Nine
A hand shot out of the crowd and touched Heaven’s arm. “I hear this is one of your concoctions.” It was Nancy Blair. “It sure is good. What’s it called?”
“Nancy, I bet you’ve had this before. It’s an Italian dessert called Tiramisu, which means ‘lift me up.’ The caffeine in the coffee and the chocolate does the lifting, I guess. I thought we needed a dish made with coffee, in honor of Truely.”
“Poor old Truely. You don’t believe that crap about Truely being just a random victim of whoever was harassing the nuns, do you?”
Heaven’s heart leaped. “No, I don’t. Do you know something I don’t?”
“I know bullshit when I hear it. I don’t for a minute think someone just picked Truely out of the crowd. In fact, whatever is going on with the sisters, it hasn’t been violent if we don’t count Truely, and I don’t.”
Heaven looked around at the crowded room. They were back at the Whittens’ for the after-funeral meal. “Two things. It may not have been violence per se, but whoever wrote all those hate letters just to shake up the chefs was a very sick individual. I think a person like that could kill someone. Second thing: I agree with you. I don’t think Truely’s murder had anything to do with the place he was killed.”
Nancy Blair shook her head. “You’re wrong there, Heaven. I think the culprit did kill Truely at that party on purpose because they knew it would be ascribed to whoever was causing the trouble for the nuns.”
Heaven smiled. “Good point. But why are we the only ones that seem to be tracking with this thing?”
Nancy looked around the room nonchalantly as she talked, her eyes darting from group to group. “The police department is made up mostly of men, even today. It was always a great boon to my business that my customers were men because it’s so much easier to hoodwink them than women. And the police have had several murders since Truely’s on Saturday night. We only have to think about this one.”
“I’d love to talk to you about this some more,” Heaven said.
“Lunch tomorrow at Commander’s Palace. Shall we say one?” Nancy Blair glided on to the next collection of well-coiffed, well-lit, mourners.
The funeral had been grand and long. Heaven had excused herself from the chore of going to the cemetery by volunteering to come back to the house and make sure everything was ready for the hordes, that they had plenty of booze available and the food out on the table. She was getting the idea that in New Orleans, funerals and all the events surrounding them were perfectly legitimate social occasions. St. Louis Cathedral had been full of people dressed to the nines. Now the house was vibrating with only slightly subdued voices telling tales about Truely and gossip about each other.
Heaven was impressed with the generosity of Truely and Mary’s friends. The food had started pouring in the day before the funeral. A whole country ham would just appear on the porch with a note. Turkeys and briskets, the linchpin of Midwestern funeral meals, were nowhere to be found on the long dining room table. In their place were big platters of Jambalaya and crawfish. Shrimp créole, a dish that Heaven had almost forgotten about, was emitting a wonderful aroma from a big silver chafing dish. A bowl of South Carolina rice sat beside it, each kernel separated perfectly from the next. Stacks of muffalata sandwiches had been delivered from Central Grocery early that morning. The entire sideboard was filled with sweet things: pralines and sweet potato pie and chocolate cake and Heaven’s Tiramisu. Elegant china and heavy silver flatware had been laid out. It was no wonder they’d needed extra staff to get ready. Everything sparkled. Heaven had to remind herself that someone had been killed to bring all these party lovers together.
All of a sudden, Will Tibbets had Heaven by the elbow and was steering her out the open French doors onto the gallery. There were plenty of people out there as well, sitting on all the beautiful wicker furniture, eating and drinking. Will slipped his arm around Heaven’s waist and squeezed her. “Thank you.”
Heaven rested her hand on Will’s shoulder for a minute. When she realized what she was doing she jerked her hand quickly away, like she’d been burned. “For what?”
“For being here for Mary Beth, or Mary as you like to call her. As long as she’s been living here, I think she still feels like the outsider.”
Heaven stepped back and found a chair to sink into. Will sat down effortlessly on the porch beside her, crossing his legs and not spilling a drop of his drink. “Will, you all think folks who came here way before the Civil War are newcomers to the area. Of course Mary would feel like an outsider after a mere eighteen or twenty years,” Heaven said. “By the way, now that Truely is buried, we have to talk.”
