Cities of the Dead (12 page)

“Not everyone,” Paulette said loyally.

“I'm sorry.” Denise smiled at the younger woman. “I get carried away, you can see. Cooking is passionate business. And that Fontenot, he made everything crazy.” She turned her attention to Spraggue; he was a new audience for a well-rehearsed scene. “Here we have Creole food, which is in the grand French tradition, and Cajun food, which is also good, but which is truly peasant food. To open a gourmet Cajun restaurant—
mon dieu!
—it is the same thing as to open a fancy-dress McDonald's with marble arches!”

“Absolutely!” Paulette shook her head vigorously in agreement, like a spaniel wagging its tail.

“
Eh, bien!
” Denise threw up her hands, ruffled her short graying hair. “Why do I go on like this, fighting with a dead man, eh? It is only that he infuriated me so. Do you know what this man did? Do you know? I write cookbooks. Good cookbooks, and this man was jealous. He went to my publisher, and he said that he would do a better cookbook than me.”

Denise Michel leaned back and folded her arms, leaving her listeners to appreciate the utter absurdity of Fontenot's claim.

“Is cookbook writing also passionate business?” Spraggue inquired. “Like cooking?”

“For me, it is money business. For others?” She shrugged her massive shoulders. “It is fortunate I have an ironclad contract with my publisher, yes?”

Did she? “Miss Michel—” Spraggue began.

“Denise,” she corrected.

“Denise.” He repeated it as she had said it: Denize. “When did you realize that Joseph Fontenot was the man who had married Dora under another name?”

The creases across her forehead deepened. “It is hard to say,
monsieur
. There's such a separation in time, you see. One does not think about them together. Dora cooks in New Orleans in, oh, the early sixties. Fontenot, I never hear of until, eh, maybe 'seventy-seven, 'seventy-eight. And then I do not meet him. He is only a name, a man who cooks pretentious Cajun food. But then, we are thrown together this past month. I have met him before, but never for more than a passing moment. Both of us are on the committee to arrange the Great Chefs' meeting. I am honored to have them come to my hotel. Always I have looked forward to being the hostess of such a dinner, with fine food and fine wine, and people who appreciate fine food and fine wine. And even that, this Fontenot spoils—”

“Why tell the police,” Spraggue said slowly, “about Dora and the dead man. She was your friend—”

Paulette got defensive. “What else could she do? There was the man, dead on the floor—”

“Calm yourself, Paulette.” Denise spoke as if to a child. “I can speak for myself,
cherie. Monsieur
, listen to me. I tell the police only the truth. All my life I have read crime stories, mostly French ones.
Romans policiers
. And always someone does not tell the truth. And always, it would have been better if they had. I do not believe that my old friend killed this Fontenot. He was a man well hated, a man waiting to be killed.”

“You can tell the truth,” Spraggue said, “and still hold something back.”

There was a sharp knock on the door. Spraggue looked at his aunt, but she shrugged her ignorance.

“We must go.” Denise Michel stood and Spraggue was awed by her height. The massive shoulders were in proportion to the rest of her. The mousey Paulette was dwarfed as she rose unsteadily to her feet.

“One more thing,” Spraggue said quickly. “During the banquet, did you leave the room? Go to the kitchen to check on things?”

“The kitchen here is well run by my staff. I have no need to race back and forth and attend to every detail myself.”

Pierce loomed in the archway. “Detective Sergeant Rawlins to see you.”

It was Paulette who whirled at Pierce's voice, upsetting her wineglass. In a flurry of awkward actions, she blushed, stammered an apology, and gazed up at Denise like a spaniel about to be whipped. Her napkin staunched the stream of pale wine.

Spraggue asked, “Which table did you wait on that night, Miss Thibideaux?”

“Oh, please,” she said, “I'm not usually so clumsy. I didn't—”

“No. I'm not accusing you of spilling anything. I just wanted to know if you'd noticed Fontenot that night.”

Denise said, “Shall I send you up another bottle of wine?”

Mary nodded gravely. She looked entirely sober now. She could probably play back the entire dinner conversation with the accuracy of a tape recorder.

