Under the Cajun Moon

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “So what can I do for you, Chloe dear?” Conrad asked as he sat on an easy chair across from us. “As nice as it is to see you, I know you two didn’t come all this way just to sit and drink sweet tea with an old man.”

  Given that he’d been here at this camp for almost a week, I wasn’t sure how much Conrad knew about what had been going on—unless, of course, he had been the one behind it all and had just used this camp as a home base and alibi. Paradise was just fifteen miles away, a distance that he could cover by motorboat in less than an hour.

  I introduced the subject of my father, and from what I could tell from Conrad’s responses, he was aware of the shooting and also of Kevin’s death and my run-in with the law. He didn’t say anything about Sam, however, so we didn’t, either.

  Instead, I focused on the conversation I had had with Kevin the night he died. Though Conrad was surprised to learn that Travis and I now knew about the treasure, he actually seemed pleased to talk about it. I realized that in a way it must have been a relief to be able to discuss openly something that he had been forbidden to mention for many years.

  When he was finished telling us about his own experience regarding the treasure—how he had almost hoped Ledet’s wouldn’t turn a profit so quickly, just so he would end up owning a part of that treasure himself—I asked him specifically about the poem.

  “Your father was so proud of that,” Conrad said, a bemused expression on his face. “I think the whole idea struck his fancy because our little group was about as multicultural as Louisiana gets. That’s why he used gumbo as the overriding theme, because it comes from such a mix of cultures: okra from Africa, sausage from the Germans, filé from the Native Americans, and so on.”

  “Native Americans?” Travis asked, glancing at me. “In the poem, that would be the ‘traiture.’”

  “Yeah,” Conrad replied, explaining that when the French settlers first came here, the Choctaws had taught them to crush sassafras leaves to make filé, which is the perfect thickener for gumbo.

  “So who’s the Native American in the poem?” Travis asked Conrad, who seemed surprised by the question.

  “I’m sorry, kids,” he said, looking to each of us in turn, “but you know I can’t tell you that. In fact, I’ve already told you far too much.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Conrad would soon find out we weren’t taking no for an answer.

  I pulled a copy of the poem from my pocket and gave it to him. I wasn’t sure if I should tell him we were on the hunt for the killer or the treasure, so instead I simply said that my father had told me to follow the recipe if anything ever happened to him and that’s what I was doing.

  “I think we’ve figured out who most of these people are. We also know that each one was given an ingredient, and that the amount of those ingredients actually correlate to a point of latitude and longitude.”

  Conrad seemed impressed that we had figured it all out, but from the corner of my eye, I noticed Travis watching the man intently as he spoke, obviously still very suspicious.

  “So what is it that you want from me?” Conrad asked.

  “Decode this for us. Tell us what we haven’t been able to figure out on our own.”

  Conrad continued to seem disconcerted by our request. Handing the poem back to me, he said that he was flattered that we had come to him for help, but he wasn’t comfortable discussing this matter without getting an okay directly from Julian first.

  “Julian is in a coma,” Travis replied. “Someone shot him, probably because of the treasure. Chloe and I are just trying to figure out what’s really going on, who’s committing all these crimes, and where that treasure is.”

  “The way I hear it, Chloe is the one behind Kevin’s killing, and quite possibly Sam’s as well,” he said, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  At our look of surprise, Conrad nodded and said that yes he had just heard the news that Sam’s body had been found in his apartment, and that the scene of the crime had not been pretty.

  “Conrad, you’ve known me since I was born. You’ve known my father since you were both kids. Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me you think I could murder someone? Do you really think I could’ve hurt Sam in any way whatsoever?”

  Conrad and I locked eyes for a long moment, each studying the other for signs of rage or madness or whatever quality murderers must possess to do what they do. I didn’t think I could see that in him, and I could only hope he realized it wasn’t in me, either.

  Rising and stepping forward, Conrad reached over my head, and for a moment I was afraid he was grabbing some kind of weapon. Instead, he pulled down a plaque and handed it to me. It was small and rectangular, a brass plate mounted on a walnut backing, and engraved 16" Andouille.

  “I have to confess something, but you can never tell your father.”

  I nodded, and he continued.

  “Julian was so dramatic about this whole thing, you know, so Hardy Boys about the buried treasure and the intricate puzzle rhyme and all that. When he gave us each a sealed envelope with our individual ingredient inside, he was so solemn you would’ve thought he was handing over nuclear codes.”

  I smiled, as I could easily picture that side of my father, the side that took himself far too seriously.

  “Anyway, later, as a private joke, some of us took our precious ingredient and rather than hide it away in our safety deposit boxes as we had been instructed, we decided we would each find a way to discreetly post it on a wall. After all, Julian hung his right there in Ledet’s, so we figured we should be able to put ours up too. I got mine engraved. I figured with so many plaques on the wall, who would notice? Ruben actually framed and hung a photograph of his kids on the beach, and if you looked closely enough at the photo, you could see that he had written in the sand at their feet the number twenty-nine and placed next to that a shrimp. Twenty-nine shrimp, get it?”

  “So Ruben is the hoghead in the poem,” Travis said.

