A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “Big Easy, my ass,” I moaned.

  “It’s just the humidity,” Daniel said as he hoisted Bella’s backpack onto his shoulder. Behind him, waves of heat rose from the street. “We’ll adapt, I’m sure.”

  Bella smiled with wicked pride, as if to warn me against trying to ruin her good time. I could’ve sworn she went humph.

  Up St. Charles, a big green Cadillac, one Detroit hadn’t produced in about 50 years, shone in the sun, its broad, arched hood glowing, its wide grille sparkling like the teeth of a cynical beast.

  “Elvis lives,” Diddio said, nodding toward the Caddy as it inched forward. He trailed Julie, Daniel and my daughter as they sought the lobby’s air-conditioning.

  A short, sinewy black man in a black jacket, cream-colored shirt and black bow tie came out of the driver’s seat and into the stark sunlight.

  “Mr. Terry Orr?” he asked as he made his way around the car.

  I nodded.

  He had fierce gray eyes, and his skin was drawn tight to his skull. His bony shoulders made it seem as if the hanger was still under his jacket, and his awkward physique made it tough to pin his age. If he’d told me he was 55, I would’ve believed him. He could’ve added 15 years to that and I still would’ve.

  He seemed mildly surprised when I stuck out my hand. He shook it, but didn’t smile.

  “And you are?”

  “Willis, sir,” he replied. “Miss Mallard would enjoy a word, sir.”

  He opened the Caddy’s back door. Filling the back on the passenger’s side was a hefty woman in a fluffy pink chiffon dress and sensible white shoes. The dress’s three-quarter sleeves revealed meaty arms that overwhelmed the pearl wristlet meant to accent the white beads on her vast pink bodice. On the seat next to her was a pink hat as wide as a beach umbrella. In New Orleans, pink was the new black, at least for Ruthie Mallard.

  Under her flouncy hair, which was as dark as Diddio’s dyed mop, she had Leo’s face—sad eyes, thin lips, broad nose, an additional chin. But not his pallor: She had bright skin under a dab of makeup, which gave her a somewhat healthy glow.

  Yet despite the pink dress, the pleasant smile, her plump body as it nestled in the tufted seat, I could tell there was nothing soft about Ruthie Mallard. I made a silent wager: Within two minutes, this woman is going to tell me what to do.

  “Miss Mallard,” I said, greeting her.

  “Oh no you don’t, Terry Orr,” she replied in a high, singsong voice. “You and me, we’re family, Terry Orr. My baby brother told me all about you and so you know it’s so. You just know it’s so.”

  Oh boy.

  “Now you come on in here. Come on.” She shifted her hat to the car’s jump seat and tapped the spot next to her. “You and I, we are going to talk.”

  With Willis holding the door, I left the heat, stepped inside and sank into the gray upholstery.

  “Some car,” I said. After three hours in the sky on a barely padded wooden board, the seat felt like tub butter on my sore ass.

  “Terry Orr, this is a 1951 Cadillac Fleetwood Series Sixty Special,” she announced. “My mama bought it fresh, and baby Leo and me, we were raised in it.”

  “Is that right?” I’d been in Yugos with more efficient air conditioners.

  “Only eighteen thousand or so of them was built. Did you know that?” she added. “And I’ll bet you there ain’t but one or two left and none looking like this one here.”

  I nodded.

  “Now, tell me your plans, Terry Orr,” she said, as she shifted in the seat.

  “I don’t get you.” When I called to tell her of Leo’s death, I mentioned I’d be attending the funeral.

  “Now don’t you tell me you and your big ol’ family came all the way to Louisiana just for my baby Leo.”

  I said, “As a matter of fact, we did.”

  “For Leo?” She tilted her head. “Is that a fact?”

  “Why else?” I asked with a shrug.

  “Ain’t that the damnedest thing. Loyalty,” she mused. “I can’t say I knew my brother inspired it, but you say so, so it must be. Damn.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Well, if you find yourself with time to spare, Terry Orr, I’d say we got everything you want: casino, jazz music, good food and lots of it. You know, character, color. You go see the Garden District and you’ll find all sorts of quaint, Terry Orr, you coming from New York, Threebeca or whatever.”

