by Linda Barnes
“This particular gris-gris bag is not something you buy in the five-and-dime. It’s special, the sort you’d get if you asked for protection for a dangerous undertaking, like going off to war—or robbing a Brink’s truck.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
Aunt Mary raised her eyes warningly to the ceiling, and Spraggue said, “Look, let me tell you a story. A lot of it’s conjecture, but it fits the facts.”
“Go ahead,” Rawlins said with a sigh. “What can it hurt?” There was one folding chair in the corner. He jerked it open and offered the seat to Mary.
“Here goes,” Spraggue said. “Stop me if I go too fast. Three people pulled the Morgan City robbery. One of them was Fontenot. Fontenot was in New Orleans up to the time of the crime, living with Dora. So it’s fairly safe to assume that the other two robbers were also in New Orleans. Okay so far?”
“Okay.”
“The robbery occurs, and gets out of hand. Fontenot is caught. This is on February 5, 1966. One week later, February 12, 1966, Miss Evelyn Despardieu is buried, along with an extra body.”
“Now you’ve lost me,” Rawlins said.
“If you were going to pull a tricky holdup with two other people, wouldn’t you pick a place to meet to split up the dough afterward? Maybe you’d even wait a week for things to cool off.”
“Maybe, but why the hell would I pick some graveyard for the meetin’? What connection is there between that graveyard and Fontenot?”
“Remember,” Spraggue said to Mary, “what Dora told me when I asked about her husband’s work?”
“She said he was unemployed most of the time.”
“Yeah, and she said that sometimes he’d come home all dirty, as if he’d taken a job doing construction. And he didn’t like to talk about it. And he seemed down on those occasions, even though he’d have a little money for the rent. And sometimes he’d bring home flowers on those days, all sorts of flowers, from florists, some that looked like they’d been picked along the road, like you might get in a graveyard.”
Mary brightened. “You think he worked part time at the cemetery?”
“I think one of the gang did. Maybe Fontenot helped out his buddy who worked there every once in a while.”
“Go on,” Rawlins said.
“Let’s say the two robbers meet in the graveyard. There’s a fight, and one of them dies. A tomb is open and ready. The caretaker at the cemetery said it’s not unusual for a vault to get bricked up the day after a funeral. In goes the extra body.”
“Let’s say that,” Rawlins agreed. “Where does it get us?”
“It gets us a dead body in a secret grave, one very rich killer, and James French, also known as Joe Fontenot, in jail.”
“Okay.”
“Now skip to French’s release. What does he do, first thing, this man who’s held his tongue and patiently waited for his reward?”
“He contacts his fellow thieves,” Mary said promptly. “And demands his rightful share.”
Spraggue smiled. “Yeah. And does the thief and killer say, ‘Here you go. Here’s your share. There’s more for you because I knocked off the third guy?’”
“I don’t know what he’d say,” Rawlins offered. “But I’m sure you’ve got some idea.”
“Well, he might say, ‘Joe, I don’t know how to break this to you, but we were both deceived. Our third partner never snowed up at the graveyard that night. He had all the money, and he took off and left us high and dry. I’ve been searching for the bastard ever since, but he must have changed his name and skipped the country. Can you imagine cheating your friends like that?’”
“And Fontenot believed him,” Mary murmured.
“Until he saw an article in the newspaper,” Spraggue said. “And the article turned his life around.”
Rawlins ran his hands through his hair. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that Fontenot was blackmailin’ one of his former partners.”
“Right after this article came out,” Spraggue said, “Fontenot made a down payment on a restaurant. He started collecting big money every month.”
“Can we prove any of this?” Rawlins asked.
“We can find out if Fontenot made inquiries about this article—at the newspaper, at the police station, at the cemetery.”
“Okay,” Rawlins said.
“And somebody can find out what kind of employment records they keep for graveyard workers.”
“I’ll do that,” Mary said. “What do I look for?”
