“I agree,” said Basous. “A most beautiful woman — very striking.”
He showed the sketch to the tenants of the courtyard apartments, but none had seen the woman. Then Basous battled his way through the Mardi Gras throngs now crowding the streets in ever-increasing numbers to police headquarters on South Broad, where he rejoined his partner, Lieutenant D’Aquin. He showed the sketch to D’Aquin, who whistled appreciatively. (D’Aquin was something of a ladies’ man.) “What a shame to waste anything that looks like that.” Then he asked, “What do you want to do now?”
“Well, I think we ought to go talk to this Bubba Noss who pays the rent on the apartment, n’est-ce pas?”
From the landlady he had obtained the information that Bubba Noss ran a “head shop” for the hippie crowd in another part of the city.
“We’ll have to go the long way ’round,” D’Aquin said, nodding at the crowded streets.
The day had turned overcast. A cold mist was in the air. Basous turned up his coat collar and trotted out to the car. D’Aquin drove. Mercer Basous was not fond of heavy traffic or crowds. Were it not for his job, which he liked, he would be happy to return to the small Arcadian village on the Bayou where he had been raised, and trap muskrats for a living.
Bubba Noss was six feet tall, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, wore a full beard, beads and sandals, and did not like the police.
“No, I don’t know who she is,” he said sourly, handing the sketch back to D’Aquin.
“Well, she was in your pad last night.”
“Man, lots of chicks are in my pad every night.”
“It looks very much like this one got herself murdered there,” D’Aquin said.
Bubba gave him a sullen, hostile gaze. “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Basous glanced around the shop. It smelled of incense which was probably used to cover up the pot that was smoked there. The goods on display included fringed leather jackets, floppy brimmed hats, books and various other articles of clothing and paraphernalia favored by the hip subculture. Several bearded, sandaled youths were lounging about, giving the two detectives curious, unfriendly stares.
“Your apartment is covered with blood,” D’Aquin pursued. “Somebody — we think this woman — got cut up pretty bad.”
“Man, you’ve wigged out. There ain’t no blood in my pad.” Then he exclaimed, “Wait a minute! Do you mean my place over in the French Quarter?”
“You have more than one pad?”
“My living quarters are here, upstairs above the shop. I just keep that pad in the Quarter for kicks. You know, atmosphere. Sometimes when I or one of my friends want to impress an out-of-town chick, we take her there. Sometimes I let my customers and friends use it for a party. Man, all kinds of people have keys to that place.”
“Where were you last night?”
“Here — upstairs. We had a big Mardi Gras party going on early in the evening.”
“How about after midnight?”
Bubba’s beard split into a toothy grin. “I was in jail. The cops come in and busted me and my friends for disturbing the peace. They thought we were smoking grass, but couldn’t find any. I just got out of the slammer an hour ago.”
“You have to admit,” said D’Aquin, “that’s a pretty good alibi.”
“Yeah,” Basous said, staring moodily at the Mardi Gras crowds as he and his partner drove back to headquarters. There, Basous went to the crime laboratory on the first floor.
“I’ve been going over this material you brought in, Lieutenant,” the laboratory criminologist told him. “I’m typing a report, but I’ll tell you what we’ve found so far. There were face powder, lipstick stains and perfume residue on one pillowcase. It was all easy to identify, but not of much value in tracing the person who used it. It’s all of types widely used and distributed, though high quality, indicating expensive taste. The other pillowcase was slightly stained with hair oil of a type men use. The hair from that pillow was heavy with dark melamine pigment, indicating the man it came from had black hair. The longer hair picked from the pillowcase which had the lipstick stains was also heavily pigmented, but take a look at it through the microscope.”
Basous bent over the instrument. He said, “No roots.”
“Exactly. So we can be pretty certain it came from a human hair wig. Now look at this.” He placed another slide containing a strand of hair under the microscope. “Notice the lack of pigment and the air spaces — the vacuoles. This is definitely from a blonde person. My educated guess is that the woman was wearing a brunette wig, but is actually quite fair — a natural blonde.”
“Hmm,” Basous murmured. “I’ll have an artist make another sketch of the woman as a blonde. How about that bit of plastic? My partner and I think it is a contact lens.”
“It is. I sent a man to the optical shop and they were able to calibrate the prescription. Here it is.” He handed Basous a piece of paper. “Oh, the blood in that room is type B negative.”
“Thanks. Any fingerprints?”
“Not much luck there. Mostly smudges. Somebody went around wiping everything in sight.”
“I figured as much, because, whoever it was carted off the bottle, glasses and ash tray. Well, many thanks.”
Basous left the sketch of the woman with an artist who did some work for the police department, asking him to sketch her as a blonde. He checked with Missing Persons, but so far no male or female had been reported missing. Then he and D’Aquin went out for lunch.
Basous ordered Oysters Bienville with which he had a small bottle of Chablis. After the meal, both detectives had Louisiana coffee, black and heavy with chicory. During the meal, Basous acquainted D’Aquin with the information from the laboratory.
“So,” D’Aquin summarized, “sometime between two a.m. and dawn, a blonde woman wearing a dark wig went to Bubba Noss’ apartment in the French Quarter with a man who had dark hair. They had a party, drinks, and then the woman, who had type B negative blood, got cut up awfully bad, probably killed.”
“I don’t see how anyone could lose that much blood and survive,” Basous agreed.
“But we know it wasn’t Bubba Noss because he was in jail at the time.”
“Yes. From what he’s told us, it could have been one of many people. Apparently his whole crowd of swingers use that place as a party room and shacking-up pad. Either the man or woman — or both for that matter — could have had a key.”
D’Aquin said, “I guess it’s up to us now to find out the identity of the couple, starting with the woman since we have a pretty good idea what she looks like.”
“And we have the contact lens,” Basous reminded him. “More than likely it belonged to the woman. She would be too vain to spoil her kind of looks with glasses. And with her obvious class, she could afford the best ophthalmologist in the city for the examination and contact-lens prescription. We can make the rounds of the doctors this afternoon and see if one of them recognizes her from the sketch.”
“That might work. Unless, of course, she was from out of town, and there are an awful lot of visitors at Mardi Gras time — and unless the lens belonged to the man; or it was dropped by somebody else at a previous time.”
“That’s what I like about you, D’Aquin. You’re always so damned optimistic.”
They spent the afternoon plowing through the Mardi Gras crowds that were growing denser and drunker by the hour.
They went to seven ophthalmologists, and at the eighth office they struck pay dirt. They didn’t even have to take up the doctor’s time. The receptionist recognized the sketch — the blonde one — at once. “Oh, I’m almost sure that’s Mrs. Arthur Turner... Linda Turner. She was in just last month.”