Authors: Julie Smith
Beau said, “He knew about Mrs. Fortier. About her…” he paused and spat out the distasteful word “… affair.”
“Yes?”
“He was distraught about it.”
Once again she nodded.
“It was … well, you can imagine how upsetting it was.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Tell me?” He looked bewildered. “That’s self-evident, isn’t it? That she was having an affair with Ernest LaBarre. What else was there to say?” Once again, he sounded hostile.
She wondered if it was all a big fat squishy lie, or just a little dried-up baby lie, maybe with a grain of truth in it. She shrugged. “You tell me. There sure were a lot of phone calls.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I saw the phone bills.”
“Well, you know how people are when they have a problem. ‘My wife’s having an affair and I’m so unhappy I could just die.’ “
“He threatened suicide?”
“No! Of course not.”
“I thought you just said …”
Beau put up a hand like a traffic cop. “Okay, okay. I see what you’re getting at. It was just a figure of speech. I mean, they say they’re unhappy and then they say it again. You could die of boredom.”
“And when he said he was unhappy, what did you say?”
“Me? I don’t know. I just listened, I guess.”
“Russell made the calls from home. That puzzles me.”
“Why?” Beau was just too innocent for words.
“Bebe could hear him.”
Beau looked almost triumphant, as if they were playing tennis and he’d finally scored. “She was always out at some meeting or other. That was part of the problem.”
“So you think he left her? “
He looked like a person who’d just found a lost child. He nodded emphatically. “I do. I really do.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?”
“The LaBarre story hadn’t come out yet. I couldn’t break a confidence.”
Skip smiled. “You’ve heard from him, haven’t you?”
“Of course not.” Outrage was written all over his face. But something was off. Had he spoken a little too quickly?
He took a moment to compose himself. “You know, he’s a pretty different guy lately—I can’t predict what he’ll do.”
Ha! Maybe we’re getting somewhere
. She said, “Different how?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like he’s lost the old killer instinct. He’s become less competitive, I guess, less interested in his work.”
“And how long has this been going on?”
“A couple of years. Since that sailing thing—you know about that?”
She nodded.
“I think that really took the starch out of him. After that he seemed like—well, ‘a broken man’ is putting it too strongly, I guess. He’s just seemed kind of subdued. Quieter.” Beau shrugged. “But then his mother died the week after, and his father died a few weeks ago. So let’s see—if your mother died and your wife was having an affair, and your father wasn’t doing so well, maybe you
would
be subdued.” Beau looked extremely proud of himself.
“Well, speaking theoretically—if your theory is correct, and Russell did decide to disappear, where would he go? You probably know him better than anybody. What do you think?”
Beau did a strange thing. He put both hands over his mouth, separated them slightly, spoke briefly, and then put them back. “Let me think,” was what he said. He thought for a full minute.
In the end, he shook his head. “I just don’t have any idea.” As if as an afterthought, he said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” And shrugged again.
Fourteen
RAY WAS SITTING on the levee drinking beer, trying to cheer himself up, convince himself he’d done the right thing, but it was uphill work. He suspected there were lots of bad things he didn’t even know about; consequences of his own actions.
The river was itself—big and muddy, like its nickname. Big and muddy and inevitable. It was what it was, it flowed like it flowed, and there wasn’t that much could be done about it, unless you were the Corps of Engineers and even then it wasn’t easy. He was trying to find a metaphor for life in this. The levee system was a good thing; the Bonnet Carré Spillway was debatable—both were attempts to control the river. Did that do anything for him? He turned it over in his mind a few times.
The part that worked for him was the part about big and muddy. Now that described life, or anyway, life’s problems.
Or anyway, his.
He thought about chucking his beer can into the river because he was already such worthless scum that one more misdemeanor didn’t matter, but in the end his better nature won out. He put it on the floor of his car and drove home, where he carefully carried it into the house and threw it in the recycling bin.
The act was like shaving and getting dressed every day even though he had no company to run, and in fact, no job at all. You had to hang on to some vestige of dignity.
