The timer on my watch went off. Enough with the mental Sudoku. These clues weren’t adding up. Someone was lying. Or maybe they all were.
I slung my duffle bag over my shoulder and left the bench. The best person to help me figure out how Tina knew Fancy’s nickname for Jake was Fancy herself. Time to talk to her.
On the way, I came upon an open-air market. Under the canopy, a man sat on a wooden crate. His deep black skin glistened. He wore a purple beret set at a jaunty angle over close-shorn silver hair. On his lap lay a gleaming saxophone. A cigar box at his feet contained a few bills and change. I stopped, and he winked at me. He brought the instrument to his lips, closed his eyes, and played a deep, haunting melody with long, slow notes as rich as old bourbon. A smiling young couple strolled by, sharing a doughy beignet.
Okay, so New Orleans is not as simple as my fantasies would have it. It’s tougher, but somehow still courtly; vile and lecherous, but smooth and savvy. A town that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t much give a damn what either the priggish or the profane think of it. I could see Jake here, walking these streets, talking with these people, laughing with them, guarding them, or, if need be, calling them out. A deep longing to see that in the flesh came over me. I wanted him to live. But more, I didn’t want the evil son of a bitch who shot him to kill again.
And I wanted revenge.
The music stopped. The man smiled at me. I dropped a dollar in the box and walked away.
CHAPTER NINE
I entered the cosmetics department and sneezed. I love perfume as much as the next female, but the invisible layer of spices, citruses, and florals that permeates such enclaves can be a bit much. Pulling Jake’s lockbox from my duffle bag, I tucked it under my good arm and scanned the mirrored aisles. I didn’t go unnoticed long.
A middle-aged woman, mink-brown hair impeccably coiffed in a languishing swirl atop her head, dressed in a white lab coat with pink trim, strode purposefully toward me. As she got closer, I could see from the way her lipstick feathered into the lines of her mouth that I could easily have been her granddaughter. She was armed with a bottle of perfume and scent cards.
“And how can I help you today, ma’am? Our latest Calvin has just arrived.”
Calvin, as in Klein. How nice they’re on a first-name basis. I returned her smile with equal insincerity. “I’m looking for Ms. Smith. I was told she’d be back by now.”
The sides of her wide mouth fell slightly, seeming to realize that she wasn’t going to get a percentage out of me. “Ms. Smith works the Quetile line. Next counter down and to the left.”
“Thank you.” I started past her.
She flicked me a perfumed card with a smoothness that would have impressed Wyatt Earp. “Oh, but you must try this. It’s the scent of the moment, and my personal favorite.”
I blinked, not sure if she was pressuring me or coming on to me. Smiling neutrally, I took it and walked toward the dramatic black sign with the Quetile logo, the name scrawled graffiti-like in racecar-red and with a lipstick trailing the last letter. I waved the card as I walked. Hmm, very nice. I rubbed the card on each wrist. You know, Hunter would probably like—
Whoa! No! Do not think of that man in any kind of sensual context. I forbid it!
Having shouted my libido down, I found my target. F. Gloria was a blond, a real blond from the way the fluorescent lights caught hints of gray in the long silken ponytail draped over her left shoulder. She had a complexion that some women would have bathed in virgin blood for. Her makeup glowed with an adroit artistry that made me wonder what was paint and what was real. But light lines radiated from the corners of her eyes and an uncompromising straightness in the butter-blond brows hardened her blue eyes, making me think of iced-over lakes. She wore a red-on-black name tag reading F. Gloria over the right pocket of her black smock. Correction: her smock wouldn’t be called black; it would probably be called Midnight Romance Ebony or some such. As I drew closer, I noticed a thin metal something sticking up out of her right breast pocket. It looked like a caliper with an eyebrow brush attached. Gee, didn’t that look scientific?
