“Hold it right there. I got nothing to say to no woman.”
Another step. “I think you do. You owe her an explanation why you jumped out of her ambulance. Left her holding a bunch of paperwork.”
“I give a shit.”
“Now, is that any way to talk?”
“Listen.” Gun was pointing up at the ceiling, then down at the floor. “You better get out of here. You’ve done stepped into something bigger than you.”
Lavert laughed. “Ain’t hardly nothing bigger than me.” With that, Billy Jack fired at Lavert’s left foot. Missed. Lavert didn’t even jump. But it did give him pause. He said, “Now, what exactly would you like me to do?”
Billy Jack thought about that for a minute. He wasn’t real sure. If he let this jig—who he now realized was Joey the Horse’s driver, though he didn’t think the jig knew who he was—back out the door, then when he left, what was there to guarantee the jig wouldn’t just be waiting there for him?
“Move on around.” He signaled to his right with the gun. “Get on over there with them.”
“With who?”
Billy Jack swiveled his head quick to the right. To the left. Christ Almighty. The Jerks was both gone.
He swiveled back.
The nigger had feinted the other way. Just like he was playing ball.
“Hold it!” Billy Jack screamed, and fired again.
Three jars of apple juice smashed and started puddling on the tile.
Then the doors slap-slapped again and Blubber Butt was here again, saying, “Hey, Dee Ann, Louise sent me back for the chocolate sauce.”
The doors slap-slapped again and a whole passle of Sacred Heart girls came in in their shorts and big floppy shirts—it was a vacation week and they didn’t have to wear those dumb uniforms—one of them named Berkeley, yelling, “Bubba, you better get your red head out here and give me a big smooch.”
She’d just learned that last word from her mother, who grew up in the sixties, and had saved all her old clothes along with her old vocabulary. Berkeley was wearing a tie-dyed shirt so radical it would make time stand still, and she thought it had for a minute.
They all did. The girls and Blubber Butt, whose real name was Cleve, and Billy Jack and Lavert stood like a bunch of wooden Indians cluttering up the Pic’N’Pac on Coliseum. Billy Jack stood there, everybody staring at him, center stage, holding that .38, when suddenly Dee Ann and Bubba, the two clerks, jumped up from the floor where they’d been hiding behind the canned goods and the cosmetics and started chucking things. Canned tomatoes. Garbanzos. Alka-Seltzer. Midol. Spaghetti-Os. Not even looking. Just whatever they could grab up.
Didn’t take the Sacred Heart girls but a minute to get into it too. Picking up movie magazines and the Times-Picayune, diet Pepsi, whatever else was close to the door.
Cleve threw a half gallon of fudge ripple.
Lavert was about ready to do his famous Grambling around-the-end sweep, when Billy Jack fired twice into the ceiling, which was just enough to make everybody freeze for the second and a half it took him to slide out the door.
Disappeared before you could say Jack Robinson.
Vanished into thin air in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the Garden District.
Damn! Lavert said, standing out in the parking lot with his hands on his hips and a big swipe of fudge ripple on his face.
You’d think it’d be harder’n that for a little bitty old white boy to dematerialize.
Wouldn’t you?
Twenty-Seven
“NOW I KNOW”—Cissy Anderson was already talking ninety miles a minute when she opened the door—“you’re gonna take a look around this place and think I’m dealing drugs.”
She was right on the money. Sam was already wondering, as her shoes disappeared into the snowdrifts of white pile, if Church’s pretty young blond office manager was in cahoots with Zoe. Your full-service, one blonde, one brunette, one-stop.
“Ha! You did, didn’t you?” Cissy squealed, grabbing Sam’s hand as if they were sorority sisters, dragging her through the living and dining areas of her miles-long loft in the down-by-the-river warehouse district of the Central Business District. Everything was new, huge, calfskin, and shiny.
