“Were you close to him?”
“Probably closer than anybody. The way to his heart was through the computer, and I was able to introduce him to it. He liked me almost as much as the machine.” Cole gave her a big smile.
“And what did you think of him?”
“Like I said, we were close.”
“I see.”
Did she close down a little? Cole thought he saw a shadow cross her face.
“Listen, would you mind if I took his computer down to headquarters?”
“What for?”
“Evidence.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“That’s all I can really say about it. Of course, if you don’t want me to—”
“Did you want to get into his files? Is that it? See if he’s got a journal in there?”
She smiled again, but he saw the tension at the comers of her mouth. “You never know what you’ll find.”
“Seizing computers is a pretty hot-button issue. The EFF would drum me out of the country if I didn’t say something.”
“EFF?”
“Electronic Frontiers Foundation. You could just download the disks, you know. The idea is, it’s bad enough to lose your software, but if your hardware’s missing, so’s your livelihood.”
“I think in this case…”
“Yes, of course.” He shrugged. “I thought I should at least register a protest.”
She began to unplug the computer and gather it up, as if he’d given her permission. “Mr. Terry, as long as I’m here, I thought I might clear up a couple of loose ends. I’m wondering where you were when the body was found.”
“Didn’t anyone tell you? I was in Baton Rouge. That’s why it was such a horrible shock for Marguerite; she had to go through the whole thing herself. Of course I got here in a couple of hours, but it was terrible for her—all alone like that.”
“May I ask why you went to Baton Rouge?”
“Of course. It was business. I’m a partner in a software company and we’re in negotiations with a company that wants to market our product.”
“I see. And where’d you stay?”
“Oh, just a Holiday Inn.”
“Which one?”
He gave her the address. “Can I help you carry that to the car?”
“Sure.”
“By the way, did you get the floppies? He could have put anything and everything on floppies.” He rummaged through Geoff’s files. “Here they are.”
“Thanks.”
As they walked to her car, he carrying the hard disk, she the floppies, she said, “Tell me about your business.”
“Well, it’s kind of interesting, really. I had another business, an electronics store—this was, oh, years and years ago when nobody had PCs. I was one of the first on my block and I was trying to find a program to keep the books, but none of them were any good. So I designed my own, and from that moment I was hooked.
“I went out and read every book I could find about computer programming; I took my first course in it long after I’d already founded a software company.”
“You’re self-taught?”
“Except for that one course, which I just took to see if I’d missed anything.”
“And had you?”
“Not a lot.”
She opened the trunk and they packed it with Geoff’s equipment.
“That’s pretty impressive.”
“You’d really think so if you knew the rest of my history.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, I fall out of love easily.” He smiled at her. “Except with Marguerite, I mean. But I’ve had quite a few jobs—I sailed a boat around the world for a captain of industry; I went to law school and passed the bar; I founded a bluegrass band that was pretty hot up in Baton Rouge a few years back; I even taught at a state college for a while—history, one of my favorite subjects.”
“You seem like a pretty well rounded guy.”
“Not anymore, I’m afraid. For the last few years, it’s been nothing but get up in the morning and work all day, and then work half the night, then get up and do the whole thing all over again. If things had gone right, and I hadn’t fallen in with a pack of idiots, Marguerite and I’d be millionaires. But now things are taking a turn for the better. We’ve got a deal going that’s finally going to do it.”
“That’s terrific.”
“We’ve waited a long damn time for it.”
He was ready to say good-bye—he still had to mow the lawn—but she leaned lazily against the car. “Are you from Baton Rouge?”
“No. Why?”
“Because that’s where the band was.”
“Oh. Just passing through. I was born and raised in Metairie. Lived a lot of other places, though.”
“How long have you been married?”
He had to pause and figure it out—Neetsie was eighteen. “Nineteen years,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It’s been good, though. It’s been great.”
“Happy marriages don’t come along every day.”
“Neither do women like Marguerite.”
She smiled at him more warmly, he thought, than she had before: All the world loves a lover.
It was hard to convey the way he felt about Marguerite. “Did you ever meet someone that you knew in that instant was right for you—was your life’s partner?”
