“I’m not in an—”
“Figuratively speaking,” he said, blinking slowly. “All you have to do to get here is walk through a few rooms. 1 figure we’re in this together, chère, so I’m going to say things I wouldn’t say otherwise. Errol was a recoverin’ addict.”
Did he think she’d worked side by side with Errol for almost two years and known him for years before that without being aware of the demons he’d fought?
“He came through a long, dark tunnel. That was his description, not mine. But he made it through—almost.” His unflinching gaze moved beyond her again. “Dammit, he tried to get past it. He surely did try.”
Celina had always assumed Jack knew Errol’s secrets, but evidently Jack had no notion she might know them, too. “He must have been in the bath and felt ill. There’s water all over. He made it out and collapsed.”
“It could have happened that way,” Jack said. “It probably did. He was a charismatic man. Women always fell for him That’s what made it so hard on him.”
“Don’t.” She couldn’t stand to hear it all aired, all of the past Errol had managed to bury. “He was a good man, the best.”
“He was a recoverin’ alcoholic.”
“Member of a large club, according to what Ι hear,” Celina said, thinking of her own stepfather.
“The stuff was more poisonous to him than to most of the other members. He was told he had what amounted to an allergy. It scared him. But he fell off the wagon this time.”
She’d smelled liquor of some kind. “You don’t know he was the one—”
“The one doing the drinking? Rather than the lady who owns those?” He pointed to the clothing on the bed. “Okay. Let’s say you weren’t the one he had fun and games with before he died. He didn’t need you flauntin’ yourself in front of him seven days a week. Turnin’ him on so he might be more vulnerable.”
“Flaunting?” Even the word stunned her. She spread her arms. “Have you ever seen me flaunt myself?”
He looked her over from head to foot and gave a short laugh. His all-seeing stare brought a rush of heat. Her own intense response shook her. He said, “Do you get to be Miss Louisiana without flauntin’ yourself?”
She winced. “You weren’t talking about a beauty pageant six years ago. You were suggesting I’ve been trying to attract Errol in a sexual way right here and now.”
“Haven’t you?” He bent forward from the waist and studied his feet as if seeing his shoes for the first time. “You think you’re hard on the eye dressed in a thin robe like that? Or dressed in any old thing at all?”
“Why don’t you say what’s really on your mind? Yes, Errol was a recovering alcoholic. He was also a recovering sex addict.”
Jack’s head snapped up. “How the hell did you know that?”
“He told me. Back at the beginning when he hired me he told me and said if I had any concerns about that he’d understand.” The amazement in Jack Charbonnet’s fine eyes gave Celina satisfaction. “His father was a friend of my parents. I knew Errol from when I was a little kid. When he got married I was the flower girl. Natalie was a bitch. He never should have married her.”
Jack’s sudden, sharp laugh wasn’t what she’d expected, and she smiled involuntarily.
“He never told me all that—about bein’ acquainted with you before. I was at the wedding too. I don’t remember the flower girl. I didn’t know you had that kind of shared history.”
“You never bothered to find out.”
Jack ran a hand around his neck. He said, “We’ve got to make decisions and act. Errol’s death is tragedy enough. What good would it do if his name got tainted by whatever went on here?”
She shook her head.
“It’s not important,” he told her. “As you said, what a man chooses to do in the privacy of his own home is his own business—as long as he does it with consenting adults, and by the look of what I’ve seen so far, the lady he was with was very adult.”
Tears filmed her eyes. She nodded.
“We’re going to clean up anything that didn’t belong to Errol, then raise the alarm. Errol asked me to come over, but he was out when I got here. Or that’s what 1 thought. You came along—ready to go to work—and we shot the breeze for a while. We waited. Then we got suspicious and came looking. And voilà. Does that work fur you?”
“You must have made up a lot of stories. You’re good at it.”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got at least one fan who thinks I am. But this is a simple story. It’s even got elements of truth in it.”
She began to tremble again. “Then what?”
