by Peter King
Whelan closed the larger door from the inside. We waited and watched. It was probably ten minutes or so and we were both feeling impatience. I had to prevent mine from showing—Interpol agents should be used to long vigils.
A door in what had to be the attached house opened and a figure came out. It was female and she wore a long coat. She strode off along the street, away from us.
“Follow her,” I said. “Just close enough to get a look at her.” She was fairly tall and had a long swinging stride. She looked to have dark hair but I had to wait until we reached an intersection where there was enough light before I could see her properly. “Slow down,” I said urgently. “Don’t get any closer.”
“Get a good look at her?” asked Benjamin eagerly.
“Good enough,” I said. It was good enough—for me to recognize her. She was Leah Rollingson, the part-Chinese beauty who had been one of the Witches’ kidnapping team.
We followed, keeping nearly a block behind. I recalled Emmy Lou Charbonneau’s words: “We think one of the Witches is mixed up in this.” Did she—or one of her sister Witches—know or at least suspect more than that? Did one of them know who it was and what her involvement was?
Ahead, a wide street crossed the one we were on. It was lit, and traffic buzzed by. Leah turned onto it and stopped.
“Bus stop,” Benjamin said, slowing down his mule. “Number thirty-six, goes all the way ’cross town.”
“Let’s wait. She may have something else in mind.”
We watched, and within a few minutes a bus came. She did not have anything else in mind—she got on the bus and we watched it until it disappeared from sight. Benjamin shook his head. “No way Myrtle can catch that,” he said.
“I didn’t think so. Let’s go back to the house.”
We parked a block away. “You’d better stay here. I won’t be long.”
He shook his head firmly. “No way, man. I’m comin’ with you.”
“You don’t have to, you—”
“Ain’t doin’ it ’cos I have to, it’s ’cos I want to. I ain’t sittin’ here alone.”
“What? A big man like you? Afraid?” I chided him.
“This here’s a dangerous city,” he said, still shaking his head.
“What about Myrtle? Is she okay alone?”
“Can’t take her with us,” he said reasonably.
“True. Anyway, she looks like a brave mule.”
Benjamin put on a hand-brake, patted Myrtle a few times and whispered something in mule language. We crossed the street and walked along to the house. No lights were visible.
“Let’s find the back,” I said. We had to go around the block and we located the house. A dim light showed in a downstairs window. The second story was dark.
It would have been exaggerating to call it a garden. We crossed a mini-wasteland of junk and rubbish. Benjamin tripped over an old bicycle then put his foot through the shattered spokes of one of the wheels and couldn’t get out of it until several dozen swear words later. I kicked a can that clattered into several other cans. All must have been empty, the way they resonated.
We finally completed our crossing of the minefield, and reached the window. I peered into a kitchen, small and untidy with pans on the stove, cans and jars and boxes on the countertops. The light was somewhere else in the house and filtered through dimly.
Benjamin squeezed beside me to look through the window.
“We goin’ in?” he breathed.
I hadn’t seriously considered it but it was obviously the kind of thing an Interpol man would do and I wanted to maintain the image.
“Yeah,” I drawled. “We’re goin’ in.”
I tried the window. It didn’t yield.
“There must be a back door,” I said.
We looked and there was, hard to see in the darkness. But the knob didn’t turn and when Benjamin tried, it still resisted. “Feels like a bolt as well,” he said.
“The window might be easier.”
We went back to it and I tried both panes, a top and a bottom. Neither would slide.
“Let me try,” Benjamin said. He took out a sturdy-looking pocketknife and opened a wicked-looking blade. He probed here and there, then suddenly, there was a metallic clang. He eased the lower pane upward. I looked inside. There was a space alongside a cabinet below the window.
“Give me a hand,” I told him. He cupped a hand and gave me a heave. It was tight but I just made it. I took the weight of my fall on my hands and rolled over. I stood and turned to the window where a big, black face stared at me.
“No way I can make it through there,” he said, and I wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or sorry.
“That’s okay,” I told him. “Stay there, keep an eye open.”
I went into the next room. A floor lamp cast a dim light. The room was as untidy as the kitchen, with cheap furniture. Tattered carpet covered a stairway and I was starting to go up when I heard hurried footsteps. I paused, heart quickening, trying to determine where they had come from. I heard them again then a muffled thump. It was a door closing.
I saw now that there was another downstairs room, one that evidently fronted onto the street. The entrance to it was off a small hallway at the foot of the stairs. I went in.
A table lamp with a Budweiser shade threw off a few miserable watts of light. The room was poorly furnished like the other but I didn’t notice any details. My attention was all on the body, half seated, half sprawled on the couch. Its awkward position was a bad omen, and a quick examination confirmed that he was dead.
I recognized him. He was the man we had followed. He was Earl Whelan, the man who had offered me the book.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HE HAD BEEN SHOT in the chest. That meant that the person with the gun might still be in the house. I hastily checked the front door. It was unlocked. I called softly to Benjamin and he came, his eyes big and shining in the dark. I wondered how much bigger they would get in the next few minutes.
