. We waited around for an interpreter from Catholic Charities to arrive, but when the interpreter hadn’t shown up by six o’clock, Paul and I dismissed everyone. Then we went and got a beer in a quiet, run-down dive on Urquhart Street.
I watched Paul drink his beer and spit out his brown shit simultaneously. “How the fuck you do that?” I had to ask.
“It’s all in the lips,” Paul answered. “You just keep the tobacco between your lip and gum and let the beer go down the throat. It’s easy. Wanna try?”
“Fuck no.”
“You should, make a different man outta ya.”
“Fuck you.”
Paul smiled that smart-ass cowboy smirk of his and leaned back in his chair. “I can drink and eat with it in and never fuck up,” he claimed.
“Eat pussy with it?” I asked.
“Sure. That’s how I got my wife to marry me. You ain’t never ate pussy until you do it with a pinch between your cheek and gum.”
“You ever listen to yourself?” I asked. “You sound just like a red-neck on steroids.”
“I know,” Paul agreed, “but I’m happy. I got me a good job, a good-looking wife and a kid looks like Huckleberry Finn.” He took out his wallet and showed me pictures of his pretty bland wife and his carrot-headed son.
“He don’t look like Huck Finn,” I told Paul. “He looks like Tom Sawyer.”
Old Snowood laughed so hard he mixed up his beer and brown shit and had to spit it all out.
•
When I got home that night, my phone was ringing. It was Fat Phil at the Bureau. “Have you solved it yet?” he asked me.
“Fuck you.”
Phil cackled. “You better be nice to me, I got a message for you.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Give it to me.”
“Say ‘please’,” Phil teased.
“Fuck you, Phil.”
“Okay, a girl named Lizette called you, said you know her number.” Phil cackled again. “Tell me, is she a good lay?”
“About as good as your daughter,” I answered.
“That ain’t funny.“
I hung up on the Fuck-head and put on some coffee before calling Lizette. She answered after the first ring.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she began, “but I would like to see you. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“Tonight?” I asked.
“If it’s convenient.”
I had too many beers and not enough to eat, but what else was new?
“Sure,” I said, “You name it.”
“Can you meet me at the Camellia Grill at ten o’clock?”
“Sure.”
“Will you wait for me out front?” she asked.
“Sure.”
That gave me time for a quick shower and time enough to pump some coffee in me and return to human form.
The Camellia Grill was a popular restaurant because it had good food and great service and because it stayed open late. It occupied a one-story white wooden building on Carrollton Avenue, a half-block up from St. Charles Avenue. It had four large ante-bellum columns in front, a long grill inside with a W-shaped counter that ran the length of the place, and the sharpest waiters in the city. It was an old fashioned grill where you had to sit on stools at the counter. There were no tables. It was a hangout for college students, uptown professionals and their fashion-conscious wives, and debutantes from the finest families of the city. It was also a hangout for Second District patrolmen and an occasional cop from the Sixth District. When I rode with Stan, we dropped by the grill often, even if it wasn’t in our district. It had the some of the best food that you could get late at night in New Orleans.
It was raining when I pulled up at the grill. I waited out front, leaned against one of the columns and watched the cars hiss by on wet Carrollton Avenue. It just stopped raining as Lizette pulled up in a white BMW at about ten after. She drove by and looked for me, nodded when she saw me, then parked. I walked over to her car. As she climbed out, she apologized for making me wait.
“I wanted to make sure you were here before I got out.” I understood.
We sat at the far end of the counter on the last two stools, away from the other people. A neat, tall black waiter walked up, placed menus and settings in front of us. “How are you tonight, Miss Louvier?” the waiter asked Lizette. There was a big smile on his face.
“Fine, Alfred,” she answered. “And how are you?”
“Just fine, ma’am.” Alfred responded. “Can I get y’all anything right away.”
“Coffee,” Lizette said. Alfred stepped away still smiling.
She wore that same perfume, the one that lingered in my senses for hours after I’d left her Sunday night. Eerie, because it wasn’t a strong scent but it stayed with me. I looked at her as she sat silently on her stool. Under the bright fluorescent lighting in the grill, Lizette’s face was white and smooth. Each time I saw her, I was amazed at how pretty she really was. She had a look about her, a glamour. Even in a baggy shirt and blue jean like tonight, she looked glamorous. Maybe it was the way she held her head or the smooth, easy way she walked, talked.
I looked down at her hands and could see they were shaking. She looked back at me with frightened, misty eyes. She shrugged and wiped the wetness from her eyes with a Kleenex and explained, “Alfred must not read the newspapers, he calls me ‘Miss Louvier’ because he can’t tell Lynette and me apart.” She almost lost it there for a moment. She choked on the last words, but hung in there and composed herself.
