Ciji Ware (55 page)

Acting on impulse, Corlis reached for the phone, prepared to ask that Aunt Marge send the McCullough diary to New Orleans, posthaste. Just then her intercom buzzed. Irritated by the interruption, Corlis padded in her stocking feet into her parlor, where she pushed the “talk” button on the wall next to the door.

“Yes?” she barked.

“Want to let me in?” a familiar voice demanded.

“No… I don’t!” Corlis answered, and then chastised herself for sounding petulant.

“C’mon, Corlis… buzz me through. I want to talk to you.”

“Look, King… I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Right this minute, you’re in the red-hot center of the campaign to save the buildings, and I’m a journalist covering the story. I think, for both our sakes, we should keep our distance.”

“That’s a load of crap!” he exclaimed, his irritation crackling through the intercom. “That’s not the reason you won’t talk to me.”

“Maybe to
you
it’s crap,” she snapped, “but not to me.”

“Why, Ace,” King said, “where’s your fabled journalistic honesty? You sent Manny and Virgil to do your work for you today, didn’t you? You couldn’t be suffering from just a tiny bit of unfounded jealousy, could you—and
that’s
why you won’t let me darken your door?”

Corlis felt herself go rigid with indignation. How
dare
he trivialize the personal and professional issues that confronted them! Typical southerner! Typical
male
!

“You think this is just about jealousy, huh?” she countered, steeling herself to sound cool and collected when she was anything but. “You think this just concerns how devastatingly attractive you are to all the women who flit across your radar screen—
especially
if they’re willing to write a check to your favorite cause?” She put her lips a millimeter away from the speaker box. “No one pays
your
way, huh, Mr. Preservation? Well, maybe—unless you decide it’s for a good enough cause! And now I’m sorry to buzz off, but I’ve got a four o’clock deadline. See ya.”

She released the “talk” button and congratulated herself for coming up with such a great exit line.

Then why, she wondered, did she feel so damned miserable?

***

King, Dylan, and Althea hovered in a corner of the antiseptic, concrete-and-chrome foyer that stood adjacent to the New Orleans City Council chambers.

“Sweet Jesus, what I wouldn’t do to have a copy of that memo you saw in Grover Jeffries’s office the night of his costume party!” Dylan exclaimed.

“Amen,” Althea said fervently.

King made no comment and beckoned toward the double doors leading to the council chambers.

The hall was packed. Many people in the audience sported large buttons that read: “SOS—Save Our Selwyns!”

Althea and Dylan began handing out the brochures while Cindy Lou distributed handmade protest signs to people sitting down front. As the group made their way through the hall, a number of television crews began recording their actions, along with shots of Grover Jeffries, Lafayette Marchand, and a gaggle of gray-suited lawyers representing the interests of the Del Mar Corporation. These gentlemen sat huddled in the back row, conferring in agitated whispers.

A few minutes later, Edgar Dumas, the recently elevated president of the city council, along with his elected colleagues, took their places on a raised dais. Dumas gaveled the meeting to order and began calling a series of city planning officials and Landmark Commission members to the podium to deliver their reports.

For forty-five minutes, the civil servants and appointed officials droned on. The council members rarely questioned those testifying about the more controversial aspects of the proposed building project. Instead, they chatted quietly among themselves or took the opportunity to catch up on their newspaper reading.

As the last witness took his seat, Councilman Roscoe Bordeleon leaned toward his microphone and made a proposal in a sleepy, low-pitched voice.

“President Dumas? Before we finish tonight and take our first vote on the proposals in front of us, I’d like y’all to hear from Professor Barry Jefferson ’bout some of the history connected with these buildings that this body seems hell-bent on demolishin’.”

Althea leaned toward King and whispered triumphantly, “Roscoe’s my mother’s second cousin once removed. He promised me he’d at least smooth the way for Professor Jefferson to address the council.”

“Way to go, Althea!” King whispered back, smiling gratefully. “I’m on the agenda, too…” He cast a worried glance at the wall clock.

Edgar Dumas gave an annoyed shake of his head. “I think we have more than enough information about this particular city block—especially if you folks all watch
television
,”
he added sarcastically, glancing in the direction of the battery of TV crews positioned below the dais. The audience responded with a mixture of snickers and cheers.

“Well…” drawled Althea’s distant cousin into his mike. “I sure didn’t know that forty-five percent of all black folks here before the Civil War were Free People of Color and owned buildings, did
you
,
Edgar?”

“Who says?” Edgar challenged. “That’s got to be wrong, Roscoe. There was nothin’ but slaves in Louisiana back then.”

Roscoe waved the color pamphlet over his head. “Why don’t you read Professor Jefferson’s brochure? It says here that the source for that forty-five percent statistic comes from our own city archives. There’s also a book,” he continued, squinting at the fine print in a footnote. “You’d better get a copy of
Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization
by Hirsch and Logdon… outta Baton Rouge, it says here. Barry Jefferson’s a highly respected professor of
African
American history, Edgar. He wrote a college textbook on this stuff, so he should know what he’s talkin’ ’bout, don’t you think? I move that we invite the good professor to speak to us for just a few minutes, so we get our facts straight.”

The atmosphere in the auditorium was suddenly charged with excitement. The lobbyists and civil servants had ceased talking quietly among themselves, and everyone in the audience was hanging on Roscoe Bordeleon’s every word.

“I don’t think—” Edgar Dumas began.