Smiling serenely, F. Gloria helped a young woman sporting a faded perm of dull, brown hair and the small, round eyes of a starving gerbil. The woman gazed at her with the kind of faith usually seen only at tent revivals. I couldn’t hear their words, but I knew F. Gloria was delivering the standard promise that desperate gerbil-eyed women fell for. This cream will do it, the promise went, this blusher, this shadow. Buy this, and you’ll be irresistible. Don’t buy it, and you’ll be lonely and unfulfilled for the rest of your life. Buy now, while you still have your youth, while we still offer a special giveaway package with any purchase over twenty dollars.
Gerbil-eyes nodded and offered up her credit card. I stared down at the muted rainbow of eye shadows in the display counter before me, ran a finger over the greasy residue of hands well lotioned. Attention split between studying the cosmetics displays and watching F. Gloria ring up the sale, I waited until Gerbil-eyes was on her way, clutching the black and lipstick-red bag as she scurried by, then smiled purposefully at F. Gloria.
She walked over to me, the same distant but pleasant smile on her face. “How may I help you? A gold eye shadow would accentuate those lovely blue eyes of yours.” Her accent rang true: bayou to the last muted vowel but modified for the urban consumer.
“On my budget, I couldn’t even afford silver.”
Her practiced smile stayed put, but annoyed boredom flicked across her eyes. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “Have you seen our new Double-Matte, Moisturizing, Kissable-Color, Day-Long Wear Lipstick line? It’s guaranteed to stay in place through the most rigorous activities.”
Rigorous activities? That sounds interesting. “Actually, I’m investigating—”
All pretense of pleasantry disappeared. “There’s an information booth by the elevators,” she said abruptly and walked away.
“Hey, wait a minute.” I trotted around the corner after her. “I only want to—”
She turned so quickly I was brought up short. The polished saleswoman persona disappeared. “You got a badge, missy?”
“Pardon me?”
The woman’s eyes darkened to the color of thunderclouds, the kind that suckle tornadoes. “You don’t got a badge, you don’t got my time.”
I reached under my arm for Jake’s box and from it pulled out Jake’s badge. In an instant, she snatched it out of my hands, scoffing at it. She tossed it back at me, and it bounced off my chest. I grabbed for it and fumbled it back into the box.
F. Gloria leaned forward, her face inches from mine. “Where’d you get that trick, sugar? Late-night reruns of The Rockford Files? If you’re going to try such a tired routine, at least get a recent badge. Ours were redesigned two years ago.” Again, she strode away.
Desperation made my stomach feel suddenly weightless. “Why did he call you Fan-Glorious?” I called out.
She stopped, and I gulped. Pivoting, she walked slowly toward me. I’d seen such an expression before, when my oldest brother was in his women-in-prison-movie phase and made me watch them when he babysat. I shifted my weight to my back leg, ready to run. She reached up and fondled the caliper/eyebrow brush in her pocket. I still had no idea of its purpose but had no doubt it could leave a scar. Then she dropped her hands onto the counter between us. “Only one person calls me that. You’re about to tell me you’re a good friend of Jake’s, ain’t you?” Her glare intensified. “That would be the safest thing to say.”
Jeez, are the words “threaten me, please” tattooed on my forehead or something? I pulled Jake’s note out of the lockbox and held it up. Her eyes narrowed at the signature, and she reached for it, but I pulled it back. “You want to talk now?”
“Where’d you get that?”
I realized that I hadn’t decided how to tell her what happened. I flushed and bit at my lower lip. “I, I work with Jake. He was shot yesterday. Oh, he’s alive!” I added quickly. “But he’s in
… bad shape.”
Her perfect skin paled. The hard set in her eyes melted away. “How bad?”
“Very. He’s hanging in there, but—”
She swallowed hard. “Is he going to die?”
My heart fell as the reality hit home again. “It’s very bad. We don’t know.”
Her eyes blazed, and she thrust a finger at me. “Don’t you go counting him out, you hear me? That man’s a rock. He’s a bull. He isn’t going to go down so easy. So don’t you go helping Satan along with all your doubts!”
