Cities of the Dead

by Linda Barnes

  “I’ll bet you have a fifteen-minute break coming up soon,” Spraggue said. “Or we could meet later for lunch.”

  “That’s a big forty-five minutes,” she said, grabbing the dollar bill out of his hand. “And I like to spend it by myself.”

  “You don’t look much like your mother.”

  “Yeah, but I’m hers. What I’m not sure is who my father was. But if I had a choice, I’d take just about anybody over old Joe, dead or alive.”

  The woman in line behind Spraggue coughed.

  Spraggue pulled a roll of Life Savers off a display. “These, too,” he said.

  “Forty cents.”

  “Forty minutes. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “I brown-bag it.”

  “A drink.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Not even champagne?”

  The woman behind Spraggue tossed her purchase on the counter and made for the door with an annoyed grunt directed at the manager’s ear.

  “Problems, Aimee?” he said thunderously.

  “No, Bobby,” she said with a sneer that the man couldn’t ignore.

  “I’d rather you call me Mr. Thomas, Aimee.”

  “I’d rather you call me Miss Fontenot.”

  “Get out,” the manager said in a tense whisper, trying to keep a jovial look on his face for the benefit of any curious customers. “You’re fired. I knew this would happen. Dammit, I have had just about enough out of you—too damn good to do anything. Just get the hell out.”

  “Delighted,” Aimee said cooly, as if she’d just accepted an invitation to tea. She ripped off the purple apron she wore over her black sweater, tossed it on the counter, and swung out the door before the startled manager had a chance to respond.

  Spraggue followed. She was moving so quickly he had to sprint to catch up; he reached out to touch her shoulder and turn her around.

  “Buy me breakfast,” she said. ‘I haven’t eaten yet and I left my damn lunch in his refrigerator and he’s welcome to it.”

  She tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow and propelled him down the sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for? Because I got fired? I would have gotten fired today or tomorrow or the next day. I get fired from jobs like that all the time.”

  “Why do you work there if you hate it so much?”

  “To support my filthy habits. Eating. Paying rent.”

  “There are other jobs.”

  “Oh, you mean like last night? Yeah, I work the bar, but I need something steady, too. A little something so I can say no.”

  “There are other jobs besides bars and convenience stores.”

  “For Cajun girls who never finished high school? Don’t like to say ‘Yes, sir?’ Don’t type or file or take dictation? Man, it’s fast food city out there, and that means taking orders for the rest of your life, or sucking up to some guy who wants to screw you so bad he’ll marry you.”

  “Two,” Spraggue said to the smiling young woman who stood near the Please Wait To Be Seated sign in the dingy corner diner. He wondered if the hostess’s glistening teeth hid a worldview as bleak as Aimee Fontenot’s. They were ushered to a sparse wooden rectangle near a streaky window. Limp orange curtains partially blocked the sunlight.

  “I’ll find another job tomorrow,” Aimee said. The anger seemed to melt out of her as soon as she sat down. It was replaced by a calculated sensuality, a deliberate tug at the tight black sweater.

  “So fast?” he said.

  “I never have trouble finding a job. Guys think I’m easy, they hire me.”

  Spraggue found her anger more attractive than her sultry come-on. The anger was real.

  ‘Of course,” she said, with the first sign he’d seen of a grin twisting her mouth, “maybe the old man left me something in his will. Always supposing he left a will. He thought he’d live forever.”

  “I don’t know if he left a will or not. Your mother would.”

  Aimee nodded thoughtfully. “She might even help me out, you know, now that the old guy’s dead. Maybe I could scrape together enough to get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  “Someplace else,” she said with a finality that signaled the end of that conversation.

  She ordered bacon, eggs, and biscuits. Spraggue ordered coffee.

  “What do you want?” she said, echoing the waitress after the waitress was gone. Her voice was breathier than the waitress’s, her eyes narrowed. She made the question sound like a proposition.

  “I want to know about your father.”

  “Why?” The anger was back.

  “I want to find out who killed him.”

