Neither the man nor the car were the kind Heaven was usually attracted to: Well-polished middle-aged men with expensive cars were such a cliche. Still, at that moment, Heaven was intoxicated with the promise of the situation. She wanted to be kissed on that terrace, with the scent of magnolia in the air. By that man. Reminding herself he was probably gay, she crossed the street and entered the small office and gift store in the gatehouse of the former convent.
Originally, Heaven had intended to go to the diocesan offices and ask for a photocopy of a picture of the cross. She even had a good reason. She was going to say that she intended to make a duplicate out of chocolate or spun sugar or some damn thing. But when she got to the convent, a tour was starting and she paid her money and got in line with a group of Catholics from Minnesota. It couldn’t hurt to learn more about the place and the sisters.
First stop was a video history of the convent that Heaven had trouble concentrating on because it had very poor production values, and bad lighting and narration. It did show the cross, a filigreed iron affair that reminded her of all those movies of the evil white explorers claiming some choice piece of real estate from a group of aborigines. Maybe the Indians were behind the attack on the convent. Heaven racked her brain. What Indians had lived here, the Choctaws? Maybe a few Choctaws had decided to get revenge. She realized the video was over and their guide, a crusty old guy with an accent that sounded to Heaven like Brooklyn, was loudly trying to get them to move out in the hall.
“The staircase from the original convent, which was right over there where the parking lot is now,” he yelled, gesturing to his left, “was moved to this building when it was occupied in 1750. Now let’s go see that staircase, original in the first convent building and finished in 1734.”
The crowd, about thirty of them, shuffled down the hall, Heaven bringing up the rear. Before she got around the corner she heard a choked gasp coming from their guide, then, “Oh, dear Jesus, what the hell?”
Screams popped out of a few Minnesota throats. Heaven pushed into the entry hall of the convent where the staircase led to the second floor, a graceful curve of thick cypress boards. But no one would want to walk up those stairs at this moment because they were covered with insects; wriggling ones, flying ones, thousands of them, millions of them. Heaven felt her stomach heave. She turned away.
“Termites!” the tour guide yelled.
Heaven was doodling on her napkin when Mary walked into the Bombay Club. “Did you get my message?” she asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Heaven said with less than her usual good humor. Her stomach refused to calm down. She hated bugs. “Did you get mine?”
“Yes, and I can hardly wait to hear. You just said there was another problem at the convent. What are you drawing?” Mary sat down and waved for a waiter. “What are you drinking?”
“First question: I’m drawing the stolen cross from seeing it on a video. I’m thinking of recreating it in chocolate. I went to the convent to get a photo of it but that became impossible. Second question: I’m drinking a Bombay martini. Since we’re in the world-famous Bombay Club, what else? And what happened at the convent was really disgusting.”
“I’ll have a Cosmopolitan,” Mary said to the waiter. “Heaven, why in the world would you use the word disgusting? Horrifying, mysterious; but disgusting?”
Heaven stuck her recreation of the cross in her purse and leaned in toward Mary.
“Bugs. Millions of them. Termites actually. And they were eating the ancient cypress staircase that’s the only surviving part of the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley at a rapid clip.”
“Termites?” Mary said as her drink appeared and she held it up in salute to her friend. “Well, that’s terrible, but I thought someone had vandalized the place again. Although I am surprised the diocese didn’t take better care of that staircase.”
“They swear they have it checked for bugs twice a year. They live in mortal fear of a termite. They’re sure it was sabotage.”
‘You’re kidding!”
“No, and what’s more, they had just given a tour at one o’clock and the stairway was fine. I guess the people at the diocese archives office don’t use the streetside door. Actually, I learned that the convent was built to face the river, so the entrance on Chartres is actually the back door. But the office workers come in and out a side door near where they park their cars. Someone brought millions of termites in and planted them on the staircase between two and three in the afternoon and didn’t get caught.”
“Ugh. What did the diocese people do?”
“Called an exterminator, and the police,” Heaven said with a little shiver. She could still see the masses of silver wings.
“Well, if there’s one thing we are experts at down here in the swamp, its killing bugs and vermin ‘cause we got plenty of ’em,” Mary said.
“Who’s killing vermin?” Truely Whitten asked as he bent down and gave his wife a kiss on the cheek.
Heaven looked up and couldn’t believe her eyes. Standing right beside Truely was the man, the silver-haired, Porsche-driving man that Heaven had fantasized about not two hours before. She felt her face turning pink. He pulled two chairs from an empty table next to them. The man must be with Truely.
“Heaven, this is my best friend in the whole world, Tompkins Wilson Tibbetts.”
Heaven couldn’t help herself. She giggled. “Tompkins Tibbetts, huh?”
He sat down next to Heaven with the comfortable slouch of a person who was at home at the Bombay Club. He grabbed a handful of goldfish crackers out of a bowl on the table and gave Heaven that bemused glance again, then actually winked. “That’s why my friends call me Will. Sorry I almost ran over you today,” he said with a great deal of humor and not a hint of apology in his voice.
