Race with Death

by Gilbert, Morris

  “Oh, no,” she responded. “I need to find out who made it and who did the inscription.”

  The black eye fixed on her. There was something frightening about being stared at by one eye—especially since the eye was held wide open so that it seemed to be reflecting some sort of fear or terror in the owner.

  Why doesn’t he take that thing out of his eye? Dani thought nervously. But he made no move to do so. He seemed to be turned to stone, as he was not moving, and his eye didn’t blink.

  Finally he spoke. “You police?”

  “I’m a private detective. Dani Ross from New Orleans.” She dug her ID from her purse, and the staring eye fixed on it. “I can’t tell you why I need to know something about the lighter,” she said. “But it could help a man who’s in a terrible predicament if I could find out who made this lighter.”

  Blanchard’s head remained motionless, but his staring eye rotated until it focused on Dani’s face. It stopped, remaining fixed, and a long silence followed. It ran on so long that Dani almost took the lighter and left the store. That eye was awful!

  Then the old man slowly lifted his left hand and removed the eyepiece. The eye that came into view matched the other, for it was as wide and staring as was its fellow.

  “I try to stay clear of police cases,” he said. “I also try to avoid doctors and lawyers. No good ever came of any of them.”

  Dani was nonplused. “Well, that’s one way to look at it, Mr. Blanchard,” she said. “But some of us can’t manage that.” She had a thought and took a trial shot. “I don’t suppose you could help in any case. I’ve been to several of the biggest stores in town. None of the jewelers could help a bit. I suppose it’s too much to ask. Nobody could know obscure things like that.”

  The staring eyes grew even wider—which Dani would have said was impossible. “You are young, and therefore have a right to be wrong,” he pronounced in a haughty tone. His nose was long and sharp, and when he elevated it in a gesture of disdain, it made quite a sight. “There are some—” he hesitated, then pronounced the word with obvious disgust, “—some shopkeepers in this city who call themselves professionals. I personally would not trust them to fix a pin on a cheap brooch, much less repair a watch or give an opinion on a fine stone.”

  A thread of hope ran through Dani. “Are you saying that you can tell me something about this lighter, Mr. Blanchard?”

  The tall man looked down his nose at her, then swung around saying, “Follow me!”

  Dani stepped behind the counter and followed as Blanchard led her down to where the room abruptly turned left. He flicked a switch, and a double rank of fluorescents threw their light over glass cases that ran around the wall. Blanchard waved his long fingers in a kingly gesture. “Look!” he said in his high-pitched voice.

  Dani moved forward and saw that one case was filled with nothing but pocket watches—most of them, she knew, were old railroad watches, mostly Hamiltons and Elgins. “What a beautiful collection!” she breathed, and suddenly pointed at one of the watches. “My uncle had one exactly like that. He was an engineer on the Missouri Pacific.”

  “Then he had a fine watch,” Blanchard nodded, his tone more agreeable. He was pleased with Dani’s obvious appreciation of his collection and took time to point out several of his prize watches that had won international competitions.

  Then he said, “I think you will find this collection even more interesting, Miss Ross.”

  Dani turned and walked to one case at least ten feet long, and looking inside, caught her breath. “Mr. Blanchard—!” she exclaimed, then could say no more, for the case was literally packed with cigarette lighters of all sorts.

  “Well, Miss Ross,” Blanchard chortled. “Perhaps now you think that there’s at least one man in this city who knows a little something about cigarette lighters?”

  “Mr. Blanchard—!” Dani turned to face the tall man, open admiration showing on her face. “I apologize deeply! I was never more wrong in my life. Please forgive me!”

  Dani’s obvious admiration brought a smile to the long lips of the jeweler. He rationed it carefully—as though he were only permitted one each day—then waved his thin fingers. “I accept your apology. Now, let me tell you a little bit about lighters in general, and then we will see about this one of yours. . . .”

  Thirty minutes later Mr. Blanchard had told Dani much more about lighters than she wanted to know! With relief, she heard him say, “Now, let’s talk about this piece.” He held up the lighter, stared at it, then said, “Not factory made. I know all the production models, and this one is not made in any factory.”

