One Must Wait

by Penny Mickelbury

  Lil slipped her feet back into her shoes and stood up. The effort caused her to flush with pain but she covered it with a wry grin. "The blood is important, Cher, I won't deny that, but the land means more when it is a question of survival."

  Lil closed the door softly but definitely and was gone. Carole Ann was left to ponder too many large things that held consequences too important for her to risk misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Never before had she experienced such confusion, confusion so intense it felt like despair. Not even the fear was this debilitating. People she wanted very much to like, people she needed desperately to trust, were blood-bound to her husband's murderer. Would Lil and Warren and Eldon and Sadie help her avenge Al if it meant exposing one of their own as a murderer? Would they expose one of their own as a murderer to preserve their land? Carole Ann knew the answers were not in her head. So, once again, she gathered every scrap of information she had so far collected and spread it out on the floor in orderly piles. Then, sifting through each of the piles, she wrote down the questions that remained unanswered, and when she was finished, there were five of them, and the conviction that when she found the answers, she would have found both murderer and motive. Then she thought of a sixth question, and remembered Warren Forchette's comment that she couldn't "count worth a good goddamn." She smiled at the memory. Briefly. And the smile and the memory wafted away on a wave of sadness and, leaving the mess in the middle of the floor, she double-locked the door, extinguished the lights, climbed into bed, and dreamt of running from something she could not see or hear but which smelled like something ugly and awful burning. Then she was no longer running but dancing, her feet trying desperately to keep up with too-fast music, and the burning smell was no longer ugly and acrid but that of food—many gigantic fish—cooking on a grill.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carole Ann spent the next three days devising new and differently ingenious means of disguising herself and escaping from the hotel undetected in order to find the answers to her six questions. She'd purchased two wigs—a brassy orange shoulder-length one and a cap of pseudo-dreadlocks—and an assortment of second-hand clothing from a thrift store in the neighborhood of Warren's legal center. One day she exited the hotel from the service area wearing the orange wig and a white uniform-like dress, hoping that she'd be dismissed as hotel staff. That day she rode the Amtrak train from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, changing clothes in the foul-smelling, miniscule compartment mislabeled as a toilet. She spent hours immersed in filings and pleadings and court orders covering the last thirty years of environmental litigation in Louisiana. She did not find the document she was looking for but she did find several others that contained the information she sought. She also did not find evidence that Parish Petroleum currently had a legal license to do business anywhere in Louisiana; that is, no license fee, no filing fee, and no taxes had been paid to the state in the company's name in the last twenty-four months. Carole Ann also knew that in a place like Louisiana, where the business of oil took precedence over most matters, such an oversight would not be considered serious, and she had no doubt that whoever served as Parish Petroleum's legal counsel could make the case that such failures were nothing more than oversight.

  And then she had a thought that sent her burrowing back into the dusty files that she'd just reassembled and stacked: She did not recall seeing the name of an attorney of record on any of the documents. There had to be a local attorney of record, yet there was not. She closed the files again, returned them to the clerk, and trudged across the square in the blistering heat to the state office building. The clerk in the licensing office recognized her, quickly processed her request, and then told her how to get to the Louisiana state bar association headquarters.

  Her visit to the historian's office in the state house was brief and productive, if not entirely pleasant. The elderly clerk apparently had not quite adjusted himself to the notion of Black female lawyers, and he needed prodding into late twentieth century reality. Carole Ann was of the perfect mind-set to prod, and she left the state house not believing the old clerk's insistence that reproduction copies were fifty cents each, but gladly paying the charge to get what she wanted. Her return trip to the Department of Vital Records was brief and productive, and she told herself she deserved to sleep on the train ride back to New Orleans.