I thought to myself that Alfred must live on Mars. I looked outside as the rain returned, harder, pounding on the sidewalk and against the big front windows of the grill.
Alfred returned with tow coffees. “Can I get ya’ll something else?” he inquired.
I looked back at Lizette and asked, “Would you like something to eat?”
She shook her head.
“Well,” I said, “would you mind if I ate? I haven’t eaten.”
“No.”
So I ordered a shrimp po-boy.
Lizette watched Alfred leave to get the order. She sat still and said nothing. I stared at her pouting lips, at the deep red lipstick on those serious lips. After a while she spoke. “I called you because I have to know how the investigation is progressing.” Before I could answer she added, “I want to know exactly what you’ve done. I have to know.” She looked back at me with those familiar sad eyes.
“Well, to start with, I’ve checked out Lynette’s classmates and all your neighbors and come up with a big zero. Nobody knows nothing, anything,” I corrected myself and continued, “I’m about halfway through the list of people whose cars were parked in the area, “
“The what?” she cut in.
“We wrote down all the license numbers from all the cars parked in the area, in case someone saw something, or in case the killer left his car behind. I’m comparing the numbers with the list of all the cars from the two previous cases, in case a car was at more than one scene, still zero so far.”
“There were two previous cases?” she asked.
That’s right, she had been out of town. “Yes, there was one on Dauphine Street and one at Bayou St. John. We’re working on all three.”
“Are you staking out the killer?” she asked.
“No. The new Task Fore is gonna handle that.” Then I explained about the Task Force and how I was still the case officer on her sister’s case.
She continued to stare at me. “What about Lynette’s address book?” she asked.
“None of the names in the book hook up to any of the license registrations,” I explained. “I’ve gone through the book, I’ve got some interviews to do.”
“And what else are you doing?”
“Then I’ll go through everyone at Loyola, and then Tulane.”
She looked away for a moment and asked, “You mean there’s nothing so far?”
I didn’t answer. I sat there with the words ‘Detective Useless’ bouncing around in my head. I felt my stomach knotting up. I listened to the pounding rain outside as the silence grew.
“I’m sorry to bother you like this,” she said finally. “I know this is your job, but I have to do something, I have to do something,” she explained. “I have to get involved. Is there any way you can keep me advised of what’s going on? I have to know.”
I nodded before I answered, “Sure. I’ll let you know.”
“I mean I want you to tell me everything,” she repeated. “I’ve got to know.” She looked away again and faced the blank wall next to her for a moment before adding, “I’ll do anything to catch him.”
“So will I, and not because it’s my job either,” I went on. “You don’t know me, but I don’t give up. I’ll never stop, never, until I get him. I don’t care how long it takes or what it takes. I’m gonna get him. Period.”
She turned back to me and asked, “But will he get off, I means in the courts?”
“I don’t know. I just hope he makes the fatal error of having something in his hand when I catch him, anything in his hand,” I said coolly, “because I’ll just blow his brains out. Period.”
Those topaz eyes look into mine.
“That’s not bravado. Every cop on this case will kill him if they get the chance.”
Alfred picked that moment to step up with my shrimp sandwich and a bottle of red-hot Louisiana Tabasco sauce. “More coffee?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered and looked back at Lizette after Alfred left. Her eyes seemed even bigger as she stared at me. The familiar knot in my stomach took another twist. I looked away and said, “I’m sorry about that ‘brains’ stuff.”
“Don’t be sorry. That’s exactly what I want you to do.” She continued staring at me. “Just promise me you’ll let me know everything that happens.”
“I’ll call you every night,” I said.
She took out a piece of paper and wrote down a phone number on it. “This is my number in my room, call me there.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll call you every night.”
“Promise?”
“I’ve already told you about the bra thing, didn’t I?”
She nodded and took her first sip of coffee. The rain continued to pound as I started in on the po-boy.
“Don’t you have a home to eat at?” Lizette asked in a voice that had lost its earlier sadness.
“Not since my third wife left me.”
“What?”
“Just kidding.”
Lizette almost smiled. And for the first time since I’d known the girl, we spent several quiet, peaceful minutes together, with the sound of the rain in the background and my stomach slowly unwinding as I fed it shrimp and French bread. Fuck the Tabasco.
•
We waited for the rain to subside and then started for the door. A unformed cop stepped in the doorway and a familiar face looked over at me.
