by Chris Wiltz
“Better than the real ones.”
“Shee-it, Pascal.”
“Out. Now. Come back in the morning.”
Karen slipped into the bedroom. The elevator started. Pascal must have gone down with him. She sat in the middle of the bed, still in his shirt, and stared out the bedroom window, a nice view of moonlight on slate-covered rooftops, if she’d been paying attention. She wasn’t; she was thinking that the money Solo gave LaDonna in the brushed-aluminum briefcase was Avery’s money, that Jack stole.
When he saw her in his shirt he said, “You heard all that?”
“Most.”
He got in bed and sat crossed-legged opposite her. “My brother, my half-brother actually, is a parasite and that may be the best thing I can say about him. He owns this building with me. He won’t let me buy him out because then he’d have to take care of his own money. He’s low wattage but bright enough to know if I don’t dole it out to him, he’ll gamble it away in no time.”
“The gun—would he use it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. If he’s pushed hard enough. He got pushed pretty hard Saturday night.”
“Sounds like it.”
He put his hands on her knees. “I think you know it. Tell me...” He rubbed his palms over her kneecaps “…did he rape Raynie? Is that the real reason she married Jimmy Johnpier?”
***
Raynie looked at herself one last time in the full-wall mirror of the ornate dressing room in the honeymoon suite at Bellagio. Her emotions ran high and confusing and she wasn’t having much luck sorting them out. Fear was easy enough. Then there was a bunch of stuff having to do with Daniel that was quite unsettling. And a nagging little voice saying something along the lines of selling her soul to the devil, which she swore she didn’t believe. She recognized curiosity too but that was more about her immediate future with Jimmy in the bedroom.
The champagne-colored peignoir was beautiful, though she preferred wearing a camisole and her underwear to bed. As soon as they’d arrived Jimmy had taken her shopping. They must have hit every designer boutique in the casino. With his encouragement she got dresses, shoes, two purses, jeans that cost almost four hundred dollars a pair, blouses, a jacket, beautiful lingerie as well as the peignoir, makeup, and a new set of luggage to get it all home. She fluffed her hair and opened the door to the bedroom.
Jimmy sat up in bed reading one of his huge collection of books about war and history. He had on navy silk pajamas with light blue piping. He took off his glasses and put the book aside.
“Raynie, you take my breath away.”
She put one knee on the bed and sat close to the edge. He seemed very far away from her on the other side of the king.
“I’m never going to lie to you, Jimmy. You can always count on that. So I’m going to tell you that I’m not a virgin but I’m scared to death.”
He smiled and looked a little goofy the way he did when he tilted his head and she could tell he was full of love for her. “You don’t have to be, precious. What I haven’t told you yet but suspect you’ll be relieved to know is that I can’t get it up any more.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy.”
“You don’t have to be sorry either. I had prostate cancer, rather advanced, and I thought I was going to die some time ago. Yet here I am with you and you are my wife. It’s all so amazing that if I die tomorrow I won’t be inclined to make much of a fuss about it.”
“I don’t want you to die any time soon.”
“I believe you.” He held out his arms. “Come on. Let me hold you and we’ll go to sleep. Unless you want me to make you happy. I can still do that.”
He lifted the covers and she slid under them. “I might like that some time,” she said, “but I’m not ready yet.”
He switched off the light and she nestled into the crook of his arm. He sighed with contentment.
All those mixed emotions swirling inside Raynie earlier dropped away and something she hadn’t recognized, maybe because it hadn’t been there yet, began to emerge—how safe she felt here with Jimmy. It occurred to her that she was still curious. Her curiosity would never be fully satisfied now. Was she relieved?
She was tired and lying with Jimmy was comfortable. As she relaxed up next to him and began to drift off, she said, “I’m not relieved, Jimmy.”
Twenty-four
Pascal finished writing out a check to Avery. He’d taken his time because he didn’t want to look at Avery’s face, which was flaming red and appeared painful. Under the baseball cap, his eyebrows were bushy and unnatural, maybe not so bad if you’d never seen Avery, though one hung askew.
