Drive Thru Murder

by Colleen Mooney

  “No, she might figure that out, or this bartender will. First, let’s see if I can get her talking on the ride home. If going with her to the bar will get more from her, then I’ll go. I have the next two days off from classes so I don’t need to rush home to get sleep or prepare any work. If I see her tonight, I’ll go there with her. Then I can see if this Sully guy sends her home in a cab.”

  “You’ll do that?”

  “I’ll just say I’m too wired up from work and need to throttle down. Even that bartender will buy it. Anything for you now that we’re going to be family.” Suzanne said this and made the half round movement in front of her stomach referring to my sister and her cousin smiling.

  “You’re the best. If Sully doesn’t send you in a cab when you’re ready to leave, call me and I’ll come get you. I don’t want you to walk home that late, it’s not safe. Besides, I won’t be able to sleep until I hear what you find out.”

  “You are gonna owe me big,” she said.

  “Yeah, I will, but be careful and see if you can get her talking when that bartender isn’t listening.”

  We were a few minutes away from me dropping her off so I briefed her on what Dante had said about his brother and my sister getting married. I told her he sounded very cynical when I asked him about a wedding date for us and his answer was ‘What’s the rush?’ I didn’t realize how much it hurt me until the tears were running down my face.

  Suzanne handed me a Kleenex from her bag. I told her it was the same night she saw him show up late and I wouldn’t let him stay.

  “Big, bad Dante. The man carries a thirty-eight, and his weapon of choice is a note?” Suzanne said. “Maybe he came over late to finish the wedding date conversation.”

  “No. Definitely not. He barged in stating very clearly that he only had a couple of hours to get sleep before he had to go back to work. I asked him if he had come over to talk about something. He all but pushed me out of his way to start taking off all his equipment. If he had changed his mind, or had something to ask me, he would have been in a more amorous mood. He didn’t even kiss me hello. No, he wanted to crash here because it was closer than going to his parents’ house and more quiet, after the dogs stop barking, of course.”

  “You’ve been in Dante’s house. With his brothers yelling at each other and Aunt Ruth screaming or crying all the time, it’s still calmer at our place, even with the dogs barking,” she said. “And you know I’m right. You don’t think that was Dante’s way of breaking the ice to talk about the marriage issue?”

  I glanced over at Suzanne and shook my head no.

  She added, “Yeah, I had to ask. Just playing the Devil’s Advocate. He is related to me, you know.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. He has always been tight lipped when it came to talking about how he feels for me, or what he wants for us. He isn’t big on words unless he’s telling me about a murder or crime scene he’s working—one I haven’t witnessed or been involved in.” That got a smile from Suzanne. I went on, “We don’t talk about anything important, unless he says I’ve blown a gasket, and the conversation only goes on long enough to smooth things over.”

  “I have five brothers, and they all avoid talking to women unless they want something, and they all want that same something. They will talk long enough until they get it. They hate confrontation, but they hate talking more. Talking means commitment. If they don’t want to commit, they don’t talk.”

  “Jiff is the other extreme. He’s all about wanting to do and plan things with me.”

  “That’s because he’s ready to commit and wants a commitment from you.” She smiled. “Anyway, I think you intimidate Dante.”

  “What? Intimidate Dante? No, I don’t believe that.”

  “Yes, I think you do. You have been involved with crimes.”

  When I shot her a look she added, “involuntarily—and actually have been the one to solve them. He’s the detective. I think he feels like you show him up.” She looked at me with a serious expression.

  “That’s crazy. I don’t go looking for this stuff. It just happens to me.”

  “It just happens to you, and then you just happen to handle it because that’s who you are,” she said. “You’re very competent at spotting inconsistencies and figuring them out.”

  “Yeah. I’d say hearing gunshots over a drive-thru speaker was inconsistent to what I was expecting, but it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know something was amiss.”

  I made the turn onto Canal Street toward the French Quarter. The convention Suzanne mentioned had brought in a lot of visitors and people were everywhere, sitting at outside cafes or waiting at the streetcar stops every two blocks along Canal Street heading in the direction of the French Quarter. The open-air streetcars function much like they did originally when they ran all over the city as the means of public transportation electrically powered and connected to overhead cables.

  Unlike other cities with similar rail transportation where the power lines are underground, due to the high water tables here, the streetcars are powered by connecting to overhead electrical lines. They stop every two blocks if someone is waiting, or if someone pulls the cord that runs from front to back making an old time buzzing sound signaling the conductor you want to get off at the next stop.

  It’s not fast transportation, but there is a relaxing quality about the side-to-side rocking it does much like a train leaving the station. When I drive by one making its unhurried way up Canal Street, I often see unstressed faces on the passengers daydreaming out the open-air windows.

  Suzanne and I rode alongside a streetcar and the hum of the electric cable seduced me to consider what she said. I was thinking I should start taking the streetcar to work when Suzanne interrupted my thoughts.

