The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  It was obvious that Andrew Jackson Mullavey wasn’t overly concerned about bearing the taint of a black-sheep brother. Her favorite quote accompanied a photo shot on courthouse steps prior to a grand jury hearing. Some reporter asking if Mullavey feared aspersion would be cast upon his own philanthropic image by these continued allegations of Nathan’s mob activity. Mullavey bluntly answering, “No, that doesn’t concern me in the least. I love my brother dearly, and family comes first.” And then the kicker: “Blood is thicker than indictments.”

  Disappointingly virtuous though they were, the articles still allowed them to cobble together more of a background picture of the man, bits and pieces. Some quick math, working from a reported age and an upper-page dateline, put Andrew and his brother at now fifty-one. Mullavey Foods, Inc., had been founded in 1937 by their father, James Mullavey, and fortune had been swift in coming. A. J. had gone to business school in Atlanta, then had joined the growing family empire in 1961, starting out in middle management and rising steadily from there. Married in 1964 to the former Evelyn Vickerson, of the Baton Rouge Vickersons. A daughter, then a son, were not long in following. James Mullavey stepped down as CEO of the corporation in 1971, remained on the board of directors for half a decade while confined to a wheelchair, though still a potent force, like some venerated yet feared old turkey buzzard. Dying in 1976, at which time both full control and his status as principal shareholder passed along to Andrew…

  Who wasted little time in imprinting his own identity on the corporation. By reading between diplomatically phrased lines such as The elder Mullavey’s reputation as frugal had become a city legend, April and Justin got the idea that the man had been a notoriously hardassed skinflint with no use for notions of charity or benevolence. Apparently Andrew Jackson Mullavey took it upon himself to atone for his father’s sins. The list of accumulated kudos from charity organizations could have filled pages. The Salvation Army. Churches of all denominations. Habitat for Humanity. The Special Olympics. He chaired the local 1984 United Way campaign. As homelessness became an increasingly prominent concern throughout the 1980s, he was right there to spearhead the opening of more shelters. He was the main backer behind DreamWish, dedicated to fulfilling the dying requests of terminally ill children. He had served on the boards of the Chamber Of Commerce, various colleges and hospitals, something called the Partnership for Civic Progress, other organizations. According to the most recent article sent, Mullavey was due to receive honors as Man Of The Year next month, in mid-December, at the annual banquet of an organization titled the CEO Alliance For A Brighter Tomorrow.

  Justin threw his hands aloft, such dazed heartbreak in his eyes that April wanted to get up and hold him.

  “This is disgusting,” he said. “This guy’s one of the biggest shams there is. When we were skeet-shooting at his place? He alluded to hunting runaway slaves, and he was just about ready to drool.” Justin shook his head in exasperation. “I go up there with those disks, you know what I’m going to look like? Like I’m holding a gun to the head of the Easter Bunny.”

  “Surely somebody there sees through him,” April said. “You can’t be in as many places as he’s been without walking all over somebody.”

  He shrugged, grunted, confidence at low ebb and frustration at high tide. “I’ve got a feeling this is more his speed, just nobody wants to believe it.”

  He held up another of the most recent articles, about the slaying of one of Mullavey Foods’ vice presidents, right in the parking garage. Justin had said he’d met the fellow.

  “I guess he wanted to save severance pay.”

  Chapter 18

  Family Ties

  Wednesday afternoon, by the time Andrew Jackson Mullavey took a late lunch at Charbonneau’s, the November sky had opened like a fresh wound and dumped more than an inch of rain upon the city in barely an hour. Warm day for late autumn, and the French Quarter felt as steamy as a soup cauldron. His new chauffeur hadn’t quite gotten the hang of routine yet. Sauntered on back after stopping the limo, got the door, and just stood smiling in vacant pride while Mullavey glared. Five seconds, ten, and the kid was soaked to the underwear before Mullavey asked if maybe he’d want to go back up front for the umbrella.

