Ciji Ware (69 page)

“Technically, yes,” Marge said with a little laugh. “But when a jazz band plays right in the middle of a political showdown inside a public building, well… it’s rather difficult not to show your feelings and tap your toes, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Corlis repeated.

Exhaustion was invading every pore, but she tried to ignore it. She’d filed a “live” stand-up in front of city hall and one outside the Selwyn buildings. Now she had only three hours remaining before the late news began in which to write and edit the full story on the day’s events—minus events in the cemetery. She nosed her car out of her parking place and headed for the exit.

“Is your arm hurting you, Aunt Marge?” she asked.

“Not much, but you’d better get me home so you can meet your deadline, dear.”

“And
you’d
better take a nap. Promise?”

Corlis felt her aunt scrutinizing her from the passenger seat. Suddenly she said, “Kingsbury Duvallon is a fine young man, you know. He handled himself wonderfully today, don’t you agree?” Corlis nodded, but didn’t reply. “Why didn’t you congratulate him, then? That tall redhead and her mother certainly did. When we were all standing at the front of the auditorium, I noticed that you two didn’t exchange a word.”

“I’ll tell you about it when there’s time,” Corlis replied, making an attempt to sound casual. Then she exclaimed impulsively, “Remember the conflict-of-interest problems between King and me that I emailed you about last week?” Her aunt nodded solemnly. “Well, the whole thing basically blew up in my face today. I don’t think King and I will be seeing each other anymore… other than just as acquaintances.”

And maybe not even that, she thought morosely, turning down Julia Street. As she pulled up in front of the entrance to her brick apartment, Aunt Marge put a soothing hand on her arm.

“Corlis, dear, this story will be over soon. Don’t make the mistake I did years ago.”

Corlis looked at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“In a situation like the one you’ve just experienced, sweetheart, there are journalistic ethics to be careful about, to be sure,” she said thoughtfully. “And then there’s one’s
damnable
pride. If you’d like to reconcile the two, it might be wise to try to figure out which is which,” she suggested with a sad smile. “Believe me, I knew a man once very much like your King Duvallon. I’m extremely sorry, now, that I let him walk away and called it professionalism.” She patted her niece’s arm. “I’ll grant you, it’s not an easy thing to reason through. Just try to decide if the other person, at heart, can be counted on to wish you well. Have King’s intentions toward his work and toward
you
always been honorable? If the answer is yes, then consider your responses to the conflicts facing you both
very
carefully—and while you’re at it, don’t forget to consider your own well-being. You have a right to do that, you know. It’s probably not healthy to turn over every aspect of yourself to journalism the way I did. I may have used it as an
excuse
not to live a real life.”

Corlis gazed soberly across the car’s interior but remained silent. Aunt Marge turned toward the passenger door and gingerly opened it with her good arm.

“Whoa there! Wait,” Corlis exclaimed, scrambling out from the driver’s side. “Let me help you, sweetie pie.”

“If you’ll just carry my suitcase upstairs,” Marge assured her niece, “you can be on your way. I’m looking forward to taking a nice nap in your elegant plantation bed you told me so much about. Then I’ll watch you on TV.”

***

“Is a beer okay for you, King, or do you want something stronger?” asked Lafayette Marchand. The two men walked to a round table in a secluded corner of the famous plastered brick building on Bourbon Street, known for nearly two hundred years as the Old Absinthe House.

“A Dixie’s fine,” he said to the waiter.

“I’ll have a bourbon,” Marchand announced. “Straight up.”

“Hard day?” King asked blandly.

A long silence ensued.

“Very…” Marchand exhaled finally. “I… uh… imagine you’re wondering why I… was the one who recruited Corlis McCullough and her TV crew to help find you at the cemetery this morning?”

“Actually,” King responded coolly, “I’m more interested in finding out how long
after
you knew Grover was gonna have me kidnapped it took you to initiate damage control.”

“About ten minutes,” Lafayette replied. “This morning, Jack Ebert bragged about what he’d done last night. I… I about leaped through the phone to kick the bastard in the balls.”

“And why would a man like you, familiar with every venal, self-serving thing that guy has done in this town the last ten years, be surprised he and Grover’d pull a stunt like that?” King asked.

“I
wasn’t
surprised, but this time it hit close to home.”

“I seem to remember relieving you of your godfatherly duties some time ago.”

“There are certain family ties that simply cannot be severed, and you and I share one of them.” Marchand leaned forward slightly. “King… I’ve wanted to… to tell you something for a very long time.”

The two men stared across the table at each other for a moment. Finally King said, “Look, Laf…” He hesitated and then continued. “Let me spare you. I already know.”

“Know what?” Marchand asked cautiously.

“I’ve known for at least ten years that you fathered me. And that you wouldn’t marry my mother.”

Marchand stared across the table in astonishment. “
How
did you know?” he demanded, losing his customary unflappable demeanor. “Did Antoinette tell you? Our agreement was that she’d never
do
that. She’d let me stay reasonably close to you, posing as your godfather, and—”

“No… Mother wasn’t the one who told me,” King interrupted. “She doesn’t know that I learned the truth. It was Grandfather Kingsbury.”

“Ah… the vengeful, almost-father-in-law,” said Lafayette, a bitter edge to his voice.

“It wasn’t like that,” King said calmly. “I’d just come back from the marines, and he wanted to be sure Waylon didn’t get his hands on the bonds you’d given me at my birth. He gave me the key to a safe-deposit box and said not to open it till after he was buried. Told me that I’d understand everything once I saw what was locked away at the Whitney Bank.”

