Free FSF, March-April 2010 by Spilogale Authors

He was twenty-six, an Ohio merchant's son and by no means an ignorant man. After his death, copies of Dickens and Thackeray were found in his quarters, as well as a stack of technical manuals and a textbook of basic French reflecting his years on occupation duty in New Orleans.
    Compared to the bloodbaths in Virginia and Georgia, Schulz and his men had lucked into incredibly easy duty. But also tedious. As if to relieve their boredom, in August the monthly supply boat arrived and Letourneau stepped onto the fort's floating dock with shackles jingling, followed by a member of the provost marshal's guard carrying an internment order and a drawn pistol. The garrison crowded around to stare at the big, rangy man with the tangled beard and hair and the unexpectedly gentle, submissive manner. (He even addressed privates as “ m'sieu .") After he'd been locked up, they all found reasons to visit Casemate Five to gape and stare at him some more, as if he were a dangerous animal caged in Barnum's circus. In fact, some wit borrowed a phrase from the great showman and posted a hand-lettered sign over his cell that read “The Original Gorilla."
    Month-old copies of the Picayune with details of his crime found a fascinated audience. Decapitated corpses had been showing up for the past two years. With fingerprinting yet to be invented, record-keeping primitive, and a vast drifting population of refugees created by the war, none of them had been firmly identified. Letourneau was arrested after his landlady, noticing a bad smell, checked the slum room he inhabited and found a woman's head in a cupboard. Subsequently, a patrol sent by the provost marshal discovered under the bed a cane knife—a wicked-looking bolo-like tool made for cutting sugarcane.
    At this point the evidence looked so firm that carpenters began bidding for the job of building the gallows. But then the case started to unravel. With the crude forensics of the time, there was no way to determine if the carefully cleaned and oiled cane knife actually was the murder weapon. Letourneau had a good reason for owning it, for he lived by doing odd jobs that included clearing weeds and brush—in fact, he'd been employed for that purpose by the military government itself. As for the head, he claimed he'd found it among the weeds near the levee and brought it home as a curiosity, an alibi so bizarre that it might even be true.
    All his life Letourneau had been known as a “natural,” meaning a half-wit. He was also a pack rat. His room yielded an amazing collection of useless objects—glass beads, ballast stones, dried beetles, a brass telegrapher's key, the skull of a horse, some cypress knees, Indian arrowheads, even a small meteorite—that lent a kind of loony credence to his story. Despite his physical strength and mental problems, he had no police record and no reputation for violence. The few people who knew him treated him with a mixture of compassion and contempt. Worst of all, from the viewpoint of execution buffs who were eagerly awaiting the hanging, another headless body was discovered while Letourneau was locked up in Parish Prison.
    The provost marshal decided to hold him, pending further investigation. Fort Clay was secure and almost empty. And so the disaster began to take form.
    "But now, Ms. Genève,” said Corman, showing a Scheherazade-like ability to interrupt himself at critical moments, “I really think we ought to document the external walls. Work before play, you know, and when it's all done and all the pictures are locked up in the brain of your little camera, I'll finish the story for you."
    * * * *
    Actually, their hour-long hike around the fort's perimeter proved more interesting than Saffron had expected.
    The place was ruinous, and for that reason picturesque. At two spots, sinking foundations had caused huge cracks to open in the walls, and she made sure that her camera caught the crooked daggers of pale sky thrusting down through the bricks.