  “Maybe we’ll take a tour of the bayous,” I offered. “I’ve never seen an alligator.”

  “See,” she said loudly. “That is the spirit, right there.”

  She clapped her hands as if delighted. Willis, who was standing out in the sun with his wrists crossed behind his rump, turned and, with a firm, alert expression, looked in at her. Then he returned to staring down St. Charles.

  “Spirit, yes sir,” she added.

  I smiled, nodded politely. She was playing me and doing a half-assed job of it. The Blanche Dubois-meets-Miss Daisy routine was about as broad as a vaudeville gaffe and no less obvious.

  “So, I’d say you and … and …” She stopped and gave herself a chastening tap on the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, but I do not know the name of your family members, Terry Orr.”

  “Gabriella is my daughter,” I said.

  “Gabriella,” she said. “Lovely name. Italian?”

  She said Eye-talian. “Yes.”

  “And your wife’s name?”

  “That’s not my wife,” I said, shaking my head. “Her name is Julie. And then there’s Daniel, who’s my daughter’s friend. And Dennis Diddio.”

  “Dennis Diddio,” she repeated as she put on a wide, knowing smile. “So that is my Leo’s great good friend Dennis Diddio. The one with all the …”

  She wiggled her fingers up and down near her ears, as if a long shock of black hair cascaded along the side of her head too.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She kept silent for a moment, nodding almost imperceptibly.

  “Your time is all planned out then,” she said finally.

  “More or less. I mean, my daughter has some ideas.”

  “I must tell you, Terry Orr. I must express my concern.”

  “About?” I leaned back against the door and its quarter window.

  She pointed at me. “I hear say you are some kind of private investigator …”

  I nodded, shrugged.

  “A curious kind?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you bring with you some form of curiosity that requires satisfaction, Terry Orr?”

  She kept saying my name as one, long, vaguely French word.

  “I came to say goodbye to Leo,” I said flatly.

  “And see the alligators.”

  “There’s that, yes.”

  “Because I had a fear in my mind,” she said. “A fear that tells me you might be looking for that cheap harlot who rode him for as long as he had some worth to himself.”

  Now we were getting to it.

  “See, Terry Orr, I knew my baby Leo,” she went on. “He wants her back, don’t he?”

  “I don’t get you,” I said.

  “He wants that Loretta Jones to cry over him. ‘Oh my Leo, poor Leo.’ Like that.”

  I shook my head. “Not exactly.”

  She turned her portly body toward me. “What is it then?”

  “He wants her brought to justice,” I said.

  She hesitated, then smiled. ‘“To justice’ you say? Well, if that ain’t the damnedest thing I ever heard.” She tossed her head back and let out a laugh. “Leo. My goodness.”

  I didn’t get her meaning and told her so.

  “I had it that he pined for her,” she replied.

  I said no.

  “I thought he could maybe want you to find her and drag her to the Halfway Cemetery and have her dive on top of his grave, sobbing and all,” she said.

  “So she’s here? Loretta’s in Louisiana?”

  “Not that I’ve been
told,” she replied. “And believe you me, Terry Orr, I can guarantee I would have been told.”

  I believed her. She had it out for her sister-in-law. Even the most dubious report of the harlot’s return would’ve gotten her attention.

  “No, we’re gonna leave Loretta right where she is,” Ruthie Mallard said. “Leo don’t need her no more.”

  I didn’t reply. That wasn’t what Leo wanted, and I’d just told her as much. But I figured all this foolishness was to find out if I’d brought word of Loretta with me, so I went along with it.

  “You ought to know, Miss Mallard, that your brother was paying down his debt to the IRS. Any assets Loretta’s got may—”

  “The IRS. The IRS,” she bellowed angrily. “Let the IRS, your city marshal, all of them … You know what they can do? They can follow my baby Leo down the grave and they can go get it from him there.”

  Again, the chauffeur turned to peer into the Caddy. This time he raised his hands to the car’s hot roof. I saw that he wore a shoulder holster stuffed with a snub-nosed .38.

  “Oh, I’m telling you, Terry Orr,” Ruthie said, “how they hounded that poor boy. Between them and that Loretta …” She smiled, reached over and tapped my leg. “If it wasn’t for a friend like you, I don’t think he would’ve wanted to live.”

