Ciji Ware

by Midnight on Julia Street

  “Now I do,” she replied ruefully, recalling that she had been fired by the janitor at WWEZ-TV.

  “During the media hullabaloo about the Good Times megamall controversy, I got pretty friendly with most of the TV crews that covered the story. So I know firsthand that Virgil is a very good guy.”

  “And now he’s out of a job just before Christmas,” she said, a bleak expression on her face.

  “I’ll give Andy Zamora a call when I get back home this morning,” King assured her as he headed down the hallway, Corlis and Cagney trailing in his wake. “Tell him to expect your call, okay? And Manny and Virgil’s, too.”

  “On a Sunday?” she asked, touched. He must really have a lot of respect for Virgil and Manny.

  “Sure, why not?” Grinning over his shoulder, he added, “I’ll tell him he’d better hustle to get a shot at hiring such a dynamite package deal.”

  When King arrived at her front door, he turned around without warning, prompting Corlis to back away and inadvertently step on Cagney’s paw. The indignant animal emitted a yowl and ran into her bedroom.

  “Oh, gosh! Sorry, Cag! Oh… do you think I hurt him?” she asked, distressed.

  “He’s got plenty of padding,” King assured her as they watched the cat scamper under the bed. “See? He’s not even limping.” Then he peered more closely through her bedroom door at the massive four-poster dominating the room. “Well, I’ll be…”

  “What?” she asked, watching him take note of the bed’s yellow brocade canopy that spilled down from a top brace decorated with a carved mahogany wooden crest.

  “Did you buy this bed in New Orleans?”

  “Yes. I probably paid too much for it, but I just couldn’t resist. When I sleep in it, I feel like the princess and the pea.”

  “I have one exactly like it in my apartment,” he pronounced.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, advancing a step inside the room.

  “Where’d you get yours? From your mother’s side of your family or the Duvallons?” she asked, suddenly recalling the scene in which someone named André Duvallon burst into the apartment on Royal Street where a corpse lay cold in its coffin.

  “Neither,” King replied. “My godfather gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday. Mine was made on his family’s plantation, upriver, way back when.” He angled his head in the direction of Corlis’s bed. “This one probably was crafted by the same slave cabinetmaker that mine was—either at the Marchand plantation or on one of the places owned by a collateral cousin—and the two were handed down to succeeding generations through different family lines. Nineteenth century, right?”

  Corlis nodded. “Well, whoever inherited this one must have fallen on dark days, because it was sold at auction in the French Quarter a couple of months ago.”

  “It’s got the exact same carvings that mine does,” King marveled, peering at it closely. “Lafayette Marchand had no son to give it to, so I was the lucky guy.”

  “Didn’t he have a daughter?” Corlis demanded.

  “He never married.”

  “Oh. Well, it was nice of him to give you such a beautiful piece of his family’s furniture,” she ventured lamely.

  “I don’t think ‘nice’ quite applies in Marchand’s case.”

  “No?” she asked as she observed an angry furrow creasing his forehead.

  “No,” King echoed shortly. “My godfather went to work for Grover Jeffries a few years back. As his public relations adviser,” he added, bitter sarcasm edging his voice.

  “If Jeffries has such a sleazy reputation, why’d your godfather decide to do that?”

  King gave her an appraising stare. “The Marchands are an old, distinguished family, but by the late 1980s, there wasn’t much left of the estate. After the big oil bust—fifteen or twenty years ago—Laf’s law practice wasn’t thriving either. However, the man knows all the important political players in New Orleans—black and white. So, he transformed himself into a fixer. The very mention of Lafayette Marchand’s name has been enough to open many doors for Jeffries in the last ten years. And opening doors for a wealthy developer can be a very lucrative business in these parts.”

  “And Marchand is your godfather,” she murmured.

  “I fired him from that job.”

  “I’m sorry,” she offered simply. “It must be hard for you to run into him all the time, since you make a habit of fighting to save historic buildings from the Jeffries style of urban renewal.” King remained silent, so Corlis thrust out her hand. “Well… thanks again for stopping by,” she said, feeling unaccountably shy. “And thanks, too, for telling me about WJAZ.”

