Officer Panola’s shift ends at seven, and she and Tilghman depart. So do the NOPD men. The Levee Board cops and JPs long gone. Borgo and I finish up with the three cooks. All have alibis and seem genuinely shook. None has a scratch mark. We focus our interest on the cook who hasn’t shown up for work this morning. Cedrick Smith lives in the Sixth Police District, better known as the Bloody Sixth, where there are more murders than the rest of the city combined. Smith is described on the police computer as “black male, thirty-eight, five nine, one-eighty, no tattoos, scars, or marks.” A convicted felon, Smith is also a registered sex offender on parole after serving ten years of a twenty-year sentence for violating Louisiana Revised Statute 14:43 — simple rape.
Before departing West End Park, Borgo and I go over the canvass notes. Two fishermen had been located, identified, and interviewed. Both saw a jogger in the area, a white male in a gray running outfit. A six-year-old son of one of the fishermen thought he saw two joggers, both white males. The license plate numbers of all cars parked in a two-mile radius is added to our notes.
At 6:32, Levee Board cops had stopped a jogger with gray clothing along nearby Lake Marina Drive, securing his pertinent data and checking to make sure he hadn’t been scratched. The man lives at the Lake Marina Tower, one of the new high-rise condo complexes overlooking the lake. He’s a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard named Bruce Addams.
“What now?” asks Borgo.
“We search for Cedrick Smith, then go to the autopsy. But coffee is first on the agenda.”
“All right. Where?”
“My houseboat. I’m gonna need my car.”
“Houseboat?”
I tell him about Sad Lisa moored over in Bucktown. He knows how to get to Bucktown, but it’ll take him a good ten minutes, skirting the marina to Old Hammond Highway to cross the 17th Street Canal into Jefferson Parish for a quick run up Orpheum Avenue into Bucktown.
Crossing back over the pedestrian bridge, I see the lake’s calmed down, the gray-brown water not so choppy. White seagulls squawk overhead while pelicans are perched on the remnants of a restaurant battered to pieces by Hurricane Georges a few years back. Three cats prowl the bridge, and I remember the feral cats back home, back along the swampland around Vermilion Bay. I like to see cats around. Cats mean fewer rodents.
My Cajun daddy loved cats, put leftovers out for them. Occasionally, when a coon came for the leftovers, my old man would peek out of our Cajun shack on Bayou Brunet and shoot the coon with his.22 for our supper. He’d shoot the possums, too, but we’d use that greasy meat for fish bait.
I grew up in an old Cajun daubed house my great-grandfather built by hand, its walls filled with swamp mud to keep out the weather. We went hungry some nights, when the hunting and fishing weren’t good, feasted when it was good. We lived off the land, the great bayous, the brown water bay, the bountiful swamp.
Once when I was five, I heard the call of a swamp cat, a bobcat searching for a mate out in the marsh. The howl sent shivers through me, and I ran downstairs to tell my parents there was a swamp monster out there. My daddy laughed and set me straight. Later my mother mimicked the cry of the mountain lion for me, and that astounded me. She could mimic any bird — cardinal, oriole, hawk, even the multicalls of the mockingbird. But that was long ago, my father gone now, my mother back up in South Dakota with my relatives, the Oglala Sioux. You see, we’re direct descendants of Crazy Horse’s younger brother, Little Hawk. At least, that’s what my grandfather tells everyone. To the Sioux, birth records go by word of mouth.
I put on a pot of strong coffee and chicory, warming milk for café au lait. Borgo arrives and I offer Hot Pockets, microwavable ham and cheese wrapped in a flaky crust. I’m so hungry, I eat two. Borgo eats four with three brimming cups of coffee. Looking around Sad Lisa, he tells me I must get plenty women with a setup like this.
“Not really. It’s old, creaky, and drafty. Couple girls got seasick when the lake got choppy and the canal began to rise and fall.”
“Couple? Hope it was one at a time.” Borgo raises his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
Cedrick Smith isn’t home. His neighbors say he lives there all right, but he stays with a woman back-a-town in the Broadmoor section, off Claiborne and Napoleon. That doesn’t narrow it down much, so we leave business cards and head for the coroner’s office.
Getting there early, we position the black body bag containing Monique Lewis at the front of the line so she’ll go first. Sipping coffee we picked up from a nearby CC’s Coffee Stand, pretty good coffee and chicory, we wait in the hall outside the morgue with the reeking smells of formaldehyde, dried blood, and cigarette smoke.
I put the pathologist’s findings in my notes. Monique is exactly five ten in length (cadavers no longer have height, they are prostrate and therefore, long) and weighs one thirty-five. Cause of death, strangulation. Manner of death, homicide. The postmortem exam confirms no evidence of sexual assault. Beneath Monique’s fingernails the pathologist finds blood and skin from her attacker. Monique has five additional tattoos and I list them.
The crime lab tech, who arrives late, will rush the blood from under the fingernails for typing and DNA fingerprinting. I push him on the subject, and he nods nervously. Late for the autopsy, he’s got a lot of catching up to do, starting with breaking out the Duraprint spray to see if he can get fingerprints from Monique’s neck. He tries but can’t.
The Sioux believe in the spirit world, believe in vision quests, ghosts, and communicating with the dead. My Cajun daddy believed in purgatory, heaven, and hell, like a good Catholic. I don’t know what to believe, but I let my mind tell Monique Lewis, as I stand next to her body, that I am Sharp Eyes of the Oglala, and I will catch who did this to her.
I can tell this white woman my secret tribe name because the words do not cross my lips. If there is a spirit world, she can hear me and know this plains warrior will track down her killer, no matter how long it takes.
“What were you mumbling back there?” Borgo asks as we leave.
“Mumbling?”
Monique Lewis lived in a garage apartment behind a three-story house in need of a new paint job. The garage could also use a paint-over and new railing for its stairs. The woman in the house, who I hoped would be the landlord, says the landlord lives in Mississippi. She gives us the name and address of the landlord as she tells us she’s never seen Monique, who must keep odd hours.
We use Monique’s house key to get in and find a very neat apartment smelling of flowers and incense. Scented candles in small glass jars line the window sills. A search of her closet, chifforobe, and dresser drawers reveals she lived alone. No address book, however, and no computer; but plenty of books, a CD player, videotape deck, and a TV. No cable. Lots of CDs, rock mostly, and movie tapes, a variety from musicals like An American in Paris to the crime film Scarface, the Pacino version.
“There were only four Beatles,” Borgo says as he points to the five posters on the bedroom wall. “So who’s this guy?”
It’s a young, bearded man with soft eyes sandwiched between posters of Paul McCartney and George Harrison. I tell him, “Cat Stevens.”
“Yeah? The guy who went Muslim, right? Gave up the music.”
I always wonder if the previous owner of my houseboat named her Sad Lisa from the Cat Stevens song. Or maybe they knew a Lisa who was sad. No way to know, since I bought it at an estate auction. Couple died together in a car wreck. I thought of changing the name, but somebody wanted that name, and it seems to fit the boat. Unlike the white-eyes, we Sioux don’t readily change the names of things.