Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  He generally steered clear of the jewelry cases, because pawned wedding rings made him sad. Today, though, he headed straight for those glass display cases, because that’s where small collectible items were stored. Faye had sent him out to look for some very specific objects.

  “Got any old coins?” he asked the owner of the second hock shop of the day. Just as he had at the first shop, he’d watched the man as his hands had gone first to Lucite-encased sets of uncirculated proofs that had never been anything but collectibles. When Joe had shaken his head, saying just one word, “Older,” the man had reached for a black velveteen display stand of silver American money, accented with just a few gold pieces.

  Joe found it interesting that the man didn’t bat an eye when he said again, “Older.” Instead, the pawn shop proprietor had just spread his hands and said, “I wish I had what you people were looking for.”

  So somebody else was looking for something old and spendable. Joe wanted to know more, but he was too much of a fisherman to snatch his bait out of the water while the fish was still sniffing at it. He’d said, “I work for somebody who’d pay through the nose for really old coins. Gold bars would be good. Pieces-of-eight. Emeralds from the old Colombian mines. You know…pirate treasure.”

  Joe reached out a hand and gently lifted one of the gold American coins, safe in its protective case, after first making eye contact and getting a nod that said it was okay for him to pick it up. “Myself, I like these. They look like they’re worth something, but my boss likes the really old stuff. To me, a chunk of silver that’s spent a lot of time on the bottom of the ocean looks pretty much like a rock.”

  “You can restore it.”

  “If you trust the restorer.” Joe held the coin case lightly between his thumb and forefinger and spun it, so that he could look at the coin’s reverse. “Know any good restorers?”

  The man wrote down a few names and phone numbers. Joe pocketed the list. He knew the first name, but the others were new to him. This ploy had gotten him some more people whose brains he could pick. He was glad he’d stalled and let this fish play with his bait.

  He kept his focus on the gold piece, hoping that the prospect of an immediate sale would loosen the man’s lips on the subject that was actually important—who else had been sniffing around for very old silver coins?

  Joe laid the coin on the counter, closer to him than to the salesman, signaling that he was still thinking of buying it. Then, speaking off-handedly, as if he were trying to hide his interest in the gold piece by making idle conversation, he said, “I know a man named Leon who’s looking for unrestored silver pieces, too. Not sure who he’s working for. Leon is always a step ahead of me. Everywhere I go, he’s picked over the merchandise. He been here yet?”

  “Last name Sechrist?”

  Joe recognized the name from the note on Miranda’s refrigerator, but he didn’t answer right away, so the man kept talking. “A man name of Sechrist was here more than a week ago. Looking for the same stuff as you. Don’t remember his first name. Only reason I remember his name is that he gave me his card and the name of Christ just jumped out at me.” He crossed himself. “No, wait. I do remember his first name. It was Dane. I remember because I used to have a Great Dane. Sweet dog, but dumb as a bag of hammers.”

  “Still got the card?”

  “Naw. I th’ew it away. I ain’t had the kind of coins he wants, not ever. I can’t keep track of who wants what, for years on end. If people want what I got, they need to come back and look.”

  This lack of salesman-like drive explained the distinctly non-prosperous look of this particular store. The last store, up Plaquemines Highway nearer New Orleans, had been much bigger, so big that there were two people working when Joe arrived. Neither of them remembered anybody looking for Spanish silver, but there were surely others on the sales staff of a place that size. Joe knew he’d need to go back when they were on duty. This guy was a one-man shop, so Joe had been able to ask the right question of the right man on the first try. Sometimes a man gets lucky.

  Behind him, he heard the sound of an opening door, followed by two heavy boots being scraped on the welcome mat. The pawn shop’s proprietor nodded at the slouching newcomer, saying just, “Good to see ya, Stan. Got something for me?”

  “Not today. Haven’t been home lately, but I’m thinking my wife might’ve already hocked everything I got. She been in here?”

  “Didi?”