“Or maybe I stole all Dr. Lee’s money? That what you think? Listen, I hope you don’t mind coming in here with me.” She continued back through a wide hallway into a master bedroom with a mirrored ceiling and a wall-length dressing table littered with every product Chanel, Lancôme, and Alexandra de Markoff had ever made. The furnishings were Norma Karnali Home—black velvet chaise, chairs, and bed, everything draped with leopard and cloth of gold.
“But I’m meeting somebody”—heavy on the somebody—“for a late lunch, and I’m not nearly ready,” Cissy went on.
She was wearing hot curlers in her dark blond hair, and a short black satin kimono. Her legs, in ash-gray stockings, were curvy and long—for a girl not much over five feet even in her spike heels. Her figure, that of a Barbie doll. Her twenty-five-year-old button of a nose turned up beneath a heavy coat of Honey Glow.
“Kitty called. I told her I would tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” Cissy held up a little hand with a French manicure. The gesture was real cute.
“I’m not the police,” Sam said, looking around for a place to sit.
Cissy grabbed up a handful of bright silk dresses, sales tags still attached, from a black and gold tufted satin chair, and tossed them on the bed.
“I know you’re not.” Cissy dimpled. “But just the same, being questioned, it’s just like TV. Like ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ Do you watch that show?”
Sam shook her head.
“Oh, you ought to. It’s great. That skirt’s a Kamali, right? Don’t you just love her?”
What? Have to play a mean game of hopscotch to keep up with Cissy. Then Sam looked down at her lap and nodded.
“I almost bought the same one when I was shopping in Houston. It folds up to the size of a hanky. Must be great for traveling. Do you travel a lot?”
“Quite a bit.”
“I bet your life is so exciting. I always wanted to travel. Actually, I wanted to be a flight attendant. Lots of my friends are. But my daddy said uh-uh, no way. He wanted me to be a doctor. He’s a doctor. A plastic surgeon. But, hell, I didn’t even pass high school chemistry, so then I was going to be an interior decorator, but I was up there in New York at decorator school, and this terrible thing happened to me. Somebody broke into my apartment and took every single thing I had, my color TV, VCR, microwave, my cute little computer, and all my jewelry, including the charm bracelet I’d had since I was a little girl with my teddy bear charm, my cheerleader charm, the one from Cindy Lou’s wedding, and you know what the funny thing was?”
“What?” Sam had long ago learned that no matter what you wanted to know, people wanted to roll, you let ’em roll. Eventually you could work the conversation around, and in the meantime, they’d give you gold.
“That man, I guess it was a man. I don’t think women go around breaking into people’s apartments yet, even with women’s lib, even in New York, he went into my kitchen cabinets and took a couple of cans of peaches—I like to eat canned peaches with cottage cheese—and punched little holes in them and sucked out the juice.” Cissy gave a little shiver. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“I do.”
“I did too. So when Daddy came up there on the very next plane after I called him and I told him about that, the burglary, not a robbery ’cause I wasn’t home, you know, if I had been, that sucker would’ve been dead, they teach us how to shoot in Texas”—she hooked a thumb over her shoulder, as if Texas were in the next room rather than all the way across the state and the Sabine River—“he said to me, Come on, Cissy, throw what you got left in a suitcase—which was a joke, ’cause I’ve always been crazy about clothes, and I had about five trunks full of ’em still hanging there and we’re going home. So we di
d. I thought it was too cold in New York anyway, and there weren’t any decent decorating programs in Houston, so I went to secretarial school. I found out I can word-process like a son of a bitch, pardon my French, and next thing I knew I was running my daddy’s best friend’s office. He was an ENT man. But then things got kind of funny”—Cissy rolled her eyes and laughed—“and Daddy and I decided maybe a change of scenery would be good, besides, you know, Houston’s kind of depressing these days, what with the oil business being so bad. ’Course, New Orleans idn’t all that much better, but I always do think it’s best to broaden one’s horizons. Don’t you?”
Sam nodded, wondering if Cissy ever stopped for breath. She was a regular little whirling dervish, not only talking ninety miles a minute, but simultaneously picking up one colored pencil, brush, blusher, liner, concealer, mascara after another, and painting herself a right pretty little face.
