by Smith, Julie
She dialed and got his voice mail. “Hey, Lamar,” she said. “Listen, I just got a call from Lorene. She’s broken up with Herbert again and wants me to come over. I’ll call you when I get home.”
It popped out, just like that—a full-blown lie that she didn’t even have to think about. Obviously, she thought, I’m not ready to deal with this.
Okay, fine. There was only one problem—the client had said he’d call tonight, and she sure needed to talk to him. He’d called early before—maybe he would again.
She phoned Darryl before she lost her nerve. “Hey, I’d love to go out tonight. Want to pick me up at home?”
“Can’t I just get you at work?”
“Sorry, I have to go home first. Or shall we make it another night?”
“Tonight’s good,” he said. “What time?”
He had a really lovely voice. “Eight,” she told him. It was six already; she’d better hustle her butt.
On pins and needles, she opened up the Newman file. It was gibberish.
Talba felt sweat at her hairline. Shit. It can’t be.
But she knew very well that it could be. Since the last time she worked at United, they’d installed an encryption program. The good news was, “Skinacat” was probably still there—they’d probably just changed its name. Whatever the new file was called would also be encrypted, which was why the “Find” command hadn’t worked.
Talba’s mind raced. That had to be what Robert Tyson meant when he said he’d just done a dynamite project. If the file was there, there was still a chance of getting it.
She caught the 82 Desire, raced in, and went straight to her room, ignoring Miz Clara’s pointed delivery of the message that Darryl had called. She needed to grab a ten-minute nap to clear her head.
She’d just closed her eyes when the phone rang. “Hi, this is your client.”
She said, “I’m working on your project.”
“What do you mean you’re working on it? Why don’t you have it?”
“I’ve hit a snag, to tell you the truth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They’ve added some security. I haven’t been able to get into the file I need.”
“What the hell kind of security?”
“Nothing I can’t solve. Don’t worry, it’s happening. Just give me a couple of days.”
“I don’t have a couple of days.”
“I’m doing my best, okay?”
“I guess it’ll have to be.” He sounded miffed, but fuck him.
Miz Clara came into the room. “You gon’ call that young man or aren’t you?”
“Mama, he called me at work. He’s due here in a few minutes. Does that make you happy?”
“Oh, Lord. I guess I’ll have to get my own supper.”
But Talba could tell she wasn’t that upset about it.
She turned her attention to finding something to wear that wasn’t a white blouse and navy skirt.
Sixteen
DINA WOLF WAS the last person he expected to end up in bed with, but there they were in her brass bed with the white-painted finials and floral comforter.
The walls were white in the bedroom, living room, and kitchen, which pretty much comprised her condo, unless you counted the balcony, or whatever they called it in Florida. The place was airy and comfortable, with bright laminated ads on the walls, which at first he didn’t get, until he realized they were her own work.
Right, she was a graphic designer. Russell had a hard time with that—it seemed a decent profession and she evidently owned the condo, but there were things about her that seemed so ding-y. Like her clothes, the first night he met her, and the fact that she was in that bar at all (though of course he was, too), and her extraordinary penchant for purple toenails.
Did grown women really go around in baseball caps and purple toenails? She kept saying, “This is Florida, baby. You gotta relax,” and no doubt she was right. He really did have to relax.
Underneath the baseball cap, she had brownish, very fine hair cut in a sort of cap with bangs, wispy side ends pushed behind her ears as if she just couldn’t be bothered. Her eyes were blue and very big, and her skin tan, but less than perfect—a little mottled from the sun. She favored white sheets (always his favorite), and now, cuddled up in them, she was undeniably cute as a button.
So these were her personalities—cute, kind of bossy and straightforward, ding-y, and somewhere, somehow, professional, he supposed, but he hadn’t seen that one yet.
She was a far cry from Bebe, or from any woman he knew in New Orleans, but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe he needed to expand his horizons.
