EQMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Not exactly,” she said. “But I can't pay for two. I can barely support myself as it is.” A very nice complexion, he thought, though she was way too young for him.

  "Well, we need to sort this out. Who did your father make his arrangements with?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea. I was going to school at Tulane when he died. I dropped out to save the store."

  "Did he leave any books or papers behind?"

  "Sure, a whole filing cabinet full. I couldn't make any sense out of them, so I just started over."

  "I wouldn't mind taking a look at what he left. Would it be okay?"

  "What's all this to you?"

  "I'm trying to settle the dispute between Melvin and Johnny without anybody getting out of line. Just keeping the peace."

  "You're a judge?” Her look was sceptical.

  "Not on a day-to-day basis. I run the Pie Pie Club. Sometimes people come to me for advice."

  "I know where your place is, but I've never been inside. Sure, if you want you can look at the papers. They're in the cooler with the roses."

  "That's a good place to store things,” Moran said. He had also been known to hide things of importance among his plants.

  * * * *

  Max and Lana Heart were communing on the flat rooftop that crowned their club, leaning over the low brick wall and watching the evening lights of the French Quarter flicker on. They had a crow's-nest view of the river, and could see a cruise ship slowly rounding the bend into the port of New Orleans. It was being guided fore and aft by red Bisso tugboats which were churning the water into great muddy waves. Lana extracted a rhinestone comb from her red hair to let it drop lazily around her neck. The evening breezes were warm and carried the scent of salt from the Gulf of Mexico. Throwing back her head to take a deep breath of it, Lana stretched her cobalt blue cocktail dress to the limit.

  "Wouldn't you like to go on a ship sometimes?” she asked dreamily.

  "No, I like it here,” Moran said. He was sipping Dewars from a leaded crystal glass and thinking about pouring it on the head of a drunk three flights down who was taunting pedestrians with meaningless insults.

  "I mean a trip for fun, like to the Caymans or Jamaica. It would be nice to get away."

  He shrugged. Lately, anywhere but the French Quarter, Max felt strangely nervous, but he didn't want his partner to know about that.

  "Do you know Ava Shoemaker?” he asked to change the subject. “She runs a flower shop over on Dauphine."

  "No. Why?” It wasn't exactly true that Lana got jealous whenever Max mentioned another female. She had eight of the most exotic, educated, and desired women in the Southern U.S.A. in her employ downstairs, but she could usually keep tabs on their rovings. It was only when Lana heard a new name that her ears perked up.

  "Oh, just a problem Johnny Lepeyere and Melvin Dubuisson brought in,” Moran replied vaguely.

  "Lumpy Dubuisson? I once voted for his father when he ran for sheriff. Fix me a drink, Max."

  "I never heard Melvin called Lumpy.” He took her glass and moved off toward the small rooftop bar with its four tall stools.

  "I think it was when he played sports in high school at McDonough 13 or something,” she said, following him.

  The sounds of a calliope floated high above the dormers and balconies of the Quarter from a steamboat pushing out into the current.

  "Her father got drowned, you know,” Max told her. “He was pulled out of the water right about there.” Moran pointed behind him to a distant spot now awash in the wake of the cruise ship.

  "I don't remember hearing about it,” Lana said, “but I see that look in your eye."

  "What look?"

  "You're interested.” She watched his reflection in her glass.

  "It doesn't seem right,” Max said. “He used to make beautiful flower arrangements when we needed them for the club, day or night."

  "So now you want to solve his murder?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Sure.” She knew what could happen if Max got interested in something. “The girl, is she pretty?"

  "Old and ugly as a bat,” he assured her, and he shut her up by handing her a fresh glass and massaging her neck.

  * * * *

  Still, Moran wandered back to the flower shop the next day.

  Ava offered him a bunch of old ledgers and checkbooks to look through. Seated on a folding chair beside a Mary Rose, he perused these with one eye while watching her work with the other.

  Between customers, he learned that Ava had been studying zoology, with an emphasis on frogs, before she left school. It was not an avocation for which she had found a practical use. She asked Max if he had always known so much about flowers.

  "I used to have a problem with drugs,” he told her honestly. “When I gave them up, I gave myself smells as a reward. It's a mind thing."

  "Isn't everything?” she asked.

  "No. Some things are real."

  In silence, she clipped dead sprigs off a rose.

