by Linda Barnes
Mary hadn’t said anything at the front desk about a nephew, that was certain from the way the woman looked him over.
He stuck the key into the appropriate door, turned it gently.
Mary yanked the door open, so quickly that she must have been waiting on the far side. She was wearing a rose-colored dressing gown, but her eyes were wide awake.
“I thought you were going to sleep,” Spraggue said.
“I did sleep,” Mary countered. “A good three hours. I feel absolutely marvelous, ready to dance.”
Spraggue closed his eyes and blew out a deep breath. Four hours was a full night’s sleep for Aunt Mary. “All I want is food and bed.”
“The young have no vitality anymore,” Mary replied tartly.
“I’m aging rapidly,” Spraggue said. “I may have gone into early retirement when I quit my job to pry into your murder investigation. I smell like a goddamn police station …”
Mary made a faint and maddening noise. “Take a shower and wash the police station off. Your bed and bath are through here. I’ll order things from room service. Certainly a hotel that keeps Denise Michel as executive chef should be able to provide an adequate dinner—”
“Denise Michel?”
“What about her?”
“Well,” Spraggue said, “she is the one who finagled Dora down here. She knew about Dora’s marriage to Fontenot. And she kindly told the cops about it. If Dora’s innocent, I’d say Denise Michel moves up to number one suspect.”
“On the other hand,” Mary said, pursing her lips, “let’s eat out.”
“I doubt she’d poison us in her own hotel.”
“Bathe,” Mary said sternly. “When your police station aroma has improved, I’ll be in my study—through the archway on your right.”
The shower helped. He had to admit it. The water—hot, cool, hot, then as cold as he could stand it—pelted him awake. He toweled off briskly in the gold-and-gray splendor of his bedroom, then lifted the phone to check for messages at the desk. None. His agent hadn’t caught up with him yet. Maybe he’d finally brought on old Harry’s long-overdue cardiac arrest. Walking out of a play the day before opening … He wondered what sort of tales his departure would breed. Spraggue? The rich bastard? Oh, yes. Terminally jealous of the lead actor. Couldn’t get his lines. An alcoholic, you know. So sad. Not to mention the cocaine …
He turned that portion of his mind off, tumbled the contents of his duffel bag on the football-field-sized bed. After yanking on a pair of faded jeans, he draped a towel around his bare shoulders and rubbed a hand across a rough jaw. He tried to remember whether he’d shaved during the morning brouhaha of phone calls, abandonments, airplanes.
Shaved.
He entered Mary’s study still rubbing his dripping hair with a towel, half-blinded, but awake. “Hi.” He bent and kissed her on the cheek. “Want to start over?”
“You smell marvelous,” Mary said. “Did you have a nice flight in?”
“Awful.”
“You should have let me send the Learjet.”
“No,” Spraggue said. “Thanks, but no.” He didn’t live in the goddamned mansion and he wasn’t going to use the goddamned Learjet. His mouth twitched. The commercial flight, late leaving Boston, fogbound in Pittsburgh, had been almost enough to shake his independence. That, and his sinking bank balance. Hollywood hadn’t called lately.
Mary smoothly changed the subject. “They have a trout Marguery on the menu that Dora says is quite nice.”
“She’s out?”
“No, dear. Mr. Jackson, the attorney, is doing all he can, but he wanted to wait for another judge, one who’s a trifle less law-and-ordery. Dora mentioned Denise’s trout prior to her—uh, incarceration. I ordered two of them and they should be up soon.”
“Fine.”
“And a bottle of Sauvignon blanc. Possibly I should have made it two bottles.”
“Possibly,” Spraggue agreed.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Mary said softly.
“I just blew my career, and hired a cabbie to sign me up for hoodoo lessons.”
“You know what I mean, Michael. Dora.”
“Yeah.” Spraggue flopped down on the sofa and closed his eyes.
“So what do you think?” Mary asked. When her nephew didn’t answer, she leaned over and placed a thick manila folder on his chest.