“Hey you!” the cop yelled, pointing his finger at me. Every eye in the place followed the finger. “Didn’t I tell you to stay outta here!”
All I could do was shake my head as he took a menacing step forward, still pointing at me, “Didn’t I tell you the next time I catch you playing with yourself, you’re going to jail?”
After I managed to get Lizette outside, I didn’t look back. I just continued to shake my head.
Lizette took a reluctant step away from the grill and asked, “Who was that policeman?”
“That was Stan, Officer Stanley Smith of the Sixth District, my old partner.”
Lizette stopped walking. I turned back to her. “That’s his way of, that’s just his way.” I shrugged.
She looked at me with those big gold eyes as her face broke into a broad grin. Then she started giggling and could not hold back the laughter.
“That’s hysterical,” she cried. “Boy, did he ever get you!”
Her laughter was contagious. “That’s the story of my life.” I let the laughter out and explained, “He’s been doing that to me ever since I was a rookie.”
Lizette laughed long and hard and had to lean on the BMW for a while before she was finally able to control herself. “Did you see the people’s faces?” she asked. I kept laughing.
Before she climbed into her car, she made me promise again to call her the next night.
“I’ll follow you,” I said and I jumped into my own car and followed her home. I pulled up behind her and waited until she went inside the mansion. Then I headed straight back for the grill, but Stan was gone, the son of a bitch.
So I went home, packed it in for the night. But sleep would not come, so I picked up the phone and called Jessica. I needed to talk to her, needed to hear her familiar voice, needed to feel her there with me. I wanted to touch her, to run my fingers over her naked body, to feel the softness of her breasts and the hardness of her nipples and the warmth of her soft pubic hair. I needed to feel the tightness fade away from my thighs. And I wanted more – I wanted to hold her an talk to her an have her there when I woke up.
But all I felt was a sinking feeling in my chest as I lay there in the darkness, the unanswered ringing in my ear. I tell you, the empty nights have a way of piling up. Each night alone magnified what was missing. Each night alone, a little of what Jessica and I had, faded.
•
“I thought we were on the goddamn evening watch,” Mark complained as he tossed another paper clip into the empty typewriter on his desk. No wonder he could never get the typewriter to work.
“We are,” I assured him, “until tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t remind me,” he moaned.
I continued. “Maybe our killer will turn himself in.”
Mark ignored me.
Mason entered the squad room and walked over to my desk where I was going over my notes from Exposition Boulevard. He dropped a set of car keys on my notes. “Your car’s ready,” Mason announced as he tuned and headed back for his office. From over his shoulder he added, “Now you don’t have to go everywhere with Landucci anymore.”
“Who?”
Mason stopped outside his door and tuned back, “You mean you don’t know?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Mason nodded in Mark’s direction. “His name isn’t Land, it’s Landucci. They changed it. Must have been afraid of the Mafia or something.” Mason turned again and went back into his office.
I looked over at my partner. “I knew you were a wop, but I didn’t know, Landucci, that’s a nice, wop name.”
“My grandfather changed it.” Mark yawned and turned to look out the window. “I prefer Landucci actually. Maybe I’ll change it back. Marco Landucci has a nice ring to it.”
“Just like Dino LaStanza,” I agreed. I glanced over at Mark for a moment and an old cliché ran through my mind, you learn something new every day.
“Why am I here in the morning?” Mark complained again. “My wife actually told me she missed me this morning. I never thought she’d ever say that!”
Snowood was supposed to call me after the autopsy of the Vietnamese victim, but he hadn’t. So I continued working on my notes until Mark finally decided where we’d go to lunch.
On our way out of the Bureau we ran into Snowood by the elevator. He was mad as hell. “Goddamn fuckin’ gooks!” he screamed as he left the elevator and stormed into the office. We followed him and watched as he started to throw thing around.
“So what happened?” I had to ask.
“It was a natural, a goddamn, rotten-assed, fuckin’ natural death!” Paul roared. “The mother fucker died of a coronary,” he huffed and kicked over his trash can. “Two whole days wasted on fuckin’ gooks!” he yelled as Mason came out and stuck his chiseled chin into the conversation.
Mason took a puff from his cigarette and muttered from behind a cloud of smoke, “Tell me about it.”
It was then I noticed a nice-sized brown stain on Paul’s chest as he tried to calm himself and explain what happened at the same time. “It was a fuckin’ natural,” he repeated as he sat heavily in his chair. He glanced down at his chest and moaned, “Looked, I spit all over myself, fuckin’ gooks.” He glanced around at us and couldn’t stop a grin from creeping across his face.
“I look real fuckin’ silly, don’t I?”