“I can feel another attack of the detective coming on,” Will said, pulling at the edge of Heaven’s very short black skirt. “Can’t you take some thin’ for this problem of yours?”
“What problem is that, wanting to find out the truth about Truely’s death?” Heaven pulled his hand away from her skirt.
Will grinned and wrapped his arm around Heaven’s leg. “I sure do love these black stockings you got on today. You have good legs, sugar.”
Heaven pushed his hand off. “Go ahead. Change the subject. But you must have some ideas about who killed your friend.”
Will stood up just as gracefully as he’d gotten down. “When I say that Truely had no known enemies, I really mean it. That’s why I keep thinking it had something to do with the sisters. I’m not talking that way just to make you irritated, sugar.”
Heaven waved her hands at him dismissively. “Oh, you know you love irritating me. Now go away. I need to think.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Will said as he patted Heaven’s head and went back through the French doors.
Heaven sat and listened to snatches of conversation swirling from each side of the open doors. Laughter sounded on the other side of the porch. A fork clanged, falling on the wooden floor in the dining room. You would have thought Truely had passed quietly in his sleep for all the concern she heard about his violent end from this crowd. The benefit for the art museum next week was much more of a topic of conversation. Did these people have no interest in finding out what had happened? Perhaps there was some unwritten code that murder was not to be discussed until after the victim had been interred twenty-four hours. There certainly was plenty of codified behavior in the South, and New Orleans was so special, so unique, it wouldn’t surprise Heaven at all if everyone in there drinking Truely’s booze already knew who did it and they were just waiting until the “correct” moment to clue in the police and maybe, if she was good, Heaven, too.
The only problem was that Heaven just couldn’t wait. She got up and ran up the stairs to her room, grabbed her purse, her raincoat, and her cell phone, and slipped out without saying anything to Mary.
In just a few minutes she was standing by the fence that surrounded the outdoor loading area of the Pan-American Coffee Company. The warehouse and the plant were closed today to honor Truely. On her visit here the day before with Mary, Heaven had noticed a loose piece of fencing when she’d been talking to the man taking the samples from the bags of coffee. The chain link wasn’t connected properly down at the bottom where the fence turned a corner. She’d meant to tell Mary to have it repaired, and she would, after she was done using it.
Heaven took one more look around. The warehouse next to Truely’s was facing the opposite direction. The parking lot of that warehouse was on the other side of the building as well, so without the coffee employees around, there was no one in sight, except people on ships on the river and they surely wouldn’t be paying attention to her. She put on the raincoat, lay down on the ground, pushed the loose metal fencing up, threw her purse through the opening, and rolled herself under in an almost neat, fluid movement. One of her high heels got caught in the holes of the fence but it was easily retrieved, and she got a hole in her dark stockings, thigh high, but it didn’t seem to be spreading. Heaven took off the raincoat and shook it. She hadn’t changed out of he
r funeral clothes for fear of attracting attention leaving the house in tights and a tee shirt. She was in a short black skirt, black knit top, black leather jacket and the opaque black stockings and Italian high heels. It was more of a New York outfit than a New Orleans one, but it was all the black clothes she had with her and she had stupidly thought black would be the dress of the day. Little did she know that the locals wear their pastels to a funeral. She dusted herself off, put her shoe back on, and headed inside with the coat over her shoulder; if she was lucky that is, and could get inside.
Heaven had briefly considered going into Mary’s purse and stealing her keys. But who knew if she was carrying around the keys to Truely’s business? She might have stuck them in a drawer somewhere. They could still be on Truely’s dresser. Mix all those possibilities with the fact that Heaven wouldn’t know the keys to the warehouse from a hole in the ground, and she’d decided to wing it.
Beside the large sliding doors that were usually open to the inside of the warehouse, there was a standard sized door for use going in and out during inclement weather, when the big doors were closed. Heaven thought there was a chance that smaller door might be unlocked. It wasn’t. She stood and jiggled it for a minute.