“And what, exactly,
did
you understand?” Lafayette asked quietly. “What had that old reprobate put inside the safe-deposit vault?”

“The bonds,” King replied with a shrug. “And a short, pithy explanation in his handwriting saying that you and my mother were in the same Mardi Gras court back in the day… that you’d played duke to her queen. That you had sex with her and—I was the result. That was about it.”

“No context. Typical of him. André Kingsbury liked to keep things simple. It was either black or white, right or wrong. No subtleties for old André—’specially when it came to understanding the differences between his two daughters.”

“Bethany and Antoinette…” King murmured thoughtfully. “Hard to believe they’re from the same parents, isn’t it?”

Lafayette absently traced his forefinger around the rim of his highball glass. “I am ashamed even to speak of what happened between your mother and me—mostly because I caused an unforgivable injury to Bethany.”

“Ah… Aunt Bethany,” King said. “Her voice always gets breathless whenever your name comes up, and then her face has this incredibly sad look.”

Lafayette inhaled sharply, as if suddenly assaulted.

“Since we were practically in kindergarten, she and I… had an understanding. As soon as I finished law school, we were going to get married, despite my parents’ objections that the Kingsburys had…” He faltered.

“Had made a colossal series of stupid financial decisions and lost all their money?” King supplied bluntly.

“My father’s words, precisely,” Laf said bitterly. “Well… that year of Mardi Gras I was your basic hot-blooded, arrogant southern white boy of twenty-five. Not that that excuses anything… but perhaps it explains things a bit. Well… anyway, I got roaring drunk on the night of Fat Tuesday, like everyone else in New Orleans, and I let myself be—” He stopped short and then selected his next words with extreme care.

“Just say it,” King said impatiently.

“Antoinette… your mother… as you might have concluded by now, is a very pretty, very willful, very persuasive woman, and she… well, I knew she’d always been jealous of her older sister. We were thrown together so much that year. She flattered me and played up to me in a major way, ’specially that night, and I did what stupid, arrogant, intoxicated males are wont to do.”

“In the words of André Kingsbury, you ‘had sex,’” King said coolly.

Marchand nodded. “The next morning… not only did I have the mother of all hangovers, I quickly realized that I’d been idiotic and would have done
anything
to turn back the clock. However, as Antoinette soon revealed to me, she got pregnant as a result of that one wild night.”

“And according to Grandfather, you flatly refused to marry her,” King said, as if he were talking about people he barely knew.

“No!” he said sharply. “I told Antoinette that I thought it was wrong to marry her if I still loved her sister and didn’t love her. I promised her, though, that I’d pay for everything. See her through her pregnancy, if that was her choice. I’d agreed to place the baby for adoption, if that was what she wanted.” Marchand stared across the table at King, his eyes suddenly moist. “Jesus, King! It’s hard, now, to think I’d never have known you. Up until you went into the marines, I at least had those years as your godfather… doing things with you when you were a boy… trying to
be
there for you, as best I could.”

“Amazing, isn’t it, how everybody kept those secrets, avoiding a scandal,” King said with the first hint of bitterness. “And nobody ever mentioned that I shot up to six foot one and my father was barely five ten. Waylon used to call me ‘the Stranger.’ Didn’t
he
know for sure that I wasn’t his?”

“This may sound crazy,” Lafayette said, “but I have no idea. Antoinette… your mother… immediately turned around and married Waylon to save face.”

“At least he was
willing
to marry her,” King said.

“Not quite,” Marchand corrected. “Since tonight is truth-telling time, the fact is—not to put too fine a point on it—she trapped Waylon into marrying her, sleeping with him real fast and making him think she was pregnant by
him
.
Of course, she passed off your early birth as premature… but as you began to grow up, Waylon must have noticed how unalike you and he were.”

“He knows…” King mused, almost to himself, “even if he doesn’t know.”

“Antoinette agreed to name me godfather, if I’d put some money away for your future—which I
wanted
to do, by the way. The other reason she went along with it was to put her own friends and Waylon’s family off the scent of possible scandal. I mean,” Marchand added with an ironic smile, “who’d have the
gall
to name me, in church, before God, as your godparent, if the whispered rumors were true? But then you fired me from the job… and now I know why, after all these years. That note you found in the safe-deposit box must have hurt.”

“Grandfather’s note wasn’t the reason I fired you,” King said. “I ended our relationship because you went to work for Jeffries. In my eyes, you were no longer an honorable man.” Hearing this, Marchand visibly winced. King continued in a steady voice. “You signed on as the man behind the scenes for a person whose values I despise, orchestrating public opinion so that everyone would think Grover Jeffries was God’s gift to philanthropy. It made me sick to see it was
you
doing the fixing.”

“It didn’t start that way,” Lafayette said heavily. “ ’Bout ten years ago, soon after you got out of the service, my life just seemed to hit a brick wall. I had no sense of purpose… little reason to
do
anything. I got pretty deeply in debt. I like going to the racetrack, and—well… I used to play for some pretty high stakes back in those days… and I got to like those gambling boats Grover had going for a while. When he wanted me to work off what I owed, doing public relations for the proposed Good Times Shopping Plaza, I—”

“Accepted an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“That about describes it. I hated myself even more than
you
did when I handled damage control for that fiasco. But when the Selwyn buildings project first started, I thought that Grover had finally gotten hold of something that would benefit the city. I had no idea those beautiful Greek Revivals were behind that ol’ screen.”

“I didn’t notice you advising Grover to give up his hotel project, even when you
did
find out about them,” King reminded him.