“No difference,” Mark responded.
“Yeah.” Snowood looked over at Mason and told us, “The gook had a coronary and after three solid hours with that moron interpreter from the Catholic Charities, I learned that they just buried him, right where he fell.”
“Just like Nam,” I added.
Paul nodded. “That’s what they’ve always done. They fall over and die and they bury ‘em right where they fall. Goddamn Foreigners!”
I waited for Paul to look my way. “They aren’t gooks. Koreans are gooks. Vietnamese are zipper-heads or just zips.”
•
We followed the adventures of the Task Force with great curiosity as they plodded along. We watched them parade around the Detective Bureau during the day shift, cluttering up the place with Federal Agents and other alleged detectives.
The FBI agents busied themselves compiling a psychological profile of the killer. The profile was gobbled up by a hungry media that was ravenous for anything. It was curious how the FBI leaked the profile to the media in bits and pieces. It took them a week to come to the same conclusion Mason had come to right after Bayou St. John. The killer was an Abnormal Sex Killer. The media went bananas.
The Task Force continued to plod along, plunging headlong after every lead. They stumbled around like a blind man at Mardi Gras, bumping into everything and coming up with a big blank. Mason kept a close eye on their daily reports in case something of real value surfaced. But nothing did.
It didn’t take long for Mason to point out that the Task Force was actually a blessing. They took some of the pressure off us. They set up patrols, put a shitload of men on the street every night, freeing us from long surveillances so that Mark and I could be selective in our follow-up investigations. They were even kind enough to answer all the kook calls that inundated Headquarters after the recent publicity. People began turning in their friends and neighbors and even husbands, “My husband didn’t come home the night that girl was killed in Audubon Park.” – “My neighbor sneaks out late at night and he’s got a dog. I heard Son of Sam had a dong.” – “I know my cousin is the killer because his eyes are crossed now and they weren’t until that girl got killed.”
But the most valuable service the Task Force did for us was decoying the media. In the Task Force and the media’s zest for publicity, they clung together, following each other around like dogs in heat, while Mark and I quietly went about our business.
•
As for me, I kept plodding along also, through the interviews of Lynette’s associates and all the people whose names were on the car registrations. At the end of the day, when I got home after midnight, I would call Lizette on the phone and talk to her, explain to her that I was doing my best, but it just wasn’t good enough. She said she understood in that soft, sensual voice and asked me to call the next night. And I would call.
I also called Jessica again and again until I finally caught her at home. She told me that I shouldn’t call her and hung up on me. I tell you, the empty nights have a way of piling up, the softness fades, but the desire does not.
Desire hides but never goes away. There are times when a man’s need is much more than a voice on the phone, when a deep animal desire reaches up and grabs you and you lie awake at night dreaming of silky legs and firm nipples and sweet, soft pubic hair.
I closed my eyes and ran Lizette through my mind, bright golden eyes, sad pouting mouth, full sensuous lips, long dark hair flowing around me like strands of light, full round hips ascending stairs in front of me, her soft sensual voice whispering in my ear, whispering of a longing, of a desire.
Lizette, beautiful, rich uptown girl.
I dreamt that night, but not of full lips nor flowing dark hair. I dreamt of rich, uptown, French Creoles in new Orleans society and of old dago Italians. I dreamt of my grandfather pulling his fruit cart up Exposition Boulevard chanting, “I got ban – na – na. I got tan – ga – rine. I got water – melon!”
•
I’m a mid-city boy. I grew up in the shadows of City Park and the Canal Cemeteries in a two-story house at 612 North Bernadotte Street. The house was made of blond brick and wood, with twelve concrete steps out front. We lived on the second floor and I must have climbed those twelve steps a million times. The first floor was sealed up and used as a basement. When I was little, we used to play in the basement during bad weather, until my brother put in a pool table and started having parties in his teen-angel days.
I remember my mother sitting on the big front gallery, which ran the length of the front of our house. She would sit in a rocking chair, shelling petit pois for dinner, or peeling alligator pears for a salad, and talking to the neighbors. The houses in our block were built close together, with only narrow alleys between them. The houses were so close, my mother could talk to her friends without shouting. My earliest memories of that porch, sitting with my mother, waiting for my father to come home. I remember a vision of my father, tall and thin in his blue uniform, ascending the steps.
•
I was a pain-in-the-ass kid brother, followed my big brother Joe around everywhere he went. I would peek at him as he talked to girls, as he smoothly moved in on their innocent eyes. I would follow him as long as I could keep up with him. But he would lose me whenever he really wanted to. He always seemed to know exactly where I was and exactly how to lose me.
