“The stench is really something, isn’t it? I don’t think we have to stay here, but I want to have a word with you,” said Rene Chanfreau.
“Chanfreau. Can you tell me what happened here?” Ethan asked.
“Uh, yeah. It seems your girlfriend shot three of your friends and then left in one of your rental cars.”
“All dead?” Ethan was white-faced with shock.
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know about the slow one. The two big guys are dead. The slow one was still alive when we got here, and now he’s at the hospital. I’m out of the loop. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“And Amelia?” asked Ethan icily. “Any idea where she’s gone?”
“Nope. Let’s go to my office where we can talk.”
As they left the room, Chanfreau closed and locked the door behind him. Ethan’s cell phone rang. He looked at it and mouthed the word “Amelia” to Chanfreau.
“Calderon. Yes, I saw. What were you thinking?”
Chanfreau watched Ethan talk. He wasn’t able to hear Amelia’s part of the conversation.
“Don’t touch the Delaplaineses. If you do and word gets out, you’ll never get Yamane back, is that what you want? Amelia? Shit.” He hung up the phone. “She knows I’ve been stalling for time.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“I’ve been trying to figure a way out of this mess!”
“How about if you start with a visit to my office last week before she got it into her head to kill your friends?”
“I was trying to stay out of jail,” snapped Ethan.
“I’m sure your friends would be really understanding about that, except oops, they’re dead.”
“Shut the hell up. I know! All I want now is for Amelia to get what’s coming to her.”
“Well, Rory and his grandparents are my first concern, and I’m going to do everything I can to see them safe. Tell me everything you know, and I may not feed you to the gators.”
Chanfreau unlocked the squad car and allowed Ethan the privilege of sitting in the back after checking him over for weapons.
26
“Talk,” said Rene Chanfreau to the man sitting on the other side of the small interrogation table. Really, it was one of those small portable tables used at picnics and garage sales, made of plastic that folded up easily on metal legs. St. Antoine’s Parish had spared no expense in outfitting its crack team of investigators as usual.
“First,” said Ethan. “You have to understand, not one of us ever expected it to come to
this.”
“Go on,” said Rene. “So few people tell me that…” He pursed his lips.
“I know it’s dumb; it sounds crazy even to my ears.” Ethan took the coffee Anthony handed to him. “Bill Rooney and Matt Gonzalez are the two dead men. They were muscle that Amelia hired to help her track down Ran Yamane. Jeff Haggerty was the man everyone called slow. Is he still alive?”
“Hanging by a thread. He stroked out because of blood loss. It doesn’t look good.”
“Shit. I was trying to keep it from coming to that.”
“Let’s start with Amelia Gianfranco and her unholy quest for the artist known as Ran Yamane.”
“Amelia is the daughter of a man we worked for at one time in New York. We all owed him; he was good to us. He was the kind of man who requires loyalty,” Ethan said quietly, “or death.”
“Ah. Organized crime?”
“Yes.”
“What has Ran Yamane got to do with that?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s why this is crazy. Amelia is obsessed with Ran Yamane, his art, his looks, everything about him. She was institutionalized for stalking him before, and when she got out, she got Matt and Bill on board to help her find him again. She sees Yamane as her property. Decreed by fate. Jeff stayed with her out of loyalty to her father. I was in it for the cash. As soon as I saw it start to go south, I put the brakes on as best I could, but she must have sensed something because she started keeping me out of things. She’d send me on errands.” He looked unhappy. “I was trying to keep everyone safe.”
“So you’re telling me that Yamane just happens to have a crazed stalker who is the daughter of a mob guy, and she’s been using her connections to follow and eventually kidnap him.” Rene didn’t quite believe him.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Not just any mob guy, but a seriously made guy. She started this Yamane thing when they went to the same fancy private school in New York. They were in art class together. Her dad thought it was a crush and indulged her for a while. When Yamane moved to Japan, she wrote to him. Yamane wrote back, always polite. When he made it big with the Snoggs, he turned his correspondence over to his publicist, but by then Amelia was writing him thousands of letters a year. When Ray Gianfranco saw what was really happening, she was in deep trouble in Japan and it was way too late. He was plenty ticked off about her stay in the institution.”