“A man who worked there in ’sixty-five or ’sixty-six, and left in February of ’sixty-six.”
“Not much,” Rawlins said.
“His first name was Robert, and his last name was probably something French.”
“Oh?” Rawlins said.
“Jeannine Fontenot told me her husband got a windfall legacy from his old friend, T-Bob. She said T-Bob and Joe were two of the three musketeers—”
Footsteps interrupted him.
“Sorry,” Dr. Noonan said. “Can you pick up the phone, Sergeant Rawlins? It’s your office, and they say it’s urgent.”
A white wall phone blended into the surrounding tile so thoroughly it was practically invisible. Dr. Noonan had to point it out.
“Rawlins here,” the detective rasped. An expression of sheer incredulity spread across his face. “She’s where? She what?” He nodded and grunted, said, “Hang on. I’ll be right there,” and slammed the receiver down.
“Damn.” The word exploded out of him.
“What?”
“It’s no good. I gotta get back to my office. Dora Levoyer just confessed to the murder of Joseph Fontenot.”
TWENTY-ONE
Rawlins edged out of the homicide lieutenant’s office as gracefully as a man with half the belly, and slammed the door hard enough to shake the partitions dividing up the squad room.
Spraggue stopped pacing the worn brown rug. “She’s lying. Let me talk to her.”
“She ain’t in there.”
“Where did they take her?”
“No place.”
The sergeant banged his clenched fist against the drawer of a tan filing cabinet. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I’m off chasing theories and in she comes, leavin’ a note, addressed to me personal, confessin’ to the whole shebang. And then she waltzes out the door.”
“She’s not here?” Spraggue said.
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“What did the note say?”
“I’m out tryin’ to clear her name and in she comes and—”
“What did it say?”
“Christ, hang on. I made a copy. Here, read it yourself, and don’t try tell me it ain’t a confession.”
To whom it may concern, the note began. It was handwritten. The Xerox machine had botched the raised Imperial Orleans logo and the cheap white paper didn’t come close to matching the quality of the creamy hotel stationery. I stabbed Joseph Fontenot. I regret the trouble I have caused. It was signed Dora Levoyer.
“We compared it with samples of her writing,” Rawlins said. “So don’t go thinkin’—”
“She wrote it,” Spraggue said.
“I’m gonna hate tellin’ your aunt about this.”
“How long has she been gone? Anybody see her leave?”
“Sergeant Hayes saw her comin’ out of the office, tried to stop her. She walked right over him practically, and Hayes is one big guy. Said she looked real out-of-it and that worried him some, so he went by the office and saw the note. Figured he’d better check it out even if it had my name on it. Called me right after.”
“She can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, yeah.”
“Mr. Spraggue! Michael!” The shout came from across the room. Pierce’s voice was barely recognizable, it was so different from his normal dignified murmur. A uniformed man was trying to hang onto one of the butler’s arms, but Pierce was making progress,
practically dragging the uniform across the floor.
“Let him go,” Rawlins barked. “What is this?”
“Dora.” Pierce was breathing hard. He tried to recapture his dignity by smoothing back his hair. “She’s gone. She left this.” He stuck his hand out, offering a stiff Imperial Orleans envelope. “I couldn’t reach you. I thought the police …”
The envelope was ripped open across the top. Spraggue skimmed the message. Same stuff. I did it. I’m sorry.
Pierce kept talking. “She was in her room, knitting, not less than an hour ago. Humming the way she does. We had coffee. She hardly ate anything. She asked if I thought Mrs. Hillman would mind if she worked in the Imperial Orleans kitchen until the case came to trial. Denise had invited her—”
“She talked to Denise?”
“Not today. Earlier. Yesterday, the day before—”
“She get any phone calls? Anything? Letters?”
“A phone call. There was a call while I was washing up. But it was a wrong number.”
“Dora said it was a wrong number?”
The butler nodded.
“Was she upset by the call?”
