Cities of the Dead Read online

  Mary accepted the accompanying white and silver card, while Spraggue read the label on the bottle. “Compliments of the hotel,” she announced. “That means Denise.”

  “Cognac,” Spraggue said. “A Sabourin Grande Champagne. A major league bribe.” He wondered about Paulette, about the possibility of linked murderers, one with motive, the other with opportunity.

  “Pour us each a glass, Pierce,” Mary said, “yourself included—and we’ll drink to this marvelous policeman.”

  The praise made Rawlins sit taller in his chair. “James French,” he said, consulting first the notebook, then the folded sheet of paper, reading easily now with the aid of the despised glasses, “also known as Joe Fontenot. What he served time for in Angola was quite some rumpus, back in 1966.” Rawlins clamped the notebook shut, using his index finger for a marker, and lifted off his glasses. They left shallow red tracks on either side of his nose. “Took place over to Morgan City. If you know Morgan City, you know it’s sort of a free-for-all zone. A good place to get lost and stay lost. Off-shore oil workers hang out there. Good pay for unskilled labor, and they need enough of it so they aren’t too careful about social security cards and identification and such. Find almost anything over to Morgan City. And there’s money around. Cash money. You don’t pay those guys with no bank checks. They like to see the green foldin’ money in the pay packets, so they can head straight over to the bar. No bankin’ center, old Morgan City.”

  “Where is it?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, ’bout ninety miles southwest. Our boy could’ve planned the robbery while he was livin’ here, married to your cook as Jacques whatever. It was one of them million-dollar jobs, the once-in-a-lifetime kind of crime. You know, if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it right once, and not fool with robbin’ the five-and-dime every other weekend.”

  He watched Mary closely as she reread part of the clipping, then passed it to Pierce. “You don’t, uh, need glasses?” he asked softly.

  “I’m wearing contact lenses.”

  Spraggue smiled. Mary rarely admitted it.

  “I hate these things.” Rawlins sighed. “Every time I have to put ’em on at work, I can just hear the young cops thinkin’, poor old geezer, hope they put me out to pasture before I get that far gone. If I didn’t need bifocals, I might get contacts, too. Not for vanity, you know—”

  “I wear bifocal contact lenses,” Mary said. “And not for vanity.”

  “They got those?”

  “For pride. They take a little getting used to—”

  “Hell with that. I’m gettin’ some.”

  “Can we get back to business here?” Spraggue asked. “What about the other two robbers? Did the ‘intensive police search’ pan out?”

  Rawlins didn’t have to consult the notebook. “The only one they ever caught was the one they sent to Sisters of Mercy,” he said with satisfaction. “The one in the article. Our ‘James French.’ And they had no luck tracin’ any of his associates. Because there he was, in Morgan City, flat out lyin’, givin’ his name as James French, and here he was, in New Orleans, as Jacques somebody, and back home in the bayou, he was Joe Fontenot. I sort of remember the ‘James French’ they arrested pulled some kinda dumb-Cajun-po’-boy routine. You know, spoke only French or Cajun, and didn’t seem sharp enough to really know what was goin’ down.”

  “His picture must have been in the newspapers,” Mary said.

  “The only reason they caught French or Fontenot or whoever was ’cause he stopped a load of buckshot. He was in the hospital with bandages over most of his head. His leg was broken too and never rightly healed.”

  “Was he the one who killed the guard?” Mary asked.

  “Nope. Matter of fact it was proved that he didn’t. But we got here a statute called felony murder, the ‘we’re-all-in-this-together’ law. If’n you commence to rob someone in cahoots with someone else and your buddy opens up with a shotgun and kills people, you’re just as guilty as he is, even if you swear up and down you didn’t even know he had a gun.”

  “But French was only in prison six years,” Spraggue said. “Doesn’t sound like very much for murder.”

  “Parole, I reckon.” Rawlins regretfully replaced his glasses, riffled through his notebook. “He didn’t get Murder One. He probably had a decent lawyer, and sometimes a judge ain’t too enthusiastic about a felony murder rap. And I recollect that this guy was still chewed up pretty bad, gonna limp the rest of his life and all. Maybe the judge thought he wouldn’t return to a life of crime so quick with a limp.”