“They come and deal with…They come and take care of things.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant afterward. Dreams.”
“It’ll go on,” Jack said as if speaking through his teeth. “After he lost his boy, he behaved like he was givin’ up. Then he came up with the idea for Dreams and it kept him going. It became his life and it does so much good.”
She wanted to turn on him, to tell him that she knew he wasn’t the kind of man who stayed awake nights worrying about sick children, that she knew Errol had been paying back the big loan he’d got from Jack back at the beginning. And the payback had been with big interest attached. Jack wanted to he sure his investment continued to pay off.
“I’ll be in the bathroom,” Jack said. “The bedroom’s all yours. Nothing gets left behind unless it belongs to Errol. Got that?”
Oh, yes, sir. She gathered the handful of black silk and held it at arm’s length. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Grow up,” Jack said, but his voice was even. “Use your head and start looking around.”
He went into the bathroom again. Celina didn’t want to look, but couldn’t stop herself. He made a ball of the towel and dropped it, then made a visual search of the space.
“How—” Celina swallowed. “How long ago do you think he died?”
“I’m not a pathologist.” He bent over Errol’s body.
Celina saw what he was doing and looked away. How could the act of touching a dead man’s penis be at once so personal yet so impersonal?
She picked up a long, black scarf from the floor and untied another from the head of the bed. The fur glove was almost hidden by a pillow. Celina took a tissue from the pocket of her robe and used it as a barrier between her fingers and the thing that disgusted her. She dropped the glove among the heap of silk.
Α bottle of bourbon had rolled under the bed. Fortunately it had been capped. The room was stuffy and foul smelling. “Should I open a window?” she called.
“No,” Jack said, so close behind her she jumped and spun around. “We’re going to admit they’ll find our fingerprints all over this place, but you don’t open windows in someone else’s bedroom, not if you’re only supposed to be trying to find them.”
“Where should I put all this stuff?” Celina asked, not wanting to as much as touch it.
“In your apartment.”
She gazed at him. “I don’t want it there.”
“What you do with it later is your business. That’s where it will have to go for now.” He picked up the phone beside Errol’s bed and dialed the emergency number. Then he said, “Medical emergency. Heart attack. I’m not sure, but I think so. I understand. I’ll stay on the line. Someone will be waiting for you down below.” He held an open hand toward Celina, and in the palm rested the awful green rubber ring she’d seen.
When she backed away, he frowned and motioned her to come to him. She did so and he pushed the ring among the other things she held while he gave the Royal Street address to whoever was on the phone.
He hung up and said, “Go. Now. Get dressed fast and come right back. They’ll be here.”
“You’ve forgotten something,” she said. “Whoever these things belong to. What if she comes forward and says what really happened here?”
“Go,” Jack said. “She’s not going to say anything.” “How can you be so
sure?”
He looked her directly in the eye. “I’m sure.”
Three
Miss Payne could move fast, he’d give her that. Jack had heard the approach of sirens, and now feet clattered on the stairs from the courtyard. Only minutes had passed, but Celina had already sped to her rooms and back, and managed to exchange her robe for a loose white linen dress. She was still frantically buckling flat brown sandals.
Jack heard Antoine say, “He this way. Lordy, I don’t know what the matter,” and shot a warning glance at Celina before going to fling the bedroom door open. He was confronted by medics. They passed Antoine in the hall and hurried through the bedroom to the bathroom, carrying steel cases of equipment and a portable gurney.
“Mr. Petrie?” Antoine said. “What the matter, him? He sick? Mr. Charbonnet? Miss Celina?”
Celina went to Antoine and threaded her hands around one of his massively muscular arms. “We need you,” she told him. “It’s bad, Antoine, very bad.”
“Lordy, lordy,” Antoine muttered, wiping his spare hand over his sweating face. A giant of a man, his tightly curled hair had turned gray, and each flash of very white, gold-edged teeth chopped his dark, finely featured face in two.
“Thank you for showing the medics up,” Jack told him, feeling the depth of the man’s distress.
