Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4)

by T'Gracie Reese

  “I wish I may, I wish I might,

  Have the wish I wish tonight.”

  And so thinking, she pressed the green button for recall.

  She pressed the phone to her ear.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Bu…

  Click.

  “Narang here.”

  Even as the words embedded themselves in static, it dawned on her immediately that, having no idea whom she was calling, she also had no idea what to say.

  Hi. I don’t know you but I’m Nina and you don’t know me either. My whole name doesn’t really matter or who I am or where I’m from or are right now but you may be the one who killed Edgar, either that or the one who might have been able to keep him from getting killed. We don’t quite know which right now and we’re not even really sure he was killed but his lungs were all filled with sewage and his blood was all filled with alcohol and that really isn’t like him so could you help us?

  The static once again:

  “Narang here! Who’s calling?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Yes? Yes, who’s calling, please?”

  Did she want to give her name?

  No.

  So what could she say?

  “Do you have the wrong number? Who is this? Who is calling?”

  “I’m calling from Bay St. Lucy.”

  A pause.

  “From where?”

  “Bay St. Lucy. It’s in Mississippi.”

  “Yes. I know of it. But I don’t…”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I need to know, though: with whom am I speaking?”

  Yet another pause.

  She could feel the tension as something in the phone that was being held to her ear was whispering:

  He’s going to hang up now.

  But he did not.

  “This is Professor Daruka Narang.”

  A British accent, with perhaps a touch of New Delhi or Bombay thrown in.

  “And…and where are you located, Professor?”

  “Please tell me who this is? Are you soliciting? Because I do not do business…”

  “I’m not soliciting.”

  “All right, but I still don’t wish to…”

  “I’m a friend of Edgar Ramirez.”

  The name seemed to dispel the static.

  So that the following pause, though longer, emanated a kind of warmth.

  Impossible as that might have been.

  The voice at the other end, when it came back, was somehow softer.

  “Edgar?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  “Of course. Of course. He is one of our students.”

  Was, thought Nina.

  But she did not say that. Not yet. Although she knew that she would eventually have to.

  “Are you calling me on behalf of Edgar?”

  “Yes. In a way.”

  “I’m very sorry but I do not understand you.”

  “Are you Edgar’s teacher?”

  “Yes, yes…in the department of geological sciences.”

  “Located at…”

  “At the University of Louisiana, here in Lafayette.”

  All right.

  So that explained it.

  Edgar knew he had discovered immensely complex, but also immensely important, data.

  He might not be able to make sense of it himself.

  So he would ask for the help of his old professor.

  Who was now on the other end of the phone, asking:

  “I really must ask that you identify yourself.”

  Okay, here goes:

  “My name is Nina Bannister.”

  “And you are a friend of Edgar’s?”

  “I’m a friend of Edgar’s family.”

  “His family?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure you knew, but Edgar lived here in Bay St. Lucy.”

  “Lived?”

  “Professor Narang, I must tell you that Edgar Ramirez is dead.”

  Strange. She had never before in her life told someone that someone else was dead.

  It made her feel, also, as if she were dead.

  The phone was also dead—even if only for an instant or so—the park was dead the dogs that should have been running around in the park were dead, the Frisbee flying over a small stream was dead, and so was the stream and so were the stars and so was all the town…

  …for just that instant.

  Then:

  “Oh my God.”

  There is nothing one can say to ‘Oh my God.’

  So she simply waited.

  “How?”

  “I…we’re not sure.”

  “But…was it an accident, or…”

  “His body was found in a drainage canal.”

  “A what?”

  “A kind of runway for sewage.”

  “I cannot believe that I am hearing this.”

  “I know.”

  “But how…how could this have happened?”

  “No one in Bay St. Lucy is certain, Professor Narang.”

  “But…but Edgar was working on an oil drilling platform, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  “Then how…”

  “He had come home. Maybe to visit his family, we don’t know.”

  Pause.

  She continued:

  “But Professor Narang, the bottom line is this. Edgar may have found out that something was wrong on The Aquatica. That’s the rig he was working on.”

  “Wrong?”

  “I know, it sounds crazy. His brother says he was worried, even scared. He spent three hours the night before he was killed…”

  “Killed?”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You think someone killed him? Killed Edgar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But…”

  “But he spent three hours of his final night attempting to call you. I know that because I recovered his cell phone. That’s how I got your number.”

  Pause.

  She continued:

  “Professor, Edgar’s brother Hector and I went to the Aquatica this morning to get his things. We found in his room a disc drive that he had hidden. On this drive is a huge amount of data.”

  “What kind of data, Ms. Bannister?”

  ‘I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t looked at it?”

  “Yes. Only a short time ago, but it’s incomprehensible to me.”

  “And you haven’t shown it to anybody?”

  “No. I’m absolutely certain that he wanted you to see it. You and no one else.”

