by Robin Caroll
“Thanks.” She smiled at Beau, and he knew she understood that he’d do whatever it took for her to be as comfortable as possible considering the circumstances. She let out a sigh.
“Okay. What happened.” Marcel pointed at both Beau and Dimitri. “No interruptions. Let her tell her story.”
Beau pulled out his notebook and pen.
“So, I found a message on my desk this afternoon that Claude wanted me to meet him here at six. I put it in my calendar and didn’t think about it again until my alert went off that it was time to leave.”
“Does Claude often request meetings outside the hotel?” Marcel asked.
She shrugged. “Sometimes. If it has to do with what the meeting is about. Like here. The message I got said he wanted to discuss his possibly opening a bed and breakfast at this property location.”
She noted the skeptical gazes of the men surrounding her and held up her hands. “Yeah, I know. As soon as I got here, I realized this would never work. I know. I know. I should have called him right then and told him I was getting in my car and going back to the hotel. But honestly? I was so irritated at him that I marched in here, ready to give him a piece of my mind.” She shook her head. “I realize now that wasn’t the smartest of things to do.”
Marcel grinned. “We’ve all been there. So, you came in . . .”
She nodded. “But there was no one here. I saw the lamp on in the back, so I headed that way. I went in there, but Claude wasn’t there. Next thing I knew, I—” Addy cut off and stared at Willie.
“I hit her on the back of the head. She went down, and I tied her hands behind her back, tied her feet at the ankles, and put a blindfold over her eyes.” He kept his head bent, gaze on the concrete parking lot.
Beau gripped his pen so hard it was a wonder it didn’t snap.
“I guess I did lose consciousness for a few minutes because when I tried to open my eyes, I was already blindfolded and tied up.”
Beau really wanted to punch Willie Neyland right in the face. No matter that the man was bigger than he was, Beau wanted to smack him for daring to lay a finger on Addy.
“But Willie didn’t leave me alone. He gave me water, as soon as I asked.”
“How noble.” Beau couldn’t stop his sarcasm from slipping out.
A police cruiser pulled in, shining headlights on the group. Two officers got out. “Detectives.”
Quickly, Marcel gave them enough details for them to pull a crime scene kit from their trunk and head into the building. He turned back to Addy. “Sorry. Please, continue. Willie gave you a drink of water.”
“Right.” She shivered. “At one point I realized that I was alone in the room, and I worked and got a piece of my blindfold off so I could see.”
Willie’s head snapped up.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that. I could see you when you were talking to her down the hall, through the little part of the blindfold I managed to move.”
“So everything you said in there was a lie. To get me to untie you!” Willie took a step forward.
Beau pulled out his gun and focused it on him. “No, Beau, it’s okay.”
“No, Addy, it isn’t okay.”
Marcel grabbed Neyland by the handcuffs and jerked him back. The big man didn’t put up a fight, just stared at Addy like she’d just run over his puppy.
“I didn’t lie to you, Willie. Every single thing I said was true. I just didn’t tell you that I’d seen you talking to her.”
“Wait a minute. Back up. Talking to who?”
Addy sighed and looked back at Beau. “When I was able to work my blindfold down, I saw Willie talking to a woman. Well, I heard him talking to someone. I figured out it was a woman before I saw her because I could hear her footsteps. I knew they were women’s heels.” She let out a little half laugh. “It’s funny how distinct certain sounds are that you never realize until you can’t see. Then those sounds are so loud in your head that it’s all you can hear.”
“So you heard a woman’s heels, then heard Willie talking to her,” Marcel prompted.
“Yes. So I looked down the hall and saw him talking to someone. I could make out him saying that I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t see who he was talking to at first because he was blocking my line of sight.” She paused. “Then he stepped aside and I saw her. I recognized her, and I have to admit, I almost threw up.”
Addy shifted to look at Dimitri. “It was Lissette.”