  On the day she drove to Lafayette, home of Louisiana State University, Carole Ann, head covered in dozens of mock dreadlocks and body draped in too-big shirt, jeans, and shoes, first attached herself to large group on a walking tour of the French Quarter. As the group snaked its way down Royal Street, she ducked into the Historic New Orleans Collection museum, double-timed her way across the lobby, quickly exited from a side door, and hurried across St. Louis Street into the Omni Hotel, where she'd arranged through the concierge to have a rental car waiting. She changed clothes in the hotel bathroom—a much more pleasant experience than that afforded by AMTRAK, then she spent the drive alternating between self-congratulations and self-pity; for she knew that no matter how clever and resourceful she imagined herself, she could not escape the reality that someone had sent two thugs with guns to kill her. Just because she'd so far succeeded in avoiding them didn't mean that they'd changed their minds about finding her or that they'd admitted defeat and retreated. What she was doing was dangerous and she knew it and the fear that generated was becoming more and more difficult to keep at bay. Not even the anger that increased with every new discovery would be sufficient to quell the fear.

  "I don't mean any disrespect, Ma'am, but LSU wasn't integrated in 1960." The young woman's brow was wrinkled and she held her hands palms up as if preparing to ward off a blow while she awaited Carole Ann's response, which was a while in coming because it took a while for her understand the girl's meaning. And when she did, another few seconds were required to formulate a response that indicated that she, in fact, had not been offended, while at the same time, covering the ignorance she did feel.

  "I appreciate your observation," Carole Ann said with a warm smile and more than a little embarrassment, "and I do understand about LSU's enrollment policies in 1960. But the young woman I'm inquiring about would have been enrolled as a white student."

  Then it was the young woman's turn to process information. "Oh! You mean she was passing," the girl said, her voice all but becoming a squeak on that innocuous word that conveyed so much. Then her brow re-wrinkled itself as her thoughts took shape. "But..." she began, and then leaned forward to meet Carole Ann in the middle of the counter.

  "They found out about her," Carole Ann stage-whispered, then leaned back into her own space on her own side of the counter, leaving the girl angled there alone for several seconds. Then she, too, returned to her own space, her face reflecting the workings of her mind—first horror, then pity, then deep sadness. This very brown girl, this student working her way through the university she'd only been allowed to attend for less than a generation, coming at once to understand and sympathize with a young girl very much like herself who, in another time, chose a dangerously self-destructive path in search of what she believed would be a better life for herself.

  "If you don't mind waiting a few minutes..."

  "I don't mind at all," Carole Ann said gratefully, and sank down into a green Naugahyde arm chair and picked up an outdated copy of "Southern Living" magazine to help her pass the time, which turned out to be relatively short. The young woman emerged from the office with the name and on-campus address of a retired librarian who served part-time as a university archivist and who, fortuitously, was working today. That lady, a stereotypical dead-ringer for the Southern Belle of two generations past, greeted Carole Ann with genteel courtesy, apologized for the disheveled state of her workroom, and listened as Carole Ann again repeated her request. The lady blushed deeply and her breath seemed to catch in her throat, but she nodded politely, pointed to the only chair in the cluttered filing room, and hurried away, deeper into the rooms of open-shelved filing cabinets. Two hours
later, Carole Ann left the campus of LSU with a photocopied record of the sad and sorry tale of the matriculation of Earlene Warmsley.

  "You damn well oughta be scared!" Jake Graham yelled at her like she was a kid in big trouble. "These assholes have killed six people by my count, including their own relatives! There ain't nothin' says you can't be number seven! There ain't nothin' says you won't be number seven you keep muckin' around down in those swamps!"

  "I'm too close to quit now, Jake." Carole Ann was almost pleading with him to encourage her to continue. She wanted to stop, to turn over her information to the appropriate authorities, to let somebody else bring the Devereauxs to justice. Except she knew that in Louisiana, either there was no such thing as justice, or if their was, it was spelled L-E-L-A-N-D D-E-V-E-R-E-A-U-X.

  "Didn't you hear what I just told you about Devereaux? Or didn't you understand it?"