  “Ms. Bannister, please tell me clearly what you are trying to say.”

  “All right. I think Edgar, brilliant engineering student that he was, had found out something very wrong was happening aboard Aquatica. I think he recorded his findings on his computer, then transferred them to this disc that I now have. I think someone may have followed him from the Aquatica to Bay St. Lucy, killed him, and made it look like he had gotten drunk, fallen into the drainage canal, and drowned.”

  “My God.”

  There was that phrase again.

  Surely someone would come up with a reply to it.

  “All right. Then precisely what is it that you want me to do?”

  “I want you to look at what’s on the disc.”

  Static.

  More static.

  It was quite dark now, and several yellow stars had crowded their way into the cupola above her.

  “All right. I do not see how I can refuse.”

  “Can I somehow send you this data electronically?”

  “Ms. Bannister, this data. I assume that no one on the Aquatica knows you possess it?”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then I feel we should avoid sending private and confidential information flying through digital space. But if you have a disk and you wish to show it to me..”

  There was, she knew a flight from Bay St. Lucy tomorrow at t
wo PM.

  It was the regular commuter flight to New Orleans.

  From New Orleans there would certainly be flights to Lafayette.

  As for money, she had a bit in the account, left overs from her months as being a principal again.

  “I’ll come to you.”

  “All right. When can you be here?”

  “Tomorrow evening. I’ll take the commuter flight from New Orleans, and I’ll probably arrive about six or so. I’ll have to check the times. I’ll also have to get a motel room. But when I do, I’ll…”

  “No. No, the motel is not good. There is a young woman here in the department., a graduate student. She is…was… a friend of Edgar’s. I feel certain that she will wish to help in this matter. She has a small place near campus, I think. I can have her meet you at the airport here in Lafayette. I feel certain she would not mind for you to stay with her.”

  “All right. I’ll be there.”

  And thus it was determined.

  She was first going to take Edgar’s cell phone back to the Ramirez home and ask Hector to take care of it.

  Then she was going to Lafayette.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: ALLONS A LAFAYETTE!

  The flight from Bay St. Lucy arrived in New Orleans at two. There was a connection to Lafayette leaving at four fifteen. Shortly before six, the Delta jet touched down at the Lafayette Regional Airport.

  She took a small travelling bag from the overhead compartment, made her way up the aisle and out into air that was heavier, more ponderous and liquid-sweet than Bay St. Lucy—yes, she remembered now, what the swamplands here were like, remembered them from drives she and Frank had taken through the Cajun prairie.

  “Nina!”

  A striking young woman was striding across the tarmac, waving her arms.

  “Are you Nina Bannister?”

  She was a tall woman, five seven or five eight, and her flaming red hair washed about her shoulders as she walked.

  “I’m Nina!”

  “Annette Richoux! A student of Professor Narang. Like Edgar.”

  The woman was wearing dungarees and a short sleeve white shirt that showed the muscles in her lithe arms.

  Nina began making her way tentatively down the ramp.

  “Can I help you with your traveling bag?”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  “Any trouble with your connections?”

  “No. Everything went fine.”

  “You’re going to stay at my place while you’re in town. Hope that’s all right with you?”

  “Of course. I hate to put you out.”

  “No, it’s no bother. It’s just…is it true what the professor told me, about Edgar?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  They looked at each other for a time.

  Then they cried for a time.

  Then, shaking their heads, they walked together toward the parking lot, with Nina saying:

  “I don’t know if what I’m doing is right. About this disk.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Maybe the information on here is not…”

  “We’re not even going to talk about it, ma chere. It’s Friday night, gettin’ to be seven o’clock. And I might as well let you know right now—I’m a Cajun girl. Born and brought up not too far from here.”

  “If you want to go straight home, I’ll understand.”

  “Home nothing. We’re going dancing.”

  And they did.

  Within minutes, the two of them were winding their way through the streets of Lafayette, Annette Richoux laughing as she drove.

  “Naw, nobody can make head nor tail of me. I was born up in Eustace. My folks were ranchers. They’re gone now, God bless ‘em. I grew up as a tall drink-a-water nerd, always reading. Nothing to do with boys. Never did have anything to do with boys. I discovered men sometime in my early twenties and I haven’t looked back. I’m brilliant, by the way, but I don’t let anybody notice, at least not socially. No way to tell you how I got interested in geology, and then the oil part of it. I guess it has to do with the fact that I was always around drillers, growing up where I did.”

  Nina, settled back and told herself that this entire thing was absurd.

  She was here because of a murder..

  What was she doing going dancing?

  “It’s been a little while since I danced.”

  “How long?”

  “Forty-three years.”

  “That’s nothing. It’ll come right back to you.”

  They swerved onto a street called Johnston Avenue, which, Nina could not help noticing, had the traffic density and speed of an interstate highway and the engineering features of a ditch.

