Crescent City Connection (24 page)

“I’ll just sit over there and keep an eye on y’all.”

He ordered a beer and tried to focus on landings and takeoffs. But they were laughing loudly. They were fucking billing and cooing. For the second time where she was concerned, he thought he was going to throw up.

After about an hour, he went and found a television and watched it. When his dad came over, he had the woman with him. Daniel stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, Mrs. Owens.”

She tried to hug him, but he backed away, knowing there were going to be consequences. But his dad was in such a good mood he didn’t even get mad. When they were on the way back to New Orleans, his dad said to him, “Son, how would you like your mama back?”

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

“Now, son, the Lord says to forgive. I have forgiven her and I want you to do it, too. I think she could be a real asset to our movement. She believes in the kinds of things we’re doing.”

“Daddy, you told her? You told her what we’re trying to do?”

“Shit, the whole world knows about The Jury. I just told her we’re it, that’s all.”

“She could be working for the fuckin’ FBI for all you know.”

“Well, she’s not. She’s with us. Lot of folks are with us. You got to get some confidence, boy.”

“How the hell could she help us?”

“She’s got money, Daniel. We could use some of that, couldn’t we?”

“Daddy, you’re living in a dream world, you know that? That woman’s nothing to do with us.”

“Don’t talk that way about your mother.”

THE BEST SKIP could do was get the FBI to tap Rosemarie Owens’s phone. She wanted a full-time tail on her, but they wouldn’t go for it. “Why not?” she ranted. “Why the hell not?”

Shellmire shrugged. “They don’t think it’s worth it. They think it’s grasping at straws.”

“Well, what else are we going to grasp at?”

“Hey, I just work here.”

She started calling on all the art galleries in town, asking if anyone knew an artist who wore white and had a beard. There were nearly two hundred listings in the New Orleans phone book, but a surprising number proved to be antique stores. That might have narrowed it down, but plenty of gallery owners knew dealers or reps who worked out of their homes, people who weren’t listed in the book, but who knew plenty of local artists whose work had to get sold. Everywhere, she had to say the same thing: No, she didn’t know what kind of art he did. He could be a glassblower, he could be into graffiti. All she knew was, he wore white, and maybe he didn’t talk much. Everybody said if he wore black and wouldn’t shut up, they could probably help her.

Shellmire called the Wednesday after she’d talked to Rosemarie Owens. “Any luck?”

“Not yet. You?”

“Not exactly. But something funny’s happened.”

She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It sounded … what? Sheepish. “Oh, no. Something bad, you mean.”

“It might have nothing to do with the case.”

“Come on, what is it?”

“Rosemarie Owens’s husband has turned up dead.”

“Dead? What kind of dead?”

“Suicide, maybe. He fell off a balcony.”

“Pretty damn suspicious.”

“Yeah, well. That’s what I said.”

“When did it happen?

“Last night. The Dallas police have already talked to Rosemarie.”

“And let her go?”

“Hell, she wasn’t even in town. She was in Atlanta with some friends.”

“Damn convenient.”

“Yeah.” He sounded a little sulky.

“Anything from the wiretap?”

“Nothing.”

“I guess we weren’t soon enough.”

“Now, Skip, don’t get your panties in a bunch about this.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me that way.”

“Just don’t get excited. Maybe he was remorseful about the way he treated her. Or maybe he got loaded and fell.”

“Turner, will you do me a favor? Get the damn twenty-four-hour tail on her?”

“I think that can be arranged. Sure. We got their attention now.”

She could practically see him grinning. She grinned back, though neither could see the other. But as she hung up the phone, she started to think about what this meant.

It’s my fault. Goddammit, it’s my fault.

She got Steve to take her to a movie that night, and afterward she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go in the Blacksmith Shop and drink awhile.

They talked about the movie and Steve’s project and Layne’s miraculous cure. They didn’t say one word about The Jury, or Jacomine, or Rosemarie Owens. She didn’t want to think about it until she had to.

Because it was only a matter of waiting. If she was right, she’d know soon enough.