Spraggue groaned, but he sat up and thumbed through it with increasing speed. It was stuffed with photographs, newspaper articles, glossy magazine spreads, all tracing the career of Joseph Fontenot.
“Aunt Mary,” Spraggue said, “I thought you slept.”
“I did,” she said. “But first I made a few phone calls. You remember Joanna, the financial writer at the Globe? Well, she has a colleague at the Times-Picayune. And Pierce came down from Boston.”
That explained everything. Pierce, Mary’s butler, bridge partner, and chief game opponent, was a wonder, a wizard of organization.
Spraggue pulled a five-by-eight glossy out of the folder. Joe Fontenot had a sleek, rounded face, camouflaged by heavy glasses and a bushy mustache. His weight had smoothed out the age wrinkles and left plump blandness in its place. His ears were tiny, delicate. The collar of his dinner jacket almost touched them, the man had so little in the way of a neck.
“Darling,” Mary said, folding her hands in her lap, “I’m your assistant, as well as your client.”
Spraggue read the first paragraph of an article headlined CAJUN FOOD GOES HAUTE CUISINE. “Mary,” he said, “you ought to go into the business yourself.”
“I wish you’d go back to it,” she replied. “The Foundation could use a good investigator.”
“I’m an actor,” Spraggue said. “I avoid reality. Get yourself a license.”
“How? I do not have three years’ investigative experience. Massachusetts requires that, I believe.”
“Get your license the way everybody else does. Bribe a politician.”
“Another illusion shattered.”
“You can’t hire me, Aunt Mary. I already have a client.”
“Nonsense. I called for help. I expect to pay you for taking on this case.”
“So does Dora. People are lining up to throw money at me.”
“I’m first in line,” Mary insisted.
“Garbage.”
“Garbage, yourself. You were acting. And now you’re out of a job. And you haven’t taken anything from your account with the Foundation in—I don’t know how long. What does a good private investigator earn these days?”
“You’d be shocked.”
“When was the last time I was shocked?”
“Five hundred a day plus expenses.”
“Consider me shocked.”
“They don’t work all that many days,” Spraggue said. “And they give discounts if a case is interesting or involves an old friend.”
“I expect to pay regular rates.”
“I’ll send you a bill,” Spraggue said. He wouldn’t, but that would stop the argument.
“Good. That’s settled then. Where do we start?”
“With the knife,” Spraggue said. “Why are they so sure it’s Dora’s knife?”
“Because it’s one-of-a-kind. A French knife that doesn’t even have an English name. A tanqueuer. A stabbing implement, used for holding a piece of meat against a carving board.”
“And why was Dora wandering around with a what’s it?”
“A tanqueuer. She brought her entire case of knives from Boston. Apparently cooks always use their own knives. It would be like me traveling without a toothbrush.”
“But why is Detective Rawlins so sure Dora was the one who used the knife on Fontenot?”
“I can answer that one,” Mary said. “I spent quite a while with Rawl—”
“Pet names, already?” Spraggue raised one eyebrow.
“You see,” Mary said, ignoring his interruption, “Dora used the tanqueuer at her two o’clock seminar. She made steak tartare,
and she always chops the meat by hand. Everyone at the seminar saw her use the knife. And saw her replace it in her case. Since she swears she locked the case, and took it up to her room, and put it in her closet, and locked her door—well, you can see that the police would jump to certain conclusions.”
“I’d like a list of the people at the seminar,” Spraggue said.
“I’ll bet,” Mary said, “that most of them sat at my table at the banquet last night. Remember? I told you they were arguing about knives and food processors and whatnot. Just the sort of argument that could have started at Dora’s seminar.”
“Find out. If you’re right, the people at your table get to be our prime suspects. With Denise Michel in first place.”
“Do you want me to keep an eye on her?”
“I’d rather you did some financial snooping.”
“Dull, dull, dull,” Mary said. “Why do I always get stuck with the money angle?”
“Because bank managers make a habit of kowtowing to you.”
“Flatterer. And what will you be up to while I ingratiate myself with silver-haired, silver-tongued bankers?”
