River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  Cruising along the street, she saw her next-door neighbor Albert Mills, pushing a lawn mower—the old-fashioned type that didn’t have a motor. He paused to wipe his brow with the hem of his shirt and then looked in her direction as she drove by, but he showed no sign that he recognized her.

  The smell of the cut grass floated on the warm summer air through her partially lowered window. Normally a happy fragrance, this time it reminded her of the graveyard.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Wallace needed to stay out of sight, but she couldn’t stay out of circulation and still do what she needed to. Unannounced and unexpected appearances would at least keep people from knowing what her next move was going to be. That gave her a degree of cover from whoever was trying to scare her. If she stuck to that and to people she knew she could trust, maybe she could go unmolested until she wrapped things up.

  She moved quickly through the scattering of tourists milling about in the lobby of the Capitol building and made her way to the elevators. Her call-and-hang-up ploy confirmed that Garrett Landry was indeed in the office.

  The elevator ride was short. As the doors dinged open she turned left and approached the late senator’s office. She listened at the door for a few seconds, her hand on the knob. No voices, but someone was moving around. She opened the door and stepped inside.

  A man was standing in front of the secretary’s desk. His back was to her, and he was stacking piles of green paper into a cardboard file box. Wallace could see that he was too heavy for his frame. On one side, his white dress shirt had come untucked from his slacks and the tail hung down, covering one of his back pockets. A battle-scarred overstuffed garment bag, folded in half, was slouched over the arm of a chair against the wall to her left. A navy blazer was folded on the seat of the chair.

  “Is that you—” He stopped in midsentence when he saw her.

  “Are you Garrett Landry?”

  He looked at her intently, clearly unhappy at the intrusion. After a few seconds, a dawning look rose in his eyes.

  “You must be the detective.”

  “I must be.”

  “Sorry I didn’t call you back, but things have been kind of chaotic, as you can imagine.”

  Wallace looked around the office, then back at Landry.

  “I thought we were going to get together tomorrow afternoon, Detective…”

  “Hartman. Wallace Hartman.” She offered him one of her cards. “Today works better for me.”

  He took the card, then offered his hand but kept his gaze focused on the card. “Garrett Landry.” He looked at Wallace, then back at the card and then laid it on the desktop. “Forgive my appearance. I’ve been on the road all day.”

  “That’s not important, Mr. Landry. I just need a little bit of your time. I’ll try not to step all over your afternoon.”

  “Sure,” he said, his demeanor softening a bit. “You don’t mind if I work while we chat, do you?”

  He turned away, not waiting for her to answer, and pulled out his phone. He spoke to her over his shoulder. “I taxied in from the airport, so I don’t have my car. Let me just text my ride that I’ll be a little later than we’d planned.” Landry thumbed the screen of his phone for several seconds, then dropped the phone in a front pants pocket. “I’ve been thinking about what you might want to know, but I haven’t come up with any way I can be of much help.”

  Wallace glanced around the office for a place to sit. The only chair that didn’t have something piled on the seat was the chair behind the desk where Landry was working. A transition was clearly under way. She wondered why the change was happening so fast.

  “Sorry,” Garrett said when he saw her looking around. “Let me—”

  “I’m fine,” Wallace said. “Sit if you like. I’m fine to stand.” She waited a beat. “My condolences for the loss of the senator. It was a shocking thing. I imagine this has been hard for you.”

  “Thank you for saying that.” Landry moved in the direction of the empty chair. He stopped short and decided to lean against the desk instead. “It’s a strange feeling, being connected to someone who’s been murdered.” His tone had an almost clinical detachment to it.

  “How long had you been working for him?”

  “Just shy of two years. I was a law clerk for one of the state appellate judges here in Baton Rouge for two years before that.”

  “So, you’re an attorney.”

  “I’ve got the degree and I’ve passed the bar, but I’ve managed to avoid practicing a single day, so far. Politics is more my ambition. Plus, the law firm treadmill looks somewhat unattractive these days. Making partner is more like chasing your tail than a bankable career.”

  “Law clerks usually rank pretty high in their class in law school.”

  “Number twenty-four,” he said with a mouth-only smile. “Not Supreme Court material, but decent.”

  “How did you get the job with Senator Marioneaux?”

  “His son, Glenn, and I knew each other growing up.” He shrugged. “Never hurts to have a connection.”

  Wallace did a quick calculation. If he and Glenn had been contemporaries, then law school was clearly a later-than-usual career choice.

  Landry nodded, smiling, obviously sensing her thoughts. “You’ve noticed I’m not as youthful as some who might be only four years out of law school. After college I took a gap year that lasted nearly twelve years.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “I came into a rather substantial trust fund the day I graduated. With a lot of very careful planning and judicious decision-making I managed to blow it all in six years, instead of the usual two. I hung on for a while after that. There are still a couple of barely profitable dive shops down in the Keys, with my name over the door, that I let slip through my fingers. But most of it either went up in smoke or went up my nose.” With an index finger he pressed one nostril shut, and made a sharp sniffing sound.