  I was going to tell her he didn’t, but I understood the sentiment and I thanked her.

  “And as far as that harlot is concerned, she wanted to go, leave her gone.”

  She waited a second, turned and rapped the window behind her with a knuckle. Willis opened the front door on his side.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Orr is going to rejoin his caravan,” she said, grinning broadly.

  The gun-toting chauffeur peered at me over the front seat, then he turned his gaze to his employer.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He came around and opened the door to St. Charles. A blast of thick air greeted me.

  I thanked the old man and turned to Ruthie Mallard. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I told her.

  She lifted her big pink hat and, closing her eyes, calmly said, “Thank you, Terry Orr.”

  By the time I got up to the room, Daniel had my suit in the closet and my dress shoes on the side of the king-size bed.

  “You are scratching your head,” he observed.

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” The room was perfect. He’d even put my copy of Slaughter at Kinmel Hall on the nightstand.

  “The green Cadillac …”

  I said, “A quiz, Daniel.”

  He smiled as he sat on the big bed.

  “How would someone who knew me well describe me?” I asked as I ran the cold water at the sink between the rooms of the boxy suite.

  “Tall. Fit. Black hair with a little gray. Your eyes are—”

  “No, no. I mean—”

  “Oh. Your temperament?”

  “Well, how about the facts of me?”

  Daniel watched as I cupped my hands under the chilly water and splashed my face again and again. The air-conditioning worked fine, but it wasn’t enough, at least not yet.

  “You are Gabriella’s father, and you used to be a writer,” he replied when I cut the water, after running my hand along the back of my neck. “Your wife and son were taken from you.”

  “All of that before the stuff about being a private investigator?”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “Why?”

  I tossed the hand towel into the silver sink.

  “Leo’s sister knew I was a P.I. but she pretended not to know that Bella’s mother was dead.”

  He thought for a moment. “Yes, she must have been pretending. A friend of yours certainly would’ve told his sister that fact.”

  There were two tiny bottles of lukewarm Canada Dry club soda in the mini-bar. I opened one and passed it to Daniel.

  “Thank you,” he said. He took a long sip.

  I said, “The victim’s sister doesn’t want me to pursue the perpetrator of the fraud.”

  “If she is more concerned with your position as a private investigator than with your personal tragedy, I would agree.” He nodded, as he tried to hold back a curt burp.

  I pulled the bottle away from my lips. “She said ‘Eye-talian,’ Daniel.”

  The young man grimaced. “Gabriella told me that as many as forty percent of the people who live in New Orleans are of Italian descent,” he replied.

  “I believe that’s so.”

  “That was an unnecessary insult, I would say.”

  “Me too.” And condescending.

  “What will you do?” He smiled as he stood.

  “Well, Daniel, what should I do?” I had my hands on my hips, the bottle engulfed by one of my fists.

  “Exactly,” he said, beaming.

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  About the Author

  Jim Fusilli is the author of eight novels and two works of nonfiction. He also served as the rock and pop music critic of the Wall Street Journal.

  Among his novels are Closing Time, A Well-Known Secret, Tribeca Blues, and Hard, Hard City, about New York City private investigator Terry Orr and his young daughter, Bella, who Orr is raising in the aftermath of the murder of his wife and infant son. Narrows Gate is an epic set in the first half of the twentieth century in the Italian-American community of a gritty waterfront city based on Hoboken, New Jersey, Fusilli’s birthplace.

  Fusilli has published many short stories including “Chellini’s Solution,” which appeared in the 2007 edition of the Best American Mystery Stories, and “Digby, Attorney at Law,” which was nominated for the Edgar and Macavity Awards.

  In 2005, Fusilli wrote Pet Sounds, his tribute to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ classic album. Described as “an experiment in music journalism,” the book combines the rhythm and emotional weight of his fiction with the often-unorthodox observations of his music criticism for the Journal, for whom he began writing in 1983. Pet Sounds was translated to Japanese by the novelist Haruki Murakami.

  Fusilli is married to the former Diane Holuk, a senior global communications consultant. They reside in New York City. For more information, visit www.jimfusilli.com.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Jim Fusilli

  Cover design by Ian Koviak

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5388-4

  This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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