  “What is a hoghead, exactly?” I added.

  “That’s slang for a mud engineer on an oil rig. Ruben’s first job out of law school was for a firm that represented the oil companies. He spent so much time learning about the science of drilling for oil that we teased him that he was becoming a hoghead. The nickname just stuck. ’Course, years later, once he and I had our own practice, all that knowledge came in handy. He represented some of the plaintiffs in the Lake Piegneur disaster.”

  “Wow,” Travis said.

  I wasn’t sure what the Lake Piegneur disaster was, but it didn’t sound relevant to our quest. I just wanted to keep things moving. I gave the plaque back to Conrad. He chuckled softly as he looked at it.

  “It seems silly and childish now, but Julian can be such a difficult person that sometimes we just needed to strike back, even if he wasn’t aware of our private rebellion.”

  Travis and I looked at each other.

  “Do you think that might be what this rash of crime is all about?” Travis asked. “Someone who’s had enough and is trying to strike back at Julian in a big way?”

  Conrad considered the question for a long moment.

  “No, I don’t think so. As tough as Julian is, and as frustrating as he can be at times, he’s very loved. His friends are loyal to a fault. It’s hard to explain, but people are just drawn to him. He’s funny and fun and the life of the party, of course, but it’s way more than that. There’s something so dynamic about how he moves through life, noisy and stubborn and energetic, and bringing all of his friends along with him. He’s very loved, actually. Except for his rift with your grandfather, Travis, I can’t think of a single person in Julian’s circle of friends who would wish him harm.”

  As I listened to Conrad’s description of my father, I realized that it answered a long-standing question for me. Deep in my heart, I had always wondered why he was so popular, why anyone would choose to befriend Julian Ledet. Given his legendary temper tantrums, I couldn’t fathom why so many people voluntarily subjected the
mselves to that, over and over. Hearing Conrad speak of my dad with such fondness, I felt I could finally understand.

  “So, again, the verse about filé that represents a Native American. Who is it?”

  Surrendering to our persistence, Conrad told us that that was Ben Runner, an old friend of Alphonse’s who just happened to be a Chitimacha Indian. As soon as we heard that, Travis and I both looked at each other, as the words “Ben” and “Ben’s daughter” had been part of the phone message my father had left after he was shot.

  “Ask a Chitimacha when his forefathers first settled in this region, and he will tell you that they have always been here. Isn’t that what the poem says, ‘For he who has always been there’? That’s Ben.” Conrad went on to say that Ben was a quiet man but nice, and very intelligent. He had grown up poor, but as a young man his dream had been to go to college.

  “When they had those four little statues melted down so your father could get to Europe, Chloe, and your grandfather could build a house, Travis, the two men decided to share the wealth and give their friend Ben a small scholarship as well. They had me ‘anonymously’ present him with a thousand dollars, but of course he eventually figured out where it had come from. Ten years later, when it came time to return the favor, Ben was a successful pharmacist back in Charenton and eager to help his friend and benefactor Julian get Ledet’s off the ground.”

  “Does he still live there now, in Charenton?” Travis asked.

  “Far as I know.”

  “Do you know what his number was, the amount of filé for the recipe?” I asked.

  Conrad shook his head.

  “Sorry, I don’t, and he wasn’t in on the whole private joke thing, so it wouldn’t be posted on his wall anywhere.”

  “How about the others? Do you know their numbers?” I asked, glancing at the window and wondering how much daylight we had left. If Conrad could save us some steps, that would be incredible.

  “Well, your dad’s is right there in the poem. Four and five, though I guess you’re supposed to put that together and make it forty-five.”

  Travis and I glanced at each other, feeling dumb that we hadn’t figured that one out ourselves.

  “I don’t know Alphonse’s number, and he wasn’t in on our private joke. That was just Ruben and Sam and me.”

  “Sam?” I asked, setting my full glass down on a coaster. “I practically lived in that apartment. I don’t remember anything hanging on the wall that had to do with okra.”

  “I can’t remember his number, but it was in the kitchen, on a pot holder or a towel or something like that. He had had it embroidered. He said Eugenie thought it was an odd thing, but the color was nice so she let him keep it where he had put it, hanging from a hook near the stove.”

  “The pot holder!” In a flash, my mind went to Tuesday night, and suddenly I was standing in that kitchen again, looking at my dead friend, Sam, with Travis’ arms wrapped tightly around me. On the floor near Sam’s feet had been a blue piece of gingham with a tuft of white cotton batting still attached.

  I told the two men I needed some air, and without waiting for their reply I stood and raced through the door and to the end of the dock, trying to catch my breath there.

  Conrad and Travis seemed to sense that I needed a moment to myself because they didn’t rush out after me. I was glad. There, beside the silent, gently flowing water, I practiced my deep breathing until my pulse rate finally returned to normal.

  Eighteen. Sam’s blue gingham pot holder had been embroidered with the words “18 stalks okra.” I could still see it, as vividly as if I were a teenager again, working in the kitchen with Eugenie, using the pot holder to pull a tray of cookies from the oven. It had made no sense to me then, but it sure did now.

