Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

He rubbed his knee and explained about the torn meniscus cartilage, then went on to explain how he’d torn up the other knee at his spring game at L.S.U., sophomore year, and had been unconsciously relying on his left leg so much, he’d torn the cartilage cushion between femur and tibia.

“You’re getting it repaired, I hope.”

“Next week.” He reached into his pocket for a small plastic case and took out two pills.

“Naproxen?”

He nodded as he swallowed the pills with the last of his coffee. He tore out a fresh sheet of notepaper, jotted down the number of the coroner’s office, and passed it to her.

“You won’t have to physically identify him. Unless you want to. We can match his fingerprints.”

She sank back in the chair and looked smaller. He looked down at his notebook as he told her the city would bury him if she didn’t have the money.

“I have a burial policy.” She got up and went to one of the dressers next to the bed. She rifled through a large folder and came up with several sets of folded papers. “Yes,” she said in a relieved voice. “It’s right here.” She restuffed the folder and started back to him but noticed something with the papers in her hand. She stepped back and pulled out a different set of papers and brought those to the table.

It was a burial policy for five thousand dollars. Barely enough to bury him. The policy was dated a year ago, shortly after her husband bought his first gun.

“Was your husband home when you left this morning?”

“Sleeping. My shift starts at five thirty.”

“Did he tell you what he’d be doing today?”

“He was supposed to be at welding school.” She pulled a business card from her purse. The school was in Metairie. She shook her head. “He never told me what he did. Wasn’t much of a talker.”

And Beau had to wonder why an attractive, intelligent woman like this could marry such a loser? Trying to understand love was an impossibility. Beau’s Cajun father told him that long ago, sitting in a pirogue while fishing with his son. “Never even try to figure,” his old man said. “De heart go where she wanna to go. Notin’ you can do ’bout it. Look at your mama. She too pretty fo’ me, too smart and too good.”

Beau nodded toward his card, still on the table. “If you think of anything else, call me. Oh, what’s your phone number?”

“We don’t have one.” She asked for his notebook and pen and wrote down her number at work.

He stood and told her he’d be in touch when they were finished processing the Ford Escort and she could pick it up. “Is there anyone who can come be with you?” he asked as he stepped to the doorway.

She shook her head and said she wanted to be alone for a while. She gave him a long stare, and he said she should lock the door behind him. As he moved down the stairs, he heard the latch click. He felt the familiar pain in his knee, but his mind was occupied elsewhere.

She has a burial policy. Odd. Maybe not. Maybe she could see the violence in her husband’s eyes.

Jodie was behind her gray metal, government-issue desk in the squad room; Paul Snowood sat in the chair next to it. The crime lab tech stood on the other side next to Beau’s desk, which abutted Jodie’s. Over by the coffeepot, Frank Willard stood beneath the unofficial logo of the Homicide Division, a vulture perched atop an NOPD gold star-and-crescent badge. His arms folded, he still looked jittery to Beau.

Snowood was explaining, “...It’s what we call here in town an open-and-shut case, a ‘justifiable homicide.’ Willard jumped the dude comin’ out and it was Dodge City for a minute.” Snowood, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, and over forty, wore another of his cowboy outfits — gold shirt with two rows of buttons, dressy, brown denim pants, tan cowboy boots. His white Stetson lay atop his desk.

“The dude and Willard drew on each other, like the O.K. Corral. Willard ducked and fired twice, and the dude just plain missed. It’s what we call back in the badlands, some good shootin’ and some bad shootin’.”

Jodie looked like she had a migraine.

Snowood, born and raised across the river in the suburb of Belle Chasse, took the fact he was born on the west bank of the Mississippi so seriously he’d evolved into a turn-of-the-century lawman, straight out of Tombstone. He’d have a handlebar mustache if he could grow a decent one.

Jodie acknowledged Beau with a nod. Snowood turned and grinned his tobacco-laced teeth at Beau and said, “Ah, the Plains warrior has arrived.” He raised a white Styrofoam cup to his lips and spit into it.

“How’s the woman from the drugstore?” Beau asked.

Jodie said, “She’s in stable condition. No fractures. She’ll be okay. Eventually.”

Atop Beau’s cluttered desk lay two semiautomatics, Willard’s stainless steel Beretta 9mm, and a blue steel Smith & Wesson forty caliber. The tech picked up the blue steel semiautomatic and wiped the white fingerprint powder from it before dropping the magazine out and pulling back the slide. He had trouble with both.