  He joined Nathan in his private nook overlooking the main dining room. Three guards down below, nearby, just having coffee and looking vaguely out of place. Their meal was ready as soon as they sat. Slices of a veal Brucholoni in red gravy, wine pasta on the side, spinach bread. Mullavey tucked a linen napkin into his collar and dug in with a listless appetite.

  “Keep picking at your food that way,” Nathan said, “and I warn you, you’ll insult me.”

  Mullavey looked dryly across the table. “And wouldn’t that bring the world to an end.” The red wine tasted sour in his mouth, heavy in the belly. He was percolating down there, had been for a week. “I’m not well, Nathan. I’m not a well man at all, and I haven’t heard a thing from you to alleviate my condition.”

  Nathan plucked a bite from his fork, chewed with pensive creases in his forehead. “You like the Brucholoni better with the veal, or beef?”

  “Beef. Ever since—”

  “Beef?” Nathan looked clearly surprised. Shook his head, here sits a swamp cracker beside me. “To each his own.”

  “Goddamn it, Nathan, ever since last Wednesday night I’ve been waiting to hear some good news from somebody, and you understand me right now: I do not take to disappointment like this.” He grabbed the napkin from an unused place setting at his left, used it to swab his forehead. “Napoleon Trintignant cannot just have disappeared. He doesn’t know anyone outside of Twin Oaks. We got the car back the very next morning, so we know he’s likely as not been on foot ever since. He’d’ve only had whatever pocket money he was carrying. So you tell me: Where in hell did that boy go?”

  They’d thought it wise not to involve the police in the search. While they had friends in the department, prudent judgment said not to send police after a witness to a murder they had sanctioned. The limo had gone unreported as missing. When Mullavey had taken a call from the police the next morning, about the vehicle having sat overnight in the lot of the Superdome, he shuffled the caller a story about his driver having left it there when it had started hitching and belching engine smoke. Better the Superdome lot than a plain roadside, right?

  Any less an upstanding citizen than himself, and surely some naturally suspicious cop would have seen that story for the hasty slapdash it was, in light of a shotgun murder in his own parking garage the night before. All it took was one loose end, but nothing more had come of it. Perhaps their guardian officers had been watching out for him after all.

  “I don’t know where he went to,” Nathan said. “I got people on the streets, asking around, keeping their eyes open. But it’s like you say, he doesn’t know anyone, so that means nobody knows him either. Somebody like that, you can’t find them right away, like you can when it’s somebody people know, somebody they talk to. It’ll take some dumbass luck.”

  Mullavey groaned. This was not what he wanted to hear.

  Nathan leaned in closer, that tight face, like an improved mirror image of his own, sharpening. “Look, you think I like the idea of a witness any better than you? Odds are your boy’s seen the two I sent to do the job, seen them in my company, and that’s why he turned rabbit. That makes me nervous too. But it’s been a week, and if he’d said a word to anybody about it, we’d’ve heard it. We’ll find him, and then he really will disappear. But until then I wouldn’t lose sleep.” A half grin, half smirk. “You look like you need it.”

  Mullavey grumbled and ate in silence for a while. Napoleon Trintignant’s disappearing act was only one of his woes. Nathan had yet to ask if there had been any problems in getting back the disk sent to Leonard Greenwald. If he was assuming none had arisen, well, let him think so for now. It wasn’t as if all hope was dead — maybe that Todd Whitley cretin would turn it up after all.

  If only he’d been
able to move on this one quicker. While Greenwald had died last Wednesday night, Segal/Goldberg hadn’t gotten word to him on the demise of his account exec until Friday afternoon. Officially he wasn’t even supposed to know about the man’s death until then, and was not about to tip his hand in advance. Whitley had been unavailable Friday afternoon, and by the time Mullavey had gotten hold of him on Monday, the trail of that damned disk was five days cold.

  If it couldn’t be found, then he would have to inform Nathan of that too, and if there was anything he despised, it was that can’t-you-do-anything-right gaze of his brother’s.