“I thought I’d start with the widow. She probably had the best reason for killing Fontenot.”
Mary nodded. “Living with that man cannot have been pleasant. If I’d spent two evenings with him, instead of one, I might have been tempted to do him in.”
“She can tell me more about him. He must have done something to bring on his death, hurt someone, threatened someone …”
“I’ll try to piece together his life from the articles I’ve already got,” Mary said. “I’ve been placing them in chronological order. Lots of recent ones. A few early mentions. A gap of about ten years in the middle. I think he was in Europe learning to cook.”
“Maybe he married a few more women over there, and they banded together to hunt him down.”
“I, for one, think they would have been relieved when he left,” Mary said.
“One more thing, Aunt Mary, since you’re on such friendly terms with the cops.”
“What?”
“Do your best to charm that little leather bag you found at the murder scene away from the good Detective Rawlins. I’d like to see it up close.”
Mary ran a hand through her hair. “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” she said in a self-satisfied tone.
“He’s probably just after your money,” Spraggue said.
Mary tossed a sofa pillow in his face.
FIVE
Aunt Mary had pinned the note to the pillow next to his head. She knew how soundly he slept, knew she’d have to drop the bedside lamp from a great height onto bare floor to rouse him.
The note, red felt-tip laced across staid blue stationery, said: Sleep! What a waste of time! Pierce and I have gone to fetch Dora out of the slammer. Bail is exorbitant. A charming man named Flowers was waiting for you in a cab downstairs so I invited him up. He’s having breakfast. Don’t forget lunch. One-thirty. Café Creole. Be there.
The phone shrilled and a Southern twang sang “Wake-up call” in his right ear and promptly hung up. The bedside clock said nine-thirty. He had requested the call for eight. He knew better than to blame the Imperial Orleans operator. No doubt Aunt Mary had decided he needed precisely one and half hours of sleep more than he himself had planned, and proceeded to rearrange matters to her liking. She could teach the hotel staff a thing or two concerning “imperial.”
Spraggue swung his legs over the side of the bed, grounding his feet in plush carpet. The hum of the air conditioner blurred all other hotel noises. He flicked off the switch and heard machinery, the tap-tap of a distant terminal, the click-click of a printer—Mary’s noises; where she went they followed. Plates clattered. So Albert Flowers was a breakfast guest. He must have impressed Aunt Mary.
Spraggue opened the door and hollered the cabbie’s name.
“Yo!” came the response.
“Is there breakfast for me?”
“I been told to order it the minute I hear you.”
“Do that,” Spraggue said, closing his door.
He lowered himself to the floor, did twenty-five push-ups and fifty sit-ups. He showered, shaved, and dressed in lightweight navy slacks and a light blue button-down Harvard Coop shirt, both wrinkled from their stay in the duffel bag—clothes that left room for improvisation. He wasn’t sure who he’d need to be today to get the desired results.
Another note from Mary sat at his place at the breakfast table, folded next to his napkin. The eggs were hot and the note room temperature, so he gave the eggs his attention first. Not just eggs—Eggs Sardou, the breakfast blowout of the old New Orleans planters, poached eggs perched on creamed spinach, slathered with hollandaise. They counteracted his morning exercises and then some.
Albert Flowers had pushed his plate back and was contentedly sipping coffee, white with cream. “Your aunt said to make sure you read this note.”
Spraggue lifted one eyebrow. Mary had suborned Flowers, with charm and breakfast.
The note was just an address, but Spraggue knew the workings of his aunt’s mind well enough to know that the address would be Jeannine Fontenot’s.
“Where’s Gretna?” he asked Flowers.
“West Bank. Not far.”
He passed the address to Flowers. “You ready?”
“Sure am. Good coffee.”
“Let me get a few things and we’ll go.”
“Okay. I fixed things up with Sister Del. The hoodoo woman, remember? You got an appointment for a reading at nine o’clock tonight.”
“A reading?”
“Psychic reading. That’s what she calls it.”