Now she was applying a lash glosser over her second coat of mascara, watching herself in the mirror with her mouth agape.
“So when did you go to work for Church Lee?”
“Wait a minute.” Cissy was outlining her lips now with a dark pencil. “There.” She gave herself a kiss in the mirror, then giggled. “About a year ago.”
“And did you like it—working for him?”
“Ummm-hummm.” Cissy was applying a melon-orange lipstick, two coats. “I loved it. I have to let this dry a minute, then I’ll do the lip gloss. He was great.”
“You liked him personally?”
“Yeah. He was the nicest man to work for. Never raised his voice. Didn’t flirt. Just explained what he wanted me to do and kept out of my way.” Cissy giggled again.
“And he was a great physician?”
“Well.” She stared off into the distance for a minute, then took a deep breath, turned, and looked Sam right in the face. “Nope. I told Kitty I’d tell the whole truth, and I ought to. Even if it means speaking evil of the dead. Don’t you think?”
“I do.”
“Well, you know he drank.”
“Right.”
“Growing up a doctor’s daughter, I’ll tell you, you just can’t do that. It’s gonna catch up with you.” She cocked a warning finger. “Just like it caught up with Dr. Lee.”
“The malpractice, you mean?”
Cissy nodded, the hot curlers bobbing in her head. Remembering them, she reached up and started pulling out big fat blond curls, which gave her an even stronger resemblance to Barbie.
“But that wasn’t the first time he was in trouble because of booze. People know, you know. You may think they don’t, but they do. And people knew Dr. Lee was drinking. Other doctors, that is. ’Cause his is a referral business.”
“All his business came from other physicians.”
“That’s right. You just don’t walk in off the street and say, Doc, I think I’ve got a little detached retina here I’d like you to fix.” There was her giggle again. She was awfully cute. Especially when she said things like detached retina.
“And other physicians stopped referring to him?”
“Not entirely. But it was getting real slow.”
“Do you think he was having financial problems?”
“Oh, yes. I know he was.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I was right there. I saw what came in. What went out. I saw that he asked me to be patient about the raise that I was due. I took the calls from creditors on the phone. And you know, raising Miss Zoe wasn’t cheap.”
“Her coming-out?”
“That, and the Carnival business. Do you know how many dresses a girl has to have to really do a deb season in this town?”
Sam guessed a hundred.
The fingers on Cissy’s right hand flashed in and out five times.
“Five hundred? You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. Well, maybe not quite that many, but you know, there are breakfasts, brunches, luncheons, teas, dinners, dances, balls, they go on for six solid months. That’s a lot of clothes.”
“Plus her gown for the Comus ball.”
“Ten thousand—with the train.”
“Noooooo.”
“I saw the bills. Designer in New York. Woman makes gowns for the opera stars.”
“Ouch!”
“That’s what I said. I told my daddy, I said, you think I spend money on clothes, you ain’t seen nothing. ’Course, they never even look that great on Zoe, bless her heart, poor thing’s so skinny. You’d think somebody would do something about that.” Cissy lowered her voice. “You know she has that problem, don’t you?”
“What do you think it is?”
Cissy rolled her eyes again. “That anorexia. Don’t you know?” She paused a minute, finished teasing her hair now, picked up a can of hair spray. “Cover your eyes you don’t want this stuff in ’em.” Sam did. “Okay. I’m through now. Though, actually, Cecil says he thinks its something else—what Zoe’s got. Starts with a B. Means she throws up. I never can remember it.”
“Bulimia. Who’s Cecil?”
“My fiancé. Dr. Cecil Little. Do you know him?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Though she sure remembered the story Zoe had told her, his walking in on her in the ladies’ room at a tea, then giving her the idea for her cocaine business.
