“This is not a neighborhood for you to be wandering around after dark,” he’d scolded.
“I’m sure I’m safe here with you,” I countered.
“What if I hadn’t been able to get here?”
“I would have asked the bartender to call a cab for me when I was ready to leave.”
He shook his head. “I can’t get used to these modem independent women,” he said, giving me a wan smile. “I was raised to look after females, open doors for them, worry about their safety.”
“I still like to have doors opened for me,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me any more than you would your male friends.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” He took a sip of his beer, studied me over the rim of the glass, and said, “The word came down from the top.”
“What word?” I asked.
“To close the case. It came straight from the superintendent, who got it from the mayor.”
“Amadour himself?”
“Sounds that way.”
“Well, that’s a surprise, isn’t it?”
“I knew it had to be something like that,” he said. “Everyone hopped to it so quickly. It couldn’t have been a decision made in the district. It had to come from higher up. And it came from as high up as you can go.”
I wondered what the mayor’s rationale might have been. He had close ties with Wayne’s sister. Was he protecting Clarice again, as he had when he cautioned me not to tell her about my suspicions? And why? Did he not want her to know that Wayne might have been murdered? Or did he suspect she might have a motive for killing him herself?
“Listen,” Steppe said, “I’m exhausted. They’ve got me running around like a headless chicken. What are we doing here? You’re not planning a trip to the cemetery tonight, are you?”
“No, but Wayne may have been here before his trip,” I said, explaining about finding the matchbook among Wayne’s personal items. “Didn’t you see it?”
“I knew there was a matchbook,” he said. “I saw it when one of the other guys emptied Copely’s pockets into the evidence bag.” He shrugged. “I figured I had time to examine all his stuff later on. After the ruling, I went to find the evidence bag, but it had already been sent to the mortuary with the body.”
1 looked around the pub. It was definitely not one of New Orleans’s more elegant establishments. The smell of spilled beer and stale cigarettes pervaded the air, and the room was dimly lit, except for the area behind the bar. It would have been easy to miss a customer, especially if there had been a crowd on Friday night. We approached the bartender. Was he on duty last Friday night? Yes. Did he recognize this man? I showed him the picture of Wayne that had been in the Times-Picayune.
The bartender studied the photograph and rubbed his chin. “I might have seen him.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“We don’t get a lot of Anglos in here,” he said drolly. “I was on the late shift. Seems I remember two white guys. They left shortly after I came on.”
“What time would that be?” Steppe asked.
“Around midnight.”
“What did the other man look like?” I asked.
“Medium height, jeans, T-shirt, baseball hat.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about them?” I asked. “Were they arguing? Did they seem angry with each other?”
“Just the opposite, I’d say. Your friend here was pretty drunk,” he said, tapping Wayne’s picture. “He could barely stand up. His buddy had his arm around him and helped him out.”
“You’re sure it was this man?” I asked.
“Short guy, shaved head. Yeah, it was him.”
“Just great,” Steppe muttered on the way back to my hotel. “He was drunk. Maybe he did stumble on a rattler and get himself killed.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Wayne didn’t drink.”
“Well, he did Friday night,” he said, yawning, as we pulled up in front of the Royal.
“The bartender didn’t come on duty till midnight,” I said. “He never actually saw Wayne drinking, just saw the effects of what he thought was alcohol. Maybe Wayne was drugged. When do you get the toxicology reports back?”
“That’s a real long shot,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m bushed. Can we talk about this in the morning? Why don’t I come by about seven. I’ll buy you coffee and we can go over everything we’ve got.”
The red light was flashing on my telephone when I entered my room. It was Doris reminding me she would need the dictating machine back in the morning. Hers was the only call. So far, I hadn’t received any communication in response to my announcement in Charlie Gable’s column that I was pursuing the recordings of Little Red LeCoeur. It was disappointing.
I took my flight bag from the closet, put it on my bed, unzipped the side compartment, and pulled out the minicassette. I plugged in the dictating machine and slipped in the tape. The high, eerie voice filled the silence, whining about Wayne never learning.
“I’ve warned you before. I know where you are, where you go. You can’t escape me now. I’ve been sharpening my blade for you.”
I took the little pad beside my phone and wrote down the full message. Something was bothering me, and it was more than the description of the torture the caller was threatening.
I listened again, cocking my head for any nuance I might have missed the first few times. My eyes fell on my flight bag. That’s it, I thought. In David Stewart’s story, the ventriloquist changed his real voice when he was working with the dummy. Had Wayne’s tormenter changed his voice? It would have been easy to record the message in advance, altering the voice, and play it into Wayne’s answering machine when he wasn’t there. I rewound the tape and pushed PLAY. This time I rotated the speed knob, slowing down the tape while the caller was speaking. With each fraction of a turn, the voice got lower and lower, until the caller drew out the words in a slow, measured beat. It was a man’s voice. It was a voice I knew.
Chapter Nineteen
Steppe called early Wednesday morning to cancel our appointment. He was exasperated. The department was sending him to a conference in Baton Rouge, and he wouldn’t be back till Friday.
