by Julie Smith
“You could work Saturday?” Adele sounded as if she’d won a door prize.
“Yes. Ma’am, I could. I’ve got some bills and…you know how it is. I’d be glad to.”
“Done deal.” Adele leaned back in her chair, looking as satisfied as if salad was enough lunch. “Royce, she’s yours.”
“Come on then, Eddie,” he said. “See if you can make me laugh—I could use it.”
“Hang on a minute. I’ve got to go apply my blackface.”
He did laugh. “You are way too sharp to be a maid.”
This was getting dangerous. On the other hand, she and Royce were developing rapport, and she needed allies. She decided to keep up the routine.
“Very good, sir. I’ll fetch my stupid-hat, sir. By the way, what about if I follow you in my car? So you don’t have to bring me back.”
“Great idea. But from the looks of the place, don’t plan on coming back any time today.”
“Royce.” Adele spoke firmly. “You can have her for two hours. Two hours only.”
Talba followed Royce out Highway 90, aka the colorfully named Chef Menteur Highway. It was commonly thought to have been named after an actual chef, but Talba, struck that the literal translation was “chief liar,” had looked it up. One explanation was that the Choctaws had once had a mendacious leader who’d been exiled there, another that they’d disliked an early governor, whom they’d nicknamed “lying chief.” A third held that it was named after Chef Menteur Pass, the tidal estuary connecting Lake Borgne with the Mississippi Sound, which had treacherous—or “lying”—currents.
Talba was going with the governor.
The Chef Highway cut through New Orleans East, which she’d visited a few times—a very few—usually on shopping expeditions and once on a case, but it wasn’t an area she knew, any more than she’d know the West Bank if Darryl hadn’t lived there. It was odd, she thought, how many New Orleanians, black and white alike, seldom ventured beyond their own neighborhoods. She’d once met a waitress in the French Quarter who’d lived in the suburb of Kenner her whole life, yet never been to the Quarter before she took the job.
But there was a Home Depot in New Orleans East, and a Wal-Mart, so Talba’d been there. She knew there was a Vietnamese neighborhood somewhere in the East, but she’d certainly never seen that.
Today, she did, though. Royce continued on the Chef until businesses began to appear with signage in Asian characters, and still he kept driving. Finally, they passed something she’d seen on the map—a large wooded area called the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge—and a little ways past that was a sign that said VENETIAN ISLES. It was a subdivision bounded on its other end—north or east, Talba wasn’t sure—by a body of water clearly marked CHEF MENTEUR PASS.
There were several marinas on the right side of the highway, where there was open water—Lake Borgne, if she remembered correctly. Venetian Isles lay on the left. It seemed to be on a peninsula between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain, which were connected by the pass. The map had indicated that if you crossed the bridge over the pass, you got to a little community on a smaller body of water called Lake St. Catherine. On the other side of this lake, another pass, The Rigolets, flowed from Lake Pontchartrain into Lake Borgne, and also, by taking a small jog, into Lake St. Catherine. If you kept going, you got to Slidell and eventually to the Gulf Coast. All new territory to Talba—she wondered if Eddie and Audrey came this way when they went to the coast for their famous weekends.
Exploring that area was for another day, however. Today, Royce turned up a street in the Venetian Isles neighborhood and came out on a canal where the marina was nestled. It seemed to consist of a small office, a big refrigerator, a few berths for boats, some conveyor setups, and a longish dock that ran the length of the property. There were a lot of baskets lying around that looked like ordinary bushel baskets, except that they were made out of wire. There were also some plastic ones, more or less strewn about, along with enormous plastic bins. The place wasn’t much to look at, and there was absolutely nothing going on.
But another truck was parked there, and a man came out of the little office as Talba got out of her car. “Good,” Royce said. “Brad’s here.”
“Hey, buddy,” he called, and gave a large wave.
Brad waved back and as they drew nearer, Talba saw that he was a slim, well-built young man about Royce’s age, with a shaved head. There was something about his face that Talba didn’t quite like, but couldn’t put her finger on. A slightly calculating look, maybe. He wore an old Saints T-shirt, a pair of cutoffs, an earring, and some kind of abstract tattoo on his right arm.