He lay on his back and thought, That’s why I left, isn’t it? He looked over at Dina to reassure himself. She was warm and soft and alive and accepting—though way too abrupt for his taste; way too weird for him; in the long run, not his kind of woman at all. But nobody said they were getting married.
He liked her a lot. He just wasn’t sure what planet she was from.
He put a hand on the warm, soft skin that covered her rib cage and she stirred a little.
Sex with her had been a pyrotechnical display the likes of which he could more or less remember from somewhere back in adolescence, but which he’d almost forgotten about. It had never been that way with Bebe; it was always just sort of companionable and sweet. It had been downright scary with the too-beautiful Cindy Lou—not that Cindy Lou wasn’t what Douglas Seaberry called “technically perfect,” but he just couldn’t believe he was in bed with her, and that really put a damper on the process of enjoying it.
This girl Dina was like some prerational protohuman, all tongue and legs and slippery, sliding surfaces, twisty moves, odd little noises. She was so aggressively sexual, he wondered if she’d had a sex change—women, in his experience, just weren’t this wildly, wonderfully demanding. It confused the hell out of him.
He’d kill to do that again—what they’d done the night before, which was everything. But this girl was a wild animal. Weren’t they supposed to be dangerous?
She woke up and smiled. “Hi,” she said, and touched his cheek, more like a little kid than an animal.
“Hi.” He reached for her and she snuggled against him, closing her eyes as happily as a puppy.
She’s so trusting, he thought. She doesn’t know me any better than I know her, and I’m the one who could be dangerous. In fact, if she happened to get a gander at my driver’s license, she’d probably wonder why someone named Edward Favret claims to be Dean Woolverton.
Before he changed his appearance, he had looked quite a bit like Edward. What could be easier than lifting the wallet of someone whose coat was constantly hanging up a few doors away from Russell’s? Voila—license, cards, the whole nine yards. Of course, he couldn’t charge anything on the cards—and wouldn’t want to anyway. All he wanted was a picture ID to get on a plane, backup cards for it, and a Social Security number. That would be enough paper to open a bank account and buy a boat. The boat thing was a little sticky, because of taxes, but too bad; for that purpose he could just continue being Edward.
Soon enough, though, he’d have to tackle the problem of getting a fake set of papers.
The tangled-web cliché flitted briefly across his psyche, and he thought that in his case, it was more or less backward. The line went, “when first we practice to deceive.” For years, he and his pals had woven a magnificent mesh of deceit, not so much as a kink in the silk, much less a tangle. If not for one madman, Ray Boudreaux, they might have gone on doing it until they took over United Oil Company, which in time they might have, they were so successful at what they did.
Which was screw people out of what was rightfully theirs.
Of course, the company didn’t know that; they thought the Skinners (a name they’d never hear) got results just because they were brilliant strategists. Which was true. Oh, it was certainly true. Over the years, they had come up with some unbelievably brilliant schemes, many of
them crookeder than a mountain trail. The one they’d pulled on Ray Boudreaux was about the best.
In fact, that was the one that haunted Russell the most, the one he’d thought about most in the darkness of those five days. It was so relentlessly, revoltingly mean it made him wonder if there was any possible redemption for those who’d participated.
But the Skinners hadn’t started out to be mean at all, or even to be dishonest. They were four perfectly ordinary young balls of fire (well, Favret and Seaberry were balls of fire—Fortier and Cavignac were just guys doing their jobs), who happened to get a nearly impossible assignment.
That is, Seaberry got the assignment, and recruited his buddies to help him with it.
Somebody at the top didn’t like Seaberry, or else (no doubt correctly) perceived that Seaberry posed a threat to him. While everybody else was out doing exciting stuff in the Gulf, Seaberry had been charged with the job of finding lucrative reservoirs in Jefferson and Plaquemines Parish. They were there, all right, and because of the new Three-D seismic equipment, they were being found. The problem was, they were often on land already leased to someone else—someone who wouldn’t be interested in selling.
