Soul Man

by Shari Hearn

  “You know Cootie,” Jolene said, shrugging. “I think he wanted us to get back together, and I wanted to make it clear it wouldn’t happen.”

  “Do we need to call an attorney?” Emmaline asked.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, that’s ridiculous. Can we all stop being so melodramatic?” Jo nodded her head toward me. “My goodness, Emmaline, I can see why Carter’s crazy about Fortune. Where is your son anyway, and why does it seem he’s avoiding me?”

  “I think he’s worried about you, Jolene,” Emmaline said, concern drenching her face. “And so am I.”

  “Don’t be. Criminals are usually stupid and will make mistakes. This one will, too and he’ll be caught. Now, I could use a coffee and a donut. How about you?”

  She pulled her sister away from us and strode toward the refreshment table. She turned around and gestured for Walter to join them.

  “In a minute.” He turned and looked back at us. “I know my sister. Something’s up. Should I be worried?”

  Ida Belle thought a moment and then looked into his eyes. “We haven’t spoken to her about Cootie. Just catching up.”

  Walter reached up and brushed his hand against Ida Belle’s cheek. The look on his face revealed the love he still felt for her after forty years of rejected marriage proposals. “She’s my sister, Ida Belle. Promise me, if you think she’s in serious trouble, you’ll let me know so we can get some representation.”

  Ida Belle took his hand and held it a moment. She couldn’t hide the love she felt for him, either. “I’ll do that.”

  THE GIANT LIME-GREEN, acrylic lips, simply titled Silence, gave me an indication why I chose to be a CIA assassin and not an art critic. That thing was butt ugly.

  The Lafayette Connection was housed in an old cannery in an industrial section of Lafayette. It had been renovated with bamboo flooring and drywall partitions to create several small galleries and artists’ studios. Cootie’s studio was in the rear of the building at the far end of Gallery B, where giant lime-green lips and other paintings and sculptures were part of a ‘minimal art’ showing.

  We’d arrived at the gallery minutes ago to find a couple of women, one blonde, the other redhead, walking from piece to piece and observing, as only art aficionados can, with their heads bent slightly to the left, then the right, with hands on chins. A glance at the door leading to Cootie’s studio revealed an easy-to-pick lock if these two would move it along and give us some privacy.

  We stared at the lips. “Would you say that’s a pout or a sneer?” I asked.

  “Holy crap,” Ida Belle muttered as she spotted the $31,250 price tag. “Someone wants money for this brain fart?”

  The two art lovers made audible gasps as they came up next to us and gazed at the lips. Both heads tilted to the left, then the right, hands on chins.

  “Lowenstein is a genius,” Blondie said.

  Redhead nodded. “Once again, he brings me near tears.”

  Gertie turned to them and smiled. “Our friend Walter sells wax lips just like that at Halloween. Two bucks apiece. Any color you want. When you’re done wearing them you can chew them like gum.”

  The women stared at her a moment. Blondie cleared her throat. “Lowenstein just won the Hugo B. Hugo Emerging Artist Award. His ‘Silence’ is a sad but brilliant commentary on depersonalization in the modern world.” She failed to add “you imbecile,” but her tone of voice said it for her.

  Gertie pursed her own human-colored lips and raised her brows. “If Lowenstein were smart, he would have sculpted a giant lime-green butt to go with the lips and called it, Kiss My Lime-Green Ass You Snot Face Bitches.”

  The two women shot one another looks of horror and quickly scooted out of the gallery.

  “Actually, I think the lips are kind of fun,” Gertie said. “I’d pay a hundred bucks to stick them on the hood of my Cadillac.”

  Ida Belle shrugged. “Might cover up that rust spot.” She looked at me. “We’ll guard the entrance to the gallery. You go down to his studio and look around.”

  Gertie dug her lock pick set from her purse and handed it to me. She and Ida Belle stood guard at the entrance to the partitioned gallery while I went to Cootie’s door and quickly worked the lock. I slipped inside and shut the door.