  “What are old friends for?” he replied with a wink, his good humor apparently returning. Then he seized her hand and gave it a friendly squeeze. It felt warm and oddly comforting.

  “Have a nice Christmas,” she ventured.

  “This year? After that wedding yesterday? I appreciate the sentiment, Corlis, but I don’t think happy holidays are in the cards for the Kingsbury-Duvallon clan,” he said, referring also to his mother, Antoinette Kingsbury’s side of his family.

  I don’t think so either, Corlis concurred silently.

  She was suddenly assaulted by a brief unhappy childhood memory of her mother—angry and silent—pushing her out of a dented Volkswagen on Christmas morning in front of her father’s glamorous quarters in Beverly Hills. She continued to meet King’s gaze, amazed by the unusually dark blue irises that stared back at her. “Well, then,” she amended, “I’ll just say happy New Year.”

  “Better,” he agreed with a brief nod. A lopsided grin spread across his handsome features. “Happy New Year, Ace. Let’s hope it’s an improvement over last year—for both of us.”

  Softly shutting the door behind him, she murmured, “No kidding. Bye, now.”

  She remained standing with her hand on the knob, listening to King’s footfalls as he descended the stairs. When she heard the front door to Julia Street close shut, she turned and wandered down the hallway, pausing in the bathroom to gaze at her disheveled reflection in the mirror over the sink.

  Damned if King Duvallon didn’t look sexier than ever, even in ratty tennis shoes and a sweat-soaked polo shirt! And he actually apologized for the events twelve years ago.

  Well… he sort of apologized.

  ***

  True to King Duvallon’s word, Corlis received a call from Andy Zamora himself, three days before New Year’s Eve. After a brief negotiation, she signed a two-year contract with WJAZ-TV on December thirtieth—at a third less salary and virtually no expense account or perks except for a health plan.

  However, in the immortal words of Aunt Marge, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” In fact, her elderly relative urged her to take the job with good cheer. “You know the McCullough family motto,” Marge advised briskly over the telephone from her condo in California. “Begin at once, and do the best you can!”

  Corlis threw herself into her demanding job from the first day she went to work for wiry, plain-speaking Andy Zamora, owner of the shoestring station located in an industrial section of town. She liked Zamora’s no-nonsense style, and her instincts told her it was a safe bet that he was a straight shooter.

  And besides, she reminded herself, with Aunt Marge’s encouragement, she’d made her New Year’s resolution. Like the New Orleans Saints football team in days of yore, she was in a rebuilding phase. She was going to stay put for once, instead of running to the next town, and this time she was going to find out why she so often was her own worst enemy.

  As for King Duvallon, Corlis had written him a carefully composed thank you note and half-expected to hear from him again, if for no other reason than to inquire how her new job was going.

  But she didn’t hear from him, and she could only conclude that despite King’s bountiful use of sugar and sweetheart, he still harbored resentment because of what happened at UCLA.

  Well, the Lord knew, she probably retain
ed a few resentments about that incident herself!

  ***

  Corlis was reminded of that fact when three months later she stared at the assignment board in the WJAZ newsroom. She, Virgil, and Manny were slated to cover a story slugged: “New Chair of Historic Preservation Announced March 9/Noon/U Campus.”

  “Who got the big nod?” she asked, her pulse speeding up for reasons she was unwilling to acknowledge. “Not King Duvallon by any chance?”

  “The news release doesn’t say… but I doubt it’s gonna be him,” said Zamora, dismissing his friend’s career prospects with a shrug. “King was promoted to associate professor last year, but he didn’t get tenure. He’s still a pretty controversial character out there.”

  “Really? He teaches architectural history, doesn’t he?” Corlis asked, surprised to learn that such a politically correct profession apparently could plunge its practitioners into hot water with the powers that be.

  “That’s the problem. He’s a ferocious public advocate for propping up and rehabbing all those rickety buildings around the Quarter and everywhere else in the city. The new department chair they’re naming today will be under the thumb of the architecture school, not the history department, and lots of those slide-rule guys like to tear down old buildings in New Orleans and construct very tall glass boxes in their place,” Zamora concluded, shaking his head.