  He had beaten Nathan out of the womb by seventeen minutes, older brother fair and square. Yet at times Nathan could turn upon him such a withering glare it was as if their positions had been reversed, and by years. The end results of two very different types of education, no doubt.

  Older eyes and older soul, perhaps, though appearances were the most deceiving of all, and here apparent birth order flip-flopped once more. Twins they were, once identical, though now a blind man could distinguish between them, so long as he could use his hands, feel their bellies. Nathan’s was considerably tighter, and lean with muscle. Mullavey decried his own, soft and doughy. As went the belly, then, so went the jowls, cheeks, everything. Even the graying of Nathan’s temples looked better on him, sharp and distinguishing. To Andrew, his own gray was just one more trait to prove that he was the one sliding headfirst into a caricature of their father.

  He supposed a trip under the cosmetic knife might improve the situation, plus a hook-up to a liposuction hose. The pain, though; the thought of pain was daunting enough to consider the relative merits of everything concerned. It was all a state of mind, anyway, I am not my daddy.

  Mullavey put down his fork and winced, pressed one hand over his stomach and tried his miserable best to stifle the sour belch that charged the gates. Failing. Nathan got a whiff and grimaced, then fanned for fresh air.

  “That’s a very sick smell,” he said. “You have an ulcer?”

  With shut eyes, “If I don’t, I should. I’ve earned one.”

  “Your problem,” said Nathan, wagging a finger, “you don’t exercise. Your body’s no different than business. You don’t take care of it, it turns right around and goes to hell on you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “That Nautilus upstairs in my office? I can get you one too. I moved another two truckloads of the things just three weeks ago, some new chain of health clubs down Florida way. Hijack another shipment, I can have one delivered wherever you want it, have you pumping some iron inside a week. Interested?”

  Pumping iron? The heaviest thing he had lifted in a long time were Clarisse LaBonté’s legs, and that was definitely with her help. Mullavey said he wasn’t interested. Genteel perspiration, wiped from the brow with an embroidered handkerchief, he could tolerate. Not the torrents caused by exercise. Might as well be a field nigger, you’re going to sweat like that.

  “Nathan,” he said then. Held his gaze firm across the table. “Isn’t there anything Eel can do?”

  “About…”

  “Napoleon Trintignant.”

  “That again.” Nathan tabled his knife and fork, rubbed his face with rigid fingers. “No. He can’t. Eel says Napoleon’s soul is his own, a hundred percent.”

  A shame, really. He’d never expected treachery from under his own roof. Those people were bought and paid for, yes, but he had taken them from the filth of the western hemisphere’s poorest nation and given them a home and no more worries. They were taken care of and everybody came out winners.

  Maybe he should start safeguarding against them too. Take a lesson from business. He’d yet to decide how deeply he believed in all this hoodoo that his brother, and particularly Eel and some of his men, did. But he respected it. That Eel was able to kill at any distance appeared a given, so long as he had the proper accouterments. Eel had the command of gods, or devils, or spirits, whatever they were. So long as he provided what his gods demanded, their power inspired fearful awe, at the very least.

  To facilitate the capture of the soul, Eel claimed to need clippings of hair from the person’s head, crotch, left underarm, and nail parings from the left hand and foot. Of these the gods took notice. Mullavey could understand, theoretically. Gods, CEOs, all needed something to catch their attention. It wasn’t as hard as might be imagined to obtain these from clueless white men and women. Especially the men. Standard business procedure, seal a deal with Andrew Jackson Mullavey or Nathan Forrest, and feminine companionship was supplied as a usual perk. Whores were accustomed to kinks; if whoever was footing their bills paid them extra to snip hair and nails from a john, awake or asleep, they would neither think twice nor ask why.

  Leonard Greenwald had been an easy one. Justin Gray, though, a screwball like that was a rare bird, turning down his whore, and she couldn’t even catch him asleep to do the job. Strange, a guy like that, he didn’t think like everyone else, and that could be a worry. A definite minority, though, as Eel’s subterranean chambers were full of hundreds of little pots where he stored his captured souls. Mullavey had been down there only twice. If Eel gave him the creeps right here in Charbonneau’s, or out at Twin Oaks, the sensation was magnified a hundredfold down on his own turf.

