Lies Agreed Upon (22 page)

“The Haas family wanted no part of Muriel’s bastard by some unknown lowlife. They paid foster families in Baton Rouge to take care of him. He grew up a charity case until he could survive on his own. He was livin’ off perverts and drunks in the Quarter when Ben rescued him.”

“You mentioned that the police didn’t want to look too carefully into the relationship b
etween Ben and Eddie. Are you implying that there was something, um, improper?” Tess probed.

“Improper? My, my,
you’re a prissy miss,” chuckled Miss Gloria. “Do you think I’m some Victorian maiden? Do you want to know if Ben liked pretty boys? I can’t say and don’t care. Even if he had an itch, I doubt proper Ben Cabrera would demean himself to scratch it. And his imaginary pleasures are anybody’s guess and nobody’s business—just like yours and mine.”

The old woman blew out a deep, tired breath and began to return the photographs to the album methodically. “Charmaine
! Charmaine!” she shouted without looking up.

“Yeah, Mi
ss Gloria?” the black woman’s voice replied quietly, turning from the kitchen counter where she was busy chopping vegetables for lunch

“I’m tired. I want to take a nap before lunch,” her charge asserted.

“Ms. Donovan, I realize you’ve taken quite a bit of time with me,  but could you answer a few more questions?” said Tess hastily, realizing that the old woman was preparing to dismiss her as summarily as she had summoned her.

“What now?”
sighed Miss Gloria. “I don’t think I owe the Cabreras much more of my dwindlin’ time on earth, young woman.” She closed the photo album with a dull thud.

“I just wondered whether you know anything about Guy Cabrera’s murder,” said Tess.

“I haven’t got a clue! Blame New Orleans. It’s a murderous place, what with so-called civil rights puttin’ low elements in high places, and corruption, and no respect for common decency,” Miss Gloria grumbled. The old woman paused, pursed her lips and then added, “But I gotta say that Guy Cabrera is one of the few Cabreras to ever give the Donovans somethin’ of value. Right before he got killed, Guy sold Ben’s townhouse to Dan. I always assumed he did it because he felt guilty about the boat accident. Guy took some token payment, but it was pretty much a gift.”

Tess blinked in surprise. Based on the little she had gleaned, she could see no connection between Guy Cabrera and the boat accident. She remarked hesitantly, “I don’t understand, Miss Donovan. I read a short account of the accident, and my grandfather did not seem to be i
nvolved.”

“Well, the accident happened because Desmond and Dylan were racin’ their boat against Guy Cabrera’s boat, of course,” answered the old lady.

“In the brief report I read, the only other boat cited was the cabin cruiser involved in the collision and rescue,” Tess pointed out.

“That’s bec
ause Guy lost the race and hightailed it after the accident, of course,” Miss Gloria explained with a long-suffering look. “Ever since they were in high school together, it was always Desmond-Dylan against Mr. Popular Guy. You put them in racin’ boats, all stupid with male hormones, and you got trouble. You add in that Noah Cabirac, and you got disaster,” the old woman declared.

“Noah was Desmond’s friend and Guy’s enemy,
” she continued, her mouth a grim underscore, “and he was pure trouble if you ask me. I bet he had a big role in the whole mess. He was runnin’ the boat for Desmond and Dylan, wasn’t he? Maybe Desmond told more to his chum, that shyster Phil Dreux. Ask him. He was always in Desmond’s pocket, even more so after the accident.”

“What about Noah
Cabirac? Did he and Desmond remain friends?” Tess asked, thinking she might find another witness to her grandfather’s youth if she could track down Cabirac.

“Noah stayed close to Desmond, but don’t go harin’ off to ask him your nosy questions.
Right after Guy died, Noah had a duck huntin’ accident—and somehow shot himself dead with his own gun. It makes you wonder. Well, they’re all dead and buried now. And that’s as good a place as any to end this gabbin’,” she concluded. Bracing her wobbly arms, she began to push slowly off her chair, spindly legs quivering and buckling.

Charmaine came swiftly and silently to the old woman’s side to steady her. “Now, I got your arm steady, Mi
ss Gloria. Why don’t you say bye to Miss Parnell,” murmured Charmaine.

One last question,” Tess pressed hurriedly, rising with her hostess. “
After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived with your brother and his wife for several years. Do you know what might have motivated my grandmother to suddenly move to Texas? Was there a falling out?”

“You ask such a crucial question as you’re pushed out the door?”

“I don’t know why you think I know your family better than you do. It was because of the little girl, of course. She witnessed the suicide,” Miss Gloria tossed over her shoulder as she started to shuffle away, leaning heavily on Charmaine’s arm.