  “He didn’t,” Mary said.

  “What about the money?” Spraggue asked.

  Rawlins grinned. “I was waitin’ for that one. Turned out to be about five hundred thousand missing. They blew the million, left half the dough behind, and escaped with their skins, exceptin’ for our boy, Fontenot. And here’s an interestin’ thing.” The sergeant closed the notebook, removed his glasses, and gestured with them to emphasize his point. “That money never turned up, and neither did anybody else who was in on the robbery with old James French.”

  TWELVE

  Spraggue lowered himself gingerly to the floor and adjusted his spine flat against the carpet. The bouncers’ heave-ho throbbed in his lower back. He did ten repetitions of a relaxation exercise another former stage-fighting teacher had sworn by.

  It didn’t work.

  Joseph Fontenot. Jacques Forte. And James French. Had there been other aliases, other identities? Spraggue felt the first twinge of sympathy, empathy really, for the dead man. He knew the desire to lead more than one short, preordained life, cut off from choice by circumstance of birth, making the kinds of decisions horses wearing blinders are allowed, beasts that see only the broad road ahead rather than the hundreds of fascinating, twisting alleys to each side. Acting let him live in other skins, experiment with other choices and other lives.

  Private investigation held the same attraction. His greatest asset was his ability to blend in, with sure, quiet confidence, to play whatever role the situation required. He had that sort of face, unremarkable, flexible. If a play needed double casting, he was usually chosen.

  Joe Fontenot, thief, con-man, bigamist, had lived more than one life. And in the real world, not on stage. Spraggue wondered what it would be like—to change your name and your walk and your hair and your clothes, to begin again somewhere else, a new-minted stranger in a clean land, unshackled by the past.

  How had ‘James French’ slipped his shackles? Even the best-behaved parolee was required to follow stringent rules. Paroled prisoners who might be able to lead authorities to half a million dollars and a murderer or two could expect closer supervision than most.

  But ‘French’ had had a fine alias available—his own name—and a wife and daughter delighted to welcome him home, no questions asked.

  Had Jeannine asked questions? Had Aimee known delight?

  Sergeant Rawlins’ revelations broke open the field of people who might have wanted Joe Fontenot dead. Cellmates, relatives of the murdered guard, partners in crime …

  Fontenot would have sought his partners out, looking for rich reward for his silence. Not to mention his rightful share of the unrecovered half million.

  Nineteen sixty-six was the year the robbery had taken place. ’Sixty-seven, the trial. Six years imprisonment. Nineteen seventy-three. Fontenot had been out of jail over ten years. But he’d started spreading money around only six months ago, when he’d gotten his legacy from his stepbrother, T-Bob. Or so Jeannine Fontenot said.

  “Will there be anything else?” The high-gloss toes of Pierce’s black shoes crushed the carpet a foot from Spraggue’s right shoulder. Spraggue had been aware of the butler, polishing ashtrays, clinking glassware, wheeling the room-service cart into the hallway, but the sudden question startled him.

  “Go to bed,” Spraggue said. “Mary won’t be back for hours yet.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “Turn off the light on your way
out.”

  The darkness might help him concentrate, might ease him to sleep. When Aunt Mary returned from her pubcrawl with her detective sergeant squire, she would find him gently snoring on the carpet. Trip over him. If she came back. As she’d waved good-bye, Spraggue had caught a fleeting glimpse of the bohemian Mary Spraggue who lurked perilously near the surface of his aunt’s staid Brahmin facade.

  A horizontal bar of light gleamed like a neon rod in the darkness. Light spilled onto the carpet from under the closed door to an adjoining bedroom. Dora’s room.

  He listened to the pad of footsteps, the swish of cloth, as he got silently to his feet. How long the noises lasted he wasn’t sure. A seam of light appeared at the side of the door, widened. A figure slipped into the room, glided over to the couch.

  Spraggue flicked on the light switch.

