Alligator Moon

by Joanna Wayne

  “Neither. It wasn’t an accident, John. Dennis ate a bullet.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Suicide.”

  No! Hell no! Him, maybe, but never Dennis. Dennis had a life. Beer to drink. Women to screw. A big move all planned.

  “I guess I should have come out there and told you myself, but it being Saturday and all, I thought I’d better catch you before you headed out into the Gulf on a fishing trip.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “A few minutes ago. Must have happened sometime during the night, but no one noticed the car over in the swamp until this morning. Hank LeBlanc and a couple of his sons found it and gave me a call. I’m here now.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Bayou Road, a couple of miles before the turnoff to Dennis’s place.”

  “Don’t move the body until I get there.”

  “This ain’t a pretty sight, John. Why don’t you wait and see the body once it’s down at the funeral home and Dastague’s got it cleaned up?”

  “Forget Dastague. I want an autopsy and I want it done in New Orleans.”

  “No cause, John. There’s not a sign of foul play.”

  “Yeah, well I call a bullet plenty sign of foul play. And the cause for the autopsy is that I said so. I want a full investigation, Tom, not some half-assed job that won’t get beyond the ridicule stage with a grand jury.”

  “Calm down, John. I know how you felt about Dennis. Hell, we all loved him. He was good-time tonic in solid form. But he had his problems. You know that.”

  “Yeah, well you’re the one who’s got them now, Tom. Full autopsy. Full investigation. Stay put. I’m on my way over there.”

  “There’s no use. I checked—”

  “I’m on my way. Be there.”

  The jackhammer was still at work, pounding so that John stumbled as he went to the kitchen for drugs to kill the pain. He shook four extra-strength painkillers into his hand and chased them with a glass of water from the tap.

  Images flashed through his mind, like stabs of glaring light. Dennis laughing. Dennis fishing. Dennis scared as shit the time he tipped the pirogue over when they were teasing the old gator with raw chicken wings.

  Dennis shaking like an old man in detox a few hours after Ginny Lynn Flanders had died on the operating table.

  Suicide, hell! This had the stench of Dr. Norman Guilliot all over it.

  “I’M NOT SURE who I need to talk to,” Cassie explained once she got Moore’s Travel on the phone. “My mother is Mrs. Butch Havelin and my father said she books all her travel through your agency.”

  “Sure. Rhonda Havelin. You must be Cassie.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve heard so much about you from Rhonda, I feel as if I know you. Your mother and I are members of the same church and we’ve worked on a couple of committees together. She’s very efficient and organized, keeps us all on task.”

  “That would be my mother.”

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “I need to get in touch with Mom, but I don’t have her itinerary. Can you pull it up for me?”

  “Are you talking about her Greece trip?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. She came in and picked up some pamphlets on the islands and sites of interest in and around Athens, but the friend she was going with booked the trip.”

  “I don’t suppose you know the name of the booking agency.”

  “No. Did you check with your father?”

  “I talked to him last night. He probably has the itinerary somewhere but can’t put his hands on it.”

  “I hope this isn’t an emergency situation.”

  “Nothing serious, but I would like to talk to her. Did Mom mention any specific hotels?”

  “No, only that they planned to stay in smaller, family-owned establishments so they could experience more of the authentic Greek culture.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Mom.”

  “I cautioned her to be careful with that when I saw her at church before she left, but I got the feeling that her friend had traveled the area before. It’s a very safe part of the world.”

  “Mom usually thinks anything less than a four-star hotel is roughing it.”

  “Nothing like hooking up with an old high school friend to make you adventuresome.”

  “Guess not.” But Cassie suspected it would take a lot more than that to make her mother adventuresome. She was probably sitting in some air-conditioned hotel calling for room service and reading a book while her friend did all the adventuring.

  Cassie thanked the woman for her trouble and broke the connection. Who’d have ever thought that locating her mother would be the hardest part of planning her own vacation?

  But Patsy David sounded as if she might be just what Cassie’s mother needed—bold and open to new experiences. Perhaps Cassie shouldn’t join them. It might throw her mother back into her maternal mode and spoil her fun. Cassie decided she’d give that further consideration if and when she actually got to talk to Rhonda.

  And she wasn’t giving up on that yet. She still had her ace in the hole. If her mother’s next-door neighbor didn’t know the details of the Greece trip, Cassie was certain it wouldn’t be from lack of prying.

  She retrieved Marianne Jefferies’s phone number from information and made the call. They exchanged the perfunctory hellos and Cassie got right to the point before Marianne had a chance to start her own round of questioning.

  “I’m trying to get in touch with Mom. Did she leave you a copy of her itinerary?”

  “Why? Is anything wrong?”

  “No. I’d just like to give her a call and see how her vacation’s going.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Butch then. As secretive as Rhonda was about this trip, I doubt anyone else would know how to find her.”

  “What do you mean by secretive?”

  “Well, anytime I asked her about the trip, she changed the subject. Might as well have just said it was none of my business.”

  Imagine that. “So she didn’t mention any specific plans?”