  “I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s a failure of the imagination,” she said. “Maybe I just don’t care.”

  “Did anybody else hate him worse than you did?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why did you hate him?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “I want to know. I listen. I buy your breakfast. I’m cheaper than a shrink.”

  “You think I need therapy?”

  “I think everybody needs therapy.”

  She laughed, but even her laugh had a bitterness to it, a rusty, unused quality.

  “Here’s my father for you.” Her accent changed, got broader, so it sounded like a caricature of her mother’s lilting Cajun speech. “He grow up po’ an’ ignorant. Dat good enough for him, dat good enough for me, all right, all right. I be a boy, maybe it be wort’ send me to school. A boy, maybe make somet’ing outa himself. A girl only good for one t’ing.” Her voice swung back to normal. “I mean it was bad enough when he didn’t have a nickel to rub against a dime, but you saw that castle he was planning to open. Where did that money come from? And why didn’t any of it come to me? That’s an easy one. Because he never thought I was worth shit.”

  She washed a mouthful of bacon down with coffee, looked up at Spraggue, and said, “Aren’t you going to tell me that my daddy loved me and I misunderstood him? That’s what shrinks say.”

  “Nope. He sounds like a bastard to me.”

  That twisted grin again. “Wish I was a bastard. Ever wish you were?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re okay. You don’t say much.”

  “Nope.”

  They stared at each other until she looked away.

  “How old are you?” she asked, making the question intimate with her eyes.

  “Older than you, kiddo.”

  “How old do you think I am?” She grabbed her weight of dark hair and lifted it to the top of her head, aping sophistication.

  “Maybe eighteen, maybe not. I’m good at height and weight, not age.”

  “What do you really want out of me?” Bedroom eyes again. She seemed to be enjoying herself, sure of her effect on men.

  “Where were you the night your father was killed?”

  “Now let me see,” she said, elaborately unconcerned. “What night was that? Wednesday? Thursday? It didn’t make much of an impression on me. Probably at the bar. Maybe home. Maybe not.”

  “Helpful,” Spraggue said dryly.

  “Ask me for something else,” she said, slipping further into her act, eyelashes lowered, voice husky.

  “How about a key to your mother’s house?”

  It wasn’t the right request. Her eyes snapped open. “To the restaurant? What the hell for?”

  “I want to see what your dad kept around the house. Your mother’s taking the position that Joe was a great man, and she won’t hear a word against him. She’s not going to let me look around.”

  “Especially after you lied to her,” Aimee said smugly.

  “Did you tell your mother I was a private investigator?”

  “Called her right after you left last night.”

  Left. Spraggue thought that was an interesting way to describe his departure from the bar. “So now she’d never let me in.”

  “Why not break in? Ever h
ear of burglary?”

  “Does that mean you won’t give me the key?”

  She took her time answering. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I mean I hardly know you. I may want to tag along, just in case you find something valuable.”

  He didn’t like it, but he thought that once he got the key he might be able to ditch her. “When will your mother be out of the house?”

  “You work fast.” She pushed her plate back with a satisfied sigh. “Let’s see … Momma plays bridge tonight.” She leaned her chin on her hand and looked up at him from under a fringe of silky lashes. “But not until tonight.… Whatever will we do until tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” Spraggue said. Her eyes were incredibly dark.

  “Make a few suggestions,” she said. “It might make all the difference as to whether or not you get Momma’s keys.”

  FOURTEEN

  Spraggue stared into Aimee’s eyes, drawn into them as if they were magnets. Her pupils were dilated. Not from drugs or darkness, he thought. Maybe she was slightly nearsighted. Maybe it was the enlarged pupils that made him picture a shade-darkened bedroom, quickened his breathing. It was an effect she knew how to use. “I’m old enough to—” he began.

  “I wasn’t going to suggest you adopt me.” She reached under the table, rested her hand lightly on his thigh. “I had something else in mind entirely.”