  “Only wife I got.”

  Joe got real interested in the gold piece again, stooping down to scrutinize it and letting his hair fall down around his face. He hadn’t come here to get any dirt on Didi, but it was hard to maintain his poker face when that dirt presented itself.

  “She was here this morning, but I doubt any of the stuff she left was yours. A woman’s wedding band. A locket, gold-filled. A pretty little white-gold crucifix. I figure it was her mama’s stuff.”

  “Did she manage to squeeze out a tear or two while she was snatching the money outta your hand?” Stan crossed the room, bellying up to the same counter as Joe. He nodded and Joe nodded back.

  The store owner handed Stan a plastic grocery bag, saying, “Yep. Said it tore her up to part with her mama’s things, and that she’d be paying off the loan as soon as she could, so she could come back and take her heirlooms home with her.”

  Stan pulled three little boxes out of the bag. They did indeed contain a wedding band, a locket, and a crucifix. “That what she called ‘em? ‘Heirlooms?’”

  “She did.”

  “Don’t hold your breath for her to come back.”

  “Not many folks ever do.”

  Joe stepped away from the counter and picked up a guitar. He didn’t know how to play it, but he hugged it to his chest and plucked all six strings, one at a time. Cocking his head as if he could actually tell whether the guitar was in tune and whether it had a good sound, he plucked them again, very slowly. Then he checked out each guitar in the store, looking over the body and neck like he knew what he was doing. He studied those damn guitars one square inch at a time, so that he could eavesdrop on the other men’s conversation without being obvious about it.

  Stan lingered for five minutes or so, but he didn’t say anything else interesting. He allowed as how he’d known his wife was a tramp when he met her, but he had a weak spot for tramps. The two men swapped information on where the fish were biting. They reminisced about a few times when they’d been memorably drunk together. And then Stan left.

  Joe, still running his hands over a guitar he didn’t know how to play, had been thinking during their monotonous conversation. He’d only come up with one notion that would interest Faye and the detective who had asked them to look into Amande’s missing coins, and it was this. It was possible that there had been no thief and no burglary. Just because those drawers were hanging open and the coins were missing at the very time Miranda was killed, it didn’t mean that there was a connection. Didi might have been searching her own house for things to hock. She could even have done it after her mother was killed or after Miranda left for her appointment with Dane Sechrist—Joe was pleased with himself to be able to give the man a first name—and before anyone else even realized that the old lady was missing.

  Still, if Didi had stolen those Spanish coins, then wouldn’t they have been in the plastic bag with her dead mother’s jewelry? Joe doubted she had the initiative to look for a dealer who would give her a better price. No, this seemed to be her family’s pawn shop of choice, since her estranged husband had also shown up in the same spot. According to the owner, the coins weren’t here, and they hadn’t ever been. Therefore, Didi probably hadn’t taken them, but he’d be bouncing his logic off Benoit to see whether the officer agreed with it.

  Joe couldn’t say whether Dane Sechrist had taken Amande’s Spanish coins or not, but he might have had an appointment with
Miranda on the afternoon of her death. Joe now knew that someone by that same name had been looking for coins like Amande’s, days or weeks before they were stolen and well before two members of the family that had owned them were murdered.

  Joe still had more pawn shops to visit, and now he had a list of restorers to check out, but he already thought Faye would be pleased with the information he’d uncovered. And the sun was still crawling upward toward noon.

  ***

  Michael’s afternoon nap was coming to an end. He was stirring in his portable crib. Faye saved the spreadsheet she was using to track the known archaeological sites in the path of the oil slick, because in thirty seconds she was going to be listening to a cranky baby.

  She could really use another couple of hours to fiddle with the data. Maybe Amande would be willing to babysit. She had never intended to let the girl work for free, and Miranda’s death meant that Amande needed the income even more. Faye was glad to have the opportunity to help her out. Even better, Michael seemed to think the girl was a great big toy.

