The Lazarus Heart (14 page)

"Well, you'd sure be one sad, penniless motherfucker if you did," she said.

Detective Jim Unger sits down on the floor beside the closet door to finish his cigarette, within easy reach of his gun. He counts the seconds between each flash of lightning and the thunderclaps that come after, and he keeps his eyes on the window.

He'd been on the force almost ten years, had spent the last four of those on homicide, and in that time Jim Unger had seen some pretty awful shit. Gun-fights, knifings, strangulations, an ax murder, bodies hacked up and dumped into the bayous to be chewed on by gators and crawfish-he'd once seen the corpse of a woman that a perp had tried to dissolve in a bathtub full of muriatic acid. But nothing, absolutely
nothing,

had prepared him for what was waiting in the bedroom at the top of a squeaky stairwell near the corner of Ursulines and Dauphine that muggy August afternoon. And nothing ever
could
have.

Vincent Norris was still his partner then, lanky white-haired Vince who'd moved from the wastes of north Texas to New Orleans to be a cop, who talked like a bad actor in an old cowboy picture. Vince had never learned to laugh at all the sick shit they had to deal with day in and day out, had never managed to set up that necessary buffer between himself and the job.

They reached the scene way ahead of the coroner, just minutes after a hysterical old woman had flagged down a patrol car. That was almost three months before Vince had his nervous collapse, or whatever the hell the doctors finally decided to call it, and left the force.

Vince phoned him once from the hospital in the middle of the night, his voice groggy from all the tranquilizers they had him on. He spoke quietly and very slowly, hesitantly, as if he was afraid someone might overhear.

"How you doin' out there in the real world, Jimbo?" he asked.

"Doing fine, Vince," Jim replied. "Doing just fine. Are they treating you all right in there?"

There was silence from the other end of the line, so long that finally Jim said, "Hey, Vince. You still with me, pal?" And Vince came back, but now he was whispering.

"They're giving me these little
pills,"
he said, "Three times a day, Jimbo, these little red
pills"
and he paused again. Jim could hear the muffled tattoo of footsteps in the background before Vince continued.

"They don't help," Vince said, and now Jim was straining to hear him. Vince didn't just sound like he was whispering; he sounded like he was speaking into the telephone from the bottom of a very deep well, as if someone had dangled the receiver over the side of a pit and Vince's words were crossing all that darkness.

"I can still see it, Jimbo," he said. "I can still see what was up there."

Jim swallowed, his throat gone almost too dry to speak. There were goose bumps on his arms, like an allergic reaction to what he was hearing.

"You gotta trust those doctors, Vince. They know what they're doing," he said, trying for Vince's sake to sound as though he believed what he was saying.

"It takes a little time, but you'll-"

Click.
The line went dead. Unger sat there for a while, sipping Scotch whisky and staring at the silent phone.

When Jim Unger was a rookie a desk sergeant told him, "You let all this bullshit get to you and you'll be picking petunias off the wallpaper." He had taken the advice to heart. He'd spent the years letting the things he saw, the atrocities that human beings were capable of doing to each other and to themselves, numb him, build up a thick callus around his soul. And maybe that's why he would only have nightmares about what they found in Jared Poe's apartment.

There were two squad cars outside when he and Vince arrived, their lights washing the darkening street red and blue. Vince went up the stairs first. A cop named Fletcher met them at the door to the apartment.

"You guys better brace yourselves good," he said, "'cause you ain't even gonna believe this one." Fletcher looked green, and he must have seen the unspoken skepticism in Jim's eyes, because he said, "My partner's in there puking. I
ain't
kidding you. This one is un-fucking-believable."

That was when Jim first noticed the smell, the cloying stink of blood and shit and raw flesh, the way he imagined a slaughterhouse might smell. Vince covered his mouth with one hand and mumbled,
"Je-sus."

"I almost think someone used one of them wood chippers on the body," Fletcher said, shaking his head as he led them through the stinking apartment to the bedroom.

"Oh, goddamn," Vince Norris muttered, and he managed to get out of the doorway to the bedroom and halfway to the bathroom before he vomited, so at least he didn't contaminate the scene.

