Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Nope. Charles Landry.”

  Faye didn’t get the joke. “He’s insufferable, but he doesn’t exactly make me laugh.”

  “I called him to ask whether Shelly had ever shared her concerns over the levees with him.”

  “Had she?”

  “I have no idea, because Charles went into immediate ass-covering mode. It seems that his firm has a finger in all aspects of flood control work—levee design and maintenance, for starters. They’ve also done some work on floodgates to protect against flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. They dredge canals. Right now, they’re bidding on a project to upgrade the pumping system. Charles did not want to hear me asking questions about why the levees failed. He handed me off to his assistant Leila the Bulldog, so she could put my call through to a so-called expert.”

  Charles’ expert must emit an odor strong enough to travel through telephone lines, because Jodi’s nose was wrinkling at the thought of him.

  “Not someone you’re itching to hire as the department’s engineering consultant?”

  “Not just no, but hell, no. It was the company’s marketing flak, telling me not to believe all the stuff that the independent levee review team said in their report.”

  “So now you’re gonna have to read that report?”

  The question made Jodi reach for the coffee pot again. “Again…hell, no. The thing’s six-hundred-and-ninety pages long. I’ve gotta find me an impartial engineer to read it. Until then, I can’t even form an opinion on the issue.” She held out two sheets of paper. “But I sure wish I had me an opinion on these.”

  Faye reached for the two pages. They were copies of the most intriguing things found in Shelly’s pocket. At least, Faye thought so.

  In her right hand was the neatly inscribed list that started with Charles’ surname and ended with Shelly’s.

  Landry

  Martin

  Guidry

  Bergeron

  McCaffrey

  Johnson

  Dupuit

  Prejean

  Broussard

  And in her other hand was a messy list, scrawled in handwriting even worse than Joe’s.

  Johnson

  Guidry

  Broussard

  McCaffrey

  Dupuit

  Bergeron

  Prejean

  Martin

  Landry

  Jodi and Faye devoted a solid half-hour to brainstorming those names. They got exactly nowhere.

  “Pontchartrain Engineering is an obvious link,” Jodi said, holding up the company’s flashy brochure. Charles Landry was one of the faces on the cover. Either he was a high muckety-muck with the company, or he was the most photogenic engineer they could find.“Shelly Broussard and Charles Landry both worked at Pontchartrain Engineering, and their surnames are on the list. Leila Caron’s name isn’t there, but Matt Guidry is her boyfriend, so there’s another link to the company.”

  Jodi flipped thoughtfully through the colorful brochure. “I went to the company website and searched their directory. Charles Landry and Shelly Broussard were in it—Leila Caron, too—but none of the other names appears. I’ll get hold of a list from the time of the storm but we’ll have to wait a while for that information.”

  “So what do we know for certain?”

  “Neither list is alphabetical,” Jodi said, ticking off her observations by counting on her fingers. “We’ve checked professional organizations for a link between these nine names. Nothing.”

  “We’ve got an engineer, a park ranger, and an administrative assistant,” Faye said. “I guess there might not be too many professional organizations that attract all three of those. Maybe something social, like The Royal Order of the Moose?”

  “I already checked that.”

  Wow. Jodi was thorough. Faye had only suggested the Moose because their name made her smile.

  Jodi kept counting on her fingers. “We thought they might have gone to church together, but Shelly, Matt, and Charles didn’t live close enough together to belong to the same parish. I even did a web search for all of those names together. Nothing came up but a bunch of genealogies, and none of them showed a family tree that included all those names.”

  “Have you just come out and asked Charles and Matt about the lists? It’d be interesting to hear their explanations of why their names might have been in Shelly’s pocket.”

  “I asked Matt, the next day after we found Shelly. As for Charles, I was saving that question, so I’d have an excuse to call him again, if it suited me.”

  “Does it suit you now?”

  “Yeah. It’s time to bother my least favorite engineer, just one more time. Okay, two more times. Hell. I don’t like the man. I’ll bother him as many times as I like.”

  Jodi downed another big gulp of her coffee and an evil, caffeine-fueled grin lit her face. “You know what? That conversation would be a lot more effective in person, don’t you think? I can wave these lists around. Make him look at the handwriting. Tell him to look real close at both lists, so he can be good and sure that he’s never seen them before. Why don’t we go make Mr. Charles Landry miserable, face-to-face?”

  ***

  Jodi put the car in park and would have jumped out of it, ready to annoy the life out of Charles Landry, but Faye stopped her with a hand on her forearm.

  “Before we go in there, you’d better tell me how your last interview with Leila the secretary went.”

  “She’s not a secretary. She’s an administrative assistant. She reminded me about that pretty loudly. A couple of times. And she had a valid point. The nameplate on her desk does say she’s an ‘Administrative Asst.’ Me, I woulda left off that last ‘t’.”

  Faye heard a little guilt speaking to her. “You know, my mama spent forty years making her jerk of a boss look good, and he never gave her any title other than ‘secretary.’ I shouldn’t laugh at Leila, just because she wants to be taken seriously.”