“It’s hard to tell with Dora.” Pierce passed a hand over his forehead. “She went back to her room. I made phone calls—your aunt had asked me to. To brokers. I did that, answered mail, then ordered dinner. Dora was in her room with the door open. Knitting, humming. Then her door was closed. Maybe an hour later, I don’t know, I was uneasy somehow. No humming. She was gone. The note was on her pillow. You don’t think—”
“The phone call was the only interruption. Is there a phone in Dora’s room?”
“Yes, but … No, it wasn’t the only interruption. You had a visitor. A young woman. Striking. Dark hair. She said to tell you—let me see, I wrote it down …” Pierce scrabbled for the piece of scrap paper in his pants pocket. “She said she’d taken something you wanted from her mother’s house. She wouldn’t leave a name or address or number. She laughed, and said you could figure it out.”
“While Dora was there?”
“In her room.”
“With the door open? Think.”
“I think so. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Rawlins,” Spraggue said. “Was Dora alone? When she came in here?”
“I didn’t ask. I think Hayes woulda mentioned—”
“Have Mary wait for me here.”
“I don’t wanna be the one to tell her—”
“Show her the notes. Get an APB out for Dora.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Aimee Fontenot’s.”
TWENTY-TWO
Since Flowers had driven Aunt Mary to St. Louis, Number Three, where the Office of Cemeteries was located, Spraggue hailed a cab to take him to Aimee Fontenot’s apartment. The driver was silent and sullen under a checked cloth cap, but he knew the city and avoided the worst of the road construction on the way.
Was it only yesterday morning he had stood here, angrily jabbing the buzzer marked “Fontenot” and getting no response? Time seemed compressed, days dense with movement. He was beyond tiredness, his body surging with the opening-night adrenaline that carried him through the rush of performance. There was no leisure to debate or argue the right course. Just the scene to be played, the clue to be followed, the single path to trace through a morass of menacing roads.
No wait this time. Footsteps on the stairs. Aimee didn’t trust the buzzer that admitted people to the building. He saw her through the door’s dirty window pane and was bowled over again by the sheer vitality of Joe Fontenot’s daughter. Even through a haze of dusty glass, she seemed painted in brighter colors, with bolder strokes, than the rest of humanity.
“Come on in,” she said, and there was no come-hither in her voice. She seemed younger even than her years, strangely subdued, as if she had made some decision that had left her numb, beyond play-acting. She wore a white cotton shirt, open at the neck and way too large—a man’s shirt—and tiny blue cotton shorts that barely edged out beneath the shirt. Her feet were bare. Gone was the green paint on toenails and fingertips. She looked defenseless without it.
Her apartment was as strange and colorful as she was. Pale stripped wood and blotches of bright primary color, wild and primitive. One room held all her possessions, and it was uncrowded. A mattress on the floor, covered with a red Indian print bedspread, acted as both couch and bed. A stained and battered rag doll sat on the pillow. Bright paper lanterns covered the bare-lightbulb fixtures. One wall was decorated with Mardi gras masks: hawks, eagles, lions, and wolves, feathered and sequined, watched over the room. The effect was garish, playful—and threatening. Contradictory, like Aimee Fontenot. Innocent and experienced. Young and old. On the make one minute, defensive the next.
“There’s a folding chair in the closet, if you want it,” she said.
“I can sit on the floor.”
“You’re not too old for that?” she said, with some of the harshness creeping back into her voice.
“I’ll sit on the bed,” Spraggue said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she muttered.
She sank cross-legged to the wooden floor and rested her elbows on her knees, cupping her chin in her palms.
“Pierce said you had something for me.”
“The snobby guy who answered your door? Is he your servant or something?”
“He works for my aunt.”
“How nice for her.” Her fingers traced a crack in the floorboards. “I took some stuff out of the house last night. Put it in the trunk of my car before you broke in.”
“So you were the mysterious burglar who got there first.”