“Never went to one of these things before,” he complained. “Seems to me they’re trying to get me out of town.”
We agreed he would call and leave his telephone number while I was at the mayor’s party, and we would confer after the funeral Thursday when he had a break in his schedule. We hung up, and I thought about Steppe’s suspicions. If the mayor and the police department didn’t want Wayne’s death investigated, he might be right; they could be moving him out of the picture. What will they do about me? I wondered.
The sky was overcast when I exited the lobby of the Royal Hotel. The lowering clouds and the still air increased the impact of the humidity, making it feel even hotter than the ninety-degree temperature registered on the thermometer. True to their word, Beatrice and Napoleon occupied the driver’s bench of the white carriage parked in front of my hotel. They sat, heads together, speaking quietly. Spying me, Beatrice put on her top hat and straightened her white sundress. Napoleon had forsaken any part of his clown costume, and wore baggy khaki pants and a Little Red LeCoeur T-shirt. How appropriate, I thought. He’d fitted a baseball cap over his black curls, and turned the brim to the back.
“Where are we off to today, Mrs. Fletcher?” he asked as he handed me into the carriage.
“That depends on how good your map-reading skills are,” I said, unfolding the crude chart I’d found among Wayne’s papers.
Napoleon glanced at the map and started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“We’re vibrating together, you and me. You asked if I knew about Little Red LeCoeur, and his recordings.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I know someone who does.”
“In the French Quarter?”
“No, ma’am, but not too far.”
; “And who would that be?”
He grinned. “Can’t tell you just yet.”
“Is this a map to where this person lives?”
He nodded.
“Do you know how to get there?”
He looked down at the map and nodded again.
“Do you think this person would talk to me?”
“Just leave it to me, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat next to Beatrice. He whispered something to her, and she slapped the reins on Keats’s rump and we moved out into the line of taxis and other traffic attempting to negotiate the French Quarter. Napoleon pulled a cellular phone from his front pocket and punched in a number. His voice was too low for me to hear, but he seemed satisfied with the conversation.
I smoothed out the folds of the blue paper on my lap and studied the abbreviations and initials along the network of lines that filled the page, trying to decipher what Napoleon had seen so easily. But my knowledge of places in New Orleans, much less outside the city, was limited, and the map kept its secrets from me.
Sometime later, Beatrice pulled on the reins and Keats came to a stop on the levee along Lake Pontchartrain. Napoleon hopped off the driver’s bench and held out his hand for me.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“There are no roads where you want to go,” he replied. “We have to take a boat.” He pointed to a flat-bottomed touring craft with rows of four seats across the beam, tied up at a terraced concrete seawall. “I need some money,” he said apologetically. “We have to pay the captain.”
While Napoleon negotiated with the “captain,” a boy of about sixteen, I experience a twinge of trepidation that I had put myself into the hands of all these youngsters. But the boat looked sturdy enough, bobbing up and down as the wake made by larger vessels on the water reached the wall.
“Okay, we’re set to go,” Napoleon told me. “Beatrice will meet us when we get back.”
The young captain, whose sea legs were better than mine, stood in the center of the boat and rode out the swells. He grasped my left hand and Napoleon took my right, and they guided me to the closest seat.
“I forgot to tell you when you called, if I don’t get this back by two, my father will kill me,” the captain told Napoleon. “He’s got a tour group this afternoon.”
“No sweat. We’ve got lots of time.”
Napoleon dropped into the seat next to mine, and the young helmsman untied the lines and pushed off from the wall. He walked to the front of the boat, picked up two orange life vests, and dropped them at our feet. I struggled into mine, but Napoleon left his on the floor. We moved away from the concrete mooring slowly, but once clear of it, the captain opened the throttle. The wind whipped my hair and stung my eyes as the boat flew across the choppy water of the silver lake, and I put on my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the airstream. We cut across the wake of a yacht, and our boat tipped up in the air and slammed down in the water, spray rising on both sides of the bow and raining down on us. My arms were covered with water droplets, and tiny dark spots appeared on the parts of my blue blouse not covered by the life jacket.
“Can you get him to slow down?” I shouted to Napoleon, who was leaning back in his seat with both arms stretched along the tops of the adjacent chairs.
“What?” he yelled back.
I shouted my request again, and he reluctantly turned around and motioned to the captain.
At a slightly reduced speed, I began to enjoy being on the lake, although our competition for the right of way was daunting. Speedboats, sailboats, slower-moving tugboats, and fishing boats moved at various angles across the water, with no stoplights or yield signs to control the traffic. Fortunately, our young captain seemed to know the lay of the lake, and we zipped along, slowing down only when its breadth began to narrow. Ahead of us was a marina. We bypassed the piers and, instead, turned into a wide bayou.