“You need to see to your left eyebrow,” Pascal said handing him the check.
Avery reached up to feel it and it came off on his fingers. “Needs a little glue.” He pulled a tube out of his front pants pocket and went across the hall to the bathroom.
Pascal followed him as far as the office door. “What happened to your face?”
“Emergency dermabrasion,” Avery said slowly, concentrating on his glue-job. “There. Better.” He walked out into the hallway.
“Don’t come back for more,” Pascal said. “As it is you’re two months ahead with what I gave you last time. You know, the time you brought the gun.”
“Judas Priest, Pascal. How many times I gotta tell you…look, my money got stolen. I’m gonna get it back.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know yet. I think you’re right—the Cuban’s got it. I just gotta find him.”
“That should be easy enough. If the Cuban’s still in town.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Sure, find O’Leary.”
“He hangs at Molly’s but I never see him with the Cuban.”
“But he can take you to the Cuban.”
“He isn’t going to take me to the Cuban.” He said it like Pascal had a walnut for a brain.
Pascal’s patience was in short supply. “He will if you follow him. Eventually. Even if it means you get on a plane to Miami.”
“And then what?”
“For fucksake, Avery. Then you deal with him.”
If they don’t deal with you first, he thought as he watched Avery retreat down the stairs so he could sneak out the back way.
***
“Talk me down, Honeycutt. I beg you, talk me down.”
LaDonna had been sobbing. She wiped under each eye with the Kleenex Karen handed her. Ramon stood watching, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides. They had found out from one of the lunch patrons that Spike Lee had been in town, making a documentary that sounded like theirs, people talking about what happened to them during and after the hurricane. He’d come and gone; his show already had an air date in August on HBfuckingO.
“Can you believe that, Honeycutt? All this work, all this money, and we got to find out from somebody eating lunch downstairs after I been talking it up big, the fuckin definitive—” she lifted her eyes menacingly at Ramon “—Katrina movie.”
Ramon lifted his hands, looking at Karen, let them fall. LaDonna started crying again.
“Come on, LaDonna,” Karen said. “There’s always another idea. I’m sure you’ll be able to use some of what you’ve got. You’re just going to have to come at it a different way.”
LaDonna flipped her hand at Karen.
Karen tried again. “No, really, LaDonna, you’ve got the money and I’m pretty sure there’s more where that came from.” Hadn’t Jack told her that Avery walked out of the game with eighty grand? Not that Jack would have handed all of it over to Solo. Where would he have stashed it? She needed to find the Thunderbird and pop the trunk.
“You know what my mother says, LaDonna: the money will come from wherever it is. And it’s the same with ideas. They come from wherever they are too. Once you get over the shock…”
LaDonna put her hand over her eyes and motioned Karen to stop. “Okay, okay, you talked me down enough.” She uncovered her eyes and looking at Ramon she said,
“I let this punk convince me I was gonna be a star.” Ramon lifted his useless arms again. “It’s okay, honey, Karen’s right, there’s always another idea. How about this? We raise the money to build a community center in the 9. We can go outside New Orleans, go to L.A., raise corporate money, money from celebs…how’s that for a way to get yourself known? We build a park around it—basketball court, playground for kids, picnic tables, barbecue pits, we even put in space for a police command center. And counseling. Video everything—how we get the money, the building of the center, the kids, the people, everything—and go for a mini-series. Now we talkin’ about more than just what happened; we talkin’ about recovery. We leave Spike in the dust.”
Silence hung for a moment before Karen and Ramon rushed her, mauling her with enthusiasm and affection, congratulating her on her great idea. She made a face and pushed them off her. “For Christ sake, let me breathe. Now all I got to do is find the energy for it, ask myself for the millionth time if this is what I really want to be doing.”