“Was? He was?”
Ethan nodded, drinking his coffee. “He died while she was in Seattle being ‘rehabilitated.’”
“That could explain a lot.”
“If you’re thinking she’s in it because she didn’t see Daddy before he died, think again. Amelia cares about no one except Amelia. The boys, now, they probably went along with her in part because of their grief. Ray Gianfranco was what he was, but he was a good man to them. Even they saw how nuts she was in the end, but they were too afraid of her to get out. That kind of loyalty and fear go hand in hand.” Ethan thought about it. “Along the way, she’s had other help, but it doesn’t stick from town to town. Mostly I hired guys who were local.”
“You make me sick,” said Rene. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Something you don’t know… Let’s see. There are eight hundred seventy-three people in this town, and they all rely on me to keep them safe. I do it, my dad did it, and my grandfather did it. You bring trouble to this town, and I’ll be sure to shut it down however I have to.” Ethan laughed with no small amount of contempt. “I feel like I’m in a Western.”
Rene reached out with one hand and snapped the smallest finger on Ethan’s left hand like a twig. He moved so fast that Ethan didn’t even feel it before Rene’s hand was back on his side of the table, casually draped around his coffee cup. Ethan turned white with pain but made no sound.
“Anthony, Ethan seems to have hurt his finger somehow,” he called out to his deputy. “See to it that Doc takes a look at it, okay?” He got up. Leaning over to Ethan, Rene whispered in his ear, “You think made guys are tough? You try harming one hair on any head in my community, and you’ll find out what alligators eat from the inside of one.”
* * *
Ethan understood the kind of pain he’d inadvertently bought with his wisecrack. He was lucky he still had a finger; Gianfranco wouldn’t have hesitated to take it right off in front of all his friends and relatives. His whole hand throbbing, Ethan watched Rene Chanfreau walk away, then allowed himself to be led to a patrol car, presumably to go to some doctor. He thought of something he hadn’t told Chanfreau.
“Anthony, that’s your name, right?” Ethan asked the young deputy.
“Yep,” said Anthony.
“Tell Chanfreau I have Rory Delaplaines’s cell phone number. It’s brand-new, and I’m not sure even his grandparents have it. If the sheriff wants it, I’ll give it to him -- show of good faith.”
Anthony glanced at him briefly before looking back at the road. “Why would you do that?”
“Did you see those three boys in that hotel room?”
“Yeah.” Anthony tried not to blanch.
“They were members of my community,” Ethan told him. “And I don’t have any gators.”
Rory thought about everything on the way down the I-35. He had sweet memories of the night before that every so often set off little explosions of wanting in his body, like erotic aftershocks from a major quake. Yamane was everything to him, and now, the closer he got to h
ome, the less he wanted to take Yamane there with him.
A light drizzle began as he turned off on the I-20 east to cut over to Shreveport. Soon, he knew from experience, that drizzle would turn into real rain spilling over the southernmost states from the Gulf of Mexico. The rain on the windshield made the light and shadow play on Yamane’s face as he slept. Rory pulled off to get gasoline and shook Yamane gently awake to let him know they were stopped if he needed to use the bathroom. Yamane looked a little weak today, and Rory felt responsible. He blushed to think now that maybe he’d been pretty inconsiderate. Yamane returned to the truck, and once again Rory helped him in. Yamane tried to push his hand away.
Next to Yamane’s ear, Rory said, “I’m sorry. Maybe I was too…”
Yamane took Rory’s hand. “I could never be sorry for last night,” he said. “Never.”
“Did I hurt you?” asked Rory.
