A Killer Like Me (6 page)

Murphy heard a baby crying. “Where’s Jonathan?”

“Feeding the baby.”

“We’re not here to arrest him,” Murphy said. “We just want to talk to him.”

The girl disappeared into the back of the house.

Murphy’s eyes swept the living room. It had been furnished from the Fred Sanford collection. Across the room, a banged-up TV sat on an overturned beer crate. Near the front door was a threadbare sofa and a scarred wooden coffee table, on top of which lay a pile of unopened mail.

Murphy took a step toward the table with the intention of thumbing through the mail, when Deshotels strolled in from a back room. The young felon didn’t say anything. He just stopped at the edge of the living room and stared at the two detectives like he was used to cops snooping through his personal belongings and knew better than to mouth off.

“We’re from Homicide,” Murphy said.

“Then I know you got the wrong place because I’m straight. You can ask my PO.”

Murphy nodded toward the sofa. “Have a seat.”

Deshotels glanced over his shoulder at his girlfriend, who had reappeared behind him. “Go finish feeding the baby.”

She shot Murphy and Gaudet a dirty look, then stormed off.

Deshotels was crank-head skinny, wearing a wifebeater and dirty jeans. He walked toward the sofa. Before he sat down, Murphy put a hand on his shoulder. “Just a second.”

Murphy flipped up the nearest seat cushion. Then he took a step forward and raised the middle cushion. He saw the chopped-down stock of a shotgun, wrapped in black electrical tape, sticking up from the crack between the seat and the backrest.

“Got a code four,” he shouted to Gaudet as he pushed Jonathan Deshotels back with his left hand and reached for the shotgun with his right.

Gaudet jumped forward and wrapped a thick forearm around Deshotels’s neck. Then he pivoted and used his 260 pounds to slam the skinny punk face-first into the floor.

The girl came screaming out of the back, but stopped dead in her tracks when she saw Murphy lifting the sawed-off shotgun from the sofa.

While Gaudet handcuffed Deshotels, Murphy held up the shotgun by the stock, using only his thumb and index finger to avoid leaving fingerprints. The gun was a double-barrel, over-and-under 20-gauge, with the barrels cut down to just over a foot.

Murphy looked down at Deshotels lying on his stomach, wrists cinched tight behind his back. “What is this, Jonathan?”

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“Are you saying this illegal shotgun, the mere possession of which carries a mandatory penalty of five years in federal prison, belongs to your girlfriend?” Murphy said.

The blonde’s mouth hung open as she shook her head.

Gaudet planted his foot on Deshotels’s back.

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” Deshotels mumbled through a mouthful of carpet.

“How about we call your probation officer instead,” Murphy suggested. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to come out here and start your revocation order right now.”

Gaudet jerked Deshotels to his feet.

Careful not to touch the metal parts of the shotgun, Murphy used a pen to open the breech. He dumped two shells of buckshot onto the coffee table. “If it’s not your gun, then your fingerprints won’t be on it, right?” he said.

“I . . . I might have touched it,” Deshotels said.

Gaudet dragged Deshotels toward the door. “Let’s take a ride.”

Inside a makeshift interview room that doubled as the Homicide Division’s kitchenette, Murphy and Gaudet sat across a beat-up breakfast table from Jonathan Deshotels.

“I’m going to ask you one more time,” Murphy said. “Where did you get the scattergun?”

“And I’m going to tell you one more time,” Deshotels said. “Blow me.”

Gaudet reached across the table and bitch-slapped him.

“What the fuck!” the kid screamed. “You can’t do that to me.”

Murphy fixed him with a dead stare. “We’re Homicide. We have different rules.”

Deshotels tried to hold the stare. He couldn’t. After a few seconds, he dropped his head.

“What were you doing cruising around Tulane near criminal district court Tuesday night?” Murphy said.

The kid cast a nervous glance at Gaudet. Then he let out a deep sigh, something both detectives recognized as a sign of surrender. The kid was going to admit to something.

“I took Lawrence out to get laid.”

“Who’s Lawrence?” Murphy said.

“A buddy from high school. He’s nineteen, never had a piece of pussy in his life. I think he might be a fag. I thought if I found him a girl I could turn him around.”

