The C.J. Henderson MEGAPACK ®. C.J. Henderson
found sitting in a corner diagonally positioned as far from the front door as possible.
Victim appears to have been facing front door at time of death.
Found, foyer: on arrival: various spring traps set within the doorway. Immediately, three large traps—set but not baited—spread in triangle formation before the mail slot in the door.
Further on, spread in semi-circle, two additional lines of traps. Mouse traps. Rat traps. Just in the foyer.
Inside: traps everywhere—scores? Hundreds? Set out…
Patterns?
“Can you believe this guy,” asked Galvez. The man’s voice was indecisive, unable to pick a tone, to slide into either humor or concern. Or worse. “He surrounds himself with traps. He’s scared of what? What? I dunno.”
“You want to know why he did it?” asked Legrasse, half in humor, half seriously. “I’m still working on how he did it.”
Galvez snorted, then sprang another trap with the cane in his hand, a handsome thing covered with graceful carvings which he had acquired from the umbrella stand in the foyer.
“Crazy,” the Spaniard muttered, “set all these traps, but don’t bait them. How you supposed to catch anything that way?”
It had been decided that, although they would, of course, need to leave as much of the insane landscape intact as possible to see if there was any clue as to what had happened in the old Backtown house out near the swampfronts, some would have to be sacrificed for both basic mobility as well as general safety.
“Smells wonderful,” snapped the lieutenant, rubbing another wipe of preventive gel under his nose. Don’t he?”
Legrasse merely glared in response. Galvez went silent. Though his one-time commander was now merely consulting, only a citizen, still he was Legrasse, who had lived through it all and won against the devil himself. They had been through much together, and Galvez knew his old boss well. Already he could see the old instincts taking over, could sense his boss was closing in on what had happened within his mind. He watched Legrasse’s hand moving across the page, knowing that somehow he would unravel the bizarre scenario before them.
Victim seems to have bolted all other doors behind him. All other rooms are cut off from the front room. Cracks around doors are stuffed with rags, old newspaper, slivers of cardboard cut to fit. Boards appear to have been nailed over all of this wherever possible.
Victim seems to have been afraid of something approaching him, something small enough to fit under a door, or through a mail slot, any small crack.
Victim does not seem to have been restrained in any manner. If this is the case, then the only conclusion one can have is that he remained in his corner, surrounded by his traps, until he starved to death, by choice. Dying of thirst was preferable to him rather than…
Than what?
And then Legrasse’s eye caught a detail he had previously missed. Indeed, one that everyone had missed so far. Staring at the desiccated corpse in the corner, he asked Galvez:
“Do you see that bulge in Mr. Claro’s breast pocket?”
The lieutenant indicated that he did. Legrasse asked him to fetch it if he could. Galvez stepped into the opening already made near the corpse and slid his hand gently inside the pungent cloth. His hand came out with its prize, a thin, leather-bound volume with a stub of pencil attached to it by a short length of string. The lieutenant paged through it quickly, then announced:
“It’s a diary.”
Legrasse accepted the black book and opened it to its first page. In a simple style made up of competent but uncomplicated sentences of mostly one and two syllable words, Hector Claro introduced himself and his dilemma to the inspector.
Claro told his tale from the beginning. The first date showed that it had been some four weeks back, after a particularly violent storm which had rained lightning down on the swamps for an entire night and half the next day. Legrasse remembered the storm vividly. He had been caught outside in it and had been drenched in moments. The noise and electrical power of it had sent much of the city into a panic. Normally calm, well-mannered horses had gone wild in the streets, crashing carriages and trampling citizens. It had been one of those times Legrasse was glad he was no longer a public servant, and the memory of the violent night connected him to Claro in a personal way.
The man told of finding scores of dead fish and other swamp creatures the next day, floating on their sides in the muddy, boiled water behind his home. Great trees had fallen during the night, and the swamp had gone through such convulsions that Claro even noted a fresh spring bubbling up through the crayfish encrusted mud.
At first he had been pleased by the events. The shocked fish had provided him with a much needed windfall. He had quickly set to gathering and preserving as many of the still living, but insensate fish as he considered safe for the salting. The new spring was fresh and looked as if it would be a constant rather than a fluke. All in all, the storm seemed to have been a blessing for Claro, unlike what it had proved to be for the rest of New Orleans. But then the next night came, and his opinion of things took a different turn.
Claro’s next episode told of a noise in the night, that of a rat trap being sprung. Due to his proximity to the swamp, the man had many such devices set about in the corners of his home and was not overly concerned by hearing one go off in the middle of the night. But, instead of the squeals such a sound usually brought, if they brought any noise at all, he heard instead a series of strange, unfathomable sounds, the curiousness of which forced him to leave his bed. Lighting his table lamp, he went out to examine his small home’s main room where he found the most curious scene.
Claro described finding the trap dragged across the room from where it had been set all the way to the front door. He could tell this had happened easily enough because of the wet, sticky trail left from the trap’s original position to where Claro discovered it, smashed and ruined beneath his mail slot. He could only think that he had snared quite a large rodent, one of sufficient size and strength to move the trap, although wounded unto the point where it was bleeding profusely. This line of thinking was diminished, however, when he realized that the smearing crossing his floor was not made up of blood.
Legrasse absently noted a faded line of coloration on the door, one leading from deep inside the large room into the foyer—indeed, directly up to the mail slot—which supported Claro’s story. The dead man’s words described the trail as a bluish-green, one with neither the smell nor taste of blood. He was confused by this, but with the simplicity of most swamp dwellers, soon forgot the incident, tired as he had been from the ordeal of collecting and salting down his windfall.
The next night, however, he was again visited after dark, and the night after that, and the one after that. He lay in his bed on all three occasions, the covers pulled up and over his head, frightened to the point where he questioned even the need to breathe. Every day he set out more traps, but each morning he found fewer of them sprung. On all three nights, he listened intently as something, or some things, crawled and slithered throughout his simple home. Whether they were searching for something, or simply madly dancing, he had no idea, nor much inclination to find out.
* * * *
As Legrasse read on, fascinated, Galvez waited, balancing himself in various poses, using the cane from the umbrella stand to keep from toppling into the myriad traps. On the one hand, he was impatient to find the answer to the riddle of the dead man and to close out the case. On the other, he was more than willing to wait to see what his former commander could determine. Together, the two had seen some horrific and terrible things in the bayou land outside their city. Indeed, in Galvez’s mind, the mystery of Hector Claro could scarce compare to some of their previous exploits.
“Better safe than sorry,” the lieutenant cautioned himself and continued to play with the cane, twirling it in one hand, studying its odd carvings, amusing himself in any way he could think of while he waited for Legrasse’s verdict.
* * * *