“Terry Jenson did the set?” he asked.
“Yeah. He and Boris are exceptionally good together,” McMasters said. “Most of what we needed was lighting. But Terry is great at set design.”
“Boris has a vision—Terry has ability to deliver that vision,” Avalon explained. “Boris, Terry—and then Brad—have been great working together.”
“What about the extras used here—the audience. They were paid—that wasn’t a live performance?”
“The extras were paid—it was not a real live performance,” McMasters said. “We have to be careful. Some people get carried away when they gain an audience. I can say for Sean and Perry and me, we’re not...hmm. I don’t know what to say. At live concerts we’ve had panties thrown at us onstage, and sometimes, security has to stop overzealous fans... Don’t get me wrong—I am so appreciative of having made it to where we’re surviving nicely as a band, but... Sorry. Long explanation. I guess you were looking for a simple yes or no.”
“Did you know any of the extras?”
“Oh, sure, a lot were friends of mine, of Perry, or Sean.”
Fin played the video again, freezing at the frame with Julian Bennett.
“You know this guy?”
“Julian. Nice enough guy. Comes down from Baton Rouge. In fact, I met him several years ago at the Speakeasy. Hey, you must know him, too, right, Avalon? He and his family own Christy Island. I didn’t know that before—I don’t think it meant anything to him. I guess any of us who grew up in this area just thought of Christy Island as a creepy place owned by an even creepier old man. Julian’s last name is Bennett—I never associated him with Christy Island.”
“But you met at the Speakeasy?” Fin asked.
“I think it was there. We don’t have that many venues nearby.” He leaned back.
“Pretty sure we all hung out there after the video, too, with Boris and the crew.”
Fin nodded politely. “You’ve been very helpful, and I appreciate it.”
“This was really nice of you,” Avalon told him.
They went back through the house and said goodbye to his family. That took a while.
When they were in the car again, Avalon said, “I think he would have gone with us out to the Speakeasy if we had asked him.”
“I think that’s possible,” he said.
“But you didn’t ask him.”
He looked over at her. “Well, I’m going to have to ask about him,” he said.
“Ah, of course. But you can’t be serious. I mean, Paul might be in a rock band, but he’s even more apple pie than I remembered.”
“You always think the best of everyone.”
“And you think the worst.”
“It’s my job. And I don’t think the worst of everyone, I just leave the possibility open that we’re not all what we appear to be on the surface.”
“You found him to be suspicious?”
“No, not really.”
She shook her head and looked at the road. Then she frowned. “I never saw Julian Bennett that day. Not that I remember. But the sequence I was in was filmed at the house. We danced across the hall or the makeshift ballroom. When they were shooting the crowd scene...” She frowned. “I was with Lauren. We were both free to go—the live-performance scene was the last thing they filmed, and I even like the song, but I’d heard it so many times that day I was ready to leave. We saw all the extras as we were leaving, but I never noticed Julian Bennett.”
He was thoughtful and he looked at her. “Boris and Terry have acted as if they first met him when they came to Christy Island.”
“Maybe they didn’t notice him at the video shoot, either.”
“Terry might not have been around once the set was decorated, but Brad does a lot of the editing with Boris from what I understand. Boris had to have seen Julian, at minimum in the footage. And if they all partied together at the Speakeasy once the filming was done, they must have been introduced to Julian then.”
“Did Boris ever tell you specifically that he didn’t know any of the Christy family?” she asked, and then added, “Oh!”
“What is it?”
“I’m curious. And you have a way of knowing everything. Or the FBI has a way of knowing everything...”
“We have access to records. We don’t spy on the average man.”
“Right, sorry!” she said.
He sighed. “What is it that you’re curious about?”
“Nolan Christy.”
“Old Nolan? He’s dead.”
“Right. But he scared people away from the island. He was a loner. What was he really doing out on that island?”
“Well, growing old and dying for one,” Fin said.
She made a face at him. “His heirs say that their parents—his grandchildren—hated him. They had to have had their reasons.”
“I’ll have Angela see if she can dig anything up,” he said. “Why? You’re expecting to discover that he was luring women to the island and murdering them there?”
“Maybe.”
“You would think that there would have been a number of missing-person reports.”
“Hey, they still haven’t identified Jane Doe, pulled from the bayou near the bar.”
“True,” he acknowledged. They drove alongside the bayou for another mile or so before coming to a fork in the road. Fin followed his navigation and turned to the left, heading along a paved road with signs that advertised the Speakeasy. Written below were words that warned, Know the password, and please, SHHH!
“Do you know the password?” Avalon asked him.
“Maybe,” he told her cryptically.
He really didn’t know; he had to check his email to see if Angela had supplied it for him. But whether he knew it or not, he was getting into the place, and he had a feeling that it was easily guessed—the venue needed clientele to survive.
After he parked, he looked at his phone.
Yes, Angela had talked to the man, and yes, Mort Jones would be waiting for him and he had his own special password.
