Artist

Artist

Eric Drouant

Kindle Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Eric Ronald Drouant

All Rights Reserved.

Dull light seeped through the window, casting a four paned imprint on the floor. A coffee table, magazines lined neatly along the edge, centered a small living room. A woman’s coat lay limp on an easy chair. The single shelf in the room contained an Archie Manning bobble head, a stack of ticket stubs, three small crystal figurines of ballerinas perched on their toes, frozen in time and movement. An outdated poster on the wall behind the sofa advertised a Boston concert in Los Angeles three years back.

The front
door was solid oak, painted and repainted repeatedly, layers of time readable in the cracks and thickened over the hinges. It was a solid door, comfortable and reassuring, and the lock was a piece of crap. A credit card, slipped between the knob and the frame, gave the Artist entrance in less time than a key would have taken. He slipped in, shutting the door behind him. He was wearing tennis shoes and worn jeans, the left front pocket stuffed with a short piece of rope, the back with a flattened roll of duct tape. He moved immediately into the kitchen, made his selection from a rack of knives set in a wooden block, pulled a length of duct tape off the roll, then another, sticking them on the wall behind the door. The rope went on the floor beneath. Moving back into the small living room, he checked his watch. Time was short.  He took his place next to the door, removing a pair of leather gloves from the right front pocket of his jeans, slipping them over sweaty hands. Waiting.

This was his second attempt at creation
, as he thought of it. The first had not gone well. He was a victim of his own impulsiveness. The girl was quick, faster than he imagined. When she entered the room, he was waiting in the middle, too far from the door. She caught the movement as he came toward her and turned back, yelling as she went. He followed. When his hand went around her mouth, she bit down hard, drawing blood. He still carried a ring of scars, curved lines on his upper palm just below his forefinger. The yelling never stopped. She managed to slip his grasp, starting a mad scramble back out the front. He panicked, went out the rear, and disappeared into the neighborhood.

Later, in his own apartment, he bathed his hand in hydrogen peroxide, wrapping it in gauze. He could never wear the gauze
in public of course. The hand stayed in his pocket for most of the next week as he slipped from class to class in a throng of students. Brooding over his failure he considered stopping right there. He couldn’t though, and eventually he resolved to do more planning, leave nothing to chance. Next time would be different. He wrote down a list of his mistakes, studied them, found solutions and burned the list in his bathroom, flushing the ashes down the toilet after committing them to memory. He was an academic after all. He could organize and plan. While he was planning, the need burned inside.

This time it would be better. He would be quick, his target less challenging. He chose his victim physically, selecting a small girl. Personality played into it. She was a shy thing he had seen in the halls between classes. Overpowering her would be easy. He followed her home on multiple afternoons, keeping his distance, watching as she made her way through the neighborhood of wood framed houses. Most of them had been two story family homes, built in the late 40’s as returning soldiers lobbied for housing to start their families. As the nearby college grew, the homes split into apartments, upper and lower. The population now was mostly students with a spattering of older remaining residents. Old growth trees, planted when the place was young and thriving with families, spread their branches over doors and driveways and offered concealment if he needed it.

Th
e location was good. He parked a block away, next to a bar on Elysian Fields. He could walk there in two minutes, be completely out of the area in five. The rope came from the storage room in his dormitory and did not belong to him. The duct tape came from a construction project he passed on his way to school. He picked it up and walked away. Even the clothes he wore made him blend in. Every college student in the world wore sneakers, jeans and t-shirts. On his walk over to the apartment, he passed several people on the street, a man working on a sewer duct, a young mother with a stroller. None gave him a second glance. He was just another young man with casual clothes and slightly long hair.

He stood behind the door and burned, listening to the old house creak around him. The people in the apartment above, a young couple, left early in the morning, ret
urning after dark. The girl had her last class at four in the afternoon and walked home immediately afterward. Her routine never varied in the week he watched. The hand on his watch crept along. Somewhere on the street, a child yelled. Steps on the wooden stair came to his ears. He took a step back, closer to the swinging hinges of the door.

Jill Chais
son, a third year Fine Arts major, daughter of an insurance salesman, opened the door to her apartment for the last time in her life, her head down as she removed the key from the lock that wouldn’t have slowed down a determined child. The Artist stepped forward, already swinging. His open hand crashed down on the back of her head as she swung the door shut. Her forehead hit the painted oak, the impact dropping her to the floor. She groaned, rolling on her side. The Artist kicked her in the stomach once, then again. Rope already in his hands he pulled her arms behind her back in one quick motion, made two wraps, knotting them securely. The tape went over her mouth. The Artist closed the still open door.

Chaisson,
stunned, managed to reach her knees. The Artist shoved her with his foot and she face planted on the hardwood floor. The point of the knife placed at her throat subdued her. He dragged her into a back bedroom by one leg, picked her up and threw her on the bed. She was light, unresisting, whimpering. Eyes wide, she watched the Artist tape her legs to the bedposts. Spread and helpless, he cut her clothes off with the knife from her own kitchen.

An hour later The Artist left through the front door, hands in his pockets. He took his time, ambling down the driveway to the sidewalk, just another student headed off to home or leaving after a visit to his girlfriend. He whistled as he walked, a nice touch. Why not? The game was beginning. He had just pulled off the first act of the play. Traffic was getting heavier, rush hour in full swing. The light was fading when he reached his car. He got in, checked his side mirror, and pulled out into traffic carefully. There was sense risking anything now, no sense risking such a great mood on the best day of his life. The last day for Jill Chaisson.