"I
said
I wasn't fucking kidding," Fletcher said defensively, and stepped aside so that Jim could get a better view.

Jim almost asked where the hell the body was, but he stopped himself as his first impression began to fade. A better question, he realized, would be where the hell the body
wasn't.
The walls, the furniture, the floor, the goddamn ceiling,
everything
was painted with a sticky, wet veneer of human gore. It was like looking into the belly of some bizarre and gargantuan creature whose insides just happened to resemble a bedroom. The only things he could recognize as actual human parts were on the big canopy bed: the victim's feet and hands, tied to the bedposts with nylon cord that might have been white once, but was now the same crimson as everything else.

He turned away, fighting his rolling stomach, determined not to be sick. "That's not even fucking possible," he said to Fletcher.

"If you'd asked me half an hour ago, I'd have agreed with you one hundred percent."

"I need a cigarette." Jim moved back toward the front door, trying to put some distance between himself and the smell. Vince was on his knees now, dry-heaving, and that sure as hell didn't help any. Jim leaned against a chair and lit one of the menthols he kept for the really bad cases, inhaled the smoke and stared at the floor and the scuffed toes of his shoes. The taste of the cigarette did little to mask the blood-and-vomit reek filling his nostrils.

"Where the hell's everyone else?" he asked Fletcher, exhaling. "There were two cruisers out there."

"They're downstairs with the old lady," the beat cop replied. "The one who found it.

She lives downstairs. I think maybe she owns this place." "She found that?" Jim asked.

"Yeah. There was blood dripping out of her fucking ceiling, if you can believe
that
shit. She came up to see what was going on, found the door unlocked. They're trying to keep her calm until an ambulance gets here."

"But she didn't see anyone else up here? Just. . . that?" "Not that she's told us about so far."

Jim sighed, breathed out smoke that tasted like cough drops, and looked over at Vince.

"You gonna be okay over there?"

Vince wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, started to answer, nodded instead.

"I know the coroner's office is just gonna
love
the mess you've made on the floor," Jim said.

"Fuck 'em," Vince muttered. Then he was gagging again.

"Find him a wet towel or something, will you?" Jim said to Fletcher. They heard the ambulance, and Jim took another drag off his cigarette.

"You may as well take your time, boys," he said.

There was the sound of a toilet flushing from behind a closed door that Jim assumed led to the bathroom. A moment later the door creaked open and a younger officer he didn't recognize stepped out. The kid's face was the color of old feta cheese.

"Think you're gonna live through this?"

"Maybe," the kid replied, smiling weakly. "Maybe not." Vince slipped quickly past him and shut the bathroom door again.

When the paramedics started up the stairs Fletcher played interception and routed them back to the old lady's place. They gave her oxygen and a mild sedative, but nothing so strong that she wouldn't be able to talk when the time for questions came. The coroner's wagon arrived shortly after the ambulance. Jim Unger had stepped outside, hoping the night air would drive some of the fetor of the apartment from his nostrils, where it seemed to have taken root like a creeping red fungus. There'd been very few times when he'd thought of the air in the French Quarter as fresh, but this was one of them. After the abattoir upstairs, the ever-present background scents of sewage and river water, ripening garbage and mildew seemed familiar and soothing.

The coroner was a heavyset third-generation Irishwoman named Pam Tierney. Jim Unger knew she considered cops a necessary evil at best, thugs who were only there to keep her crime scene from getting trampled before the
real
detective work could be done. He'd actually seen her slap a policeman's hand for touching a coffee cup that lay near a body. "Just keep your hands in your pockets," she'd said. "I don't think that should be too hard for a bright young man like you."

She stood in front of him now, peering expectantly at the windows of the second- story apartment.

"Word on the radio is you got something special waiting for me up there."

"Oh, I think they ordered this one just for you, Tierney," he said, making no effort to hide his feelings for the woman. Jesus, half the ward knew she was a fucking dyke, that she was currently shacked up with some artist chick from New York City.

"So what are we waiting for?" she asked impatiently, and he shrugged his shoulders, flicked the butt of his third menthol into the gutter.

