Swamp Santa (A Miss Fortune Mystery Book 16)

by Jana DeLeon

  “This isn’t about the mother,” Gertie said.

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. “Someone is looking for his baby.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The bar that Ashley had worked at was in one of the ritzy hotels in the French Quarter, the kind that businessmen preferred when traveling and companies liked for events. It was quiet when we arrived, but we were well ahead of the after-work crowd. Two senior gentlemen sat at a corner table when we walked in. They stopped talking long enough to check us out but must have decided we looked too difficult because they went back to their conversation.

  A young woman, probably twenty-five or so, was wiping down the bar and greeted us as we approached. “What can I get you ladies? Wine is half price until five.”

  “Oh!” Gertie said. “I’ll have a pinot grigio.”

  I heard Ida Belle sigh, but she must have figured we’d get more out of the bartender if we had a drink, so she slid onto a stool. “I’m driving,” she said. “Just a Coke for me.”

  “I’ll have beer,” I said. “Whatever you have on tap.”

  She gave me a couple options and I chose one, then she set about pouring the drinks.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you ladies in here before,” she said as she served. “Are you vacationing?”

  I shook my head. “Actually, we’re here on business.” I showed her my identification.

  Her eyes widened. “Private investigator? What do you want with me?”

  “It’s not about you specifically,” I said, trying to keep her calm. “You just happen to be working. I’m trying to locate Ashley Breaux. Her sister hasn’t heard from her in a while and she’s concerned.”

  “Oh,” she said, and frowned. “I thought she just quit. You know, walked off?”

  “Why would you think that?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “She hadn’t been the same since she got pregnant. I knew she was giving him up for adoption and she said that was the best thing to do. But it didn’t look like she meant it. She seemed really sad…depressed, you know?”

  “So she was still working here after she gave the baby up?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. She was still out on maternity leave the last time I saw her. She’d stopped in to collect a bonus pay we got for the previous month. Said she’d dropped the baby off at the attorney and it was all taken care of. But when she was due to come back to work, she never showed.”

  “She didn’t give notice?” I asked.

  “No way. The boss was hella mad when she didn’t show that first night she was scheduled to return. There were two events going on and we were slammed. He had to rustle up some contract help and that cuts into profits, which cuts into his bonus.”

  “I assume he tried to call her?”

  She nodded. “Said her phone was disconnected, and when he tried to send a couple of her personal items she’d left here to her apartment, they came back as no longer at this address.”

  “She never said anything about leaving? I mean, even before the baby? Future plans? Dreams?”

  “Sure. We’ve all got those. You spend most nights with suits slapping your butt and you have plenty of dreams, but I don’t know that she was actively working on anything.”

  “What about the baby’s father?” I asked. “Did she ever mention anything about him?”

  “Told me she didn’t know who he was. She used to pick up guys sometimes at closing. Or let them pick her up. Whatever. We’re not supposed to but that doesn’t stop some of the bartenders from working a side angle.”

  “She was taking money from the men?” I asked.

  “She never said so, but that’s my guess. I mean, the guys she left out of here with weren’t even in her league, you know? Ashley lived kinda rough but she was hot.”

  “What about a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “There was this one guy. He came in several times but I never got his name. Every time I saw him, he was hitting her up for money. She didn’t look all that enamored with him. Honestly, if anything, she looked a little scared. I think he tuned her up some. A couple times she had a black eye. Hard to hide that, especially on a long shift when makeup starts to fade.”

  “Can you give me a description?”

  “Maybe. I never paid close attention really. He was probably thirty-five or so. Clean-cut and usually wearing a suit. Looked like good quality, so I never got why he needed her money, but then plenty of people put everything they make up their nose, so… Anyway, sorry I can’t give you more but all the suits start to look alike after a while.”

  I frowned. Clean-cut and wearing a suit was not what I expected and didn’t match Becca’s description of someone who was ‘rough.’ Maybe this was a guy Becca didn’t know about.

  “Have you seen that guy in here since Ashley took off?” I asked.

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Do you think he was the baby’s father?”

  She shrugged. “Honestly? I have no idea. Ashley was cool enough and a really good bartender, but she was also odd. She’d tell us things about her one-nighters with guys or about a cool drug trip but didn’t talk about the rest of her private life. I didn’t even know she had a sister until you said so.”

  “Has anyone else been in here asking for Ashley?”

  “Yeah, there was one guy. Came in maybe a week or two ago. Older, rude. He asked everyone working if they knew where to find her. None of us do but I wouldn’t have told him if I did. I got a bad vibe from him. I mean, maybe he was just here trying to collect or something. That happens, but still. You don’t go telling a strange man where he can find a single woman, you know?”

  I turned my phone toward her and showed her a picture of Cooke. “Was this the guy?”

  She studied it for a couple seconds and frowned. “Maybe. Looks cleaner in that photo, though. He looked like he’d been living on the streets a while when he came in here.”

  I pulled out my card and handed it to her. “If you hear from Ashley, please give me a call. Or if you see that guy in the suit. I’d love to talk to him.”