“We’re going to search the house.” I told him.
He looked doubtfully over my shoulder. “Ain’t nobody in there, is they?”
“Not a living soul,” I told him.
We did it room by room. He stood at the door and I went inside, checking closets, showers and large cupboards. Finally there was only one room left.
“We won’t go into that one,” I said.
“We won’t? Why won’t we?”
“Because there’s a dead man in there.”
I was right about his eyes. They could get much bigger. “You Interpols don’t fool around, do you!”
“He was dead when I found him.”
“Hey, that frail we saw leavin’—you don’t suppose she did for him?”
“I don’t know but I’ll have to call the police.”
Benjamin shook his head in self-reproach. “Minute you said, ‘Follow that mule,’ I shoulda known. Man, I shoulda known. What a day!”
“Do you have any problem with the law?” I asked. “If you do, you can take off. I know you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Nah,” he said emphatically. “I’m clean. It’s okay, I’ll stay. Besides,” he added, “you’ll want me for an alibi. Maybe the law think you offed this guy” He cast a curious look toward the room with the body but his curiosity didn’t go as far as going in to look.
“All right. There’s a phone in the kitchen. I’ll use that.”
“You supposed to hold it with a cloth or somethin’—you know, so’s you don’t get fingerprints on it.”
I nodded. “Television does have an instructional value, doesn’t it?”
Lieutenant Delancey’s look was distinctly frosty. “You’ve already found more bodies than I’ve had hot dinners this week. Who’s this one?”
We walked into the room. Delancey examined the body, poked around the room, then looked to me for answers.
“His name’s Earl Whelan. He drives one of the mule-drawn carriages. So does Benjamin.” I explained t
he steamboat incident and our all-mule pursuit. When I came to the part where we came into the house, he looked disapproving. “Breaking and entering! That’s not—”
“Luckily, the latch on the kitchen window was broken and I was able to get in that way.”
“Sure it was.” He poked through the room again, examined the couch carefully, then the body. He looked at Benjamin, who had been standing silently by the door.
“Know this guy, do you?”
Benjamin was polite and cautious with his answers but, under Delancey’s expert probing, it emerged that Whelan was a drug courier. Delancey knew that several taxi drivers made extra money that way and Benjamin reluctantly admitted that one or two carriage drivers did so, too. As Delancey dug further, it seemed that Whelan was into other illegal activities. “Anything to make a buck,” Benjamin said contemptuously.
“So you didn’t see anybody else?”
I had been awaiting that question with unease. I thought Leah an unlikely murderess but I had been wrong before on more than one occasion. I liked her but that was no basis on which to protect her in a murder investigation. A more pragmatic consideration was that I would be putting Benjamin on the spot. Either I would be forcing him to lie, or his contradiction would look bad for me. I had to tell the truth.
“We saw a woman leave the house a while before we went in.”
The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Know who she was?”
I told him. I saw the look of surprise on Benjamin’s face but managed to keep Delancey’s attention on me so that he didn’t notice it.
“How did you come to know her?” he wanted to know.
I explained but didn’t refer to it as a kidnapping. I used the euphemistic description of “an invitation to attend a meeting of a chefs’ association.”
“Anything about the way she left? Hurried? Worried? Anything to indicate she might have just shot a guy?”
“No, she left normally,” I said, “but after I went in, I heard someone in the house.”
“And neither of you heard a shot?”
Negatives from both of us.
The lieutenant was still asking questions when Forensics people began arriving. The lieutenant finally told Benjamin and me that we could go, adding to me, “Call me tomorrow. We may need to talk some more.” We left after Benjamin had told him of a mule in the adjacent building that needed consideration. “I’ll see it gets taken care of,” the lieutenant assured him.
“Want me to ride you back to Jackson Square?” Benjamin asked me. When we arrived, I gave him three twenties and he looked at them so strangely that I gave him another.
“Hope you don’t need any more help, man,” he told me, although he took another look at the bills in his hand as he stuffed them away and appeared to be tempted to change that hope.
“Not this kind, you mean. No chases, no break-ins and no dead bodies. Otherwise, you’re available.”
He grinned amiably. “Man, you got a nose for trouble—but okay, otherwise … I’m here.”
Despite the late hour, Jackson Square had more than its share of itinerant musicians, late-night strollers, lovers, bizarre outfits, diners working off excess calories and even a night-shift mime. I walked back to the hotel and slept well, with only a minimum of hazy dreams featuring a dead body.
I was entering the breakfast room next morning when a blonde vision in gray and blue intercepted me. It was Elsa Goddard and she smiled brightly. “I hoped I’d catch you. How are you enjoying New Orleans?”
She listened with widening eyes as I told her of finding another body. “So you were there! I saw it on the early-morning news!” Her expression changed. “Does this have anything to do with the book?”
“It seems possible.” I was being cagey, still not certain how much I could trust her. Even if she were not involved personally, her media personality made her one of those people around whom it is safer to be reticent.