"Ladies first," he said, and followed her up the stairs, praying silently that this would be the day that old blood-'n'-guts Tierney finally took a ride on the porcelain bus. When they reached the door to the bedroom, Jim didn't look in again, stared back instead at Vince and Fletcher loitering about the living room. Vince still looked way too sick to care, but Fletcher rolled his eyes, shook his head.

Pam Tierney didn't say a word for a good three or four minutes, just stood very still, staring into the blood-soaked room. When she did turn back to Jim, the only sign that the sight had affected her was a loud, exasperated sigh.

"Wow," she said softly, and laughed, actually fucking
laughed,
a short, dry, unhappy

sound that made Jim Unger want to hit her.

"Any particular thoughts as to the cause of death, Detective?" she said, stepping around him, heading for the kitchen.

"How about a goddamn hand grenade?" Fletcher said as she passed him and Vince and his partner. The partner was sitting on a black leather sofa, looking through a photo album.

"Yeah, Fletcher. That's a real good one. You must've been working on that one all afternoon." Then to the partner, "Hey, what the hell are you doing?"

The kid flinched and looked quickly up at her, startled, his eyes wide as those of a little boy caught with his arm up to the elbow in a jar of Oreos.

"Unless you're some sort of freak of nature and were born without fingerprints, I'd really like you to put that down and get up off the couch. Can you do that for me?"

"Better listen to her, Joey," Fletcher said. "Her bite's a lot worse than her bark."

But the young cop had already set the photo album back on the coffee table where he'd found it and stood up so fast he looked like some sort of mechanical wind- up toy.

"Thank you," Pam Tierney said, and disappeared into the kitchen. "What's her problem?" the kid asked.

"Her girlfriend's probably on the rag this week," Fletcher said.

At that moment Tierney's two assistants reached the top of the stairs, both of them loaded down with cameras and cases of forensic equipment. They stood in the doorway, looking lost and wrinkling their noses at the smell.

"Where's the body?" one of them asked, and everyone, even Vince Norris, started giggling.

"If you girls will try not to touch anything for about five minutes," Jim said, "I'm gonna have a few words with the Dragon Lady in there."

He found Pam Tierney at the stove, emptying a package of Community Coffee into an iron skillet. The gas flame licked at the bottom of the pan and the air was already redolent with the rich, scorched smell of burning chicory and coffee grounds.

"What the hell are you
doing?"
he asked her, staring dubiously at the skillet.

"The guy who trained me up in Baton Rouge used to do this whenever we got a real stinker, especially the ones that had been underwater a while. Personally, I think it smells a whole lot worse than what's in there," and she motioned toward the front with her head. "But I can't have everyone puking all over the place while I'm trying to work." She adjusted the flame beneath the skillet and fanned the dark smoke toward the ceiling.

Jim coughed, squinted at her through the haze.

"Are you gonna try to tell me that shit in there didn't bother you?"

Pam Tierney turned to face him. He noticed that her eyes were watering, but he assumed it was from the sizzling coffee grounds.

"What do you
want
me to do, linger? Barf all over the floor like the Three Stooges in there? Fuck yes, it
bothers
me, but I'm the one who has to go back in there and pick through whatever's left of that guy."

Jim glanced back toward the bedroom. "I think it was a woman," he said. "There's black nail polish on the fingernails and toes," but Tierney shook her head. She left the stove on and squeezed through the narrow entrance to the kitchen, edging past Jim Unger. She barked some instructions to her assistants and they began setting up, unpacking. Then she turned back to Jim, still standing in the door to the kitchen.

"Come here a second, Sherlock. I want to show you something."

Jim groaned, but he walked across the room to where she was standing at the edge of the bedroom, pointing down at something lying near her feet on the gore-smeared floor.

"You ever seen one of those on a girl?" she asked him. Jim bent closer for a better look before he realized that the sausage-sized lump of meat on the floor was a penis with a small bit of the scrotal sac still attached. The head had a large stainless steel ring through it. Jim Unger felt the hot rush of acid and half-digested lunch forcing its way back up from his stomach and dashed for the toilet.