  Wallace decided to have a seat behind the desk, after all, so she walked around Landry and sat. He turned and was now looking down at her from across the desk.

  “Mr. Landry, I need you to think really hard about the questions I’m going to ask you.” She rested her palms on the desk, her fingertips drumming gently on the wood.

  “I guess we’ve gotten the small talk out of the way.” He looked at her, letting his eyes wander just a bit. The barest hint of an approving smile flickered across his lips.

  Wallace waited a few seconds, watching him watch her. “Were you aware of any threats to Herbert Marioneaux’s life?”

  “Not specific threats. No.”

  “Then tell me about the nonspecific kind.”

  Landry perched, sidesaddle, on the front edge of the desk. “He was never fully able to shed the reputation he carried with him from his … earliest days.”

  “Did that translate into people threatening his life?”

  “It translated into the kind of hate mail that would make most people lock themselves in their houses and not come out without an armed escort.”

  “I’d like to see those letters.”

  “Pull on your boots and gloves, Detective. They’re all in a landfill somewhere.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “He refused to take them seriously. Said they were just bumpkins with more mouth than brains. Stupid people blowing off steam or goofballs flaunting their ignorance, so he ran them through the shredder.”

  “Did he ever report them to the police?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What about the sergeant at arms for the legislature? Or the state police detail here in the building?”

  “Same answer.” Landry leaned toward her. “Look, he just wasn’t the type to be easily intimidated, and he didn’t want people to think that he could be. He figured that if he reported the letters it would end up in some newspaper somewhere and make him look scared and weak—like he was hiding behind the police and couldn’t take care of himself. Impression management was very impor
tant to him.”

  “You read some of these letters.”

  “He showed me a few.”

  “Did any of them make reference to any specific method by which the sender might go about taking the senator’s life?”

  “One letter writer seemed to show a marked preference for knives. Which could mean he was a hunter.”

  “Sure. Field-dressing a deer carcass requires a good bit of bladework.”

  Landry looked surprised that she would know that.

  “Anything else come to mind?”

  “There were also the usual threats of beatings and the like. My guess is that a lot of them came from the same individual or small set of individuals.”

  “Anything exotic or particularly out of the ordinary?”

  “Not in any of the ones he showed me. It wasn’t like individual words and letters had been cut from newspapers and magazines—nothing that dramatic. They were mostly just amateurish baloney, from what I saw.”

  “Can you remember when the last of the letters showed up?”

  “It’s been a few months, at least. They seemed to be seasonal, coming in bunches. Another reason he thought they must have been mostly from the same individual, somebody with blocks of free time at regular intervals throughout the year. All the ones he showed me were typed, so there would’ve been no way to track back to anyone from the handwriting.”

  “Anybody ever show up here at the office with an attitude that raised a red flag?”

  “Politics is a sharp-elbows business, Detective Hartman—as I’m sure you know. Campaign donors can get testy when they think they or their money are being ignored or forgotten. So, of course, there were shouting matches from time to time. But you can be sure there’s half a dozen of those going on in this building at this very minute. It’s the typical give-a-little-expect-a-lot mentality that’s always snapping at the heels of the elected official.”

  “Can you remember the names of any of the people who were involved in those meetings?” Wallace pushed a piece of paper across the desk toward Landry and offered him her pen.

  Landry looked at the paper and pen, then at Wallace, but made no move to begin writing. “I’ll have to give that some thought. None of it’s been recent, and to be honest, I can’t recall any names at the moment.”

  Wallace assumed Landry was lying. He’d gone to the trouble of making a lengthy point of how shouting matches cropped up but was now unable to summon the name of a single individual involved. That seemed unlikely. But she wasn’t ready to start pushing yet. She still needed his cooperation.

  “What can you tell me about the press conference Senator Marioneaux had scheduled for this past Monday?”

  “I knew the time had been blocked out on his appointment calendar, but I didn’t know what it was for. Sometimes he would set something up, just to have the press ready and waiting, in case some new initiative or project looked like it needed an assist from the Fourth Estate. But he might just as easily call it off if it turned out the announcement would’ve been premature.”

  “He had also scheduled an interview with Barry Gillis, a reporter from one of the TV stations, for the Sunday before.”

  Garrett rolled his eyes at the mention of Gillis’s name. “Then my guess is it was something he and I would’ve discussed on Saturday, but…” He lifted one shoulder, then let it drop, and gave her a rueful smile.

  “Speaking of the senator’s calendar, I’d like to take a look at that, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” he said, pointing. “Coy told me you’d want that. Let me get where you are, and I’ll pull it up. It’s digital.”

  Wallace stood and Landry slid into the chair and then typed and clicked his way past a log-in to the desktop screen—a sunset shot of the Baton Rouge skyline with the bridge in the background. Dozens of icons populated the screen.

  “Here we go.” He clicked on the calendar icon, typed in another password, and opened the application.

  Wallace had watched carefully as he navigated his way to the calendar, but his fingers moved too quickly across the keyboard, so she hadn’t been able to see what the password was.

