The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  “But they’ll go to my house.”

  “Only if they don’t have anything else to do. But something else might happen between now and then. Now take off.”

  I knew he was right. There was no telling what Sikes had said and whatever Toby might have said would only have made it worse. I could see it right now: Toby, chagrined because I hadn’t wanted to go home from school with him, might have claimed I was the one who’d yelled. And what if I’d dropped something along the road that night?

  I felt my safe little world starting to slip away.

  Five seconds later I was over his back fence and into the bamboo patch on the other side. I wandered the streets for hours, until well after dark. I knew my father would be worried, but what could I do? Finally, as I was walking down Cloverdale, a mile away from where either of us lived, a yellow Chrysler pulled up beside me and, through the open passenger-side window, I heard a familiar voice and saw a flash of garish jewelry.

  “Colin, is that you?” It was Blanche St. Martin. I kept walking. Maybe she’d decide she’d made a mistake.

  “Colin, you stop when I speak to you.”

  I halted, miserable. The door opened. “Get yourself in here. Your father is worried sick. He’s called everywhere looking for you. He thought you’d been murdered or run over by a train.”

  “I was just walking,” I said.

  “Well, you get in here. I’m taking you home this minute. Your poor father.”

  I climbed in like a sheep on the way to slaughter, wishing the cloying perfume that filled the car were a poison gas that would end my suffering once and for all.

  “Blaize is worried about you, too, you know. When he heard everybody was looking for you he almost had an asthma attack. It’s really very thoughtless, Colin, to do that to your friends.”

  I tried to make myself smaller in the seat. But at least she hadn’t said anything about the police.

  My father opened the door on the third knock.

  “He was down on Cloverdale,” my captor pronounced. “I’ll leave you to find out what he was doing there.”

  “Thank you, Blanche. I’ll take care of it.” My father shut the door behind her and shook his head.

  “What the hell, Colin? You don’t know how to use a telephone?”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I didn’t mean to worry anybody.”

  “Oh, hell, I knew you were all right. But I had to call around, and by the time Blanche St. Martin was finished, you were as good as dead.”

  “Dad …”

  “Yes?”

  I licked my lips, trying to screw up my courage. “Have the police …?”

  “What? Been looking for you? No, I was going to hold off calling them unless you stayed out all night. But I figured you’d be home. I remember how it was to be your age. You have a fight with one of your friends? Or were you going to see some girl I don’t know about?”

  “Dad …”

  “Hey, you’re fifteen. Pretty soon you’ll be dating and then you’ll be driving. No need to hurry things, but I expect you’re normal in that respect. There are some pretty nice-looking young ladies in your class.”

  “I don’t care about any of them,” I said. “They’re stupid. Most of them haven’t ever read a book and those that have look like Ella Pitre.”

  “Ella’s a nice girl,” he said. “She just hasn’t been gifted with the looks some of them have, and maybe that’s not all bad. But, mark my words, one of these days a girl will come along and then everything will be different, overnight. Trust me.”

  I couldn’t resist: “Is that how it was with you and Mom?”

  He rubbed his jaw and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Well, it wasn’t that simple. At first we didn’t hit it off. I was dating another girl, Corrine Dupuy. She was the first real girl-friend I ever had, unless you count puppy love in high school.”

  “I always thought Mom was your first girl.”

  He just smiled and took some plates out of the refrigerator. “She was my second girl, Corrine was the first. I was really in love with Corrine.”

  I felt embarrassment at the revelation, as if I were about to be told I was illegitimate.

  “She was the first girl I met when I came down here from up north. She was a beautiful woman, the kind of girl all the boys want to date. I felt like I was the luckiest graduate student at LSU.”

  Corrine Dupuy. I’d never even heard the name before. Now I was being told I might have been her son instead of my real mother’s.

  “What happened?” I heard myself croak.

  “Oh, your mother happened.” He chuckled and put one of the dishes on the stove and turned on the gas burner. “She was friends with Corrine. Except not really; I think Corrine just brought her along to show she could have whoever she wanted. Corrine was a show-off.”

  He turned around from the stove to face me.

  “Your mom told me later she didn’t want to go, that Corrine dragged her along.”

  “It was a date?”

  “More or less. I’d asked Corrine to go to the Paramount Theater and when I went to pick her up she asked if your mother could come, so what could I say?”

  “You didn’t want her along?”

  “I guess I should’ve been happy to have two girls, but from the first time we met, your mom and I decided we didn’t like each other.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. She told me later she thought I was aloof, that I thought I was better than other people. I thought she was hard to get along with. She argued with everything I said.”

  “But how …?”

  “How did we ever get together?” He wandered over to the cabinet and took out the supper plates. “I guess because it was love at first sight after all.”

  “What?” I wrinkled my nose.