“I don’t think many people do. How did you two meet?”
“Well, it wasn’t even that we met—I saw her across a crowded room and wouldn’t rest until I found out who she was. It took me an hour to work up the courage, though. Lucky for me, she was just out of a marriage to a very abusive man. What can I say? We fell desperately in love.”
“Leighton or Mike?” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who was the abuser?”
“I guess they both were, now that I think about it, but I met her after Mike. Otherwise I’d have snapped her up a few years earlier. Neetsie was born about a year after we got married, and meanwhile Geoff and I formed a real father-son bond. Mike had been abusive to him as well as to Marguerite; but maybe you knew that.”
She nodded, not giving anything away.
“He was withdrawn at first, but I found the cyberpunk lurking under the quiet exterior.”
Her smile looked painted on as she said good-bye, he didn’t know why. Maybe he’d run on too much. It was a habit, Marguerite had said.
SKIP HATED TO leave without talking to Marguerite, but she had a feeling it might be for the best—better to catch her without the doting hubby hanging around.
Cole had surprised her.
He was vaguely handsome in that clean-cut, fraternity-boy way so many New Orleans men were blessed with. But he had something else—a kind of wild energy, a charisma. He was a fast talker and a little short on modesty, but she felt herself drawn to him, drawn to the whirling center of all that electricity. How did a man like that sit at his computer all day? He seemed as if he should be out playing tennis. Not only that, how did he hook up with a dud like Marguerite?
But she must be missing something about Marguerite. The woman appeared to have had very nearly the male population of New Orleans in love with her at one time, and it didn’t seem to have abated much. What did she have that men saw and women didn’t?
Skip pulled into her parking place, thinking that the biggest mysteries she encountered weren’t always who did what to whom.
Remembering that Ted Bundy had been famous for his charm, she wasted no time checking Cole’s alibi—but his business associates confirmed the meeting he’d attended, and the Holiday Inn said he’d checked out at midmorning the day of the murder.
She turned her attention to a note she’d found on her desk when she walked in: “Call Mike Kavanagh ASAP.”
Gladly,
she thought.
About time we met.
Kavanagh had a classic New Orleans accent, not exactly yat, but pretty close. He said he’d be right ’dere.
He was overweight and red-faced, veins popping on his nose. He clearly ate too much and drank too much. His hair had been red, but it was mostly gray now. When he shook hands with her, he stood close enough so that she could smell the alcohol on his breath. She hoped he wasn’t too attached to his liver.
She hated cops who gave cops a bad name, and Mike Kavanagh, she could see at a glance, was capable of that. She had taken what Cole said about his being abusive with a grain of salt, but now she wondered.
“What can I do for you?” she said.
“I came to ask you that. May I sit down?”
“Of course.” They both sat.
“I knew you’d find me eventually. Terrible thing about Geoff.” He looked at his lap and shook his head. “Terrible thing. Wasn’t it?”
She nodded, thinking he looked shaken indeed.
“I thought you’d like my ideas on the case.” He attempted a smile.
“You have some?”
“Nah, not really. But you do—you think I’m a pretty good suspect, don’t you?”
“Are you?”
“Well, Suby told me about all this memory stuff. She says half that goddamn thing—the TOWN—thinks I did it.”
“Suby?”
“My daughter. Geoff got her on the goddamn thing.”
“I don’t understand. How did they know each other?”
He brought his fist down on her desk. “See? See? You don’t even know. Geoff and I were close, goddamn it! Marguerite didn’t tell you that, did she? I went to see that kid every week after we got divorced, and then welcomed him into my home after I got married again; he came to see Suby in the hospital the day she was born. They were like cousins, those two. Practically brought up together.”
“I guess I didn’t know that.”
“That bitch Marguerite’s not gon’ tell you. I don’t know why I ever married her—I must have been crazy.”
“Maybe you were crazy in love.”
“With skinny ol’ Marguerite?” He sat back in his chair, regret on his face. “I tried. I really did try. But the only good thing I got out of it was Geoff.”