Antoine said, “I gotta go to Mr. Petrie, me.”
“Not now,” Celina said. “We have to allow the medics to do their job.”
Jack studied her face. Either she was concerned for Antoine or the lady could act.
“Mr. Charbonnet,” the man said, “you tell me what happen?”
“You know Mr. Petrie didn’t have a good heart,” Jack said. Antoine waggled his head. “He dead. You sayin’ he dead, him.”
More sirens sounded, quickly growing closer. Jack met Celina’s very blue eyes again. He saw a question there and raised his brows. if they hoped to salvage as much as possible here. she had to keep her cool.
Two cops appeared behind Antoine. One said, “Excuse us, podner,” and they made their way into the bedroom. Jack glanced behind him at the activity inside the bathroom. The medics worked over Errol’s body. When he turned back, Jack saw that Antoine cried silently and made no attempt to hide the tears.
One of the policemen left the bathroom. “Might be better if you three gave me your names, then took a seat in another room,” he said, flipping to a clean page in his notebook. “We’ll start with you.” He pointed his pen at Antoine.
By the time each of them had complied, another siren sounded and rapidly zeroed in. It cut off outside the building.
Within moments, loud male tones rose above other, more quietly spoken men’s voices. “I am going up there. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to shoot me in the back. Right there between my shoulder blades. Just make sure you give me a chance to take off my shirt first. It’s linen and cost a bomb, I can tell you.”
Jack felt an urge to laugh at what he recognized as Dwayne LeChat’s dramatic declaration.
Compact, with blond curls still wet from the shower, Dwayne wore denim shorts and a flowing white poet’s shirt. He tore into the bedroom a few steps ahead of two more members of the New Orleans Police Department. Beneath a perfect tan, his round face was almost as white as his shirt. He pushed Antoine aside and started for the group in the bathroom, but stopped. “I knew it,” he muttered. He glanced at Celina and said, “Is he dead?”
“We’re afraid he may be,” Jack said quickly. Celina’s eyes darted to his and away again. He’d have to keep on top of things or she’d give them away. “Why don’t you go into the parlor, Dwayne? Errol would want you here. He thought of you as family.”
Dwayne chewed the knuckles of his left hand. “You’re talking about him in the past tense already. You think he’s dead for sure. Oh, my God. How?” He turned to Celina. “How did it happen, darling? He’s—oh, I don’t care, I refuse to speak of Errol in past tense. He’s the gentlest of creatures. He abhors violence. No one would deliberately hurt him.”
Jack stared at Dwayne, then shook his head slightly when a policeman, his cap pushed back from his sweating brow, asked, “What makes you think Mr. Petrie was deliberately hurt, Dwayne?”
“He’s as fit as a fiddle, Mulligan,” Dwayne snapped, his intelligent brown eyes sharp. “You gentlemen of the law are a trifle too quick for your own good—unless some law-abiding citizen needs you to actually think about something. Then your tiny little minds crawl—in reverse. I want to see Errol.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea at the moment,” Officer Mulligan said.
Dwayne gave him a pitying look and went toward the bathroom anyway. As owner of a drag club on Bourbon, he was on at least a last-name basis with most city cops. No one knew if LeChat was really Dwayne’s last name. Jack liked the guy. He was rarely serious, but he was a man who made a faithful friend.
“1’ll go and wait in the parlor,” Celina said, holding his gaze. She seemed to want him to get the message that she was in control. “I’ll take Antoine with me.”
“I should wait outside,” Antoine said, his expression desolate.
“You’ll wait with me,” Celina said firmly. “I need you, and Mr. Petrie needs you to be here too.”
A sudden, uncontrolled burst of sobs froze them all. Jack turned around in time to see Dwayne stagger backward, his hands pressed to his stomach. Mulligan caught him by the arm and led him to the others, saying quite gently, “I think this is too much for you, Dwayne. Why not give yourself a break and go sit in the parlor? Have a drink.”
