by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
My father was a natural-gas engineer, but like none of his colleagues. He hated the oil-and-gas industry. He scrubbed his hands up to his elbows when he came home from work and never discussed what he did on the job. Nor would he socialize with his fellow employees or even use their names in conversation. He had wanted to be a journalist or a historian, and instead ended up a pipeliner during the Great Depression and hostage to both the job and my mother’s hospital bills. Part of that job involved dredging channels through freshwater swamp and marshland, poisoning the root system with saline, and contributing to the erosion of the Edenic wetlands in which he had grown up.
We stayed at the Hotel Frederic in New Iberia, his birthplace, whenever his company sent him to Louisiana. The Frederic was a grand building, four stories high, made entirely of brick and stone and concrete, with a roofed gallery above the entrance and a ballroom and marble pillars and potted ferns and palms in the lobby and a birdcage elevator and wood-bladed ceiling fans and a saloon with batwing doors and a shoeshine stand where a man of color popped a rag in 4/4 time. I loved staying at the Frederic and riding up and down on the elevator and waking to the Angelus. I loved eating breakfast in the dining room with my father, just as I loved everything else we did together in New Iberia.
It was raining when we returned to the hotel. The sky was black, veined with electricity, the fog as soft and white as cotton rolling off Bayou Teche. We ate silently in the dining room. There was no one else in the room except a waiter and two men in suits eating in the corner with their hats on. My father looked casually at the two men, then ordered a bowl of ice cream for me and went into the saloon. When he came back I could smell whiskey and cherries on his breath. “Ready?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Was that ice cream okay?”
“It was fine.”
“You’re a good boy, Aaron. Don’t ever forget that. You’re the best little boy I’ve ever known.”
We rode up in the elevator, piloted by an elderly black man in a gray uniform and white shirt and a black tie. “Mighty cold out there tonight,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” my father said.
The black man stopped on the third floor, the skeleton-like structure of the elevator rattling. “Mr. Broussard?”
“Yes?”
The black man’s eyes were lowered. “These are dangerous times. That’s when bad people tend to come around.”
My father waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “Thank you, Clarence,” he said.
After we were inside our room, he went to the window and looked down on the street, then pulled the shade and turned on the desk lamp and sat down.
“I owe you an explanation, Aaron.”
“About the dead men?”
“A German submarine was out there. I saw its conning tower and periscope go underwater.”
“Why didn’t you tell the people that on the radio?”
“The government always knows this. But they don’t want to share their information.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe they’re afraid of panic. Maybe they wish to hide their incompetence.”
“But they’re supposed to tell the truth,” I said.
“This is a different kind of situation, Aaron.”
“The families of the burned men in the water won’t know where they are.”
He looked at the design in the rug. The fabric was worn, the colors softened with dust. “They knew what they were doing when they signed on. The world is for the living.”
“This doesn’t sound like you. Daddy,” I said.
“The government is wrong to suppress the truth. If they question me, I’ll tell them what we saw. But I’ll also have to tell the newspapers. Not to do so would be dishonorable.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The men who start wars never go to them,” he said. “They kill people with a fountain pen and call themselves leaders. Never allow yourself to become their servant, Aaron.”
That night I dreamed of a giant shark that had a human face. It broke the surface of the Gulf and crunched a toy ship in its jaws, a red cloud blossoming in the waves around its head, pieces of the ship and tiny men washing through the wetlands and into the streets of New Iberia and through the lobby of the Frederic Hotel and up the elevator shaft and into our room, drowning my father and me.
The next day was Saturday. He took me across the street to Provost’s Café & Bar for lunch. That might seem strange in our current culture, but in that era in South Louisiana the pagan world and Christianity had formed a truce and got along well. The ceiling was plated with stamped tin that resembled pewter and was hung with wood-bladed fans. There were domino and bourré and pool tables in back, and a ticker tape under a glass hood below the blackboards where gaming results of all kinds were posted. On Saturday afternoons the floor was littered with football betting cards.
There was no profanity in Provost’s, no coarseness, no ill manners. When we went to Provost’s we always sat at a checker-cloth table in the corner, and my father always bought me a po’boy fried-oyster sandwich and a side of dirty rice and a bottle of Dr. Nut, the best cold drink ever made. But as soon as I sat down I knew that today was different, that the world had changed, that the sinking of the tanker would not leave our lives. The two men who had been eating in the Frederic’s dining room with their hats on came through the front door and walked past us and stood at the end of the bar. One looked like a boxer and had a scar across his nose. The other man was very big, and wore a vest, with a pocket watch and fob. They each ordered beer from the spigot and faced the bar mirror, one foot on the brass rail, while they sipped from their mugs.
I could see my father looking at them and knew he remembered them from the hotel dining room. My father was a handsome man, with soft, dark hair he combed straight back. His eyes were small and narrow, like those of his grandfather, who had been with Stonewall Jackson through the entirety of the Shenandoah campaign, and also at Gettysburg.