  She took the card and slipped it into her jeans pocket. “Sure. Hey, you don’t think anything bad happened to her, do you? She had her issues but overall, Ashley was a decent person. Never backstabbed, always pulled her weight and usually more, never stole tips from the other bartenders, always positive and funny…that’s really rare in this line of work.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “I’m definitely going to try to find out.”

  She nodded and wrote a name and number on a cocktail napkin. “If you get anything, would you mind letting me know? I’ve been wondering but now I’m kinda worried.”

  I folded the napkin and tucked it in my pocket. “I will, and thanks for talking to us.”

  “No problem,” she said, and headed to the other side of the bar to wait on a group of men in suits who had just walked in.

  “You want to check out the apartment now?” Ida Belle asked.

  Gertie checked her watch. “It’s getting late. Unless you want Ida Belle driving at warp speed, we should probably head back soon.”

  “When people with guns are chasing us, you don’t have a problem with warp speed,” Ida Belle pointed out.

  “I was sorta hoping to avoid any gun chasing with this investigation,” I said.

  “I was sorta hoping to avoid warp speed,” Gertie said. “I rolled my hair this morning and don’t want it going flat before the caroling.”

  “The apartment building is on our way out of the city,” I said, “so let’s go ahead and make that stop. I don’t figure it’s going to take long to hear ‘I don’t know anything,’ which is probably all we’ll get from the manager.”

  Ida Belle started up the SUV and we headed out.

  The apartment building had seen its better days, probably fifty years ago when it was built. Or maybe not even then. The brick showed the signs of enduring decades of bad weather and neglect. The patches of lawn were mowed, but the grass that was probably pl
anted there after construction was long gone and had been replaced by weeds and bare dirt. A faded sign at the entrance indicated where to find the office and we parked in front of a small one-story offshoot in the middle of the complex and headed inside. The man working there didn’t even bother to get out of his chair when we walked in.

  Midfifties. Six foot even. Two hundred fifty pounds. No threat at all as he probably only got out of the chair twice a day.

  We must not have looked like his usual renters because he narrowed his eyes at us and barked out, “What do you want?”

  This was already going well.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said, not bothering to give my name. “I’m looking for Ashley Breaux.”

  He snorted. “You’re not the only one. But I’m surprised someone paid a PI to find her. Must have stiffed them for more than a month’s rent.”

  “I can’t really disclose client information, but let’s just say my client has a vested interested in locating her.”

  “’Fraid I can’t help you,” he said. “I went around knocking when she was two days late on the rent. Got no answer and no one had seen her in a while. Hadn’t no one complained about a bad smell, but I figured I best check anyway. Her clothes and bathroom stuff was gone. All that was left was a bit of kitchen stuff and some furniture that was falling apart.”

  “Did she have a car?” I asked.

  “She never registered one,” he said. “And I never saw her in one. Saw her catch a bus to the Quarter most days. Assumed that’s how she got to work.”

  “Did she have an emergency contact?” I asked.

  “Her mother,” he said. “But she said she hadn’t seen or heard from her in weeks.”

  “You think she was telling the truth?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t see any reason for her to lie. Not like she’d be on the hook for the rent. And she got all upset with me…insisted I call the cops and report her as missing.”

  “And did you?”

  “Why would I? It was clear she left on her own accord or all her stuff would have still been in the apartment. The cops don’t care about someone skipping rent. All they would have done is told me to take it up in civil court.”

  I nodded. I knew he was right. Despite the fact that no one could account for Ashley’s whereabouts, that didn’t mean she’d been the victim of a crime. And since her personal belongings were gone, that indicated she’d left of her own volition. Or someone who wanted to harm her had been very careful. I really hoped it was the first option and not the second.

  “Do you mind telling me which unit was hers?” I asked. “I’d like to see if any of her neighbors know anything.”

  “Room 165,” he said. “But they ain’t likely to tell you anything, even if they know. People who live around here don’t like questions, and they figure if someone wants to be found then they’d let people know where they were.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and headed out. I knew he was right. Even though I wasn’t a cop, a lot of people saw PIs as something along those lines.

  We knocked on the doors of a few of the apartments near Ashley’s, but no one answered. Since I heard noise inside all of them, I figured no one was interested in talking to strangers. We didn’t look like cops but they didn’t know us, either, so that automatically made us suspect.

  “Looks like no one wants to talk to us,” Gertie said as we headed out.

  “Couple of old gray-hairs and one young woman,” Ida Belle said. “They probably think we’re pushing Jesus.”

  “Who are you calling old?” Gertie asked.

  “There is no time for this discussion again,” Ida Belle said, and looked over at me. “So what do you make of all this?”

  “Nothing good,” I said. “Could be the suit was Ashley’s off-and-on love interest and maybe the father of her baby. I figure Abshire skirted the line on things to make a buck and the suit, or whoever the father is, found out and is looking for his child. Ashley knew the whole deal was shady and dropped the baby, then hightailed it out of town.”

