Cities of the Dead (7 page)

“Your husband's parents, are they still alive?”

“No. No. That Cajun bayou life moves fast. The girls are married and mothers at seventeen. At fifty they're old, the way that others are at eighty. His parents died years ago. And his sisters are all married off, out of touch. Not a close family, like some. He had a half-brother—or was he a step-brother? Just about Joe's age. They were real close, T-Bob and Joe, growing up. Two of the three musketeers. We owe a lot to T-Bob.”

“T-Bob? Why T?”

“You don't know Cajun. A mixture of French, English, some words all our own. T-Bob was probably named for his father, and they would call him ‘Petit Bob,' you know, Little Bob. And that would become ‘T-Bob.'

“I see.”

“But what T-Bob's last name would be, I don't even remember.”

She was starting to talk to herself.

“You said you owed this T-Bob a lot,” he said.

She looked up at him in surprise, as if she had forgotten he was there.

“We owe him the restaurant,” she said simply, “the dream. All this is our legacy from T-Bob. He was so close to my husband.”

“Your husband must have been very sad to lose such a friend.”

“Well, it had been a long time since he'd seen T-Bob.” She hesitated uncomfortably. “And the money, it was a wonderful surprise, the answer to so many prayers.”

“When was this? When did T-Bob die?”

“I'm not sure when he died, but the money came maybe six months ago. We did a lot in six months, finding this place, changing it—”

“You mentioned ‘three musketeers.' Your husband and T-Bob and …?”

“It's a long time ago,” she said. “I have a bad memory for names. You wanted to know about my husband's cooking?”

Spraggue smiled blankly, inwardly cursing Mrs. Fontenot's devotion to the straight line. “When did your husband start to cook for a living?”

“Friends would always happen to drop in at meal time if they knew Joseph was cooking. They'd bring something for the pot. You know, ‘I got a rabbit. If your boy Joseph wants to season up a rabbit stew like he knows how to make so special, my family'd sure be happy to help y'all eat it.' He learned to cook with nothing and he had no training. He made things up as he went along. Whatever got trapped, he cooked. Later, of course, he had formal training, in France.”

“Before you were married?”

“No. No. Nothing happened before we were married. He was only eighteen when we married, and me, I was one week past my seventeenth birthday.” The shadow of a smile flickered across her face, and for the first time, Spraggue had a sense that she must have loved the murdered man.

But how long ago?

“I see,” he said. It was a verbal nod, a prompt—and she went on.

“We live the way our parents live. We speak mostly Cajun French and we trap and catch fish and get by. There's always enough to eat, but it's a long way from where we started to here, believe me.”

“This is terrific coffee,” Spraggue said encouragingly. He wondered how much blank tape was left on the cassette.

“Thank you,” she said. “It is quite a story but it's not my story. It's Joe's story. There was always more that he wanted. He wasn't happy in the bayou, always dreaming big city, and not Abbeville either. Dreaming Paris. And one day he says to me he must go to France. He says, would you be okay on your own for awhile? See, we didn't have money for us both to go. You know, he says, I'll come back for you, but I gotta learn something else. I can't spend my life here.”

She paused, lost in an earlier time.

“It was hard for me when he left. I thought I'd die, and the baby, well …” She smiled at the photograph on the coffee table. “The baby was so young. Me, I have my family and I knew he'd come back—but I didn't think he would be so long away.”

“How long?” Spraggue said quickly, thinking of the missing years Aunt Mary hadn't been able to chart.

“Oh,” Jeannine said, uncomfortable again, “a long time.”

“And during that time what did your husband do?”

“All the things he dreamed about, I guess. He lived in Paris and he learned to be a chef. He lived all over France.”

And in New Orleans with Dora. “He wrote you?”

She swallowed coffee. “My husband is not—was not a writing man.”

“But you waited.”

“He said he'd come back and he did. I almost didn't know him at first—he'd been sick. But after a while, when he was strong again, we packed up and came to New Orleans and he got a job as a cook, and he worked very hard and became so well known—and then his own restaurant, and there was gonna be a cookbook with a fancy New York publisher—and now—”

The doorbell rang. It echoed through the downstairs restaurant like a Chinese gong.