He paused by the car, surveilling the space around him, and the restaurant.
A path led down to the water. The slow-moving bayou drifted beautifully by in the sunlight of the dying afternoon. Docks right below the restaurant offered space for ten to twenty small boats, less space for bigger shrimpers. A small grassy slope made its way down from the restaurant to the water and the docks. A tile-and-gravel path provided a walkway.
He looked at the Speakeasy. There were a few period all-weather lounges beneath an arched overhang by the entrance. The outer wall was white, but there had been a picture painted on it of a young woman in a 1920s sheath dress, lounging imperiously on a settee, a cigarette cradled by a long cigarette holder in her hand as she looked with disdain at the world around her.
He paused, thinking about the dead woman.
Lost to the water; deteriorated, decomposing, decayed.
But maybe the plan had been to dress her up, leave her in the front, posed on one of the period sofas there, down to the cigarette holder in her hand.
Had something gone wrong?
Perhaps someone had come upon him...or them. It was easy enough for them to charm and abduct a woman; maybe they weren’t so tough, though. Fin had a feeling that Mort Jones kept a gun on his premises and knew how to use it.
“What is it?” Avalon said.
“Just observing.”
“You’re such a liar.”
“What?”
“You’re imagining that one of the sofas there would have been a place where a dead woman might be displayed...in her twenties’ splendor.”
There was a little window slot on the door; when Fin knocked, it slid open.
A deep voice demanded, “Who’s there?”
“Fin from the G-zone,”
he said.
The door opened. A large friendly-looking man with a white mustache and beard opened the door; he appeared to be in his late fifties to early sixties, and was dressed in a suit that might have been worn in the 1920s or 1930s, complete with a fedora.
“Hello, and welcome. We don’t open until five, so you’ve arrived perfectly to see the place while it’s empty. You’re Special Agent Finley Stirling? And Miss Morgan?”
“Thank you so much for agreeing to see us,” Fin said.
“Come on down the steps. We’re not heading to a real basement, just a slightly lower level. But going down steps to a speakeasy, well, according to rumor, you had to have a password and steps.”
The little hallway with the steps was dark. They were led to a room where the walls were decorated with copies of well-known Art Nouveau and Art Deco pieces. The lighting was kept dim. The sofas were plush, and arranged in discreet, shadowy conversational areas.
The workers all looked as if they belonged a century in the past. Mort Jones had done a great job with the place; Fin could imagine police bursting in to break up the party.
“Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933,” Mort told them. “I guess it was a good thing and a bad thing that it all ended with the Depression. Meant some could sip away a few of their problems—and some could drink themselves right into the grave of depression. Anyway, I was always fascinated with the stories of passwords, secrets and the mob, the criminal empires...and the FBI, Bonnie and Clyde, Eliot Ness and The Untouchables. Right up your alley, I think.”
“I believe it’s changed a bit since those days.”
“But the fight for right goes on,” Mort said.
“Yep—and, time and time again, they get the bad guy through the IRS.”
Mort smiled. “I don’t believe that for a minute. Anyway, we were just devastated by what happened here. To think that it might have happened again, and again...” He shook his head. “May I get you something? We have a full bar. Of course, you’re working. We have anything you can imagine, lots of taps...oh! We brew our own root beer.”
“I would love a glass of your root beer,” Avalon said, causing the man to beam.
He had workers on, preparing for the night. But he walked behind the bar himself, pouring them two glasses of the house root beer.
“Come on over to a well-darkened corner—we’ll talk,” Mort said.
They followed him to a corner that was indeed dimly lit.
“This root beer is delicious,” Avalon assured him.
He smiled. When he sat, he grew serious. “It looked as if that poor woman was coming here—from the picture they sent out. I mean, the papers carried the fact that she’d been... I guess gnawed on and decomposed and...well, anyway, I studied the sketch from the police artist over and over. I never saw her in here. We went through all our employees, and everyone who wandered in here during the next weeks. I think it’s so heartbreaking that her picture went out there, and she...well, she just wound up being an unknown, though the community here got together and she’s in the local cemetery, in one of the society tombs. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... She was halfway there before she was interred, from what the police said to me. They never found out where her costume came from. They never figured out anything much, though, don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the police. Someone killed that little girl and she wound up in our bayou.”
“You’d never seen her here, and no one here claimed to have seen her before?”
“No,” he said quietly. “I have a lot of customers from this region. And when they all say that they haven’t seen a woman, I believe that they haven’t seen a woman. You’d think that someone would speak up if they knew something. But the thing is, she was dressed up just like a young person on a Friday or Saturday night. Not so much during the workweek, but on Friday and Saturday nights, people like to playact.”
“I heard you almost closed the place,” Fin said.