  “No. You should laugh at her because she’s a pretentious snob. Let me see…within the first five minutes, she’d asked me how long I’ve lived in New Orleans, where I went to grade school, and who my people were. She made sure I knew that her mother ruled a particularly choice Garden Club with an iron hand. I also learned that, just this past Mardi Gras season, her father was King of Some Mystic Krewe or Other. I believe she was about to ask me what regiment my great-great-great-grandfather served in during the Civil War. Excuse me—the War Between the States. Also my mother’s maiden name.”

  Faye motioned to Jodi to flip the car key toward “auxiliary” long enough for her to roll the window down and let some air into the stuffy car. “If I’d been in your shoes, I’d have told her I was a descendant of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen. Your mother’s maiden name is none of her damn business.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s pretty important damn business around here. The social circles you can enter, the exclusive Mardi Gras balls you attend…‘who your people are’ is a critical component of those things, and your mama’s maiden name figures into all that. I’d say it was more important than what color your mama was, and you can’t say that for most places in America.”

  Faye, whose parents’ skin colors couldn’t have been more different from each other, wondered why nobody was asking about anybody’s daddy’s family. She figured it was because people’s last names revealed enough information for the asker to go poking around in their father’s genealogy, unaided.

  “A big, fat civil rights lawsuit or two might fix those social circles and Mardi Gras balls…”

  “Did I say any laws were being broken?” Jodi asked. “I’m pretty darn white, and I wouldn’t be comfortable at society balls around here. I could attend. You could attend. But if nobody knew who our people were, we might be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to have more than a brief, polite conversation. It would be nothing personal. They just wouldn’t be able to think of anything to say to us.”

  Faye knew these things. Bobby Longchamp had been as o
bsessed with family relationships as Leila. It had just bothered her less, because she liked him more.

  ***

  “We only want a few minutes with Mr. Landry.”

  Jodi was making every effort to use her most official detective’s voice on Leila Caron, and she could see that it was working. She liked it when people respected her badge. She liked it better when people respected her as a person, but Leila seemed to be one of those who just respected the badge.

  It seemed that she was also more than a little intimidated by the badge. Or maybe it was guilt that was keeping her bright black eyes fastened on Jodi, as she carefully answered questions without really saying anything at all. It was as if Faye wasn’t even in the room.

  Jodi watched Faye push that envelope a bit, first leaning on Leila’s desk, then actually resting her hand atop the stack of papers on the desk corner, just as she’d gotten Jodi’s attention earlier that day by laying that same hand flat atop the paperwork she was filing.

  Nervous Leila never noticed. She just kept giving Jodi noncommittal answers.

  It wasn’t that Leila betrayed her nerves overtly. Her voice never trembled. Its tone was pleasant but firm. Her hands were steady.

  No, she hadn’t thought of anything else significant that Shelly had said or done during those tough days at Zephyr Field, the woman had told Jodi as a hand reached up to touch her cheek.

  No, she’d never, at any time, seen anyone at the office arguing with Shelly, Leila had said as she brought her hands in front of her, palms inward, in an instinctively protective position.

  No, she’d never heard Shelly mention being afraid of anyone or anything, she’d asserted calmly, while she adjusted the position of the bright gold bangle bracelet encircling her wrist, again.

  Yes, she’d be happy to let Jodi and her tagalong friend speak to Mr. Landry, but they had to remember that he was a busy person. She was sure he would have contacted the police, if he’d remembered anything that might be helpful.

  With that, Leila sighed and turned to lead them into Charles’ office, stopping only to alert him by intercom that they were coming.

  The woman simply bristled with body language that said she was lying. Or that she wasn’t giving them the whole truth. She had more tells than a bankrupted poker player. Her last evasive tic cost her, though.

  By moving toward the door of Charles Landry’s office with the liar’s stereotypical facial expression, eyes locked straight ahead, she never saw Faye drag her hand across the desk, raking a single piece of paper into her other waiting hand.

  ***

  Charles Landry was a better liar than his administrative assistant, or at least Jodi thought so. His hands were relaxed. His body position was open. His voice was blandly pleasant.

  Too bad his speech patterns were skewing way more formal than the ordinary conversational style of a good ol’ boy from the Big Easy. Jodi had learned early in her career that liars always reveal themselves. Maybe they wanted to be revealed, although Jodi highly doubted that. In her experience, liars and criminals were convinced that the rest of the world owed them…everything.

  “No, I do not recall ever seeing this,” he said, as he perused the neatly inscribed list of names that had been retrieved from Shelly’s pocket. He reached for the second list with its hurriedly scrawled handwriting, and said, “Nor this.”

  “How about the names? Are any of them familiar to you? Other than your own name, I mean, and Matt’s. And Shelly’s.”

  “Yes. That’s my last name. It’s also my brother’s and my father’s and my mother’s. All my aunts, uncles, and cousins, too. And lots of people that I’m not related to, as well. Would you like to talk to all of them?”

  In Jodi’s peripheral vision, she saw Faye continuing her trick of hovering just outside the interrogant’s field of vision, forcing him to choose where to focus his eyes. Like Leila, Charles chose the woman with the badge, because he perceived her as the biggest threat. The man had no idea who he was dealing with.