  They talked casually and perilously as sixty miles per hour in-city traffic shot beside them and around them like so many harmless multicolored lights, and they negotiated the nonsensical and directionless turns of downtown Lafayette.

  Finally, they pulled beneath a massive live oak tree that overhung the front porch of an establishment whose battered sign pronounced: “The Blue Gator.”

  “Annette! My favorite young genius student from the great university!”

  “Hello, Pierre!”

  A man as massive as the tree itself rolled out of the clapboard door and down a wooden walkway that was certainly destined to collapse at any time, allowing him to submerge on his own.

  “Nina, this is Pierre Boudin! He owns The Blue Gator!”

  “Hello, Pierre.”

  “And hello back to you, Miss Nina! You’all come right on in! Guests of honor at the Blue Alligator!”

  His face was a combination of ripe tomato and under-inflated basketball, and his eyes—mere slits now—had not existed for years as actual openings. But the vines that tangled and sprouted from the white shirt barely covering his chest certainly were organic in nature, and thicker, healthier, more deeply-rooted, than human hair could ever have been.

  “Abidas?”

  “Yeah, Amber for both of us. Red Stick Ramblers playing tonight?”

  He nodded:

  “You know it!”

  “The Red Stick Ramblers, Nina,” said Annette, “are the best Cajun band there is.”

  They followed the tree man up the walkway…which sunk appreciably but did not overflow…and, with Pierre standing behind and holding the door open for them, entered the Blue Gator.

  It was, observed Nina, a great deal like Pierre himself. Not so huge, nor bulky, but certainly tangled and completely untrustworthy. Immediately to their right was the bar, lined with bottles of Abida Beer. To their left was the dance floor. It was perhaps fifteen feet square, and completely bare now, save for one solitary jazz musician, a tall black soprano saxophonist, who poured forth mournful and delicate tunes that absolutely no one was listening to.

  Beyond, though…

  …she could see, peering through the garish yellow light, was a crumbling garden, vines overhanging bare rafters, tables scattered here and there, some with tablecloths, some bare and reflecting in their green metal tops the half moon that peered mockingly though the places in the roof that were not roof.

  “Nina,” said Annette, “maybe you can go back in the garden and find us some place to sit. I got this T shirt on, and these jeans. That’s nothing to go dancing in. I’m gonna change into something sexy; I’ll come and find you.”

  So saying, she turned and disappeared.

  Nina, left to her own devices, made her way back into a jungle of furniture and vine-tangles that seemed to keep opening out from itself, passing a bench here and there, and overhearing patches of conversation.

  “Non, c’est…c’est bien trop…”

  “Oui, je crois bien que…”

  French. English. Cajun. Creole…all of it seeping out of the woodwork from people defying characterization: yes, that was a university group; there were three people who seemed to have come from a nursing home; and there was a family, along with an infant in arms and a two yea
r old.

  Finally, she found a rickety table and sat down, overhearing a conversation beside her as two men discussed fishing.

  They were both talking at once, shaking their heads, agreeing, disagreeing, citing geographical features of southwest Louisiana, moving into and out of the feeding habits of the red bass, and culminating in a reminiscence of Earl Long.

  Pierre brought two bottles of beer. She began drinking one.

  Somehow the softness and gaiety of Lafayette began to wash over her.

  How many days ago was it that she had come upon Edgar’s body?

  Four? Five?

  It was all a haze.

  And then, the wake at Olivia Ramirez’ home; the strange encounter with Hector; the meeting with the oil executives; the bizarre helicopter ride to the equally bizarre carnival ride that was Aquatica; the inky waters of the coulee…

  …and now this.

  A different world.

  Everyone was smiling here.

  How long had it been since she had smiled?

  And while thinking these things, she let another idea play in her head.

  There would be any number of men here for her to dance with.

  She could not dance; but she would learn.

  There would probably be one man later in the evening.

  He would be a perfect gentleman.

  And she could, if she wished, go to bed with him.

  This evening, for that matter. This very evening. She was of an age, as was he, when, at an appropriate time on the dance floor or in the back seat of the car returning home, she could simply say matter of factly:

  “Let’s stay together tonight. I miss being with someone.”

  And he, though perhaps a bit shocked, would have too much gallantry and pride, if not desire (since Nina still could not believe she was actually a woman who could instill sexual desire in men)…to refuse.

  And tonight, for the first time in so many years, so many years…she could have sex.

  Frank would not be standing by the bed, shaking his head.

  She could have sex.

  But she would not.

  She had just begun to speculate concerning the reasons why not: this delightful sense of freedom in smaller things, the love of reading until whenever, (and of reading whatever without having to summarize it or explain it); the lessening of sexual desire (or was it there and simply being ignored?); and the simple and exquisite sense of self-reliance that, while probably illusory (because she did need love, did she not? And what about the ‘no woman is an island thing?)…was growing yearly more enjoyable…