  “Then Cooke roughed up Abshire to get information about the adoptions,” Ida Belle said. “It’s definitely not good but you’re right, it does fit.”

  Gertie shook her head. “So what do we do now?”

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “We’ve narrowed down our pool of suspects at least.”

  “Yes,” Ida Belle said. “But I don’t want any of them to be the killer. Megan and Seth are good people and they don’t deserve problems. And with Megan pregnant now…this is a mess.”

  “Don’t forget Becca,” I said. “She had opportunity and she was friends with Ashley. And I’m guessing she knows more about the entire situation than she’s saying.”

  “Do you really think so?” Gertie asked. “She seemed scared when you told them about Cooke. If she already knew someone was looking for Ashley’s baby, would she have looked that surprised?”

  “Maybe she looked scared because she did it,” Ida Belle said.

  Gertie huffed. “I hate this. All these people just trying to protect a baby from an abusive man and one of them is probably going to end up in prison over it.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not our call,” Ida Belle said.

  “What about Zach and Amber?” Gertie asked. “Are we striking them off the list?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. I still think it’s possible their adoption wasn’t on the up-and-up, and I think Zach knows it. Probably Amber does as well. They’re just not admitting it because they got what they wanted.”

  “The question is what lengths would they go to in order to protect themselves?” Ida Belle said. “And a surprising number of otherwise-average people have taken extreme measures when it came to their children.”

  “So we’re back around to what do we do now?” Gertie asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to get any more than we already have out of the couples and Becca. We could continue talking to the other people who were working the cafeteria. Maybe someone saw one of our five suspects hand Santa food or drink.”

  I looked over at Ida Belle. “Did you send the files to the Sorcerer?”

  “Yes. He said he had to finish up a project, then he’d take a look at it and let me know. I was hoping to hear something today.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’d like to identify the man behind all of this. Nothing about him sounded nice, and hiring Cooke doesn’t help his case any. If we can dig up dirt on him, it might help make an argument against him getting custody.”

  “And might help build sympathy for the defense,” Ida Belle said. “Not that I’m excusing murder, but there are mitigating circumstances here.”

  “If it turns out Cooke was the one who beat up Abshire, that might help the defense as well,” Gertie said.

  “I hate this!” Ida Belle said, and I stared at her, somewhat surprised at the amount of emotion in her voice.

  “The killer is supposed to be a bad guy,” she continued. “And we’re supposed to be racing toward him like we’re trying to capture the devil. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of otherwise good people in the middle of a nightmare. And the biggest victims from the legal end of things are the shady attorney and the equally shady PI.”

  I nodded. “I think this is why cops are always saying, ‘We don’t get to pick the vic.’”

  “A good reminder of a crappy reality,” Ida Belle said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Given the way the holiday events of the week had gone so far, I had no idea what to expect from caroling. I’d seen it on those Hallmark Christmas movies Gertie had forced me to watch—groups of people walking through the snow from house to house and singing at the front door. I suspected the Sinful rendition wouldn’t sound like the professionals they used on television, but it was the spirit of the thing that counted.

  That spirit, according to Ida Belle, was why Gertie got to participate.

  As I’d heard Gertie sing many
times in church, I was well aware of why she wasn’t in the choir and probably never should be. Yes, there was all that joyful noise nonsense and all, but I had my doubts that even the most pious among us would find Gertie’s singing joyful. I usually lip-synched, so never had to worry about that form of judgment, but then I didn’t enjoy singing the way Gertie did.

  When we parked on Main Street, I spotted a four-wheeler with a trailer attached at the end of the street and frowned. Surely we weren’t going to revisit the whole sleigh farce again. Not after last time.

  “That’s not what we’re going caroling in, is it?” I asked.

  Ida Belle nodded. “Usually we do the whole horse-drawn thing. It’s better for pictures. But after last night, everyone felt the four-wheeler was the better option.”

  “You’re not driving, are you?” I asked, because if Ida Belle was at the wheel, our chances were probably better with the horses.

  “No,” she said. “I’m the unofficial song director so I have to be in the trailer.”

  “Do I have to be in the trailer?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve had more Christmas joy packed into this week than all of my previous life. I could probably sit this one out and wouldn’t feel like I was missing anything.”

  “Nonsense,” Gertie said. “Caroling is awesome. Besides, most of the residents bring us baked goods, and some have eggnog…the whiskey-laced kind.”

  “Hmm.” I considered the new facts introduced. I didn’t exactly have a shortage of baked goods at my house, but the lure of sampling random baked goods and chasing them with whiskey-laced eggnog might be just enough to keep me from jogging back home.

  “Fortune!” Emmaline’s voice sounded behind me and I turned just in time for her to gather me into a hug and kiss my cheeks. Carter’s mother was a lovely woman whom everyone in Sinful adored, including me. Fortunately, she seemed to like me too, which made me extremely happy and made living in Sinful and dating Carter a lot easier than if she’d taken an immediate disliking to me.