A Marked Man

by Stella Cameron

  Cyrus found Jilly watching him, her expression horrified. He couldn’t make himself say a word.

  Sidney stood beside Jilly and he thought her eyes filled with tears.

  “And like I said,” Lil added. “There’s another one. That Guy livin’ off Jilly. Me, I want to know what he does up there. Watch the television and sleep, I shouldn’t wonder. He’s even managed to lose his best friend.”

  Lee said, “What do you mean?” as if she weren’t particularly interested in the response.

  “Hush up,” Doll whispered harshly.

  “You know Nat Archer,” Lil said, ignoring Doll’s warning. “He and Wazoo got something goin’. Nat won’t have nothin’ to do with Guy anymore since he stayed here with his feet dry in Katrina. He knew he should have been back in uniform on the streets of New Orleans, him.”

  “Get out, you liar,” Jilly said, her voice clear and steady. “Get out and never come back.”

  Cyrus jumped to his feet and hurried to meet Jilly as she came from behind the counter. “Hush,” he said, holding her shoulders. “She doesn’t know what she’s sayin’.”

  The cruiser moved away and Guy ran back upstairs without looking into the shop. His face was set. The rest had dispersed.

  “Yes,” Jilly said. “Lil knows exactly what she’s talkin’ about. And if she says it anywhere ever again, and I find out, I’ll sue.”

  “And Mr. Guy was down there in the water helpin’ people till he couldn’t move no more,” Sidney said. “Days, he did it. And the sheriff and most the men in Toussaint. Mr. Guy, he just didn’t do it with a NOPD badge is all.”

  “You go ahead Jilly. You pull the wool over your eyes and pretend.” Lil pointed at Sidney. “And customers don’t like bein’ waited on by trash, remember that.”

  “We’re leaving,” Cyrus told Lil. “Now.” He took her by the elbow and led her firmly from the shop.

  “Oh,” Sidney said. “She isn’t gonna lose her job, is she?”

  “I’m sorry, Jilly,” Doll Hibbs said. “I shoulda put a stop to what she was sayin’ but I…well, I just got carried away by it all, I suppose.”

  Jilly hugged Sidney and said. “Father will do the right thing. He always does.” But if Lil lets her poisonous gossip get to Guy, Jilly would make sure she suffered.

  Lee O’Brien stood quietly, looking at the floor.

  “Lee,” Jilly said. “I like you and I hope you’ll do the right thing and leave all this out of the paper.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Business hummed at Pappy’s.

  Annie went over her numbers for the past month and felt good about the performance. Pappy still kept a close watch on what happened at the dance hall and eatery. He had just about lived in this office when he’d been completely at the reins. Most of his time was spent at home with his wife these days but he had a twin computer to the one that stood on Annie’s desk and if she didn’t get reports to him when they were expected, e-mail shot her way.

  She flipped through a series of screens. The Swamp Doggies, a local band and great favorite at Pappy’s, segued into “Toussaint Nights” and Annie smiled. Cheering broke out on cue and she heard the fiddle of Vince Fox racing away with the melody.

  So why did she feel so bad? Because she hadn’t seen Max in days–and she had never felt quite so alone. Each day she got to work early and stayed until the night manager, Jim Broussard, arrived in the early evening. When he was off, she stayed late into the night. Annie picked up a pencil by its worn-down eraser and doodled lightly over the top of a folder. Jim was due in tonight but she wished he weren’t because she didn’t want to go home.

  Each day she made excuses to go in and out of her office at the time when Max used to come in. Only he didn’t come in anymore and she’d known he wouldn’t.

  This place was her future. This was where she had the chance she’d hoped for, and she couldn’t blow it.

  A tap on the door and Wazoo stuck her head into the cramped room. With her hair up and tamed behind two shiny black combs, she looked different, and she looked sexy.

  “Me, I can go away again if you don’t want to see me.”

  “Wazoo sounding humble?” Annie said. “Well, what have you been mixing with your comfrey coolers?”

  Sucking in one cheek, Wazoo slipped into the room and closed the door firmly. “You better watch how you talk to me, you. I had to make up my mind to do what I don’t do natural. Me, I come here to help.”