“Cecil’s a friend of the Lees. Was a good friend of Church’s. I never did call him that to his face, you know. Church. Always Dr. Lee. My daddy taught me that a long time ago. Doctors go to school all that time, they like to be called Doctor. It burns them too, did you know, when other kinds of doctors call themselves that. You know, like Ph.D.s. But they have a point, I mean, when somebody says Is there a doctor in the house? they don’t mean some guy’s got his degree in English, now, do they? Not gonna save your life, if you see what I mean.”
“I do.”
Cissy turned from the mirror now. All done. She gave Sam a dazzler of a smile. “Hold on. Just let me slip my clothes on. I’ve got to get going if I’m going to meet Cecil.” She struggled across the thick pile in her catch-me fuck-me high heels, the spikes sinking in, and threw open the door to a closet larger than many people’s living rooms. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She was gone long enough for Sam to reach over to her dressing table and sample a couple of bottles of perfume. Cissy stepped back out, buttoning a blouse of black Charmeuse above a black and gray skirt. A jacket was draped over her arm. Very plain. Very understated. Very Giorgio Armani. Very two thousand bucks.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“You know, my daddy always told me that he had raised me in a style that meant I’d have to marry in the profession. The medical profession, I mean. And he was right.”
Sam laughed. “I think he was.”
“Oh, I know. Believe me. I was in love with this cowboy once over in Houston. My daddy said, Honey, you just go right on ahead, you want to marry that boy, you can move out there on the edge of town with him and his mama and papa and put you a mobile home out behind their house, string you up some line for the diapers.”
“Made his point?”
“He might have raised me vain, but he didn’t raise me stupid.” Cissy smiled. She turned this and way that so Sam could inspect the product.
“Absolutely stunning.”
“Thanks. So listen.” She sat down neatly on the bench to her dressing table, facing Sam now, her cute little knees together, careful not wrinkle her skirt. “What else did you want to know?”
“I think I’ve got it. Church’s finances are what I’m really after here.”
“Well”—Cissy ticked off the items on fingers ringed by Tiffany—“that malpractice, the drinking, then the debut and the balls, their house uptown, plus Comus, the way he was used to living—” Cissy shook her head, pursing her glossy melon lips. “Not too long, he would of been broke.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Why would I make it up?”
“No, I don�
��t mean that. It just seems—”
“Seems don’t mean jack. I’m telling you what’s what.” Cissy said the words with the precision of a little girl who would have a man’s credit rating checked and rechecked before she’d give him a good-night kiss, never mind raising her skirts.
“Well, that’s what I came for.” Sam stood. “I thank you for your time, and I guess I’d better let you get going before you’re late for lunch.”
They were halfway across the living room when Sam thought Why not? “By the way, do you know Church’s girlfriend?”
“Sister Nadine? Sure.”
“Really? That’s who he was seeing?”
Cissy laughed, showing lots of catlike white teeth. “Yeah. Idn’t that a hoot? I thought you knew. Idn’t that great?”
“Everybody else know that?”
Cissy double-bolted her door. Shook her head. “Naw. Nobody.”
“So how did you?”
Cissy turned, gave Sam a big wink. “Secretary misses something like that ought to be shot.”
*
Billy Jack was pumped now. Sitting in his Town Car, engine idling, knees jiggling, doing a hundred miles an hour standing still. Fingers drumming on the steering wheel.
God Almighty! Shit! He couldn’t believe that big nigger walking in the Pic’N’Pac like that.
Whoowhee!
Wuddn’t that the living end?
Those kids chunking things at ’im. He’d like to go back, do it all over again. Show ’em what was what. Pump a few rounds in ’em.
But that was okay. For now. He had better things to do. Like following this tall, curly-haired woman driving a rental car. She was a DEA agent. He was sure of it. After all, hadn’t he seen her last night up in Zoe’s room in that house where she was staying now. Holding a meeting, had to be about him. He’d take care of Miss Zoe Lee later. But first things first.
He wanted to know more about this bitch. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she wuddn’t in cahoots with the Big Man’s nigger—it wasn’t no coincidence he’d stopped in the Pic’N’Pac. Nigger was in with the feds too. He could smell it, them hot on his trail, just like a hound dog with scent in the wind.
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