Under the Cajun Moon (17 page)

Together, Sam and I walked in time with the music, in turns holding each other up and audibly sobbing as we went. For me, it had been a very uncommon and public display of emotion, one that would later earn a reprimand from my mother despite the fact that I was twenty-one at the time and far too old to be scolded by her. It didn’t occur to me until later
that perhaps what my mother had called embarrassment had actually been jealousy. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t cry that hard when it came her turn to be laid to rest.

It was true that I was nearly inconsolable with grief that day, mourning the woman who had touched my life with such love. By the time we reached the cemetery, the band had worked through the sad songs and was picking up the tempo. I had never understood why people were always dancing and laughing at jazz funerals. But then Sam explained that we had mourned the goodbye for ourselves, but now it was time to rejoice the passing into heaven for Eugenie. As the band burst into a rousing version of “Panama,” Eugenie’s favorite song, I finally got it. We sang and danced the second line toward her grave for what felt like hours, brown skin and white all glistening with sweat in the hot afternoon sun. After the dancing, I had prayed, prayed that when she got to heaven God would welcome her as lovingly as she had always welcomed me.

Truly, had it not been for Sam and Eugenie, I might have broken my ties with this city altogether, years ago.

“Are you okay, Chloe?”

Startled from my thoughts, I turned to see Travis staring at me curiously. I realized that we were on Royal, crossing Orleans, and that a single tear had somehow made its way down my cheek. I wiped it away impatiently.

“I’m sorry. I was just thinking about Eugenie’s funeral.”

“Sam’s wife?”

“Yeah. She was a very special lady.”

“
Mais oui.
I remember.”

“Speaking of ladies, I need to call my mother.” I dug my cell phone from my purse, dialed my mother’s number, and was relieved to hear her answer. This would be the first time I had spoken to her since I’d been arrested.

“Mom? It’s Chloe.”

At the sound of my voice, she burst into tears. I was surprised but touched, especially when the crying went on for a block and a half. Once she had calmed down enough to speak, though, I quickly realized that much of her outburst had come not from love or concern about my ordeal
but from the mistaken assumption that I had killed a man. She went on and on, demanding to know what could have possibly gone wrong to make me do something like that.

My own mother thought I was a murderer? Even Travis, a guy I hadn’t seen in fourteen years, knew I was innocent. Yet here was Lola Ledet, sniffling into the phone about how could this have happened and what were we going to do and surely she had raised me better than this. I just let her keep going, telling myself that she hadn’t raised me at all. The faculty and staff at boarding school did. Sam and Eugenie did. The nanny did. My mother, on the other hand, had been merely a bystander.

Now she was a bystander
and
a traitor.

The conversation with my mother was made even worse by the fact that I was having to have it in front of a virtual stranger. To his credit, Travis rolled down his window and pretended not to listen, but even so it would have been hard not to hear, considering our proximity.

“Look, Mom,” I finally interrupted, “we can talk about all this later. Right now I’m trying to find Sam. Do you have any idea where he is or how I could reach him?”

She did not, as apparently she also had been calling around trying to find him all day. Ledet’s manager had told her that no one there had seen him and that Sam hadn’t even shown up for family meal, which was unusual for him. As we neared St. Peter, I noticed a car pulling out of a metered space off to the side and gestured to Travis that he should park there. He made the turn and attempted to parallel park his big truck in the tight space.

“All right, Mom, one more question. Last night Sam took the tape from your answering machine and brought it to someone who could enhance the sound. Do you know where he brought it?”

Travis grunted as he eased carefully into place. Ignoring him, I listened to my mother, who was trying to remember what Sam had said. There was no question in my mind that my father’s shooting and my framing were directly related. I had done a lot of thinking today, and I had the feeling
that the best chance of finding the shooter and proving my innocence began with that tape.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”

“Did he say a person’s name?” I prodded. “Maybe the name of a business? Whoever it was, they have some high-tech equipment. Where did Sam take it?
Think
, Mother.”

“I’m trying, Chloe. You have no idea how difficult this has all been for me!”

“Oh, yeah, and a day in jail has been a real walk in the park for me!”

“Don’t be rude, darling. You know better than that.”

Speaking of rude, Travis had finished parking the car and was now tapping me on the arm. I waved him off but he persisted. Finally, I asked my mother to hold on and cupped my hand over the phone.

“What?”

“
C’est moi.
It’s me.”

“It’s you what?”

“I’m the guy you’re looking for. The recording. Sam brought it to me.”

Travis popped a CD from the player and held it up to show me. Handwritten in marker on the top were the date and words
J. Ledet Phone Msg
. He opened the glove compartment and pointed to a small digital tape sitting atop a typed sheet of paper. “Last night, before he came and met you at the restaurant, Sam brought this tape to me at my studio. That’s why I’ve been trying to find him, to tell him what I was able to figure out.”

Without responding, I took my hand away from the phone and asked my mother if by any chance the name she was trying to recall was Travis Naquin.

“That’s it, Travis! Alphonse’s grandson. Of course, how could I have forgotten? He’s some bigwig music producer, has a whole studio and everything. Sam thought he might be able to help.”