  “I got the impression they didn’t have any. I drove Rhonda to the airport when she left. She seemed really nervous that day, which made perfect sense to me. I mean, in this day and age, anything could happen to two women traveling alone.”

  A morbid thought. Cassie wasn’t going to go there, but she was starting to feel a bit uneasy. “I don’t guess you have her friend Patsy’s home number.”

  “No. I’m not even sure where the woman lives. Some little town in northern Louisiana.”

  “Minden?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “I may try to find her phone number. See if her husband has an itinerary.”

  “You’re out of luck there. I asked why Patsy wanted Rhonda to go to Greece with her instead of going with her husband and Rhonda said Patsy had never married.”

  No wonder she still had energy to go on adventures.

  “If you talk to Rhonda, let me know how she’s doing. I swear she and Patsy sound like the senior version of Thelma and Louise. Trouble, if you know what I mean. And with all those attractive Greek guys around looking for rich American women to seduce.”

  Cassie finished the phone conversation, then walked to the counter, refilled her coffee cup and flicked on the radio. She switched the dial to her favorite light jazz station, tuning in just in time for the news break.

  Dennis Robicheaux, anesthetist at the Magnolia Plantation Restorative and Therapeutic Center, shot and killed himself last night less than a mile from his home on the outskirts of Beau Pierre. Robicheaux had been part of the surgery team when Ginny Flanders died during a routine cosmetic surgery operation.

  A suicide. Talk about stirring a handful of complications into the pot. The situation now reeked of guilt on the part of the surgery team and gave Drake and Reverend Evan Flanders a huge advantage in public opinion if not in the trial itself.


  It might add a few insurmountable hurdles to Cassie’s plans, as well. Her boss would want human interest stories and some investigative articles on the new development. Olson was determined to turn the previously floundering Crescent Connection into a magazine no local citizen would want to be without.

  He wanted in-your-face reporting on issues that mattered and up-close and personal articles on the kind of stories that the citizens just couldn’t get enough of. Dennis Robicheaux’s suicide would fit solidly into the latter category. Olson would have complained about an impromptu vacation before the suicide. He’d likely veto it now.

  Instead of a week in the Greek Islands, she’d be tooling around the tiny south Louisiana town of Beau Pierre. It was a disgustingly poor tradeoff.

  NORMAN GUILLIOT stepped into the shower, his body still humming from the orgasm he’d reached a few minutes ago with his wife. Fifteen years of marriage, and Annabeth could still touch all the right buttons to get him off.

  She wasn’t as hot as she’d been when he’d first met her, but at thirty-six she still had a body that turned heads. She was smart, too, a lot smarter than most folks gave her credit for being. Her worst fault was probably her extravagance. If one fur coat was too much for a climate that never saw a real winter, buy two. But he could afford her, so what the hell.

  The goal now was to stay wealthy. He’d worked damn hard to get where he was, and he wasn’t letting some two-bit lawyer and a TV Bible thumper yank it away from him. He was fifty-eight, years too old to start over.

  Norman adjusted the stream of water until it was as hot as he could stand it, then let it pulsate onto his shoulders and roll down his taut stomach and over his private parts, washing his and Annabeth’s juices right down the drain. That was okay. They were in endless supply. He squirted some shampoo into his thinning hair and worked it into peaks of lather.

  The shower door opened and Annabeth poked her head inside, looking like some blond apparition floating in the fog of vapors.

  “You have a phone call.”

  “Get the name and number. I’ll call them back when I get out of the shower.”

  “It’s Sheriff Babineaux. He says it’s important.”

  Norman’s muscles tightened and his breath seemed to be sucked into the steamy vapor that whirled around him. “Did he say what this is about?”

  “No.”

  He rinsed the shampoo from his hair, then left the water running when he stepped onto the wine-colored carpet to take the receiver from Annabeth.

  “What’s up, Tom?”

  “Your anesthetist killed himself.”

  “Dennis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, I’m sure. I’m looking at the body right now.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Sometime during the early hours of the morning. Apparently he was driving home from somewhere. He ran his car off the road just south of the Tortue Bayou.”

  “But you said he shot himself.”

  “He did. Shot himself right in the head. The gun was still lying there in the swamp when Hank LeBlanc found him this morning. He was heading out to do some fishing and saw the car. Stopped to check it out, and there was Dennis. Dead.”

  “Dennis? Dead?” The words tumbled about in Norman’s brain, and for a second he wasn’t sure if he’d said them out loud or merely thought them.

  “I know this is a shocker, Doc.”

  “Are you certain it was suicide?”

  “No doubt. Of course, his brother John isn’t buying that, but the evidence is here. It’s open and shut to my mind, and my mind is the one that counts in this parish.”

  “Is John there with you?”

  “No, but he’s on his way.”

  “So am I. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dennis blew his brains out with a .45. That ain’t the best accompaniment to breakfast.”

  “It won’t be my first sight of blood—brains either, for that matter.”

  Annabeth was staring at him when he broke the connection.