  Stealing the souls of the Haitians, though, would be another matter entirely. They weren’t dumb, knowing exactly what could be done with these bodily offerings, and they would die free of soul rather than let somebody like Eel take them. Up to now, Mullavey hadn’t seen the point of trying.

  Now look where it had gotten him, just for trying to keep the Twin Oaks staff from getting agitated.

  Sometimes he was simply too kind to those who were plainly his lessers.

  Mullavey got home to Twin Oaks at close to ten o’clock that night. Huge house full of silent rooms and hallways — his footsteps always sounded heavier this late, lonelier. The domestic staff, their day’s work done, had all retreated to their rooms in the guest/servant wing, and the house seemed emptied of daily routine. The spark of ongoing life they gave it now extinguished.

  Evelyn was in the master bedroom, and as she sat at the large rolltop desk near the fireplace, writing with pen on paper, he watched her, secretly. She had yet to notice him; his approach had been characteristically quiet.

  Evelyn was younger than he by seven years, now in her mid-forties. He studied her in three-quarter profile, straight-backed and in an anklelength satin nightgown. Hair softly golden brown, luxuriant to her shoulders. A heavier, thicker appearance to her chest as of late, a more matronly bosom, and this he appreciated. Mother of his children, finally grown into the image he’d had of her all along, now that both kids were gone from home.

  She looked up, saw him. Gave him a smile that never reached her tired eyes.

  “Who are you writing to?” he said.

  “My sister. I’m almost done.”

  Mullavey cherished that about his wife; she was the only person he knew who wrote letters, real handwritten letters.

  Friends and family in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Atlanta, elsewhere. Evelyn called it a dying art, and one she would maintain until her own dying day. That’s my lady, upholder of tradition.

  She set her pen aside with the letter incomplete.

  “Drew,” she said. Tightly irritable. “How much longer is that man expecting to stay under our roof?”

  Ah. Luissant Faconde, the Haitian exile. He’d been wondering about this himself, actually.

  Evelyn went on. “You told me two weeks, and it’s been a month and I still don’t rightly know what the man is doing here. The girls are all terrified of him, the way he looks at them, and I know at least one’s given in to him several times. I don’t want our girls being made to feel that they’re concubines, Drew. As if that sort of thing is expected of them.”

  “Who is it he’s been with?” Asking calmly, thinking, Please, not Clarisse, not her.

  Evelyn folded her hands together with
a huff. “What does it matter, who? It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Lorgina.”

  Mullavey nodded. They’d had Lorgina since she was fifteen or so, and she was now in her mid-twenties. Quite lovely, in her way.

  “Have you considered,” he said, “that maybe the girl likes him?”

  Evelyn rolled her eyes, brushed a lock of wavy hair from her eye with a sweep of her wrist. “I’ve seen love and I’ve seen fear, and while the two may feel very much the same in the heart, they don’t look a thing alike in the eyes. No, Drew, she does not like that man. Now, how much longer will he be staying?”

  “He’s got some business to finish, yet, and then he’ll be on his way.”

  Evelyn curled down the rolltop with a sharp slam. Obviously her letter writing was concluded for the night. “Business at what? He rarely leaves! Only when he’s left that time or two with you, and the few times your brother’s sent a car for him. And that, I don’t mind saying, certainly scares me, what association he might have with Nathan.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” said Mullavey, and left the room. Knowing full well he was sidestepping the question. Evelyn had been told Faconde was a shipper from the Caribbean, that he was working out the particulars of a deal with Nathan, for his maritime import business on the docks. When earlier asked why Faconde had to stay with them, instead, he’d told Evelyn that the Haitian was used to larger quarters than Nathan could offer. And this was quite true. Nathan and his wife, his second, lived quite well two floors above Charbonneau’s. Nathan enjoyed the narrow closeness and vitality of the French Quarter. To Luissant Faconde it would be maddeningly claustrophobic.