  "I heard you, Jake, and I understand." She understood that Representative Leland Devereaux had been in Congress long enough to hold and wield extensive power—over people and over things and among the things over which Leland Devereaux exercised power were the Congressional Committees with oversight responsibility for the troubled Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Park Police. According to Jake, Leland was leading the charge to dismantle the EPA; and while there was growing support in both houses of Congress for EPA's demise, the agency still had significant and powerful supporters, including the President of the United States. But that didn't prevent Leland from behaving like a frontier dentist and pulling the EPA's enforcement teeth with rusty pliers every chance he got. And no, Jake said, Leland had not bothered to note in his official Congressional biography that he owned the majority interest in the Parish Petroleum Company. He listed his occupation as "attorney," and certainly not as attorney of record for the same Parish Petroleum Company.

  "And I hear," Jake added, "that the Park Police muckety-mucks are as big a bunch of brown-nosers as you'll find anywhere on Capitol Hill. Do big favors, get big budgets. Law of the Hill Numero Uno.”

  "That's amazing," Carole Ann said.

  "What are you talking about? You're the one who told me to check Devereaux's committee assignments. You must have known what I’d find."

  Carole Ann cut him off, exasperated. "I didn't know anything, Jake, I was merely checking every possibility."

  "Yeah," he snarled at her, "and it checks out and now you go all weak on me. What's that about?"

  "Dammit, Jake, they’re cops! Employed by the U.S. Government!"

  "So fuckin' what?" Jake asked with scathing cynicism. "Leland's a lawyer. One of the lawyers—employed, I might add, by the U.S. Government—who writes the laws the rest of us have to obey. Does that mean you believe he ain't likely to break 'em?"

  Carole Ann needed to change the subject. "Speaking of which, what's the word on Larry?"

  "Nothing.”

  "What do you mean, nothing?"

  "Just that," Jake said, and Carole Ann could picture him scrunching up his face the way he did when he was exasperated with her. He hated it when she questioned him, when anybody questioned him. "Nothing. The guy's a member in good standing of the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia Bar Associations. He goes to their meetings. All of 'em. He belongs to the downtown YMCA where he swims and works out every morning at six o'clock except Sunday. That's when he goes to church. Catholic. He takes his wife out to dinner every Friday and Saturday night. And he goes to work. In the office every morning by eight, out every evening by eight. Been livin' by the same pattern for years, as far as we can tell. Buuuttt.." and he dragged the word out aggravatingly.

  "Jacob Graham!" she hissed at him. "Don't you dare hold back on me!"

  He laughed the laugh that altered his face—she could picture him, transformed in an instant from grim to good-looking—then turned serious to tell her that Larry Devereaux had placed nineteen calls to Louisiana in the past eight days, almost half of them—eight—to one number. Carole Ann had been in Louisiana for ten days, which convinced them both that Larry had a direct connection to somebody Carole Ann had encountered. During those eight days, Larry also made a dozen calls to his brother, both to his Capitol Hill office and to his Fairfax, Virginia home. "Seriously, C.A., it's time for you to take cover and turn this mess over to somebody who can expose the bastards without being killed."

  "You know as well as I do that I've got nothing that any states attorney or district attorney or U.S. Attorney could take into any grand jury and ask for a murder indictment! Dammit, Jake, the only thing we can probably prove is that Larry Devereaux isn't white, and while that may be pathetic and dumb, it ain't illegal."

  They both were quiet for a while. Then Jake said, "Yeah, that's probably true, but spread out everything you've got on the front page of the Washington Post and nobody'll give a good goddamn about a grand jury indictment. The blood lusters in this town'll hang the Devereaux boys by their nuts from the pointy top of the Washington Monument and light a bonfire at the bottom."

  Carole Ann considered the nature of the insatiable beast that was Washington and understood the correctness of Jake's pronouncement; shivered at the thought of it. "I don't talk to reporters," she said.

  "I do," he snapped back at her. "It's called log rollin' or back-scratchin' or some such, and it's a tried and true Washington tradition. Closely related to good ol' quid pro quo. You do know him, don't you?" His sarcasm bit hard.