  “I’m going to say something and just listen. Jiff sounds like the right guy,” she said. “Dante,” she held up her hand when I started to interrupt. “How old are you? That’s how long you’ve known Dante and he’s known you. If he can’t tell you what he wants with you by now, then you two can’t want the same thing. You know what you want, right? He’s still acting just like he did when y’all lived next door to each other. Hasn’t it dawned on him why you moved? Has it dawned on you?”

  A few moments passed with flashes of all the times I waited on Dante and wound up spending the time alone crossed my mind. What Suzanne said hit the mark. “I think it just did,” I said, keeping my eyes on Bourbon Street and the tourists aimlessly walking in the traffic looking at everything except where they were going.

  After I dropped Suzanne at The Club Bare Minimum I realized while driving home, she was right. That would be my life with Dante—what he was capable of giving me. I would be the one to do everything for both of us in that life.

  If I married Dante, I would be the one taking care of everything for us—where we’d live, how many children we’d have, what schools we could afford, where we’d go on vacations, which cars we’d drive—all of it—by myself. I saw myself feeling lucky if we made it through a holiday dinner before he was beeped and called away to a homicide.

  The cold realization was that nothing had changed with Dante after I had moved out of my parents’ house, other than I lived a little farther away now. He was still living with his parents in the house right next door to my parents where we both grew up. I decided carrying the torch for him was the hottest thing going on between us and that was getting me nowhere…fast. The only thing not moving fast was me making the decision to move on.

  While I had patiently waited for him to ask me to make a life together, it occurred to me it didn’t even have to be a marriage proposal. I would have settled for him to tell me anything that indicated our life was moving forward, even if he wanted us to move in together, or get engaged with no wedding date set.

  Dante and I living “in sin” would have sent shock waves to my very Catholic parents. My mother thinks I can get my sister pregnant just by moving out, so heaven knows what she’d make me res
ponsible for if I moved in with a man and wasn’t married to him. Dante’s mother, on the other hand, would have been ecstatic.

  Did I really want to be the wife of a cop? I would be more like his personal assistant while he had an intimate relationship with every criminal in the city. I had two choices: I could stay the course being the person known to him and see him when I see him, or I could move on and start enjoying all there is to do here with someone who wants to be with me.

  My cell phone rang and it was Jiff.

  “I can’t stop thinking about dinner with you the other night. I want to spend more time with you, and I want you to be with me,” he said as soon as I answered.

  “I was just thinking about you too.” Well, I was getting there.

  “Good, because I’ve made reservations for us at one of the plantation homes this weekend outside of Baton Rouge. It’s about an hour and a half drive—the Myrtles in St. Francisville. Have you been there?”

  “No, but I heard it was haunted,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. That means you should stay closer to me while we’re there.”

  “Maybe you’ll be the scaredy-cat and want to stay close to me,” I teased.

  “I want to take you to all the antique shops there, and I made dinner reservations at The Carriage House. We’ll stay at The Myrtles.” He paused and I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. Then he asked, “Will you go with me?”

  I heard myself say, “When do we leave?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Suzanne finally called me at work on Tuesday. I had been distracted and couldn’t concentrate while I waited to hear if she got home safely after her covert mission at the bar with Sandra. I had waited at home until seven thirty this morning, but I had to leave to beat the traffic. She phoned me at ten a.m.

  “Whoa, you hung out with Sandra until now? That was above and beyond the call of duty. So, what did you find out?” I asked when I finished listening to a yawn.

  “Well, I’m not sure, but those two are weird. This Sully guy does pump her full of drinks. He was trying that with me too, but I watched what he poured. If I took a sip he topped off my glass.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t get much from Sandra if she was bombed.”

  “Right, but it did take her almost three hours to get there. After she fell asleep on the bar I tried to chat him up, but he wasn’t going for it. He did ask me where you were, so he knows we’re roomies.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Before she passed out on the bar she was trying to rope him into a conversation with the two of us and he wanted no part of it. That’s when I noticed he started pouring her stronger drinks and keeping them topped off. She was drinking vodka martinis.”

  “Wow, as if they aren’t strong enough already.”

  “Well, I mentioned she had quite the cat house across the street, you know, trying to make a joke of it, and she said something along the lines of ‘it’s nice to have neighbors who don’t call the police over the cats instead of that bitch’ and she was about to say the name, but Sully cut her off with a look that said ‘shut up Sandra’.”

  “Shoot, I wish she would have said the woman’s name who used to live here,” I said. “I thought she would say Opal and you could ask Opal who?”

  “She was about to. I have a feeling she would love to vent on the cat hater if given half a chance. I’ll try to get it when we hitch a ride the next time we both work late.”

  She was yawning, and I could barely make out most of what she was saying.

  “OK, thanks. Get some sleep and I’ll see you later,” I said.

  “Wait, one more thing. I asked him how did he and Sandra know each other, and his answer was, ‘from around.’ I asked around here? And he just shrugged and said, ‘you know, from here and there.’ Then he did something I thought was odd when it was time to leave.”

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “First, he felt through his pockets like he was looking for something until he remembered I was sitting there. Then, he went in Sandra’s purse and found her keys without looking very hard. He reached in and grabbed them. It was odd, it seemed like he knew his way around her purse. He gave the keys to me and said, ‘hand these to her when y’all get out the cab, or she’ll wind up sleeping in the hedge.’