  Annie plopped her bare feet on the desk. Her shoes had become too warm hours ago. By choice she would wiggle her naked toes in the air at all times. “Thank you,” she said and glanced off at her screen. “I think you’re helpful all the time, you just don’t want to get the reputation for being soft.”

  “Anyone been in here to tell you about what happened?” Wazoo asked.

  She got Annie’s full attention. “What?” Her midsection did a nasty little flip. “Have they found Michele?” She already knew the answer but had to ask.

  Wazoo sat on Annie’s desk and wrapped her skirts around her legs. She shook her head, no. “Doll Hibbs is upset,” Wazoo said. “Me, I’m tellin’ you because I never saw her this upset before. Whole town went up this afternoon.”

  Annie stood up.

  “Right there in Jilly’s place. Big fight. Big fight. Bet you never heard of Tom Walen.”

  “I never did,” Annie said, wanting to hurry Wazoo but too familiar with what could happen if she tried. This lady could make an art form of spinning out conversations.

  “He’s engaged to Michele Riley,” Wazoo said. “He come lookin’ for her.”

  “Oh.” Annie went back to her chair and slumped. “That makes me feel awful just to think about it. Poor man.”

  “Mad man, if you listen to Doll. Come into Jilly’s with steam comin’ outa his ears and lookin’ for Max.” Wazoo’s tilted black eyes turned mournful. “You gonna need my help, girl. You both gonna need it.” Fumbling around she pulled a soft cloth bag from a deep pocket in her red-and-black striped skirt. “I gotta be around that Max more. Figure him out. At Rosebank, could be. Or could be not. Could be he dangerous to care about.”

  “Wazoo,” Annie moaned. “Just give me the high points.”

  “Low points, you mean,” Wazoo said, holding out the bag. “You put this away somewhere it’ll never be found by anyone but you. Understand? If you need to do somethin’ about it, we’ll know. How about you put that in your purse?”

  Made of brown cotton, a black cord tied the bag tightly shut at the top. The contents were lumpy.

  Annie sighed. “I don’t think I want this.”

  “You don’t know if you do or not, cher. Do what Wazoo tells you. And don’t you open it. That’s a bad idea.” She shoved it into Annie’s hands. “Cyrus and Joe Gable was at All Tarted Up havin’ coffee. Max Savage and his brothers was there, too. In comes Tom Walen—Doll said all this to me—and he thinks Max did somethin’ to Michele so there was a fight. He said other stuff about Max, too. Ended up outside and Spike took the two of them off in his car.”

  “Max?” Annie blinked rapidly. She sniffed the bag absently. “Spike arrested Max?”

  Wazoo shrugged and jumped from the desk. “I never said that word. Arrested. Spike, and Guy Gautreaux, Joe Gable and a bunch of other guys had to separate them two so Spike could take ’em off. Probably decided a chat would do for now. He can throw them in jail later.”

  Annie drummed her fingers on the desk. “Is Max still there with Spike?” She kept hearing his angry accusations before he walked out of her apartment the last time.

  “I heard he took off with his brothers but this Tom Walen still wants to kill him.”

  “Oh,” Annie said, miserable.

  “I’ve decided you stay away from that man, Max, you,” Wazoo said. “I’m not sayin’ he’s a bad man but we don’t know and you already got trouble. He’s got trouble, too, but he’s hard to help. Too much anger in him—maybe enough he could kill. You hear from that Bobby man again
?”

  “No,” Annie said, wishing Wazoo wouldn’t make her think about things she’d rather forget.

  “You will.”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “I think he saw me one day and got curious about what I was doing. So he decided to look me up. He won’t be back.” She wanted to believe it.

  Wazoo twitched her skirts back and forth. “You have more bad dreams?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You did have more bad dreams.”

  “Not exactly,” Annie told her. “Impressions. That’s what I’d call them. But not nightmares.” She would never tell Wazoo the last things she’d seen. The memory of Max’s reaction to her confession still stung. He thought she’d made it all up…. She stared at Wazoo. How could he believe she’d be that cruel?

