“What did you see inside the house?”
“Was there another fire, and if so, was it caused by the Absinthe Killer?”
Basically the JP—the Jefferson Parish Police—answered no comment as they were instructed.
The circus had begun again.
“Hey, darlin’, got a minute?” I asked my soon-to-be fiancée over my cell. My watch read 4:30 p.m., but my knees thought it was much later. I had just arrived at the station with Ron and Wayne who were anxious to start throwing questions at me.
Jennifer responded as if she were lounging on a couch. “Got all the time in the world for you. Something up at work?”
“I just wanted to tell you before you heard it on the news. We found two new bodies today. It’s the Absinthe Killer.”
“Oh, shit.”
“I knew this woman, too. The murderer wants my attention for some reason.”
“You? Why you?”
“I don’t know. To be safe, I’m sending a uniform to sit outside the house.”
“Oh, God . . .” Her voice cracked.
“I gotta go. I love you.”
She returned the sentiment and hung up.
Ron seemed to have mellowed out a little after spending time with Agent Wayne. I figured it was because they were nearly the same age and had a lot in common.
The three of us entered Greenwood’s office when he called for us, and Greenwood was the first to speak, looking at me.
“Lacey called in and told me you knew the second female victim as well as the first. I’m going to pull you off the case.”
I regarded Greenwood calmly. “These are girls from my past, Cap. The case won’t be affected. Besides, Ron’s the lead on this.”
“You’re too close—”
I cut in. “This guy is looking at me right now. If you take me off the case, it could set him off.”
“I agree,” Wayne said, and it seemed that was all that was needed.
This was the start. From here on out, I was going to be questioned about my past. And if the FBI was true to form, Agent Wayne probably had my file being sent over as we spoke.
“Tell us about Angel,” Ron said.
“She was my first girlfriend when I was a sophomore in high school. We dated for about three months. After high school I never saw her again.”
“Did you have a sexual relationship with her?” Wayne retrieved his little pad and pen.
“No, not intercourse.” Although I sure had tried.
“What high school was that?” Wayne asked, ready to write.
“Washington, out in the East.”
“East?” Wayne asked, jerking his head slightly as if a fly had landed on his forehead. He probably thought I was referring vaguely to the East Coast.
“New Orleans East,” I repeated. “It’s a public school on Bundy Road. Whites were the minority there.”
“No. The school was about 60 percent black, 30 percent Vietnamese, and about 10 percent white.”
Wayne turned to Greenwood for the first time. “Have one of your uniforms get a list of all the students who attended Washington during the same years as Detective Dupree.”
“Just call me Deck,” I said with a touch of Southern hospitality.
“Any psychos you may have had a problem with?” Lacey asked.
“No. I hung out with a group of four guys from Brother Martin High School on Elysian Fields Avenue. I really didn’t have many friends from Washington.”
“What about those four guys? Any problems?” Lacey looked like he was about to jump from his seat. He was making me nervous.
“No. After high school, we went our separate ways on good terms. We could check them out, but I doubt anything will come from it. I’ve heard they’re pretty successful now.”
“Have you thought about people you used to work with?” Greenwood said.
My head rotated in his direction as if on a swivel. “I could have pissed off a shoplifter at the Dixie-Mart, I suppose. People were always taking stuff, and they got pretty mad when the cops took them away. One time this guy threw a can of peas at Spider—” Just remembering that name caused me to freeze in midsentence.
“Spider? What about him?” Wayne knew a memory had been sparked.
“He was a nutcase I worked with way back when. Like a punk rocker. Really obnoxious. Oh, damn, the red bow. It’s him.” I must’ve appeared to be on crack as I looked around the room. The feeling of revelation was powerful enough for me to lose the air in my lungs. I got up and faced the door, while I caught my breath.
“Who’s this Spider?” Lacey got up, too.
I scrambled to get my thoughts together. Every memory came back, one by one, until all the puzzle pieces were there. “I worked with Spider at the Dixie-Mart. His real name was Gene Lotz.”
“Wasn’t this guy interviewed when Paulina Wilder disappeared?” Wayne asked.
“Yes,” I managed, dumbfounded for a moment that Wayne had known that, although it was a matter of public record. “Yes,” I said again as feeling returned to my tongue. “Spider—Lotz—was interviewed when Paulina disappeared but was cleared, never charged with anything. He was one of my coworkers drinking in the parking lot that night. Now I realize that Spider’s our guy. It all makes sense.”
“Why do you think it’s him?” Ron asked.
Greenwood spoke before I could answer. “Yeah, I remember this Lotz fellow from the incident file in your records.” It had come out as if he were stoned. I figured he just wanted to say something, so we wouldn’t forget he was in the room.
Ron continued, “If you can prove Lotz is our guy in these homicides, then I’d say we’ve just solved the mystery of Paulina’s disappearance. At least the who took her part.”