He heard Cille’s car in the driveway. One day a week she worked the early shift, but he’d forgotten it was today, had looked forward to an afternoon of wallowing in his misery.
The door banged as she came in. “Hi.”
She was wearing white jeans and a white T-shirt, what passed, these days, for a nurse’s uniform. She was heavier than she’d been when they met, maybe ten or twenty pounds heavier, but it looked good on her. Her hair was no longer blond, because she couldn’t afford to have it colored these days, and remained fairly long because that way she didn’t have to pay to have it cut as often. She generally wore it up, in artful disarray. To Ray, she looked like the prototypical Perfect Wife, but he knew in his heart she’d still look that way to him if she weighed three hundred pounds.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“Come on.” She moved closer. They were so perfectly in sync she always knew when something was wrong.
He was sitting at the dining-room table—his makeshift desk—trying to think of something to do. She took another of the chairs. “What is it?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. I just had a beer. I guess it got me depressed.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s all this shit.” He gestured impatiently at the pile of newspaper clippings that, for some masochistic reason, he was collecting. They were clips about the mini-oil boom out in the Gulf.
“Uh-uh. I don’t buy that. It’s LaBarre’s wife, isn’t it?”
He had already agonized about this at length—surely he ought to be over it. But Cille knew; she was uncanny that way. He took her hand. “Cille, what if she’d died?”
His wife shrugged. “If she’d died, it was her time. You didn’t cut her wrists, she did. You didn’t have an affair with Bebe, Ernest LaBarre did.”
“That sounds so cold.”
She squeezed the hand she was holding. “I know, sweetheart. I know. But you want to see cold? Look at United Oil if you want to see cold.”
“Mrs. LaBarre isn’t United Oil. Even Bebe isn’t. Hell, if it comes to that, even United Oil isn’t. The very brilliant Baroness de Pontalba proved that—I think.”
“Bebe might have known.”
“Oh, honey, maybe. Maybe not. The point is, maybe I’ve gone too far. How do I know I’m not out of control?”
She gave his hand another squeeze, let it go, and got up. “Because your own sweet wife says so.”
She really thought he could do no wrong.
It was her money he’d used to start the company. That night when he met her, the night she wore lilac and he fell in love with her, he had no idea she had two nickels to rub together. All that talk about starting a foundation, it turned out, was something more than idle chatter. She could have if she’d wanted to.
Her grandfather had been a doctor and her father had, too, but he had built on it with investments in the sort of places people went to die these days—extended-care facilities for the aged. Lucille’s brother was a doctor, and she’d become a nurse, the only one in her family, but it was what she wanted to do, and now she was a nurse-practitioner. To Ray’s mind, it seemed her own gentle form of rebellion. She didn’t like doctors and didn’t mind saying so—didn’t get along with her moneygrubbing father and had no use for her arrogant, smug brother. She could have been a schoolteacher and made them all a lot happier, but you had to rebel somehow or other and she was a nurturer by nature.
She was probably the only nurse in New Orleans with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank—courtesy both of Granddad, whom she had liked (but who hadn’t been around for a while), and her mother, who came from a shipping family and who had died young, despite all the medical men in her life. In Cille’s head, the money was earmarked (after college was taken care of) for that foundation of hers, but it ended up going into Ray’s dream instead of hers. She knew people and she introduced him to them. She had every confidence, as she said at least once a day over his protests, that he’d make so much money she’d have twice as much for her foundation.
She desperately wanted success for him, not because she needed it—she was fine being a nurse, it was her choice—but because
he
wanted it. She wanted what he did, but not in a clingy way. In that magical, mythical “supportive” way spouses, Ray thought, were supposed to have.
He adored her with every cell of his body.
He had had a beautiful little company—a lovely, profitable, splendid little company—Hyacinth Products, named for the water hyacinth, whose flower was exactly the color of the dress she wore the first time they met.