Ramon spread his arms wide and said with passion, “Oh muchacha, of course you want to do this. What could be better?” He smote himself of the forehead. “And look, get this great idea—we can sell chunks of the levees to the celebrities—you know, like the Berlin Wall or something. They’ll pay thousands for that shit. We put it in a pretty box, a receptacle of some kind they can show on their coffee tables…”
Both Karen and LaDonna screamed, “No!”
Karen said, “Your idea, LaDonna, it’s too good…once you get started you won’t have time to ask questions like what do I really want to be doing.”
“Yeah, yeah. You know what, Honeycutt, all this positive thinking, quoting your mother, it doesn’t sit real well on you.”
“You scared the shit out of me, crying like that.”
“Yeah, that’s some scary shit,” Ramon said. “Maybe you’ll like my idea for the Food Network—new New Orleans recipes, like spicy cookies called Cre-Oreos…”
“Shut up, Ramon. I’m telling the two of you, and you better hear this, Ramon. This isn’t my idea. Solo came up with it. Not the police command center. I came up with that.”
“You got to be kidding,” Karen said. “I had no idea he had that much imagination.”
“Honeycutt, haven’t I ever told you that a man’s greatest ideas come when he’s got the hots for some woman?”
“Fuck me,” Ramon said.
***
Avery Legendre stood in front of his bedroom mirror and put on his new creamy ten-gallon Stetson. Oh yeah, that was the look, his best one. He wore it down low and it put most of his face in shadow. Eyebrows—hardly noticeable. He didn’t have on the whole cowboy outfit tonight—he was keeping a low profile, stick with regulation jeans and a short-sleeved black shirt but he had on his lizard cowboy boots. Just like a lizard, slide out from under his rock and wait for O’Leary to slide out from under his. He grinned at himself in the mirror.
Showdown at the midnight hour.
Now for the most important part of the show. He tucked the Walther into his waistband at the back. The summer weight sports coat, check the profile—nice.
He thrust his pelvis forward and cocked both his index fingers at the mirror. “Where’s my fucking money, motherfucker?”
With the speed of Jackie Chan and the cool of Clint Eastwood, he pivoted toward the window and aimed his right finger. “Bam. You’re dead.” He saw the Cuban fall, clutching his heart, right where the bullet hit the target.
Shee-it. It might be worth eighty fucking grand.
***
Only, by the time he’d been waiting two hours at Molly’s, sitting at the bar stacked two-people deep, getting jostled, trying not to drink too much but drinking too much, listening to a bunch of wise-offs—like he gave a shit about their asshole opinions—Avery didn’t feel so cocky. He was getting more aggravated by the minute. The only other place he knew to look for O’Leary was over on Frenchman Street.
He went to the bathroom at Molly’s and did some blow. Cockiness restored, he hit the street. He crossed Esplanade into the Marigny. Half a block away he saw Jack O’Leary come out of the Spotted Cat and cut obliquely across Frenchman. Avery waited until he went into La Costa Brava then he followed.
What he saw when he stepped into the place stopped him cold. O’Leary was sitting at the bar with Pascal, both of them talking to the woman bartender from Saturday night, and coming from the back was the Cuban with the woman LaDonna who owned the place. Behind them was another man, a hip-hop type, serious bling on his ears and around his neck, and the Cuban’s thug, refried bean-breath. They started toward the bar as O’Leary stood, though Avery couldn’t quite pick up what he said over the loud music.
He went around to the dining room side and ducked into the bathroom. He needed enough blow to put some steel in his nerves, because O’Leary had led him straight to the Cuban all right, but that’s where Avery’s plan stopped. He had no idea what in hell’s nation to do now.
***
The band had packed up and cleared out, which left two couples still drinking at the side tables and Pascal at the bar. He glanced at his watch. Karen had been surprised when he offered to come to La Costa and wait until she got off, but he was looking weary. It was after two.
Zachary was cleaning up, filling the refrigerator with beer. She was about to tell him to make a last call when Jack walked in, boisterous as always, calling out to her over the music before he had cleared the doorway. Pascal turned his head. Jack didn’t seem to notice him.
“I knew I should have locked the door,” Karen said.