  “In this country, you mean?”

  “I mean in the world.” Dani ducked under his scornful glance, half expecting him to add, “Or anywhere else, for that matter!”

  “This is an American shell,” Blanchard continued, “so why would anyone take an American shell to Germany to have a lighter made from it?”

  “Is it hard to make a lighter, Mr. Blanchard?”

  “A cheap one, no. This one—very difficult.” He held the lighter up, put his eyepiece in, and studied it. Once again he forgot to remove the eyepiece as he looked at her. “Let me show you how delicate it is. You’ve had it apart?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Ah, then I will show you. Come with me.”

  For the next ten minutes Dani watched as the nimble fingers of the jeweler disassembled the lighter, showing her how the fuel cell had to be specially made, turned on a lathe to exact dimensions. Using a bright steel probe, he pushed the moving parts of the lighter back and forth, showing her how each piece had to be exactly dimensioned and made on a fine scale. And then it had to be gold-plated, which was difficult in itself.

  Dani watched all this, then asked, “Are there many men who can make a lighter like this?”

  “Oh, yes, there are many who can—” Blanchard nodded, but when he saw the disappointment on Dani’s face, he hastened to add, “but only a few who do it on a regular basis. It is very tedious, and most workers simply recommend one of these.”

  “Can you give me their names, Mr. Blanchard?”

  “Of course. I know them all. We meet at shows from time to time.” He looked at her carefully, then removed the eyepiece. “This man you speak of—he’s in serious trouble?”

  “He’s going to die if I can’t help him,” Dani said simply. “And right now, this lighter is the only piece of evidence I have.”

  “I see.” Blanchard slowly rotated the lighter. Finally he said, “Come by tomorrow. I will call the men who might have done this.”

  “Oh, Mr. Blanchard!” Dani reached out, and the old man took her hand with a startled look in his wild eyes. “I can’t ever thank you enough!”

  The old man seemed disturbed at being thanked. He pulled his hand away in an embarrassed movement, saying, “What thanks? I make a few calls—no big thing.”

  “Yes, it is,” Dani insisted gently. “May the Lord bless you!”

  This statement seemed to disturb the old man even more than her handshake and her thanks.

  “Now, don’t drag God into this!” he cried, holding up a bony hand. “I don’t believe in him!”

  Dani shook her head. “Well, he believes in you, Mr. Blanchard!”

  She left the shop, and when the young men accosted her with a new chorus of crude remarks, she laughed, and waved at them, calling out, “Jesus loves you!”

  The group fell silent, and as Dani pulled out and drove away, one of them said, “Aw, what a waste! A good-looking chick like that, off on some kind of religious kick!”

  13

  Annie’s Place

  * * *

  After trying to call home for the third time to tell her mother she’d be in late, Dani gave up. Mom probably took Allison to a movie, she thought. Retrieving the quarter, she tried her office, but it was five-thirty, and she got no answer. Fishing the quarter out again, she left the phone and got into her car.

  She’d stopped at a gas statio
n on Siegen Lane to fill up the tank and use the phone out front. Yellow dozers and backhoes were ripping up the broad street in large chunks, making so much noise that she probably couldn’t have made herself heard over the phone. Baton Rouge doesn’t have a whole street in the entire system, she thought with disgust. In criss-crossing the town she’d seen so many orange barrels marking out street construction that she’d muttered, “I’m going to get a bad case of orange jaundice out of this!”

  Now as she drove away, headed for the tavern operated by Cory Louvier’s mother, she had to thread her way through dozers, sawhorses with yellow lines, and orange barrels by the hundreds, it seemed. She’d mentioned the thing to the woman taking the money for gas, but the woman had merely shrugged wearily, saying, “I think they’ve got a crew out looking for streets to tear up. And they never finish one—just get it tore up then go tear up another one!”

