Cities of the Dead (8 page)

Flowers grinned.

Spraggue stared at his watch. “Trouble is, I've got a lunch date.”

A dark green Volkswagen Rabbit eased into the alley beside the restaurant.

The driver moved quickly, with a young woman's step. She ran up the front stoop and knocked, then disappeared inside. Spraggue scribbled the license number of the green Rabbit in his phony reporter's notebook, then turned to Flowers. “If I leave you here to keep tabs on Fontenot's daughter, can you call another cab to get me back to the Quarter?”

“I could. Waste of time though. Just mosey yourself 'round the block to Le Ruth's. 'Round lunchtime, every tourist in the Quarter cabs out there. Any of them drivers be delighted to have a return fare.”

“Okay.”

“And I'll eyeball this lady for you. What you want to know about her?”

“Where she lives. Where she works. Where I can find her if I want her.”

The cabbie chortled. “Follow that dame, right?”

“You got it,” Spraggue said. “Then catch me at the hotel in time for that hoodoo ceremony tonight.”

SEVEN

“Paul Armand will join us for dessert,” Aunt Mary said contentedly, dabbing at one corner of her mouth with a linen napkin.

“Dessert?” Spraggue spread a hand protectively over his stomach. “Look, if you made any dinner plans for me, cancel them. I may want to act again, and Falstaff is the only good fat-man part I know.”

“I've never seen you grill a suspect,” Mary said brightly. “I'm looking forward to it.”

The Café Creole was hardly the setting for the third degree. The restaurant made Fontenot's place look like a corner cafeteria. Satiny rose-colored wallpaper spread upward from dark-panelled wainscoting. Chandeliers glowed overhead. The main dining room was a fantasy ballroom heisted from a wealthy planter's antebellum manse, complete with an overflow of ladies and gentlemen waiting for tables. The line wandered clear out to Bourbon Street and down the block, where the elegantly garbed queue could gawk into two strip joints, one featuring an “all-male kick line,” the other a “live college girl revue,” and an open-air saloon where a Cajun fiddler stomped and wailed on a make-shift stage.

Spraggue hadn't liked leapfrogging the line, but Mary had assured him that all the regular patrons did it, and they'd been ushered immediately and ceremoniously to a table where a bottle of champagne waited, compliments of Monsieur Armand. The starch-stiff waiter with the waxed mustache had not failed to notice this courtesy and the service had been, like the oysters Bienville and the soft-shell crabs, exemplary. Dining out with Mary was like that. Something in her demeanor called forth the best efforts of waiters and cooks alike. Maybe she looked like a restaurant reviewer.

“Can I help?” she asked eagerly. “With Armand?”

“Just be interested,” Spraggue said.

“I am.”

“If he's a talker, let him talk. Talkers are always looking for listeners. If he's not the chatty type, we crank the interest level a little higher. I've seen you do it when you deal with your money men. Suddenly you hang on their every word—”

“That's just common sense—” Mary began.

“That's acting,” Spraggue said.

When Paul Armand crossed the room, heads followed. There was a faint murmur as savvy diners recognized the chef and whispered his identity to their table mates. He was a tall man with a stooped posture that made him look as if he'd been caught bending over to stir a sauce pot. He must have been lean once, but age and haute cuisine were catching up with him in the form of a protruding belly, which he sometimes remembered to hold in. Now, aware that eyes were on him, wrapped as he was in chef's apron, his graying hair topped with a tall white toque, he made the effort, straightened himself, and was altogether an imposing figure with his thin, drawn face and bushy eyebrows.

He sketched a courtly little bow in Mary's direction. From his name and appearance, Spraggue expected a French accent, possibly fake, but Armand's voice was pure deep South, broad and lilting. “Miz Hillman? Pleased to meet you again, and I do hope the circumstances are more congenial this time than last—though I doubt the food could be as fine.”

Mary returned his formality. “Mr. Armand, I'd like you to meet my nephew, Michael Spraggue. The cooking at the awards banquet was exquisite, but I have found nothing to complain of here.”

His gallantries accepted, Armand sank into a chair and the paunch came out of hiding. He said, “You're a cook yourself?”