“She was very beautiful, I hear.”
He made a face. “Shee-it. I don’t know, maybe she was. She was my brother’s wife and that was the end of it. I never really paid her any attention. But Leighton, he worshiped her. Thought the sun rose and set on her. Then when he died, she just seemed so… I don’t know, so sad and small somehow. Real fragile, and real burdened. I just felt real, real sorry for her. She had that little boy—bad little kid. Really bad. But then after we were married, he just kind of settled down. He needed a father was all.”
“Are you saying you married Marguerite because you felt sorry for her?”
“Well, that was why I started seein’ her. I’d take her and Geoff to the movies, the Audubon Zoo—I thought it was my duty as an uncle. Leighton and I were like that.” He held up two mashed-together fingers. “It was what I had to do for his son and his widow.”
His eyes clouded as he went back in memory. “Sometimes she’d cook me dinner. Or we’d go out to the lake and get crabs. It just seemed we were together a lot.” He shrugged, apparently trying to piece it together for himself as well as Skip. “It seemed like the thing to do to get married. It sounds kind of funny now, but I did it out of duty, sort of. Can you understand something like that?”
“Not really.”
He slammed his fist down again. “That’s how it was, goddamn it! You can believe it or not.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe it. You asked me if I could understand it.”
“Are you a Catholic?”
She shook her head.
“Well, that explains it.”
When she said nothing, he poked at his chest with the fingers of both hands. His face got redder and redder. “I didn’t get who she was, see. I believed Leighton—did that ever happen to you? Somebody you’re close to likes somebody so much you talk yourself into that person?
“I remember the first time I met her, I thought, this woman is trouble. She’s up to something I don’t understand. She’s gonna hurt my brother. But then she didn’t and he married her and he kept on thinking she was a saint even though she looked like a goddamn hippie. She had to do that for her job, he said. Because folksingers had to look that way. And I was so dumb I just believed him. You know what? You should always trust your first impressions. I had a lot of clues and I was too dumb to notice. Like what a bad little kid Geoff was.”
“Bad how?”
“He was always in your face, always asking for things, demanding things, and throwing tantrums when he didn’t get them. Nothing was ever enough for that kid. I thought it was just natural—his father dies, it upsets a kid. Ha! There’s this other thing—his mother pays no attention to him the first four years of his life, it leaves a real big hole. That’s what the kid was like—some kind of bottomless pit. Of course, Leighton and Marguerite probably fought a lot too. That probably didn’t help.”
“I thought he thought she was a saint.”
He looked uncomfortable. “Well, Leighton was different from me. I like a peaceful kind of woman.”
Right. Subservient, you could even say.
“I think he was into kissin’ and makin’ up.”
“Why do you say that?”
He looked down at his flat, blunt fingers, thoroughly embarrassed. “Because Marguerite was.”
He seemed inclined to stop there, but Skip was having none of it. When he hadn’t spoken for thirty seconds, she said gently, “Oh?”
He looked her full in the eye, apparently determined to come clean. “She got me with this helpless act. Then we get married and she wants to go out every night all by herself and drink and hang with a bunch of hippies and do every kind of drug you can name. Now think about it—what’s the next thing women do when they do drugs?”
“I guess that depends on the woman.”
“You know what it is. They’re hangin’ out in a bar with a bunch of lowlifes—you know what they’re doin’. She wouldn’t come home until two or three—she’d leave the kid over at her mother’s—but finally she’d get back and I’d be good and mad.
“Well, she knew I was going to be good and mad. How could she not know? Same thing happened every time. She’d fight with me a while, then she’d get real seductive. I fell for it the first few thousand times.”
“Ah. You got off on it too.”
“Well, now, that’s the thing.” He was talking to her as if she were a man, not embarrassed anymore, simply analyzing what happened. “I didn’t get off on it. The first few times, I was so surprised I just reacted like a piece of meat. Then after a while, I started realizing it was kind of makin’ me mad. I was feeling kind of used, to tell you the truth. And eventually, I didn’t want nothin’ to do with her after we’d been fightin’.” He paused and took a breath, even smiled.