  Traffic was heavy over the Mississippi River bridge, and weariness pulled at her as she finally headed west on Interstate 10. She knew the country to the South, around New Iberia, with its canebrakes thick and green and bayous crowded with lily pads. It was a beautiful country, dotted with egrets nesting in the sand and herons breaking from their feeding places, gliding on gilded wings along the corridors of live oaks.

  She’d fished those backwaters, and as she sped along past Grosse Tete and the exit to Butte La Rose she wished suddenly that she could do exactly that—drop the case and fish in the rich brown waters that lay to her left. Once used by Jean Lafitte’s collection of brigands and slavers, the marshland was currently utilized by a modern group of pirates that made Lafitte’s crew seem almost angelic by contrast. These “modern pirates” were smugglers of marijuana and heroin who thought nothing of wiping out whole families for the change in their pockets. They often hijacked boats to use in their drug runs, killing the owners and sinking the boats when they were no longer useful.

  By the time Dani was a few miles out of Lafayette, dark was closing in. She pulled off at the Breaux Bridge exit and found Annie’s Place with no difficulty, for it was located exactly where Riley Catlow had told her—almost in the shadow of a tall rice dryer, the tallest structure for miles.

  Annie’s Place was one of the thousands of small taverns that seemed to spring up like mushrooms in southern Louisiana—every town having at least one, no matter how small the population. To call them “taverns” was to lend a dignity to them that they did not possess, “beer joints” being a more accurate description. Annie’s Place was a small concrete building set well off the highway. As far as Dani could tell by the yellow lights that outlined the door and the sign over it, it was painted a leprous gray. Annie evidently was convinced that beauty of decor was unnecessary to entice customers, for the place lacked grace of any sort.

  Pushing through the front door and stepping inside, Dani saw at once that Annie had not wasted money on expensive decorations inside either. A long bar ran along the side wall for the length of the building. It was held up by customers, most of them dressed in cowboy outfits—jeans, fancy shirts, and ostrich skin boots. The room was not entirely dark, but it was gloomy enough that Dani had to squint carefully as she made her way across the floor. Tables were scattered randomly over half the floor, and on the other half, couples were doing Cajun shuffles to the stereo. Dani could never quite understand the words of Cajun songs—perhaps because like country western “artists,” Cajun entertainers all seemed to have nasal problems.

  She bumped into a chair, and the occupant at once stood up and took her arm. “Hey now, Baby, how about it?”

  “Later maybe.” Dani managed to retrieve her arm from the man’s grasp, and arrive safely at the bar.

  A young woman with the long ringlet hairstyle and a peekaboo blouse came to stand in front of her. “What’ll it be?” she asked in a lazy voice. There was a sensuous quality in the girl, who was no more than eighteen, Dani guessed. She was pretty, but hardness had already begun to creep into the planes of her face and had put a glint in her dark eyes.

  “I’d like to talk to Annie Louvier,” Dani said.

  “She ain’t here,” the girl said. “Went into Lafayette.”

  “Are you expecting her back soon?”

  “Yeah, she don’t never stay gone long.” The girl shrugged, then demanded, “You want some beer?”

  The smell of hot food came to Dani, and she glanced over the girl’s head to see a window, and beyond that, a man standing over a grill. “Could I get something to eat?”

  “What’ll you have?”

  Dani saw no refinements such as a menu, and said, “If you have any shrimp or boudin, I’ll have that—and a large Coke.”

  Without turning around, the girl yelled out, “Jake, shrimp and boudin!” Then she nodded carelessly toward three booths along the far wall. “You can wait over there. I’ll bring your food when it’s done.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dani made her way to the booths, found one that was empty, and for the next few minutes was occupied in declining offers from men to join her. It took some effort, for a simple “no” seemed to be too complicated for them to grasp. Finally she said, “I’m expecting a friend,” and even this was not enough, for most of her would-be suitors went to great lengths to explain how she’d be missing a blessing if she didn’t have a drink and a dance with them.

  One of them, a tall, good-looking man in his mid-twenties, went right to the heart of the matter. He ambled over with a can of Miller’s in his hand, stood over her, and asked, “You married, honey?”