  “Say what you thinkin’,” Wazoo said softly, crooking a finger. “Let it come out. I see it in you.”

  “I don’t think anything.” But she did. Max’s reaction, the way he’d lashed out, had been everything to do with his anger at her. She had shocked him. But she didn’t know how she found out the names of the dead women. Max would think she’d dug around and found out the details. She’d looked at the computer and thought about it many times. If she dared, she might do it, but she couldn’t face what she might discover.

  “Listen to Wazoo. Be careful. Watch who is around you. I don’t know where the evil will come from, but it will come. Don’t be alone.”

  “I have to be alone and I want to be,” Annie said. “But I love you for caring.” Even if these warnings scared her silly.

  Wazoo tossed her head. “Me, sometimes I just forget how much trouble helpin’ people can be.”

  Annie smiled. “What was Bobby Colbert wearing when he left Hungry Eyes the other night?”

  “Him, he wants you that one,” Wazoo said. “Another angry man. And jealous of you. I don’t know what he was wearing.”

  “A jacket with a hood?”

  Wazoo squinched up her face and shook her head slowly. “Maybe. It was hot. It’s always hot. Too hot for jackets. Me, I don’t know. I gotta go. I got a date.” She seemed about to say more, but gave a sharp shake of the head instead.

  “Don’t let me keep you from Nat,” Annie said.

  “You won’t.” She pointed to the brown cotton bag. “Keep that safe, you understand?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Wazoo hesitated. “You come, too. Come with me.”

  “On a date with you and Nat?” Annie laughed, dropped the bag into her voluminous purse and turned back to her computer screen. “That would be cozy.” But Wazoo’s out-of-character suggestion made her nervous.

  She didn’t look at Wazoo again but the woman hovered.

  “Maybe you need someone to look out for you,” Wazoo said. “Someone who knows what they doin’.”

  “’Bye, Wazoo. Thank you for everything. Give Nat a hug for me.”

  Wazoo snorted. “Every hug I give that man come right from me. It isn’t easy for me to say, but Guy Gautreaux is one fine damn detective and he’s for hire.”

  “Mmm,” Annie said.

  “You ignore Wazoo all you want. If one of them dreams you havin’ comes true, you’ll wish you listen to me.”

  “I can’t afford to hire a detective,” Annie told her, slowly typing “Google” in the search box. Just a little look at the Internet and she would back off, but she couldn’t keep hiding from facts she might need to know.

  “Maybe you can’t afford not to,” Wazoo said, and let herself out of the office. In seconds she looked around the door again and said, “Two things. I think I could have let Irene outside that night he went to the Gables’.”

  Annie’s heart lifted. “That’s great. I’ll tell—”

  “Please don’t tell anyone. I went in to make sure I turned off the oven. The second thing is that Lil Dupre said bad things at Jilly’s place. She got in trouble with Cyrus and poor Jilly.”

  Annie did look at Wazoo then. “What did Lil do?”

  “This and that,” Wazoo said. “She’s in a bad way, but there was no call for her to spread gossip about good people. You hear any of it, you tell ’em they mouth gonna turn inside out and rot…then fall off. They don’t die right away, but they want to.” She left again and closed the door tightly.

  Annie sighed and put the search engine to work. Max Savage, reconstructive plastic surgeon, wasn’t hard to find.

  Annie read entry after entry and printed each one out.

  Son of financier Leo Savage and publisher Claire Worth Savage. Lists of Max’s professional accomplishments with emphasis on face transplant research. Annie shuddered at that. She didn’t follow links to his many published papers.

  There was mention of twin brother, Roche, psychiatrist, also with links to published papers. Half brother, Kelly, was Leo Savage’s son by a first marriage to Julia. Apparently Kelly worked for his father’s firm. There were pictures of family members at black tie events and other shots of Max in scrubs, Max teaching, Max explaining surgical procedures. Julia, Leo Savage’s first wife, looked stunning, an exotic woman. Annie could see Kelly in her but Julia’s features were much more flamboyant. The woman stared at the camera with a sultry sneer. On the other hand, Max and Roche looked very much like their dark-haired mother. A big man, in early photos Leo had blond hair, and an autocratic face.