Both impressed and intimidated, I could only stammer, “I, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“Yeah, well don’t. You hear me? Don’t you—” She blinked as the corners of her eyes filled with tears. Her breathing quickened. “Oh, fuck,” she said softly. Her hand went up to the side of her mouth, and she brushed at her lipstick as if it suddenly annoyed her.
I heard dainty steps behind me.
“What are you lookin’ at?” F. Gloria barked. Heels clicked quickly into the distance. “Come on,” she said, walking toward the opening in the counter.
I followed along on my side of the display case. F. Gloria paused to murmur something to another Quetile saleswoman whose robe sported an extra row of scarlet piping along the collar, probably the chief scientist. The woman frowned her disapproval. That caused F. Gloria to say something quick, sharp, and low. Ms. Chief Scientist paled and backed off in a hurry.
With me in tow, F. Gloria crossed the gleaming floors to the back of the store. She pushed her way through a set of green swinging doors. I ducked in before they swung closed.
Stacks of boxes lined the walls, and a plastic table, surrounded by matching chairs, sat near a kitchen-type counter. Notices and schedules were tacked to a corkboard above a scarred white microwave. A McDonald’s fish sandwich wrapper and a half-empty drink lay in the middle of the table. F. Gloria tossed the cup into the sink and brushed the wrapper onto the floor, then motioned for me to sit. I did, putting the lockbox on the table before me. F. Gloria fetched an unopened pack of Marlboros from a side pocket, took off her smock, and tossed it over the back of her chair. She sank wearily into the seat opposite me.
Beneath the lab coat was a different woman. Her simple dress, peach and sleeveless, hung on her sharp shoulders. Braless, the dress draped over nipples on the leeward side of youth.
She held the Marlboros in hands that looked older, then crinkled the cellophane and dropped it to the floor on top of the sandwich wrapper. She stuck the cigarette between her lips, staining the white paper with lipstick that now seemed orange and garish. Images flashed through my mind. I saw homecoming queens who had once reigned supreme in small towns all over the South, flounced prom dresses their regalia. I saw their male minions, the jocks, their hard-ons straining to get free from their jeans. Their court, the bed of a pickup parked beneath a blooming magnolia. But F. Gloria’s reign had ended long ago, the last tailgate flipped up on a final autumn night, leaving her to find her own way home.
Fancy struck a match and the sharp scent made my nose twitch. Cigarette lit, she rested an elbow on the table and blew smoke into the air above her. For several long moments, she stared quietly at the ceiling. I studied her now-fragile face as she watched the smoke eddy up and around from every new puff.
When she had herself under control, she took another deep drag and let out a long, shaky breath. Her eyes turned to me, her expression calm and unwavering. “What happened?”
“We were ambushed. I’m trying to find out who did it.”
“Here, in N’Awlins? I thought he was up Chicago way.”
“It happened in Chicago.”
She stared with a detached, menacing intensity that knotted my stomach. I swallowed hard. She knocked the ashes off with a deft flick of her thumb. “Y’ain’t no cop and y’ain’t his type. So what’s it to you?”
“I worked for him. I was there when it happened.”
“You were there? And you didn’t see anyone?”
I shook my head forlornly. “I wish I had.”
Her eyes softened. “Did he know he was shot, before he went down?”
“Yes.”
She laughed a short, two-pulse laugh. “I’ll bet he was pissed. That’d be just like him. To get shot and be all pissed about it. That’s my man for you.”
Conflicting emotions, sadness and joy, merged in me, like two mismatched chemicals swirling together, producing vapors at once disorienting and invigorating. Her intensity, the rawness of her manner, stung like cold water, both harsh and bracing. But in her eyes, her love for Jake was palpable, and I wondered what it would be like to be loved that deeply.
The door creaked open, and a man walked in. Physically nondescript, he was a standard watered-down white boy, the kind who didn’t get why he’d never been given the keys to the executive washroom. His pale brown eyes widened. “Gloria baby, you okay?”
F. Gloria blew smoke at him. “Go whack yourself off somewhere else, Chester. Me and my girlfriend here are having a conversation.”