  “Did he send you home in a cab?” I asked.

  “Yes, he did. Wait, there’s somebody knocking on our door.”

  “I’ll let you go.” I was about to hang up.

  “No, let me see who it is, hang on,” Suzanne said. I could hear her walking across the hardwood floors to the front door. “It’s Sully,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t hang up.” Then I heard her open the door saying, “Hello Sully, what brings you by here?” To me on the phone she said, “Hang on Mom, I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Oh, sorry to catch you on the phone, do you want me to wait until you’re off? I can come back.” I could hear Sully talking to Suzanne.

  “No, it’s my mother, she’ll hang on,” Suzanne told him. “Hang on a minute,” she said into the phone.

  “I think you forgot this at the bar,” he said.

  “That’s not mine,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry, I thought you left it. Okay then, I’ll let you get back to your mother.”

  I could hear Suzanne close the door and when she came back to me on the phone she said, “That was Sully trying to bring me back some old sweater he thought was mine. It looked like a rag he cleans the bar with. He knew it didn’t belong to me. That was just creepy.”

  “I don’t like him coming to our house. Do you want me to call Dante?”

  “And tell him what? Some guy tried to return a sweater he thought was mine? What does that sound like? We know he’s a slime bag but Dante can’t do anything about that.”

  “You’re right. Make sure all the doors are locked. I think we should consider getting some security cameras,” I said.

  “I think we should consider moving. That guy makes my skin crawl,” she said. “Oh, I’ll let you get back to work because I need to get some sleep, but first I have to bathe these mutts. They’ve been digging in the yard again and now they’re dragging in something they found. It’s plastic. It looks like… maybe a shower curtain but I can’t find the hole where they are digging.”

  “I think it’s under that shed in the yard. I saw those little stinkers come out from under it. Don’t worry about them. Put the baby gate up and lock them in the laundry room or kitchen, and I’ll bathe them when I get home. Get some sleep,” I said, and we hung up.

  By the time Friday rolled around, I had not seen Suzanne since the night I dropped her off at her job. I spoke to her Tuesday morning after she went with Sandra to Sully’s bar—the same day Sully had come to our door under the pretense of returning some sweater she left there. We kept missing each other with her strange hours and days off, so I texted and left her a voice mail asking if she would dog sit over the weekend for Meaux and Jesus along with Isabella, Jiff’s schnauzer. She texted back that she would.

  Jiff and I planned to leave for the plantations in St. Francisville late Friday afternoon. I left work around two-thirty to come home and get Dante over to meet with Sandra before Jiff came to pick me up at four o’clock. This was cutting it a little close, since Jiff and I wanted to try and beat the five o’clock traffic out of New Orleans. It was always a bottleneck until you passed the airport going west, or the high rise going east.

  As I walked over to Sandra’s to leave a reminder on her front door that today was her scheduled meeting with Dante, I worried she wouldn’t remember she had agreed talk to him about the palm reader found floating in the river. Her rival had been found near the Mandeville Wharf at the end of Elysian Fields Blvd at the very back of the French Quarter. I was about to leave the note on her door when she opened it.

  “You wanna come in?” she asked.

  “Thanks, but no. I came to remind you Dante will be here in a few minutes to talk with you,
remember.”

  “Who?”

  “Dante, my…friend. You remember him, right? He helped me get you out of the hedges a couple of times.”

  It had only been once he helped me get her out, begrudgingly, but I hoped she felt some guilty obligation to meet with him once I pointed out he helped remove her from the shrubs.

  “He wants to ask you some questions about that friend of yours missing—the other palm reader.”

  “She wasn’t my friend. He can come over. I didn’t really know her well, so I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”

  My brain was lost in thought as I walked across the street. I had hoped to avoid Dante seeing me walk out of my house with a suitcase and get in Jiff’s car. The best ideas in theory are often poorly executed. Such was the idea of Dante meeting and speaking with Sandra the very day I was leaving for the weekend with Jiff.

  I had also hoped to see Suzanne to tell her my weekend plans. Instead, I left a note on her bedroom door as a heads up that Sandra said she was going to work tonight and I was spending the weekend with Jiff. I also reminded her that Isabella would be here also.

  Then I waited, watching out the kitchen window that faced Sandra’s house to make sure she didn’t leave, or drift off to Sandraland forgetting about Dante’s appointment. I saw her heading to the burned-out car to ring the cats’ dinner bell—popping the trunk—to commence feeding hour. The great feline migration was underway as Sandra placed bowl after bowl in front of her house and in the driveway.

  The feeding frenzy was at its peak when Dante came flying up my street and screeched to a stop in front of my house. My stomach knotted up when I saw he had Hanky with him. I had a bad feeling about Hanky, the cats, Sandra—the whole shebang. Hanky got out of the squad car, faced Sandra’s house and immediately put her hands on her hips exposing her holster and badge. I ran out to meet them at the curb.