Stella Cameron - Out of Body

“I’ve been a journalist for years. It hasn’t stopped us from being civil—until now.”

The office was beneath street level and muggy. Throughout the subterranean warren of rooms, old cigarette smoke tainted the air. Fisher sat in a metal folding chair with his legs stretched out and his heels on the piece of orange carpet that spread from beneath Archer’s desk. If you stood still on that carpet a little too long, the bottoms of your shoes got sticky. Maybe it was soaked in nicotine from years of service.

Windows along one wall overlooked the corridor. Mangled blinds hung at random angles and didn’t stop anyone outside from seeing the entire room and whoever was in it.

Archer let out a long sigh and drew his lips back from his teeth. Dimples, there whether he smiled or not, were out of sync with his big frown. “We’re friends,” he said. “Until you give me a reason to be somethin’ else. You were a great cop, just like your dad. I wish you’d stuck around. You would have been my partner after Guy Gautreaux left for good. I’d have liked that. But you had to write stories for crissakes.”

Fisher had been a good enough cop, but he had wanted to write about the kind of people he met on the job every day. He knew the Quarter like the back of his hand—the clubs, the bars, the strip joints. Shops and their owners. And the everyday work force: portrait sketchers, palm readers and card readers, folks who hung out with bags of grave dust, rodent droppings and chicken feet in their pockets; dancers, singers, musicians, pushers, pimps, pavement princesses, pickpockets and crackheads—both the zombies and those who still had a few gray cells left to fry.

There was a lot of humanity existing on the very edge, people with rich or crazy histories, and often crazier here-and-nows.

“When will we know exactly how the vic died?” Fisher asked. “If it was before or after the gator?”

“The autopsy should be going on now, if Blades got to it.”

Fisher grinned with half of his mouth. “Blades is a first-rate M.E. I still say he chose the profession to fit his name.” He made a note about the autopsy in his notebook.

“I don’t think you’ll risk asking him about that one again—if you ever see him.” Archer jotted several more lines on his board.

“It’s not my fault if he doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Fisher said, and had a mental image of the tall, stooped man with his cadaverous face. “What’s your best guess on this woman?”

“She’s dead.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Let’s get back to where we were,” Archer said. “You weren’t finished spilling your guts when the press conference came on.”

“I wasn’t spilling my guts.”

“Seemed to me like you had a lot to say.”

Fisher let it go. “You ever see gators in the river?”

“Nope. Heard of one a time or two.”

“I don’t believe it.” But Fisher supposed they could get there somehow. “I guess Katrina could have caused just about anything.” The hurricane continued to get blamed for most things and it was often guilty.

Archer began a fresh round of pacing back and forth, picking up crime scene photos from his desk in one direction and peering at them through slitted eyelids; dropping the grisly images of Shirley Cooper down again on his return. The body looked as if it had been in an outsize blender. He had held the photos up for Fisher to see when her name was mentioned on TV a while earlier.

“You could have been going to say just about anything.” The detective hadn’t forgotten his previous line of questioning. “What would you have said if you hadn’t found out we had a body?”

“I didn’t think about a body at all. Not one way or the other. Did I know I was going to walk in here in time to watch a press conference and hear about a bunch of missing women?”

Archer scowled. “The chief couldn’t wait to get in front of the cameras.”

After another detective had interrupted them to tell Archer to turn on the TV, Fisher had watched Chief Beauchamp’s press conference. He learned the case was Archer’s and that he’d begged off being on camera, not that reporters wouldn’t get to him soon enough. And that was the burr up Archer’s ass.

“You know the press will be all over this like white on rice. That’s why you’re so mad. There’s probably a posse of ’em hanging outside right now. And the calls are going to start. Get used to it.”

“Now you’re a mind reader,” Archer said through his teeth.

“I know you,” Fisher told him. “I know they rode you like a rented mule in the Cassidy case and you’re still sore from it.” Benton Cassidy, a rich, spoiled kid with a father who could hire any hotshot lawyer for sale, had almost walked even though everyone was convinced he’d killed his young stepmother and the son she’d had by Cassidy’s father.

“Cassidy’s going to rot in his cage until he croaks,” Fisher went on. “Your side won in the end.”

Archer grimaced. He lifted a slim, frosted glass bottle of Bong Vodka out of his bottom desk drawer and pulled two paper cups from a dispenser on the wall beside his personal water cooler.

“Every crime’s public property now.” Vodka gurgled into the cups.

“It’s always been that way.”

“They didn’t used to expect every detail.” The vertical crease between Archer’s brows had become permanent. “What they want most is what you don’t have and may never get.”

“The guy from the Times brought up the seven other women who disappeared and never showed up again.”

“Yeah,” Archer said. “But they were spread out and the type that make themselves vulnerable.”

“Weren’t they all on the street?” Fisher asked.

“I think so,” Archer said. “Can’t remember. And it stopped a couple of years back.”

“But the cases were never solved. And they weren’t singers.”

Archer’s frown darkened even more and he shook his head.

“There could still be a connection,” Fisher said. “The perp may have waited until he felt safe to start again.”

“Thanks, Sherlock,” Archer said.

Fisher felt deeply morose. “I don’t know how you afford this stuff on a detective’s salary.” He looked into the soggy cup he’d been given. “Can’t you get some crystal glasses to drink it out of? On the arm—”

“Fuck you,” Archer said, then he snapped open a smile. They both knew he was too straight to be on the take. “The only things I take on the arm are expensive dinners, and women, of course.”

As far as Fisher knew, Archer continued to have only one woman in his life. She lived out in Toussaint on Bayou Teche and was an off-limits topic unless Archer brought her up.

The booze blasted Fisher’s throat. It might not be his favorite treat, but this stuff packed a wallop. It was good. He thought he’d finish the drink before he revealed a new detail. This one might turn out to be part of the case that was currently eating Archer’s hangnails.

“Bucky Fist’s still at the scene,” Archer said of his current partner. “He’s probably got an audience he’d like to feed to a goddamn gator. I thought Lemon would be slamming tips at me already. I reckon there’s so many it’s takin’ him a lot longer than he likes to weed them out.”

Lemon was a semiretired cop who worked phones on this type of case. He was good at pinpointing what was worth passing on and where it hung in the pecking order. Five years ago he’d lost the use of his legs in an ambush. By some miracle, the bullet he took didn’t put a crimp in his connubial bliss—Lemon made sure no one thought otherwise.

The way Archer talked, as much to himself as to anyone else, made Fisher think the other man had as good as forgotten he wasn’t alone.