Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Read Online Free

bites the eyes, the nostrils, the throat. Violence has a heavy smell that lingers for days—a taste as well—and a presence, thick and gray and swirling. A burned body is the most nauseating: bitter and permeating; not much remains to deal with, though flakes of skin come off and attach to your arms, clothing, face, hair. With most bodies, there is the smell of urine and feces; what they don’t tell you, what the movies and TV never show, is that at death, bladder and bowel control ends, the muscles relax, and any waste matter left in the body comes out.
    As a body settles, fluids build up and are released. The optimum time to work with a body is before these fluids seep out. As rigor mortis sets in, the body swells into large dark blisters (much more quickly in the relentless Louisiana heat), and eventually the skin pops. Then smell becomes a taste. I wasn’t prepared for the taste of death, how it would coat my tongue and throat and lungs. Smoking cigarettes didn’t help; neither did scalding coffee or the most corrosive alcohol I could think of, straight gin. I would taste death for days after contact with a body.
    The only consistent concession I see cops make, at least the plainclothes detectives, is removing their suit jackets around the really noxious bodies. My first encounter with this was in the middle of an aggressive, sweltering Louisiana summer afternoon. I smelled the body as I walked up the outside stairwell of a run-down apartment complex off Flannery Road. Three days, I figured. Turns out I was short by a day.
    â€œSomething died in there,” the manager told me.
    â€œYes it did.”
    â€œMaybe an animal? A dog or something?” His voice had more hope than I’d expect from someone his age.
    â€œMaybe.”
    The body lay in the back room, sitting up in bed. No signs of violence or forced entry. The body was so deteriorated I couldn’t tell if he was originally black or white; actually, it was tough to figure out if “he” was a he or a she from the bloating and disfiguration.
    I notified the dispatcher, requested a Homicide detective, an ambulance, the coroner, an assistant DA. Detective Ray Robileaux, a short, intense man I’d worked a few calls with before, arrived first, took off his coat, and handed it to me.
    â€œHold this,” he said, then went inside.
    I’m standing there holding this man’s coat, and I don’t know why. I thought, What the fuck, I look like his wife? and followed him in. He was puffing away on a cigarette asking me questions about the scene, and I was responding, my voice funny-sounding because I’d shut off my nose and closed my throat to a slender cocktail-straw opening to cope with the smell.
    Suddenly Robileaux noticed his coat in my hand. He started thishigh-pitched scream of words: now he’d have to get it dry-cleaned and why the fuck did I think he’d asked me to hold it?
    â€œUniform isn’t around to hold coats for fucking detectives,” I snapped back.
    He paused in midstep, tucked his tongue between his teeth, then laughed. “You got some cojones , Katie Joubert.”
    But uniform patrol doesn’t have the option of removing at least some of our clothing to work a body. On those days, at the end of shift, I make a beeline for my house, strip, and let the shower—as hot as I can stand it—and a pitted bar of rosemary soap rinse away the exterior vestiges of death. I lather my hair twice, massage in conditioner, slather vanilla lotion over my whole body afterward, apply perfume to all my pulse points. I put on a dress and let my hair fall down the middle of my back.
    â€œWhoo boy, what the hell you been doing?” Johnny asked the first time I worked a body after we got married. “You smell like the whole goddamn perfume counter at Goudchaux’s.”
    â€œI don’t shop at Goudchaux’s,” I said, and then I told him about the body, an elementary