  Carole Ann had the good sense not to try to dig herself out of that trap. She calmly asked for and wrote down the Louisiana telephone numbers that Larry had called. Then she said, "I want two things, Jake. I want Al's murderer in jail and I want Parish Petroleum or somebody to pay the people whose lives and homes have been destroyed. That's what I want, Jake. I don't mind hanging Leland and Larry out to dry but I want them wearing big M's, for Murderer. I don't want them to get away with being thought of as your garden variety crooked politician and lawyer." She thought she heard Jake snicker; she was certain she heard him sigh deeply.

  "Will you talk to me at least once every twenty-four hours until you leave there?" he asked quietly.

  "I will, Jake, and that's a promise," she said, and hung up the telephone. Then she programmed his telephone number and Tommy's into her cellular phone. And as an afterthought, she added Dave Crandall's and Lil Gailliard's and Warren Forchette's. She tried not to think about why she was doing what she was doing, then told herself that's exactly what she needed to do: To think long and hard about the fact that her life was in danger and that she was taking steps to protect herself. The truth presented itself to her, but she damped it back down. The truth was that Jake's advice, as usual, was the best advice. Leaving Louisiana was the best protection she could give herself. But she could not and would not leave now. Not yet. Not until she was certain that she could have the two things she'd told Jake she wanted.

  So, instead of leaving town, she decided to change hotels, even if she was followed. Her current location had become too familiar, and she'd exhausted all means of undetected escape from it. She considered and weighed the advantages and merits of large hotels, like the Sheraton, where she currently was registered, against the smaller, European-style establishments, and, after studying Fodor's and Frommer's, opted for the middle course: She chose the 500-room Le Meridien, a block away on Canal Street. Not only did it possess all of the necessary amenities, it was expensive enough that she could expect the kind of personal attention Jake recommended. She rode the elevator down to the lounge and called Le Meridien from a pay phone and made a reservation for a late arrival. She left the Sheraton at midnight and checked into Le Meridien five minutes later, relinquishing her car and keys to a uniformed valet, and wondering, worrying, whether such service was beneficial and protective, or would prove to be dangerous. And wondering whether this kind of dissection of the facets of every thought and action had become a permanent part of her existence.

  She remained within the luxurious confines of the hotel for the next forty-eight hours,
taking full advantage of the establishment's restaurant, health club, heated swimming pool, business center, and concierge, who made it his business to find for her the beer she craved. She dressed in her finest silk and gold and donned her four-hundred-dollar-an-hour-lawyer attitude and pressed upon the concierge that under no circumstance was anyone on the hotel staff to acknowledge the fact of her presence to anyone who did not ask for her by name and room number. Then she pressed a hundred dollar bill into his hand to make her point. She slept and she worked, worked out all of the details of her case, and she made two telephone calls in addition to the promised daily check-in with Jake, who heartily approved of her change of venue.

  On her third day in Le Meridien, her cellular telephone rang while she was running on the treadmill in the health club. She barely slowed to answer it, because she didn't intend to talk. She listened briefly, then said, "Call me at exactly five o'clock and I'll tell you where to meet me," and she severed the connection and resumed her pace. The pounding of her heart had nothing to do with the speed at which she was running.

  At exactly five o'clock she was standing in front of the Doubletree Hotel. Fifteen minutes later, she watched him enter the sun-lit mezzanine lounge, watched him look around for her, watched him walk toward her. She studied Larry Devereaux and saw a white man. She did not move or speak when he approached the table and sat down across from her. She continued to watch him, to study him, searching for a clue to an opening to him, and receiving nothing. He sat still and silent, looking everywhere but at her, appearing more bored than interested or concerned. And perhaps that was the way to open.

  "I don't mean to bore you, Mr. Devereaux—”

  He whipped around to face her, blue-green eyes icy and mean and matching the words that cut her off mid-sentence. "Well, you do bore me, Miss Gibson. Or Mrs. Crandall. Or whatever you're calling yourself these days. I didn't stop my work to fly down here to play mind games with you. You said you had vital information for me. Either you have something to say or you don't. If you do, get on with it. If you don't, cut the crap and let me get on with my life."