A waiter approached their table again. Heaven couldn’t remember the last time someone had winked at her. It was so corny. “Maybe, just this once, I could have a second martini,” she said.
“That’s what New Orleans does,” Mary said as she handed Heaven the aspirin bottle along with her coffee the next morning. “It makes people break their own rules. You, the girl with the one-martini limit.”
Heaven was clutching a glass of ice water, a huge glass of ice water. She pressed it against her face and then moved it to her lips and downed three aspirin. Next she took a big gulp of coffee. “At least I stopped at two and switched to that Far Niente cab. What a great dinner. I loved the thing with the duck and the jalapeno jelly and the caramelized onions.”
“You and Will were having a ball,” Mary said with a sly smile.
“Oh, stop it. It was just a harmless dinner flirtation. I forget. Is he married and did I take any clothes off?”
“Divorced and not a one. Well, I think your shoes. I seem to remember your foot working up his leg. Do you remember you promised Truely you’d come to the coffee warehouse today?”
“That I remember. I’m looking forward to it. I’m into coffee. We use a single estate bean and grind them at the restaurant to ensure freshness.”
“Well, la-de-da,” Mary said with a laugh. “I must admit, I had a ball last night myself. I haven’t laughed that much in months. Your rendition of the termite story got funnier as the night went on.”
“Speaking of the crises at the convent, I need to go upstairs and pack my stuff. My plane leaves at three and I want to do a little investigating before I leave, and also visit Truely. Where’s his office?”
“In the warehouse at the beginning of Magazine Street, you can’t miss it. Don’t forget your lunch,” Mary said.
“My lunch?”
“You’re having lunch with Will at K-Paul’s at 12:30. Aren’t you glad I hadn’t been traumatized by termites so I could keep track of you?”
Heaven got up and kissed her friend on the top of her head. ‘Yes, I am. I would have remembered. The coffee is kicking in. Thank you so much for your hospitality.”
“I wish you’d change your mind
and stay here when you come back next month.”
Heaven shook her head. “I want to stay in the Quarter so I can be close to the venue for the dinner and to Peristyle, the kitchen I’m prepping in. I got a small suite at the Hotel Provincial. It’s not even a half block from the convent. I’ll be more productive there.”
“Heaven,” Mary said seriously, “about this investigating. I know you’re famous for catching the bad guy at home, but New Orleans isn’t Kansas City.”
“Which means?”
“Nothing is ever the way that it seems here. Everything is more dangerous than it seems.”
“That seems like the Surgeon General’s warning for life in general, not just New Orleans. Now go to work. International law needs you.”
Mary shrugged. “Be careful. I mean it.”
Heaven waved confidently from the kitchen door.
The television station that Amelia Hart worked for was right in the Quarter. Heaven hadn’t called ahead and had no idea if Amelia would be there or even remember who she was, and if she did, would want to talk to her. She pressed the buzzer on the street and when the receptionist answered she bluffed with, “Heaven Lee from Kansas City to see Ms. Hart.” That got her in the door. The next fifteen minutes were spent cooling her heels in the waiting room, but then the woman behind the desk said that Ms. Hart would be out shortly.
And she was, walking toward Heaven with her hand outstretched. “This is a surprise.”
Heaven got up and shook the hand. “I’m leaving to go back to Kansas City this afternoon and there were a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about before I left.”
“Come in then,” Amelia said in a businesslike voice. She used a code to get them through a door to the warren of equipment, cables and props that constituted a television studio. “I have something that resembles an office,” she said as she turned the corner into a tiny room crammed with a desk, a computer and printer, hundreds of clippings and books and files, and photos of Amelia with various celebrities push-pinned to the cork walls. Amelia sat down in front of her computer screen and removed a big pile of magazines from the only other chair in the room. Heaven sat.
“It looks like you read a lot. I promise I won’t tell on you and ruin your reputation as just a talking head.”
Amelia smiled involuntarily but didn’t warm up. ‘You said you wanted to talk about a couple of things. I’m sure one of them is the trouble at the convent.”
“Did you hear what happened yesterday?”
“I’m in the news business, remember?”
“Did the police question you because of your, eh, concerns about the benefit dinner for the sisters?”
“Now, why is that any of your business?”
Heaven tried a sweet smile. “Look, it’s nothing personal. I just met you. You came into a meeting I was attending and raised hell with a bunch of women that weren’t used to having someone talk to them like that. That’s why I thought the police would make you Suspect Number One.”
“And what about you? Is that how you see it?”
“Doesn’t play that way to me. While you’re saying your piece, the courtyard is trashed and an antique cross is stolen. You don’t seem dumb. Why would you call attention to yourself if you’d already done physical damage to the place?”
“So, what? Are you going to defend me to the cops? Since you’ve got this all figured out, you want to take me down to the precinct and straighten them out?”
“No, I wondered if you had any ideas about who might have done it. I can’t imagine this is high priority to the cops, even if everyone does love the sisters.”
Amelia smiled. “Obviously, not everyone loves the sisters. I’ve already told you I’m not a fan. But carrying a million termites into the convent is not my kind of revenge. I can’t stand the sight of one cockroach.”
