by Bill Hopkins
Pond-raised catfish was the special today. Hush puppy aroma made Rosswell drool. One of the fluorescent lights overhead popped with the sound of a New Year’s Eve champagne bottle opening, then failed. A couple of the folks waiting to be seated jumped, gawked at the light, and laughed at a joke Rosswell couldn’t quite hear.
“Mabel?” Rosswell tapped her on the shoulder as she rushed to and fro. “What’s going on? You giving something away?”
Mabel blew out her mouth, holding her lips so the air whooshed straight up her face. The terminally ill air conditioner failed at keeping the place under eighty degrees. Still, it was better than the ninety-six degrees outside under a cloudless sky.
“Everything’s gone nuts,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“It’s all your fault.”
Rosswell ran a few scenarios through his mind, sifting for one where he’d be found guilty of causing a crush of tourists to inundate Mabel’s Eatery. Why was she irritated? That was the purpose, wasn’t it? You open a business, you increase walk-in traffic, but you don’t complain when you’re successful at attracting paying customers. That was capitalism. Wasn’t it? He gave up.
“What did I do wrong?”
“You sent my daddy off God knows where on a research assistant task. He won’t answer his cell phone.”
“Cell phone? When did he get a cell phone?”
“He got it this morning and I got not one, not two, but three busloads of starving Baby Boomers from Tupelo, Mississippi.”
“Sorry.” Rosswell slumped his shoulders. Where had he sent Ollie? He couldn’t remember. After meeting Alessandra the night before, he’d excused himself and plodded to his bed, crashing into a sleep deep enough to drown him. He had, in fact, slept through his alarm.
“I’ll go somewhere else.”
When he turned to leave, Mabel grabbed his collar. “You’re staying right here.”
Women confused Rosswell. Mabel hated him because he killed her baby daddy, but she wouldn’t let him leave her restaurant. He guessed she would make him stand in line for an hour before he got to eat lunch. It was part of his punishment.
“Judge, you and I have had our ups and downs.” Rosswell nodded, yet said nothing, preferring to let Mabel take the lead. “That’s in the past. This is in the now.” She waved a hand at the throngs of people. “See that? I need your help. Two waitresses quit.”
“Karyn and Jill?”
“They said they had to take their midwife tests. Thank God the cook is still here.”
Rosswell tossed the dice. “We’re okay, right? I mean, you and me.”
“Yes.”
Rosswell asked, “Now, what can I do?” at the same time he concluded that he and Mabel had resolved their rocky relationship. It was the best he could hope for. No need to jeopardize it by drawing it out. She said she wanted to be friends again, and Rosswell had said okay. Period. Even if. End of story. A curt explanation was what he got and he wasn’t getting anything more.
Rosswell said, “I could ask a couple of the women at the courthouse if—”
“Here.” Mabel thrust one of her aprons at him and forced a pencil and a ticket pad into his hands. “Write legibly and stick the ticket on the whirly when it’s written.” She showed him a lazy Susan device, hanging from the top of the shelf that opened into the kitchen. Waitresses slipped tickets under the clips on the whirly. Then the cook spun it, fetched the ticket, and fixed the order.
“Uh…okay.” Rosswell wrapped her apron around his waist, finding he had enough to wrap it again, thanks to Mabel’s increasingly large size.
“Be nice to the customers. You get half the tips. Put all the tips over there in that jar. We split them up at the end of each shift. Get the orders right.” Mabel surveyed the filled tables. “Start there.” She pointed to a table at the far end of the restaurant. “They’ve been waiting the longest.” The man and woman sitting there didn’t look happy.
When Rosswell reached the table, he was sweating. His palms hurt and he was short of breath. This was worse than sending someone to jail.
“Ready to order?”
The man said, “A half hour ago.”
“Honey,” the woman said to the man, “it’s only been twenty-five minutes.”
“Ready when you are.” Rosswell poised the pencil above the ticket pad, smiled and waited.
I wait because I’m a waiter. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Thank you, Johnny Milton.
The woman said, “Could we have a couple of small glasses of water? No ice.”
Rosswell rushed to the water station, retrieved two glasses of water and scampered back to the table.
The man frowned and held up the large glass. “We asked for small glasses with no ice. These are large glasses of water filled with ice. Ice dilutes the drink.”
Oh, brother. Ice dilutes water?
Rosswell said, “They’re on the house. Free refills, too.”
The woman picked up the menu. “Give us a couple of more minutes.”
After fifteen minutes, most of the people had food in front of them, calming the noise level.
“Dang,” Mabel said behind Rosswell.
He whirled around. “Did I do something wrong?”
“You did everything right. You’re more efficient than any waitress I’ve ever had.”
Rosswell felt himself blushing. He was on the verge of fainting, having missed breakfast and being late for lunch. A ringing, no doubt due to his empty stomach, had started in his ears. The smell of the food had revved up his drooling into overdrive. Now, after having drooled himself to the depths of Sahara Desert dryness, his tongue felt like a package of sandpaper. Bright spots danced in front of his eyes like he’d stumbled into a herd of overactive lightning bugs. Sweat soaked his shirt.
“Thanks. I’ve never been a waitress before.”
