Cities of the Dead (6 page)

Another note from Mary sat at his place at the breakfast table, folded next to his napkin. The eggs were hot and the note room temperature, so he gave the eggs his attention first. Not just eggs—Eggs Sardou, the breakfast blowout of the old New Orleans planters, poached eggs perched on creamed spinach, slathered with hollandaise. They counteracted his morning exercises and then some.

Albert Flowers had pushed his plate back and was contentedly sipping coffee, white with cream. “Your aunt said to make sure you read this note.”

Spraggue lifted one eyebrow. Mary had suborned Flowers, with charm and breakfast.

The note was just an address, but Spraggue knew the workings of his aunt's mind well enough to know that the address would be Jeannine Fontenot's.

“Where's Gretna?” he asked Flowers.

“West Bank. Not far.”

He passed the address to Flowers. “You ready?”

“Sure am. Good coffee.”

“Let me get a few things and we'll go.”

“Okay. I fixed things up with Sister Del. The hoodoo woman, remember? You got an appointment for a reading at nine o'clock tonight.”

“A reading?”

“Psychic reading. That's what she calls it.”

Spraggue went back to his bedroom and dumped one of the plump down pillows out of its case. He stood for a moment in the center of the room, then moved through the suite, placing an occasional object in the pillow case.

“You gonna hock that stuff?” Flowers followed him around anxiously. “Your aunt say it's all right?”

“These are theatrical props,” Spraggue said, prompted by Flowers' quizzical glance. “Never mind. Let's go.”

Within the Quarter, traffic stood still. The acrid tar smell, the haze, the jitter and boom of construction machinery told the tale. Every alternate street was being ripped up and repaved. Jagged hunks of cement lurched out of vast potholes. Flowers cursed, and finally drove up on the sidewalk to escape Royal Street. Spraggue, in the front seat, cranked the window down and watched barges slide along the wide brown Mississippi as the cab crossed the bridge.

The address was in the middle of a block bleached by too much sun, a block that housed both a corner liquor store and a church. Number 18, a ramshackle structure of indeterminate architecture, was too big to be a private home. If the neighborhood decayed any further, it would end as a funeral parlor.

The surrounding blight had been temporarily defeated. The light blue paint was so new it shone. A lacy wrought-iron balcony wound around the second story, giving the place a French Quarter air. The sign out front was neon—enormous script letters spelled out
Fontenot's
.

The name of the place didn't surprise Spraggue. Sergeant Rawlins had given Mary a list of the contents of the dead man's pockets. Mixed in with the keys and credit cards were two items of interest: five one-hundred dollar bills, and a fully written acceptance speech for the Great Chefs of New Orleans Best Chef Award. The speech was not modest. If Fontenot had gotten a chance to deliver it, the audience might have taken turns stabbing him.

Mrs. Fontenot answered the doorbell on the first ring, blinking in the sunshine.

She wore a crisp pleated white cotton blouse tucked into a dark full skirt, making the most of a waist too small for one so buxom. Her features were strong, her face carefully made up, a mask that almost hid reddened eyes. Over forty, he thought, good skin, good bones. Her dark hair was scraped back from her broad forehead and twisted up on top of her head. She had an air of brisk forcefulness about her that made Spraggue wonder if she had slept since the murder; she looked like the kind of person who handled disaster by taking every item out of a closet, dusting it, and putting it back.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I've been expecting you.” There was a weary eagerness to her voice. “Which paper did you say you were from?”

There. That was why good acting coaches always said not to prepare for an improv.

“
Times,
” he muttered quickly. Surely the most likely candidate would be the Louisiana
Times-Picayune
. If he were wrong, his error could be fobbed off as a request for the correct time—or an excuse for his presumed tardiness.

“I never thought—” she began enthusiastically, then calmed her voice to a more funereal pace. “Me, I always read these stories in the paper while I'm waiting on line by the market. You know: ‘Mother of Murdered Girl Speaks Out,' but I never thought I'd be talking to a reporter about my own husband, struck down in the prime of life.”