“Is there something wrong about those men, Daddy?” I said.
“Pay them no attention.”
“Who are they?”
“I think they’re police officers.”
“How do you know?”
“A gentleman does not wear his hat in a building.”
A black man put my sandwich and bottle of Dr. Nut in front of me, then came back with a bottle of Jax for my father.
“They’re coming this way, Daddy,” I whispered, my eyes on my plate.
“Don’t speak to them or look at them. This is our home. Our family has lived on the bayou since 1836.”
I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. The two men were now hovering over our table. The man with the scar on his nose was standing immediately behind me, his loins eye level with me. “How y’all doin’?” he said.
My father wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin. “How can we help you?”
“We thought you might have been fishing out on Terrebonne Bay yesterday,” the man in the vest said.
“Not us.”
“The trout are running,” the same man said. His eyes were like brown marbles that were too big for his face, his body too big for his suit and vest and starched white shirt. “I’d like to get me a mess of them.”
“My name is James Eustace Broussard,” my father said. “This is my son Aaron. We live in Houston. I’m an engineer with an oil and natural gas company there, although I was born and raised in New Iberia.”
“You know how to cut to it,” said the man with the scarred nose.
“Sorry?” my father said.
“You keep your words neat and tidy,” the same man said. “You don’t clutter up the air.”
“We were having lunch, gentlemen,” my father said.
“Put your lunch on hold and take a walk,” said the man in the vest. “I’m Agent Hamilton. This here is my partner, Agent Flint. We’ll have you back in five minutes.”
“I’m afraid I will not b
e going anywhere with you,” my father said. “I’d also like to see your identification.”
“I’ll show it to you outside,” Mr. Hamilton said. He pulled on his collar and rotated his neck.
“I know why you’re here,” my father said.
“Tell you what,” Mr. Hamilton said. He pulled up a chair backward and spread his thighs across it. His teeth were as big as Chiclets. “I’m going to do you a courtesy because of your war record. Yesterday you called in a Mayday on a fire that was put out by the Coast Guard. Right? End of story. You did your good deed and we take it from here?”
“How did you come by my name?” my father said.
“The people at the boat landing,” Mr. Hamilton said. “We got us a deal?”
“A deal for my silence?”
Mr. Hamilton leaned forward in his chair. “Lower your voice, please.”
“I will not,” my father said.
The agent named Flint, the one who looked like a boxer, was still standing behind me, his fly inches from my face. He tugged gently on my earlobe. “You got you a right nice boy here,” he said.
My father set his fork on his plate and rose from his chair, his fingers propped stiffly on the tablecloth. “Don’t place your hand on my son’s person again.”
Mr. Flint screwed his finger into his ear, as though he were cleaning it. “Know a lady by the name of Florence Greenwald, Mr. Broussard?”
“I beg your pardon?” my father said.
“She’s a looker,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Enough to make a man turn his head.”
“We’re not knocking it,” Mr. Flint said. “I’ve let my swizzle stick wander a few times myself.”
“I think you’re both evil men,” my father said.
“Enjoy your lunch,” Mr. Hamilton said. “We’ll talk a little later.” He winked at me. “See you, little fellow.”
They walked out the door. My father sat back down, his eyes out of focus, his hands limp on each side of his plate, as though he had forgotten where he was or what he was doing.
I knew who she was. I also knew, without anyone telling me, that I was not supposed to mention her name. There was a great coldness in the relationship of my parents. In my entire life I never saw them kiss, hold hands, or even touch. Sometimes I would wake and hear them arguing in the bedroom, usually late at night after he had come home from the icehouse, bumping against the doorway, scraping against the wall with one shoulder. Once I heard him say, “What am I supposed to do? Go in the kitchen and get a butcher knife?” It wasn’t until puberty that I understood what he meant.
Miss Florence worked for the Red Cross and sometimes played bridge with my mother and her friends. For my birthday she gave me a book of stories and illustrations about King Arthur. Then she seemed to disappear from our lives. One evening in the kitchen I asked my father where she had gone. My mother was cleaning the stove, her back to us. She cleaned the house two times a day and washed her hands constantly.
“Miss Florence moved away,” my father said.
“Why’d she move?” I said.
Mother scrubbed at a speck of grease next to the gas burner, then realized the burner was hot and grabbed her fingers, her mouth crimped, her eyes watering.
“I’m not sure, Aaron,” my father said. “Why don’t we go have a Grapette?”
Mother walked out of the room. Then I heard her slam the bathroom door.
But my real knowledge of my father’s secret life did not come until weeks later, and to this day I cannot say with honesty that the evidence warranted my conviction. It was one of those moments you have as a child when you suddenly realize there is something terribly wrong with your family, and that the problem will not be corrected, and with a sinking of the heart you realize your life will never be the same.