“I called Karyn and Jill, begging for their help. They’ll be here any minute.”
The county assessor, a fifty-something balding man folks called Betourne, and his deputy, a thirty-something balding man Rosswell didn’t know, came in and sat at an empty table.
Mabel said, “Take care of those two and then you can leave. Or eat. You get a free meal.”
Rosswell nodded, thinking that was what he needed to make his life worthwhile. More courthouse gossip about the alcoholic judge who waits on tables.
Mabel said, “Try not to shoot them.”
Chapter 23
Saturday Noon, continued
Betourne and the deputy assessor conferred, seemingly oblivious that Rosswell hovered next to them. The two men hunched over a drawing of some kind, spread out on the table. It crinkled when Betourne flattened it with his hand.
“We run into this all the time.” The assessor used his chubby finger to highlight things to his deputy. “It’s something you’ll have to be aware of. It’s not a big deal, but the first time you see it, it knocks you off kilter.”
Rosswell cleared his throat. “Ready to order?” The men looked at him.
Betourne blinked. “Judge Carew?”
“That’s me.”
“What are you doing waiting tables?”
“Community service.”
“I see.” Betourne folded his hands and stared at something on the table, perhaps unsure about Rosswell’s sanity. “Let me finish up with Allgood here. It’ll take a second. Then we’ll order.”
“Okay.” Rosswell didn’t move. The order would be the last one of the day. He couldn’t hang around in the restaurant all afternoon. Detective work awaited him. “I’ll wait here.”
“Yeah, that’s fine.” Betourne returned his attention to Allgood. “Sometimes these lines”—he pointed to a couple of lines on the piece of paper on the table—“can be ten or even fifteen feet from this line.” He pointed to a third line.
Rosswell pretended to write on the order pad while scrutinizing the assessor’s paper, trying to glean its purpose. It appeared to be a stylized diagram sho
wing a bird’s eye view of the plan of a building.
“Yeah,” Allgood said. “That’s weird.”
“You find them,” Betourne said, “in the old places a lot. I always explain this to the new people who start working for me.”
“What was their purpose?” asked Allgood.
“Passageways behind the walls in the house were a fad back then.”
Rosswell gasped and dropped his ticket pad and pencil. I’d make a damn lousy spy.
“Judge,” Betourne said, “are you okay?”
Rosswell said, “Tell me about those secret passageways.”
Betourne stared at the paper a moment before he spoke. “They’re not secret.” He returned his gaze to Rosswell. “About a hundred and fifty years ago, passageways were all the rage among folks who could afford to build big houses. There were a lot of rich river men in this county before the Civil War. When my predecessors measured the houses that have them, they noted the discrepancies between the outside walls and the inside walls.”
“What did they use the passageways for?”
Betourne said, “I was about to tell Allgood here that rumor has it that before the war, a few of them were used in the underground railroad, holding slaves until they could spirit them out at night and sneak them across the river to Illinois.”
Allgood offered, “I’ve heard that rumor ever since I was a kid. People said a couple of the houses were connected by a tunnel.”
Betourne said, “Those bluffs along the river are limestone. They’re honeycombed with caves.”
Rosswell said, “How many of these houses are there?”
“In this county?” Betourne scratched his chin. “Five or six with passageways. That’s all I know of for sure. I’d have to go through every single real estate assessment to give you an exact number. I’ve never heard of any with a tunnel connected to another house. Do you want me to look up that information for you?”
Rosswell thought a moment. Could Ollie search for that on the computer? Eventually, he said, “No, that’s okay. I don’t need the info. I found it curious. It would be interesting to know. That’s all. Nothing more. I’m a history buff and tidbits like that are worth knowing when you’re a history buff. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
Rosswell told himself to shut up, that he was babbling like a spring-fed brook after a heavy thunderstorm.
Betourne and the deputy stayed silent, exchanging a quick glance, then staring at their menus.
Maybe Rosswell could venture a couple more questions. “If I wanted to look at the history on a particular house, your office would be the place to go. Right?”
Betourne said, “Right.”
Rosswell pushed a little further. “What houses have these passageways?”
“Let me think.” Betourne sucked his lips, then shut them tight and focused on the ceiling before he answered. “In town, there’s one down on Gabouri. One on La Porte. There are a couple north off 61 Highway toward the river. Owned by two sisters. Then there’s also that mansion in the same area where that red-headed guy runs a rehabilitation center.”
“Nathaniel Dahlbert?” Sweat poured down Rosswell’s face. His heart ran the Kentucky Derby in record time.
“That’s him.” Betourne leaned around, watching something behind Rosswell. “And right there are the two sisters.”
Rosswell glanced and witnessed Karyn Byler and Jill Mabli, replete in their waitress outfits, receiving their marching orders from Mabel.
“Another thing, Judge. You’re staying in one.”
“The Four Bee?”
“That’s the one.”
Rosswell stopped on his sprint for the door long enough to dump the apron, pencil, and ticket pad into Mabel’s arms.
“What’s your daddy’s cell number?”
Mabel told him.
“If you see him and I haven’t talked to him, tell him to call me immediately. Oh. And I don’t think Betourne is going to give you a tip.”