  “How far back does this go?” she asked.

  “Years. All the way, I think. For as long as he was in the legislature. You want me to print you a copy?”

  Wallace pulled a flash drive from her pocket. “Let’s put it on here.” She handed him the device.

  Landry copied the calendar and handed it back to her.

  “Who maintained the senator’s appointment calendar?” she asked, slipping the drive back into her pocket.

  “It was an open calendar. He put things in and took things out. I did the same. So did Coy. It was a fluid document, because his schedule could be unpredictable, subject to change at a moment’s notice. Why?”

  “Just wondering. Did everyone with access have a password?”

  Landry smiled guiltily. “Yes, but we all used the same one.”

  “How were things with you and the senator?” Wallace asked.

  “In what regard?”

  “How was your relationship with Mr. Marioneaux?”

  “Excellent, in every respect. I’ve known him practically my whole life, and I looked up to him as a young boy. I’m pretty sure he was disappointed in my choices after college, but he had a tendency to hold everybody to the same standards he held himself to.”

  “So, your family was close to his?”

  “No. Just me. Glenn and I were friends growing up. We met in grade school. My folks had a lot of money. Still do. Glenn’s family was one generation away from sharecropping.”

  Wallace allowed a startled look to cross her face.

  “I don’t mean that literally, but you get what I saying. Poor and working-class would have been a high reach for Glenn’s grandparents.”

  “Yet you looked up to Glenn’s father. That’s interesting.”

  “He was a rather unusual man. Turning labor capital into education capital and then into social capital typically takes at least three generations to accomplish, or so the social science gurus in the academy tell us. Herbert Marioneaux did it in one.” Garrett raised an index finger to emphasize his point.

  “Apparently, not everyone shared your admiration for him.”

  “Not everyone took the time to know him. He made mistakes and, like all of us, he started life as a victim of his upbringing, but he managed to…” Landry pursed his lips and bobbled his head as he searched for the word. “To rectify his thinking and his actions. And he was quick about it. Something most people never even attempt, much less actually do.” He stepped from behind the desk.

  “I have to admit, you’re challenging my long-held notions about the man. That’s something I did not expect.” Wallace offered Landry what she hoped was an engaging smile.

  “And you’re challenging my long-held notions about the police. Something I didn’t expect.”

  Wallace bunched her shoulders and widened her smile. Landry smiled back.

  “I can see why you would be so enchanted with him,” she said. “What I can’t see is why it took you five days to come back from that little junket you were on.”

  Landry’s posture stiffened. His nostrils flared and his eyes widened. Slowly, he rubbed his palms together and then tilted his head back to look down his nose at her. A black expression hardened on his face.

  Wallace kept a steady gaze on Landry and stayed quiet.

  “If there was something I could have helped with, I would have been home on the first plane out of there. Glenn and I spoke the day after it happened, and he told me that it looked like the case was solved, already. That the police had arrested a suspect and from what he told me the evidence looks pretty conclusive.”

  “As a lawyer, you probably know that until the evidence has been tested in court sometimes those looks can be deceiving.”

  “And as you probably know, I won’t have a role in those court proceedings. I’m an outsider to the case, with no useful information to o
ffer. Why would I come running back?”

  “Moral support?” Wallace waited, but Garrett just stared at her. “What about this office?”

  “What about it? I’m not the only member of his staff.”

  “But you’re the most important one, yet the last one to make yourself available to the police. I’ve already spent time with everyone else because they were all here.”

  “Detective Hartman, do I need to point out just what an absurd statement that is? If you interviewed us one after another, then, by definition, somebody would have to be last. Surely you’re not implying that my place in the queue is of some evidentiary significance. If so, I must have missed that day in law school when they trotted out the age-old principle that you’re presumed innocent unless you happen to be last in line to be interrogated by the police.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that, given your evident admiration for the man, you seem rather unconcerned. On a personal level, I mean.”

  “Are you passing judgment on how I express my emotions?”

  “Of course I am.” She studied him carefully as he stood before her, in front of the desk. A low murmur of conversation and laughter grew louder as a group of people moved along the corridor outside the office door. Wallace made a point of running her eyes over Landry’s doughy face, then his hands, eventually locking him into an eye-to-eye stare.

  “What is it you think I do for a living, Mr. Landry?” her voice barely above a whisper. She pushed her hair behind her ears, then laced her fingers together and lowered her hands gently onto the desk, never breaking eye contact.

  Landry shifted from foot to foot. His hands hung loosely at his sides, then took up momentary residence in his pockets, finally coming to rest as he crossed his arms over his chest.

  Outside, in the hallway, the chime of the elevator sounded. As its doors opened, the number of voices grew briefly more numerous. The chatter ended abruptly as the doors slid shut. The rough drone of an airliner’s engines faded from the soundscape, leaving silence in its place.

  “I collect information and I pass judgment,” she said into the stony quiet of the office. “And at the moment, I’m judging you to be a bit of an artful dodger.”