“Sandra, Brad Leitner. Hey, buddy, this is Sandra, but you can call her Eddie. She’s on cleanup duty.”
“Why Eddie?”
“She’s a laugh riot—regular little Eddie Murphy.”
“Hey, Eddie. Say something funny. We could use a laugh.”
“Man walks into a bar—”
Leitner was already shaking his head.
“Okay. There’s a priest, a rabbi, and a minister—”
Leitner looked beseechingly at Royce. “This is seriously not working for me.”
“You want good jokes,” Talba said, “my hourly rate’s fifty bucks.”
“Think I’ll pass. Place smells like a garbage dump. You’re just in time.” He went back into the office.
He was right. The place was filthy, and stank. Stank badly. The dock was littered with—among other things—decaying shrimp heads and even whole shrimp. Very dead ones. She could see why the neighbors were upset.
“Ever been here?” Royce said. “Whole place is on canals. Almost every house has a water view. A lot have docks.”
The neighborhood must be a find for house hunters. It seemed very modest—the figures she’d found put the average mortgage somewhere in the $800 range, though surely that had changed—and yet it still seemed to offer that nearly untouchable amenity: affordable water views. The American dream for a song. Yet she could see the neighborhood was changing. Many of the houses looked as if they’d been built between the ’50s and ’70s, but they were dwarfed by new ones that she bet hadn’t been included in those five-year-old figures. It looked as if some of the older dwellings had been torn down to build the monsters, a sure sign of gentrification.
So, of course the neighbors were mad. Not only had they bought a little chunk of paradise, it was a crowded paradise. The last thing they wanted was commercial activity in their haven.
“What goes on here, exactly?” Talba asked. “I mean, I don’t see any action. Shouldn’t there be boats here, unloading shrimp or something?”
“This is the slow season. But I’ll show you how we do it. See, the boats dock right here, and we unload with a thing like a large vacuum cleaner that goes down into the hold—you know what the hold is?”
“Not exactly.”
“It’s like a big bin, or bins, where the boats keep the shrimp, packed with layers of ice. The shrimp goes into our bins, here”—he indicated deep plastic vats on the dock—“and then we put it on the conveyor, where it’s separated from the water and ice, so we don’t have to pay for that too—see, it’s done by weight. Then it goes into those wire baskets, which hold a hundred pounds each. Used to go into the plastic ones—those are called champagnes, nothing to do with our family. They hold seventy pounds, and they were used when shrimp was sold by the barrel. But now it’s by the pound. We weigh it and put it back in our own bins, once again packed with layers of ice. They can hold seven hundred pounds. Then the bins go in the refrigerator, and from there the shrimp’s sold. All there is to it.”
Talba couldn’t really see what there was to learning the business, but she supposed it had to do with how large the shrimp were, and what the going rate was. She nodded as if she got it.
“Stack the bins and the baskets, and hose everything down, will you? That’s a fire hose, by the way—use both hands. Don’t worry about the trash—just throw it in the water.�
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“In the water?” Talba couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That meant more or less in people’s front yards. “No, we better haul it. Got some plastic bags?”
“Don’t worry about it. Catfish’ll eat the shrimp heads. It’s all organic; natural recycling.”
“What about the other stuff?” Styrofoam cups, papers, assorted other detritus.
Brad shrugged. “Who’s gonna haul it? You or me?”
Talba sighed. “Ideal situation, you.”
“Well, listen up, Eddie. You want to be environmentally correct, you do it; just don’t expect any help from me.”
Of course he didn’t have plastic bags, but he did steer her to a market across the highway. On her way to get bags, she took the opportunity to explore the neighborhood, which wasn’t easy, considering that nearly every street ended in a cul-de-sac. The place had been carefully constructed so that almost every house was on the water. How it got its name was clear—the canals. The streets had names like Genoa, San Marco, and Murano. It was a kind of Disney Venice, without reproduction Italian palaces. Instead, the new homes—though semipalatial—came in any style you could name.