I nodded at my partner who looked satisfied with himself but still eager. I glanced over at Wayne and began my tale. “Paulina was Jennifer’s younger sister. I was just beginning to date Paulina my senior year in high school, and we both worked at Dixie-Mart. One night after it closed, some of the closing crew—me and Paulina included—sat outside drinking beer. Spider was there also. Me and Paulina went around the back of the store to get some more beer I had stashed, and someone knocked me out. When I woke up, Paulina was gone. I met Jennifer when I went to talk to her parents the next day. We didn’t start dating until two years after that.”
Ron and Greenwood remained silent. It was odd, but without even asserting his authority, Wayne seemed to have become the unofficial leader on the case, although I knew Ron would never admit it.
“Why do you think Gene Lotz is involved now?” Wayne asked.
“The red bow on Angel’s neck. I remember two specific occasions when Spider grabbed a red bow off one of the aisles and put it next to his crotch, telling me that he wraps his dick in a red bow when he knows he’s going to get laid. Plus, I used to shave my head at that time. It has to be him. Spider and I used to tell each other stories while we cleaned the store about girls we dated or picked up at bars. He’s killing these girls I once told him about.”
“Do you know why he might do that?” Wayne scribbled furiously in his notepad.
Sweat dripped down my forehead. I felt I was going to need a change of clothes. “Well, we didn’t part on good terms, but I can’t explain why.”
“Try,” Wayne said.
“About a week after Paulina’s disappearance, I was depressed, so Spider and I went out drinking and were actually having a good time. At some point, we started doing shots of Jäger, and the rest of the night was a blank. I woke up the next morning in my car in my parents’ driveway, and my hands were cut up and swollen, like I had been in a fight.”
“Had you?” Ron asked.
“I didn’t know what the hell happened until I got a call from work saying that Spider had come in and quit and his face was bruised and cut up. That was the last time I had any contact with h
im. It’s like he fell off the face of the earth after that.”
“So, you don’t know what led to the fight?”
“No. It was strange. We were pretty good friends at work, but we never really hung out outside of that environment, just me and him. We’d go to a local bar with other coworkers after closing, but that was it.”
“You were bald when you met him, right?” Wayne asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you were bald when you beat him up, right?” He kept writing while he talked. “Did you ever see him with a girlfriend?”
“Not in person. He had lots of stories, though.”
“Did you think he might be trying to impress you? Did he try to exaggerate his accounts with women?”
“Now that I think about it, he did always have some wild story about having sex. And you know what else? He told me he loved my shaved head. I had the bald look for about a year. Maybe that’s why he shaves these women’s heads, to reenact some fantasy about being with me.”
Wayne leaned forward on the couch, resting his elbows on his knees. “He told you stories, hung out with you primarily. You never saw him with a woman. Now, I’m gonna speculate that Spider is in love with you, and since he can’t have you, he’s killing women you once had. He’s using gay men to sexually charge him enough to have intercourse with the female victims.”
“I’ve come across crazier reasons,” Ron said. “Wait, no, I haven’t.”
“After all these years?” I asked, a little skeptical. “Let’s talk about it later. I think we better pick him up.”
“Find his address and go get him,” Greenwood ordered. “Keep me updated.”
“Do you have an address?” Wayne asked as we left the room.
“No, but I know where his mother lives. Her house was flooded, but maybe we’ll get lucky and she stayed to rebuild. We can start there.”
“The East still has a few trailers of people who stayed. I’ll run his name through the system first.” Ron detoured into the computer room.
“I’ll do the same at the field office. What’s his mother’s name?” Wayne flipped open his cell phone.
“Greta.” I remembered because he used to call his prostitute mom “Stretchin’ Greta.”
I sat down at my desk, contemplating the night of the fight and exchanges we had had at work. But trying to recall specific events was hard when all the times we worked together seemed to melt together.
The signs had been there, however blind I was to them. Lotz had always gravitated to me when we were standing in a group. At work he’d find me and offer his help. And the stories of his love life, which were so bold and colorful, now seemed too extraordinary to have been true. All that time he had been harboring feelings for me, and I was throwing my heterosexuality in his face.
I thought back to the first time he had sprung the red bow on me. It was only Spider and me who had been blocking the store, pulling the merchandise forward on the shelves, before closing. The conversation came to me piece by piece, like the lyrics of an old song suddenly remembered. It was using the bow as a visual aid that marked a spot in my long-term memory. I could see his face as he lied through his teeth.
“Last weekend, dude, you’ll never believe it,” had been his famous opener. “I was at the Gold Mine, and it was gettin’ to be around four in the morning. I was drunk and my friends left, but I didn’t want to.”
“Your friends just left you?” I had said, picturing him walking home from the Quarter.
He had shrugged it off. “I figured I’d get a ride from someone. Anyway, I notice this chick staring at me from across the bar. Oh, she was hot. Titties out to here, man. She was a bit older, though. I’d say around thirty, but she was smokin’.”
“You fuck her?” I had asked. It was a little joke we shared. Whenever one of us told a story about a girl, the other interrupted with this query.
“Wait,” he had said as he skipped over shelves in his exuberance. “I look back and smile, and she smiles. I’m thinking something’s gonna happen, but then this old man comes up to me, and at first I thought he was tryin’ to get to the bar, but he wasn’t. He told me that this chick wanted to fuck me in a motel.”