  He’d like to spare her this, but that was the thing about fame and wealth. It set you inside this giant ball and everybody who walked by felt compelled to give it a kick. She was in the ball with him, so she’d have to prepare herself for a new onslaught of reporters’ feet slamming into their ball.

  “What is it now?” she asked.

  “Dennis Robicheaux shot and killed himself last night.”

  “Oh, no! Not Dennis.”

  His towel slipped from his waist as he reached for her and pulled her into his arms.

  “Not Dennis. Please. Not Dennis.”

  “I know it doesn’t seem possible, but these things happen.”

  “He didn’t kill himself. I know he didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know him that well, sweetheart. He had some problems.”

  “No. Not Dennis. He wouldn’t kill himself. Why would he?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s the Robicheaux blood. Look at his brother. As soon as the first blast of adversity hit, John came running home to drown himself in whiskey and the same stinking life he’d worked to escape.”

  “Dennis wasn’t like John.”

  “I’m not saying he was, but he was still a Robicheaux.”

  “It was the reporters who did this to him, Norman, not his Robicheaux blood. They kept hammering away at him, determined to blame Ginny Lynn Flanders’s death on him.” She pulled away, looked in the mirror, then dabbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “What will this do to the lawsuit?”

  “Nothing. The reporters will howl and make a big show about it, but in the end, it won’t have a thing to do with the legal proceedings.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  So did he. “I’m going to finish my shower and meet the sheriff out where they found the body.”

  “I want to go, too.”

  “It’s no place for a woman.”

  She barely knew Dennis, but she had a tender heart, cried over dead goldfish. He’d like to stay here with her. He sure had no desire to see the body, but he had to be certain John didn’t throw some of the stinking Robicheaux shit into the mix.

  This was suicide. And a suicide it would stay.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JOHN HIT the brakes and steered the car to the shoulder of the narrow road. A group of about six men stood in ankle-deep water a few yards away, gathered around the body. The body. Dennis.

  The reality of the situation hovered over him, but it hadn’t struck yet. Once he walked over and stood where the sheriff and the others were, once the image got inside his head, reality would grab him by the balls and squeeze down tight.

  A warning screamed and echoed in his ears as he sloshed into the bog. Hold back the day. Hold back the stinking black day. But the sun was already beating down on him, the fetid air already clogging his lungs. There could be no holding back.

  His boots sank into the mud, stirring up the mosquitoes that hid in the low grass.

  “I’m sorry about this, John, really sorry.”

  John nodded, acknowledging the sheriff’s words but avoiding eye contact with him and the others. He didn’t want to feel any bond with them, didn’t need their self-serving commiseration. Pity was debilitating, and he needed his wits and strength to see him through this.

  He forced himself to look at what was left of Dennis. For a second, he thought he might just collapse and evaporate in the morning heat. Somehow he held it together and his training as a defense attorney checked in, registered every contingent. The position of the body, the bloodied and shattered remains of the brain. The splatters of blood on the thick plants that clogged the swampland.

  “It’s a rotten shame,” LeBlanc said. “Dennis was a good man.”

  “Yeah. A rotten shame. Has the body been moved?” John asked.

  “We haven’t touched it,�
� Babineaux answered.

  “I want pictures before it’s moved to New Orleans for an autopsy.”

  “I know this is tough, John, but you need to get a grip. What’s an autopsy going to show that we can’t see for ourselves plain as day? Dennis was shot in the head at point-blank range with his own gun. We found the weapon right at his fingertips.”

  “How do you know it was Dennis’s gun?”

  Babineaux held up a plastic bag containing a small blue metal Colt .45 with a brown wooden grip. “Are you going to tell me it isn’t?”

  John stared at the weapon. It was his grandfather’s pistol, World War II vintage, the first weapon John had ever shot. He’d practiced his aim by firing it at tin cans behind the house long before he was old enough to get a driver’s license.

  “I recognize it,” he said, figuring it was no use to lie. Babineaux had taken the thing away from the old man often enough when he’d had too much to drink in Suzette’s and started waving it at anyone fool enough to argue with him.

  “I don’t give a damn if you found his finger on the trigger. Dennis didn’t shoot himself.”

  “No sign there was anyone else with him.”

  “You don’t have any proof there wasn’t. So I suggest you get a decent crime-scene unit out here even if it means calling one in from New Orleans.”

  “I don’t know what they’d do that I haven’t.”

  “I want every detail you can sieve out of this bloody swamp.”

  “I’m sorry about your brother, John. We all liked Dennis. You know that. But the guy had problems and maybe he just couldn’t deal with them.”

  “Or maybe Norman Guilliot couldn’t.”

  “Don’t go making crazy accusations.”

  “Then do your job.” John swatted at a mosquito that was feeding on his neck, then walked toward Dennis’s car. It looked as if he’d just lost control and slid off into the bog. A few seconds later and he’d have hit the bridge railing or possibly plunged into the rain-swollen bayou.

  Maybe that’s what the killer had meant for him to do. A nice, accidental drowning. The gun might have been the insurance, plan B in case the first option didn’t fly. Either way, something must have been planted to make certain Dennis left the road at the specific spot where his killer was waiting.