Yamane smiled and shook his head, looking at him from under his lashes, and something flashed into Rory’s mind. He couldn’t tell what it was, but it was as though something dropped into place that wasn’t there before, and it completed a puzzle he’d been working on since Long Beach. He knew then that he couldn’t take Yamane home with him, no matter what.
Amelia could rant, and Amelia could rave, but if she were completely deprived of her prey, she lost the battle and the war. The trick would be to see to it that she found out at the last possible second. All he needed was to get really, really close…
Rory’s cell phone rang. He picked it up, and thinking it might be Ethan Calderon or Jenks or whatever he was calling himself today, he closed the truck door in Yamane’s shocked face and held up his hand, indicating he’d take the call in private. “I’m here,” he said.
“Rory, is that you?” said Rene Chanfreau.
“Who is this?” Rory recognized the accent but not the voice.
“It’s Rene Chanfreau. You ought to know my voice; I’ve told you to go home and sober up enough times.”
“Maybe if you said, ‘What would your grandmère think if she saw you right now?’ I’d be more likely to recognize it.”
“Maybe. I know you’re in trouble, and I want to help.” Rene got right to the point. “I’ve got Ethan Calderon in custody, and all of Amelia’s help is dead or in the hospital. It’s all down to you and one woman now.”
“Don’t underestimate her,” Rory warned. “She’s going to try to make a trade: Yamane for my grandparents, but Yamane says don’t buy it; she’ll try to kill us all.”
“That’s what Calderon thinks too. By the way, he gave me this number.”
“Did he? I wonder if that’s what he meant…”
“About what?”
“Never mind. I’m trying to think of a plan, Sheriff Rene.” Rory tilted his head back so that it rested on the tailgate of his truck. “But honestly, I’m scared. I’m in way over my head, and I’m afraid my ignorance is going to get us killed.”
“I understand. You’ve done really well so far from what Ethan told me. Let me think, and then I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll talk some more. I’m going to check on Euphonia and Claude. I’ll make up some excuse. I’m on your side, and I have Ethan’s brain to pick, even if I have to crack his head like a walnut to get to it.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.” Rory hung up.
Something inside of Rory unwound then, and a deep tension that had curled around his heart loosened and relaxed until he could breathe more easily than he had in a week. He sat on the bumper of his truck, just experiencing the sensation of having someone on their side. Closing his eyes, he felt the beginnings of a gentle drizzle on his face.
Amelia thought it was time to end this thing with Yamane once and for all. There had been a time when she’d considered him a friend. When he had known he was hers and had written pretty notes in his own handwriting, sometimes with little sketches attached. That was before he became famous and she started getting computerized letters with a rubber- stamped signature. When he turned his back on everything they had together, giving her a distant, polite, yet cold, shoulder.
She remembered looking at his face -- that beautiful, mocking face -- at the teahouse they’d gone to in Tokyo as she’d casually dropped Rohypnol in his drink. He’d allowed her to carry him out of the restaurant and back to her rented house. Yamane had known he belonged to her then. He had just kept making such a fuss about that damnable dog. She had wanted his focus on her, so she’d eliminated the dog. It almost seemed like he held that against her, which she thought was quite unreasonable of him.
Now? She was tired of the game. Yamane belonged to her, and no amount of pretending would make it otherwise. She had known keeping him would require a great deal of patience, but currently hers was wearing very thin.
Rene knocked on the Delaplaines’s door, half-sick about what he had to do.
“Rene,” said Claude warmly as he opened the door. “To what do we owe this pleasure?” “I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m going to have to take you in.” Rene kept his face passive.
“I told you, you can’t go around peddling drugs in St. Antoine’s Parish, and I gave you plenty of time to stop. Now get Euphonia. I’m afraid you’ll both have to come with me.”
Claude looked at him with shocked eyes. “Euphonia? What’s she got to do with it?”