And then the damn Three-D seismic came in. Actually, that was fine—what had happened certainly wasn’t the fault of the technology. He owed his demise unequivocally to Mr. Russell Fortier.
Okay, that did it—changed his mood completely.
Just thinking of Russell Fortier.
Gone too far? How could he have gone too far? Would he ever even have considered messing with people’s lives as thoroughly and as utterly ruthlessly as Russell Fucking Fortier?
When it first happened, when he lost his lease, he tried putting himself in the position of the person or persons who’d screwed him out of it. At the time, only one was known, and it was Russell Fortier.
In a way, the thing was like an aikido move, using Ray’s own strength against him. It was a thing that twisted and turned upon itself, a thing so devious it was enough to make you shiver in the middle of the night if you happened to wake up in a cold sweat because you could see everything you ever worked for going down the drain like a swatted insect.
When the company fell, he lost everything. Every cent he made had gone back into it. He and Cille had lived well, had even put a decent amount of money in a college fund, but not only was there nothing besides that—nothing at all—there were debts. He had put not only his own money into the company but other people’s. And then, poof! One day there was no company.
Of course, he had sued. Fat lot of good that did.
At first, he would think about the person who had done this to him and wonder what had driven the man to it—if he had gambling debts, or a disabled child in a hospital too expensive to contemplate, and, assuming he did, if this could even help him. Or did he get some big, fat-cat Big Oil bonus for it?
Or maybe it wasn’t any of that. Maybe it was done just for the sheer pleasure of muscle-flexing. Some sort of socially acceptable version of weenie-waggling. Maybe Fortier had done it just because he could.
Maybe he was the Prince of Darkness in a business suit.
That was really how it started—this no-holds-barred, crazy-assed scheme he was involved in now. It had all started with wondering what manner of man would do such a thing. He had researched Fortier and found no gambling debts, no disabled child. He had followed him, spied on him, become more and more obsessed.
Eventually, Lucille, in some mad attempt to help him get the thing out of his system, had suggested hiring Allred, which they had done with the little money they had left in the college fund.
After that, the thing took on a momentum of its own. It was still gaining, the proverbial downhill snowball; maybe it was unstoppable now.
Fuck it
, Ray, he said to himself.
Would you really want it to stop?
No way, Jose
, his psyche answered.
Assuredly not.
Negative in the extreme.
When he thought of the wrong done to him and his family, his investors and their families—even, in some cases, his employees and their families—when he thought of all that, and the senselessness of it, the utter unnecessary-ness of it, the last thing he wanted to do was let it go.
He wanted the sons of bitches to pay. He wanted them publicly humiliated, and he wanted to take United Oil down.
United Oil had sold him Hyacinth Oil; had sold it to him. And now, out of no further motivation than corporate greed, they’d screwed him back out of it. Not, to be sure, Big Oil as a juggernaut—Russell Fortier had done it.
But had United said, “No thank you, Mr. Fortier. You’ve obtained this honest man’s lease by nefarious means and we will have nothing to do with it”?
They had not.
It made him so mad he wanted to kill.
It made Lucille mad, too. He could see the tension of her muscles, those little ones in her hands, in her neck, her jaw, around her eyes—he could see how truly furious she was, though she wouldn’t show it. It would ill behoove a member of the helping professions even to admit to so much anger—but Ray knew it was there. And it was there on his account—because he was her husband and she was an angel. But also because he was the underdog in this situation. Lucille was scrappy that way. She’d bite and scratch and tear flesh to help out an underdog.
Exactly what help Fortier had had, Ray didn’t know yet, but with The Baroness on the job, he was sure going to find out.
And there was one other little thing—the murder of Gene Allred. The assholes were going to pay for that. It was just a matter of getting the damned disk, and the world was his.
Fifteen
OKAY. ON WITH the white blouse, the navy skirt, and the goddamn pantyhose, and run for the 82 Desire.
Some day she really must write a poem about it—the fume-spewing bus that replaced the streetcar. How poetic could you get?