  It took me a minute to make sense of what my eyes had first spotted inside Cootie’s studio: a painting of a naked woman, propped up against the wall. The woman appeared to be in her thirties. She stood with her back to the artist, her face turned to look at him coquettishly. Though just a side view, the face looked somewhat familiar to me. A closer look revealed the canvas had been partially cut from its frame. The woman had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her right cheek. My gaze drifted again to her face. The shape of her nose. Her eyes. Her smile that was more smirk than smile.

  My eyes traveled down to the bottom of the painting. The model wore an ankle bracelet. On it her name was written.

  My eyes grew wide. Holy crap. I knew who it was.

  I felt a breeze and looked over to the window. It was wide open, and the curtains were flapping.

  One thing all CIA assassins know is to never let themselves get distracted by a “shiny object,” because you never know what may come up from behind. The nude painting had been my “shiny object.” And whoever came up from behind had their own object. One they used to knock me in the back of the head. I felt a sharp pain and dropped to the floor, the name on the ankle bracelet the last thing I saw as I blacked out.

  I had no sense of time as I slowly came back to consciousness. It hadn’t been long, though. If I’d been inside Cootie’s studio for a good length of time, Ida Belle and Gertie would have come back to check up on me. I delicately touched the back of my head and felt the knot. I’d had worse in my day, but it was still painful to the touch.

  I dug my phone from my pocket and texted Ida Belle. I was ambushed. Get inside.

  Moments later the door opened. Ida Belle rushed in. “What the hell?” She helped me up and into a chair. “Who did this?”

  “Is everything okay?” Gertie whispered on the other side of the door.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Keep guarding the entrance to the gallery.” I got up and staggered to the window and looked out, but there was no sign of whoever clunked me on the head.

  “You need to sit down for a bit,” Ida Belle said.

  “I saw a painting of a nude woman. Someone was in the process of cutting it out of the frame before I came in. Right after that I was knocked in the head.”

  “Was the nude a woman on a horse?” Ida Belle asked.

  I shook my head, feeling the pain. “The woman looked to be in her thirties. I got a side view of her face. Her nose looked familiar. And her smile. And she was wearing an ankle bracelet with her name on it.”

  “Who was she? Omigod, please don’t tell me it’s Gertie.”

  “Worse.” I grimaced. “Celia.”

  Chapter Twelve

  IDA BELLE GENTLY FORCED me into a chair and examined the back of my head.

  “Someone didn’t want that painting found.”

  She gazed around Cootie’s studio, the size of my living room. “Take a look around. It’s not the only canvas cut from its frame.”

  “What?” I’d been so focused on the nude painting of Celia and whoever knocked me unconscious that I hadn’t noticed the two other frames with their canvases cut out.

  “Would you please get back here and sit a minute?”

  Ignoring her, I picked up one of the frames. Pieces of canvas stuck out from the edges.

  After checking that none of the untouched paintings were a nude woman on a horse, Ida Belle texted Gertie and got the all-clear for us to come out.

  Gertie blanched when she felt the back of my head. “You need some ice for that.”

  “She’s going to need some bleach for her eyes, too,” Ida Belle said as we shuffled out of the gallery.

  “Why’s that?”

  “She saw Celia naked.”

  WE POSITED
DIFFERENT theories of this newest development on our drive home. Was it Celia who knocked me on the head and made off with what looked like a nude painting of herself? It was bad enough I had allowed someone to get the drop on me, but if it had been a creampuff like Celia, I owed the United States government an apology for all my wasted training at Langley.

  “She could have hired someone to steal it for her,” Gertie said. “She has plenty of thuggish nephews on Max’s side of the family who’d help her for the right price.”

  It would have been understandable if Celia had hired someone to steal a painting of her in the nude. However, there was the matter of the two other paintings the thief took. Why? If it were Celia or someone she hired, why didn’t the person just take the painting of Celia? Why cut out two other canvases and take those as well? And, more important, was the nude painting of Jo among them?

  We needed to sort things through. Easier to do with some coffee and a slice of Francine’s peach pie.

  “I think we first have to find out if it was Celia in the painting you saw before you got knocked out,” Gertie said as we sat at our usual table in the café. “As I recall, Celia Bender also dated Cootie way back when. Maybe she was the one who hired someone to go steal it.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve seen TBT photos that Celia shared on Facebook. The woman in the painting looked the same except, you know, she was naked.”