  He caught Dora bending over at the waist, patting at the couch. A brown handbag sat on one of the cushions. She grabbed it and turned to face him.

  She expelled her breath slowly. “It is you,” she said. There was nothing in her voice, neither relief nor apprehension.

  “Going out?” She was wearing a neat beige suit, a pink blouse, tied at its high collar with a bow.

  “No,” she said. “Yes—maybe. I was just … I wanted to walk around outdoors.” She wore lipstick. It was too bright for her pale face.

  “It’s late,” Spraggue said. “Way past midnight.”

  “Midnight is late in Boston, not in New Orleans. I wanted, suddenly, to go somewhere with bright lights and music and people talking. Happy people. I wanted to see the old places. Maybe to sit on a bench at Preservation Hall and watch the old men play joyful music. And Sweet Emma. I wondered if Sweet Emma still played the piano. She’d be an old woman now, or dead.”

  “Preservation Hall closes early. Midnight, I think.” Wouldn’t Dora know that, Spraggue wondered. She’d spent years here, not months.

  “I forgot,” she said quickly. “Maybe Pat O’Brien’s then. Or—”

  “I could go with you.”

  “No, really, it was just an impulse. Better, probably, not to go. It used to be, in New Orleans, when I lived here, safe everywhere. Now they say there are muggings. Almost as bad as New York.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want to go?”

  She licked her lips and tried to make them smile. “No, monsieur.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Dora. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Believe me, monsieur, this has nothing to do with that man’s death. Because I am suspected unjustly of that, my whole life must be examined with a microscope?”

  “If you want to go, go,” Spraggue said. Would the streets be crowded enough to let him follow her unnoticed?

  She hesitated. “I’ll stay.”

  “Then sit down. And tell me more about your Jacques Forte.”

  “I’ve told you what I can, what kind of man he was,” Dora said helplessly. “It was long ago. I tried so hard to forget that it does not come back easily.”

  She sat on the edge of the sofa, clutching her purse. If she hadn’t left her handbag on the couch, she could have escaped the hotel easily. Her room had a door to the corridor. Had she been out before? Had Mary given her a key? Probably a duplicate at the desk anyway.

  “What I need,” Spraggue said, “is a few facts. When and where and why and how.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Dora said simply.

  “What did you know about Jacques Forte when you married him?”

  “I knew—I thought I knew—that I loved him.”

  Great. The naive reply of a seventeen-year-old.

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I never met his family,” Dora said defensively, “if that is what you mean.”

  “What did he tell you about his family? Why didn’t you meet them?”

  “There was some difficulty. His mother, he said, had died when he was young, and the woman his father had married after that, he was not close to. He did not like her, and his sisters were also estranged from him. I sympathized with him because I have no family myself.”

  “Friends, then,” Spraggue said. “Who were the witnesses at your wedding?”

  “For me, Denise Michel stood up. It was not a grand wedding, you understand. A ‘JP wedding,’ he called it. A Justice of the Peace presides.”

  “Who was the best man?”

  “No one, I think. His friend, I cannot remember the name, was called out of town, and the man at the office said it was not legally necessary.”

  “No friend to stand up at the ceremony?”

  “The man was going to come and then could not at the last moment.” Dora’s voice flattened out and she finished lamely, “Or that is what Jacques told me.”

  “This friend, was he called T-Bob?”

  “T-Bob,” she repeated. “I think so. I remember that name. Petit Bob. He may have been the friend.”

  “You knew him?” Spraggue said. “You met him?”

  “No. Never. But I remember hearing his name.”

  Dead end. Roadblock.

  “Where did you live?” Spraggue asked. “You and Jacques?”

  “In the Faubourg Marigny, a one-room apartment on Kerlerec Street.”

  “Did you look for the apartment together? Was his name on the lease?”