“Aw, sugarpops, you know you’re always glad to see ole Jack.”
“You remember Pascal Legendre.”
Jack’s smile froze but only for a second. “Sure. Pascal. Long time no see.” He moved the bar chair next to Pascal’s to put some distance between them, and sat on the edge of it.
“How’s Miami?”
“It’s good, man, great place. Yeah.”
“When are you going back?”
Jack didn’t seem to know what to say and Karen wondered if this was going to get weird. He was first to turn toward the noise on the stairway and stood up, grinning at LaDonna and her new entourage. He made a great show of greeting them; he clapped Solo on the shoulder, shook Ramon’s hand vigorously.
LaDonna motioned to Karen from the end of the bar. Karen said to Pascal, “Soon,” and went over. They leaned in and LaDonna said up close to her ear, “He’s going to put the whole two fifty in.”
“Did he bring it?”
“Not yet. Another fifty in a couple of days.”
“Acting possessive yet?
“Maybe a little, but, what, I’m gonna turn it down now?”
“That’s a choice.”
“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll see how I feel then. Why don’t you close it down for the night, come on over and we’ll talk about the project.”
“I’m going out with Pascal Legendre.”
LaDonna reared back to take a look at Pascal. She waved at him. He waved back.
She leaned in again. “He’s some hot shit, Honeycutt. Supposed to be a real catch.”
“Yeah? I’ll let you know.”
“Shit, girl. Attitude like that, he’ll stand up on his hind legs and beg.” She looked after the group, Jack attached, going into the dining room. Not trying to be quiet now, she said, “What the fuck is O’Leary doing here?”
“Wandered in a few minutes ago. He is Solo’s sometime partner, you know.”
“Not on this deal he’s not. I better go make that real clear. Zachary, bring over a bottle of champagne. Three flutes.” She headed off to the dining room.
Zachary got the champagne from the refrigerator, and Karen asked the two couples if they wanted last drinks. He came back and told her to hand him another flute. He gave a laugh. “Jack’s telling LaDonna he wants nothing to do with her movie so she’s letting him drink champagne with them.” She handed him t
he flute.
“What movie?” Pascal said.
“LaDonna’s hurricane movie. It used to be Ramon’s movie—he’s the blinged-out boyfriend—but not any more.”
“Who’s the big guy? In the suit?”
“That’s the Cuban,” Karen said. “Solo Fontova.”
“He’s in on the movie?”
“Looks like it.”
“I see.” He nodded. “I get it now.”
“What?”
“Avery’s money. It’s in the movie.”
Zachary ducked behind the bar. “I’m ready to go. Okay?”
“Grab the keys,” she said, lifting four full go-cups. “I’ll lock up after you.”
Ernesto was lurking in the foyer. He backed into the short passage to the dining room, something creepy about the way this big wide guy could move so fast, so silent on his feet like slabs of rock. Karen held open the door for the two couples as she searched for the key on the big ring.
Zachary motioned to her to step outside with him. “Where’s Buddha?”
“I told him to clean up the music room.”
“You better get him. I saw that cowboy dude go in the bathroom a while ago but I never saw him come out.”
***
Pascal was standing behind the bar chair, stretching. Karen walked up to him, his arms still over his head, his eyes closed, and locked her arms around his waist. He smelled good. She decided she shouldn’t dwell on that. He came out of the stretch, running his hands over her shoulders and down her back. He kissed her.
“Ready?” he said.
“Almost…Zachary said he saw Avery go in the bathroom.”
“When? How did I miss him?” He was surprised, as though he’d been looking out for him.
Karen lifted her shoulders and pulled herself into him, taking a deep breath. She let her arms fall. “Gotta close out the register then we can go.”
He nodded and headed off to the bathroom.
He still hadn’t come out when she finished. She decided to take everything upstairs and check on Buddha when she came down. Several minutes later, though, she came around the stairway wall to see Pascal following Avery, in his flashy cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat, as he stomped off toward the dining room. She bypassed the door to the music room.