“Whose suicide?” gasped Tess. The old woman stopped and stared at Tess with a hard, bleak expression.

“
You didn’t know? Desmond’s suicide,” Miss Gloria answered. Her expression softened and she sighed. “Desmond was so handsome and strong before he got maimed. He really suffered. I wasn’t surprised when he finally shot himself. It was in the library of the old townhouse, and I’m sure he didn’t know the child was there. Why would a little girl be hidin’ under a desk? But why don’t you ask that Phil Dreux? He knows all about it. He was with Desmond on the day of the suicide.

“
Now, I need to lie down and rest,” announced Miss Gloria crankily as she tottered off.

Tess sat down at the table, stunned. Her mother had seen Desmond Donovan commit s
uicide. Her perception of her mother was irrevocably changed.

Charmaine returned and walked a numb Tess to the door. “I hope you
learnt somethin’ useful. You need help findin’ your way home?”

“I’m using GPS navigation, so I won’t get lost geographically. I wish there was some d
evice to help me feel less lost in other ways,” Tess said with a wan smile.

“We all wish that, darlin’. It’s why some turn to the Bible and some t
o bourbon. Take care now.” Charmaine smiled sympathetically as she waved Tess on her way.

10
SWAMPS

The dancing gator on the billboard of Happy Cajuns Swamp Adventures had bleached from green and brown to lime and pink, and the sun-faded sign cast a meager noon shadow over the glare of an oyster-shell parking lot. Tess pulled in next to a small wood-framed tour office and leaned her head against the steering wheel, closing her eyes in exhaustion.

After Miss Gloria’s parting bombshell about the connection between her mother and Desmond’s suicide, Tess had driven from Metairie on mental autopilot, blindly obeying GPS-voiced guidance to her preprogrammed tryst with the Happy Cajuns. In an endless, painful loop, her mind tried to make sense of her new perspective on the past.

Sometimes Tess sent messages of reconciliation into the void: “Now that I know about your childhood trauma, Mom, it makes sense that you developed such a tough perso
nality. Desmond did something horrible and incomprehensible, and none of the adults in the family could have protected you, even Grandma. The rest of your life, you were guarding against demons I couldn’t see.”

Other times she raged: “How could you make me a wi
tness to your suicide, Mom? You knew from your personal pain how devastating it would be. Did that meeting about the Cabrera property bring back some black memory? Why repeat something so ugly? Who were you punishing?”

Her maternal specter remained stubbornly aloof, so Tess set aside her internal preocc
upation and forced herself back to her surroundings. She read the red-lettered tour office marquee. Under “Swamp Adventure Tickets,” the sign also offered “Cold Drinks, Candy and Bottled Water” to travelers. At bottom, smaller lettering introduced “J.J. & Joe Comeaux, Proprietors.” Tess assumed Joe Comeaux was Remy’s Uncle Joe.

She had debated abandoning the planned swamp tour right after she left Miss Gloria’s
house. Her secretive motherly phantom might be incommunicado, but Sam Beauvoir and Phil Dreux were alive and available for confrontation. She felt especially betrayed by Sam. She realized that, though he knew there was a connection between Desmond Donovan’s suicide and her grandmother’s sudden departure from New Orleans, he had dodged the issue. As a friend of Desmond Donovan, the devious Dreux also had personal knowledge of the incident, which he purposely had not shared.

In the end, Tess decided it was wiser to plan her questions and approach both men in a calmer frame of mind. She would wait until her Thursday meeting with Dreux and her Friday meeting with Beauvoir. In the meantime, she might as well distract herself. So Tess left her air-conditioned car with a determined step and went to
the schedule board in the parking lot next to the office to confirm the 1 p.m. ticket time for a Bayou Excursion.

She glanced around the deserted area with a frown. Across a two-lane asphalt road w
as a roofed, T-shaped boat dock. A large canopied flat-bottom tour craft and two air boats with great caged propellers were moored, all bobbing tamely.

Tess was about to mount the steps to the office door when a white van with a bright Happy Cajuns Swamp Adventures logo swung into the lot and drew to a gravel-spraying stop. A young driver, with corn-rowed hair and a loose Swamp Adve
ntures T-shirt, slid out and hauled back the sliding side door. The metal squealed in protest, and the complaint was quickly echoed by the squinting, brochure-fanning tourists who spilled onto the sun-baked lot. The driver shooed his milling charges toward the boat dock.

