by Tami Hoag
“I believe number four on the list of supervisory conditions for parole by the Louisiana Department of Corrections includes the phrase ‘I will avoid bars and casinos. I will refrain from the consumption of alcohol,’ does it not?” Nick asked. “You, being the felon, should know these things, Roddie. Ignorance of the law is not an accepted affirmative defense. It’d be a shame for you to end up getting your ass violated over your reckless desire to hang out in a tittie bar.”
“Oh, now, hold on there, Mr. Po-lice Man,” Roy Carville piped up, flashing a smile of oversize yellow teeth. “Don’t be such a hard case! Mr. Perez here is just enjoying an icy Co-Cola on a hot day.”
“Is that so? And you’re his landlord?”
“I am.”
“You own both those shit holes out on that little bayou road?”
“I own several . . . properties on that road, yes,” Carville said, struggling to keep the smile.
“I need to have a conversation with you, Mr. Carville.” Nick looked around, his lip curling ever so slightly with distaste for the surroundings. “Elsewhere. Do you have an office we might retire to?”
Carville threw up his hands like he was at a tent revival. “Absolutely! Not a problem! Follow me, Officer!”
“Detective,” Nick corrected him. “Detective Sergeant Fourcade.”
“Detective Sergeant. Yassir! Come right this way!”
Carville hopped off his bar stool and started toward a hallway. Nick glanced at Roddie Perez as Stokes walked up.
“Don’t be in a hurry to leave, Roddie,” Nick said as Perez began to shift his weight off his stool. “Your old friend Detective Stokes here will keep you company while I chat with your friend.”
Nick followed Carville down the short hall to a small cluttered office painted the color of tomato soup. The place smelled of mold, mice, and cigarettes. Carville sat back against an old wooden desk heaped with papers, grinning like they were old friends there to shoot the breeze.
“What can I do you for, Detective Sergeant Fourcade?” he asked cheerfully.
“How do you know Roddie Perez?”
“As I believe you’ve already surmised, he rents a house from me.”
“And how did that come to pass? Are the two of you old friends? You used to run together back when, before Roddie was a guest of the state?”
“No, sir, not at all! I’m an honest businessman. I don’t truck with criminals. I do not,” Carville said, shaking his head, still smiling.
“Well, apparently you do,” Nick said. “Because there he sits, right out there.”
“Mr. Perez has done his time. He’s a free man now. Free to start his life over and become a productive member of society,” Carville said. “I believe in giving all men a second chance, don’t you, Detective Sergeant?”
“No,” Nick said flatly, more to be contrary than anything else. There were people who deserved second chances in this life, but he guessed Roddie Perez probably wasn’t one of them.
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils to burn out the smell of the room.
“Mr. Carville, you may or may not be aware a crime was committed last night at the house you rent to Miz Genevieve Gauthier.”
“I did hear that, yes,” Carville said, the smile finally sliding away. “That’s a tragedy, that is. My condolences to Miz Gauthier.”
Nick nodded, letting his anger build for a moment as he looked at Roy Carville, sleazy weasel purveyor of lurid delights for voyeurs. Smug was the word that came to mind. Like he thought whatever might happen to other people was nothing but amusement because it didn’t really touch him.
It wasn’t hard to imagine him making life difficult for a woman like Genevieve Gauthier—poor, alone, without much real control over her circumstances. The idea infuriated Nick. He had been raised to treat women with deference and respect, and to treat any person or creature weaker than himself with kindness. He couldn’t abide men who sought any opportunity to exert their power to manipulate and control over the powerless.
“Why you didn’t fix the air conditioners?” he asked.
Carville almost startled at the question. “What?”
“I said, why you didn’t fix those air conditioners?” Nick asked again, his temper rising one degree hotter, and then another, and another . . . “That house was a hundred fucking degrees last night. They had to leave the windows open.”
“W-well, I didn’t know—”
“Don’t insult me with lies,” Nick snapped, stepping forward, one step, two steps, compressing the space between them. Carville leaned back.
“She complained to you the air conditioners were broke, and you didn’t do shit about it.”
“Well, I fail to see how—”
He took another step, closing the small distance between them to almost nothing, leaning into Roy Carville’s space.
“Fils de pute.” He all but spat the curse words in Carville’s face, his anger at a boil now. “They had to leave the windows open. The killer came in through a window. Came in through the window and stabbed that little boy to death. If you fail to see how you are complicit in that, I sincerely hope Miz Gauthier hires herself a lawyer who can explain it to you.”
“Now look here,” Carville said, slipping to the side and away from the pressure and the implied threat of Nick’s body language. “I couldn’t foresee something like that happening! Maybe she did ask me about them air conditioners, but you got to understand she’s already two months behind in her rent!”
“So you sought to force her out into the street by making the home uninhabitable? Clearly, I need to bone up on my real estate law. I gotta think that’s not legal.”
“Uninhabitable?” Carville scoffed. “Hell, didn’t nobody have air conditioners when I was growing up here. We all managed to survive.
