Coq au Vin

by Charlotte Carter

  I found it, made the turn, and then halted in my tracks. The grimy street hulked before me like a living presence, a fearsome thing with hollow eyes and wings.

  Half the buildings on the street had been razed. Half of those remaining were in some stage of gentrifying refurbishment. Piled building bricks, wheelbarrows, and construction machinery cluttered the sidewalks.

  The women’s center was all boarded up. I stood on the pavement and waited, staring at the building. Was I expected to go in there? My heart froze in my chest. How was I going to get in? I looked around for the inevitable smelly type who would emerge from the shadows and take me around the back way. Who else would be inside? Homesteading junkies fixing by candlelight? Lady Martine in her stilettos, the ring leader of some murderous band of outsiders?

  Where did they have Andre? The thought of him gagged and locked in a closet or in a corner with his wrists and ankles bound made me tremble. And though I tried willing myself not to think of the worst—that they had killed him as soon as he hung up, as soon as I’d agreed to bring the money—I was losing the battle.

  What if they were watching me right now? Killing him right now?

  The press of all those gruesome possibilities was too much. I began to rush toward the building. But a word spoken softly and carried on the mild air stopped me.

  “Nan.”

  I whirled.

  Not another soul on the street. I looked around frantically. Up at the bricked-in windows. Even to the branches of a yellowing plane tree. Where had that voice come from?

  There was an old gray Volkswagen parked directly across from the center. I hadn’t even noticed it before. I walked toward it, slowly. And then I began to cry, making no noise, just weeping silently, happy, grateful: that was Andre sitting behind the wheel. He lifted one hand slightly and beckoned me to him.

  I ran to the driver’s side and tried to open the door.

  “Take it easy, Nan,” he said tonelessly. “Go around to the other side and get in.”

  For a moment I couldn’t move to obey him. I was too busy searching his face for bruises, checking his clothing for bloodstains. But then I saw him wince, and he repeated sharply, “Go around and get in, Nan.”

  I did it on the double.

  “Don’t turn around yet!” he barked when I had closed the door after me.

  It soon became plain what his wincing was all about. There was a gun less than half an inch from the nape of his neck.

  “I’m okay, Nan, just you be cool,” he said desperately, seeing me seeing the black muzzle.

  A “titter” came from the backseat then, no other word for it, really. Yeah, a titter—and the motherfucker was girlish as all get-out. Tinkling and merry, and perhaps tinged with madness.

  “Yeah, he’s okay,” said the laugher. “And you know what, girl? I want to thank you for letting me borrow this pretty man of yours for the day. We had a lot of fun.”

  Andre’s warnings be damned. I turned around and took a good look. A good hard look.

  A silence had fallen in the car. It went on and on and on. I was the one to break it.

  “Vivian,” I said, “I hate you.”

  CHAPTER 13

  You’ve Changed

  “I mean, Vivian, I hate what you’re doing. Whatever that is.”

  “I swear to Jesus,” she replied, “sometimes I barely know what I’m doing anymore.”

  “Here’s a suggestion,” I said acidly. “Get that gun away from Andre’s head. Are you out of your mind!”

  The thing was withdrawn and Andre let out an endless breath. I took his hand and held it for a long moment before turning back to my sweet old aunt, as Gigi had once called her.

  “I’m not sure you heard me, Viv. I just asked you if you were out of your mind.”

  Vivian sighed heavily, then, as if she’d just had a hit of B12, demanded breezily, “Where’s that money, Nanny Lou? Pretty man here tells me my ship’s come in. When I found out you were in Paris looking for me, I figured you’d brought some dough from home. But I never dreamed you were going to make me a rich bitch.”

  It was my turn to laugh gaily. “Just a minute here, Aunt Viv. Let me get something straight first, okay? You think you can frighten my mother half to death with your stupid telegrams, get me all the way over here, and then, like, hide from me—terrorize me—kidnap my fucking boyfriend and hold me up at gunpoint. Then you’re gonna call me Nanny Lou, right? Like when you used to bounce me on your knee. Do I have all that right, Aunt Viv?”