My brother and his friends used to play in the Canal Cemeteries at night. I would follow, except when they went into Odd Fellow’s Rest. Joe told me that it was called Odd Fellow’s Rest because that was where they buried all the odd fellows – the deformed people, the hunchbacks, the dwarfs and midgets, and crippled people. That was where monsters were buried like the vampires of the Canal Cemeteries and the werewolves of City Park.
I wouldn’t go near the place, even in broad daylight – until one evening Joe talked me into climbing the back fence with him. Odd Fellow’s was a small cemetery, a triangular graveyard at the corner of Canal Street and City Park Avenue. Joe and I sneaked into St. Patrick’s Cemetery that night, then he helped me over the rear fence of Odd Fellow’s Rest because I was so small. We stuck together, until Joe found the perfect moment to leave me in the middle of the place. Then he took off and I was, in the middle of Odd Fellow’s, alone, except for the monsters.
I couldn’t yell and found I could not move for a long, long time. I stood there, as still as the tombs, as still as those little concrete houses of death. After a while, I realized I could move my head and look around at the crumbling sepulchers. The large palm bushes that were nestled between the tombs cast spider shadows beneath the high street lights from City Park Avenue. I remember one sepulcher was wide open, its cement doors had crumbled and the tomb was open, and there were bones inside.
I climbed the rear fence like a cat chased by a bulldog. But I didn’t go straight home. I hid and waited until it got late and my brother had to go look for me. I waited even longer and then suddenly appeared at our front door, crying and pointing at Joe, who got the hell beat out of him by my father.
•
Once summer a girl named Jennifer moved in next door. She had long dark hair and big brown eyes and quickly developed a serious crush on my big brother. Joe was a little older than her and never paid much attention to her.
I remember vividly the evening she really tried to get his attention. You see, her bedroom was directly across the narrow alley from Joe’s bedroom, and one evening when I was rooting around in Joe’s bedroom, because he was out and there were always neat things in Joe’s room, she came home and undressed with her window shade up. Joe wasn’t in, but I was. I sat on his bed in the dark room and watched that teen-age dream as she stripped, completely. She played it to the hilt, standing stark naked in her open window, brushing her long dark hair. I must have held my breath for five minutes, until she flipped off the lights and climbed into bed.
That was the first time I saw a girl, a woman, completely naked, breasts and pubic hair and the works. I didn’t sleep at all that night, I was eight years old and I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, look at naked women. I wasn’t very successful. Jennifer was the only girl I saw naked until I was in high school.
She and her family moved away the following winter. I wonder whatever happened to her. She’s just a memory now, but that sure was nice of her.
•
I told Joe the story about Jennifer years later. He didn’t believe me. I told Joe the story again just before he died. He was in a quiet mood that day and after I told him, he looked at me and asked, “You really telling the truth?”
I swore I was.
Joe suddenly looked sad. He sat there in his police uniform, sergeant’s stripes and all, staring glassy-eyed into, space. He looked like a little boy who had lost a favorite toy.
“She really did that?” he asked again.
“She sure did.”
Then Joe was quiet for along time.
Later, with a smirk on my face I asked Joe, “You believed that story?”
He glared at me and roared, “You little bastard.”
Then we went out and knocked down a few cold ones. That was the last night we spent together.
•
The dark streets of the fifties are gone now, and so are the sock hops of my youth, and so is the brother who used to play jokes on me. But my house is still there at 612 North Bernadotte. My parents still live there. One Sunday, following the Exposition Street murder, I received orders from my mother to come to dinner. I hadn’t been to dinner since my transfer to Homicide.
When I pulled up, my father was sitting out on the front gallery with the Sunday paper. I watched him for a minute as he sipped coffee from a large mug and scanned the paper. His hair was gray but still full and curly and his pencil-thin moustache was almost white. He was wearing his familiar tee shirt and Bermuda shorts. My father was the kind of guy who wore his baggy shorts below his pot belly and wore white socks with sandals.
He peeked at me from behind his Times-Picayune as I started up the front steps. “Well, well, look who showed up today,” he chided, his face still buried in the Metro section. “Been reading about you lately,” he added as I plopped down in the rocker next to his rocker.
I didn’t say anything. I just waited for him to continue. After a moment, he did continue, “Looks like business is up. You got anything good on this Slasher fella?”
“Nope.” I leaned back and closed my eyes, inhaling deeply the sweet familiar scents from the trees.
My father shuffled his paper and sighted. “Well, he’ll fuck up sooner or late and you’ll get him.”
“That’s a load off my mind.”