She and Mary had talked about the fact that the place didn’t have an alarm system, that they left big piles of coffee beans out in the yard, as they called this covered outdoor wharf area. Theft had never been a problem for Truely as the burglars of New Orleans didn’t seem to be into roasting their own coffee beans. Now Heaven was sorry she’d fussed at Mary about tighter security. Mary must have said something to the work crew about locking the place up tight.
Heaven dug around in her purse. She knew there was a bent paper clip down in the bottom somewhere that she used on her computer when it froze up. She found it, and also a credit card and a hairpin. She fiddled around and discovered, to her delight, that picking a simple lock like this one wasn’t so hard. It wasn’t a dead bolt. Heaven stepped inside the warehouse and dropped her coat by the door.
She had no idea why she’d been compelled to come here today or what exactly she was looking for. But she’d been thinking about what people killed for and it was money and hurt feelings most of the time. What combination of those two had done Truely in?
She now had a half-baked theory. After all, coffee beans came from exotic places that also grew other more illegal plants. Although she couldn’t imagine that the United States Customs Service wasn’t totally hip to the geographical relationship between Colombian coffee and Colombian cocaine, maybe there was something else that could be smuggled in that wouldn’t be quite so obvious. She knew they had lots of emeralds in Columbia. Maybe Truely was involved in the gem smuggling game.
Heaven pushed and pried bags apart so she could read their origins. She found some labeled ORGANIC BOLIVIA and others saying COLUMBIA ESTATE. That seemed like a good place to start. Now she had to find one of those tools, the trier. She knew that the time clock was in the room with the fancy coffeepot and the tables and chairs for employees to eat their lunch. She went there and sure enough, a whole row of triers hung on hooks on the wall by leather loops, along with the long lab coats she had seen some workers wearing. She grabbed one of the triers and went back to the bags.
She was looking forward to this part. It had looked like fun stabbing into the coffee bags. Heaven slipped off her heels and climbed up on a small stack of the Bolivian beans. She was awkward with the tool at first, tearing a hole in the first burlap sack by not having a smooth in-and-out motion. Someone would curse when they moved this bag and it leaked beans all over the place. The person doing the cursing would most likely be the surly man who hadn’t revealed his name the day before. Oh, well. After a few attempts, Heaven got the trier down pat. She could stab down into the bag deep enough to be sure there wasn’t a bag of emeralds hiding in there. She methodically stabbed each bag in three different places, then moved on. Soon she was out of Bolivia and almost done with Columbia. She briefly considered diamonds from Africa and almost started over to the African coffee, then gave up. This wasn’t getting her anywhere. She sat down on the edge of the pallets and looked at the mess she’d made. Because she wasn’t armed with the baggies that were needed to store the beans that came out of the burlap bags in the trier tube, she had just tossed them on the floor. All around the pallets of bags she’d been poking in, there were coffee beans. They stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise neat environment. Heaven considered finding a broom and cleaning up after herself. She decided against it. If she hadn’t found anything in the sacks of coffee beans, maybe she’d learn something from the reaction to a breakin at the warehouse. It might scare someone into making a mistake and she might notice that mistake.
With that decision, she walked back to the lunchroom and hung up the trier. Then she walked down the hall and opened every door. Most of them were for offices, full of invoices and computers and fax machines. But down at the end of the hall, several doors past Truely’s office, she found a room that puzzled her. It looked as though a brand-new sewing machine had just been moved into the room; the box for it was still lying on the floor. A chair had been pulled up to a table and the sewing machine was plugged in and set up. On the floor beside the chair was a stack of coffee bags, their seams carefully opened so they were flat. Heaven looked through the pile. Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico, Ethiopia. Not a Bolivia or Columbia in sight. What Heaven couldn’t understand was why the sewing machine? Was Mary going into the coffee bag fashion business? Since she wasn’t supposed to be here, it wasn’t a question Heaven could just ask when she got home, but she definitely would have to find out.