  “No.”

  A confident grin came to the man’s lips. “Got a main squeeze?”

  “Well—no, not really.”

  A smile came to the man’s broad lips. He pushed his black Stetson back on his head, leaned forward, and whispered, “Honey, this is yore lucky day! I’m Dax Fontenot—I’m the bouncer here.”

  He evidently expected Dani to be impressed with his position and was a hard man to convince that she had no interest in him. Dani energetically fended off his offers to show her a good time, and when the waitress came, she said, “Have to give you a rain check, I’m afraid.”

  The waitress laid a heaping plate of fried shrimp and boudin in front of Dani with a beer schooner filled with ice and Coke. “Be seven dollars,” she announced.

  Dani fished a ten out of her purse, and handed it over, saying, “Keep the change.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” The waitress looked up, peered across the room, then said, “There’s Annie—you want I should tell her you wanna see her?”

  “If you would. My name’s Dani Ross.”

  In the murky darkness, Dani didn’t see the sudden interest that leapt into the girl’s dark eyes. “I’ll tell her,” she said quickly. Leaving the table, she made her way across the floor, dodging hands expertly, and said to the woman who’d come to stand behind the bar, “Annie, woman to see you. Name’s Dani Ross. Over there in the last booth.”

  “All right.”

  The girl watched as Annie moved to the booth, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. When she got an answer, she said, “Skip—this is Lila . . . Yeah, I miss you too . . . sure, I’ll be ready. Hey, Skip, you asked me to be on the lookout for anybody who came around asking about Cory? Well, one just came in—at least I think so. It’s the woman from Baton Rouge you tole me about—Dani Ross.” She listened carefully, then said, “Yeah, Skip, Dax is here . . . what?” Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “That’s trouble, Skip!” The man’s voice crackled, and the girl finally said, “I’ll tell him—but I’m out of it if it’s trouble. And listen, bring that perfume you promised to get me from Maison Blanche—that Passion stuff.” She hung up the phone, studied the pair in the booth, then a call for more beer caught her attention and she turned to the cooler.

  “You want to see me?”

  Dani nodded, saying, “If you have a few minutes—” She put her fork down, adding, “I hate to bother you at your place of business—”

  “W
hat is it you want?”

  Annie Louvier, the mother of the murdered girl, was about fifty. She had very black hair with no sign of gray, and her eyes were black as well. She was attractive in a hard fashion, her trade having formed her. She gave Dani her full attention, her lips tight with suspicion.

  “I know it sounds—well, trite,” Dani said slowly. “But I’m sorry about your daughter.”

  “You didn’t know Cory.”

  “No, but I always feel bad about things like that.”

  Annie’s hard black eyes didn’t mellow. “I done my crying, Miss Ross. Now, what are you doing in my place?”

  “I’m a private—”

  “I know who you are. That guy Savage, the one who got into trouble with the law, he works for you.”

  Dani blinked in surprise. How did she know about that? It wasn’t that big in the papers. It alerted her, for if Annie Louvier was keeping score on such things, she might know something that would help.

  Dani gambled then, for she knew that this woman could not be influenced by other methods. “I don’t think it was Eddie Prejean who killed your daughter,” she said. Carefully she watched for a reaction in the woman, but saw only a glint of suspicion growing in the dark eyes that were fixed on her.

  “You got any proof of that?”

  “Well, not really—”

  “You go to the trial?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then what makes you think he didn’t do it?”

  “I talked with him, Mrs. Louvier.” Dani felt the weakness of that statement, but had no other choice than to forge ahead. “I know convicted felons lie about their guilt. I’ve been lied to enough to have some sort of judgment about things like that. But after talking to Prejean, I think there’s enough doubt that I hate to see him executed.”

  Annie Louvier studied the young woman carefully. “You have any kids?” she demanded suddenly.

  “No, I’m not married.”

  Annie’s lips twisted in a gesture hard to interpret. “I was a good mother when Cory was little. She never had a daddy, but I tried to make up for that. . . .”