“My God!” Dwayne pulled away from the policeman as if he were afraid of being hurt. “He is dead. They’re going to take him away and cut him up. They’ll take his insides out and paw him and poke him and make their nasty, sterile little notes. And they won’t know anything about who he was. You can’t open a man’s body and find him inside. Errol Petrie isn’t in there anymore.”
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t good at shows of emotion.
“Go sit down, Dwayne,” Mulligan repeated. “Maybe you could take him, sir,” he said to Jack.
With a nod, Jack took Dwayne firmly by the elbow and guided him from the bedroom and along the corridor to the parlor. Once inside, he steered the other man into a daffodil-yellow armchair and poured him a brandy.
Celina came to stand in the middle of the room. Antoine hovered awkwardly to one side. Both declined a drink with a shake of the head.
Jack heard more footsteps in the hallway but didn’t bother to find out who else was descending on this house of death.
Celina touched his sleeve hesitantly and immediately dropped her hand. He wanted to take that hand in both of his and press her palm to his cheek. He wished they were alone. He’d wished that on a number of previous occasions, but never as desperately as now. Wanting her was suicidal, and even allowing the thoughts he’d had about her to surface at a time like this was bizarre.
Without warning, Antoine bowed his head and wept. His body jerked with each racking sob, and Dwayne leaped up from the chair to mutter to himself and pace.
Agitated, Celina said, “Stop them, please,” and clapped her hands over her ears. “This is too much.”
He agreed, but couldn’t allow himself to give in to an urge to yell for calm. “You’ll be able to leave soon,” he told her, not at all convinced he was right. “The police will have some questions to ask, but then they won’t keep you.”
“I won’t be going anywhere.” She sat on the couch that matched the daffodil-yellow chair, crossed her legs, and twitched her skirts around her knees in an unconsciously provocative gesture.
Jack’s glance at her legs wasn’t so much unconscious as inevitable. They said her legs had bought her the Miss Louisiana title. Jack didn’t believe any woman got to be Miss anything that a lot of people coveted on the strength of their legs, or any other thing God had given them. Not a pair of long, long legs, or a pair of deceptively innocent navy
-blue eyes—or a mouth many would consider too big.
Or did they?
Taken a piece at a time, Celina Payne might not be spectacular. Put all those pieces together and she was physically irresistible—except to Jack Charbonnet.
Antoine’s sobbing subsided and Dwayne threw himself back into the chair.
Jack cast about for something other than Celina to hold his attention. He ran his gaze up the high white walls to gold crown moldings, a still life in oils that hung over the fireplace, and vowed to improve his timing when it came to admiring the female of the species. Thanks to Celina’s redecorating talents, and Errol’s indulgence of her influence over him, the room was tastefully beautiful.
When she spoke again, he realized she’d expected him to respond to her last statement. “I take it you don’t have a problem with that, Jack,” she said. “I’ll be staying here for the present anyway. I’ll have a lot of work to do to keep things running.”
She’d have a lot of work to do? Jack studied her again and decided he might not enjoy some of the battles that lay ahead. On the other hand, they might not be all bad….
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” he told her, taking some pleasure in the surprise on her face. “Your help is going to be needed, I’m sure. Errol told me many times that you kept him on the straight and narrow around here.”
A rap sounded on the open door and a man with an official air but dressed in rumpled plainclothes stood there. “Detective O’Leary,” he said. “NOPD. I’m going to ask all of you to remain here, please. I’ll be asking each of you to speak with me alone. Nothing to worry about. Just formality at this point.”
Jack straightened up and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Sure. I’ll be glad to do anything I can, but couldn’t you let Miss Payne take a rest first? She’s had a terrible shock, Officer.”
“Detective,” O’Leary corrected. “And haven’t you had a shock too, sir? Under the circumstances, it might be as well if Miss Payne hung in here until we’ve spoken with her. Just procedure. I’m sure you all understand. Did you turn the victim over, Mr. Charbοnnet?”
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