Wrong paper, Spraggue thought. Mrs. Fontenot sounded like she'd memorized one of the turgid soap opera scripts his agent kept sending him. Her words had a strange sort of rhythm, an unfamiliar melody that reminded him of other voices, Dora's lilting French, Rawlins' twangy Southern.

“What paper did you way you were from?” she repeated.

“The
Star,
” he hastily amended.

“I mostly read the
Enquirer,
” she said apologetically. “This was going to be our restaurant.” She motioned him inward. “You said you might take some photographs … The kitchen was my husband's own design. If you had a camera …”

“I was just going to ask where I could find the nearest drugstore,” Spraggue said smoothly. “My photographer's out of film. If I can send him for supplies, we can take care of the whole story this morning.”

“Wonderful. I was worried you might not make it until late this afternoon, like you said. Hmmmm. A drugstore. How about a regular camera store? There's one close by.” She pointed off toward a distant intersection and said, “It's just three blocks east of the light. Right by the KB. Big place. Can't miss it.”

“Thanks.” Spraggue hoped the “other” reporter would get called to a fire. He went back out to the cab, gave detailed instructions to the rear window, trusting the glare to hide the fact that only Flowers was inside.

He opened the cab's front door, rummaged in the pillowcase, and came out with a notebook, two pens for his breast pocket, and the cassette recorder he always traveled with when he was acting. He'd stuffed it in his luggage by mistake, from force of habit, ready to record his lines and cues. Now he was glad of the error. Grasping the recorder, he realized he felt comfortable in the reporter role. He'd played one in a TV cop show once. Then he'd worn horn-rimmed glasses and a cap.

“Come right in,” Mrs. Fontenot said when he climbed back onto the porch.

The foyer was dark and cool, and smelled of newly varnished wood floors. Several interior walls had been knocked down to make one large main dining area. Ceiling fans spun lazily overhead. The decor was haphazard, here and there a stab at elegance: flocked red wallpaper, gold wall sconces. But the floors were bare, and the walls covered with unframed maps and menus. Chairs and tables were crowded into the room as if Fontenot had anticipated an overflow crowd. The overall effect was contradiction, a ritzy diner.

“I can just hear my Joe say how fine the publicity would be.” Mrs. Fontenot let out a mournful sigh. “Only now, I don't know. I doubt I'll ever open this place. People would have come out to Gretna to eat Joe's cooking. Yes, they would. They would've come miles and miles. Me, I'm a good cook myself. Pretty near good as Joe. But I haven't got Joe's reputation and now, well, I don't know if I've got the strength.”

Spraggue made sympathetic noises and scribbled in his notebook.

“I suppose I could sell it,” she went on. “But it would seem like, oh, such a betrayal. Joe worked so damned hard for this place. It was his great dream. Just come see the kitchen.”

Spraggue got a guided tour, complete with relics (Fontenot's favorite cast-iron griddle) and anecdotes (the time Fontenot had made bread pudding with bourbon and lemon sauce for, well, a very well-known actress who's a trifle overweight, and she—well, Mrs. Fontenot wouldn't want that in the paper!). Joe Fontenot hadn't skimped in his kitchen; his restaurant was either deep in debt or well-endowed. His wife waxed eloquent over the eight-burner Vulcan gas ranges and the stacks of skillets. For a time she seemed to forget entirely the reason for his visit. Her plain face beamed and all the sharp separate parts blended into a whole that could only have been called attractive. She conjured up opening night, the first delighted customers—and then she remembered, and her face fell into sober defeated folds.

“And you and your husband lived here as well?” Spraggue prompted.

“On the second floor. We haven't done a thing up there. All our time, all our energy, went into the restaurant.”

“I'd like to see your own place. Kind of a homey angle for the story.”

“But it's a mess. Boxes still packed, no pictures on the walls—”

“I understand, Mrs. Fontenot. I won't take any photos.”

She shrugged, as if no one could possibly understand. But she gave in, saying, “Well, at least up there, I can make some coffee. You'd like some coffee?”

“Very much.”

“I don't think you told me your name. Or if you did, I don't remember.”