“And don’t let her tell you I never did nothing for her,” he argued. “I offered her a job here to help make ends meet.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you did,” Nick said, his temper spiking another notch. In his mind’s eye he pictured Carville leering at Genevieve Gauthier through his squinty eyes, grinning like the Cheshire cat with his big yellow teeth as he invited the single mother to come earn her keep in this place.
“So because she didn’t want to dance naked in front of a bunch of drunks every night, she should lose her child?”
“I was being generous!” Carville insisted. “These girls make good money!”
“And Genevieve, she’s a pretty girl,” Nick said, nodding, stalking Carville around the cramped space as he tried to move away. “A fresh face, a perky new set of breasts—that’s a boost for your business, isn’t it, Roy?”
“I won’t argue it would have been mutually advantageous, but she said no.”
“Maybe you didn’t take that well, huh, Mr. Carville?” Nick asked. “Maybe you thought she should have been more appreciative. Maybe you thought to send someone to give her a little scare. Someone like your friend Mr. Perez, who lives conveniently next door.”
Carville’s eyes went as wide as they could at the accusation. “That’s ridiculous!”
“But you can’t control Mr. Perez, who you claim not to know very well. Maybe you don’t know that he’s been convicted of assault in the past. Or maybe you do.”
“I did not—”
“So, it wouldn’t really be your fault if he lost control and killed that child.”
“You’re out of your mind, Fourcade!”
Nick took a step back then, killing the physical pressure entirely, like flipping off the power switch. He cocked a leg and smoked his cigarette and watched Roy Carville, like a mouse trapped in a cat’s keen view trying to figure out what the hell might happen next.
“Well, people, they do say that about me,” Nick conceded softly, nodding, the perfectly reasonable man. “Me, I don’t suppo
se I could be a fair judge of the subject.”
Carville just stared at him, afraid to show an emotion that might trigger a wrong reaction.
“Has Mr. Perez ever said anything to you about Miz Gauthier?” Nick asked. “That he noticed her, spoke to her, had designs on her?”
Carville shook his head. “No, sir.”
Nick arched a brow. “Really? I find that hard to believe, the two of you being such aficionados of beautiful women. And you having offered Miz Gauthier a job and all. Seems like that might have come up in conversation.”
“It didn’t.”
“Curious. Well,” he said with a shrug, “we’ll see. The crime scene unit processed the scene today. We’re all done there. If I get a call that Mr. Perez’s fingerprints turned up in that house, he gonna have some ’splaining to do.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Carville said, sitting back against the desk again, relaxing ever so slightly.
“You’re just the landlord.”
“That’s right.”
“Très bien,” Nick murmured, glancing away. He let silence fall between them for a moment.
Carville looked relieved. “Will she be going back to the house—Miz Gauthier?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t think so. Would you? She’s in the hospital, at any rate. Why?”
“Well, I’m just wondering. I mean, we’re near the end of the month here . . .”
Nick stared at him for a moment. Amazed anew that he could be surprised by a human being’s callousness.
“You want to be able to rent out the scene of a murder?” He shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, you are.”
“I’m a businessman. I will understand if she don’t wanna live there no more. Hell, I’ll even waive the last month’s rent.”
Nick counted to himself: Inhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Patience . . . He wanted to beat this man to a bloody pulp and dump his body in the swamp. The world would be a better place for it. He took another measured breath and let it out slowly.
“I’ll let you know when you can have the house back. Shouldn’t be more than a few days,” he lied. “I think we’re done with it, but I might have an afterthought to look through it again in a day or two—just in case we might have missed something. I can’t think about it right now. My focus has to be elsewhere tonight.”
He checked his watch and sighed, surreptitiously watching Carville through his eyelashes. The man was twitching, uncertain as to whether he was off the hook or not, wanting to let his guard down but not sure he should.
Très bien, Nick thought. Très bien. You twitch, you motherfucker. You keep twitching, fils de pute . . .
Clipped to his belt, his cell phone vibrated, announcing a text message. He glanced down at the screen. Dixon: Tox screen in.
He moved forward suddenly to stub out the last of his cigarette in a dirty ashtray on the desk. Carville flinched sideways.
“Merci beaucoup,” Nick murmured, staring into the man’s little rat eyes. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Carville. You have a wonderful evening, sir.”
He turned and walked out of the room and back down the hall, emerging into the bustle and noise of a crowd on their third round of drinks, and Ryan Foret belting out “Tee Nah Nah” over the sound system.
Both Stokes and Perez looked at Nick expectantly. He spared not a glance for Roddie Perez but cut a look at Stokes and said, “We gotta go. Our victim has something to tell us.”
SEVENTEEN
You will never see your son alive again . . .
You will never see your son alive again . . .
You will never see your son alive again . . .
“I will never see my son alive again,” Genevieve murmured. “I will never see my son alive again . . .”
She rolled the words around in her mouth like marbles, hard and cold. Her throat closed at the idea of trying to swallow them. She imagined them chipping her teeth as she forced them out.
“I will never see my son alive again . . .”