The interruption gave Paulette a chance to regroup. She clung to the back of her chair. “I waited at the head table,
monsieur,
” she said, borrowing a little of Denise's French lilt. “Where the judges sat. It was an honor for me. I don't recall seeing Monsieur Fontenot.”

Denise bowed her way out, Paulette mimicking her ungainly stride. Spraggue drained his glass and set it back in the forest of glassware on the table. His right bicep felt like it had been squeezed in a vise.

“Interesting,” Spraggue said.

“What?” Mary was surveying the wreckage of the tablecloth. Breadcrumbs, wine stains, spilled coffee. “Let's go into the study.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Me?” Mary drew herself up with dignity. “Mainly, I poured. A waste of good wine.”

“Just who is little Paulette?”

“Denise knows her mother. She's taken a special interest in her. In training her to cook. That's what she said, at any rate.”

“Paulette brought up the food?”

“Yes. Cook, waitress, and unexpected guest. Denise will probably send someone else to handle the clean-up. Paulette doesn't handle her drinking well.”

“But she seems devoted to Denise,” Spraggue added thoughtfully. “Denise invited her to join your little party.”

“Yes. And I agreed, because she was a waitress at the banquet. What about it?”

“I don't know.” Spraggue shook his head to clear the fog of Scotch, champagne, and burgundy. “Something about the way Paulette looked at Denise, it bothered me. Sometimes she looked like a worshipper at an altar. And sometimes …”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes she looked like the sacrifice.”

ELEVEN

Sergeant Rawlins looked thinner than he had at the station. His navy suit camouflaged his stomach. His jawline showed the evidence of a hasty shave. He'd even made an effort to slick back the cloud of white hair. When Mary offered her hand, he leaned over and brushed it with his lips.

Spraggue wondered if he ought to get lost.

Mary said, “You look like a man bearing good news.”

“You didn't tell me she was a mindreader.” Rawlins flashed a sidelong grin at Spraggue.

“Only when the moon's full,” he replied.

Mary shrugged. “The rest of the time, I'm reduced to reading tea leaves. Have you got something?”

“Have I got somethin'?” Rawlins patted the pockets of his suit until one of them yielded a folded sheet of paper. “Set yourselves down and take a peek at this. I only made the one copy, so's you'll have to share.”

MURDER IN MORGAN CITY
screamed the headline.

“Huh?” Spraggue unfolded the paper. It was legal-size, cheap and white, fresh from a Xerox machine. Either the original clipping had been in bad shape or the copier needed service. “Where's Morgan City?”

“Read first, questions later.” Rawl sat in the only chair designed for his weight, folded his hands over his paunch, and turned into a smiling Buddha. Mary and Spraggue huddled on the couch, heads bent close together.

In a mid-morning attack on an armored car carrying the payrolls of several major oil drilling companies, one guard was killed, one severely wounded, and a third man, allegedly one of the robbers, was shot and later apprehended by the Morgan City Police. Estimates of the loss range from $150,000 to well over $1,000,000.

“What's this got to do with—” Mary began.

“Read,” Rawlins replied sternly.

Lieutenant Gil Dumais of the Morgan City Police stated that three masked assailants were involved in the well-planned robbery, two armed with handguns, one with an automatic weapon. Two of the suspects escaped and are the object of an intensive police search.

The wounded were taken to Sisters of Mercy hospital, where the name of the injured guard was not immediately available. The dead guard's name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin. Both were employees of Southeast Security, Inc. The name of the wounded suspect, now under guard at Sisters of Mercy, is given as James French, age and address unknown.

There was a date handscrawled on the corner. Spraggue thought it might be September, '66. He glanced questioningly up at Rawlins.

“Wait till your aunt's done readin'.”

Mary sighed. “If this is supposed to make lightbulbs appear over my head, I'm afraid I may disappoint you.”

Rawlins leaned forward and rubbed his palms together in anticipation. “Lookit, your nephew said somethin' to me this afternoon, about checkin' out the dead man, 'cause he married your cook usin' an alias. I wouldn't have even tried fingerprints, except we got this fancy computer scanner system on loan from the Feds. Japanese make it. NEC. Costs enough to pay five hundred extra beat officers or somethin', so I'm bettin' we never buy one, but I sure am gonna stick in a good word for that machine after this. Checks six hundred and fifty file prints per second! Picked those prints out so fast my head's still spinnin'. Woulda taken a good print man thirty years. If he got lucky.”