“No,” Mary replied, “but I am an avid eater, and I don't know where or if I've tasted a finer sauce than the one on this soft-shell crab.”

“Ah.” Armand smiled. His fingers were busy on the table, automatically aligning the silverware in front of him precisely one inch from the table's edge. “You're one dangerous lady. You've got me totally disarmed, and I'll tell you whatever it is you want to know. Now you said you were working for that woman who's accused of killing poor Joseph. Denise told me the whole story, how she used to be married to Joe and all, or thought she was, anyhow. I think the cops are way off base, but I don't see how I can help.”

Poor Joseph. Spraggue regarded the man with interest. Had he found a friend of Joe Fontenot's, someone who mourned his passing?

“I already ordered dessert,” Armand said abruptly as waiters began hovering. “First, something from the cheese tray, a
chèvre
with just a bit of cinder, then an assortment of tiny French fruit tarts, and
café filtre.
”

Mary nodded happily and Spraggue thought of another fat male role—Big Daddy in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. He said to Armand, “You sound as if you were a friend of Fontenot's.”

“I surely was,” Armand answered gravely. His eyes never left the hands of the waiters. One young waiter, aware of the intense scrutiny, almost dumped the “
chèvre
with the hint of cinder” on the rug.

“What can you tell me about him?” Spraggue said.

“To help get that lady out of jail?”

“Dora Levoyer,” Mary reminded him. “She was at our table at the awards dinner.”

“The name slipped my mind. She is—or she was—one fine cook. Lost track of her. Haven't heard that name for some time.”

“She no longer cooks for the restaurant trade,” Mary said. “She's in private service. My own.”

“Ah.” Armand's bushy eyebrows lifted and settled. “Then she works for you and not the other way around—and I take your compliment about my soft-shell crab even more highly. Now bear with me a minute. I thought the police had the whole thing tied up with a ribbon.”

Spraggue said, “We don't think Dora killed anyone.”

“I think you're right.” Armand sighed and flicked a stray crumb of French bread off the tablecloth with a well-manicured fingernail. “But if she didn't, well, that surely could open a couple cans of worms around here.”

“Maybe we could start with how you came to know Joseph Fontenot,” Spraggue said.

“I miss him,” Armand said quietly, as if he were embarrassed to acknowledge the fact. “And I'm surprised that I do. Joe was a difficult man, such a difficult man—but he was an artist in his own way, and yeah, I guess I miss him. Maybe it's the shock. Guess it's like losing a bit of my own life, I knew him so long. Some of it's mourning for myself. Somebody close to you dies like that, it makes you realize that someday everybody will say these nice things about you—and these nasty things, too—and you won't be able to get back at 'em. Makes me feel old.”

A talker, all right, Spraggue thought.

“How long did you actually know him?” he asked. Maybe this was someone who could fill in the missing years.

“Since I was a kid. I knew him from the bayou. I knew his people. He was the one who was going to be the famous chef—but I made it first, and he came to me for a job.”

“When was that?”

Armand wrinkled his brow and pouted his lips, deep enough in thought to get careless about his looks. “Eight, nine years ago. Maybe a bit longer—I can never remember exactly when things happen. But I hadn't seen him in a long time.”

“How long?”

“Long enough so I didn't even recognize him. God, people change. The glasses and the gimpy leg. He looked like he'd had hard times, and my restaurant was doing well. Once, I think, when I was still a boy, teenager maybe, I told him if he ever needed work to come to me. See, I wasn't born in the bayou like him. I used to go down with an uncle of mine to trap and fish. My rich uncle, Joe always called him, because a man who owns a boat must be very rich. Joe would show us the spots to catch the best crawfish, the best
sac-a-lait
—that's perch—things like that. We used to yap a lot about growing up, the way boys do, and in my dream my rich uncle would die and I'd open a fine restaurant and Joe would cook for me. In his dream, he'd find a pot of gold, or marry a rich girl, and open his own. My dream came true faster.”

Armand sampled a forkful of raspberry tart and nodded curt approval. A waiter ceased hovering and disappeared.

“At first,” Armand continued, “I could hardly believe this man was the same person as that boy, but when I tasted his gumbo, I knew he was the same old Joe.”