  “Son, when a man and woman don’t care about each other at all, they don’t have any reason to fight. It’s when they start out fighting all the time that there’s something between them. They just don’t want to admit it. In our case, your mom didn’t want to admit she could be so attracted to a Yankee, who had such different ideas from hers. In my case, I guess I saw something underneath that intrigued me and I was frustrated at first that I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

  “What happened to Corrine Dupuy?”

  “Oh, she finally saw which way the wind was blowing. She surely didn’t need me. She was in plenty of demand. She married an oil company man and they moved to Beaumont. He was killed in the war and I heard she remarried right afterward. Corrine could take care of herself.”

  I tried to absorb the thought: if he’d married Corrine Dupuy, my mother would still be alive. But, then, I wouldn’t be who I was, so maybe it was a foolish speculation.

  “Was she prettier than Mom?”

  “She was more glamorous. But not more beautiful. Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever met or ever will.”

  He paused, then gave me a strange look: “Do you remember her very well, Colin?”

  “Sure.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s good. I’d hate for you to ever forget her. I think about her every day. Do you know, we were married twelve years, right after the war started and I was about to be shipped out, so we were apart three of those years. But the years we were together, we never had a fight, not even an argument.”

  I stared at him open-mouthed. How could he say that? I remembered that day like it was yesterday, the look on her face when she saw the car, her running back into the house, the slamming door … or was it that he didn’t want to remember it?

  After supper I wanted to call Stan, but I was afraid. What if he told me the cops really were looking for me? But that was crazy: If they were looking for me, they’d have been here by now. I decided I’d wait and ask him tomorrow at school. That was plenty soon enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I leave the old house where I used to live, knowing if I stay here much longer someone will call th
e police to report a suspicious character. And maybe I am a suspicious character, for what will I say if a policeman pulls up beside me, asks why I am here?

  “I’m looking into a murder, Officer. Only it happened before you were born.”

  When you are young you take your situation for granted. I missed my mother, but somehow I figured that this was the way things were supposed to be, and it was only much later that I realized how much grief I had repressed. I think it was because my father so seldom let himself show emotion, saving it all for the poems he wrote. He was always still up when I went to bed and there were times when I got up in the middle of the night for water or to go to the bathroom, and the light in the breakfast room was on, and when I peeked in, I would see him, bent over his yellow notepad, pencil in hand. Once, when the sound of my footsteps startled him, his head whipped around and I thought for a moment that he didn’t recognize me and for the barest moment I was afraid, as if I had come upon a stranger in the act of burglary.

  Years after his death, his second wife, Stella, sent me a cardboard box with stacks of papers inside. Her note said simply:

  Colin, your father wrote these before he met me, and they seem to have to do with your mother. I think it best that you have them.

  I held the box, hands trembling, unsure whether I dared open it. My parents were dead and there was nothing these papers could do to bring them back. If I opened the box and read what was inside, it would be like unsealing their coffins and peering at their long-dead faces.

  I put the box on a shelf and never opened it. Maybe, I thought, the time would come, but not then.

  The next day at school I tried to ask Stan what the cops had wanted, but he jerked away, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. I watched him melt into the crowd changing classes, stunned.

  What had I done? Why was he angry with me, and for what?

  At lunchtime I didn’t see him in the cafeteria and Blaize sidled up to me, placing his tray on the table beside mine.

  “Is it true about Stan?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “What?”

  “His mom came and got him before the bell rang.”

  “Why?”

  He leaned closer to me and I saw several heads turn our way.

  “Toby says the cops went to his house yesterday and searched it. He says they found all kinds of letters and things that showed his old man and Senorita Gloria were making out.”

  I felt a sinking sensation. Now I understood about the fight on the lawn and I understood about the unmarked car that had pulled into the driveway right after Stan’s father got home.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It must be. I mean, Toby said they have his old man downtown right now, questioning him. He says when they searched through her things they found some letters he sent her.”

  “Jesus.” I recalled Stan’s adamant defense of the Spanish teacher.

  “I didn’t know they even knew each other,” I said.

  “My mom says he was popular. He’s a woman’s doctor, you know. She says some of those women’s doctors go into it so they can get women to take off their clothes.”

  “Yeah, but was she his patient?”

  “That’s what I heard. I heard she went to him for female problems.”

  “Who’s saying that?”

  “Lots of people. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  “Well, do you believe it?” I asked. “I mean, that they were having it on?”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s possible.”

  “Because Toby said so?”

  “No. It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “Well, I watched her in class. She used to, well, like flirt with some of the guys, her students. Always patting them and hugging. She used to say that’s the way people were where she came from, but I don’t know.”

  I thought of the day I’d run into her in the hallway.

  “That doesn’t mean he killed her,” I said. “I mean, if she was that way, she may have been screwing a lot of guys. Any one of ’em could’ve done it.”

  “Yeah,” Blaize said but he didn’t sound convinced.