  “I’m something else, huh?” she said soberly.

  Vivian leaned forward a bit. There was gray in her hair now and her eyes were dull, the coppery skin over her thin face not so taut anymore. But she was still my wild auntie. Great bones, high forehead, wide and noble nose with that sexy bump between the nostrils. Still a package of nervous energy and sharp angles. My dad’s wayward sister. My baby-sitter and role model, whom I adored. Aunt Vivian. Armed kidnapper and holdup woman.

  I couldn’t take it in. “Why’d you do it? Why?”

  “That makes no difference now. I know I scared you shitless and I’m sorry I had to do it this way. But I want that money, Nan. You give me that money and then you and your young man get on a plane and go home, you understand me? Get out of Paris. This has nothing to do with you and you’re going to get burned bad if you stay here.”

  “Nothing to do with us?” Andre at last spoke up. “Lady, notice I’m not asking you if you’re crazy. I already know the answer to that. You’ve been threatening to blow my head off for several hours now, and you can sit there and say it has nothing to do with us?”

  She didn’t answer him, head turned away.

  “God damn!” he exploded. “I ought to come back there and snatch you—”

  I managed to shush him with a hand to his face.

  “Who was Ez?” I asked her point-blank.

  Snap of the head. Her voice broke as she asked, “What?”

  “Come on, Viv. You heard me. Who was Ez? The man who also called himself Little Rube Haskins. And what do you know about the way he died?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you all about that. I told you, that’s nothing to do with you!” She was gripping the back of my seat tightly as she spoke.

  “You heard what Andre just said, Vivian. If it didn’t have anything to do with us, we wouldn’t be sitting here looking down the barrel of a gun. So cut the shit, auntie. I want to know what’s going on here. I want some answers! Were you sleeping with that guy Haskins when you lived in Paris all those years ago? Did you set him up to be killed?” It frightened me to ask the next question, but I did it anyway: “Did you run him down yourself?”

  Her fingers tightened on the old upholstery.

  “Why did you run from your hotel and why did you make yourself so hard to find? Who told you I was looking for you?” I pressed.

  No answer, of course. Just an awful grimace and her knuckles going white.

  I began to scream out my questions then: “Did you know a pimp named Gigi who was murdered the other day? Don’t just sit there like a mummy, Vivian. You owe me some answers! And don’t give me any more of that stupid shit about getting burned, okay? We’re already burning.”

  “All right, Nan, that’s enough!” She returned my nasty tone at equal volume. “Stop playing the tough guy, because it isn’t going to work with me. There are much nastier guys than you after my ass. And they don’t just want to make me apologize for not dropping a line every once in a while. They’re trying to kill me.”

  “Who!?” Andre shouted before I got the chance to. “Who’s trying to kill you? Jesus Christ, woman, why don’t you just tell us what this is about?”

  Vivian flinched at his tone. And then she almost smiled. “All right. Listen up, the both of you. I’m going to tell you as much as you need to know, and hope it’s enough to convince you to get out of town.” She turned those now-sad brown eyes on me.

  “I had me a lot of men, Nan. A lot of friends and
a lot of coke and a lot to drink—but mainly a lot of men. This one particular one,” she said slowly, “your father used to call a cracker. To his face. He thought that was funny. But then, as you know, my brother never had much of a sense of humor.

  “I don’t know why, exactly, don’t ask me to explain it, but this one I loved. Jerry Brainard was his name. I don’t know if you remember him.”

  “Kind of,” I said. “We found his picture in your album.”

  She nodded. “You’re young, baby. Both of you are. You don’t know yet what it does to you when somebody you thought loved you, turns around and puts a knife in you. I don’t just mean leaving you. I don’t mean hitting you, or fucking around on you, or anything like that. I mean when you love them enough to give them your eyes, and then they actually put you in a position where—where you’re going to die. They could’ve saved you. They could’ve warned you. But it wasn’t convenient for them. You just don’t know what that kind of betrayal is like.”