27
Dimitri
Adelaide looked at him with such sympathy. “I know you don’t want to hear that and are probably having a really tough time believing it, but I promise you, Dimitri, it was Lissette.”
As if he wouldn’t believe her?
Dimitri pulled her into a sideways hug as they sat on the stairs outside the warehouse. “Shh, mon chaton, I believe you.” For the umpteenth time since he’d laid eyes on her, he sent up another prayer of thanks that she was safe.
An ambulance pulled into the lot beside them, paramedics opening the back doors. Quickly, Marcel filled them in on the situation, and they got Adelaide sitting on the cot while one paramedic checked her head and the other checked her vitals. Dimitri, Beau, Marcel, and the handcuffed Willie Neyland stood in a semicircle outside the back of the ambulance, watching and waiting.
“Can I still talk to them?” Adelaide asked the EMS technician taking her blood pressure.
“Sure,” the woman replied.
“Okay.” Adelaide looked back at Beau. “Lissette left. She never spoke to me or anything, but I knew it was her. Then Willie came back to check on me.”
Dimitri stared at the man. He was so big. Hitting Adelaide on the head. His beefy hands on her as he tied her up. Dimitri wanted to rip his head off.
“We started talking, and he untied my hands. He gave me another bottle of water.”
“So generous,” Beau said.
His partner shot him a disapproving look, but Dimitri didn’t think he and the good detective had ever been as much on the same page as they were right at that moment. Dimitri wanted to applaud, but figured Detective Taton just might handcuff him, too, if he did.
“I told him things about my family, and he told me things about his. We talked about some of the rough things we’d been through. Willie, everything I told you was true. About my mother. What happened to me in college. And my friendships.”
He met her stare, not saying anything, but his expression softened. Beau and Dimitri shared a look for just a split second. She’d shared about Kevin Muller? She really had come so far emotionally in the last year.
“He told me about his father not having been around and his mother looking out for her three sons. How his older brother was shot by a cop, which brought a lot of tension to the neighborhood.” She looked at Beau, including Marcel in her gaze. “Y’all know how that can be. It’s hard on everyone involved.”
Both detectives nodded, their faces grave.
“He told me how he dropped out of school to help with finances, and he’d been looking out for his little brother. A woman and her daughter stepped in to help. They told his momma that they could use voodoo to help keep her two remaining sons safe.”
Dimitri knew where this was going, and he wanted to scream. At the very least he wanted to pull Adelaide into his arms and hold her. Instead, he remained still and listened to her continue.
“His momma died, but the woman and her daughter took in Willie. His little brother moved to Texas where he got married. But Willie stayed here. The woman died, leaving just Willie and her daughter.”
The EMS technician finished taking Adelaide’s vitals and sat back, obviously interested in the tale as well.
“This daughter manipulated Willie to do what she wanted. Told him that if he didn’t, she would not only remove the protection around him and his brother, but threatened to put curses or the like on his little brother.”
Dimitri could relate all too well. Just a year ago, he’d had curses and spells put on
his house and him, and, as he figured, probably by the same person.
“That person, that daughter, that woman is Lissette. She threatened to hurt Willie’s little brother if he didn’t subdue me, tie me up, and keep me here.”
While Dimitri understood the man’s dilemma, this was Adelaide being abducted and manhandled. He wanted to hit something very, very hard.
“What do you think she hoped to accomplish by keeping you here, Addy?” Marcel asked. “I mean, what was her endgame?”
Adelaide shrugged. “I don’t know exactly.” She glanced at Dimitri.
At first it didn’t make sense. But then he considered Lissette’s words to him on the phone. And the coldness of her voice . . .
She’d intended to kill Adelaide. Or have someone else do it. Dimitri couldn’t imagine a world without Adelaide.
“She said she was going to have someone take you out of Louisiana as soon as she could make plans,” Willie volunteered.
“Who?” Beau asked.