“Why not?”
“I forgot to take his order.”
Rosswell’s hunger intensified when he hurried out of Mabel’s into the hot afternoon sun. He’d faint if he didn’t soon eat something. Instead, he punched Ollie’s number.
The phone rang three times and went to Ollie’s voice mail. Rosswell cursed, disconnected, then tried again. When Ollie’s number rang the second time, Rosswell caught sight of his research assistant traipsing out of the courthouse. Ollie stopped, pulled out his cell phone, and began tapping keys.
Rosswell again punched the phone off and hollered, “Ollie!”
Ollie swiveled his head until his gaze fell onto Rosswell, who darted into the street, and narrowly missed being run down by a carload of gawking tourists. The car had Ontario tags with a bumper sticker that read: I’M FROM TORONTO! KISS ME!
“Judge, you’re going to get run over if you don’t start watching where you’re going.”
Rosswell panted for a few seconds before he could talk. “I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Phone reception is lousy in the courthouse. Especially in the vaults.” Ollie stared at his phone for several seconds. “Also, I’ve been getting texts from Candy.”
“Candy Lavaliere from Marble Hill?”
“Yep.”
Rosswell had known her for a decade. Big woman. Premature silver hair with a gentle, stunning face, soft and clear almost to the point of translucence. Tanned and buff, she smelled like Ivory soap. She wore big charm bracelets on her arms that rattled and clanked. Rings on every finger. She was an expert shooter who also lifted weights and had read every book in the public library…twice. Ollie’s intellectual equal was Candy, the cosmetologist who loved to dance.
Rosswell whispered, “So you two are doing the—”
“We’re talking. That’s all.”
“Yeah, talking. Well, where have you been this morning? Talking?”
Ollie straightened to his full height, puffing his chest out. “I’m your research assistant. I’ve been researching. They usually close right on the dot of noon on Saturday. I had to give them twenty bucks under the table to stay a few extra minutes. You owe me.”
“Researching what?”
“An interesting tidbit I found in The Complete History of Sainte Genevieve County, Missouri by Marie Vienneau.” Ollie stretched his neck, craning to see what was shaking at Mabel’s. “What a crowd. Let’s go to McDonald’s. I’m starving.”
They ate in silence. After two quarter-pounders, Rosswell munched on a chocolate chip cookie. “What was so interesting that you ran off from Mabel’s on her busiest day ever?”
“The French have always been hosts, no matter who came through. If it was German traders, they set out a feast with lots of beer. If it was Irish miners, whiskey flowed freely. During the Civil War, when Union troops marched through, the French hoisted the Stars and Stripes and had a grand old time. When the Confederacy came through, they hung pictures of General Lee and feasted until dawn.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“Farmers say that you can eat as long as you own some dirt. The French say that you can eat as long as you own a restaurant.”
“You’re babbling.”
Ollie made a face as if he’d sucked on a rotten lemon. “Try this. Passageways in the houses of Sainte Genevieve County.”
Rosswell choked. “You knew about them?” He coughed a few cookie crumbs onto the table, then sipped water from a plastic cup.
“Everybody knows about them. I thought you would have said something before now.”
“Me? Why?”
“Rosswell, try to keep up. You said there was an entrance to the cave in Nathaniel’s place.”
“I didn’t know there would be actual passageways. Maybe a door built around a cave entrance. Not an actual passageway.”
“Rosswell! Where do you think the noises were coming from when we were in the cave?”
“Ah! From the passageway.”
“Besides, they’re in the
book. You have read the history book haven’t you?”
Rosswell coughed again, spewing more cookie crumbs onto the table. “I’ve been kind of busy.” He drank more water. “There were a few pages I glanced at.”
Ollie positioned his right forefinger in front of Rosswell’s face. “That’s the number one reason why you hired me. Good thing you did.”
“Listen, in fact I did find out something about passageways.” Rosswell detailed his conversation with the county assessor.
“That jibes with Vienneau’s book.”
“Exactly.”
“And you think Nathaniel is using the passageways to stash bodies or dope or something.”
Rosswell shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s doing, except that it’s illegal.”
“Argumentum ad ignorantiam.”
“I was absent the day they discussed that in law school. What are you talking about?”
“Argument from ignorance. You lack evidence to the contrary, therefore you assume something else. You don’t know what that bright light in the sky is, consequently it must be a visitor from another galaxy. You don’t know what Nathaniel is doing, thus, it must be illegal.”
“Do you know how many times you’ve read my mind?”
“Once? Twice? I give up. Tell me.”
“Nathaniel buys a house that has guard towers and secret passageways.”
Ollie held up the forefinger again. “Wait one minute.” He riffled through a file folder. “Here.” He plunked down a document similar to what Betourne had shown his deputy assessor. “It’s not a secret. It’s filed at the courthouse. It’s not exactly a house plan. It’s measurements of the house. See this line here? It’s almost five feet from this line. You know what that means now, don’t you?”
“Yes, I said I heard the assessor explaining it. Don’t tell me all that crap again. I got it, okay?”
“Then how do you propose we search the passageways? False alarms are out. Maybe we could go out there and ask him real nice.”