I could feel my father’s eyes staring at me. It was the same feeling I used to have when I was a kid and he would point those eyes at me and I would feel my stomach bottoming out. I felt those eyes again and opened my own eyes to look back. And I smiled. “So, how’s it going, Pop?”
He didn’t answer me, but looked away back at the Sports section.
“The Chief says ‘hello’,” I added as I rose from the rocker and headed through the front door.
Just as I stepped in the house my father asked over his shoulder, “By the way, how’s Jessica?”
I stopped for a second and said, “We broke up.”
I found my mother in the kitchen and gave her a big hug. She held me an extra second before pulling back and looking me up and down. “Dino,” she exclaimed, “you look tired, son. Have you been taking care of yourself?”
“Sure.”
She looked behind me and asked, “Is Jessica with you?”
“We broke up.”
My mother gave me her sad-eyed look. God, I hate it when she feels sorry for me. She shook her head, sighed, and tried a half-smile on me before returning to her cooking. She put the finishing touches on her lasagna and started telling me the neighborhood news, as if I cared about the people who occupied the houses around their house. I didn’t listen. I just watched he move around the kitchen in that easy way of hers.
She moved as she had all my life, not wasting any movements. She looked the same as she had all my life, except for her eyes. The sadness within her eyes was a familiar look, one I’d seen many times in the past. It was a permanent look now, since Joe’s death.
It was over my mother’s lasagna that my father picked up or conversation about Exposition Boulevard. “Was the murder near a big old house that looks like a castle?” he asked.
“Castle?” I shrugged.
“Yeah. On Exposition Boulevard. I remember there was a house that looked like a castle, not too far from St. Charles Avenue,” he explained with a curious look on his face.
“I don’t remember any castle,” I answered, glancing over at my mother who smiled and rolled her eyes.
“No gray brick house with ramparts?” he asked.
“No.”
My father chuckled to himself and looked up across the table as if he were looking, far away. “When I was a boy,” he started, “I used to spend weekends at my cousin Angelo’s on Magazine Street.” He looked over at my mother and added, “You remember Angelo, looked like a chimpanzee.” He looked back at me as he hung his arms at his side and explained, “Angelo had real long arms and was all hair.”
My mother cut in at that point. “Angelo was from the better-looking side of the LaStanza family.”
“Ha!” my father roared. “I always knew your mother had the hots for old Angelo.” He dismissed my mother with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, he’s dead now. Got his head squashed in a elevator on Canal Street.”
“What?” I had to ask.
“Don’t interrupt your father,” my father snapped as he continued his story. “When I was a kid I used to stay at Angelo’s and we would play baseball in Audubon Park. Angelo was a couple years older than me and he told me about a prince ho lived in the house that looked like a castle on Exposition Boulevard. We had me bow down every time I passed that castle, because if I didn’t then the prince’s guards would come out and chop off my head. So I did.”
My father didn’t stop or breath as he went right on, “I bowed every time I passed that place. Once, we were in a group of boys and I bowed, and when the boys asked me I told them, they laughed their asses off. Damn Angelo.” My father paused for another bite of lasagna, then added, “Never did like Anglo.”
“So that’s it?” I asked. “That’s the whole story? What about the elevator?’
My mother answered, “Angelo got his head caught in an elevator and died.”
“He didn’t die right away,” my father added, “he lived about a month after that.”
“And for a month he was the smartest LaStanza I’ve ever known,” my mother announced.
I got a kick out of that one. She got my Pop again. But he just huffed it off. “Never did like Angelo,” he repeated, looking over at me and asking again, “You sure there isn’t a house that looks like a big castle on Exposition Boulevard?”
“Not near St. Charles.”
My father slapped his forehead – an innate Italian gesture. “Damn. It wasn’t near St. Charles. It was down by Magazine.” He shook his head. “I’m getting old.”
•
On my way home that evening I thought again about the pressure cooker of police work and about humor. My father knew it well and so did my mother. She was a veteran of many a long, lonely night wondering if someone would come home or not. And she could cut a joke with the best of us.
After Joe died, I thought there was no humor left in the world for a long time. We almost lost it there, but eventually the humor came back and a Sunday dinner could be almost nice again.
I only wish my parents wouldn’t feel so guilty about me, about me not being their favorite son. Our family’s story is the story of a family whose favorite member has died. Joe was my father’s favorite. He was also my mother’s favorite. I don’t blame them for that. Joe was my favorite member of the family. He was the center of our family, its driving force, its unifying force. Only, we never knew that until he was gone and there was such emptiness. Sure they loved Joe more, but so did I. I just wish they wouldn’t feel so guilty about it.