Willie shook his head. “I don’t know. She knows I can’t drive, so I couldn’t. She said she was making plans and it would all be over in a few days. That’s all I was supposed to do—keep her for a few days.”
Dimitri wanted to rip someone apart at the moment.
The paramedic examining Adelaide’s head put a cold compress against her wound and moved from behind her. “You’re good, but we need to get you to the hospital and have your head checked out.”
“Oh, it’s okay. This is all I need.” Adelaide pressed the compress against the back of her head and grimaced. “I’m good, thank you. Thank you both.” She smiled at both the ladies, but pain was evident in her face.
“We need to rule out a concussion, and the doctors will check you out.” The EMS technician stood and jumped from the back of the ambulance. She smiled wide at Marcel. “We’ll meet you at Tulane Med.”
Dimitri stepped forward. “May I ride with you?”
“Sure.” Adelaide looked at the paramedic. “Is that okay, I mean?” The EMS technician looked at Marcel and Beau.
Marcel turned to Dimitri. “Until we conclude taking her statement, we need her not to be alone with anyone else. I’m sorry, but you’ll need to just meet her at the hospital.”
Not what Dimitri wanted to hear, but he guessed he understood. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the hospital.” Beau slipped his notebook back into his pocket. “We’ll use the sirens and everything, so we’ll get there about the same time.”
“You think so? Should I take that a challenge?” The EMS driver grinned. She glanced at Adelaide’s widening eyes and laughed. “I’m just kidding. We’ll cut them off.” She winked and shut the doors.
“I was just kidding about the lights and sirens. Don’t rush. Precious cargo there.” Beau gave the paramedic a volume of information without saying a word.
A slow smile crossed her face. “See you there, then, Detective.” She moved to the driver’s door of the ambulance. “Better take the back route. One of the krewe’s parades is going on, and there are streets closed.”
“Yep. I had a bully of a time routing around to get here.” Marcel turned to his partner. “I’ll make sure the unit knows what we need before I meet you at the hospital. I’ll be there soon.”
“Come on.” Beau jerked his head at Dimitri.
They were buckled up and on the road before Beau asked, “Do you have any ideas on what Lissette planned? I’m trying to figure out what she thought she could get out of it, but I’m coming up empty. She made a plan, even though it seems very flawed, so I’m guessing she had an end result in mind. Do you have any thoughts?”
Might as well get his suspicions out, and probably better to do it out of Adelaide’s earshot. “This might be crazy, and I have nothing to back this up, but I think she planned to kill Adelaide and set up my father for it.”
“What do you mean?”
Dimitri held up his hands to ward off the detective’s argument. “Just hear me out. She left the message for Adelaide about a meeting with my father. Not her, not me . . . my father. She did it in such a way that Adelaide’s assistant, Vicky, would see the appointment was with him. The time was specific as well. As was the location, although Vicky couldn’t remember that. I’m betting that the actual message itself would show up afterward that had the address. Vicky would be able to recognize it was the message she saw.”
Beau nodded as he pulled up to a stop sign and spared a glance at him. “You’ve got my attention.” He slowly made the turn.
“She made sure to also log the appointment on Father’s calendar, which I saw and did exactly as Lissette intended: thought my father in fact had a meeting with Adelaide. By all purposes, we would assume that Adelaide met my father at the Basin Street warehouse at six.”
Beau nodded as he steered. “Still, you said he was at home when you went to confront him. With other people as witnesses.”
“Detective, would you believe the alibi of a man’s son and housekeeper if something had happened to Adelaide? When all evidence would show that he met her at the place where her bod—where she would have been found?”
“No.”
“Me either.” Dimitri stared out the window into the downtown lights still blazing. Carnival season in full blast, justifying New Orleans’s earned nickname as the “most unique” in the United States. “But the most compelling to me was what she told me on the phone. That if Father went to jail, then his estate would be divided between me, as his named heir, and her, as his forced heir. You heard her—I asked her what she planned to do and she told me she had taken care of everything. I think that meant she had everything planned out, at least in her mind.”