Some were Southern, with columns, some were Caribbean, some looked like Spanish or Moroccan villas. A couple sported Grecian statues, an unfortunate few were a postmodern mess, and one or two even looked vaguely Italian. Most of the newest ones seemed to be at the end opposite the pass, and Talba began to see that if you lived at this end, the development looked very new and shiny indeed.
Oddly—at least to her—the streets were clogged with cars. Maybe people used the money they saved on housing to buy cars to get them back to civilization. And at least three of the vehicles were Orleans Parish district cars. It must be a popular haven for cops. Fits, she thought. Cops never live in high-crime neighborhoods.
When she’d had a decent spin, she drove back to the marina and started filling a bag with crustacean corpses and coffee cups. While she was doing it, she listened. And watched.
Royce sat in his little office drinking coffee and flapping his jaw at his buddy, but doing very little else so far as she could see, until a man drove up and went in—a dark white man, maybe a Cajun. They talked awhile, but Talba couldn’t hear much until Royce gave him a tour. She was still bagging garbage, and black women bagging garbage, it turned out, were as invisible as rumor had it. “Nice little operation ya got,” the man said. “I want ya to know how much me and my buddies appreciate what ya doin’ for us. Seem like nobody wants to buy the real stuff no more.”
That word “stuff” caught her attention, but it turned out the man was talking about shrimp. “Hell, we believe in y’all,” Royce said. “Louisiana wild-caught shrimp’s the best in the world.”
“That what they callin’ it now?”
“Branding, Tom. It’s called branding. Only way to compete.”
“Well, I leave that to you marketing geniuses. All I know, Mr. Brad and Judge Buddy take damn good care of us. What few of us we got left.”
“Hey, Tom, we don’t want to see shrimping die out in this state any more than you do. How much product you figure you can supply us with?”
“Oh, couple thousand pounds every three days or so. We stay out about that long. Maybe more, we get lucky.” Royce nodded and shook. “Done deal. We can use ’em.” He waved good-bye to Tom and got on his cell phone, looking out over the water, acting as if he were on vacation.
“Hey, Randy, this is Royce Champagne—you know, from Jesse Partee’s? Well, I’m not working for Jesse any more. Yeah. Yeah, I’m over at my daddy’s place.”
Talba was on the hosing part now, and it was harder to hear, but a phrase came through now and then. “We can afford it ’cause we’re doing a volume business. Lots of Jesse’s customers are coming over to us—that’s the reason I left.”
And then, “Oh, come on, Randy, you don’t want to do that. Nice place like yours, you don’t want to serve that inferior chink stuff.” He listened a few minutes. “Well, I’m telling you you can’t afford not to.” Pause. “No, that’s not a threat. I’m talking quality here.”
It went on like that for a while, but it didn’t sound to Talba as if he’d made a deal.
Royce hung up, swore, and tried again, pacing up and down the dock, staring at pelicans and gulls, acting like he thought he was important. And striking out, Talba was pretty sure.
His voice was getting louder and louder; nastier and nastier. Some salesman. And then suddenly, it sounded like he was talking to a woman. “Hey, there, darlin’, what are you doin’ here? You’re way too cute to be hangin’ around a place like this.”
Oh, right, whoever she was, she was definitely going to go for that. Talba glanced his way, just to get an idea of what Royce’s idea of cute was, but she didn’t see anybody. He was down on his knees.
“Come on now. Come on, don’t run away. Hey, Eddie, head him off!”
Him? Talba thought, and something jumped off the dock and disappeared in the bushes.
“Damn! He’ll starve to death. You see him? Looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week.”
“Did I see what?”
“Little calico kitten. Cutest thing you ever saw—tiny black nose in a snow white face. Wonder where his mother is?”
This was a side of Royce she hadn’t suspected.
“I’m gonna leave some shrimp out for him. Anybody’s got enough, it’s us.”