“That must be my photographer,” Spraggue said. Or the real reporter, he thought.

“Oh.” Mrs. Fontenot pushed at a few stray hairs on her forehead, tested out a smile. “Would you want pictures just of the restaurant or—”

“It would be wonderful if we could include you in a few shots. If you wouldn't mind.”

“Well …” she said uncertainly.

“Think about it,” Spraggue urged as they went down the stairs. “I wouldn't want you to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.” He shuddered slightly as he said it. Was there nothing this reporter fellow wouldn't stoop to?

The door opened on a Flowers transformed, a Flowers whose experience of professional photographers must have been bizarre indeed.

He wore what could have been a flak jacket from an old Army movie, and had so much paraphernalia strung and strapped about his person that he had to slide sideways through the door. A light meter swung from his neck like an oversized medallion. Thirty-five-millimeter film cans hung on his belt like shells on a bandolier. He sported mirrored sunglasses, and he was all brisk cheerfulness.

“What kind of shots you have in mind?” he asked Spraggue immediately, nodding a hello at Jeannine Fontenot. “
House Beautiful
spread?” He was terse and businesslike, a pro. He was having a great time.

“Get a few shots of each room,” Spraggue said. “I'll trust your judgment.” Under his breath, he added, “Take your time.”

As long as Flowers was going to play along with such gusto, he'd see what personal items he could find up in the apartment. He patted his back pocket absent-mindedly and said, “I'll be down in a minute. I dropped my notebook upstairs.”

This last was untrue, but Mrs. Fontenot was already engaged with Flowers, discussing camera angles. Spraggue wondered if Flowers could take pictures. He certainly talked a good game.

Once upstairs, Spraggue wondered how long he could justify searching for a lost notebook. He tucked it under a sofa cushion.

The brown cardboard boxes stacked in one corner were labeled, but the masking tape stickers told only the room each should be deposited in:
SECOND FLOOR LIVING ROOM
was all the information they gave. The tape fastening the top box was loose, so Spraggue helped it along.

Books. Large ones. At first he thought they were all cookbooks, but one, stuck in vertically, had the thickness of a scrapbook.

A photograph album. An old one judging by the yellowed leaves. Yes. If that were Mrs. Fontenot, it would have to be, oh, twenty years old. He thumbed through the pages quickly. Joe Fontenot liked taking pictures of his wife. He took a decent snapshot. Had she been his wife yet? She had a photogenic smile. Sheet after sheet of Jeannine Fontenot. Then sheet after sheet of the daughter, the little girl in the coffee table photograph, the pictures markedly fuzzier.

The telephone rang. Spraggue stuck the book back in the cardboard box and resealed the tape. Two rings and it died, answered below in the restaurant. He breathed again.

Then he started down the hall.

A kitchen, a bedroom, a bath. Would all Fontenot's papers still be packed in brown cartons?

Flowers raised his voice so that Spraggue could hear him from the stairwell. “Well, I'd like to get some more shots of the kitchen, but if you're sure that's all …”

Spraggue turned and fled back to the living room. He flipped the safety catch on a back window open. The shade, after he pulled it down another half inch, hid the lock. Then he knelt in front of the sofa and thrust his hand under the cushion.

“There,” he said triumphantly, pulling out the notebook, and turning when he heard footsteps on the stairs. “It must have slid down here. You didn't have to worry about me.”

Mrs. Fontenot was jumpy. Either the phone call or Flowers had upset her. “No,” she said hurriedly, “it's not that. It's just that I didn't realize the time. I have to ask you to leave now.”

He held out the tape recorder. “But I still have a few questions.”

She stared at her wristwatch. “A couple more,” she said.

“You know they've arrested a woman, Dora Levoyer, for your husband's murder.”

“I was told that.”

“Did the police tell you why they arrested her?”

“Turn that machine off.”

“Okay.”

