“What were you doing on the second floor of the Westside?”
“I was playing a hunch. I’m a great little hunch player.”
“You make mincemeat of Wallace’s lights and gizzard on a hunch?” Lieutenant Ritter asked.
“Down, Cossack!” said Rhodes. “Down. Roll over. Sit up. Beg...”
“Bob, you’re not making any sense,” the girl broke in. “Lieutenant, I’ll tell you why he was at the Westside. He had an awful fight with Paul Wallace the night before last. You see, Bob and I are very much in love, and Bob is terribly jealous. He thought Paul Wallace had designs on my virtue, so Bob told him if he as much as invited me to his apartment again, he would kill him.”
“And last night he made good his threat?”
“Of course not. Last night I told Bob he was being silly and he would have to go around and apologize to Paul Wallace. Only he couldn’t apologize because nobody answered when he knocked on the door. I guess Mr. Wallace was already dead.”
From the expression on Bob Rhodes’s face, Dr. Coffee judged that at least part of the girl’s story was new and startling to him.
“Patty,” said Ritter, “if this guy Wallace was so buddy-buddy with your family, how come your Auntie Min never heard of him?”
“Because I never spoke of him in front of Auntie Min. Auntie is a real spinster. She thinks all men are creatures of the devil. If she ever thought that I went to see Mr. Wallace alone, she’d simply die, even if he is old enough to be my father.”
“Is he your father?”
“No, of course not. Lieutenant, why don’t you let Bob go home and sober up? You’ll never get a straight story out of him in this condition.”
Ritter ignored the suggestion. “Getting back to your Auntie Min,” he said, “how come she wasn’t worried to death about you being alone with that voice coach of yours ’way down south in New Orleans?”
Patty laughed. “He’s even older than Mr. Wallace.”
“What was his name, Miss Erryl?” Dr. Coffee asked.
The girl hesitated. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” she said after a moment. “He wasn’t very well-known outside of the South. In the French Quarter they used to call him Papa Albert.”
“No last name?”
“That was his last name — Albert.”
“Address?”
“Well, he used to live on Bourbon Street, but the last I heard he was going to move away.”
“To Baton Rouge?”
“I... I don’t know where he is now.”
“Didn’t he write to you from Baton Rouge?”
“No.”
“Or to Mr. Wallace?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have written to Mr. Wallace from Baton Rouge?”
“I... I...” Patty Erryl suddenly covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
“Lay off the gal, will you, Cossack?” Rhodes stood up, swinging a full beer bottle like an Indian club. “If you have to work off your sadistic energy somewhere, call me any day after dark and I’ll give you some addresses which I suspect you already know. You can bring your own whips, if you want, and—”
“Sit down, Mr. Rhodes.” Dr. Coffee gently removed the bottle from the reporter’s hand. “Miss Erryl, I happened to listen to the broadcast of your operatic audition. I thought you did a first-rate job. I particularly admired the way you sang Vissi d’ Arte. Do you have any real ambition to sing La Tosca some day?”
The girl’s weeping stopped abruptly. She stared at the pathologist for a moment. Then she said, “Why do you ask that?”
“You seemed to have a feeling for the part of Floria Tosca,” Dr. Coffee said. “I’m sure you must be familiar with the libretto. You are, aren’t you?”
Patty Erryl’s lips parted. She closed them again without saying a word.
“Come on, Max,” Dr. Coffee said. “Miss Erryl is right. I think you’d better tackle Mr. Rhodes when he’s more himself.”
“But Doc, he admits—”
“Let’s go, Max. Goodbye, Miss Tosca. Goodbye, Mr. Rhodes.”
As the police car headed for Raoul’s Auberge Française (one flight up) where since it was Thursday, Dr. Coffee knew they would be regaled with Quenelles de Brocket (dumplings of fresh-water pike in shells), Max Ritter said, “Doc, I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have taken that wisecracking reporter downtown.”
“You won’t lose him, Max. I saw some of your most adhesive shadows loitering purposefully outside The Slot.”
“You never miss a trick, do you, Doc?” Ritter chuckled. “Doc, you don’t really believe that a guy gets that squiffed so early in the day just because he can’t apologize to a dead swindler, do you?”
“Hardly, Max. But a man might get himself thoroughly soused if he realized he was seen heading for the apartment of a man with whom he had quarreled the night before and who had since been murdered. My guess is that he spent the rest of the night ducking from bar to bar, trying to forget either that he killed a man or that he had certainly maneuvered himself into the unenviable position of appearing to have killed a man.”
As they waited for a light to change, Ritter asked, “What was that crack of yours about Tosca?”
Dr. Coffee laughed. “Pure whimsy. Probably unimportant. I wanted to watch the girl’s reaction.”
“You sure got one. What’s the angle?”
“Max, why don’t you drop in at the Municipal Auditorium when the Metropolitan Opera troupe stops by for a week after the New York season?”
“Doc, you know damned well I never got past the Gershwin grade. Who’s the Tosca?”
“Floria Tosca is the tragic heroine of a play by a Frenchman named Sardou which has become a popular opera by Puccini. Tosca is a singer who kills the villain Scarpia to save her lover, an early Nineteenth Century revolutionary named Mario, and incidentally, to save her honor. As it turns out, her honor is about all that is saved because everybody double-crosses everybody else and there are practically no survivors. But it’s a very melodious opera, Max, and I think you might like it. Listen.” Dr. Coffee hummed E Lucevan le Stelle. “Da da da deee, da da dum, da dum dummmm...”
“You think we got a Patty La Tosca on our hands, Doc?”
“It’s too early to tell, Max. Right now, though, I’d say it might be a sort of Wrong-Way Tosca. Instead of Floria Tosca killing Scarpia to save Mario, Mario may have killed Scarpia to save Tosca. Only I’m not sure who Mario might be. I’ll know more tomorrow or the next day. I’ll call you, Max.”
Dr. Coffee was reading the slides from the Wallace autopsy. The Fite stains provided colorful sections. The acid-fast bacteria appeared in a deep ultramarine. The connective-tissue cells were red, and all other elements were stained yellow. He raised his eyes from the binocular microscope and summoned his Hindu resident.
“Dr. Mookerji, I want you to look at this section from the femoral lymph node. You must have seen many like it in India.”
Dr. Mookerji adjusted the focus, moved the slide around under the nose of the instrument, grunted, and held out a chubby brown hand.
“You have further sections, no doubt?”
“Try this. From the right earlobe.”
Dr. Mookerji grunted again, then twisted the knobs of the microscope in silence.
“Hansen’s bacillus?” ventured Dr. Coffee.
“Quite,” said the Hindu. “However, am of opinion that said bacilli present somewhat fragmented appearance. Observe that outline is somewhat hollowish and organisms enjoy rather puny condition if not frankly deceased. Patient was no doubt arrested case?”
“The patient is dead,” said Dr. Coffee, “but I’ll go along with you that it wasn’t Hansen’s bacillus that killed him. It rarely does. In this case it was a knife.” He stared into space as he toyed with the slides in the rack before him. After a moment he asked, “Doris, when is that New Orleans convention of clinical pathologists that wanted me to read a paper, and I replied I didn’t think I could get away?”