  “But everybody calls Duvallon the ‘Hero of New Orleans for fighting off the Philistines,’” she protested. “He’s the perfect candidate to head a department of historic preservation. He knows the history of New Orleans soup-to-nuts, and he is a proven preservationist. How can they not give it to him?”

  “Easy…” said Zamora. “To fill this cushy job, they’ll pick some Milquetoast who yaps poetic about pretty buildings but doesn’t fight to save ’em the way King does. That way they don’t buy trouble from the powerful folks who support their fund-raising round here.”

  Corlis took a closer look at the news release Zamora had just handed her. “So who’s underwriting the endowment to pay the new guy’s salary?”

  “That’s why I like you, McCullough,” Zamora said with a satisfied smile. “My guess is that’s the story. The university’s been running in red ink and donations are way down. I was pretty surprised to hear someone’s popped for an eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-buck contribution for a do-good kinda thing like this.”

  Corlis whistled softly. “Eight hundred and fifty K to endow a professorship. That’s a lot of oysters.”

  “You got that right,” Zamora said with a cynical laugh. “Somebody’s sure gonna get their name carved in granite on a building out there…” he drawled. “So far, they’ve kept it very hush-hush. Should be mighty interesting to find out who put up the cash.”

  ***

  Some two hundred people jammed the steps leading to the front door of the starkly postmodern steel-and-glass building just off St. Charles Avenue.

  God, that place is ugly! King mused, glancing skyward. Absently he wondered if there was such a defense as justifiable homicide against architects and builders who created visually offensive structures. Exhibit A: the supremely undistinguished Graduate School of Architecture looming ahead of him in the misty March air.

  At the curb nearby, the side door of a white minivan, WJAZ-TV emblazoned in red letters on the side, slid open. Virgil and Manny, clad in bright yellow rain slickers, stepped from the van. Could Corlis McCullough be far behind? King wondered, strangely gratified by such a possibility.

  Several times since Christmas, he’d almost reached for the telephone to call Corlis, but instinct told him to wait. He guessed by now he’d completely gotten Cindy Lou’s behavior out of his system, but it had taken a while.

  “Whoa!” said Christopher Calvert as all five feet four inches of Corlis McCullough emerged from the van and onto the sidewalk. The PhD candidate who was King’s teaching assistant nodded in the direction of the slicker-clad broadcaster. “Isn’t that the reporter who did the story about your sister’s wedding? I would have bet my green book bag here that no one in this town would have hired that little lady again. Do you think she’s got a relative at WJAZ?”

  “Nope,” King pronounced.

  “Then how’d she get a job after what happened at WWEZ?” he demanded.

  King smiled faintly. “Apparently, she’s got friends.”

  Back in December, Andy Zamora had thanked him profusely for steering this particular group of castoffs in his direction.

  “Corlis and that crew are the best in town, and they’ll be desperate enough for jobs that I’ll bet they’ll work for me real cheap!” he’d crowed. “Bless ya, buddy.”

  When King had received Corlis’s prim-and-proper thank you note, he’d almost given in to his impulse to pick up the phone and ask her to dinner.

  Well, now’s your chance, Duvallon, he amended silently, discreetly admiring the lady’s shapely legs.

  He watched with increasing absorption as she pointed her microphone at the satellite dish spiraling hydraulically twenty feet up on a slender pole from the roof of the van. Damned if she didn’t look a lot cuter in her yellow slicker than the two burly members of her television crew. Beneath her reporter’s rain gear, he caught a glimpse of a sassy flash of red wool skirt that just skimmed her knees. Her brunette hair was tucked beneath the hood of her jacket, a few feathery tendrils curling above her artfully arched dark brows. He’d never taken note of her eyes twelve years ago behind those wire-rimmed granny glasses she’d always worn. Now, thanks to the wonder of contact lenses, he’d noticed when he saw her in her Julia Street apartment in December that her eyes were drop-dead gorgeous pools of sea green and liquid amber, fringed by dark lashes that wouldn’t quit.