Tess followed the sightseers, hastening her steps as molten tar burned up through the thin soles of her sandals. The dock roof provided only minimal relief from the sun, and Tess shifted uncomfortably among the tourists, who had quickly
formed into small familial clumps. The opaque green-brown water sucked at the slimy piers and emitted bubbling exhalations. The crowd’s scents of sweaty cotton and sunscreen soon began to blend with a pungent potpourri of fish, mud and fuel.

Tess willed the tour to start before her interest melted in the heat, and she was rewarded by the sight of a large-bellied man emerging from the tour office. He waved at the departing van driver and strolled toward the dock, followed by a skinny man holding a bucket labeled BAIT.

“Well, hello, frien’s,” boomed the jovial baritone of the large man. “I’m Joe Comeaux, an’ I’m gonna take you to meet wid some nice geddas in da bayou. (It took Tess several seconds to realize that he was talking about ‘nice gators.’) Now lemme jus’ collec' da tickets an’ make sure we don’t got no hitchhikers, ’cause I do hate to t’row anybody in da swamp. Yeah, you know I’m jokin’, frien’s.”

Tess studied Remy’s Uncle Joe Comeaux curiously. He had a weathered, florid face with a bushy gray mustache and a cap of tight grizzled curls. He was as wide front to back as he was side to side. A black T-shirt with the jigging gator logo was stretched tight over the equator of his gut and cinched by a straining leather belt that held up jeans tucked into calf-high rubber boots.

“Now, dis ole boy here is my right han’ Pete,” continued Uncle Joe, indicating the bucket-toting man in stained overalls. “Pete’s gonna be feedin’ da geddas while I handle da boat. If you wan’, you can he’p him. We never lost a whole tourist yet, jus’ mebbe a finger,” he added, with a grin for the nervous laughter. He began to help the women and younger children into the boat as Pete untied lines on the dock, working with a lit cigarette limply balanced on his lower lip. As he crossed back and forth, he left a dribble of ash and a thin curl of smoke in his wake.

Once the tourists took their seats, Pete flicked away
his cigarette, jumped in and joined Uncle Joe at the helm. “Ready to go, Cap’n Joe,” announced Pete, with an unself-conscious grin that revealed a missing front incisor. He winked broadly at two astounded teenage girls. Pete seemed to suffer from the happy delusion that he was a charmer.

“O
K, frien’s, here we go,” shouted Uncle Joe, forcing a roar from the engines that vibrated the length of the boat. “Now, you take a good look as we go ’cause you are in one ancient place, one of da last wild places. Yeah, look close now. Da wetlands is gettin’ smaller all da time now, like dem glaciers. You can blame man-made stuff like levees an’ loggin’, or nature like da hurricane. Or mebbe all dat. But, me, I jus’ know it’s a shame. A man needs wild places to keep humble an’ peaceful. Dat’s how I see it.”

As the boat sped over the water, the shore became a blur of green
, and Tess gratefully leaned out into the stream of air along the craft’s railed sides. Uncle Joe’s lilting voice flowed back from the helm as he provided required safety instructions and homespun anecdotes to hook the tourist crowd.

Tess paid minimal attention. Her only reason to grasp
the gist of Uncle Joe’s tales was a desire to please Remy with an understanding of his family and background. Her ancestors had been plantation and city-dwelling people, not swamp-dwelling Cajuns. The long-ago vacation “bayou house” and today’s tour were as close as her family research would come to this alligator-infested world, she assumed.

Because of her interest in Remy, s
he forced herself to listen more closely when Uncle Joe began to describe his personal history. He had not been raised in the bayous, he explained. He was the son of an auto dealer from Lafayette. He had an older brother who now ran the car dealership, and he had an older sister married to a college professor (presumably Remy’s father). Joe, being a more adventurous sort with little aptitude for schooling, had worked as an oil rig roughneck before starting his tour business.

When Joe was a boy
, his parents had dealt with his sometimes troublesome excess energy by sending him off each summer to his Uncle Martin—“only I call him Nonc Martin in da Cajun way”—who made his living hunting and fishing in the Manchac swamp between Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain. There was something familiar about the word Manchac, but Tess’s heat-slowed brain could not dredge it up as the guide began recalling his adventures with “Nonc Martin.”

Nonc Martin
had lived—along with his wife and children—in a swamp shack without most modern amenities. He poled through the cypress groves in an old-fashioned pirogue, a clumsy vehicle made from a hollowed cypress log. His trained eye could spot the faint gator trails in the floating weeds and judge their size and destination, Uncle Joe claimed. He knew from long observation where the fish congregated and the vagaries of their appetites. He knew the habits of the wetland birds and the uses of the native plants. His hunting and fishing missions shifted with the seasons in a seemingly never-ending cycle.