Beau nodded. “She’d laid the groundwork well, that’s for sure. Enough to cast suspicion on Claude from the beginning.”
“If something had happened to Adelaide, her vehicle found in the parking lot, with the meeting documented . . . and no sign of Adelaide . . .”
“And we would pull GPS records on her car and verify the time. We would also do the same with her phone and see what data our forensic techs could pull off of it.”
Dimitri gripped the side of the console as Beau turned down another side street. “I’d bet that Lissette took Adelaide’s phone with the intent to put it somewhere connected to my father. His car, a coat pocket, somewhere that would dispute Father’s claims that he never had a meeting with her.”
“And that would catch him in another lie, making him look all the more guilty.” Beau let out a low whistle. “That’s cold of her. To set up y’all’s father.”
“I think she’s gotten desperate. Learning that Father planned to cut her out of his estate as soon as she turned twenty-four put her back against a wall.” On one hand he could understand her desperation. But alternately, he’d told her he would take care of it. Of her. Maybe that was just too hard for her to believe, considering the lack of trust she had in men overall.
“There’s the ticking clock that she’s up against. She turns twenty-four this year, you said, right?”
“Yes. In the fall.”
Beau turned down another back alley and pulled to a stop at the main road. He turned to glance at Dimitri, the graveness of his face illuminated by the dashboard lights. “Do you really think Lissette is capable of murder?”
Dimitri paused. Just considering it made his heart ache, but he had to. He took a slow breath. “My initial response is there’s no way she could do such a thing, but considering everything . . . She truly believes in the voodoo. She probably planned to get rid of Adelaide by that method.” He shook his head. “But when that didn’t work? She would have to have a backup, because I don’t think she could physically do it herself. She would probably manipulate that Willie fellow or someone else. I think she was desperate enough.”
“Tell me, what do you think is her main beef with Addy? Surely it can’t be just that she thought you chose Addy’s job over hers.”
Staring out the front windshield, Dimitri sat
in silence for a minute. Then two. This was about to get awkward, but there was no other way around it. “I think Lissette realized the depth of my feelings for Adelaide. I believe she learned of our planned date this weekend, and it was a catalyst for her desperation.”
“How so?” Beau didn’t ask about the date, so Dimitri could only assume that he either already knew, suspected, or had his own date with Adelaide. None of which made this conversation any less uncomfortable.
“If things progressed with Adelaide as I hoped they would, then Adelaide would stand to be more than just the general manager at the Darkwater Inn.”
“Oh.” Beau pulled the car into the emergency-room lot at Tulane Medical Center. He parked and twisted to look at Dimitri. “I know this is an odd and difficult situation for us to both be in, both of us feeling the way we do about Addy. I get that.” He unfastened his seatbelt and let out a breath. “And I really wish neither of us were in this situation, but here we are.”
Dimitri clicked his seatbelt release as well but didn’t move.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t like our situation, but it is what it is. You’re a good guy, Pampalon, even if your father isn’t. If there’s anything we need to tell each other, for the sake of the case, let’s just do that. We’re both men and capable of handling hearing things we might not like.”
Dimitri nodded. “I agree. And I appreciate that you came out to get me as soon as you knew Adelaide was safe. You could have left me in the dark longer.”
Beau nodded. “So you think that Lissette considered if things got serious between you and Addy, she would be ousted, so that made her put her plan in action?”
“Sadly, yes.” Dimitri hated to think Lissette was so callous, but that’s what her actions defined. “She didn’t trust that I would make sure she was not excluded.” That was what broke his heart. He’d done everything he could to prove to his sister that he was on her side. From accepting her even before the DNA results were in to going with her to confront their father to demanding Father include her in the hotel business, Dimitri had done nothing to indicate he wouldn’t stand with her.