Louisiana Lament

by Julie Smith

  He had the grace to look ashamed. “Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.” He nodded briskly every time he said “right.” “We’re just taking the day off, that’s all—in memory of old Hunt. Tomorrow, it’s business as usual. I’m going back to run the fucking bait hut, and Rashad’s taking over here as poet-in-residence.”

  Rashad laughed. “Caretaker. Arnelle’s hiring me to keep Austin out of here.”

  “Problem is,” Talba said, “I’m here today. Think you could summon up a lucid three seconds?”

  Rashad snapped his fingers. “Madison. Hey, man—Madison!” He was lapsing into the kind of talk his Aunt Felicia’d probably washed his mouth out with soap for. “Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya. It’s Madison, man.”

  “What, exactly, is Madison?”

  “Kerry’s name. Name’s Madison, man.”

  Talba rolled her eyes at Austin. “I’m calling his aunt and your sister.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Rashad said, and started laughing uncontrollably.

  Austin stared at him and shrugged. He seemed perfectly in control. “It was pretty high-quality shit,” he said apologetically.

  “Forget Arnelle, I’m calling Angie. Rashad, Janessa sends her love.”

  “Yeah, man, I love her, too.”

  As she always did, Talba had made a formal file when she backgrounded Lynne and Hunt Montjoy, which she now hurried back to consult. Though it wouldn’t include Lynne’s maiden name, it would include her full name, and “Madison” might be in it.

  It wasn’t, though. But that didn’t mean anything.

  She could have stopped to background Kerry, but she was in way too much of a hurry. She simply thought up a quick pretext, dialed the Montjoy home, and asked if Kerry Madison was staying there.

  “This is Kerry,” said a dubious-sounding young voice.

  Talba forgot about the pretext. “Kerry, my name’s Talba Wallis and I’m a private investigator. I have evidence your uncle may have been murdered. I wonder if you could give me a few minutes?”

  “Uh, shouldn’t the police… um…”

  Talba could have kicked herself. “Look, Kerry, it’s a whole long story. I work for E.V. Anthony Investigations—if you’ve got a phone book, turn to it, okay? See us there? Old, distinguished firm. And you can meet me at the office, so you’ll know I’m legitimate.”

  She spoke without confidence. Even as the words poured out, she knew she was leaving out the thing Eddie had always taught her she needed most—a good reason for Kerry to help her, a motive, so to speak. She took a chance. “I know the guy was an asshole, and I know something bad went down between you. But there might be somebody worse out there, that’s what I’m worried about.” Like maybe your aunt. “We really need to talk.”

  “How do you know..? Um, well…I’m leaving in about an hour.”

  “Perfect. I’ll take you to the airport.” And you can be grateful and spill your guts.

  “Um…”

  The girl wasn’t too quick, that was obvious.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Wait! My mother’s here. I can’t just…”

  “Right. Say Rashad’s coming to get you. She’ll buy that.”

  “Oh, Lord, if she ever hated anybody…”

  “Doesn’t matter. She’ll buy it.” Talba looked at her watch. “Noon straight up.”

  ***

  The girl who came out the door carried a blue duffel that looked only about half full. She must have come just for the memorial service, though Talba hadn’t seen her there. She was average height, maybe a little heavy, and pale. A white, white, white chick, saved from total blandness by magenta-colored hair and purple lipstick that, unfortunately, bleached her out even further. She looked scared to death, which was good. Scared Talba could deal with.

  She got out of the car and reached for the duffel. “Hey, girlfriend, this all you got?”

  The girl stopped dead in her tracks. “I know who you are!”

  “Uh-oh. Caught me peeping at a keyhole?”

  “You’re the Baroness de Pontalba.”

  Talba executed her Baroness curtsy. “The Baroness myself thanks you for flying Air Poetica. Our cruising altitude will be roughly sea level, or a little below, with a complimentary stop for coffee if you should so desire.” She opened the door and ushered in the passenger.

  The girl slid in and turned to her, staring. “I’ve heard you read three times.”