  “Whatever it is,” Spraggue said, keeping his voice level, “it’ll have to wait a while.” He folded four singles and stuck them under the corner of an ashtray to cover the check.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not interested. I can tell when a guy’s interested.”

  That wouldn’t be too tough, Spraggue thought. Rule out any man obviously dead. “I’m interested,” he admitted, keeping the depth of that interest carefully out of his voice. He was intrigued, both by her offer, and by the reason behind it. At the Creole Strip, cash for service was a given. What kind of payment did she have in mind now? “But I have other things to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Make a phone call. Is there a phone around here?”

  “On the corner. Can I come?”

  “Okay. Seeing as how you have nothing to do for the afternoon.”

  She placed her hand back in the crook of his arm and matched his stride. Her fingers felt hot on his arm.

  The hotel receptionist got the phone on one ring and cut him off before he finished giving Mary’s name. But she punched the right extension and Mary answered crisply.

  “How’d it go?” he said.

  “Thank goodness.” She breathed deeply and rushed on. “I won’t have to leave that message after all, and I couldn’t even figure out how to word it without everyone in the hotel realizing what was going on. Darling, I’ll tell you all about everything at the police station—Where are you?”

  “The police station?” Spraggue repeated, not wanting to describe a phone booth that was getting progressively more crowded with Aimee Fontenot’s deliberately taunting presence. “Is Rawlins back from Angola?”

  “No, dear. Oh, I wish he were! His deputy called. Or I think it was his deputy, that man named Hayes. We have to get over there. That dreadful man, that fat recipe man, Harris Hampton, is making a terrific fuss, throwing some sort of fit really, and the police are out looking for you—”

  “For me?”

  “Darling that’s just it. He says you tried to kill him.”

  FIFTEEN

  Aimee kept the come-hither in high gear until the moment she slid out of Flowers’ cab, still refusing to part with the key to her mother’s house. She insisted that it was “lost” and that maybe, if Spraggue came by tonight about eight, they might have a go at searching for it. Flowers’ ears pricked up and a slow, easy grin settled over his face.

  “Like I said,” he murmured after she banged the door shut, “everybody oughta have a good time in New Orleans.”

  A shiny white van blocked the concrete walkway to the police station. Halfway up the path, a dark-haired woman adjusted her lapel mike and barked orders at two men carrying TV minicams emblazoned with the Channel 4 logo.

  At Spraggue’s hurried warning, Flowers sped by and turned the corner. They pulled up at the back entrance to the station.

  “Better not wait,” Spraggue said. “I’ll call.”

  None of the cops at the station stepped forward and slapped the cuffs on him, but he could tell from their watchful eyes that he was no longer the fair-haired boy. He wished Rawlins were there.

  A silent patrolman led him to a stuffy cubicle on the third floor. Aunt Mary, wearing a red knit dress, provided the only spot of color in the room. She was perched on a dreary beige sofa that was fractionally brighter than the stubble of carpet and the battered gray file cabinets. She used his entrance as an excuse to rise.

  The man in the room towered over her. He was three shades darker than the coffee-colored Flowers, half again as tall, and had none of Flowers’ easy diffidence.

  “Sergeant Hayes,” Mary said tartly, “I’d like you to meet my nephew, the notorious Michael Spraggue. Michael, Sergeant Hayes.”

  Hayes looked about thirty, except around his eyes, which stared out of a fiftyish snare of wrinkles. Spraggue split the difference and put him at forty. His handshake was firm and strong, with nothing to prove.

  “Is there a problem, Sergeant?” Spraggue asked.

  Hayes gave him the kind of glance you give a coin you’ve just flipped to see if it comes up heads or tails.

  “A problem,” Hayes repeated. “Yeah.” He spoke in a slow deep bass, rich as cream.

  The quarter had landed on its edge. Spraggue watched the sergeant’s eyes, waiting for the coin to topple.