  Hoisting a newly diapered child on her hip, Faye trudged down the hill to the houseboat, only to find it empty. No Amande. No Didi. No Tebo.

  Amande’s well-used picnic table was empty. Didi’s car was in the parking lot, but Tebo’s wasn’t. Faye couldn’t picture the three of them in a car, cruising around like an all-American family. When she tried to imagine it, her brain kept putting Amande in the driver’s seat, despite the fact that the girl lacked even a learner’s permit. Faye couldn’t even let herself imagine Didi or Tebo in a position to hurt Amande, and they were both often in no condition to drive.

  Faye looked at her phone. It was about five o’clock, a little early for dinner, but maybe Didi had taken Amande to the marina’s restaurant to get something to eat.

  Michael was getting heavy and Faye’s lower back ached, so she lowered his feet to the ground and grabbed his hand.

  “Let’s go find Amande.”

  “A-mah!” he said clearly. Faye’s ears, tuned to his babyish diction, heard the word as entirely distinct from the “Ma-mah!” that he used to call her. She couldn’t wait to tell Amande that he could say her name.

  Michael’s tiny shoes tapped on the wooden walkway that led to the restaurant. Faye’s boots clattered in counterpoint to his rhythm. Faye couldn’t get over how much the marina grill looked like Liz’s place back home. She could have sworn she was looking at the same fishermen, sunburned and sweaty, wearing the same soiled t-shirts and telling the same fish tales. For Manny’s sake, she wished there were more of those fishermen leaning their elbows on those tables, but greasy fried fish filets were not a necessity of life, so fewer people were buying them. She’d heard tell that Venice and Grand Isle were chockful of reporters with dollars to spend, but none of them were here.

  The linoleum floor was as worn and as clean as the floor at Liz’s place back home. The clattering racket from the kitchen was as loud. Someone with a voice as loud as Liz’s was hollering, “Three eggs, scrambled!”

  Reminded of the joys of eating breakfast at suppertime, Faye hoped that fried eggs and grits were on the menu. She wouldn’t mind grabbing a quick bite before she handed Michael off to Amande and got back to work. Slipping a hand into her purse, she found a couple of jars of toddler food rolling around. Score! Eggs for her, chunky bits of mushy squash for Michael. Dinner was served.

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and texted Joe to tell him to find his own dinner, because she wasn’t cooking any.

  Remembering that she’d come there to look for Amande, not to get some grits, Faye looked around and spotted her at a table in the back. She was surrounded by some familiar faces, and Faye was struck by how few of the familiar faces in this community were attached to people that she liked very much.

  There sat Didi, completely ignoring Amande while she had an animated conversation with Steve Daigle. Faye, having taken more sociology and anthropology courses than was good for her, saw that Didi was a textbook example of seductive body language. Her hands went frequently to her hair, smoothing it back and tucking it behind one ear. She bent forward from the hips at an angle designed to accentuate breasts that were small but perky. The chicken wings she was eating gave her frequent excuses to run a single index finger over her wet lips before gently sucking off the grease.

  Steve seemed to be enjoying the show, leaning down to make eye contact and running the fingertips of his right hand up and down Didi’s slender back.

  Was Steve worth all that effort? Faye supposed he was attractive, if you liked a longhaired man shaped like a fireplug who had the face of a Pekingese puppy. Was Didi really attracted to him? Or did she just instinctively do these things the instant she smelled the pheromones of a human male…any human male? Had it crossed Didi’s mind that this man had been her sister’s husband until a week before? And had it crossed her mind that there was some possibility, however slight, that this man had killed her mother, just yesterday? In fact, anyone in the room could have done it. Maybe this would have been a good day for Didi to have a quiet dinner at home with her bereaved niece.

  Instead, she was downing a shot and listening to inspired pickup lines like, “It’s been a long time since I saw a body like yours.”