The Baroness was looking out the window as she rode through the Bywater, thinking that Tennessee Williams had taken license, and he hadn’t even been a poet. He had written: “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at…Elysian Fields.” The streetcar had traveled a slightly different route from the bus, but even in Williams’s day, if you were headed toward the cemeteries at the foot of Canal, you were headed to Metairie instead of paradise. In any case, it made a pretty metaphor, though Lamar had the gall to laugh at it. To actually laugh at Tennessee Williams. Well, Williams was white, but he was gay—that made him hip by definition. And besides, he was Tennessee Williams; you didn’t laugh at Tennessee Williams.
Whoa, girl
, she thought.
What’s this?
Usually anything Lamar did was okay with The Baroness. She didn’t like thinking bad about him, because her mama and Corey hated him so much. Somebody had to defend the man.
Darryl Boucree’s getting to me
, she thought.
She had gone to bed last night thinking about Darryl.
And then she dreamed she got on a train and took a long trip.
I wonder
, she thought,
if they’ve got trains named Desire? Think I might be on one now. Watch out, girl! He might be cute, but you don’t really know him.
Totally useless caveat, she knew it perfectly well—the guy wasn’t cute, he was adorable. And who wouldn’t be attracted to somebody who was a teacher just because he wanted to be?
Actually, she’d found out quite a bit about Darryl Boucree in their short but sweet beer date—the fact that he had two moonlighting jobs argued that he had some kind of dependent. But at least it wasn’t a wife unless he was a liar, and whoever heard of a liar who liked poetry? (Oh, well, scratch that one—Byron, for instance, had probably had a mendacious streak.) But she didn’t think it could be a wife. Probably a mother or something.
The exciting thing about Darryl Boucree, and perhaps the thing that had most drawn her to him, was that he was a musician. Creative people understood each other. Well, actually they didn’t, if one were she and the other Lamar, but at least they had a good shot at it. And Darryl was actually one of the Boucree Brothers! (Though he had explained to her that the membership of the band changed nightly and they weren’t all brothers—some were uncles and cousins and fathers and sons.)
What must it be like to be from a family like that?
When she asked him that, he laughed—said it was just like any other family, but she didn’t believe it. In fact, she knew it wasn’t—it was nothing like her family, which thought her crazy and irresponsible because she was a poet.
I hate to think what they’d do if they ever found out about the dicking.
The thought, mundane as it was, set off some little pleasure center in the back of her skull, made her feel warm and chocolatey-sweet for a second. What was that all about?
Ah, she had it. The “dick” locution reminded her of Darryl, because he’d thought it up and they’d had that little exchange.
Something had definitely been set in motion. Oh, well.
Que sera.
Which reminded her of something else—in addition to his other sins, Lamar didn’t like Alfred Hitchcock movies. He didn’t like anything to do with honky culture; it surprised Talba, but she did. Everything was too mixed up together to throw out big chunks without a damn good reason.
She got off at Canal and walked the rest of the way. The name she had, the dude she was supposed to report to, was Edward Favret. She found, to her utter delight, that he was in the same department she’d been in before, Acquisitions and Property. She thought, as they shook hands,
That fifty bucks I slipped ol’ Currie must have done the trick.
But Favret quickly disabused her. “Ms. Wallis, it’s a pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Oh, shit. She thought she’d kept a low profile.
“Robert Tyson says you’re the best temp he’s ever worked with, and we ought to hire you permanently—maybe that’s a thought, if you’re interested.” He gave her a look that made her nervous. He didn’t even know her. She hoped.
But she smiled and nodded, and a line rang through her head:
All nice like a good little pickaninny.
That was how her poems started sometimes—as lines that she expanded on.
I’m fixin’ to write about being a temp for Big Oil,
she thought, and wondered if she could do it on company time.
“Anyway, we’re revamping here—we’ve got a lot more stations that have to go in. I can really use you.”
Not good
, she thought.
Best not to be noticed at all. But can I help it if I’m a hell of a nerdette?
He left her alone.