So now my parents let the pressure out with jokes, but I wonder if they relive Joe in their minds as I do. Sometimes I turn on that tape recorder in my mind and Joe is there with me, messing up my hair or cruising around City Park in his old Buick. My brother had this big white Buick with huge rear fins. It looked like a land-shark. Joe had the name of the car hand painted on its sides. It was called The White Weenie. I remember the day Joe put another sign on the truck of the car which read, “Don’t laugh – your daughter might be in the back seat.”
•
I’m a mid-city boy. I grew up on North Bernadotte Street, grew up riding the Canal Cemeteries streetcar downtown and going to Catholic Schools, St. Anthony of Padua and then Holy Rosary and then Archbishop Rummel High School. And now that I am grown, I still live by City Park in a small bungalow on North Murat Street with evergreens lining the narrow street and the tall, haunting oaks of City Park a half-block away.
I live alone in a one-story pale-green stucco bungalow with a red tile roof and a front door that is round at the top. It’s the only house I’ve ever known that was built with one bedroom. My mother visited once and called it a dungeon. The name stuck. I’ve tried to buy the place but my little old landlady won’t sell. The land’s too valuable.
The Dungeon was built in the twenties and still has its original fixtures and a solid white kitchen that can blind you with the flick of a light switch, I love the place because its small and out of place, nestled behind the huge houses on City Park Avenue. In New Orleans, it didn’t matter what neighborhood you lived in as much as what house you lived in. Even in the finest uptown neighborhoods, there were small wooden shotgun houses sandwiched between mansions, just like my bungalow behind the larger houses on City Park Avenue.
•
When I returned to the Dungeon that Sunday after dinner, I sat on my sofa and stared out the picture window of my living room. I started running the facts of the case through my mind again, and again come up with nothing but frustration. I crawled back in the pressure cooker again, beating my head against the walls.
I felt helpless and useless. And somewhere along in there, I felt a foreboding, a chill running across my face. I felt I had to do something. I felt he was out there, that night, that very night, he was on the prowl. So I prowled. I grabbed my .357 Magnum and climbed into my unmarked unit and prowled the city like a lone wolf, a predator just waiting for the moment.
I cruised the Quarter and then drove by Bayou St. John before pulling up at Audubon Park.
I took my place in the gazebo across the way from the Louvier mansion and waited for him. In old movies, the killer always returned to the scene of the crime. I waited for him to return that night, the night I felt the foreboding. I wanted to catch him lurking in the foggy night, to catch him slithering between the trees, to point my Magnum at him and blow the fucker’s head away.
In front of the grand jury I would be asked why I shot him six times. And I would answer, “Because all I had was six bullets in my gun.”
So I waited. But nothing happened. No one lurked. No one slithered. I watched the sun creep up, and with it, the hot, humid dawn warmed the land and drove off the foreboding I felt. I took a stroll by the Louvier’s on my way back to my car and was surprised to see the front door open before six in the morning. The maid stepped out and called to me, “Mr. Policeman, Miss Lizette sent me to ask if you want some coffee.
All I could do was remember I hadn’t called Lizette that night.
“I just fixed some fresh,” the maid announced. “You come on in here now.”
She stepped back in and left the door open for me. I went in and found Lizette sitting at the dining room table. She was in a thick purple robe, her hair up in a bun. She had on only a hint of make-up, but she looked so good.
“You look beat,” she told me as I sat down heavily across from her. “Where you out there all night?”
I nodded and laughed. “Pretty much.”
“What were you doing?”
“I just, I just, I was prowling last night. If he can prowl, so can I.”
“Did something happen last night?” she asked, her big eyes round like golden saucers.
“No, I just had a feeling.” Nothing had happened. If it would have, I’d have heard it on my little fucking radio.
The maid brought us coffee and it was good and strong. I was updating Lizette on the case when Mr. Louvier came down the stairs, also wearing robe. He stepped into the dining room and almost jumped when he saw me. He gave me a quick look, a look that said, “What are you doing here with my daughter?” He didn’t have to ask, it was in his eyes.
Lizette saw it too, because she got right up and kissed him on the cheek and explained that I had been out all night, watching the house and how it was only polite to ask me in for coffee. Mr. Louvier said he understood. That was white of him.
I finished my coffee and rose to leave. I didn’t get any argument. Lizette did walk me to the out the dining room, suggested I get some sleep. “Will you call me tonight after work?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Lizette led me into the library and let me stand in front of the portrait and stare at the girl in the white gown, at the alabaster skin and the wide eyes that stared right back at me. I felt the pressure building inside me again. I could feel it, could feel my hands shaking ever so slightly. I didn’t want Lizette to see it, so I left. She gave me a curious look, but I was too tired to read it.