“All right, Mom, that’s what I needed to know for now. I’ve got to go.”

“Wait. When are you coming down to the hospital?”

“Soon.”

“I hope so. So many people came to see about your dad that my
bodyguard finally made me move into a private waiting room for safety purposes. I’m going stir-crazy in here all by myself. I need someone to talk to.”

Her words were not lost on me. She wanted me there not to comfort me or to help me figure out what was going on, but because she was bored and tired of being by herself.

“I only get to see your father once an hour,” she added pitifully, “but of course he doesn’t say a word. It’s awful for me.”

“Goodbye, Mother,” I said, disconnecting the call. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, counting to ten.

To his credit, Travis didn’t offer any platitudes to make me feel better. Instead, he quietly waited in silence as I pulled myself together.

“My phone’s battery is getting low,” I said finally, unzipping a side pocket of my purse and pulling out my car charger. “May I plug it in?”

“Of course,
cher
,” he replied, gesturing toward the power outlet.

“Thanks.” I plugged in the charger and propped the phone in a cup holder. Then I turned to Travis and asked him to tell me about the message. “Were you able to recover the missing parts? Do we know who shot my father?”

“No, we don’t know that. I was able to clarify a few things and pick up some external sounds, but overall I was disappointed. Between swamp gasses and mineral deposits, south Louisiana is brutal on cell phone transmissions. For the first part of the call, the sound was broken up by external interference, so the missing words can’t be recovered. The only parts I could recover were near the end, when it wasn’t a transmission problem but simply of matter of your father’s voice growing weaker and being drowned out by other noises.”

“Can I hear it?” I asked, wondering if I was going to be sorry for asking.

“Sure. Take a look at this first.”

He handed me the page from the glove compartment, and I looked at it to see that it was a typed transcript of the tape similar to the one Sam had handwritten and shown me last night. This version included some words in parentheses, and everywhere a gap appeared, indicating missing words,
Travis had typed a number. He explained that the words in parentheses were the extra words he had managed to recover from the original using his equipment. The numbers were the amounts of seconds unaccounted for.

“On the parts that are audible, he speaks an average of three words per second,” Travis continued. “So where the gaps are just a second or two, that means we’re only missing a few words. In the longer gaps, obviously, we’re missing far more.”

“So, here, where you wrote a seven,” I asked, pointing to the biggest number, “that means we’re missing about twenty-one words?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a lot.”

“I know. That’s why it’s so frustrating. I worked on this most of the night, and as you can see, I was able to recover the last third nicely. But there’s still lots of gaps in the rest, especially at the beginning. Like I said, there’s nothing anyone could do to get those missing sections back because they never made it onto the recording in the first place.”

I asked Travis to play the message, and I braced myself for the sound of my father’s agonized voice to fill the vehicle. Sure enough, suddenly he was talking, and so I read along. I noticed that where Sam had written “bins” and “bins totter” Travis had put “Ben’s” and “Ben’s daughter,” which made more sense. He had also made notations of other sounds, such as the cutting of the boat engine and the noise of that boat scraping on the bottom of the bayou. The most important part of what Travis had done, though, was to recover the last few sentences in their entirety.

Once the message ended, we sat quietly together in the car. Up the street, music played from a boom box where two little boys were tap-dancing their hearts out.

My poor dad. I knew he had suffered before he lost consciousness, but I hadn’t fully grasped the extent of that suffering until I heard his voice on this message. I couldn’t help but focus on the urgency and despair, so I told Travis to play it again, and this time I tried to listen more fully to the words themselves. As I did, two sentences jumped out at me near the end.

I always told you we had an insurance policy, our special recipe. I just didn’t know it would end up getting me killed.

“There,” I said. “Stop there. What does that mean, ‘I always told you we had an insurance policy, our special recipe’? What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your mother.”

The “special recipe” could have been almost anything, the salt-crusted fish that Ledet’s was famous for, something from one of my father’s many published cookbooks, even the recipe for his pink secret salt. Travis was right. I needed to call my mother back. Though I really didn’t feel like talking to her, I thought she might be of some help. When she answered the phone, I read that sentence to her and asked her if it had any special meaning.

“‘I always told you we had an insurance policy’? ‘Our special recipe’?” She sounded puzzled.

“Yes. If Daddy said that to you, what would you think he was talking about?”

“Hmm. I’m sorry, Chloe, I just don’t know. I do remember him saying ‘If anything ever happens to me, babe, that’s your insurance policy,’ but he wasn’t talking about a real insurance policy.”

“What was he talking about?”

“Some poetry he wrote, back before Ledet’s ever opened. He had it framed and hung it in the entranceway. It’s still there. It was just a poem and not a legal document. Whenever he called it an insurance policy, I just thought he meant symbolically, like it represented the restaurant itself.”

“How about your ‘special recipe’? Does that ring any bells?”

“Gosh, Chloe, that could be any one of a thousand different things. The man is a chef, you know.”

“A poem framed and hanging in the entranceway,” I said, trying to remember it. “Are you talking about the one that’s matted with the photo of the ribbon cutting?”