  Jodi waited patiently while Charles studied the two lists and made noncommittal noises. Then she took her leave of him, but Faye did something. She showed that she was done with silent observation.

  “May I ask you a personal question?” she said, speaking softly so that Charles had to turn an ear in her direction in order to hear.

  “You can ask,” he said. Wariness put an audible edge on his voice.

  “Nina’s my friend, and I know she has been so glad to spend time with you again. She told me that she had no idea why you’d come back into her life so suddenly. Could I be so bold as to ask why you did? You don’t have to tell me, but Nina’s my friend and I…” Faye’s voice trailed off and she looked at him expectantly.

  “I couldn’t…well, I…” Charles’ smooth manner was now thoroughly ruffled. Finally, he just blurted it out. “Nina’s not what I pictured for myself. I plan to head up this company, or one like it. I wanted a wife who could make cocktail party conversation, and Nina doesn’t even own any hairspray. But you know her. There’s not anyone like Nina. I just couldn’t stay away.”

  He signaled to Leila that the interview was done. As she led them through the door, back into her own workspace, Charles turned toward his own desk. In that instant, Jodi felt Faye press a scrap of paper into her hand. She glanced at it and blessed the day that she hired Faye Longchamp to help her with this investigation.

  It was a simple to-do list on a piece of paper that said From the desk of Leila Caron across the top. The clear round handwriting on that paper was utterly familiar.

  Leila Caron had written one of their two lists.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Faye’s face was expressionless, but Jodi could read her body language as well as she could read a liar’s. She was smugly proud of handing Jodi something she could use to pry a little truth out of Leila.

  “Ms. Caron,” Jodi said, holding out a copy of Shelly’s sloppily written list, “does this look familiar to you?”

  The mouth said no, but the eyes said Leila wished she knew whether this lie was safe to tell.

  “How about this one?”

  Leila hesitated, then raised her eyes to the bulletin board hanging three feet from Jodi’s left shoulder. Jodi glanced that way and saw three pieces of paper covered with neat round handwriting identical to that on the list in her hand. Leila saw the glance, and she was a good enough gambler to know when to fold her hand.

  “Yes, I’ve seen that before. It’s my handwriting.”

  “Do you remember making this list?”

  “I’m an administrative assistant. I take notes and shuffle people’s paper for them. I make lists like that one every day. I can’t possibly remember them all.”

  Jodi knew that the woman was feeling cornered, if she was willing to acknowledge the menial labor that was central to her job. She decided to press her a little. “But do you remember this list?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Well, at least Leila had given her a straight answer, even if her body language screamed out that it wasn’t true.

  “Did you ever make a list like this for Shelly Broussard?”

  “Shelly worked for Charles. Charles is my boss. Of course, I gave her notes and lists of things that he wanted her to do. I did that for all his employees.”

  This was true. But Jodi was well aware that most of that kind of work was done on computer now. She didn’t know why the fact that this note was hand-written seemed notable, but it did.

  “Why would you make a list of names like this? Hypothetically, I mean.”

  “Umm…”

  Leila was thinking too long. Instead of throwing out a few random reasons for listing nine surnames, she was reviewing her alternatives and taking the time to mentally throw out the one that was true.

  “Maybe it was a list of potential clients that Charles wanted her to call. Or subcontractors. Yeah, they could be subcontractors.”

  Jodi was so dead certain that Leila was lying that this
was actually useful information, in a backhanded way. There was no way in hell that these names referred to clients or subcontractors.

  “Well, if you remember anything about any of the people on this particular list, or if you think of something that reminds you why you wrote it in the first place, you’ve got my card. Have a good day.”

  Jodi turned to Faye and nodded that it was time to go. The look on Faye’s face, even more smug than before, caught her attention.

  Jodi’s eyes followed the line of Faye’s slim arm downward to the desk, where she was again resting her hand. This time, however, the hand was not lying flat. Three fingers and a thumb were curled into her palm, leaving an index finger pointing…at what?

  Jodi’s own body language nearly slipped when she followed that index finger to its target. Faye was pointing at Leila’s desk plate, which Jodi had seen before. It announced to the world at large that she was an Administrative Asst. It also broadcast to the world that her professional name was Leila Martin Caron.

  Leila was not married. Jodi presumed that she never had been, but she’d have to check. She wagered that “Martin” was Leila’s middle name and that it had been her mother’s maiden name. She and her ilk did not let go of their family relationships easily. It was the most natural thing in Leila’s world for her to continue letting the world know who her “people” were, even though her mother had presumably been married to Mr. Caron for decades.

  And Martin was one of the names on Shelly’s lists.

  ***

  Leila waited for the woman cop and her poorly dressed, dark-skinned flunky to leave the room. Then she counted to sixty before opening her office door and peeking out. They were gone.

  She turned around and surveyed her desk from this angle. The two women had been looking at something. What had they seen and why had it caught the silent archaeologist’s eye? Why had it been so noteworthy that she had lurked right there, in that spot to the right of the desk, until the detective looked her way?