It was a stupid, thankless, frustrating assignment, and they were having fairly poor results. All of them were feeling tense, and one weekend they’d gone duck hunting.
Russell hadn’t thought about it in so long he’d forgotten that part. They were in this camp, this male-bonding kind of place that belonged to a friend of Favret’s, where they’d just made some robust firehouse meal like spaghetti (“pasta” was far too effete) and garlic bread. They’d tossed back quite a few brews and probably some Scotches as well, and they were probably telling some sort of macho lies—about past football prowess or something—when somehow the talk took a swing toward the thing that was getting them down.
They’d been tense with each other at the time—tense in general—and they were feeling relaxed for the first time in weeks or even months. How it happened, Russell would never know—maybe the stars were right for it.
But the general atmosphere of guy-type exaggeration had somehow spawned it.
One minute they were sitting there cursing the assholes who’d gotten them into this and the next they were joking about outrageous ways out of it—kill the guys who were doing the glamorous stuff, or maybe kill the guys with the leases.
Russell could remember the exact moment it had started. He could see Beau Cavignac waving a beer, wearing some stupid flannel shirt that belonged on a lumberjack, and saying, “Listen, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—let’s just kill ’em all.”
“Blood!” someone shouted.
And then Seaberry said, “Why don’t we just screw ’em out of their damn leases?”
There were all sorts of legal tricks possible with leases. The jokes that went on that night were of a somewhat technical nature, but nonetheless jocular in the extreme.
“Hey, here’s one,” Seaberry had said, with regard to some dude who wouldn’t sell—call him Smith. “We get him for discrimination. We find some person of color who used to work for him and we just pay him to start a lawsuit that’ll wipe Smith out.”
“How about this one?” Cavignac added. “You know how nobody’s very careful about paying their royalties? Well, we just stir up the landowners. Simple as that—a bug in the right ear, and voila, an audit—followed by a lost lease.”
“Beautiful,” Russell said. “Magnificent in its simplicity. But why go simple when you can be devious? We hire our own accountant, see. And his job is to sign on with Smith.”
“Hey, wait,” Favret objected. “Maybe Smith doesn’t need an accountant.”
“Well, we kill his or something. And then we say to our guy, all you have to do is cook this dude’s books, and United’s business is yours till the end of your days.”
“What does that do?” Cavignac asked.
But Seaberry had already put it together: “Leases have to produce in ‘paying quantities,’ or they terminate. Suddenly the books show losses.”
“Goddamn, let’s do it! Let’s just goddamn do it.”
Well, they had. It had started out as absurdity, and then they’d simply done it—done all the things they thought of that night and more. Everything they could think of, in fact, over the next few years—except for the murders, that is. Even the Skinners had drawn the line at that.
They’d given themselves the name after Cavignac’s cat-skinning remark. At the time, it had some resonance involving wildcatting, but all that had been lost in the mists of time.
They had a system. Whenever they had a problem, they’d get drunk and get loose, and let their criminal sides take over. It never failed to amaze them all how inventive they could be. And if it was outrageous enough, they did it.
For Russell, at any rate, it was like that giddy time when he was first learning to sail. What a high! What a sense of exhilaration!
He hadn’t given a thought to the people they were hurting, or to their families—he had seen them only as the enemy, had seen each problem as a challenge.
And it paid off. Oh, did it pay off—in raises and bonuses and promotions.
They were high rollers who couldn’t lose, and the other three were still doing it right now, unless Boudreaux had succeeded with his plan to expose them all and right their wrongs—if in fact, that was what he wanted to do. Russell wasn’t all that sure. They’d offered Boudreaux money to go away, but apparently it wasn’t enough. Maybe they would kill him.
Russell had already started to come apart when Boudreaux surfaced. By that time, he was just getting through, having lost the heart to be a corporate criminal.