“Yeah. The papers in the drawer were just recipes and junk. I took them and I took some personal shit, things I wanted to look through without my mother hanging over my neck—”
“But now your conscience is tormenting you,” Spraggue said flatly, “and you want to give them to me.”
“Yeah.” Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
“Why not sell them? You were all hot to cut a deal last night.”
She stared at her unadorned nails. “They’re not for sale.”
“Staring at your baby pictures got you all sentimental, right?”
“You shut up! Maybe it did. I don’t expect you to understand. Maybe it made me remember a time when I was …” The anger melted out of her voice and left it quiet. “Different,” she finished lamely. “Just different. And people loved me.” She stood in a single motion, grabbed a pile of books off a cardboard box, and dropped them at his feet. “Take this shit and get out.”
The leather bindings were sprinkled with flaking gold-leaf fleurs-de-lys. They held thick yellowing pages. Spraggue opened one at random. Six square photos to the page. Black-and-white. “This your dog?” he asked to break the silence.
“I don’t want your goddamn pity. I don’t want a thing you’re selling.”
“It would help if you’d show me some pictures.”
“Why?”
“Something your mother said, about your dad’s old friends. One was a guy named T-Bob—”
“I never met him,” she said. “Mom used to talk about him. Dad, too. I don’t think they were friends though. I think Joe hated him for something.”
“Could you show me a picture of T-Bob?”
“Maybe. Mom captioned some of the pictures. I can at least show you the right book to look in.”
“When you went to my hotel room,” Spraggue said, his eyes searching Aimee’s face, “did you notice a woman there?”
Aimee turned away. “She stared at me, stared at me like I was, I don’t know, a ghost or something. I got out of there fast.”
She picked up the photo albums and plumped herself down on the mattress next to Spraggue. Yesterday, she had seemed like a hooker with thirty years’ experience. Today, she was a high school girl who’d never been kissed.
They began with the book he’d leafed through that first morning, wh
ile Albert Flowers had taken photos downstairs.
“This is Mom. Not much older than I am now. I don’t look like her, do I? But you can tell I’m Joe’s daughter. This is Gran’mere. She died when I was three, maybe. Gran’pere, when I was four. These were all taken way before I was born. Mom wasn’t half as good-looking when she was young. She knows how to put herself together now. Back then, they were so damned poor, she made all her clothes and stuff. Mine, too.” She shook her head. “I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“I didn’t live your life. You didn’t live mine.”
“Here.” She pointed at a fuzzy shot. “That’s my dad gone fishing with two guys. One of them could be T-Bob, I suppose. They’re all about the same age.”
“You have a magnifying glass?”
“Nope.”
Spraggue stared at the photo. Three men grinned back at him, squinting against sunshine. The two sidemen pointed at a fish in a net held by the man in the middle. Spraggue thought Fontenot was the one in the center, but the graininess of the photo was such that he couldn’t be sure. He slipped it out of its black photo-corners. No names on the back. Maybe with a magnifying glass—maybe Mrs. Fontenot could identify the men.
“Can I take this one?” he asked. “You’ll get it back.”
“Here’s Momma and Gran’mere,” Aimee said. “You can burn any pictures of Joe.”
She flipped a page and Jeannine Fontenot disappeared from the photos. The first page had been mostly Jeannine, posing in a bathing suit, laughing, hiding behind a tree. Then the album switched focus, the pages taken up by photos of Aimee as a child.
No photos of Jeannine pregnant.
And now, no photos of Joe Fontenot at all.
“Oh,” Aimee said, “look at these.” It was an early birthday party. A three-year-old Aimee beamed out from the photos. Her grin lit up the page.
She rubbed her fingertips over the smooth surfaces of the photos. Some of the hardness seemed to wash away from her eyes, and Spraggue saw why she hadn’t asked for money. She was trying to live up to that child, to that impossible, unblemished promise.
In one of the birthday photos, a man dandled her on his knee.