On a Saturday afternoon, just before our trip to Terrebonne Bay, my father took me with him to the bowling alley. He had no interest in bowling, but the alley had an air-conditioned bar. Part of the Houston Post was folded back on the floor of his company car, the shoeprint of someone smaller than a man stenciled on it. The crossword puzzle was exposed. The blank squares had been filled in with pencil. My father had less interest in crossroad puzzles than he did in bowling.
That was when I knew he lived another life. I felt like I was on a swinging bridge above a canyon and the tether ropes had just been severed. I had seen Miss Florence working on a crossword puzzle in the reading room at the rental library in our neighborhood. She was from New Orleans and had been a nurse in France during the First World War. She read books my mother’s regular bridge group did not. My father’s loneliness hung on him like sackcloth and ashes. His colleagues in the oil-and-gas business had no inkling of his cultural frame of reference, one that included names like Malvern Hill and the Hornet’s Nest, which were as real to him as the trench in which he watched a sniper’s round mortally wound his best friend on November 11, 1918.
The rain was blowing against the window of Provost’s Café & Bar.
Men were cheering at the end of the bar. LSU had just scored a touchdown against Ole Miss.
“Aren’t you going to finish your po’boy?” I said.
“I think I need another Jax and you need another Dr. Nut,” my father said.
I knew he would be drunk by the end of the day, walking off balance in the hotel lobby, an object of pity and shame. I felt as though a giant spider was feeding on my heart.
“Are you crying?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you looking like that?”
“Why were those men talking about Miss Florence?” He watched the rain running down the window glass. “Is she here, Daddy? Is this where Miss Florence lives?”
“Those men bear me ill will for political reasons, Aaron. I spoke up for a man who used to be a communist because I believed it was the right thing to do. These men are also angry because I don’t believe the government has the right to control the news.”
“What does that have to do with Miss Florence?”
“Nothing. They harm others because there is nothing else they do well.”
The waiter saw my father’s empty Jax and came to the table. Then my father surprised me. “We’re through here,” he said. “Give us a check, please.”
“Where are we going, Daddy?”
“To the Daily Iberian.”
“What for?”
“If a man ever tries to blackmail you, you dial up the newspaper and put the phone in the man’s hand and tell him to do his worst. Are you my little podna?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
I had never been inside a newspaper office. I sat with my father at the editor’s desk, which was in a cubicle that gave onto the editorial room and the back shop where the linotype machines and printing presses were. The air was warm and comfortable and had a clean, bright smell like freshly ironed clothes. The reporters wore ties and dress shirts, the copyreaders green visors. The society editor, a large woman in a deep-purple suit and frilly white blouse, had her own cubicle and a big smile for everyone who passed by. I felt as though I were in a special place, a fortress where virtue and truth would always be sacrosanct and would always prevail.
The managing editor was a round man, not fat, just a man who was round, like a series of sketched circles that had been hooked together. He also had thinning sandy-red hair and a soft, kind face. “You saw a submarine sink an oil tanker, Mr. Broussard?” he said, his eyes crinkling.
“I don’t know that it was a tanker,” my father said. “It burned with the intensity of one. But it could have been a freighter carrying something else.”
The editor closed the door to the cubicle and sat back down. He tried to smile. “The sunset can play tricks.”
“I saw four bodies. I touched them with a boat hook.”
The light went out of the editor’s face. “I see.”
“Will you run the story?”
The editor shifted in his chair. “These are unusual times.”
“Your father was an appointee of President Roosevelt,” the editor said. “I would think you’d understand, Mr. Broussard.”
“My father broke with President Roosevelt when he tried to pack the Supreme Court.”
The editor nodded his head but didn’t reply.
“Can I buy space for an ad?” my father said.
“An ad?”
“If you won’t write the story, I will. I will also pay for the space.”
“You’re serious?”
“I was just threatened in Provost’s by two men who claim to be law enforcement officers.”
“The FBI?”
“If the FBI hires thugs.”
The editor wiped his mouth and tapped his thigh repeatedly. “They actually threatened you?”
“With blackmail.”
“About what?”
“Ask them.”
The editor leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips to his forehead as though he were trying to flatten the wrinkles in it. “We don’t run news stories as ads, Mr. Broussard. But I have the feeling you already know that.”
“It crossed my mind.”
The editor took a notepad and a fountain pen from his desk drawer. “I wish I had the flu. I wish I had stayed home today. In fact, right now I would welcome an asteroid through our roof. Okay, Mr. Broussard, let’s start over.”
The story ran two days later. It was on a back page and only four paragraphs in length. The story stated no calls to the Coast Guard or the FBI were returned. That evening we ate in the hotel dining room. My father joked with people he knew from his childhood. No one made mention of his statement in the Daily Iberian. We walked down East Main inside a tunnel of oaks, past the plantation house known as the Shadows, built in 1832, and past other antebellum homes and Victorian ones, also; one resembled a beached paddle-wheeler and glowed like a candlelit wedding cake in the gloom.