“Well, she’s an accomplice, isn’t she? Claude, I told you and told you. I can’t have my community thinking it can go get mixed up with drugs, can I?” Rene hated this, hated the look on Claude’s face, hated the fear the old man was experiencing. He had to make this look convincing, though, because he worried that Amelia was watching the house. “Now, go get your wife and your lawyer’s phone number. I’ll wait.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
Rene turned away from him. “Anthony, you go around back and take some of the evidence into custody, and watch out in case Miss Euphonia tries to escape. She’s a wily one.” Anthony had been told his job was to see if he could find any trace of Amelia.
Claude was still sputtering, and Rene could see he felt betrayed by a man he thought was his friend. Please, Rene prayed silently, just don’t go having a heart attack before I can tell you the truth.
“Euphonia.” Claude bellowed for his wife. “Euuphoniaah!” he shouted. “Do you know what Rene Chanfreau is here saying at the door of our house where he used to trick-or-treat, damn it!”
“Evening, Rene.” Euphonia wandered into the room. “Rene, have you come to arrest my husband for his drug trafficking?”
“I have, Miss Euphonia, and unfortunately, you must come as well, as his accomplice.” He burned with shame to say those words.
“I see,” Euphonia said. “I’m glad to see you’re ashamed, Rene Chanfreau, bless your heart. Although I’m sure God will strike you dead for doing this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rene answered. After that, Claude came quietly, apparently seeing little to be gained by arguing. Anthony had gathered enough of Claude’s crop in a Ziploc baggie to put Claude away for quite a while in Louisiana.
“So. I haven’t been in the back of one of these since the sixties.” He laughed. “Did I ever tell you I was arrested when I went to hear Dr. King speak?”
Rene looked in the rearview mirror. “No, I’d like to hear about it sometime,” he said. “About today --”
“I doubt I’ll live long enough to be much of an object lesson to the youth of our community.”
“Don’t be a fool, Claude. Rene’s not here for you,” said Euphonia, with a perfectly sanguine expression on her face. “This is about that awful woman, Amelia, that Rory’s got himself mixed up with, isn’t it?”
27
Ran Yamane was as happy as a man could be. His fingers were sticky with barbecue sauce, and the chef at the smoke pit was allowing him to try anything he saw that he wanted. Rory was laughing and talking with the big southern cook as though they were lifelong friends, even though they’d just met.
“Do you want to try this?”
said Skeeter, the pit master, holding out a small slice of pork tenderloin that had been smoked to perfection. “See that pink ring on the meat, just inside there? That’s how you know it was smoked and not grilled like they try to say is barbecue these days in the city.”
“Mm.” Yamane ate it and sighed with pleasure. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, sir,” said Skeeter. “It takes a long time to make a good barbecue; it takes smoke, time, and love. Leave out any one, and it isn’t barbecue, right, son?”
“Yes, sir.” Rory grinned.
“Can I try a piece of that?” Yamane pointed to some mahogany-colored bits of meat on a piece of aluminum foil. “Please?”
Skeeter seemed delighted to show off his expertise. “You surely may. Those are the burnt ends of the brisket -- you just go ahead and try that now.” He allowed Yamane to take the juicy brown beef bit from the end of his vast carving knife like he had with the other tidbits he’d fed him, treating him a little like an exotic pet.
Yamane closed his eyes and ate, moaning over the morsel. “He doesn’t get out much,” said Rory.
“Oh, I can see; fellow like him must spend his days at home with his head in a bag.” Skeeter rolled his eyes.
“Excuse me?” Yamane snapped.
Rory and Skeeter laughed. Yamane had liked the huge, sad-eyed pit master immediately when they’d stopped at this small, family-owned smoke-pit barbecue joint in northern Louisiana. He was taller than Rory by about five inches, which made him a giant to Yamane. He clearly saw more than was on the surface, but seemed nonjudgmental and kind.
“Where did you say you were from again?” he asked Yamane.
“Well, I’m originally from New York, but I live in Japan,” Yamane answered. “So you can see why decent barbecue hasn’t come my way before now.”
“Decent?” Skeeter raised his brows.
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