  When we saw Sam on Tuesday night, that pot holder had obviously been torn up and disposed of somehow, though one telltale piece had remained. More than anything, I now knew for certain that the killer was also on the trail of the treasure. Sam must have tried to hide the pot holder from whoever had gone to his apartment and demanded to know his share of the recipe.

  When Travis and Conrad finally came outside, I explained all of that to Conrad and told him to be careful, that he might be in danger too. He didn’t seem too disturbed by that possibility, which led me back around to wondering if he was involved or knew who the killer was.

  As if reading my mind, Conrad suddenly blurted out that he believed that I hadn’t killed Kevin Peralta after all.

  “You didn’t seem so sure earlier. What changed your mind?”

  He smiled.

  “Your tea in there. I’ve never seen two people take so many sips of tea and yet consume not a single drop from the glass. My guess is you were afraid I was going to drug you. If you think I’m the killer, then that tells me you’re not the killer.”

  We all laughed, but I didn’t say the next thought that popped into my mind, which was why would he even have noticed something like that unless he was watching us drink and waiting for the drug to kick in?

  With my mind swirling with questions and answers and all we had learned here, Travis and I said our goodbyes and climbed into the boat. I wasn’t sure where we would go from here, but I had a feeling our next stop would be Charenton, to visit Ben Runner, the Chitimacha Indian.

  “You know, Chloe, I always felt so sorry for you when you were small,” Conrad said as he helped us with the ropes. “Between your father’s ego and your mother’s reinvention of herself, you didn’t have much of a life. I have to say you turned out amazingly well, given the circumstances.”

  I was surprised by his words but also oddly vindicated.

  “I had a pretty rough childhood myself,” Conrad continued. “If your father hadn’t rescued me from the bullies in the Quarter, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me.”

  I thought of Conrad’s verse in the poem, the line that said he “learned to fight back in old Orleans” and asked him what it meant.

  “I was a rich little nerd from the Garden District, but my parents were having some issues, so when I was about eight years old I went to live with my grandmother in the French Quarter. I did not fit in there, and it didn’t help that I went by the name of Connie back then, fodder for being called a girl. I was tormented until the day Julian and Sam saw what was going on and stood up for me. The two of them sort of ruled the block, you know, so after that, I was left alone. I was so grateful that I kept hanging around them, and eventually we became good friends.”

  Travis turned on the engine, but it was making an odd sound, so he turned it back off again.

  “Sorry, this’ll just take a second,” he said, moving to the back of the boat to fiddle with the motor. “It’s been doing this for a while.”

  As we waited for Travis to make the necessary adjustments, I looked up at Conrad as his earlier words popped back to mind.

  “So, what did you mean when you referred to my mother’s ‘reinvention of herself’? Reinvented how?”

  An almost sheepish expression came over his face.

  “You know,” Conrad said, reaching for the fishing pole he had set down earlier. “Her days on Bourbon Street and all of that?”

  Dumbfounded, I simply nodded and said, “Uh-huh?”

  “I saw the toll it took on you, Chloe, the way she went overboard always making sure you did everything so perfectly and followed all the rules. But really, I’ve never seen such a transformation in anyone as I did when that woman came back from finishing school. Your father was right to send her there once they were married, given the lifestyle to which they both aspired.”

  “Finishing school,” I echoed. I knew she had gone to a finishing school at some point in her life, but I had always thought it was when she was a teenager.

  “Yes, so she could step in as hostess when the restaurant opened.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “It was amazing. We were all floored when she came back. I mean, gone was the crass, bleached blonde exotic dancer who wen
t by the stage name of Fifi LaFlame, and in her place was this other woman, the elegant, classy Lola Ledet. Your dad knew all along that Lola had it in her. She just needed a little polishing around the edges.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  FRANCE, 1719

  JACQUES

  No question, this was one message Jacques would have to deliver in person. After all he had seen and heard today, he knew Papa’s little violation of confidentiality was the least of the issues to be dealt with, one of no real consequence. Greater by far was the swindle perpetrated by M. Law, a man who had just made a very public promise to two hundred citizens of France, a promise he had no intention of fulfilling. As if in one brilliant flash, Jacques understood everything now, how this whole event was supposed to have gone today.

  If M. Freneau had brought back the trunk he was supposed to have brought, the statuettes up on the stage would have been the gilded ones. Law’s ploy was to promise solid gold fleur-de-lis to the crowd but in reality give them only gilded fleur-de-lis instead. Thus duped, the people would have seen the trunk carted off to the ship and loaded in the cargo hold in full view, and everyone involved would have thought that the promised treasure was real. Given that this deception would not be discovered for three years, Law must have thought he would deal with the repercussions later, when the offended parties were too far away and too poor to have any legal recourse.

  If that were the case, why bother with having the real ones made at all? If the real ones were never meant to see the light of day upon this stage or be carried off to the New World, what was their point?

  Jacques began working his way through the murmuring, shifting crowd as he thought about that. Why had Law bothered with making the real set at all? Jacques could think of several reasons.

  To start rumors and get people talking, which would help draw a crowd.

  To trick the royal goldsmith himself into testifying to their validity. After all, he made them. Of course he thought they were valid.