“Sergeant Rawlins—” Mary began.

“Hey,” Rawlins said reproachfully, “I thought we agreed on ‘Rawl.'”

“Rawl, I'm not understanding this. What's an old robbery got to do with fingerprints?”

Rawlins turned to Spraggue. “You talk to Jeannine Fontenot this morning? She say her old man spent some years away from her?”

Had Rawlins had him followed? Was there a fine for impersonating a trashy journalist? “She said he spent time in France, learning to cook.”

“France, huh?” Rawlins leaned back, a grin splitting his plump face. “Angola's pretty damn far from France.”

“Angola?” Mary said. “As in African Angola?”

“Angola as in Louisiana,” Rawlins announced. “Site of Louisiana State Prison.”

Spraggue broke the silence with a low whistle.

“What I mean is,” the sergeant continued, pleased with the reaction, “this guy who got arrested for robbin' the payroll in Morgan City, back in 'sixty-six, under the name of James French, keeps the same damn prints on the ends of his fingers as Joe Fontenot. We're not lookin' at a dead man who changed his name once for the purpose of connin' some poor lady into matrimony. We're starin' at a six-year jail term and multiple aliases.”

“James French,” Spraggue repeated. “And when he married Dora, he was Jacques Forte.” He ticked off the names on his fingers. “When he married Jeannine, he was Joe Fontenot. Must have had monogrammed underwear.”

“Rawl,” Mary said, “this is wonderful!”

The detective's fat cheeks reddened.

“Is there more?” Spraggue asked.

“Well.” Rawlins stretched out the syllable, while he patted down his pockets again, then removed a tiny notebook. “I got a few things jotted down. Got a guy on the way over to Morgan City right now.” Rawlins thumbed through the pages, held the notebook open at arms length, moved it slowly closer.

“Rawl,” Mary murmured.

“Okay, okay,” he muttered, reaching into his breast pocket, yanking out a leather case. “I'm not tryin' to hold back.” Reluctantly, he perched a pair of reading glasses on the bridge of his nose. They were thin rectangular slits, framed in black. “I want to say it all at once, and I don't know right where to start. I might just head up to Angola to talk to the warden tomorrow—”

Pierce had an entire vocabulary of door knocks. This one was subdued, perfunctory—an announcement of interruption rather than a request to enter. He presented a bottle on a silver tray.

Mary accepted the accompanying white and silver card, while Spraggue read the label on the bottle. “Compliments of the hotel,” she announced. “That means Denise.”

“Cognac,” Spraggue said. “A Sabourin Grande Champagne. A major league bribe.” He wondered about Paulette, about the possibility of linked murderers, one with motive, the other with opportunity.

“Pour us each a glass, Pierce,” Mary said, “yourself included—and we'll drink to this marvelous policeman.”

The praise made Rawlins sit taller in his chair. “James French,” he said, consulting first the notebook, then the folded sheet of paper, reading easily now with the aid of the despised glasses, “also known as Joe Fontenot. What he served time for in Angola was quite some rumpus, back in 1966.” Rawlins clamped the notebook shut, using his index finger for a marker, and lifted off his glasses. They left shallow red tracks on either side of his nose. “Took place over to Morgan City. If you know Morgan City, you know it's sort of a free-for-all zone. A good place to get lost and stay lost. Off-shore oil workers hang out there. Good pay for unskilled labor, and they need enough of it so they aren't too careful about social security cards and identification and such. Find almost anything over to Morgan City. And there's money around. Cash money. You don't pay those guys with no bank checks. They like to see the green foldin' money in the pay packets, so they can head straight over to the bar. No bankin' center, old Morgan City.”

“Where is it?” Mary asked.

“Oh, 'bout ninety miles southwest. Our boy could've planned the robbery while he was livin' here, married to your cook as Jacques whatever. It was one of them million-dollar jobs, the once-in-a-lifetime kind of crime. You know, if we're gonna do it, let's do it right once, and not fool with robbin' the five-and-dime every other weekend.”