Before anyone else arrived, Jessica gripped Kim by the wrist hard and exacted a promise from her. “You're not to tell anyone about the note Matisak left behind, do you understand? Do you? Promise me you won't. Just promise.”
“ I can't do that.”
“ Damnit, it's got to be kept between us. Damnit, Kim, I need your promise on this. If you say a word to anyone about it, our friendship is over before it's begun.”
Kim bit her lower lip, dropping her gaze and considered this and the state that Jessica Coran was in. “I wasn't aware we had a friendship.”
Jessica was still waving her. 38 around. “Please, promise me, Kim… promise me.”
“ All right… all right, Jess.”
“ All right, what?”
“ All right, I promise.”
Inside fifteen minutes the hallway was cordoned off as a crime scene, uniformed police and detectives everywhere, including Carl Landry and Lew Meade from the FBI. Word was buzzing that Alex Sincebaugh and Ben deYampert could not be located.
Ed Sand's head was bagged as evidence. Kim kept her promise about the note from Matisak. Frank Wardlaw did the forensics honors, and he kindly assured the two women that the perpetrator was nowhere to be found, but neither was the rest of Ed Sand's body.
A distraught Jessica Coran was told a half hour later that Sand's body was found in his hotel room at the Hilton, a floor up from her own room, blood everywhere from the decapitation. Jess had had no inkling that Sand even had a room at the Hilton. There was also found a briefcase in Sand's possession filled with surveillance devices, wiretaps, bugs. Jessica realized too late that Ed Sand had bugged her room and was shadowing her, and that his interest in her was part of his job as an FBI undercover man. He'd been handpicked by Zanek to protect Jessica.
Jessica and Kim had been followed from her room to Kim's by the stalking Matisak.
Landry confided that Lew Meade had led them to Sand's body, having known all about Sand. “When my men got there, they found a Do Not Disturb sign on Sand's doorknob outside. Inside, they found Sand's torso and limbs stretched across the bloody bedding.”
25
An honest heart is hard to find.
The morning found all of New Orleans in a silver veil of haze, fog and drizzle, an occasional groundswell of rumbling thunder electrifying the gravestones, reminding everyone of the approaching hurricane and the fragility of life as a handful of ghostly people walked amid the desolation of the city-maintained Cemetery #27 in the Uptown district. They'd gotten a late start due to the murder of Ed Sand, and the disruption it had caused both Dr. Coran and Dr. Desinor, but both women had steeled themselves to continue on with the manhunt for the Hearts killer. Unfortunately, there were people milling about the ancient cemetery and some would definitely notice the unpleasantries. It was nine A.M. and Alex Sincebaugh had long given up on anyone meeting him here, so he'd come and gone and come back again, learning belatedly of the goings-on at Kim's hotel room. He was kicking himself now at not having followed a strong desire to go to her hotel after their fight at the restaurant, but he and his partner had found a trail which smelled keen, so deYampert and he had pursued it hotly the night before. They had gone to a gay nightclub where Alex intended to shake some information from the patrons one way or another. Ben had had several off-color jokes in response to that, but Ben was also uneasy with traipsing through gay bars, and he'd registered his concern plainly enough, along with his concern that maybe the whole direction they were taking, hinging as it did on the words of a creep named Pigsty Gilreath and the Surette killing, might be leading them down the wrong path.
Surette had been one of the better-liked performers in the French Quarter shows; he'd played nightly at the Blue Heron just off Bourbon Street. Sincebaugh had never caught his act, but he'd heard that Surette had been impressive, that Horny Vicki Surette had had them on their knees-both male and female. And it was there that Davey Gilreath, otherwise known as Pigsty, had met Surette. This was old news, all gleaned on the first sweep of interrogrations and interviews with suspects in the wake of Surette's death. In the newspapers at the time, Surette had merited a two-inch column and an obit in the crowded pages of the Sunday Picyune.
Alex had been frustrated and stymied on the investigation after Gilreath had disappeared without a trace; no one, not even the streetwise, knew of Pigsty's whereabouts. It was as if he'd fallen into the Gulf.
As they pursued leads the night before, Alex had reminded Ben of all that they knew of Davey Gilreath, that he'd been raised on a farm somewhere in northern Louisiana, that he was an addict, a snitch and that he had once been Surette's lover.
“ Guys like that come and go with the wind, Alex. He could be in Alaska or Maine or on a merchant marine ship getting it on with all the boys there. I tell you, it's a dead end,” Ben assured him. “Besides, we ruled him out as a murderer long time ago.”
“ I don't suspect him of killing Surette.”
“ Well, then… why're you pursuing it?”
“ I'm uneasy with his disappearance. He seemed quite contented here before…”
“ Before people like him started getting bumped off daily? Hell, I see nothing strange in his getting out of New Orleans,” Ben countered, laughing. “What I find strange are the transies we've seen tonight who damned sure ought to've gotten out of this area till we catch this creep.”
Ben, always the voice of reason, did make sense. Alex still felt compelled to say, “Yeah, but what if the little bastard knew more than he was telling?”
Ben next breathed in a deep breath of night air and gave his best patience-in-action glare as he said, “Listen, Sincy, let me pose a slim but possible theory here, okay?”
“ Shoot! Be my guest.”
“ Supposing our dim-witted Pigsty-chosen, mind you, as a snitch for his fine propensities in ratting out his friends and selling his mother on the street-just supposing this piece of human filth got some sort of Phantom of the Opera syndrome, and with-”
Alex's laughter cut Ben off. “Phantom of the Opera syndrome? Is… is that something you got from Dr. Longette?''
Ignoring the interruption, Ben continued. “And with all of New Orleans his stage, Gilreath suddenly lashes out and strikes back at some festering cancer within him and-”
Again came Alex's laughter, turning to tears with a mental image of Pigsty in tights and cape.
It was then that Alex pulled the car to a stop across from the third gay nightclub they'd visited that night, The Warm Fuzzy.
Ben just kept rattling on as they stepped from car to bar. “Striking out at his own gayness, maybe… or the fact he was powerless, always the puny runt, pushed aside by life, people, siblings, always of no consequence, always sucking hind tit.”
“ You think he sucked hind tit with Vicki Surette?”
“ Last one on, last one in… I'd bet my last dollar on it.”
“ Maybe you've got something, there, Ben. But I'm having a hard time seeing Gilreath in the role of-”
“ Don't you get it? Maybe Gilreath decided to be of consequence for once in his miserable life, to prove a villain since he can't prove a hero, so to speak, another Lee Harvey Oswald, only his anger is directed toward those resembling him.”
“ You maybe ought to become a shrink, Ben.” Alex stepped through the doorway and into The Warm Fuzzy, his eyes instantly alert and searching. He was also instantly made as a cop along with his nervous, fidgeting partner beside him. But Alex also spotted a known male prostitute and sometime snitch known among his street friends as Ricky Aspen for his physical attributes. He was tall, slender and firm, but the aspen in Aspen was a mere willow at the moment. If anyone knew anything about Pigsty's whereabouts, it might be Ricky. Alex's thoughts were now brought to a jarring halt when finally the officiating grave-keepers started up the noisy back-hoe, which began to hungrily, greedily chew at the huge stone over the aboveground city plot paid for and maintained by the taxpayers. Here lay Victor Surette's body as it had rested since the year before.