  Oh, don’t I now? I wanted to say. You really should have dropped a line, auntie. I could have told you some story.

  I had to fight myself to keep from interrupting her, to tell her that, young or not, I’d had almost the identical experience with a man I thought I loved. But I couldn’t go into that now. I had to hear her ghost story now.

  “When we were living here in Paris, it was fabulous,” Vivian said, coming alive again, for just a second. “I was over here—speaking French, girl! I had this fine man who was crazy about me and a lot of other men in love with me and all the fun in the world and the party never stopped. Just like back at home. Just like everywhere in those days. Your aunt Viv could hang with the best of them and drink most men under the table. I was bad, baby, I was out there.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, the day came when the party did stop. Jerry screwed me royally. Took everything I had. But hey, those are the breaks, right? Somebody dogs you like that, it’s cold, yeah, but you can walk away from that in one piece.

  “No, that wasn’t the worst of it by a long shot. See, there was this other fella who was crazy about me, too. He loved me, Nan. This Negro loved me in a way I couldn’t begin to understand at the time. And I played him. I played him something shameless.”

  “You mean Ez. Rube Haskins.”

  “Yeah. Ez. A sweet little guy who was in way over his head and never knew shit from Shinola. I let him think I could have the same kind of feelings for him that he had for me. And I took him for a lot of money—everything he made from singing and all the front money this German company gave him to make this record. All to help Jerry. I’m not proud of it, Nan. I did a lot of stuff I never should have done—things you’d be ashamed to know about me—things that could have landed me in jail if I’d been caught—but I feel the worst about Little Rube.

  “Anyway, what goes around comes around, like they say. I fucked over Ez, and Jerry did the same to me. He made off with more than a hundred and fifty thousand. Except—before Jerry left Paris—before he dumped me—Ez was—”

  “He was run down by a car. Murdered,” I supplied.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Jerry killed him?”

  She nodded. “Right. That piece of shit killed him. Wasn’t enough that I had ripped him off and tore his heart out. Jerry had to kill him, the poor bastard. The cops looked into it, but they had no suspects. I figured it was only a matter of time before they’d hear something about the woman Ez had been keeping company with. They’d learn about me, come after me. What could I do? I felt horrible for the way it all came down. But it wasn’t me who did the killing, and I didn’t intend to get cracked for it. Sure, I was ashamed of myself, but I wanted to live. I left here on the run and never stopped running.”

  “Until you got to the next party,” Andre said brutally.

  Vivian shot him a bullet of a look. But she didn’t deny his words. “That was all a long time ago,” she continued. “I did what I had to do to survive. A lot of the stuff I did wasn’t very nice. Wasn’t the kind of news my family would appreciate hearing. But I never forgot Ez, I never forgot Jerry, and I never forgave.

  “I’m about played out now, Nan. Look at me. Do I look like I’m still a party girl? You think all the pretty men still want me? Think anybody wants to use my picture to try and sell nylons or a pack of cigarettes? I don’t think so.

  “But now I see my chance to get even with Jerry Brainard. To even the score—for me and for Ez. A couple of months ago I heard through some people I know that Jerry was living in Paris again. I decided to come over here and see him, see him one more time—and kill him. I’ve got to kill him, understand, because he’s still at it. Even after all this time he’s still trying to bury me.”

  And Daddy had once voiced the fear that “maybe” Vivian was “accepting money from men.” I had to laugh at the memory.

  My fabulous aunt Vivian. Next time I guess I should be a little more careful about choosing a role model.

  I shook my head. “You can’t do it, Viv,” I said sadly. “You can’t get even.”

  “Watch me,” she said, then corrected herself: “No, don’t watch me. That’s what I’m trying to tell you and this boy. Get out of here so you don’t have to watch me. So none of it touches you.”

  Too late for that.

  “What did you mean—that thing about burying you? You mean Brainard knows you’re in Paris and coming after him?”