But if he didn’t continue, if he joined Ray in his whistle-blowing, he’d end up in jail. Worse, though, where did it leave Bebe? She couldn’t help but be tainted by it.
He’d done enough, and hurt enough people without dragging Bebe down. Sure, he wanted to be Dean Woolverton—start a new life, take the sloop cruising, all that glamorous stuff. Sure he did.
But also, he had no choice.
Dina Wolf stirred. “I’m hungry.”
Russell said, “I’ve got a nice sausage for you.”
“Oh, please. It’s first thing in the morning.” She stretched. “I’d kill for a bagel.”
“Okay. Let’s go out and find one.”
“I’ve got plenty in the freezer. All you have to do is somehow cut them and heat them. I can wait. I’ve got some eggs in there, too.”
“Hey, how’d this get to be my responsibility?”
“I thought you volunteered.” She looked at him with those huge blue eyes, her bangs covering her eyebrows, her nose a bit sharp for his taste, and she reminded him of his daughter—so cute and innocent, he couldn’t imagine her manipulating him into making breakfast.
***
Ray could remember it like it was yesterday—the first time he ever met Russell Fortier. He and Lucille and Margaret Ann had been on one of those scouting weekends families go on to scope out colleges. They had had two days away from Ronnie, who was in what Cille called a “bad stage of development,” meaning he stayed holed up in his room all the time, probably masturbating, coming out only to heap scorn on everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity.
Margaret Ann tended to get sulky around him, but in fact that wasn’t her nature at all, a delightful fact Ray had almost forgotten. The three of them had had meals together, had gone shopping, even sandwiched a movie in between appointments, and his daughter hadn’t once tried to duck out of sight, embarrassed to be seen with her parents. At Vanderbilt, she’d acquitted herself splendidly, chatting and asking intelligent questions as if there was something she cared about besides The X-Files. Ray had for the first time a sense of who she really was, the nearly formed adult they’d be shipping off next fall.
They got back late Sunday night, and even after the flight and the seemingly endless drive across the causeway, he had felt exhilarated. Margaret Ann went off to
her room, Ronnie didn’t come out of his, and he and Cille had an unaccustomed nightcap, drinking to the excellent job they’d done, bringing up this child to be a credit to her age and sex and social position. In fact, they were feeling so warm and fuzzy about it all, they went upstairs and made love.
Ray was feeling on top of the world when he went in to work the next day. It wasn’t ten o’clock before the phone rang and an unfamiliar voice spoke to him: “Mr. Boudreaux. This is Russell Fortier over at United Oil. I wonder if I could talk you into having lunch with me?”
Just like that. Lunch, for no reason. These Big Oil bozos behaved this way—as if anyone in the world would be thrilled to pieces just to spend a couple of hours in their boozy presence.
Ray decided to jolly him along. “United? Really? I used to work there myself.”
“Oh, yeah, we all know you—bought a lease from us and built yourself a nice little company. Must be nice being your own boss.”
“Can’t beat it.”
“How about Galatoire’s on Friday?”
Ray didn’t know what this guy wanted, but he evidently thought he was going to get it—Russell Fortier had the confidence of some high school football captain who didn’t know any better. Ray said, “I’d rather eat my gun.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Last thing I want to do is get into that kind of trouble.” Galatoire’s on Friday was more like Mardi Gras than lunch. People went at noon and didn’t come out till six P.M. It was a place for a power lunch in the networking sense only, unless of course you were the object of the power play—in which case, it was a great place to get you drunk and friendly toward your host. Serious business was sure to be interrupted by table-hopping friends, single women on a flirting mission, even, sometimes, too-friendly waiters with a snootful.
Fortier laughed to show he wasn’t put off. “How about Thursday?”
“I think maybe you ought to give me some idea what this is all about.”
“I’ve got a little business proposition I thought you might be interested in.”
“You? Or United?”
“Why, United, of course. I’m in Acquisitions over here. We’re interested in Jefferson Parish.”