Dancing with the Dead

3

They knew Jonas Morrisy in the parish. The honest merchants, the con artists, the whores, the gays, the blues and Cajun musicians, and the grifters; they knew him and played straight with him, because he played straight with them. If he said he’d crack skull if they didn’t cooperate, he meant it, always. He’d been a beat patrolman there for twelve years before making sergeant, ridden in a two-man patrol car for five more years before becoming plainclothes. Now, at fifty, he was a New Orleans P.D. homicide lieutenant. The cop everyone had known twenty years ago hadn’t changed: He was tough, shrewd, and persistent. And still honest.

He sat now behind his wide, cluttered desk in his office in Homicide, a sloppily dressed, shambling man sucking on a meerschaum pipe he never lit. His gray eyes were as bright and calculating as when he was a rookie, even if now there were crow’s feet at their corners. His hair was almost completely gray but still thick and unruly, and his lower lip still jutted determinedly. Perched on an off-center nose, the no-nonsense black-framed glasses suggested he was a man of decisiveness and violence. Thick and scarred knuckles added to the impression.

In his big hands he was holding a copy of the medical examiner’s report on the Verlane woman. Detective Sergeant Waxman, who’d just handed him the report, was standing in front of Morrisy’s desk, neatly dressed as usual, his tie knot the size of a pea, his suitcoat buttoned despite the river delta heat and humidity that the air-conditioner wasn’t quite coping with today.

“Something, eh, Lieutenant?” Waxman said. He was a lean, handsome man with sleekly combed red hair, built for the expensive clothes he wore. Sometimes Morrisy wondered where he got the money to dress so well, but he never asked.

Morrisy grunted and read on. Something, all right. There’d been so much blood at the crime scene he hadn’t realized the extent or nature of the injuries. Except for the horrendous slash across the victim’s throat.

“Weird, huh?” Waxman asked, still searching for a reaction.

Morrisy laid the file folder on his desk and looked out the window at the buildings across the street. Fat gray clouds were building up. Rain clouds. Rain this time of year wouldn’t do a thing to break the heat, only add steam to the recipe for misery. He said, “We don’t tell the husband the worst part, or the media.”

“I’m assuming hubby might already know,” Waxman said. “A certain bell doesn’t ring with that guy.”

“Maybe. But we need to keep this from him just in case, and keep the media in the dark on it, ’specially those TV jerkoffs. That way it’ll be our card to play when we bring in a suspect.”

Waxman’s heavily lidded eyes flicked to the folder on the desk, back to Morrisy. “I been in Homicide a long time, Lieutenant, and I never seen that kinda thing.”

“That’s why it’s such a good hole card.” It was standard procedure in a homicide investigation to hold back a few pieces of crucial or defining evidence that only the police and the killer would know. It made it easier to obtain accurate statements and helped nail down convictions.

“The media’d love it,” Waxman said.

Morrisy nodded. “Wouldn’t they?”

“They already like the fact she was out doing the light fantastic with men she barely knew, dressed the way she was, maybe asking for it, you know?”

“It doesn’t hurt that they like it,” Morrisy said. This was still the deep South, and a prime piece like Danielle Verlane out slutting it up even though she was married, then paying for her transgressions with her life, made especially juicy copy. Straight out of the Old Testament, far as the news media were concerned. They could moralize their guts out over this one. And if they knew the rest, the nightmare part, it would really play like crazy. Morrisy prided himself on being adept when it came to dealing with news people, using them instead of the other way around. He was determined that would be the way it went on this case. “Any word on the prints?”

“Too smudged to mean anything, lab report says.”

Morrisy leaned back in his chair and sucked air through his dead pipe, making a soft whistling sound. Though he hadn’t fired up the old meerschaum since his doctor had warned him to stop smoking six months ago, he could still smell and taste tobacco when he breathed through the tooth-dented stem. And in his mind he could still smell, and even taste, the thick coppery stench of blood at the Verlane murder site. The nicotine smell helped to make that less repellent, had allowed him to eat a big breakfast of eggs and grits this morning.

He thought about the husband, Rene. Maybe Waxman was right and the guy was good for the murder. Important guy, but not so important he was too big for Morrisy to go after. Just the right size, in fact. Plenty of publicity, but not much career liability. If the press could be played right. Used.

Which it could be. Oh, yeah, it could be, all right.

“Bring me the statements of the customers in the lounge,” he said to Waxman, “then we’re gonna go talk to some people.”

Waxman flashed his handsome smile and strode out the door into the squad room. Morrisy knew he’d order the unmarked car brought around on his way to get the computer printouts of the witness statements. He could count on Waxman. They made an efficient team because they thought a lot alike.

That’s what it would take to nail the bastard that did the Verlane bitch, Morrisy thought, teamwork. This was no ordinary murder.

But then, he was no ordinary cop. He’d proved that over and over.

He could prove it again.