  Speaking of the bereaved niece, Amande did not appear to have absorbed Didi’s teachings on how to handle men. Her chair was backed as far into the corner as it would go, and her hands were folded in her lap. She offered no encouragement to the man sitting next to her, other than the look of adolescent infatuation on her sweet face. Faye’s maternal instincts rose up and demanded to know who the hell this man was, because he was clearly hitting on Amande and he was just as clearly too old for her.

  Amande’s dinner companion was the scuba diver she’d been eying just the night before. He was a lot better looking than Steve, with a deep tan, close-cropped white-blond hair, and intelligent brown eyes. Faye might have approved, if he’d been ten years younger. As she approached, he was talking with his hands, saying, “I’ve seen sharks this big—big enough to eat me, but I must look like I taste bad.”

  He wasn’t touching Amande, but he was deep into her personal space, which was probably why she’d retreated so far into the corner. She was giggling at his story, but she retained her nervous pose.

  Then, because there weren’t enough sketchy men hanging around this underaged girl, Manny appeared at Amande’s side, dreadlocks swinging and earrings dangling. When he grasped the girl by the shoulder, Faye snatched Michael off his feet and crossed the remaining space between them in three steps.

  Before she got there, the situation exploded. Manny used his other hand to pick up the full glass in front of Amande. He took a swig, then slammed it on the table in front of Didi so hard that half its contents sloshed into the young woman’s lap.

  “Are you insane? What did you do, dump a full shot in the girl’s Sprite? Two?” He slapped a long-fingered hand on the wet table. “Get out! Get out now. All of you. And you, Didi? Don’t come back.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t drink when you were her age, Manny. I thought it was time she learned to hold her liquor, and I thought it would be better if she was with me, so I could look out for her.”

  Didi made her behavior sound so very reasonable.

  Manny just shook his head and said, “There’s no need for us to be having this conversation. I already told you to get out of my establishment.”

  Amande grabbed his arm in both her hands. “I wasn’t drinking it. I saw her pour the shot in there, and I knew better. Really, Manny. Don’t kick me out. I’m having a good time.”

  He didn’t say anything. Faye’s judgment was that he was too angry to speak.

  Amande pulled Manny’s arm hard, bringing his thin and dusky face down even closer to hers. “Are you saying I can’t come over here any more, just to hang out? Even without Didi?
Where else am I going to go? I don’t have a boat. I don’t have a car. I don’t go to school. I don’t even have a backyard. Are you telling me I’m trapped on that houseboat, day and night?”

  He leaned down closer to her than Faye liked. Dammit, this man was too old for Amande by fifteen years. “It was one thing when you were a little girl and I let you hang out here in the afternoons, before the drunks really got rolling. You’re too old for that now, Amande. You’re also too pretty. And you’re too young for…this.”

  He made an impatient gesture, first in the direction of the half-empty drink in front of Didi and then toward the blond would-be suitor sitting next to Amande. Then he looked the suitor in the eye and said, “She’s underage, okay? Get out. All of you. And Amande, you go straight home. Don’t let anybody in the door but your idiot aunt.”

  Joe appeared at Faye’s side, as the tanned man was leaning back in his chair, saying, “Hey, I didn’t know!” for the second time.

  Amande looked at both Faye and Joe and said, “I didn’t drink any of it. Truly. I’m not stupid.”

  “We know that,” Faye said. “I came over here to see if you’d like to babysit for a couple of hours.”

  Amande cast a regretful eye in the direction of the handsome man who now seemed afraid to look at her, but she rose and said, “I’d love to spend some time with Michael.”

  “Hold up,” Didi said. “What are you paying her to babysit?”

  Faye wanted to say, “Are you her agent?” but she held her tongue. Instead she said, “Minimum wage.”

  “Good,” Didi said. She looked at Amande and said, “I don’t know when I’ll be getting any income from the oil company stock. I guess I’ll get social security for you, but it’ll be a while coming. In the meantime, we can sure use some money, even if it’s just a couple hours of minimum-wage work.”