  “No,” Dora said quickly. “It was my apartment first where we were living. A nice apartment, not big enough for two perhaps, but we had so little money—”

  “So this man with no friends or family moved into your apartment.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve already told myself that I was a fool?” Dora’s hands twisted the strap of her handbag. “I tell myself a sensible woman would choose a sauté pan, a paring knife, more carefully.” She stared at the carpet, and her voice stayed low and flat with truthfulness that was as painful as an open wound. “I was no love-smitten schoolgirl. I was almost thirty years old—”

  “Did your husband have a job, Dora? Did he go to work every morning?”

  “He was a cook, monsieur, that I know. But he could not find work. He had been a saucier at one of the hotels, he said, but he was let go because of some contretemps with a foolish waiter. He looked every day for work. It was so hard for him, I think. A man must have work, for self-respect. I think sometimes he worked odd jobs, because he would come home very dirty, as if he did roadwork, his hands calloused from digging. And then he would bring me flowers, sometimes beautiful flowers from the florist, sometimes a few faded flowers, sometimes blooms that looked like he’d picked them along the road. And he would have a little money for the rent. But he would be shame-faced. He would not tell me about this work.”

  “Luggage?” Spraggue said. “Photographs?”

  “I never realized,” Dora said in a faraway voice, “until after he was gone, how little of him was in the apartment. It was always my apartment. He brought but one suitcase full of clothing with him. That’s all. I thought he was only poor. It’s no disgrace to be poor, certainly.”

  “No disgrace,” Spraggue agreed softly.

  “He seemed a decent man,” Dora said defiantly. “He was not some thief, some murderer!”

  There was a deep stillness in the room.

  “Why do you ask me these questions?”

  “Because it might help solve his murder,” Spraggue said finally.

  “No,” Dora said. “He was not killed by the past. He was killed with my tanqueuer—with my knife that people saw that afternoon. My knife case was unlocked only during the seminar. I locked it afterwards, and the key I wear around my neck. So it must have been someone from that seminar, from that dinner, from today.”

  There it was, Spraggue thought. She was right. No matter what newspaper clippings Rawlins pulled out of his pockets.

  “Where were you going tonight?” he asked.

  “Out, monsieur. Just out.”

  THIRTEEN

  Buildings on either side of Aimee Fontenot’s Esplanade Avenue apart
ment had a sheen of gentrification—new shutters, potted plants, Mardi gras bunting. Aimee’s place had weatherbeaten gray paint peeling off warped window frames. In the unlocked foyer, the name Fontenot was scratched on white adhesive tape stuck to a chipped wooden panel under a battered mailbox.

  Spraggue rang her doorbell at nine the next morning. He figured nine o’clock would give her a chance to sleep off some of that bad champagne, but not enough time to recover from a hangover and get out of the house. He stabbed at the bell again. The muscles in his upper arms ached, and the memory of the bouncers made him hope the buzzer was exploding right in her eardrum.

  No one answered. He wondered if she’d taken a paying customer to her bed. That might slow down her reactions. He hit the buzzer again, a staccato burst. Nothing.

  Albert Flowers, skimming through the morning paper while waiting in the cab, was undismayed at Aimee’s absence. He told Spraggue to cheer up, there was still one place where the woman might be, although Albert himself didn’t understand why a girl would work at a place like that Bourbon Street dive and still hold a crummy clerk’s job at the local K & B, where the Lord knew she couldn’t make in two days what she’d earn on her back in an hour.

  Aimee Fontenot looked as out of place behind the counter of the convenience store as a raven would have looked in a cage full of parakeets. Her handsome face glowered at the line of customers. Spraggue was sure that the words “Have a good day” never crossed her lips. She worked mechanically, just slowly enough to be slightly insulting, as if she knew she was too good for this job and this area and these people. She was rude without being blatantly disrespectful, insulting without giving specific cause for offense. It was a thorough performance and Spraggue caught the manager of the store glancing nervously at the woman from time to time as if wondering what he could do to get rid of the demon behind the cash register before she got rid of the queue of customers.

  Spraggue picked up a packet of chewing gum at a garish display set deliberately low enough to tempt small children and got at the end of the line.

  When it was his turn to pay, she recognized him. That he could tell from her eyes. “Forty-five cents,” she said.