“So you were trying to cure your friend’s homosexuality,” Gaudet said, “by renting him a disease-ridden prostitute.”

Deshotels nodded, the irony apparently lost on him.

“Tell me about the gun,” Murphy said.

Deshotels stared down at his hands as he picked at the chipped Formica tabletop. “It’s just for protection. You know my neighborhood. Fucking niggers—” He jerked his face up at Gaudet, eyes wide with terror.

Gaudet shrugged. “I’m half white. I don’t much care for niggers either.”

Deshotels relaxed. “I bought it a while back, sometime after Doreen had the baby.”

“From who?” Murphy said.

“I got it off the street, paid some . . . some black dude fifty bucks for it.”

“Did you find your potentially gay friend a prostitute?” Gaudet asked.

Deshotels shrugged. “He whooped it up while we were riding around, even hollered at one skank, but in the end he chickened out, even though I offered to pay for it.”

“He must be a close friend,” Gaudet said.

Deshotels shrugged. “We were friends in school, been tight ever since.”

“You don’t mind that maybe he’s a fudgepacker?” Gaudet said. “Maybe you swing that way a little bit yourself.”

“Fuck that.” Deshotels shook his head. “I like pussy.”

“Tell me about the skank,” Murphy said.

“She was just a whore, man.”

“Where was she?”

“On Tulane.”

“Where on Tulane?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think,” Murphy said. “Think hard.”

Gaudet rocked forward in his chair.

Deshotels leaned away. “Next to criminal court.”

Murphy nodded in appreciation. “What did she look like?”

After another glance at Gaudet, Deshotels said, “Just a black whore, big tits, skirt up to her ass, heels.”

“So why didn’t you stop and talk to her,” Gaudet said, “if you were looking for a whore for your friend?”

Deshotels shrugged.

Gaudet leaned closer. “You said your friend hollered at her, right?”

“I told you, he wasn’t serious about it.”

“You mentioned the girl’s skirt,” Murphy said. “What color was it?”

“I don’t know. Some dark color. Black, maybe.”

“Was she short or tall?”

Deshotels’s eyes darted up and to his left.

A good sign, Murphy thought. Neurolinguistic programmers would say the kid was trying to recall facts, not make something up.

“I’d say she was tall,” Deshotels said, “definitely taller than the dude.”

“What dude?” Murphy felt his pulse quicken.

“She was standing next to some loser.”

The detectives looked at each other. Deshotels’s description of the prostitute matched the victim, and he had seen someone with her around the time the coroner estimated she had been killed. You didn’t have to be Sherlock fucking Holmes to figure out that this half-brain-dead meth freak might have gotten a look at the serial killer.

Murphy worked to keep his voice neutral. “Tell me about the guy she was with.”

Deshotels waved his hand in the air. He was smiling. “Fuck you, man. You’re trying to bait me with that gay shit again? I wasn’t looking at the dude. I was looking at the whore.”

“Don’t make me hit you again,” Gaudet said.

Deshotels quit smiling.

“What did he look like?” Murphy said.

Deshotels rolled his eyes. “He was an old dude, man, little shorter than she was.”

“How old?”

“Had to be like thirty-five, forty.”

“Look at me, Jonathan,” Murphy said. “I’m thirty-eight. Detective Gaudet is . . .”

“Thirty-five,” Gaudet said.

“Did the guy look younger than us, older than us, or about the same as us?”

Deshotels fidgeted in his chair.

Murphy realized they were probably taxing his mental capacity. “This is important, Jonathan.”

Deshotels threw his arms down on the table. “Younger, maybe. Not much, though. I’d say like around thirty.”

“Black or white?”

“White.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Man, I wasn’t paying attention to all that. I told you, I was looking to hook up my boy with some pussy.”

“Did you see his car?” Gaudet said.

“I seen lots of cars, motherfucker. It was a—”

Gaudet rocketed out of his chair and grabbed Deshotels by the throat. “What did you call me, you tweaked-out little cocksucker?”

As Gaudet squeezed, Deshotels’s face turned red and his eyes bugged out.

“Nothing, nothing,” the kid squeaked. “I’m sorry.”

The big detective held him for a few more seconds, then shoved him backward against his chair. “Next time you ‘motherfuck’ me, you’ll leave here in a goddamn ambulance. Understand?”