I drove straight home and tried not to think about Lizette and that curious look, tried not to even think about Lynette. I wound up thinking about Mr. Louvier and the look he had given me. It was a look that said I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I was good enough to work on a daughter’s murder, good enough to guard a house all night, good enough to get down and dirty with the dead – but don’t touch the living. Lizette was beyond reach, period.
I already knew that.
•
He was The Slasher. That was better than Jack of the Night. He would have to rewrite the letters to the police now. He would sign them Slasher.
Jerome Hemmel sat in his room after the newspaper came out with his new name and read the article over and over. He missed work Monday and didn’t want to go in on Tuesday, but he did, and no one knew who he was. He walked around the university and looked into faces and they didn’t even know he was the Slasher. He was invisible to them. All they saw was Jerome Hemmel.
During the nights that followed, he locked his door and made sure his window was bolted shut before he took out the brassieres. Lining up the three bras one after the other, he ran his fingers over the silk. He took each of the, one at a time, and held them against his face, smelling them and then slowly licking them. With his free hand he rubbed between his legs until her exploded.
Then he put away the bras and the new articles and sat up in his bed and shook as he stared at his front door, waiting for the detectives to come. But they never came. With each night that passed, he grew less and less afraid and thought that maybe they weren’t ever going to catch him.
And soon the time came when he could stand it no more being Jerome Hemmel.
On that lazy Sunday night, he took out the long-bladed knife and hid it under his coat. He waited until it was good and dark, making sure no one saw him leave his apartment. He climbed into his car and left Urquhart Street and Jerome Hemmel behind. The farther away he drove, the better he felt. And slowly, the power came back to him, because he was now the Slasher. Jerome never felt that power.
When he stopped at a stop sign, a girl crossed in front of his car. He watched her walk away down the sidewalk. And when he turned the corner there was a parking place waiting for him, waiting for the Slasher. So he parked and jumped out and followed the girl.
She could not hear him as he approached because the Slasher wore sneakers. But he knew that if she turned around, she would see him. To his victims, the Slasher was never invisible. He stalked her quietly and quickly until he was right behind her, his hand on the handle of the long-bladed knife. He would fuck her good!
The girl seemed to sense something and turned quickly to look at him. She stopped and so did he. She didn’t seem afraid at all. And as he looked into her face he saw that she was ugly.
There was a long moment with a hand on a handle and two sets of eyes looking back and forth. Then there was a smile that crossed the girl’s face as she turned and walked away.
The Slasher did not kill her, because she was ugly. The Slasher actually felt sorry for ugly girls. They missed so much. But pretty girls had everything, beauty, attention, and those cruel smiles that ever came his way. The Slasher wanted to fuck pretty girls. Nobody felt sorry for dead ugly girls but everyone felt sorry for beautiful young girls who died. So fuck them. Fuck them all!
•
There was a Signal Thirty reported at the corner of Carrollton Avenue and Tulane, a man shot dead while standing at a bus stop at one o’clock in the morning. I was still out cruising and heard Mason heading over there, so I turned around and joined him.
“What are you doing ere?” Mason asked me. “Don’t you have a girl friend?”
“Not anymore,” I told him. “She said I liked autopsies better than I liked her.”
Mason chuckled. “Welcome to the big league.”
“So” – I changed the subject – “what happened to him?”
“Got himself shot in the head,” Mason answered as he looked at his watch. “If he would have waited and hour, it would have been the other platoon’s problem.”
“Fucking inconsiderate, I’d say.”
“Yeah,” Mason agreed as he put away his humor and started processing the scene with the crime lab technician. I lent a hand by canvassing the area. There wasn’t a fucking soul around. When I finished my canvass I found myself across Tulane Avenue, watching Mason.
A curious feeling came upon me as I stood there. I began to wonder how many times the dead man had passed the intersection of Tulane and Carrollton. I must have passed there a thousand time myself.
I wondered if he ever knew he would die there. Had he ever felt a chill when he passed? I wondered if he ever looked over an saw a figure standing in the shadows, a hooded figure with a skull face carrying a scythe. I wondered if he knew that figure waiting for him at Carrollton and Tulane.
I felt a chill myself standing there, felt that same creeping fear I had felt long ago in Odd Fellow’s Rest. I looked around quickly for the hooded figure, but he was not there. And I knew why I could not see the Grim Reaper, because if I had a mirror and looked into it I would see that skull face looking back at me.