Spraggue went back to his bedroom and dumped one of the plump down pillows out of its case. He stood for a moment in the center of the room, then moved through the suite, placing an occasional object in the pillow case.
“You gonna hock that stuff?” Flowers followed him around anxiously. “Your aunt say it’s all right?”
“These are theatrical props,” Spraggue said, prompted by Flowers’ quizzical glance. “Never mind. Let’s go.”
Within the Quarter, traffic stood still. The acrid tar smell, the haze, the jitter and boom of construction machinery told the tale. Every alternate street was being ripped up and repaved. Jagged hunks of cement lurched out of vast potholes. Flowers cursed, and finally drove up on the sidewalk to escape Royal Street. Spraggue, in the front seat, cranked the window down and watched barges slide along the wide brown Mississippi as the cab crossed the bridge.
The address was in the middle of a block bleached by too much sun, a block that housed both a corner liquor store and a church. Number 18, a ramshackle structure of indeterminate architecture, was too big to be a private home. If the neighborhood decayed any further, it would end as a funeral parlor.
The surrounding blight had been temporarily defeated. The light blue paint was so new it shone. A lacy wrought-iron balcony wound around the second story, giving the place a French Quarter air. The sign out front was neon—enormous script letters spelled out Fontenot’s.
The name of the place didn’t surprise Spraggue. Sergeant Rawlins had given Mary a list of the contents of the dead man’s pockets. Mixed in with the keys and credit cards were two items of interest: five one-hundred dollar bills, and a fully written acceptance speech for the Great Chefs of New Orleans Best Chef Award. The speech was not modest. If Fontenot had gotten a chance to deliver it, the audience might have taken turns stabbing him.
Mrs. Fontenot answered the doorbell on the first ring, blinking in the sunshine.
She wore a crisp pleated white cotton blouse tucked into a dark full skirt, making the most of a waist too small for one so buxom. Her features were strong, her face carefully made up, a mask that almost hid reddened eyes. Over forty, he thought, good skin, good bones. Her dark hair was scraped back from her broad forehead and twisted up on top of her head. She had an air of brisk forcefulness about her that made Spraggue wonder if
she had slept since the murder; she looked like the kind of person who handled disaster by taking every item out of a closet, dusting it, and putting it back.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.” There was a weary eagerness to her voice. “Which paper did you say you were from?”
There. That was why good acting coaches always said not to prepare for an improv.
“Times,” he muttered quickly. Surely the most likely candidate would be the Louisiana Times-Picayune. If he were wrong, his error could be fobbed off as a request for the correct time—or an excuse for his presumed tardiness.
“I never thought—” she began enthusiastically, then calmed her voice to a more funereal pace. “Me, I always read these stories in the paper while I’m waiting on line by the market. You know: ‘Mother of Murdered Girl Speaks Out,’ but I never thought I’d be talking to a reporter about my own husband, struck down in the prime of life.”
Wrong paper, Spraggue thought. Mrs. Fontenot sounded like she’d memorized one of the turgid soap opera scripts his agent kept sending him. Her words had a strange sort of rhythm, an unfamiliar melody that reminded him of other voices, Dora’s lilting French, Rawlins’ twangy Southern.
“What paper did you way you were from?” she repeated.
“The Star,” he hastily amended.
“I mostly read the Enquirer,” she said apologetically. “This was going to be our restaurant.” She motioned him inward. “You said you might take some photographs … The kitchen was my husband’s own design. If you had a camera …”
“I was just going to ask where I could find the nearest drugstore,” Spraggue said smoothly. “My photographer’s out of film. If I can send him for supplies, we can take care of the whole story this morning.”
“Wonderful. I was worried you might not make it until late this afternoon, like you said. Hmmmm. A drugstore. How about a regular camera store? There’s one close by.” She pointed off toward a distant intersection and said, “It’s just three blocks east of the light. Right by the KB. Big place. Can’t miss it.”
“Thanks.” Spraggue hoped the “other” reporter would get called to a fire. He went back out to the cab, gave detailed instructions to the rear window, trusting the glare to hide the fact that only Flowers was inside.