herding them behind a hastily erected barrier, and once an arc lamp is hooked to the roof of a car, its beam wide enough to identify each and every vehicle pigeonholed in the alley, they begin to understand the source of this sudden police presence.
Somewhere a dog barks and, as if in echo, three or four more start up somewhere to the right. They holler in unison for reasons known only to themselves.
Third entrance from the Claiborne end a car is parked at an angle, its fender running a misplaced parallel to the others. Its positioning indicates speed, the rapid arrival and departure of its driver, or perhaps a driver who had not cared to harmonize with perspective and linear conformity, and though the carboy who walked this alleyway – minding automobiles, polishing brights and hoods for a quarter’s tip – has seen this car for three days consecutive, he hadn’t called the police until he’d looked inside. He’d taken a flashlight, a good one, and, pressing his face against the left rear quarterlight, he’d scanned the luxurious interior, minding he didn’t touch the white walls with his dirty, toe-peeping kickers. This wasn’t no ordinary car. There was something about it that had drawn him inside.
More people had gathered by then, and down a half a block or so some folks had opened up the doors and windows on a house party and the music was coming down with the smell of fried chicken and baked pecans, and when a plain Buick showed up and someone from the Medical Examiner’s office stepped out and walked towards the alleyway there were quite a few people down there: maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty.
And there was music – our human syncopations – as good tonight as any other.
The smell of chicken reminded the ME’s man of some place, some time he couldn’t remember now, and then it started raining in that lazy, tail-end-of-summer way that seemed to wet nothing down, the kind of way no-one had a mind to complain about.
It’d been a hot summer, a quiet kind of brutality, and everyone could remember how bad the smell got when the storm drains backed up in the last week of July, and how they spilled God-only-knew-what out into the gutters. It steamed, the flies came, and the kids got sick when they played down there. Heat blistered at ninety, tortured through ninety-five, and when a hundred sucked the air from parched lungs they called it a nightmare and stayed home from work to shower, to wrap split ice in a wet towel and lie on the floor with their cool hats pulled down over their eyes.
The Examiner man walked down. Early forties, name was Jim Emerson; he liked to collect baseball cards and watch Marx Brothers movies, but the rest of the time he crouched near dead bodies and tried to put two and two together. He looked as lazy as the rain, and you could sense in the way he moved that he knew he was unwelcome. He knew nothing about cars, but they’d run a sheet through come morning and they’d find – just like the carboy had figured – that this wasn’t no ordinary automobile.
Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, built by Ford as the XM in ’56, released commercially in ’57. V8, 290 horsepower at 4600 revs per minute, Merc-O-Matic transmission, 122-inch wheelbase, 4240 pounds in weight. This one was a hardtop, one of only sixteen thousand ever built, but the plates were Louisiana plates – and should have been on a ’69 Chrysler Valiant, last booked for a minor traffic violation in Brookhaven, Mississippi seven years before.
The carboy, released without charge within an hour and a half of his report, had stated emphatically that he’d seen blood on the back seat, a real mess of it all dried up on the leatherwork, clotted in the seams, spilled over the edge of the seats and down on the floor. Looked like a sucking pig had been gutted in there. The Cruiser wore a lot of glass, its retractable rear window, quarter-lights and sides designed to permit full enjoyment of the wide new vistas open to turnpike travellers. Gave the boy a good look at the innards of this thing, because that’s what he’d figured was in there, and he wasn’t so far from right.
These were the Chalmette and Arabi districts, edge of the French business quarter, New Orleans City, state of Louisiana.
This was a humid August Saturday night, and only later did they