Deshotels clutched his throat with both hands as he gasped for air.

Gaudet sat down. “I said, do you understand.”

The kid nodded.

“Did you see the guy’s car?” Murphy asked.

Deshotels shook his head. When he spoke his voice cracked. “Guy looked like a dweeb. Lawrence yelled something at him, calling him a loser or something. I didn’t see his car.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I don’t think so. I just saw him for a second, going past at like sixty.”

Gaudet eased his upper body forward across the table. “Think hard. Do you remember anything else about him that could help us identify him?”

Already pressed up against the back of his chair, Deshotels was as far away from Gaudet as he could get, but still he tried to put an extra couple of inches of space between them. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?” Gaudet’s question came out as a growl, low and menacing.

“That’s all I know . . . sir.”

Friday, July 27, 8:05
AM

Murphy barged into Captain Donovan’s office. “We have a witness and a partial description of the serial killer,” he said.

The captain lumbered to his feet. For once he didn’t yell. He seemed tired. “If I hear the term
serial killer
come out of your mouth one more time, Murphy, I’m transferring you out of Homicide. Do you understand me?”

Gaudet dragged Murphy out before he had a chance to say anything really stupid.

Murphy was ragged. He and Gaudet had cut Deshotels loose at 2:00
AM
after wringing everything they could from him.

“We’re keeping the shotgun,” Murphy had told the kid as he dropped him off on Octavia Street. “If you start crawfishing on us when we catch this guy, acting like you don’t recognize him, I’ll not only violate you on your probation, I’ll talk to a buddy at ATF and get a federal indictment against you for the shotgun.”

Like all evidence, the shotgun was supposed to be booked into Central Evidence and Property immediately after its seizure, but since the storm, CE&P had become even more of a circus than it had been before Katrina. Gaudet flipped a quarter. Murphy called tails. It landed heads.

Murphy waited in line for an hour to get to the lone, slow-moving property clerk. At 4:00
AM
he called it quits. He put the sawed-off and the two shells inside a brown paper bag and tossed the bag into the trunk of his car. Then he went home to his apartment and grabbed two hours on the sofa. He didn’t even bother getting undressed.

After the meeting with Donovan, Murphy knocked on a door uptown, in the 1200 block of Fern Street, the door to the house where he had once lived. It was 9:30
AM
.

The house was a shotgun single. Three concrete steps led to a small porch. A wooden swing hung next to the door, perpendicular to the front of the house. Murphy had hung the swing one crystal blue Saturday afternoon three years ago. Potted plants took up most of the rest of the space on the porch.

Kirsten Sparks pulled open the door. She took one look at Murphy and shook her head. “What the hell do you want, Murphy?” Kirsten had always called him by his last name. Even when she loved him.

She wore a white linen skirt and matching blouse. Her long red hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her tattered leather attaché case was slung over one shoulder and a purse hung from the other. She carried a fat set of keys in her hand.

Murphy felt self-conscious. He hadn’t showered or shaved. He was wearing an old tie and a rumpled shirt.

“Did they give you a medal?” she said.

“What?”

“For jumping on that wrinkle bomb. I hope you saved somebody else from looking like shit today.”

It was an old joke. One she had picked up from the boys in the newsroom. He smiled, but he didn’t feel it. “You headed to the paper?” he asked.

“That’s where I work.”

“I see you got off cops and started covering city government.”

It was a lame pun and she ignored it. “What are you doing here?”

Murphy felt like he was drowning. “I see your byline all the time. That was a great piece you did on the mayor and his bimbo assistant.”

Kirsten looked at her watch. “I’m filling in as assistant editor on the city desk, and I have a budget meeting in less than half an hour.”

Murphy stared at her. She had creamy white skin with a faint splash of freckles on her cheeks, and bright blue Irish eyes. She was beautiful.

The last time he saw her had been almost a year ago, a few weeks after they split up. She was at the Star & Crescent having a drink with a Second District detective named Tony Izzalino. Seeing her this morning, rushing out the door for work, a jumble of bags and keys, had made him realize how much he missed her.

“My mother has been asking about you,” Murphy said.

“Your mother hates me.”