The next morning Roger Owens’s death was splashed all over the paper, with pictures of the tearful Other Woman, the young model who’d succeeded Rosemarie, and a summary of Roger’s accomplishments on the planet Earth, which he’d apparently devoted his life to destroying.

Shellmire’s call came around noon: “The Dallas police got a letter.”

“The Jury?”

He sighed. “They’re faxing it over. You’d better come into the office.”

In a way, it was like the others, especially so far as the rhetoric went: The Jury wanted justice and couldn’t get it through conventional means. Roger Owens was the kind of man who gave philanderers a bad name. Politicians talked about family values to stir up working-class people, while the fat cats who really ran the country, the ones at the top, did anything they damn well felt like, and got their pictures in People magazine. And that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Global Operations Ltd., which Roger had founded and of which he was the CEO, was the biggest polluter in the world today, having strip-mined thousands of acres in seventeen countries and dumped toxic gunk in every river in every one of those countries. Along with exploiting the land, Global had exploited the poor, paying slave wages under life-threatening conditions, and causing more deaths each year than cancer. He was as much a murderer as Hitler or Idi Amin, yet because of his connections, and because of his money, Owens would never be convicted of anything, let alone punished for it.

“Well?” said Shellmire.

“Shit. Just shit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Skip didn’t answer. Though she’d done nothing wrong, though she’d call Rosemarie Owens again if she could turn the clock back, she was too mad at herself to say anything.

“The guys here don’t think it’s genuine.”

She nodded. “It looks like a copycat. It definitely looks like one. It isn’t a criminal justice issue. That’s what The Jury’s supposed to be into, right? Is that how they’re reading it?”

“You got it. This one’s all over the map—feminism, environmentalism, you name it. I mean, Owens might have been a bad guy—sounds like he was a kissin’ cousin to the Prince of Darkness—but it doesn’t feel right. The other issues were cut-and-dried, more or less. At the risk of sounding crazy myself, they were easy to identify with. Popular causes.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“The letter is genuine, Turner. I swear to God the thing’s genuine. Jacomine killed him for his lady love. Avenged her honor, so to speak.”

“Bullshit.”

“For a price, Turner, for a price. He’s going to try to collect it now. And that’s where we come in.”

“Would you mind telling me what you’re talking about?”

“Listen, have you met Rosemarie Owens?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ve talked to her on the phone, and Jacomine may well have met his match. I tipped her unwittingly—she was ready for him when he called. With a tiny little errand for him to run.”

“Wait a minute, now. Hold it. You’re a good cop—therefore you didn’t tell her he’s a suspect in the Jury case.”

“No, I just got her to thinking. She had to know he was already a murder suspect. And let me tell you, she’s the kind of woman who gives hard bitches a bad name. I’m telling you she got him to kill hubby. By the way, they’re not divorced yet—I’ll bet she still inherits. But I doubt she actually hired him. They probably just had a nice, friendly talk—real gentlemen’s agreement kind of thing. Terms probably weren’t even slightly spelled out. But I’ll bet Jacomine got the idea a lot of Owens’s dirty money might just make its way into his hands if he did his ex-wife a good turn. Who knows? Maybe she’s going to join up with him— maybe they’re the new Barrow gang.”

* * *

Daniel had rarely seen his father so exuberant. “Things are going great, son. Things are going our way.”

Daniel usually stood while his father sat. Today he sat, too. His dad was in too good a mood to complain, for one thing. For another, he felt deflated. Depressed about the way things were going; not at all in agreement with his father.

“Daniel, boy, you want your little girl back?”

“Daddy, you know I do. I’d like to work on that now.” That was the closest he dared come to saying what he meant:
I haven’t had a spare second, goddammit. I couldn’t look for her because I’ve been too busy gratifying your damn teenage crush.

“I’m very happy with the way things are going. Aren’t you?”

No.

But he said, “The Bazemore hit was real important.”

His dad only nodded. It was impossible to rile him today. “Yeah. The Owens thing too. We have done a lot of very important work. For a while now, there’ll be no more killing.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

“We’re in tune, boy. We’re right in tune.” His father just kept nodding and smiling. “Now we’ve got two projects to do here in New Orleans. Then we’re gon’ move on. First thing is to get our little family back together. We’re gonna find Lovelace and get her to come join us. The second thing is, we’re gonna pop a six-foot blister on our hiney.”