  Gertie pounded her fist on her chest as if hit by a wave of heartburn. “I wish you’d stop saying the words ‘Celia’ and ‘naked’ in the same sentence.”

  I rubbed it in to Gertie. “Celia was naked all right. She stood with her butt to the artist, with her face turned, looking back. She had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her right cheek, just where it starts the slow curve...”

  “Oh stop,” Gertie said. “You know how suggestible I am. Now every time I see a hummingbird I’ll imagine it sitting on a mound of pale, wrinkled butt.”

  “If Cootie painted Celia in a state of undress,” Ida Belle said pointedly to Gertie, “that would probably mean she had an affair while married to Max. I can’t imagine her posing for him otherwise.”

  “The ankle bracelet said ‘Celia.’” I said. “It looked like her, but I could be wrong.”

  Ida Belle rubbed her chin. “We have to search her house.”

  “Let’s say she did have someone steal her nude painting,” I said. “That doesn’t mean the thief gave her the other two canvases that were cut from their frames. And even if the thief did, Jo’s painting might not be one of them.”

  Ida Belle agreed but added, “It’s the only lead we have. And, if it were Celia Arceneaux who hired someone to steal it, my money would be on her nephew, Boone. She’s always getting him to do some of her dirty work.”

  Gertie groaned. “What a lowlife he is.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him to keep the other two nude paintings. Which means we’d also have to search his place. I’d rather do that only if I’m positive a hummingbird tattoo is perched on the correct Celia’s butt.”

  Ally came over with a pot of coffee. “I’m assuming you want some.”

  We all nodded. “And peach pie.”

  “One slice, three forks?” she asked. Before we could protest, she laughed. “Just kidding,” she said as she poured coffee in our cups. “Three slices, three forks.”

  I leaned into Ally. “I have a strange question to ask. Have you ever seen your Aunt Celia naked?”

  The very question gave Ally a start, causing her to splash coffee over my mug and onto the table. She grabbed a napkin from our table and wiped it up. “What? Are you out of your mind?”

  Gertie leaned into her and lowered her voice. “Look, we know Celia has a constant bug up her butt, but do you know whether she has a tattoo on it as well?”

  Ally lifted her brow. “Number one, how would I know that? Number two, why do you want to know?”

  Ida Belle sighed. “There’s a possibility your Aunt Celia’s nephew, Boone, may have stolen some things for her. One of those things belongs to a friend of ours. But in order to know that, we need to know whether Celia has a tattoo on her butt.”

  Ally’s gaze swept across our faces. “You three lead very interesting lives. Well, I wouldn’t put it past Boone to steal something. Not that I know him well. I’m not related to him, Thank God,” she added for emphasis. “But I have seen his car at her house the past few days. I just assumed they were cooking up something to make the three of you miserable. As for a tattoo on her butt, I wouldn’t know. And for that I’m grateful.”

  Ally finished pouring our coffee. “The only one who might know about a tattoo is her masseuse. But she’s away on a month-long cruise right now.”

  Ida Belle suddenly perked up. “She sees a masseuse?”

  Ally nodded. “Same one I see. Aunt Celia’s been seeing her for weeks now, ever since Fortune came to Sinful. Her name’s Marta. She works out of a spa in Lafayette, but she makes a trip to Mudbug and Sinful once a week. Aunt Celia said if she didn’t have Marta to help her relax once a week she would have murdered you three by now. She even bought her own massage table for Marta to use on her. She didn’t like the idea of her naked body touching a table other naked bodies touched.”

  “Would everyone please stop using the words ‘naked’ and ‘Celia’ in the same sentence?” Gertie asked.

  Ally chuckled. “Aunt Celia’s been extra cross since Marta left for her cruise. I tried to get another gal to come to Sinful and see her, but no one was available.”

  Gertie and Ida Belle glanced at one another. Ida Belle smiled. Gertie gave a subtle shake of her head.

  “What’s the name of the spa?” Ida Belle asked.

  “Hands Across the Bayou. You three want ice cream with your pie?”

  Another look from us made Ally smile again. “Three pie à la modes coming up.”