“Yes, I know what they say, that this woman was his mistress long ago—”

“His wife.”

“Ridiculous. I don't believe it. That's all. I think it's easier to arrest her than to look for the jealous one, the one who couldn't stand my husband's success. This woman, this Miss Levoyer, she's not from around here, she's not well known. The police want to keep this nice and quiet. I don't believe it. That's all.”

“Who else would you suggest I talk to, to get a complete picture of your husband?”

“Well, you could talk to Paul Armand. At the Café Creole. He worked with Joe. He can tell you about Joe's cooking.”

“And?”

“Oh, a lot of cooks around here. Talk to the people at the Great Chefs, they'll tell you he would have won.”

“What about Denise Michel?”

“No. She hardly knew him. She didn't like him. You wouldn't get anything from her.”

“Didn't like your husband? Do you know why?”

“That's enough questions.”

“Did your husband own a gris-gris, a sort of charm he kept with him?”

“Did the police tell you that? Look, he had a charm, but it meant nothing—like a rabbit's foot. My husband was a good Catholic.”

Spraggue shrugged, said, “I'd like to talk to your daughter, for the article.”

“No.”

“It would give our readers another angle.”

“No. My daughter should not be bothered with this. It would upset her.”

“Is she away at school? She's seventeen, isn't she?”

“Eighteen. She's not away anywhere. But I don't want you to interview her. She's been through enough. There will be nothing in this article about my daughter, you understand, or there will be no article at all.”

“But—”

“Look, I have been polite to you at a time of grief. I answered your questions because I think that people should know that jealousy killed my husband. I've let you take pictures.” Mrs. Fontenot sneaked another look at her thin gold wristwatch. “And now I ask you to leave.”

SIX

Flowers held it in until they slammed the doors of the cab shut—barely. Then he gave a great whoop and asked eagerly, “How'd I do, man? How'd I do?”

“Nice work. I wish you could have held her down there longer. I wanted to find Fontenot's checkbook. He was carrying five hundred bucks when he died, and it would give me a warm feeling to know it didn't come legit from his checking account.”

“I tried,” Flowers said. “Once she got that phone call, she was different. Before that call, she was fussin' with her hair and all ready to let me snap pictures to my heart's content. After that call, all she wanted was to send me on my way.”

“Well, you did fine. Authentic. Where'd you get the camera gear?”

Flowers slapped the pillow case on the front seat. “Theatrical props, right? Got 'em from my brother-in-law. He lives kinda close by and I busted records gettin' over there. Gotta get the goods back tonight, though, or my sister's in big trouble.”

“You actually take any pictures?”

Flowers bristled. “Course I did! And my brother-in-law'll develop 'em—for a price. I took the layout, you know, like a bank job, like if we was gonna break in later. Shot the doors and windows. Took a close-up of the front door lock—”

“You have true criminal instincts.”

“I had me one hell of a time,” Flowers said. “You need an assistant full time, you let me know.”

“Up in Boston?”

“Not durin' the winter time.”

“That may limit the partnership.”

Flowers' enthusiasm was undiminished. “Well, what are we gonna do now?”

“Why did she clear us out so fast?” Spraggue said under his breath.

“I tol' you, 'cause of that phone call.”

“Who was it from?”

“Dunno.”

“You listen in?”

“Sure,” Flowers said.

“She must have called the other person something. Think. When she answered the phone, she said hello, and then …”

“Honey!” Flowers said triumphantly. “She called him ‘honey'!”

“Ah,” Spraggue said. “Maybe we'd better wait here for a while.”

“It's a lover, right?” Flowers asked. “You think it's her lover, this ‘honey'? You think maybe she offed her old man 'cause she had somethin' else goin' on the side?”

“I think it's the daughter. She didn't want me to talk to her daughter. And if dear daughter called to say she was on her way over and Momma didn't want our paths to cross—”

“You think the daughter killed her daddy?”

“Momma doesn't want us to talk to her. Any time anybody doesn't want me to talk to somebody, that somebody zips to the top of my interview list.”