“And you would have needed an accomplice for the other job since you didn’t come in the meeting holding the cross high above your head like Don Quixote.”
“My, my, you have been thinking this through,” Amelia Hart said as she leaned back in her chair, looking Heaven over like she was noticing her for the first time.
“So, if we both believe you didn’t do it, who did?”
“It is intriguing. I’ll grant you that. For all the crime in New Orleans, folks leave the churches pretty much alone. We don’t have to lock ‘em up like you do up North.”
Heaven handed Amelia her card. “Will you call me if anything happens while I’m gone? I’m concerned that whoever is doing this is just getting started: that the benefit dinner could be a real disaster. You’re in the business of knowing what’s happening in town. You hear and see more.”
Amelia noncommittally took the card and put in in a desk drawer. “What was the second thing?”
Heaven fished around in her purse and pulled out a slim booklet. “I went back to the convent yesterday. By a stroke of bad luck, I was there when the termites swarmed. But that’s not the second thing. I bought this little book about your ancestor in the bookstore. Henriette Delille: Servant of Slaves. Imagine my surprise when I read that she herself had a slave. And you all upset about the Sisters of the Holy Trinity.”
Amelia Hart flared, of course. “We’re all victims of our times, Heaven. By the time Henriette was a grown woman, in 1850 say, it was very hard to free a slave. You white folks had made sure of that. She would have had to put up a big bond, plus the slave had to leave the state. Maybe her…” the word was hard for her to get out, “slave didn’t want to leave New Orleans.”
Heaven stood up. “I didn’t know a thing about any of this until just two days ago. I’m just trying to understand. It does seem strange that any of these religious women, whether black or white, would not see that to own another human being like you own a dress is wrong.”
“Easy for you to say, standing here now.”
“I also noticed in the booklet that Henriette received her slave from her sister. Was that your great-great-great-grandmother?”
“Fuck you, Heaven. Are you saying I’ve got the same blood on my hands your white ancestors have? Not in a million years. Now get out of here.”
Heaven paused at the open door. “I meant what I said about coming back next year and cooking for your aunt’s order,” she said as a parting peace offering. She didn’t wait for a response, just found her way to the reception area and to the street. “Well,” she said out loud as she walked down Chartres, “that certainly went bad fast.”
The Pan-American Coffee Company warehouses were what you’d expect; right on the wharf, an outdoor concrete dock with a tin roof and filled with wooden pallets, some empty and stacked high on top of each other, others loaded with fifty-pound burlap bags of coffee beans from all over Central and South America. It was basically the same story inside some ancient-looking warehouses, bags of beans everywhere.
Heaven was following Truely around, trying to act interested. He noticed she was distracted.
“What’s the matter, Heaven girl, still hungover from last night?”
Heaven shook her head. “No, I’m over that. I went to see Amelia Hart this morning.”
“Doing some of your famous sleuthing? Watch out for that one, Heaven, she’s hell on wheels.”
“And I made her so relaxed and comfortable by reminding her that her free-woman-of-color religious great-great-great-aunt, or whatever it is, owned at least one slave.”
Truely laughed. His lanky frame held a suit beautifully. “Now what ever possessed you to do that?”
“Well, I got this book over at the convent about her aunt. I just couldn’t get over the fact she pitched such a fit, and her family owned slaves, too. I’m new at this Civil War stuff. It’s still so vivid to folks here. Of course, we had our own problems out in the Midwest, but they don’t seem to come up in conversation very often. Right where I live, in Kansas City, the Kansas folks were on one side of the Civil War and the Missouri folks were on the other. But I guess, because it was new territory o
ut there in the 1860s, we don’t have the same long history with slavery as you all do down here. New Orleans is older than the United States, for God’s sake.”
“A fact we like to bring up as often as possible,” Truely said as they headed back through the warehouse to his office.
“I guess my point is, I’m not claiming any moral superiority because my great-great-grandparents didn’t keep slaves. The prairie settlers were way too poor for that. But because it isn’t part of my family history, it seems like it would be kind of creepy.”
Truely stopped and pointed around at the vast room they were standing in. “I’m the ninth generation of my mother’s family to import coffee. I’ve got forklifts and conveyer belts and electronic tracking systems up the ass. We run this whole warehouse operation with just forty employees. Of course, we’ve got lots more people out at the roasting and shipping facility. But I know as well as I know my name that this room, or one on this very spot, was filled with slaves in, say, 1850, doing what those forklifts and conveyers belts do now. It’s eerie,” he said softly and took Heaven’s arm.
They stopped at a state-of-the-art coffeemaker. “Want a cup?” Truely asked as he poured himself some. Truely’s coffee cup seemed permanently attached to his hand. He gestured with it gracefully.
“What is it?” Heaven asked, embarrassed to be such a snob.
“This is from a Jamaican estate right across the valley from Blue Mountain. Good enough?”
She nodded and accepted the cup, slurping as they walked. “Delicious. Is it as expensive as Blue Mountain?”
“About half the price. So, Heaven, who do you think is fooling with the convent?”
Red Beans and Vice Page 4