“Maybe all of us
weren’t
descendants of slaves!” Bordeleon said languidly. “Maybe a few of us have a
different
heritage that we don’t know much about.” For the second time Bordeleon waved the brochure over his head. “In the city today, where nearly seventy percent is black folks, I don’t know of
one
black-owned building on Canal Street—and yet most of y’all on this council seem determined to demolish the block where Professor Jefferson and the preservationists say Free People of Color once built and occupied a whole
set
of beautiful buildings!” He pointed to the easel. “I say we invite Professor Jefferson to talk to us, Edgar,” he challenged, his lethargic manner suddenly becoming surprisingly passionate. “I say we slow down before we all vote to wreck a place that our ancestors put up a hundred and sixty years ago. If we don’t, we’re
crazy
,
man!”

Corlis noticed that the reporter from the
Times-Picayune
was making furious notes, as were other representatives of the print and electronic media. At some point in these proceedings, Jack Ebert had slipped in, unnoticed, and was also writing in his notebook. She glanced over her shoulder and could see Grover Jeffries whispering into Lafayette Marchand’s ear.

“We’re outta time today.” Edgar Dumas announced, clearly also out of patience. A low rumble rolled through the contingent of preservationists who began to shift in their seats and to raise their cardboard placards. “I’ll do this much, Councilman,” Dumas temporized, pointing his gavel in the direction of the city clerk. “I order Professor Jefferson’s brochure to be submitted to the record. It’s time that the clerk read the ordinance, and we vote.”

“Point of order! Point of order!” a loud voice rang out. Kingsbury Duvallon leaped out of his seat, waving a sheaf of papers over his head.

“I would ask that you sit down, sir!” thundered the council president, banging his gavel.

“Point of order, before you take the vote!” King shouted. “I have information here that speaks directly to the highly irregular way in which this project comes before the city council.”

“Sit
down
,
sir!” Edgar bellowed. “Or I’ll have you ejected!”

Ignoring this directive, King strode over to the microphone reserved for the public to address the lawmakers.

“Is
everyone
in this chamber aware of
who
the brand-new owner of the Selwyn properties is?” King barked into the mike. He waved the set of documents. “A few months ago, the eleven buildings on Canal Street were secretly purchased by an entity called B and G Limited, an out-of-state holding company, registered in Delaware.”

“It makes no difference to this proceeding who the Selwyn family may have chosen to sell their property to,” Edgar Dumas interrupted furiously.

“Makes no difference?” King echoed caustically. “Not if B and G Limited stands for ‘
Bonita and Grover
Jeffries
’!”

“I’m warnin’ you, Mr. Duvallon…” Edgar Dumas growled.

“This purchase was never made public, even though I would suspect that many of you council members knew full well about it. Yet y’all failed to disclose to the
public
that Grover Jeffries secretly owns the land, and he’s bribing officials to let him change the landmark zoning and tear down the historic structures on it to build whatever he wants.”

“Security!” barked the council president.

“And I also have proof,” King declared, overriding Dumas’s admonition, “in the form of articles of incorporation on file in the Louisiana State Capitol, that Grover Jeffries is the silent and principal shareholder of the magazine
Arts This Week
and that he hired Jack Ebert—standing right over there with the media—specifically to write a series of deliberately damaging articles to smear not only
my
character—”

“Mr. Duvallon,
sit down
!”
Dumas bellowed.

“—but the character of anyone else in the historic preservation movement or the media in New Orleans who dared voice opposition to—
or even question
—this boondoggle perpetrated by the combined B and G and Del Mar hotel holding company!” King finished as if the city council president hadn’t interrupted.

Startled private exchanges ricocheted around the hearing room, swelling the hall with a cacophony of sound. Corlis, who stood not four feet from Ebert, stared, slack-jawed and dumbfounded at the notion that Jack had been
hired
by Grover Jeffries to craft damaging articles about King. Meanwhile, the arts critic’s features registered an astonishing succession of emotions: shock, alarm, and finally pure, unadulterated fury.

Edgar Dumas pounded his gavel for order to little avail. “Mr. Duvallon, you’re out of order!
Take your seat!
”

Despite Lafayette Marchand’s herculean efforts to keep Grover Jeffries in
his
seat, the developer sprang to his feet and sprinted down the aisle toward King at the podium.

“I submit to the members of the city council,” King shouted above the burgeoning melee, pointing at Jeffries like an avenging prophet, “a copy of an invoice that Jack Ebert presented to Grover Jeffries for services rendered at
Arts This Week.
Ebert’s a hack-for-hire who’d write
any
lie—for a price. And I submit that
this
man, Grover Jeffries, has used undue influence in the form of
secret and illegal payments
to city officials!”

Whoa there, Mr. Preservation!
Corlis thought, pleading silently with King.

Surely he didn’t have
that
smoking gun memo in his possession. She could vouch that he’d
seen
a piece of paper on which Jeffries ordered behind-the-scenes “campaign contributions,” but he didn’t have a hard copy.

No documents, no story. Journalism 101.

King had gone too far, Corlis thought, anxiety invading her every pore. Meanwhile Jeffries stood outside of the ring of humanity that had formed protectively around King. The portly developer was impotent with rage. Members of the city council, however, had a clear view of both the crusading preservationist and the incensed developer. In various stages of surprise and agitation, the five men and two women elected to represent the city of New Orleans gaped at the enraged combatants.