  Talba fired up the Isuzu. “Oh, really? I’m surprised your uncle allowed it. But then, why not? He pretty much thought I didn’t exist.”

  “No he didn’t. He thought you were probably the worst poet in America.”

  Talba smiled. “Sounds right.”

  “But then that’s what he said about everybody. As long as they were female.”

  “Or black.”

  The girl shrugged. “He never complained about Langston Hughes.”

  Talba laughed and Kerry, once she was sure how Talba was going to take it, joined in.

  Evidently, she wasn’t half as dumb as she’d appeared on the phone.

  “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your name on the phone. I’m not sure I ever even knew it.”

  “And why should you? For that matter, why should you have even heard me read?”

  “Oh, I’m… well, I’m doing my dissertation on contemporary African-American female poets and the spoken idiom, that… oh, never mind. My boyfriend calls it ‘Black Chicks with Chops.’ You get the idea.”

  Talba was getting more than one idea, and it was amusing her no end. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Am I in somebody’s dissertation?”

  The purple-lipped girl turned to her in astonishment. “You’re in lots of people’s dissertations—didn’t you know that? You’re a cultural icon.”

  It was true that Talba had had a small volume published by a hip-lit press a few years ago, but it was so supremely obscure, the first and only printing so minuscule, that she could no longer even find used copies. If she was a cultural icon, the culture that had elevated her had to be as obscure and attenuated as the volume itself.

  “Little moi?” she said. “Surely you jest.”

  That sent Kerry into a fit of the giggles. “Some tough black babe.”

  “I,” said Talba grandly, “am a Baroness. In case you haven’t heard. Are you a poet, too? Is that why you chose that subject?” They were approaching I-10 and the last thing Talba wanted was for Kerry to get over the novelty of having a subject of her dissertation drive her to the airport.

  The girl colored, creating a Barbie-pink flush that clashed with her hair and lips, which fought with each other as well. “Hunt didn’t think so,” Kerry said. “Bastard! But I hate his kind of poet. I can’t stand those whitey snots who just move their cracker mouths in a phony-ass monotone. Like they all think they’re T. S. Eliot or something. What I like about black poetry is the performance. The vigor! The passion!

  “By the way…” her flush deepened “…you’re a fantastic performer.”

  “Thanks.” Talba gave her her Baroness smile, mostly generous and gracious, yet slightly condescending due to her rank. “I mean it’s a little… with your uncle and all… he never even noticed poets like me….”

  “Oh, he noticed. Believe me, he noticed. He was just a small-minded, jealous, supremely insecure, pathetic asshole bastard sonofabitch. Couldn’t even get it up most of the time.”

  Talba raised an eyebrow. “And you would know, I hear.”

  The girl sighed. “Why do you want to hear my story?”

  “Listen, have you got time for coffee?”

  Kerry looked at her watch. “Maybe at the airport. Let’s just get there first.” She pulled out a pair of blue-purple sunglasses and put them on. Talba wasn’t sure why.

  Wanting to get Kerry into the position of owing her one, Talba steered the conversation to poetry until they were safely at the airport, even taking the unusual step—once they were in the terminal—of offering
to critique some of Kerry’s poetry. The offering part was unusual, but being asked wasn’t. She wondered why this was the first she’d heard of Kerry. “Why didn’t you get in touch before?” she asked. “If you wanted to meet me?”

  “I don’t know, I… well, actually, Hunt convinced me that would be gauche. That it was beneath a poet’s dignity to, uh…”

  “Wait a minute! He must have mentored people. Like Rashad, for instance.”

  “Rashad? ‘Mentor’ isn’t really the word I’d use. Rashad was more like Hunt’s favorite bird dog. Oh, hell, what would I know about Hunt? We hadn’t been close in a long time. I, uh…” She took off her glasses and looked at Talba through tragic dark blue eyes. “I had an affair with him. I know, I know…”

  “Kerry, I already know that. Nobody’s going to judge you for being young and stupid. We all were at one time.”

  “I was sixteen.” Her eyes overflowed.