A heavy smell of cooked cabbage hung over the restaurant, the daily special, scooped up and devoured a hundred times every Thursday. A harried waitress in a pink uniform worked the counter, a few stray hairs leaking out over her ear where she kept her pencil. The place was long and not very deep, with room for only a single line of tables between the counter and the window looking out over the street. Further back the room widened into a double row of seating, booths along the left wall, tables on the right. The rear area was quite, set apart from the hustle of the counter where customers tended to eat a hasty meal and depart, leaving their money on the counter and their newspapers on the seat for the next patron.

Each booth carried a picture on the wall beside it, something f
or diners to look at, or ignore as they saw fit. A framed newspaper with a headline announcing some event in the city hung over one booth, an artistic shot of the swamp over another, or in the case of the booth where Kurt Dupond was sitting, an autographed photo of Chris Owens, dancing on stage in her burlesque club on Bourbon Street. How that photo found its way into a diner on Chef Menteur Highway Dupond didn’t know, but it had been hanging there for the last ten years. The black and white image was turning brown at the edges, fading from the sunlight and cigarette smoke and time.

Dupond worked his way through his meal steadily. The cabbage was cooked to perfection, spiced with chunks of corned beef, potatoes, and the occasional carrot, which he pushed to the edge of the plate and ignored. Plate glass windows on either side of the building looked out on the highway on one end and behind Dupond, a grey cinder block wall, the ass end of a tire repair store. He could see the length of the building and outside, in the parking lot, a green Ford pickup wedged itself into a parking space. The o
wner, a short muscular white man dressed in overalls and a stained Doors t-shirt, banged the door into the car next to him when he got out, flicked his cigarette onto the pavement. He was wearing cheap sunglasses that came off when he walked in. He caught the sight of Dupond sitting in his booth and made his way over. Dupond let him settle in, waved at the waitress to bring another plate. It came with a glass of iced tea and a side of cornbread.

  “He’s at his Mom’s place off Louisa,” Emile Adan said. “He rolled in about an hour ago, carrying a zipped up bag and what looke
d like groceries. I’ve got Kreeg keeping an eye on the place until we decide what to do.”

“Anyone else with him?”

Adan shook his head. “Not that we saw. He has a little brother, about six years old, but we don’t know if he’s in there.  His Mom came out once and threw something away. She went right back in and we haven’t seen any movement after that. Brooks and Weaver parked on the street behind his mother’s house. They said it’s been quiet.”

“OK,” Dupond
said, “finish up and we’ll go pay him a visit.”

J. Lee Clive was born with a wooden spoon in his mouth. The son of a drunken mother and sometime father he managed to reach the age of seven before his first arrest for stealing a lawnmower. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. He could hustle enough money for a gallon of gas, push his lawnmower across the highway to the white neighborhood and make him some money. He got three blocks before the police pulled him in. Undeterred, he turned to hustling tourists in the French Quarter, learning to dance with bottle caps on a ragged pair of tennis shoes. When he was hauled in for curfew, he turned to the only option left, and started carrying dope around for the older boys. Once he had enough scratch he bought some for himself, cut it up, and began to build himself a business.

At twen
ty-two, he bought his first heroin and found his calling. He also found a wellspring of ruthlessness inside himself. He shot his first man, an aging addict named Sammy Mulls, who made the mistake of stiffing him for a shot. The second was a competitor who dared to set up a man on J. Lee’s turf. The bullet-riddled body was pulled off the neutral ground of Louisa St. on a Sunday morning; the victim dressed in his Saturday night clothes. Despite the crowd at the shooting, not a single witness appeared. By the time of his latest birthday, his twenty-fourth, J.Lee owned six square blocks of the neighborhood surrounding the Desire Projects. He dressed well, sold good product, and managed his business like any other entrepreneur, carefully cultivating sources and customers.  He also ruthlessly eliminated the competition.

When it reached the point that bodies started stacking up,
Kurt Dupond began paying attention. At thirty-two, Dupond was the youngest Homicide detectives on the force. After graduating the University of New Orleans with a degree in Geology, he spent a year working for his father’s oil services company and hated it. A friend of his was already on the force and he suggested Dupond apply. He did, and found the work interesting. Once on patrol he relished the challenge. Every night there was something different, sometimes boring, sometimes hair raising, but always unexpected. He threw himself into the work, earned a degree in Criminal Justice while working nights in every seedy neighborhood in the Crescent City. When he bagged two suspects leaving Whitney Bank with a paper bag full of money he was already on the fast track. He also had a long list of informants, built up by his willingness to let the small things pass and the occasional good word put into a prosecutor.

Three weeks prior,
Dupond watched as a crew pulled the body of a sixteen year old out of a drainage canal. It was a few blocks away from Lee’s territory. His informant, a local bar owner, had gotten him word that Lee was the shooter. A neighborhood canvas turned up a convenience store clerk that had seen Clive talking with the boy the previous day. The conversation grew heated, the boy ran away, turning up the next morning in the canal, shot in the back. Clive was nowhere around the neighborhood, until he arrived at his mother’s house.

Now Dupond
pulled himself out of the booth. At a little over six foot, he still carried muscle from his days spent wrestling in high school. He kept himself in shape running the levee along the lakefront, three blocks from his apartment. His hair was dark blonde and cut too long for his supervisor, but not long enough that anyone would mistake him for a college student anymore. His eyes were an inviting blue, a feature that served him well with the secretaries in the department and even more so when he was making traffic stops as a uniform.