Mort Jones nodded solemnly, shaking his head. “I got a daughter that age. She’s up in NYC going to school—she likes it up there. She may come back, and she might not, and that will be her choice. Thing is, I love my girl no matter what her decisions might be. Somewhere out there, someone loved that poor girl, too. We can’t find them—that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. And I couldn’t begin to imagine something like that happening to my daughter. Poor thing—made her call me every single night for ages after it happened. But she’s a good girl. Lost her mom about a decade back and she makes sure that she comes back to bring me her love and make sure I’m not feeling like I’m alone.”
“She sounds lovely,” Avalon said.
“Absolutely,” Fin agreed.
“Anyway, I got talked out of closing. The place had kind of been a dream of mine. And now it does well, I see my friends all the time, they encourage me...it’s good.”
“That’s great,” Fin told him. “I hear you have musical acts in here, too. We were just meeting with Paul McMasters. He was telling us how he played here when he was starting out.”
“That’s right,” Jones said, nodding with approval. “They’re not quite my type of music—I like the crooners, guys like Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and the Four Seasons. They were okay. But I like Paul McMasters, and I know he’s a talented fellow. I want to entertain the customers here, not myself. Anyway, yeah, he played here—and he’s going to do some kind of special event for me. People will come from miles and miles around and it will be ticketed and...well, it will probably pay the bills for a year.” He looked at Avalon. “But you were in that video he did, weren’t you? Miss Morgan, you gave that video something that far surpassed the music!”
“That’s very sweet of you.”
Fin pulled out his phone and showed the man a likeness of Julian Bennett. “This man comes around here, too, right?”
“Julian? Sure, he’s from Baton Rouge. He’s come down often enough. And I think he’s friends with McMasters. Why?”
“Before or after the woman was found in the bayou?”
“I’m not so good with time.” He shook his head. “Thinking about that poor woman. What is wrong with people?” he asked softly. “I think they believed, in the end, she had a date. And they were probably coming here, but something went wrong between them. A lovers’ quarrel. And he killed her and tried to bury her on the embankment, and the water and earth encroached and...and well, she was found weeks after her death.”
“We don’t think that this was a lovers’ quarrel,” Fin said.
“You think that she was...oh! Dressed like a flapper. Maybe she was killed and...” He broke off, shaking his head again. “You think they meant for her to be found here? Like the woman on Christy Island? But something happened,” he said.
“Do you know where she was found?”
“Down the bayou, southward,” he said. “But in the time since she was killed and then found, the body could have shifted a lot. She might have been near here, and someone might have shown up.”
“What time do you close the bar?” Fin asked him.
“Two o’clock is official. I’m around, and some of my bartenders, for a while after. Sometimes, people stay a bit later—they tend to be friends, and if they’re not, they become friends.” He gave them a weak smile. “This is supposed to be a great place in town to work. Good music, good food and my people get discounts on food and drink when they’re off work.” He sighed.
Fin noticed as someone else came down the steps to the Speakeasy. The man was tall and lean with dark hair with a curl over his forehead. Like Mort, he was wearing trousers with suspenders and a fedora.
He nodded at Fin, coming toward him. “You’re the law, right? On that poor girl?”
“Yes.”
“This is Special Agent Finley Stirling,” Mort said as Fin rose to shake hands with the newcomer. “And Miss Avalon Morgan. Sir, miss, please meet Casey Gr
anger, my head bartender.”
“You know, I didn’t think a thing of it until now,” Casey said. “But it would have been right about a couple of weeks before that poor girl was found. Didn’t occur to me then—they thought that she’d been killed some distance from here. But...”
“But, what? Come on, Casey, spit it out!” Mort said.
“Well, I stayed late. I thought I heard something down by the docks. We keep a shotgun out here—we’re a distance from the big-city lights, you know. I went out with the shotgun and I thought I heard people scurrying away. Thought it was teenagers, or some idiot drunk up to no good. So I went all the way down to the dock, but all that was there was Mort’s little motorboat. I stayed a while, watching. Then Trina—she’s a local liquor salesperson—came in. I hadn’t realized just how late it was...or how early it was. She had an appointment with Mort that morning and Mort showed up right after. But I checked out that path and the boat dock with that shotgun. Whoever had been there—and I know someone was there—skedaddled. I don’t think of myself as being threatening, but a shotgun can do the trick.”
He stared at them all in wonder, then winced and shook his head. “It never occurred to me...and now it does,” he added softly. “I might have been there. I might have...stopped what happened to that poor girl.”
Fin stood. “No, you couldn’t have stopped them. She was dead before they came here. You might have prevented them from going through with their full plan. You did what you could, and there was no reason you would have thought to go after them.”
“Them. More than one,” Mort said.
“We believe that the care necessary to display the victims requires more than one person,” Fin said. “If you had come upon them and not known what you were up against...well, as I said. The way they work, we believe she would have been dead. But it’s helpful that you heard what you did, and that we know you went out with that shotgun,” Fin said. “Do you remember anyone unusual who was around in the time right before that night? Or who was around more than usual?”
Casey looked thoughtful, but shook his head.
“What about any members of that rock band—Pauly’s Pariah?” Mort asked, scratching his head as he also tried to recall.
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