  “Yeah, he knows all right. A piece of scum he sent after me almost killed me one night. If I hadn’t been carrying a can of Mace, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I spotted the same guy hanging around my hotel, waiting for a rematch. Oh yeah, Jerry knows I’m here all right.

  “Then, a couple of weeks ago he killed a woman. Or had her killed. A white girl who was working for him. And now the son of a bitch is trying to frame me for it. He’s been slowly, steadily turning the cops on to me. He left things I had in my suitcase at the hotel near that girl’s body—some old scarf of mine. It looks like the candlestick or whatever it was he used to bash in her skull was mine, too. I can’t remember half of what I had in that bag. He’s playing some kind of game with me, that old Satan. But he’s not going to win. I’m going to get him first, and after that—whatever happens, happens. If I make it out of town, fine. If I don’t, fine. But I don’t want you here. I don’t want you to have to deal with the fallout.”

  I went back to that morning when Andre and I sat on the hotel bed amid the breakfast dishes, reading about Mary Polk’s murder in the morning paper. I recalled the cold ripple that had gone up my back.

  Thank God, I had thought then, thank God it isn’t Viv lying dead in that alley. I had tossed the newspaper aside and never spoke of the story again. But that killing had worried me, even then. Maybe it was something as ethereal as that little square of fabric on the ground, the one that had indeed been Vivian’s Scout bandanna. I don’t know. But something had made me fear the murder was no out-of-the-blue occurrence, a tragedy unconnected to our lives. I felt somehow that it did have something to do with us—with Vivian and me. And that it was going to come back on us one day.

  “Back up a minute,” Andre was saying to Vivian, trying to sound soothing. I knew what he was going to ask her, ’cause I had the same question for her on the tip of my tongue. “What kind of work did the white woman do for him?”

  Vivian snorted. “Work? You work for Jerry and Jerry works you. He’s been into so many different scams and businesses. He moved dirty money for a while. Computer secrets. Drugs. I don’t know what that chick was doing for him. It could have been any one of a hundred things.”

  “What a sterling fellow you gave your heart to, Viv,” I commented. “Did you ever help him in any of his businesses when you were with him? Did he work you?”

  Her stiff posture and the way she bit off the words she was about to utter gave me my answer.

  My role model had done a bit of everything, it seemed. That pickpocket, whoever he was, t
he one who made the cryptic remark to Gigi about Viv being up to her old tricks? Guess he hadn’t lied either. I no longer wanted to know exactly what he meant by the remark. It didn’t matter anymore.

  What mattered was shutting my aunt down before she blew away this Satan of an ex-husband and spent what was left of her life in prison. Hell, after all my contortions to keep the authorities out of her business, I now realized she would be better off just telling the police that Brainard had killed Rube Haskins. If they reopened the case and could prove that, she’d have her revenge. If the law in France worked the same way it did in the States, there was no statute of limitations on murder. They could, theoretically, nab you a hundred years after the fact.

  Inspector Simard would help us, I was certain, advise us. Viv had done an awful thing beating Haskins out of his money, but he was in no position to bring charges against her for that. And most important, she had nothing to do with the murder.

  Now, how was I going to get her to see it that way?

  I had had a lot of men, too.

  I was going to be thirty in another year and a half. I had lived in Europe. Seen a bit of the world. I’d done my share of dumb things, and God knows I play fast and loose with the truth when it suits my purposes. But I tell myself that I still have a fairly good heart; at any rate, whatever there is in my heart, it ain’t larceny. I have a salty tongue sometimes, I’m told. But I’m not a cynic, either. Something beautiful, new, intriguing, sexy presents itself to me, my first instinct is to say yes rather than no.

  I had always thought Viv had a lot to do with me being that way. That my determination to be out there, as she put it, was due to her influence. Now I wasn’t so sure. I just knew she was family, she was in deep shit, and I had to help her.

  “I want my money, Nan.”

  “Okay,” I said, stalling. “Tell us where Jerry is now. Do you know where to find him?”

  “I know—now I do. But I’m not telling you. How stupid do you think I am, Nanette?”