  “We’ve got a citizen downstairs wants to swear out a complaint on you,” Hayes rumbled. “Not for jaywalkin’ either. The reason you’re up here and not over in Interrogation with the cop who caught the squeal is ’cause somebody down there matched this up with the Fontenot homicide and swung it my way. Rawlins filled me in before he left for Angola. He told me about you, and he’s a man whose judgment I generally trust. I’ve been stalling this guy. I thought maybe, if I got the two of you together, we might skip a lot of paperwork and publicity.”

  Publicity. Spraggue nodded slowly, remembering the TV cameras out front. The tall man’s eyes never left his face.

  “You want a lawyer?”

  “Not if we can keep it informal,” Spraggue said.

  The coin fell, heads or tails. Hayes made a decision. In whose favor, Spraggue wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll bring the complainant in,” Hayes said. “He may insist on a lawyer. Or an armed guard.” The sergeant’s teeth flashed in what could have been either a grin or a grimace, and he walked out, leaving the door ajar.

  Spraggue folded himself onto the couch to wait. He was sure Aimee had a more comfortable sofa.…

  Aunt Mary brought him back to reality with a whisper geared to foil any eavesdroppers at the open door. “I phoned Henri Fiorici in New York. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of it. No backbone. No motive.”

  “Didn’t sound like he was desperately in love with Dora?”

  “Once upon a time, maybe. But there’s quite a leap between loving someone years ago and killing to protect that someone’s honor two days ago.”

  “Agreed.”

  “More importantly”—Mary lowered her voice until she was almost inaudible—“Fontenot’s financial position.”

  “You’ve got something good?”

  “You have no idea how many banking regulations have been tossed in my face.”

  “Not as many as you know how to circumvent,” Spraggue said.

  Mary smiled. “Well, Pierce and I phoned every local bank, inquiring, on behalf of the Foundation, into the financial status of Joseph Fontenot. It’s a horribly common name in Louisiana, but fortunately, he had the middle initial O. For what, I can’t imagine. I got a copy of one of his past paychecks from Paul Armand and worked from that. It turn
ed up a very simple savings and checking account arrangement at the First National Bank of Commerce. None of Fontenot’s dealings through First National in any way accounts for a sixty-thousand-dollar deposit on that restaurant. The man didn’t have the money.”

  “Dead end,” Spraggue said.

  “You underestimate me, my dear. Once I had exhausted Joseph Fontenot, I began on Jacques Forte and James French. An accommodating head teller at the Hibernia Bank ferreted out Forte’s account.”

  “He wouldn’t have used James French again. French had a police record.”

  “If I’d thought of that it might have saved some time,” Mary said. “But listen to this.” She pulled a scrap of paper out of her gray leather handbag. “Jacques Forte opened one of those money market plus accounts on July tenth of last year with an initial deposit of twenty thousand dollars. Certified check. And he deposited ten thousand every month until he died.”

  Sergeant Hayes’s voice boomed through the open door, requesting that Mr. Hampton follow him, please.

  Spraggue stood up.

  Hampton entered the room with the same practiced elegance that had carried him in and out of the Café Creole. He looked sleek and well-fed and pleased with himself. His thinning hair was lacquered in place. He patted the yellow handkerchief that stuck out of the pocket of his sky blue suit, and peered around the room. He seemed disappointed with its contents.

  “Sit down.” Hayes indicated the lumpy sofa with a commanding nod of his head.

  Hampton obeyed with a hint of condescension, a monarch sitting in the presence of commoners.

  Mary said, “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”

  Spraggue leaned against a cardboard-thin wall.

  “Mr. Hampton,” Hayes said. “You know these people?”

  “I have spoken to Mrs. Spraggue-Hillman.” His voice was silky soft. Spraggue had heard it on the radio. “She sat with Dora Levoyer at the banquet, at my table. I’ve seen Mr. Spraggue only on the stage, and in, I think, one movie. And, of course, last night.”

  If Harris Hampton had seen him in one movie, he’d seen him in half the movies he’d made in his life, Spraggue thought. The man qualified as a fan. “You forgot to mention the Café Creole,” Spraggue said. “Yesterday afternoon, when Paul Armand gave you the boot.”