And yet, when she heard the words, she felt weirdly numb, as if they didn’t touch her. As if they meant nothing. In her mind’s eye she imagined the words like razor blades, cutting her flesh a thousand times. She watched her blood running everywhere, soaking her hospital gown, soaking the sheets, dripping on the smooth polished floor. But she felt nothing. No pain, no sorrow, no fear, no nothing.
It was the drugs, she supposed. Whatever they were giving her for the pain was leaving her numb physically, emotionally, psychologically. Numb was good. She tried to achieve a certain amount of numbness every night of her life to dull the pain of her existence. She would stay numb for as long as possible.
She looked around the generic hospital room they had moved her to on the second floor of the hospital. A private room—like she was somebody special. The walls were a pale cool green. A picture of the Virgin Mary hung above a nondescript gray metal cabinet of drawers opposite the bed.
A picture of what people wanted to imagine the Virgin had looked like, she corrected herself. No one could possibly know for sure. In fact, it was easier to safely say she had looked nothing like the woman in the picture, with her flawless ivory skin and small, slender nose. For two thousand years people had been reimagining Mary to suit their own needs. But that was what people always did—remold history into a shape that pleased them.
Mary was always depicted as peaceful, an idea that gave people comfort. Resigned to her fate, Genevieve had long thought, powerless to change the course of her life. As a teenager, Genevieve had wondered what it must have been like for that young girl all those centuries ago, facing her parents, pregnant with no plausible explanation. Everyone glossed over that part of the story.
She knew what it had been like for herself to be pregnant without support. No one had ever forgiven her anything. She had never felt acceptance or peace. But she had never truly resigned herself to her fate, either—though she would have been better off if she had. She had never let go of wanting something more, something better, something special just for her.
KJ had been just for her, she reminded herself.
You will never see your son alive again . . .
What would her life be like without him?
Quiet.
Life with KJ had been a constant, exhausting cacophony. Without him, she imagined silence. No more boy noise—yelling and roaring and crashing and clattering and belching and farting. No more racket of rowdy play. No more temper tantrums. No more crying from frustration or disappointment or fatigue or hurt feelings or pain. No more of the noise that had come from both of them, each directed at the other.
What would her life be like without him?
Silent.
Not the kind of silence that wrapped itself around them after he had fallen asleep in her arms but the kind of silence that pressed in on you and filled your ears until you had to scream to relieve the pressure. The kind of silence that eventually became a piercing white noise.
A sense of dread seeped beneath the drug-induced numbness. She didn’t want to let it in. She didn’t want to be alone with it. She didn’t want to be alone.
She looked at the phone on the bedside stand for a long moment, wondering if she should, wondering if he would answer. If he answered, would he be angry with her for calling? Probably.
Even as she thought it, she reached for the phone anyway.
The phone on the receiving end rang once, twice, three times—
Please, please, please, please—
—and straight to voicemail.
She hung up without leaving a message and blinked back tears. She had no one else to call, no one who would come and see her. Clarice Marcel was the kindest person she knew, but no one would bring Clarice to visit, and Genevieve could only imagine how confused the old woman would be talking on the telephone. She
didn’t have any friends, not really. Jojean Florette was an acquaintance, not a friend, and the last time they’d spoken—just last night, though it seemed a hundred years ago—hadn’t been pleasant. Jojean was hardly the type to come with comfort and cheer, anyway.
She didn’t have any choice but to be alone, shut up in this room like a prisoner.
A deputy stood watch outside the door to her room. She could see the slope of his broad shoulders through the frosted glass. She had caught a glimpse of him when the nurse had come in to check on her. He was tall, trim, young, white.
Was he there to protect her or to contain her?
He shifted positions, turning sideways. Voices rose and fell outside the door. Genevieve caught a few words at a time.
“. . . orders . . . no visitors . . .”
“. . . be ridiculous . . . Sheriff Dutrow . . . representing . . . auxiliary . . .”
The door swung open, and a woman walked in carrying a small bouquet of white flowers in a clear glass vase. Neat and tidy were the words that came to Genevieve’s mind. She was one of those neat and tidy women who always had her hair done and fresh lipstick on, like Mavis Parsons at work. Stepford Wives, Genevieve called them in her less charitable moments. Women who had it all together and seemed never to put a stylish pump wrong. They raised families, tended to their husbands, lunched with the Junior League, and volunteered at church as if they somehow had more hours in the day than women like Genevieve.
This one came directly to her, her head tipped slightly to one side, hazel eyes full of superiority and pity, not a single auburn hair out of place. She had a prim little mouth that quirked up on one side, as if she found the situation somehow ironic.
“Ms. Gauthier,” she said softly, her voice like butter on warm biscuits. “My name is Sharon Spicer. On behalf of the Our Lady of Mercy hospital auxiliary, I want to express our sincere condolences on the loss of your son.”
She set the vase on the bedside stand and clasped her manicured hands together. Genevieve’s eyes went to the tasteful diamond engagement ring she wore.
“I don’t know if you have family in the area,” the woman went on, “but if you need assistance with anything, anything at all, please feel free to contact me. I’ll leave you my number. Between the auxiliary and my church group, you will have all the support you need during this trying time.