Robert Tyson, hidden by some office module that looked like it belonged in a spacecraft, scooted out, and gave her an amused grin. “My favorite genius. Welcome back to wage slavery.”
“Hey, Robert. How’s it going?”
“Better now that you’re back. You ever think of applying for a permanent job? You ought to consider it. You’re good, girl.”
“You really think so?”
You don’t know the half of it.
“I really do. We could use you around here. And it’s not a bad gig, except when they treat you like a nigger, which in my case is about half the time.”
“Been laying a lot of wire, huh?”
He grinned again. “No, actually, I can’t complain. I had a few weeks doing what I was hired for—real interesting project. Dynamite project.”
Normally, she’d have loved to hear more about it. She was starting to miss programming. But at the moment she was anxious just to get him out of the way so she could steal her file—which was going to be a snap, due to the little alteration she’d made last time she was there.
She said, “But if I came here, I wouldn’t get to do squat—’cause I’m black and female.”
He grinned again. “No, that’s better—the old double-minority dodge.”
She grinned back. “Whatever works,” she said, and bent over her computer, waiting for lunch.
She planned to lift the file she needed as soon as he left. Technically she could do it with people around, but the last person who had that file had died. For all she knew, even nice Robert Tyson couldn’t be trusted.
After a while, she watched him fetch his brown bag and head off to the coffee room. Okay, good. She connected to the now-shared drive on Fortier’s workstation, once more brought up the “Find” command, typed in “Skinacat,” clicked the “Find Now” button, and murmured, “Come to Mama.”
The status line read, “0 Files Found.”
They must have changed the name of it
, she thought.
Especially if they know it’s been stolen.
What to do next?
Damn, damn, damn! If only she’d kept the names Allred had given her. It was true what she’d told the cop—once she was done with them, they were out of her head. But if she could just remember one of them, and the renamed “Skinacat” still existed, she could use the “Find” command to sniff out the file.
She closed her eyes and focused.
“Talba! You’re back.” It was one of the secretaries she’d met when she worked here before.
“Hey, Rochelle—look at you! Your due date must be about yesterday.”
The woman stroked her distended belly. “It’s got to be a boy—anything this big…”
Talba was too impatient to swap wives’ tales about carrying high or low. “When are you due?”
“Not till the middle of next month. Do you believe that?”
Another voice said, “Rochelle, who’re you talking to? Talba! How long you here for?”
Rochelle said, “Come on, Talba—let’s have lunch.”
Talba gave in. People were prowling about, coming and going from lunch, and she probably wasn’t going to have a moment’s peace. Meanwhile, she could let her unconscious work on the problem.
And sure enough, the answer came in the coffee room. One of the women had a child who went to a private school named Newman, and she remembered that was one of the names on the disk. Marion Newman—she recalled the first name because it was so unusual.
Back at her desk, she asked the “Find” command to locate Marion Newman and once again found herself looking at “0 Files Found.” That could mean only one thing—somebody had removed “Skinacat.” Good-bye, $1,500.
That was completely unacceptable. Talba’s mind turned it over as she did her legitimate nerd work.
Maybe,
she thought,
I spelled it wrong.
Maybe it was Marian. Or Neuman, or even Neumann. She decided to break it down, trying each word individually. She typed in “Newman” and was instantly rewarded—there was a file named that.
She was just about to check it out when she looked up and saw Edward Favret leaning over her cubicle. He had a slightly sloshed look, being apparently just back from lunch. “Brought you a cookie.”
She looked at him curiously, wondering. Yes, no doubt about it. He was flirting. She said, “Thanks, Mr. Favret, but I’m on Sugar Busters.”
“Oh, Christ. Not you, too.” It was the diet of the moment. “You don’t need to lose weight.”
She smiled, all nice again. “It’s not that. I’m already sweet enough.”
“Isn’t that just the truth? “ he said, as if he’d thought of it himself. He wandered off dreamily, the cookie still in its Mrs. Fields bag.