  Ally walked back to the kitchen.

  Gertie poured cream in her coffee and shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking, Ida Belle. Not going to happen.”

  “We need to know whether or not that’s our Celia in the painting. If it is, we need to search her place and Boone’s. Inga and Ilka are a perfect cover to find that out.”

  “Then you and Fortune are going to be Inga and Ilka, because I’m not doing it.”

  I choked on my coffee when I heard my name. “What? Who’s Inga and Ilka?”

  Ida Belle ignored me. “I always did the snooping. You and Marge were always Inga and Ilka. You have the voice and the routine.”

  “Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” I asked, to which they both ignored me.

  “It’s just for an hour,” Ida Belle said to Gertie. “You can see if she has a tattoo. If she does, then I’ll search her upstairs and attic. If Jo’s painting isn’t there, then we know we have to search Boone’s place.”

  “Inga and Ilka died with Marge.”

  Ida Belle pointed to Gertie. “Then it’s time they come back to life. Jo’s painting could be in Celia’s house. Or at Boone’s. If that bird is on her butt, then all I need is one hour to search her place.”

  Ida Belle and Gertie locked eyes. When it came to a stare down, Ida Belle usually won.

  Gertie sighed. She was caving. “Fine. But you owe us. When Marta comes back from her cruise, I’d like to book a massage for Fortune and me. Your treat.”

  Ida Belle nodded.

  “Owe US?” I said.

  Gertie looked at me. “Can you do a German accent?”

  “Why?”

  Gertie ignored my question. She looked at Ida Belle. “I’ll need our newest burner phone.”

  Ida Belle pulled a phone from her purse and handed it to Gertie. With a sick look on her face, Gertie punched in some numbers and waited a moment. She forced a smile and said, in a high-pitched German-accented voice, “Hallo, iz zis Miss Celia Arceneaux? My name is Inga Braunsweiger and I am zee lead masseuse at Hands Across zee Bayou. Your niece, Ally, vonderful girl by zu vay, called to inform us you were not happy
vis our services. Zat gives me a sad face.” We could hear Celia’s voice on the other end. “No, I’m afraid Marta is still on her cruise.” Celia’s voice sounded upset and increased in volume. “Vell, it so happens I have an appointment in Sinful and could squeeze you in for a complete spa treatment. Mud, massage, facial, free of charge, but you would have to be ready in two hours, and I’m sure you couldn’t—” Gertie smiled. “Oh you could. Vunderbar! Now, I hope you don’t mind, but I vill be bringing my daughter, Ilka, an accomplished masseuse in her own right.”

  “Daughter?” I whispered. Ida Belle held a finger to her lips.

  “I vould like to demonstrate to Ilka the newest techniques I used on Lizzy the last time I visited London.” Gertie paused. “Elizabeth. The Queen of England.” Gertie held the phone out and we could hear Celia gasp. Placing the phone back to her face, Gertie said, “I’m the only one the Queen and Angela Merkel trust to pound out their cellulite.” Gertie lifted her brows. “Vell of course I can vork on your cellulite. My fingers are heat-seeking missiles when it comes to cellulite. Now, I must hang up. Until zen, Auf Wiedersehen.”

  Gertie hung up and handed the phone back to Ida Belle.

  “I need some cough syrup.” Gertie opened her purse and pulled out a bottle of SLS cough syrup and dumped a one-finger pour into her coffee.

  “Do I get a say in this?” I asked, though I knew I didn’t.

  Gertie took a gulp of hooch-laced coffee and blew out a breath. “I need an Ilka. Having two masseuses overloads the subject and makes them more pliable.” She lowered her voice and added, “We learned all about it in spy school.”

  “Why can’t Ida Belle be Ilka? I can go snoop around in Celia’s attic.”

  “Because Ida Belle massages like she’s cleaning a fish.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  Ida Belle calmly got up and walked behind me. Placing her hands on my shoulders, she began massaging. I knocked her hands away. “You’re being horrible on purpose.”

  Ida Belle shook her head and sat down. “It’s true. My hands won’t work any other way. That’s why Marge always had to be Ilka. That woman could give a good neck rub.”