  Man, oh man, the woman’s eyes could tame a tiger. And those legs! He wished he could snap a close-up of them to send to some of his old fraternity brothers. They’d probably fall off their barstools if they could see what Corlis McCullough looked like now!

  He suppressed a grin as he watched her gingerly leap over rain puddles in a pair of saucy sling-back navy heels. Hadn’t anyone informed the woman that when it poured in New Orleans, a person needed to keep a pair of galoshes handy? However, considering her sexy ankles, he was glad she’d forgone practicality today.

  “Hey, Professor Duvallon!” Chris declared, staring at him curiously. “If we want to get decent seats, we’d better get in there pronto. Look at the size of this crowd!”

  The two men joined the throng heading up the brick path toward the large amphitheater that served as a lecture hall during class hours. The university’s official news release had promised that at noon “an important announcement regarding a major gift to further historic preservation efforts in Louisiana” would be made at the architecture school.

  A fully funded Professorship of Historic Preservation sounded terrific. However, King’s antennae went up the second he heard that such an announcement was in the offing.

  “Did you get Hailey Seitz on the phone last night?” King asked of Chris. The moisture falling from overcast skies had shifted to a Louisiana-style sprinkle—soft and slightly steamy. The Mardi Gras bacchanal the previous week had been celebrated in glorious sunshine. Well, that was New Orleans for you, he thought. If you hate the weather, wait five minutes.

  “Professor Seitz said he doesn’t know who’s being named chair any more than we do.”

  “Jonathan Poole never returned my calls,” King disclosed with disgust. “It’s gotta be Poole. Feckless, gutless, lazy, and boring. The perfect choice.”

  “You know,” Chris confided in a low voice in case any colleagues were within earshot, “I can’t believe this university would have the gall to give this new professorship to the guy who designed the Good Times Shopping Plaza and whose boss tore down four square blocks of historic buildings to put it there!”

  “Every time I catch a glimpse of that place, I feel like setting an alligator after Poole for designing it and throwing a bomb at Grover Jeffr
ies for putting it up.”

  King allowed himself a brief, searing recollection of Emelie Dumas, a retired cook and housekeeper who had worked for his family for thirty-seven years, sitting beside him in a rented truck, numb with shock. The old woman had been coerced into signing the papers allowing for the demolition of her house before King had realized that her entire block was on Jeffries’s hit list. He had never forgiven himself.

  “Well, at least funding a university chair like this might garner some needed attention to the preservation movement itself,” Chris ventured hopefully.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” King retorted. “Not in this town.”

  ***

  Corlis reached back into the van and grabbed her voluminous leather shoulder bag and a notebook from off the seat. She righted herself and prepared to advance on the Graduate School of Architecture building where the news conference was about to begin. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a gaggle of campus security men congregating in the open green space inside the quadrangle.

  “Is there some sort of panty raid expected here today?” she asked facetiously, cocking her head in the direction of the uniformed officers.

  “Why, I hope so,” Virgil replied with a salacious grin as he hoisted his video camera onto his shoulder. “You ready, Manny?”

  “Yep,” the taciturn soundman replied, angling his freight dolly with the rest of their equipment onto the curb. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.”

  As the trio entered the building’s lobby, Corlis caught sight of Associate Professor King Duvallon striding in the direction of the first floor auditorium. She kept him in her sights as his handsome dark head bobbed above the crowd.

  “I’m going to try to line up Duvallon to do a short interview for us after this little show is over, okay guys? See ya in a sec,” she said, hurriedly following King’s tall, lean figure as he entered through the swinging doors into the hall.

  The wide, modern amphitheater was packed with spectators by the time Corlis pushed her way through the milling hordes and caught up with King. Down front, a long table adorned with a felt banner sporting the school’s insignia was set up on a raised stage. Conferring to one side were university president James Delaney, a few deans, several members of the alumni Board of Administrators, and a few bearded souls dressed in rumpled seersucker suits who looked to her to be terminally nervous members of the teaching faculty.