  “Omigod.” Quickly, Talba found a restaurant, sat the girl down, and ordered coffee, regretting, under the circumstances, that it couldn’t be morphine. Sixteen, she was thinking; the daughter of his wife’s sister. What a maggot-infested rat turd. What a rare and vital specimen of the virulent evil-virus.

  But the girl wasn’t finished. “He got me pregnant.”

  “Shit!”

  She shrugged. “Well, it could have been worse. At least he paid for my abortion. Mostly.”

  Talba was getting the hang of the sunglasses. Kerry had them on now, and, although she dabbed constantly at her cheeks, at the tears flowing freely beneath them, no one could actually see her eyes. A good thing, Talba thought. She didn’t want to.

  “I don’t like the sound of that ‘mostly,’ ” she said.

  “When he gave me the money, he took it out of his wallet and counted it, and then he looked at his watch, said, ‘Almost lunchtime—I’m gonna need a few bucks,’ and put one of the twenties back in his wallet. I was standing on the sidewalk and he was in the car. He… just left. And all I had was a ten.”

  “He left you ten dollars short?” Talba really couldn’t believe it. “What on earth did you do?”

  “I went inside and tried to make a deal with the clinic. Somebody in the waiting room heard the whole thing and tossed in the other ten.” The last couple of lines took her a long time to deliver. She was fighting sobs, but quite a few were escaping.

  “My God. Have you had therapy?”

  Blowing her nose, the girl nodded. “I started once I got to college and I was out on my own. I never told my parents—either they wouldn’t have believed me or my dad would have killed Hunt. And poor Aunt Lynne! I didn’t—I just—I mean, I did a terrible thing to her….”

  “For Christ’s sake, you weren’t the one who did it.”

  “Believe me, my family would have seen it that way. They thought Rashad was the cause of my trouble. And he was the only thing holding me together. He was all there was! My parents are Bible beaters, see. They knew I was depressed, but they thought I just needed to get away from ‘that black boy’ and come to Jesus. You know why I came here? I didn’t have to. Know why I did?”

  Talba nodded. “Sure. I’d have done the same. You wanted to see him dead.”

  “They cremated him, goddammit!”

  “Bad break.” Talba smiled, which provoked a smile from Kerry.

  “Okay. I know what that sounded like.”

  “No, really. I’d have felt exactly the same.” She wasn’t lying. “So Lynne never found out?”

  “Not unless he told her. What do you think the chances are of that?”

  “Zip and none, frankly. How about Wayne Taylor?”

  “Wayne Taylor?” Her nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “Who’s he?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was Taylor. It had to be Taylor. Everything pointed to it, including the absurd notion of trying to make Hunt look guiltier by revealing what he’d done to Kerry. It had to be him and he had to be falling apart, maybe getting more dangerous and reckless every day. He could have killed Hunt, and Hunt might not be the last. The question was, what to do next. She couldn’t very well go to Crockett and tell him Taylor had a good motive, so he must be guilty.

  Her phone rang as she was simultaneously thinking that thought and getting close to the Superdome exit, which would take her back to the Central Business District. Maybe Eddie hadn’t had lunch yet and she could snag him to chew the thing over. “Hello,” she said, her mind already on what to order for lunch.

  “Hey, Baroness, we solved the case.” It was Austin, even more wasted than two hours before.

  She wasn’t sure if this was a joke or what. “Congratulations,” she said tentatively.

  “It’s Wayne Taylor, man! Has to be. A ten-year-old could see it. Hell, Arnelle could have figured this one out.”

  Because she had just come to exactly those two conclusions herself, her guard was a bit down. “Yeah,” she said, “but the question is, what to do about it.”

  For the next few hours, she kicked herself for those words, but in the end, it was Darryl who convinced her that by the time she talked to Austin, events had already spun so far out of control she had no way of stopping them.

  “We’re doing something about it.” Austin said. “We are in that very process right this minute. We are very much aware that Wayne Taylor killed my mother and my sister, and maybe Rashad’s buddy Hunt. In addition, he shot at Rashad and set him up to rat out his own friend and maybe kill him. We are at this moment on our way to Wayne Taylor’s one o’clock class, formerly known as Writing the Novel: A Seminar.”