Immediately, the air was still, thick with humidity and the sounds of insects and birds in the trees lining the waterway. Our captain chose a smaller branch and we glided up the stream, disturbing a great blue heron, which lifted into the air at our approach, its six-foot wing span creating a fleeting shadow over the boat. The water was dark, covered with patches of green algae, and the tupelo, gum, and cypress trees pressed in on us until there was no longer a distinct shoreline; we were surrounded by water and woods. There wasn’t a sign of civilization until the captain rounded a curve to bring us to a rickety dock balanced on long poles sunk into the murky water. Tied up beneath the wooden platform was a small red pirogue, a Louisiana canoe.
“I’ll wait two hours,” the captain told Napoleon. “After that, I’m gone, so you better be here.”
“No problem,” Napoleon replied. As our boat knocked against one of the pilings, he leaned over, grabbed the rope that tied the smaller vessel, and pulled it toward him. “You can leave the life jacket here, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said. “You can stand up in this water, although I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Why not?”
“Leeches,” he replied. “Snakes, frogs, alligators. Lots of wildlife lives in this soup.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.
“You might want this,” he added, tossing me an aerosol can of insect repellent. I took his advice and sprayed my exposed skin.
The captain took the rope from Napoleon and held the canoe steady while we stepped into it. There was not a lot of room for both of us. Napoleon sat in the stem. I sat in the bow, facing him. Our knees were barely two feet apart. He pulled a paddle out from under the seats, pushed it against the bigger boat until he had room to maneuver, and aimed the bow into the woods. In minutes, I could no longer see the tourist boat and the dock it was tied to.
We paddled for what seemed a long spell, passing live oaks, black gums, and swamp maples. Several times I heard gurgles, and saw the surface of the water move, ripples growing out from where some creature had submerged itself, or a faint wake where another glided out of sight behind a tree. A low grunt echoed in the woods.
“That’s a bull alligator,” Napoleon told me, pointing out the log-like back of one of its kin drifting away from our boat.
We brushed away strands of Spanish moss that hung down from the trees, and swatted at flies buzzing around our heads in the steamy heat. We pushed through weeds and bumped against Cypress knees, the tree’s roots that grow into the air about the base of the trunk and are believed to help the Cypress breathe. The boat was small and easy for Napoleon to handle in the tangled growth of the swamp. I tried to see what markers were guiding him, but he was reading a language I’d never learned.
The clouds above darkened, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Perhaps a break in the drought was near. I hoped we wouldn’t get caught in a storm in the swamp. Napoleon aimed at a place where the woods deepened, and we found ourselves in a daytime twilight, the water black, with gray mist hovering above its surface.
“We’re here,” he said softly.
I turned and could barely make out through the mist a cabin perched on stilts. A tin roof covered the small house that had siding cut from logs, a thin layer of bark still clinging to the boards like crust on a piece of bread. There was one window, and a lantern was placed on the sill. Napoleon tied the pirogue at the bottom of steps leading up to a small porch, and we climbed out.
“Missus,” he called out. “We’re here.”
I looked at Napoleon. “Is someone expecting us?”
“I asked him to bring you here,” said a tall woman, who stood silhouetted in the cabin door.
I looked at Napoleon. “She asked you to bring me here?”
He had the grace to look abashed. “I’ll wait out here,” he said, shrugging.
“Napoleon told me what you said in the newspaper,” the woman said, beckoning me inside. “I’m Sarah Williams. Elijah was my husband.”
Mrs. Williams closed the screen door and invited me to sit on the only chair in the room. A handsome woman with strong fe
atures and dark brown skin, she was dressed all in black, and wore a white turban that covered her hair except for a few stray gray curls that showed at her temples. She sat down on a thin mattress that had been set on a platform to serve as both bed and couch. It was covered with colorful fabrics and half a dozen pillows.
“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Williams.”
“He was a good man.” She looked at me with sad eyes.
“I’m a widow myself,” I volunteered.
“Then you know.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
We sat silently for a moment before she asked if I’d like some tea.
“Only if you’re having some yourself,” I replied.
She rose and filled a kettle from a gallon jug. One corner of the room had been made into an efficiency kitchen with a tiny sink, hotplate, and shelves holding boxes of foodstuff, canned goods, and dishes. Jugs of water sat on the floor. While she busied herself with the preparations, I took in the rest of her surroundings.
The room was cramped but furnished with more than just the simple basics someone would need to live. Beautifully patterned fabrics were draped from the walls and reached to the floor, probably concealing storage. Two polished maple dressers sat side by side. One held a stack of books, along with an elaborate metal triptych serving as an altar, in front of which were arranged multicolored candles, two crosses, and bowls of bones, herbs, and powdered substances I couldn’t identify. A small oriental rug hung on the wall above the altar. Fastened to it were Mardi Gras masks made of feathers and ebony African masks. On top of the other dresser, glass canisters were filled with a jumble of everyday items—packets of tissues, a hairbrush and comb, pads of paper, lipsticks, individually wrapped mints, pens, coins, soaps, candles, matches—each in its separate container. A mirror hung on the wall above the canisters with more than a dozen photographs stuck in its frame. They were of Elijah and fishermen he’d guided.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her back to me.
“I must admit, I didn’t know it was you I was meeting,” I said. “Napoleon didn’t tell me.”
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