She left to find a place to dump the trash, then spent two more hours downstairs at the Champagne house, trying to make it presentable for a party. She wasn’t doing too badly as a maid, she thought on the way home, but detecting was another matter—she was no closer than ever to finding any evidence connecting Buddy to Angie’s drugs.
That night Miz Clara taught her how to make shrimp étoufée. Talba figured that was appropriate.
And something good happened the next day. Judge Champagne didn’t go to work—simply played truant, to all appearances. Stayed in his office and talked on the phone. She couldn’t wait to get home and listen to her tapes. Adele was out doing errands again, Kristin and Royce were working, and Suzanne had a yoga class followed by a massage.
It was a good day to impress Buddy with her étoufée, and she didn’t even have to make it—she’d brought in the sample batch she’d made with Miz Clara, after first saving some for their dinner Friday. But she did make bread pudding for dessert, one of her own specialties.
Before lunch, though, she had to get Adele’s and Lucy’s rooms in shape. She’d been slowly working on Adele’s, but she’d barely been in Lucy’s except to make the bed. She might as well try to sort out some of the clothes strewn all over the floor. Most of them went into the hamper in the bathroom, but there were a couple of jackets that needed hanging up.
On a shelf in the closet, she noticed a box marked with a skull and crossbones and a simple, enticing legend: lucy’s. keep out. Maybe there was a diary in it. For all she knew, Lucy’d overheard a conversation she shouldn’t have, and written about it.
She took down the box.
Indeed, there was a journal in it, the first entry marked, “Love Spell.” Followed by, “Spell to Bind Suzanne.” And other spells. She closed the book, and found another in the box, this one printed. It was titled, A Teen’s Guide to Witchcraft. There was also a miniature cauldron, a stemmed glass, an ordinary stick, candles, incense, shells, and feathers. The guide outlined the tools a teenage witch would need, enabling Talba to identify the stick as a wand and the glass as a chalice stand-in. Talba knew enough about neopaganism to realize the apparatus was harmless. Lucy certainly wasn’t a practicing Satanist, but this wasn’t the sort of thing that usually went over in Catholic families. She’d known the kid was a rebel.
And when she thought about it, if there was a diary, it would probably be in Lucy’s computer. This was Talba’s specialty—she had a great program that could get a simple password in about fifteen seconds, but she’d have to do without it today. No problem, though—she also
had a knack for passwords, and Lucy’s was bound to have something to do with the stuff she’d just found. She tried out a few—“girlwitch,” “witch-girl.” “abracadabra”—with no success, and finally got out the witch book again, looking for likely buzzwords and finally happening upon “magick,” which worked. As simple as that. The kid believed in magic. She went to Lucy’s “favorites” file and clicked on “blog.”
There it was: she had one. No juicy stuff there, but to Talba’s surprise, Lucy wrote poetry. Pretty good stuff, too. And she, Talba, was one of the best-known poets in the city. Now here was a hook.
She logged off and went to fix lunch.
She set the table for four, just in case, but Suzanne and Buddy were the only ones who showed up. Suzanne sat across the table from him, in a tight tank top, though it was February. “Lookin’ good, honey,” Buddy said. “But aren’t ya cold in that?”
“Oh, no, I’m warm-blooded.”
The judge laughed. “Now, that I can believe.”
Uh-oh, Talba thought, and sure enough, when she brought in the dessert, an uneasy silence had descended. “I don’t think I’ll have any,” Suzanne said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.” She looked pointedly at her father-in-law. Then she stood, tossed her napkin on the table, and left the room.
“You gon’ pull a Royce on me?” Buddy called after her. “Come on back, I was just kiddin’ around.”
She didn’t come back.
“On the rag,” Buddy said, and winked at Talba.
Uh-huh, she thought. Buddy, you are a bad, bad man. He wasn’t close enough to have groped Suzanne (unless he’d tried to play footsie), but he’d sure as hell said something that freaked her out.
“Now, this is what I call lunch. And very nicely served, if I may say so.”
“Thank you, sir,” Talba said demurely. “Will you be in this afternoon? I thought I’d give your bedroom a good going-over.”