It was too narrow an escape. Talba decided to wait till after work to finish, when Robert Tyson had gone, and Favret had gone, and Rochelle had gone, and she could get a moment’s peace.
Tyson was the last to leave. “ ‘Bye, good-looking. See you in the morning.”
“ ‘Bye, handsome.” She spoke absently, not even looking up, to discourage conversation.
He stopped anyway. “Working late?”
“I’m leaving in about five minutes. I’m just at the end of something.”
“I’ll stay a minute and walk you out.”
Shit!
she thought.
What if he decides to help me?
But at that moment, her phone rang.
Lamar, goddamn him.
She picked up. “Well, no problem,” said a vaguely familiar voice. “I asked for Her Excellency, The Baroness de Pontalba, and they put me right through.”
“Darryl? Darryl Boucree, is that you?” She looked up at Robert Tyson and watched a slow smile spread across his features. Evidently grasping the situation, he waved and went on out. “How’d you get my number?” she asked the phone.
“Your mother. Who else?”
“Good thing I don’t have any enemies. She’d probably give them my address and everything.”
“She said she thought I sound nice.”
“Well, you do, darlin’. Can I call you back? I’m just finishing up here.”
“Great. That’s what I was hoping. Want to grab a bite?”
“I don’t know—I’m … um … let me call you in a minute?”
“Sure.” He gave her his number and hung up.
In fact, she more or less had a date with Lamar. Or anyway, Lamar would expect to see her, as he did every night or so, and if she was suddenly busy, he’d come to the correct conclusion. However, she noticed she hadn’t refused. She sat alone in the office, mulling over the situation; trying to figure out a way to have her cake and eat it, too.
Damn it! I like this man.
But if I go out with him, it’s good-bye to Lamar. Am I ready for that?
It took her only a moment to come up with the answer: More or less.
Now what to do? Call Lamar and come clean? Was she going to do that?
That was easy:
Hell, no.
Well, then, what? Say I’m sick. Or better yet, lay the groundwork—say I really need a night off, and if he asks questions, that we can talk about it later.
She dialed and got his voice mail. “Hey, Lamar,” she said. “Listen, I just got a call from Lorene. She’s broken up with Herbert again and wants me to come over. I’ll call you when I get home.”
It popped out, just like that—a full-blown lie that she didn’t even have to think about.
Obviously
, she thought,
I’m not ready to deal with this.
Okay, fine. There was only one problem—the client had said he’d call tonight, and she sure needed to talk to him. He’d called early before—maybe he would again.
She phoned Darryl before she lost her nerve. “Hey, I’d love to go out tonight. Want to pick me up at home?”
“Can’t I just get you at work?”
“Sorry, I have to go home first. Or shall we make it another night?”
“Tonight’s good,” he said. “What time?”
He had a really lovely voice. “Eight,” she told him. It was six already; she’d better hustle her butt.
On pins and needles, she opened up the Newman file. It was gibberish.
Talba felt sweat at her hairline.
Shit. It can’t be.
But she knew very well that it could be. Since the last time she worked at United, they’d installed an encryption program. The good news was, “Skinacat” was probably still there—they’d probably just changed its name. Whatever the new file was called would also be encrypted, which was why the “Find” command hadn’t worked.
Talba’s mind raced. That had to be what Robert Tyson meant when he said he’d just done a dynamite project. If the file was there, there was still a chance of getting it.
She caught the 82 Desire, raced in, and went straight to her room, ignoring Miz Clara’s pointed delivery of the message that Darryl had called. She needed to grab a ten-minute nap to clear her head.
She’d just closed her eyes when the phone rang. “Hi, this is your client.”
She said, “I’m working on your project.”
“What do you mean you’re working on it? Why don’t you have it?”
“I’ve hit a snag, to tell you the truth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They’ve added some security. I haven’t been able to get into the file I need.”
“What the hell kind of security?”
“Nothing I can’t solve. Don’t worry, it’s happening. Just give me a couple of days.”
“I don’t have a couple of days.”