  The next day there was a memorial service for the murdered teacher at the Catholic Chapel on campus, and the student body was excused to attend. Her body had been shipped back to South Texas, so there was no coffin, just some flowers and a brief eulogy by the priest and a somewhat longer one by Dr. Cornwall, who talked about how he hadn’t been privileged to know her for very long but it had been a pleasure to work with her, because she was so well-liked and easy to get along with. He said none of us could fathom why these things happened, and managed to work in again that he hadn’t known her for long, or knew anything about her personal life, because his relationship with her had been purely professional, but he said she’d be missed and that it was a dark day for education and for the school itself and for every student. Finally, he told us that as great as the evil was that had happened to Senorita Gloria, it was just as bad to spread rumors and gossip, and that he knew there’d been all kinds of talk, and such talk could be very hurtful to innocent people, and he said he had full faith in the police and the district attorney and that we should all just mind our business and let them do what they were trained to do.

  That night my father got another phone call, this one from somebody in his department. His face turned grave and when he hung up the phone he came to where I was watching TV, trying to calculate whether I should call Stan or not, and turned the set off.

  My head jerked up because he only did that when he had something truly momentous to impart. He sat down beside me on the couch, taking care to pull up his pant legs.

  “Now Colin,” he said, “I don’t want you to get too upset by what I’m going to tell you, but I think it’s best you heard it from me.”

  I waited, afraid.

  “I just got a call from Peter DeGarmo. He says the police have arrested Dr. Chandler.”

  He reached over and patted my shoulder. “I know how hard this is for you. You and Stan are close. And I know how hard it must be on Stanley. There’ve been all kinds of rumors flying around, and now this. I feel very sorry for him.”

  “But his dad didn’t do it.”

  “We’d like to think that. It’s certainly what I want to believe.” He ran a hand though his short brown hair. “But I might as well tell you before you get it from somewhere else, in case you haven’t already—it looks a lot like there was something going on between Miss Santana and Dr. Chandler, and that’s what the police are looking at.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was no sense confirming that the news was all over school.

  He put his hand on my knee. “You know, son, sometimes grownups do things they wish they hadn’t. Stupid, foolish things, on the spur of the moment. Some people are weak and some people crave excitement and some people get bored with their lives. Then they slip. Nobody’s perfect, not you, not me, not Dr. Chandler. If he slipped, well, that’s between him and his conscience and his family. What I’m saying is doing a foolish thing doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “But you think the thing between him and Senorita Gloria is true.”

  He sighed. “I don’t want to think so, but it seems like there’s evidence it is. The police wouldn’t have arrested him if they didn’t have something concrete.”

  “But what does that prove?”

  “They’ll say it shows he had motive. They’ll say she tried to get him to leave his wife and threatened to expose him, or that they had a fight because she resisted his advances, or that he wanted her to marry him and she wouldn’t. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of that. I hope and pray there isn’t, for his and his family’s sake. But as Stanley’s friend you need to be prepared for what you’re going to hear in the next few days and weeks. I’m afraid it’s going to get very ugly.”

  I shut my eyes for a long minute, wishing it would all go away. He gave my knee a pat.

  “Of course, he’s hir
ed a good lawyer. J. Carter Criswell. You can bet he’ll pick apart every bit of evidence they try to use.”

  J. Carter Criswell, I thought: His son, J. Carter III, was a senior on the high school football team and a first class asshole.

  “After all, so far it’s just circumstantial,” my father went on. “They don’t have a witness. Nobody saw the two of them together at the cemetery. I guess, in fact, you and Stan are the closest to witnesses they have, because you saw the car driving away.”

  “God …”

  He nodded. “They’ll probably talk to you again, but when they do, I’ll be there, and all you have to do is tell the truth. It was night, you didn’t get a good look at the car, and that was that. You tell the truth and you’ll always be okay.”

  The truth. What would he say if he knew the truth was that I was the last person to see Gloria Santana alive? Guilt weighed me down, but then I told myself, why should I feel guilty? I wasn’t holding back anything that mattered. I hadn’t seen the killer, just a dying woman. What difference to the case could that make?

  Unless they somehow found out. Because Stan knew I’d gone down the road alone. He’d been asleep when I returned, and so he had no way of knowing I’d seen the dying woman, but if he mentioned my little excursion, what could I say to defend myself? I remembered Father O’Dwyer saying once in his sermon that only the guilty hold back the truth. And if anybody could ferret out the truth, it was J. Carter Criswell, the man who’d gotten off more murderers and crooked politicians than anybody else in the state.

  It was Blaize who said we had to do something to prove Stan’s father was innocent. I was seated at the end of a table in the lunchroom. Usually I ate with Stan, but he hadn’t come to school again today and Blaize came up with his tray, looking unusually pale and set his food down beside my own.

  “It’s for Stan’s sake,” he said. “I mean, he’s our friend.”

  I hadn’t told anybody about the argument I’d witnessed between the Chandlers.

  “I don’t know what we can do that his lawyer isn’t doing,” I said. “Besides, how do we know he didn’t do it?”

  “You don’t understand.” Blaize’s face was thin and earnest. “It’s all over school now.”