“Let’s sit for a minute,” she said, and waved to a group of chairs and a table out of the stream of guests going in all directions. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I can trust you,” she began as soon as we were seated. I almost said thank you. “It’s this matter of the book. You see, one of the Witches has been offered it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and the shots of the dead man on the news this morning—well, that must be the man who offered it.”
“Which of the Witches was offered the book?”
She raised elegantly manicured eyebrows. “I’ll let her tell you.”
“All right. It’s a coincidence, though.”
“Coincidence?”
“Yes. That man, Earl Whelan, offered it to me, too.” I described in brief the encounter on the paddlewheeler.
“You turned it down?”
“Yes. It was a fake, a phony.”
I was watching her carefully. I didn’t learn much, though. She showed more surprise than any other reaction.
“How did you know that?”
“I was able to examine it carefully.” The answer was evasive but she didn’t seem to doubt it. “What about yours?”
“She said she’d need time to raise that much money.”
“How much did he want?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Pity he didn’t show it to you. You could always show up early and get it cheaper.”
She smiled. “I was a little overbearing at that auction, wasn’t I? But I was so furious at that woman, selling it before the—” She was getting angry at the memory but she caught my eye and brought back the smile. “There I go again. But tell me, how did you really know the book he showed you was a phony?”
She was sharp. She had picked up on the one point I didn’t intend to explain, as I saw no reason to bring up the story of Herman Harburg and his involvement. Without him, my omniscience stood out prominently. How to explain it?
“I’ve seen a lot of chefs’ books,” I said loftily. “This just didn’t look genuine.”
“How did he take it?”
“He seemed a little confused—as if he wasn’t certain himself whether it was real or not.”
“Just who was he? Do you know?”
“He drove a mule carriage—one of those that operate out of Jackson Square. Apparently he was a drug courier on the side.”
“I know some taxi drivers make extra money that way,” she said. “I suppose a mule-drawn carriage is even less suspicious.”
“Evidently. He also had a reputation for dipping his fingers into other endeavors, not always legal.”
“So if you think he didn’t know if the book he was offering you was genuine or not, he must have been acting as a go-between? He may not have had anything to do with the theft—or the murder?”
“Looks that way. Tell me something—” I went on. “I presume you’re no longer acting on behalf of the Witches?”
She shrugged. “Business is business. There’s a story here that hasn’t been unraveled yet. If I can get it, it could revitalize my whole career.”
“Does it need revitalizing? You seem to be doing very well.”
“Between you and me, my future at the studio is shaky. A great story like this could get me into serious TV journalism.”
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to be careful,” I said. “Two people have died already.”
I didn’t expect my warning to be very effective and it wasn’t. She nodded a brisk acknowledgement, as if I had told her to dress warmly. “Actually, it was another matter that I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “We’re putting on a show featuring Creole and Cajun cooking … Well, these are pretty familiar themes around New Orleans, so we wanted a new angle. We’re doing this show as a conflict, a battle between the aficionados, but we’re going to goose them up to be more fanatics than fans.”
“The Creoles versus the Cajuns?” I suggested. “Kitchen knives at two paces?”
“Something like that,” she smiled.
“And which side d
o you want me to be on? The winning one, I hope.”
“Oh, you’ll be neutral.”
“Shot at by both sides, you mean?”
“Oh, those days are over—besides, we don’t allow firearms in the studio.”
I thought of drawing her attention to the fact that Larry Mortensen had not been disadvantaged by any such rule but I didn’t. Anyway, it sounded like fun. She gave me the details and I agreed to be there.
I escorted her to the door and watched her depart. As I turned back into the lobby, one of the desk clerks called to me. I had a call: would I take it in the first booth?
It was Marguerite—she of the near-perfect features; black hair, long black lashes—and she was calling to ask if I would like to be their guest for lunch today.
I accepted readily.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I WASN’T TOO CLEAR on the location of the Bistro Bonaparte but the taxi driver was. It was a neat, trim, very French looking place, and the awning outside and the window shade were both of the bright, turquoise-blue that had an immediate Parisian appeal.
I was conducted into the main dining room but I was told there were two other, smaller rooms. In here, the distinctive ambiance was enhanced by mirrored walls, soft antique lights, vases of fresh flowers and mouthwatering displays of fresh fruits. Touches of the Baroque were evident in the carved wood panels between the mirrors and the red velvet drapes. The snowy-white tablecloths and the glittering silver completed the picture of a successful restaurant. All in all, it was very tastefully done, and without going to extravagant expense.
Marguerite looked charming in a simple black dress with small gold earrings and a thin gold chain around her neck. Her black hair was shiny and smooth and her long lashes looked as if they had grown a couple of millimeters since my kidnapping by the Witches. Her skin was faultless and her red-lipped smile was welcoming as she led me to a table and pulled up a chair opposite.
“Bonaparte himself would have been delighted at the opportunity to eat here,” I told her.
“My aim was to offer New Orleans food, but with the French flavor resulting from years under French rule,” she explained. “I tried to embody that in the design, too, both outside and inside.”