It’s just the way we do things here

My first murder was in a little shotgun house in Jennings, a town in Southwest Louisiana that sits about halfway between Lake Charles and Lafayette (between New Orleans and Houston) on Interstate 10.

Because it was a small newspaper and I was the sports editor and it was football season, I was at the office working when I heard a call about some kind of disturbance come across the police scanner. Because my title was merely suggestive of my duties-because I was the newspaper’s chief photographer and a general assignment reporter as well, and because I was there-I picked up my camera and a notebook. The address was not so far away, just a few blocks, and the November night was cool. So I put on a jacket and walked. It might have taken eight minutes.

When I got there, I recognized a couple of the town police officers who were already on the scene, as well as a Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Department detective named Elton and the sheriff’s department spokesman, a bright and funny guy named Al who could have been a stand-up comedian. They were talking quietly on the porch, and no one made to stop me as I walked up the steps.

Elton, who was probably 35 but seemed ancient to me, shook his head and told me what they’d found. A little girl, maybe 10 years old, had had some sort of argument with her slightly older sister. Some words had passed between them, then the older girl-who might have been 12-took a pair of scissors from her grandmother’s sewing basket and stabbed her sister. The victim’s body was still inside.

There was no yellow police tape; there was no team scurrying around taking photographs and collecting forensic evidence. They hadn’t arrived yet. I couldn’t see the suspect; they’d cuffed her and put her in the back of one of the cars. Elton didn’t stop me when I walked inside the house. He just said, “No pictures.”

It wasn’t the first body I’d seen. I was not so young that I hadn’t experienced the death of people who were important to me. And a couple of weeks before I’d answered a similar nighttime call at the local airport. A drifter from New Jersey had made his camp in the middle of the runway and a small plane had struck him while he slept. He’d been dragged many yards and his limbs had been broken and hyper-extended into crazy angles. Elton had leaned over him and gently lifted his wallet from his jacket, fished out his driver’s license. I didn’t feel anything for the drifter-his body looked like busted waxworks-but I almost cried when, back at the sheriff’s office, Elton called the man’s father to tell him what had happened.

So it wasn’t my first corpse, just my first murder. I went in the house and saw the body-the eyes glassy, the mouth surprised-and the blood spreading over the narrow pine floorboards like a Rorschach blot, like black wings, on either side. I stood there in the oily warmth of that little house-there was a space heater glowing beneath a Walter Sallman portrait of blue-eyed Jesus on the wall-and looked hard at that dead girl.

I remember thinking how familiar that house was, how it was so much like other houses I knew; houses of aunts and cousins and the grandmothers of friends. Places I’d visited when I was child. It was smaller than I remembered, but I felt I knew it. It was so ordinary.

I walked out, and Elton and Al were standing under a tree. “Why you think they keep the house so warm?” Elton asked no one in particular, as he drew on his cigarette. “All these murder houses seem so hot to me.”

He told me what he could. It was the grandmother’s house. The girls were alone. The stabber had called 911 and had been sitting on the porch with the scissors in her lap when the police arrived. They were looking for the grandmother, and maybe the mother-I don’t remember if they were visiting or if they lived there-but they hadn’t been located yet. They had no idea what had caused the altercation, and it really didn’t matter much. The killer was going to the hospital, not to jail. There wasn’t much chance she’d be tried as an adult, there wasn’t anything to see, just paperwork to fill out and file. A few more questions to ask.

Over the next decade as an offand-on cop reporter, I’d see a lot of bodies and write a lot of murder stories. I knew a couple of murderers who got away with it. I knew at least one real-life hit man who’s still walking free today. He’s in his 80s now, and though he’s been arrested a couple of times and is suspected in dozens of crimes, he’s never done time. If you met him you would think he was just an old man; no scent of sulphur announces him. He’s careful, but he’s no genius.

He didn’t need to be.There’s always something dull and stupid about a murder. It requires no special capacity for evil, no special capacity at all. You could do it, though you protest you couldn’t. It’s easier than you believe. And when it happens, it usually feels so much like an accident that you can convince yourself it was unavoidable.

I don’t want to get into any more arguments over guns. I think people who aren’t crazy criminals ought to be able to make up their own minds about whether they want one, and I think people who own them ought to be willing to take extraordinary measures to ensure that their guns cause no harm. But there’s too much money at stake to have a real conversation about what a reasonable society ought to do about its problems with gun violence. I’m willing to stipulate that we don’t live in a reasonable society, and that pragmatically we must accept that there is a religious (and superstitious) component in the ongoing gun debate that cannot be discounted or reasoned away. For better or worse, gun obsession is part of our culture.

And so is murder.

I don’t know why someone would shoot at some kids because they played their music obnoxiously loud. I don’t know why someone would shoot someone over texting in a movie. I don’t know why some people always seem to have their guns at the ready, or why we’d draft laws that encourage people to not remove themselves from potentially dangerous situations. I don’t knowwhy so many of us seem to need to swagger and sneer.

All I know is that dead is dead, and that people die for nothing every day. It’s hardly worth a couple of column inches in a newspaper. It’s just the way we do things here.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com Read more at www.blooddirtangels.com