A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

I went into the kitchen, tore off a section of paper towel, folded it in a neat square, and went back into the bathroom to lift the toilet lid. My neighbor's bluetick dog floated in the purple water, one eye of his severed head staring up at me, his entrails bulging out of the slit that ran from his testicles to a flap of skin on his neck.

I dropped the bloody piece of paper towel in the wastebasket, turned around, and saw Bootsie frozen in the doorway, her hand pinched to her mouth, her cheeks discolored, her pulse leaping in her neck.

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CHAPTER 12

She sat alone in the bedroom while I talked to two uniformed cops who had been called by the apartment owner. A black man from the city health department dipped the dog's remains out of the toilet with a fishnet, while my neighbors stared through the open front door of the apartment. I told the cops a second time that I had no idea who had done it.

One of them wrote on his clipboard. There were red marks on his nose where he had taken off his sunglasses, and his sky-blue shirt was stretched tightly across his muscular chest.

"You think maybe somebody just doesn't like you?" he asked.

"Could be," I said.

"You're not in a cult, are you?" He grinned at the corner of his mouth.

"No, I don't know much about cults."

He put his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.

"Well, there're a lot of spaced-out dopers around these days. Maybe that's all there was to it," he said. "I'd get some better locks, though."

"Thank y'all for coming out."

"Mr. Robicheaux, you say you used to be a police officer?"

"That's right."

"You never heard about a nailed-up frog before?"

I cleared my throat and looked away from his eyes.

"Maybe I heard something. It's a little vague."

He smiled to himself, then wrote out a number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

"Here's the report number in case you or the owner needs it for an insurance claim. Call us if we can help you in any way," he said.

They left and closed the door behind them. There's a cop who won't have to write traffic tickets too long, I thought.

Back in the bedroom Bootsie sat on the side of my bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her cotton dress was covered with gray and pink flowers.

"I'm sorry you had to arrive in the middle of all this," I said.

"Dave, that officer was talking about a cult. Do you know people like that?"

"It wasn't done by cultists. He knew it, too."

"What?"

"I'm supposed to think I've got a gris-gris on me. You remember a Negro woman named Gros Mama Goula in New Iberia?"

"She ran a brothel?"

"That's the one. She'd like to shake up my cookie bag. She either sent some of her people over here to do this, or it was done by a guy named Jimmie Lee Boggs. But my guess is that the two of them are working together."

"I just don't understand."