Heaven tackled Truely’s office last. After ten minutes of determined digging, she was almost ready to give up on it. She couldn’t take the time to go through the file cabinets and the desk didn’t seem to have one personal item in it, not one. It was a massive oak number with a wide middle drawer, a lot like the desk her Mom had used in the barn for her antique business. Heaven remembered things getting caught in that middle drawer, so she pulled it out again and wiggled the drawer up and down, putting her hand back as far as she could. There was something wedged in between the drawer and the side of the desk at the back of the drawer. Heaven gently pried at it until it fell out the other direction on the floor. It was a photograph. She reached down and picked it up.
“Oh, shit,” she said out loud. It was a photo of Amelia Hart wearing a revealing piece of lingerie, a teddy. Heaven supposed you could call that little bit of lace a teddy. Amelia was blowing a big kiss at whoever was holding the camera. Heaven slipped the photo in her purse and tried to put the desk back in the same disarray it had been in when she started her search, wondering if someone else had been there before her, removing the private stuff but missing that photo. Maybe Mary looked through it when they’d been there the day before, trying to find all of Truely’s papers. Or maybe it had been tossed today, while all were gone. She took off for the warehouse.
When she got back to the door she’d entered, she put on the raincoat, went out and purposely left the door slightly ajar. It wasn’t enough to attract the attention of a vagrant looking for a home for the night, but it would tell the warehouse crew that someone had been there. That and all the coffee beans she’d left on the floor should shake someone up.
Heaven went out under the fence, this time taking her shoes off and shoving them to the other side of the fence first along with her purse. She was getting better at this breaking-and-entering stuff.
The house was quiet when Heaven got back. They must have run out of scotch. Quickly, she went up to her room and now changed her clothes into tights and a big white linen men’s shirt. She went back downstairs looking for Mary, quickly trying to figure out what she was going to say about her whereabouts. Blending back in with the crowd wasn’t an option.
She found Mary sitting by herself on the enclosed porch, obviously one of her favorite places. “Heaven, where have you been?”
; She lied. “I didn’t know hardly anyone and after the first hour I had run out of niceties. I don’t know how you Southerners do it. I went over to Audubon Park. Ended up at the zoo. It was great. But what I want to know is how did you get rid of the hordes of people that were here?”
“When the food was gone, they left. Also, I think Will told them it was time to go.”
“Where’s Will?”
“I told him it was also time for him to go home and get some rest. I know he’s crushed about Truely and he just hasn’t had a chance to let go.”
“What about you? It seems like we haven’t had any time to talk about this stuff. Have you bawled your eyes out yet?”
“That first night I did. But the medication is making everything hazy now. I’m still numb.”
“Just remember, give yourself a time limit on taking the pills. They can creep up on you.”
“Right now I don’t care if I ever come out of this fog.”
Heaven started to say something trite about time changing the way we felt about tragedy, but she decided to keep her homilies to herself. “So what are you going to do tomorrow?”
“I’ve asked for a month off from the law firm so I can attend to Truely’s business, decide if I want to keep it or sell it. In the morning two lawyers who are taking my cases for the month are coming over so we can go through them. Luckily, I don’t have anything ready to go to court right now.”
“Good, then I’ll work on my project in the morning while you’re busy.”
“What project?”
Heaven smiled innocently. “You know, who has it in for the nuns.” And what Truely was doing with a naughty photo of Amelia Hart in his desk, she thought to herself with a sinking feeling.
Heaven stood outside the restaurant Bayona and let her eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. She’d stopped there to check with Susan Spicer on where the labor for the benefit dinner had come from. Heaven hadn’t given it much thought at the time. She’d supposed that employees of the many restaurants and cafes in the French Quarter had somehow been summoned. But in the cold light of day she realized nothing happens without someone making the phone calls and having access to temporary labor. Susan’s manager had confirmed this. They had used a temporary staffing agency in the food service field. The service sent waiters and dishwashers to hotels when they had a big convention and their own staff couldn’t handle it, or an offsite party for a restaurant. They also worked with the local caterers to supply workers for them.
Red Beans and Vice Page 15