“Ed,” Spraggue said. “Ed Adams.” It came to him as he said it that the name was from some forties Alan Ladd film noir, a journalist who found a body in a cheap hotel room.

“You're not from around here.”

“No.”

“I can tell by the accent.”

Spraggue wasn't used to thinking of himself as having an accent.

Upstairs, the paint was dingy yellow. No pictures on the walls, as Mrs. Fontenot had pointed out, but you could tell where the last tenants had hung theirs by the faded rectangles. The windows had plain white shades, no curtains. All the furniture looked hand-me-down—springs sprung, upholstery tattered.

“We were going to do so much up here,” Jeannine Fontenot shouted from the tiny galley kitchen. “I found the most perfect wallpaper, pale blue with yellow roses. We were going to furnish from scratch, just throw all this junk out.”

More money, Spraggue thought. He studied two Plexiglas-framed photographs on the dusty coffee table. One was Joseph Fontenot; the other a faded snapshot of a small child, a girl, as the frilly white dress and elaborate ringlets made clear. She smiled up at the photographer with such joyful innocence that Spraggue hated to think of her growing up.

“Now,” Fontenot's widow said, settling onto the couch with a mug of chicory-flavored coffee in one hand, “what do you want me to tell you?”

“Everything,” Spraggue said easily. “Background. I hope you don't mind the tape recorder. It helps my memory and I want to get any quotes just right. Anything that you say is off the record will stay off the record.” He smiled down at her and wondered if he weren't overdoing the smarminess just a bit. His image of one of those gossip-sheet “reporters” was pretty negative, sort of a greased eel. If he'd had time to costume the part he would have chosen a shiny suit and a loud tie.

“I guess it'll be okay. Makes me a little bit nervous. What do you mean by background?”

“I want to do the sort of piece that will let our readers know exactly what kind of a man your husband was. Where he came from. How he lived. His accomplishments. When someone is killed in such a spectacular fashion, right before the presentation of an award he might have won—”

“
Would
have won. No ‘might' about it. In the category of best chef, my husband might as well have been running alone. There was no one close.”

Mrs. Fontenot did have something in common with her husband—a belief that he could do no culinary wrong. She bit her lip and continued, “Maybe that's why …”

“Why what?”

She thought about her words before she spoke, and then she pitched her voice low, as if a whisper would outwit the tape recorder. “There is so much jealousy in this place. You wouldn't think it. You would think there would always be room for one more, for a man or woman of talent and taste and style. But my husband—you wouldn't think it to meet him, he was such a charming man …”

That would take some convincing, judging by that acceptance speech, and by Mary's assessment of the man.

“He was charming,” Jeannine Fontenot repeated in her tense whisper, “but a lot of the other chefs didn't appreciate him, because—well, it's the truth and not boasting, he was better than they were.”

“And you think that—?”

“I know what you're going to ask. Do I think that one of those other cooks killed him out of jealousy, out of spite?”

“Do you?”

“This part I want off the record,” she said. “But yes. Yes, me, I think there may be something in that. Jealousy is a very powerful feeling.”

She said the last few words with such intensity that Spraggue wondered how much she'd known about her husband and Dora.

“Now,” she said apologetically. “I've gotten way off the track. You wanted to start with my husband's background?”

“Please, I'm interested in your theories about his death.”

She wasn't to be led. She mumbled that possibly they could go back to that later.

Spraggue said, “Maybe I could start with the education of a great chef. Was your husband raised in a family that cared about cooking?”

She laughed. “He was raised in a family that cared about eating. Talk about poor! They didn't have a pot to cook jambalaya in. My husband was born in the bayou. Bayou Cajun, like me.”

That identified the elusive accent. Spraggue was glad he was getting it on tape.

“He was the youngest,” she went on, “the only boy, and a wild one at that. Funny, with all those women, he was the one wound up doing the cooking. He always said if I'd ever tasted his mother's cooking, I'd know why he cooked—out of self-defense. He always had a nose for food. You know, great cooks don't smell or taste the way other people do. It's a gift, the way that perfect pitch is a gift. It's an art. People in New Orleans appreciate that more than the rest of this country, almost the way they do in France.”