“Who was it, her dad?” I had asked. I remember that this was one of his weirder stories. The look on his face was real excitement, as if he believed every word.
“No, man. He said I could fuck her in a motel if he could watch.” He had always waited for my reactions, careful not to trample over sentences.
“You let him watch?”
Spider had laughed as he straightened out some gift paper. “Yeah, man. We went to a motel, and this guy watched as I banged the piss out of her. He came over to the bed a couple of times to play with her tits, but that was okay with me.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” I had said with a straight face. “That guy could’ve killed you or robbed you.”
“Fuck it. What are you gonna do? I’m seeing her again.” This was when he grabbed the red bow off the shelf and positioned it against his crotch. “I’m gonna wrap this bow around my dick and give her a present like she never had before. That ho won’t be able to walk, baby.”
I had laughed and realized that we could never hang out together again outside of work.
Ron came from the computer room shaking his head. “Gene Lotz isn’t listed anywhere. We’ll have to go talk to his mother. Maybe he still lives with her.”
“If it’s okay, I’ll ride along with you,” Wayne said, hanging up his cell phone. “It’s going to take a moment for someone at the field office to get back with me. I told them that if any Gene Lotzes come up across the country, find out which one’s mother’s name is Greta.”
We walked out of the Eighth abreast with Wayne in the middle. I found myself used to having the guy around, and I think Ron was warming up to him as well.
Agent Wayne, Ron, and I arrived at Greta Lotz’s redbrick home on Mercier Street in New Orleans East, noticing first that the roof shingles were all curling toward the sky like giant brown Doritos. The lawn was a chaotic integration of grass, clovers, wildflowers, and weeds, while the bushes surrounding her house were dying. Parked in the driveway was a FEMA trailer that had seen better days.
The house next door had three rusted-out cars parked on the lawn and two that were elevated on blocks. Across the street lay the charcoal remains of what used to be the neighborhood’s only two-story home. Up and down the block were more trailers, a sure sign of the slow recovery or slow trailer retrieval by FEMA. I thought about going to see the Dixie-Mart since it was only six blocks away, but I knew it had caught fire and no one had touched it since.
Spider had told me about his mother one night when we had gotten extremely drunk at Abby’s, the local bar that our night crew used to frequent after work. He had said he and his mother lived in this house, the same one she and his father raised him in. I had lived two miles up Hayne at the time. The neighborhood eventually changed over the years. Most of the forest acreage had turned into low-income housing, leaving only a few areas for the middle class. Over time, the poor whites migrated out, and poor black families settled in.
Businesses were closing and gangs had taken over certain sections, but forty-five-year-old Greta Lotz refused to move. She had told her son once before that she was going to die in that house, and it was a fear Spider had expressed. Sure enough, not even a devastating hurricane could make her budge.
“Deck, check the trailer,” Ron said.
I stepped up to the door, pulled the latch, and it opened, revealing trash and blankets littered about. I walked in and held my breath. It was bad, but no one was here. No one had been here in a while.
I shook my head and walked up to the house. Ron knocked on the door.
A yell came from within. “Who is it?”
“Police, ma’am. We’d like to ask you a few questions,” I said in a nonthreatening manner.
Greta Lotz opened the door in a DayGlo floral nightgown and slippers. It looked
as if she had been sleeping on her face. She was slightly built and maybe five six if she stood on tiptoe. Her hair was prematurely gray and tangled like a pit of snakes. “What do you want? Is this about the nutria I shot with my BB gun?” Her voice was deep and rough.
“No, ma’am. I’m Detective Dupree, this is Detective Lacey, and this is Special Agent Wayne with the FBI.”
“Oh, my, FBI.” Her face appeared to plump out as her mouth made an O. She straightened her nightgown. “Is this about that Muslim greeter at the Walmart? Who told you about us?”
“That’s not why we’re here, ma’am, and for your own benefit, you should probably stop guessing. May we come in?” I asked politely. “I used to work with your son, Gene. I was hoping we could ask you a few questions.”
“Of course.” She moved aside to let us enter.
“Your place looks nice.” I noticed shoddy drywall and trim work. Getting construction workers out here was a miracle in itself, getting good ones was another.
“Is Gene okay?” Ms. Lotz asked as she made us each a glass of iced tea. “Sit down at the table. Go ahead.”
I shrugged at Ron and Wayne, then sat down at a worn pine table. “Well, we’re trying to locate Gene. If you could tell us where he lives now, we’ll make sure he’s okay.”
“Is he in trouble?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” I assured her. “We want to ask him some questions about an investigation. We think he can help us.”
Ron stood up. “Ma’am? You mind if I use your washroom?”
“Go right ahead, sweetie. It’s the first door on the left. It’s a new toilet. Would anyone care for some peanut butter?”
We declined that offer as she brought us our teas and Ron disappeared down the hall. The drinks were complete with ice and a squirt of lemon juice from a container shaped like a lemon.
Mrs. Lotz sat down. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t spoken with Gene for about five years. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t even know any of his friends or even if he has any. How’s that tea? Good?”