In the fall, he hunted squirrel, rabbit and deer. From December through February, he trapped nutria, mink, and otter for their fur. Once there had been beaver and muskrats, too, but they were already scarce in Joe’s boyhood. Nonc Martin would be busy each winter skinning, stretching and drying pelts in a hot, stinking shed adjacent to his home.

Nonc Martin and his way of life were gone, but Joe recalled how, as a boy, he had come as many weekends as possible in September for the most exciting hunting season—the alligator season. Then he helped Nonc Martin and his son J.J use their quota of hunting permits to catch alligators.

“Now only da wetland owner or lessee can harvest geddas, and he gets jus’ so many pe
rmit tags dat he can use or share wid da licensed gedda hunter, so dere’s no overhuntin’ like we had back in da ole days. Now you can catch a gedda by takin’ a big ole hook like dis on heavy line.”

Uncle Joe hefted a large wicked-looking steel hook and passed it back to the first awed tourist for a tou
r around the seated passengers.

“
Den, you stick on some raw chicken an’ hang dat bait hook from a strong branch about 2 or 3 feet over da water,” the big man continued. “Geddas feed at night, so you go roun’ each mornin’ an’ check dat hook. Lotta times, da chicken’s still hangin’. Sometime da chicken’s gone, ’cause mebbe a gedda or a big owl stole it. Sometime you see da line goin’ down in da water, and den you haul up a gedda. Ladies an’ gennelmen, dat can be real dangerous. One man pulls da line and one man gets ready to shoot dat angry gedda dead wid a rifle.”

Uncle Joe proceeded to pass around a plastic permit tag looped through a piece of allig
ator tail and then held up an alligator skull from a 12-foot monster that Nonc Martin had once captured. Alligators start as 8-inch hatchlings but can reach 14 feet or more by age 75, Joe explained.

The skull elicited excited chatter from the children
and awed murmurs from the adults as they eyed the big teeth. Uncle Joe pointed out that alligators have no grinding teeth and must swallow their food whole. When the reptiles capture prey, they can go into a “death roll” in the water, flipping their victims violently and biting down to gulp limp pieces.

“But, if a gedda gonna eat up a big man like me, he
can go anodder way,” added Uncle Joe in a solemn voice. “He gonna drag me down unner da water till I drown an’ den he can stow me in his unnerwater meat locker, say unner a cypress log, till I get tender ’nough to chomp up.” The crowd responded with satisfying gasps of disgust.

“Now da gedda is one ancient critter, been da same since dinosaur times,” he continued cheerfully. “I reckon dey keep goin’ by keepin’ it simple. Dey’s strong an’ mean, but dey don’
t t’ink too much. Dey got a brain da size of a lima bean. Yeah, I bet you ladies are t’inkin’ dat sounds pretty much like some men you know, eh.” Joe grinned and winked at the laughing crowd.

While the tour guide talked, the boat had entered a series of narrowing channels and eventually came to a full stop. Scrub vegetation arched over the water, daintily adorned by pink swamp roses, and the banks were sculpted by shadowy grottos. “Now lemme introduce you to some hungry li’l geddas,” announced Uncle Joe.

Pete, with a new cigarette dangling from his lip, leaned over the starboard rail and tossed a handful of marshmallows into the water. He waited a second and then began to bang the side of the boat, yelling “Viens, viens ici.” Either alligators understand French better than English commands, or the tour operators added a French accent to spice the bayou adventure.

There were splashes and rustles all along the bank, and the water was suddenly rippling with brown snouts and undulating scaled tails. About ten little alligators glided up, tails wagging happily, and began to snap up the marshmallows. After gulping the first round of marshma
llows, the creatures, all less than 4 feet in length, floated closer to the boat’s hull, looking up at Pete with greedy golden eyes and open grinning mouths. It was clear that this was a regular dining experience for the juvenile alligators.

When Pete had run out of marshmallows, Uncle Joe asked merrily and rhetorically, “Wanna see if we can fin’ dese li’l guys big brodders?”

He swung the craft out to a wider waterway and past a small stand of cypress, the tapering columns and spare arms of the high trees draped in gray Spanish moss like forgotten Christmas tinsel. Uncle Joe slowed and pointed. “Now frien’s, dere’s your bald cypress tree. Da bald cypress is da state tree. We call it bald ’cause it loses needles in da fall an’ goes bare-headed till spring,” he shouted over the droning motor. The tourists had been temporarily sated by the thrill of feeding monsters, and they lolled in their seats and showed little interest.