  Studying Max’s family and history made Annie feel like a spy.

  Max was the star, and unfortunately scandal had tarnished a lot of the shine. She skimmed entries dealing with the two women he had supposedly been the last to see alive. Looking at their names, Isabel Martin and Carol Gruber, on the screen, chilled Annie. In both cases, no hard evidence had been found to link Max to the crimes. His cars had yielded no incriminating forensic specimens, or any sign of violence having taken place.

  Annie read detailed descriptions of both deaths and exited from Google.

  Her jaw ached and her teeth would not stay together. Her body felt stiff and too hot. Every gruesome specific of the murder scenes could have been plucked from Annie’s nightmares, and her waking visions. The two women were assumed to have been snatched after Max dropped them off.

  Questions rushed at her. Had Max’s car been gone over for evidence this time, and his apartment? Did Spike think someone else had stolen Michele Riley away? If so, who? She doubted any of her ideas hadn’t already been covered.

  If Max was really being singled out for ruin by a murderous crazy, who was it? Toussaint wasn’t big enough to hide anyone for long. Strangers couldn’t get in and out without being noticed. Too many eyes belonged to too many people with time on their hands.

  She jumped when Jim Broussard knocked and came in. Olive-skinned with straight black hair and dark brown eyes, his features were sharp. He worked hard and never let her doubt that he believed making her look good was a point for him, too.

  With a hand at the back of his waist and the other held rigid against his belt buckle, he rocked his hips back and forth, and danced a mean and fancy two-step while he sang: “‘A man with a plan with a pistol in his hand, hmm, hmm, doo-doo-doo. Victims of the darkness, what can they do? Victims of the darkness, they don’t see the light.’ Dance with me, Annie. Or maybe you can’t two-step.” His grin was supposed to soften her up and it worked.

  The Doggies played the piece Jim sang and for a few minutes Annie matched him step for step, slapping her bare heels down first on the old wood floor.

  Jim turned his mouth down at the corners when the piece finished. “You surely can two-step,” he said, smiling again. He took her place behind the desk and she was grateful she had gotten rid of any evidence of what she’d been doing. “How did it go today?” he said.

  “Very well,” she told him, searching for an excuse to hang around but finding none. “It never slows down for long. Testimony to keepin’ the kitchen quality up and the comped meals down. Getting those plates out of there fast is the key to makin’ sure we aren’t paying customers’
bills for them.”

  “Yup,” Jim said, already getting into the calendar of events for the week. “Wedding reception on Saturday afternoon. That’s a good one.”

  “Sure is.” Annie slipped her feet into her sandals, gathered her purse and said, “’Bye, call if you need me,” before heading out.

  Getting through the patrons took time but meeting and greeting went with her territory.

  “Hold up, Annie.” Bobby Colbert got up from a table close to reception, a great big smile on his face. “I was afraid you might be off duty.”

  “I am,” Annie said and almost bit her tongue. “Got to get along and deal with the chores that don’t do themselves.”

  “This is a great place,” Bobby said. He wore a brown silk shirt the same color as his eyes and she could smell his cologne. “Not that I’d expect you to run a place that wasn’t great.”

  “Thanks. Sit down. Your meal will get cold.”

  “Sit down with me.” He looked around. “I’ll get you a drink. Have you had dinner?”

  Escape was all she wanted. “Not tonight, Bobby, but thanks for the offer.”

  The smile left his mouth. “Better things to do?”

  Annie stared straight into his eyes. “No. Other things to do. Thanks, though.”

  He narrowed his eyes and she thought he would keep pushing her, but he sat down instead, pushed his plate aside and rested his chin on cupped hands.

  “’Night,” Annie said and walked away.

  She didn’t hear any answer.

  At last she passed Blue the alligator and used a shoulder to open one of the swinging doors to the outside and the covered bridge over the shallow ravine that stretched a short distance in front of Pappy’s.

  Annie stood to one side of the door, chasing thoughts around in her head. There was something she had to do—sooner or later but not when it would soon be getting dark. She wouldn’t dwell on it, or even let the idea stick.