  “Formerly known as?”

  “We’re about to rename it—thought you might like to join us. Liberal Arts Building, room four hundred and three.” He rang off.

  Talba listened to the dial tone for a long time before she snapped out of the paralysis she’d gone into. She was aware of her skin cooling, as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, and of goose bumps popping out on her body, of her mouth going dry, and a certain lightheadedness, which made her shake her head to clear it and drive past the dome to take the Elysian Fields exit, the fastest way to UNO.

  She tried to think. Call Eddie? Call 911? No. Call Austin. Find out if they had weapons. But he didn’t answer his cell phone.

  Rashad then. Janessa would have his number. She dialed, fingers shaking. “I need Rashad’s phone number.”

  “Why? What’s goin’on?”

  “Give it to me, Janessa. I’ve got an emergency.”

  “What kinda emergency? Rashad’s not gon’ be arrested, is he?’

  Talba thought about it. “Not if I can stop him.”

  “Why? Whassup?”

  “Give me the number, Janessa.”

  Janessa surrendered the number, which Talba punched in with shaking fingers. It rang seven times before she got a voicemail message. She wanted to throw the phone.

  Back to square one: What to do? She didn’t think she could call the cops—even Skip Langdon—on the basis of somebody saying they were about to rename a class. What kind of a threat was that? And why the hell hadn’t she asked more? Then she remembered she hadn’t had a chance—Austin had hung up on her.

  Wayne. She could call Wayne. She tried his office, then his home, but she didn’t have his cell phone number. Not that he’d answer it, anyway. It was quarter of one. He might be on his way to class, perhaps already there. She wondered if Austin and Rashad were, too.

  She did the only three things she could think of: She got the number of the UNO campus police, she put it on speed-dial, and she kept driving. She would have prayed, too, if she’d been a church lady.

  Her spirits lifted when she got to the parking lot—there was no Harley in sight. And none parked illegally on the grounds of the building. So far so good. As she neared the classroom, she could hear Taylor talking to someone. And then a woman answered back. That had to be good. Even better, music was wafting out of the room, something upbeat and vaguely familiar.

  The door
of the classroom was open, and Talba could see that several students had already drifted in. The woman Taylor was talking to was Janet, his wife, dressed in one of those shapeless linen bags that a certain kind of New Orleans woman wore almost as a uniform—the young married, young mother kind of Uptown woman. Whoever made those dresses must be a jillionaire, Talba thought, just on the basis of sales in Orleans Parish alone. They had huge pockets that seemed never to be used and they seemed to come only in beige. They doubled as sundresses in hot weather and jumpers in the fall. Janet wore a peach-colored T-shirt under hers. Her light brown hair was slightly untidy, her round face a little flushed. She looked rather like an amiable cherub, and Talba strongly, strongly felt this was no place for her at the moment. She looked around for Georgia, the baby, but saw no sign of her.

  There was no sign of Rashad and Austin, either.

  What Janet and Wayne seemed to be doing was tacking photos all over the walls of the classroom. For some reason they had also set up a little cafe table in front of the desks, with a tablecloth and candle.

  Two more students entered the classroom. “Cabaret,” one said. “What’s happening?”

  The music, Talba thought, finally recognizing it. He means the music.

  “We’re in pre-war Berlin today,” Wayne answered, throwing an arm at the wall of pictures. “As you may know, my wife Janet’s the official ‘setting’ photographer.”

  “Ah,” the student said, “This must be the class on ‘setting.’ ”

  Wayne looked at his watch and then at the door, where he spotted Talba. “Baroness. To what do I owe this honor?”

  “I need to talk to you. Would you mind…”

  But he didn’t even hear her. He was completely full of himself and the performance he was about to give. Two more students slipped in, bringing the number up to about a dozen. Talba wondered how many more there could be. Janet waved at her.

  “Students, we have a rare treat today. This is one of our finest contemporary local poets, the Baroness de Pontalba.”

  “Listen, I…”