“Say what?”

“Did I ever mention those run-ins I had with a fat, nasty bitch of a cop in this town?”

“Oh, yeah. Once or twice. Also, it was in Time and Newsweek and everywhere else.”

His father laughed. “Sometimes I can’t remember just how far our little movement’s come. You do me good, Danny. You know that, boy?”

Daniel was nearly bowled over. His father had never even come close to suggesting such a thing. Maybe Rosemarie Owens was good for him. But he caught himself—good for his dad’s mood, bad for the movement.

“Okay, here’s your assignment. Find your daughter, Lovelace. Devote twenty-four hours a day to that little job, and if I tell you to do anything else, tell me to go to hell. Now, we had to do those other jobs—they were priority one. But if anything else important comes up, we’re gon’ just let it go for a while. It’s time to regroup, and that’s exactly what we’re gon’ do.

“Okay, got your assignment?”

Daniel nodded, happy to be doing something he knew he could do and had no ambivalence about.

“Now before you go, let me ask you a question. Who’s the best-looking young Christian African American we got in our flock?”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Just answer the question, goddammit.”

“Well, I guess that’d be Dashan Johnson. Jericho, now. He changed his name to Dashan Jericho.”

“Excellent choice. Excellent. Dashan’s a nice tall boy, isn’t he?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Women like ’em tall. Get Dashan on over here. And one other thing—soon’s you get a chance, drive out to the country someplace and go to a hardware store. We’re gonna need some dynamite and blasting caps.”

Daniel knew better than to ask why. He just made time and did it.

LOVELACE WAS FALLING in love with Brenna Royce—not in a sexual way, of course—but she had taken her on as an idol. Brenna was beautiful, she was creative, she was a great mother, she had fabulous taste, she was wonderful to Lovelace … in fact, that could be her number-one good quality.

She couldn’t say enough good things about Lovelace’s cooking, and that was damn good for the ego, but it wasn’t only that—she seemed to really like Lovelace. She was always making tea for the two of them and getting Lovelace to sit down and talk to her. Naturally, this had a down side, as Lovelace couldn’t tell anyone except Isaac a single true thing about herself.

So she was evasive to untruthful. She said she lived alone, she’d had a couple of years of college at “a small midwestern school,” she’d come to New Orleans to pursue a relationship that hadn’t worked out, she was from Virginia, her mother was a schoolteacher, and her dad was dead.

In turn, she learned Brenna and Charles were both from Atlanta, had known each other practically forever and were more or less expected to marry each other. However, they hadn’t. They’d each married someone else, and in each case it hadn’t worked out.

And so they had remet and remarried.

Lovelace was charmed. “How romantic.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

Lovelace hardly knew how to answer. She could have said nothing, but it wasn’t in her nature to leave it alone. The question of what these two were doing together had occurred to her more than once. She’d thought all along that Brenna was a much more interesting, much better-looking person than Charles. She said, “You didn’t marry for love?”

Brenna looked mischievous. “Both our families have a lot of money.”

Lovelace was still trying to grasp it. “But if you had money, and he had money, why did you need to get married? If you weren’t in love, I mean.”

She spread her open palms. “Our families wanted grandchildren, and we wanted to make them happy. That was one reason, anyhow.”

Thinking she was getting the hang of it, Lovelace touched Brenna’s hand. “I’m so sorry. I wish there were something I could do.”

“Do I look unhappy?”

“No, but you deserve something special. You’re such a fantastic person, you deserve to be adored.”

“Do you really think so?”

“You’re so fabulous. You’ve got your life under control like nobody I’ve ever seen. You’re so creative and so beautiful….”

Brenna leaned over to brush something off Lovelace’s shoulder, or so Lovelace imagined, and wondered what it could be.

And then Brenna was kissing her. She absolutely hadn’t seen it coming. If someone had shown her a video of it taken in the future, she still wouldn’t have believed it.