“Did Fontenot get along well with the rest of the staff here?”

Armand lifted his eyes from his careful dissection of the raspberry tart. “If I said so, the others would sure give me the lie,” he admitted. “Joe was difficult, that's all there was to it.”

“How?”

“Well …” The eyebrows did their lift-and-settle routine. “He was special. He was gifted. And I guess he thought there oughta be a different standard of conduct for the creative chef. He put himself above the others. Now, I wanna say that he
was
gifted. In a man with no gift, his actions would have been intolerable. But, well, Joe knew what he could get away with. He knew that we could afford to lose some old salad chef, some apprentice saucier, a whole lot easier than we could afford to lose him. Because he was good. He was special. I guess we all wished he didn't have to remind everybody how special he was all the time.”

“He had arguments with the rest of the staff?” Spraggue asked.

Armand threw back his head and laughed. Spraggue found himself thinking that the laughter was as rigidly controlled as the rest of the man's behavior.

“Arguments!” Armand repeated. “Since Joe left, my kitchen's been like a library. Nobody hollers anymore. It used to be like a Cajun bar during Mardi gras. Of course, part of the lull may be because I'm in there now, and the cooks are a little scared of me. Since Joe left, I do more of the cooking.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“About six months. I always knew that when he had enough money, he'd open his own place. God knows, he saved as much as he could from his salary here, scrounged as many meals offa me as he could.”

“You don't sound as if you minded.”

“Couldn't blame him. I always wanted my own place, too. And there's plenty of room in New Orleans for another fine restaurant. Other cities, maybe not. But here, everybody eats out, and the competition only helps. If people eat at Fontenot's, then they come back here to see if I'm still as good, and they can't quite tell, so they have to go back to Fontenot's to check, and then they have to come back here—you see?”

“Jeannine Fontenot doesn't think many of the restaurant owners of New Orleans agree with you on that.”

“Oh, Jeannine. She tooting that jealousy horn again? How everybody's against her Joe? Well, she'll see. When she opens that place up, she'll have a crowd every night and it won't hurt us a bit.”

“She didn't seem to think she'd be opening at all, without Joe to draw people in.”

“Bullshit!” Armand mouthed the second syllable of the word, with a quick look over at Mary to see if he'd offended her. “Maybe you don't know how fine a cook that lady is. You know she wasn't at that banquet 'cause she's Joe's little woman. Maybe Joe got her thinking that, but she was there in her own right, as one of the Great Chefs of New Orleans. Hell, otherwise I'd have brought my wife, if she could've got the time off work.”

“Does your wife cook?” Mary slipped the question in.

“She's a nurse. Always pulling down night shifts.”

Spraggue asked. “Do you know how Fontenot got the money to open his restaurant?”

“Savings, far as I know. He worked hard. I paid him well and he was tight with a buck. You want another one of these tarts before your coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Spraggue said. “They're wonderful, but I couldn't eat another—”

“I'd love one,” Mary said.

“Apricot or raspberry?”

“Apricot.”

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

“Did you ever hear Fontenot talk about a relative of his, a half-brother or step-brother named T-Bob?” Spraggue barely got the question in before they were surrounded by waiters. Mary's plate was refilled. His own plate disappeared and a coffee cup capped with a tiny silver filter pot took its place.

“T-Bob?” Spraggue repeated.

“Sounds familiar,” Armand said. “I don't recall.”

Spraggue said, “Did Fontenot come into any sort of legacy before he left here?”

“If he did, he didn't tell me about it. But come to think of it, that would explain the size of that new restaurant. I thought he'd start small, not with a monster like that place. I figured he'd taken out a loan—and a sizable one at that. I thought maybe he had a friend who was a banker. Or else …”

“Or else?”

“This is just something I picked up in the kitchen. Cooks gossip, you know. Chop a little, gab a little, stir a little, talk a little. Anyhow, I did hear that Joe went and presented a cookbook idea to Simon and Schuster. You know, the publisher that does Denise Michel's cookbooks. And there was talk that Fontenot was about to replace Michel as the local cookbook millionaire. I thought maybe …”