Jodie’s cat eyes are weary as she lets out a long sigh. “We’re going to recanvass the building first. I’ll start at the top with Juanita. You start at the bottom, okay?”
I slip my radio into my back pocket.
It takes me six minutes to solve the murder.
Mindy Cellers, with a “C,” an inquisitive seven-year-old who lives in apartment 1A on the first floor, stares at my gold star-and-crescent badge clipped to my belt as she tells me, “I know who killed her.”
I go down on my haunches, eye level now, and ask the obvious, “Who?”
Mindy tugs at the sides of her reddish hair. “I tried to tell the police last night, but nobody would talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you.” I keep my voice low and soft. “Who killed her?”
“The Wolf.” Her green eyes narrow as she nods. “That’s what he calls himself. He visits her a lot.”
“What does he look like?” Hoping she’s not about to describe a canine from some childhood fantasy world.
“He’s as big as you and thicker. And scary looking.”
“Scary?”
“He’s got a sharp face and big eyebrows.” Mindy leans forward. “I think he’s her boyfriend.”
A door opens behind me and I turn to see an old man peek out.
“He saw the Wolf when he left.” Mindy leans past me, speaking to the old man. “The Wolf almost knocked you over when he left, didn’t he?”
I stand and the old man’s gaze moves from my gun to my badge and he shrugs. He’s barely five feet tall, balding with a craggy, sallow face. He’s in a faded red plaid housecoat. Barefoot.
“I’m Detective Beau. Homicide. You saw someone yesterday?”
The man glances around, hand still on the door as if he’s about to slam it and escape back inside. I recognize the look of fear; I ease forward.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ll get him, you know. Nobody kills a cop and gets away with it.” I drop my voice menacingly. “Not in New Orleans.”
“You don’t know Wolf.”
I slip my radio from my back pocket and call Jodie.
Allan O’Grady lives in 1B, an apartment decorated with timeworn furniture and old-fashioned lamps and smelling like sweaty socks. Jodie and I both jot O’Grady’s story on our note pads.
Last night, at about 7 p.m., the former boyfriend of Kimberly Champagne who lives in apartment 2B came hurrying down the stairs, bumping into O’Grady who was coming back into the building from putting his garbage out. The Wolf, in a black jacket and baggy black pants, kept his hands in his pockets as he jammed his shoulder against the door to swing it open and rush away. An hour earlier O’Grady had heard several loud pops, but thought it was a car backfiring. Later, when the police arrived, O’Grady heard voices and crying but wouldn’t answer his door no matter how many times people knocked on it. He’d turned off the lights.
Jodie asks why everyone knows this man as the Wolf and I spot Juanita Cruz easing in the open doorway. Her eyes are red and she nods me over. We step back into the hall where Mindy still waits in her doorway.
Juanita’s face is scrunched up as if in pain. “I know him.”
She takes a step back and sits on the stairs. “Kim broke up with him months ago.”
I pull out my note pad as I watch her breathing heavily now.
“What’s his real name?”
“Ahern Smith.” She sucks in a deep breath. “Calls himself the Wolf or just Wolf. Always refers to himself in the third person. Like, ‘The Wolf is hungry,’ or, ‘The Wolf thinks this is nice.’” She blinks up at me and tears flow from her eyes. “He’s an ex — Green Beret.”
I sit next to her and ask how long she’d known Kimberly Champagne.
“I broke her in when she came out of the academy.” Juanita buries her face in her hands. “We were partners for six months.”
Before leaving with Juanita, Jodie explains to me how the Wolf made it look like a break-in, as if Kim had stumbled on a burglar. “We’ve been looking at every goddamn 62-man in the computer.”
Jodie shakes her head and thanks me before she heads back to the detective bureau to get a line on this Wolf character and secure the necessary warrants.
I’m left to take the formal statements from O’Grady and Miss Mindy Cellers with a “C.”
“What’s a 62-man?” Mindy asks.
“Burglar.”
“I’m not afraid of the Wolf.” She tilts her head to the side and smiles. “I know you’ll get him.”
I give her a long stare before I say, “I usually do.”
Ahern Keith Smith, alias the Wolf, has no arrest record but did spend eight years in the U.S. Army. In a photo we secured from Kim Champagne’s apartment, a picture we’ve distributed to all law enforcement, he looks a little like the actor River Phoenix, the kid who OD’d, only the Wolf’s face is leaner and meaner-looking with an almost rabid glint in his blue eyes.
His condo is on St. Charles Avenue, corner of Peniston Street, in the center of a row of new town houses built on ground that once housed a mansion. On either side of the condos are mansions with antebellum columns, verandas and all.
At 4 a.m., I follow three S.W.A.T. men, decked out in all black, army helmets, bulky flak vests. The first one carries a sledgehammer, the second a bullet-proof shield. It’s Jodie’s case and her warrants, so she makes me put on a flak vest or I have to stay out. I’m in all-black too, black T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, my Beretta cupped in both hands as we move up to the Wolf’s front door. Jodie’s right behind me, her own 9mm Beretta in hand. She’s blacked-out also, her hair in a ponytail.
The condo is quiet. A voice booms “Police!” as the sledgehammer shatters the deadbolt and the door flies open. Everybody wants him to be there with a weapon in hand so we can send the Wolf straight to hell, as painfully as possible.
He isn’t there, but there’s blood around the kitchen sink. Pulling on rubber gloves, we start rooting. In the Wolf’s desk, I find detailed notes of his surveillance of Kim Champagne — her work schedule, times entering and leaving home, times and places she went to after work, along with black-and-white telephoto pictures of her. Just as I find the Wolf’s night-vision goggles and binoculars, Jodie discovers six semi-automatic pistols and a World War II Browning Automatic Rifle, the famous B.A.R.
I can see the strain in Jodie’s eyes. Under the bright lights of the condo, her smooth face is still void of age lines, although she’s pushing forty. I remind her of that, just to break the tension, and she gets up on the balls of her feet, extends her five-seven frame, and gives me a rabbit punch in the solar plexus.
As the crime lab tech enters to collect the blood, headquarters calls Jodie on the radio to notify her that Ahern Smith’s black SUV was just found abandoned on the Claiborne Avenue bridge over the Industrial Canal. There’s blood in the car.
“Jesus! I gotta go.” Jodie yanks off her gloves. “You got this?”
“I’ll finish up,” I tell her as she pulls the band from her hair, shakes out her ponytail, and hurries away.
When I find the Wolf’s journal, I read the last entry where he says he’s going to kill Kimberly, then himself. He even gives us the reason, a broken heart he calls my heart’s death since she left him. I flip back through the pages as he describes his life without Kimberly, back through their relationship to the time he first saw her as they each stood outside Galatoire’s, each with friends, waiting for Sunday breakfast at one of the most exclusive restaurants in a city of great restaurants. Kimberly wore a short red dress that day.
He admits his clever lines didn’t impress her at first, but he succeeded in discovering where she worked and kept at her until she let him take her out. I skim over the details of their sex life and feel a sickness in my stomach, knowing all this will be read in open court when we catch the bastard, all the detailed descriptions of Kim’s body.