Chester peeked at me, as if hoping I hadn’t noticed the verbal emasculation. I averted my eyes, and he backed out of the room. I turned to watch F. Gloria form a perfect smoke ring three inches above eye level. “Dick-wad,” she said, nodding at the door. “ ‘Gloria baby,’ my ass. Give a guy one blow job, and he thinks he can be your weekly lollipop.”
My eyes went wide, and I actually gasped.
She grinned. “What’s the matter, sugar, you didn’t ever go down on a guy?”
“Um. Not in the last ten minutes.” Well, what the hell else was I going to say?
She took another drag. “Got me off Dead Tuesday shifts.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I was beginning to see why Jake called her Fan-Glorious.
“Jake wasn’t anything like that walking dildo,” she said. “He never assumed, just because he had it once, he could have it again. Jake always asked. I liked that about him.”
My smile froze. I blinked. “You mean you and Jake were … um … ?”
“Yeah, we were ‘um.’ We used to ‘um’ two, three times a day on a good day. That man had stamina, I’ll tell you.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Jake Thibodaux? Big, redneck ex-cop, can belch out ‘God Bless America’ on a single beer? We’re talking about the same guy?”
She turned a smile on me; it was brazen and genuine. “He didn’t always look like he does now. Oh, you should have seen him ten years ago. God, he was something. Built like a bull elephant, solid, hard everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. And all the time too.”
The scene of Jake in the car that last night popped into my head. She’s got to be kidding.
She let the cigarette dangle from her mouth. “You don’t believe me.”
“Well, uh …”
“It started with him and me a long time ago. We were both a lot prettier. He didn’t let himself go until he left here. Small wonder why.”
The smoke seeped into my lungs, but I didn’t want to cough in front of her. “How old were you?”
“Like the song says, ‘old enough to know better, young enough not to care.’ Back then I was just plain old Fancy Smith from Bocatelle.” She spread her stick-thin arms open wide to encompass the stockroom, cigarette dancing as she spoke. “But look at all I have now.”
“Fancy? That is what the ‘F’ is for then?”
She tapped ashes off on the edge of the table, watching them fall. “Fancy Gloriana Scarlet Emilina Smith.”
I stared.
“Mama read too many romance novels,” she said.
Staring still seemed to be my best option.
“She named my brother Chastain Beauregard Emery Sinclair Smith. I swear to God that must have been what they fought over the night he was killed.”
Not being able to come up with anything else, I said, “Tell me about you and Jake.”
Her expression darkened. “You writing his memoirs or something?”
“W
hoever tried to kill him has killed at least two people, maybe three if a very nice lady doesn’t recover. Not to mention trying to kill me.” I shook my head. “I thought I knew him.”
F. Gloria stared pensively at the cigarette in her hand. “Jake brought Mama home one night about, oh, eleven years ago. I was a hair under eighteen.”
My God, she’s only twenty-nine? Out in the showroom lights, I could believe that. There in the back room, under the neon lights, I’d’ve put her in her forties.
“Mama had been shoplifting.” Fancy leaned forward, her eyes intense, “Now, you got to understand Mama didn’t realize that’s what she was doing. She was a good Christian woman.”
I nodded.
She sat back and took another drag. “Mama kind of lost track of reality once Papa left and all.” F. Gloria breathed out a long cloud of smoke. “To her, those high-priced showrooms were like her front parlor. The way she saw it, she was just moving her things from one room to another—from the showrooms to our house—to make things pretty for visitors.” The woman’s thickly lacquered lips curled up in an affectionate grin. “Mama wasn’t all there.”
“But I’ll bet she was quite the lady.”
A start of emotion—surprise? gratitude?—shone in her eyes. She flicked at her cigarette. “It happens that way to Southern women sometimes, the craziness. Especially to the ones who are poor white trash on the outside but the belle of the ball on the inside. It started happening to Mama after I was born. It had something to do with Papa leaving, or getting dumped in the swamp, or whatever the hell happened to him. All I know is that one day he was gone. And no one would talk about him. But you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about Jake.”
The Last Best Lie Page 14