  "My father's death was real,” she said eventually. “He was in the water for three days, and the only way I could identify him was by his wedding ring. My own dad.” She was crying softly. “He was a sweet man who didn't bother people. He went to Mass at Cathedral every day and never even complained about the brass bands playing for the tourists outside."

  "That is sad,” Moran said. “Why would somebody kill him?"

  "I don't know. Maybe he saw something."

  Moran, idly flipping though the yellow papers, thought he saw something.

  * * * *

  The hoods were back.

  "I've looked into your situation,” Moran told them. “I'll make one observation, which is that it seems to me that neither one of you is performing any actual service for the Shoemaker girl."

  "Why, I sure am,” Lepeyere said. “She ain't had no trouble with any City health inspectors, has she? Big Eddie ain't been around, has he?"

  "She's got a delivery van double-parked in front of her shop every time I go past,” Dubuisson protested. “You never seen a parking ticket on it. Wonder why!"

  "Well, I don't intend to upset your traditions,” Moran said. “We've all got to make a living and the world's got to keep turning around. Melvin, the account is yours. Johnny, you're out of luck and should stay away from that particular flower shop."

  Dubuisson grinned and popped his suspenders.

  "That ain't fair!” Johnny Lepeyere shouted, half rising from his chair. “Give me one simple reason why you're taking his word over mine!” Moran gave him his fish stare, and Lepeyere settled back into his seat.

  "The simple reason, Johnny, is that the girl's father always paid Melvin's father. I know this because the ledgers say so."

  He handed Lepeyere a piece of paper. “Right below where it says ‘Flower Pots, $80,’ it says, ‘Lump, $100.’ Am I right?"

  "Yeah?” Lepeyere agreed.

  "That's my pop, and they call me Lumpy, too,” Dubuisson cried happily. “And one hundred dollars a week is just about right."

  "So it seems to me,” Moran concluded, “the Shoemakers are in Melvin's parish, so to speak."

  Much satisfied, Dubuisson jumped up and shook Moran's hand vigorously.

  "That ain't exactly proof!” Lepeyere shouted. “'Lump’ could mean crabmeat. It could mean anything."

  Moran shook his fingers free. “I say it's proof, and that will end the disagreement. And somebody killed her old man, you know. It wasn't you, Johnny, was it?"

  "Of course not.” Lepeyere was on his feet, too.

  "Wasn't me, either,” Dubuisson chimed in, but Max ignored him.

  "Well, I've taken an interest in her and what happened to her old man. You understand me, Johnny?"

  Lepeyere glared back at Moran, but then remembered himself and doused the fire in his eyes.

  "You're barking up the wrong lamppost, Mr. Max, but you have my respect, as always.” He bobbed his head one-fourth of an inch, the hint of a bow.


  "Help yourselves to a drink at the bar on your way out,” Moran said, showing them the door. “It's on the house."

  He watched them walk down the hallway. They both seemed to be in a hurry to get away and skipped the drink.

  There was something about the Shoemaker girl Moran liked. It wasn't right, killing a man who made flower arrangements for a living, who sent wreaths to Max Moran. He would see about it. Old Oscar's papers held other clues.

  And one of them was an entry near the end that said, “Delivery to Witch's Hat, 8 P.M.” The Witch was as close to the river as you could get without getting wet, and Johnny Lepeyere, well ... It was something to think about. What might Oscar have seen?

  Copyright © 2006 Tony Dunbar

  NO NEUTRAL GROUND by Sarah Shankman

  The author of the Samantha Adams mystery series as well as the Louisiana-based novel Keep-ing Secrets, Sarah Shankman grew up in small-town north-eastern Louisiana—what she calls the no-dancing, no-drink-ing, no-fun part of the state. “I treasure my time in NOLA in the late ‘60s,” she says, “as part of the founding staff of New Orleans magazine.” She visits the city often, and is at work on a kids’ adventure novel.

  Diana stood, distracted—furious, actually—on the St. Charles neutral ground. A late spring afternoon, the rain was pouring on that grassy median strip down the middle of the boulevard where the streetcars run.

  It wasn't like Diana to let her emotions get the best of her. The chair of the English Department of the university just across the way, Diana Banks was a focused woman. An extremely busy focused woman. On her plate: a creative writing seminar, the deadline looming for a collection of her own short stories, endless committee meetings, and a department contentious as the Balkans.

  The peacekeeping was particularly wearisome. Just this afternoon, even before the incident that had moved her to rage, Diana had said to her friend Abby, “Cristabel is having another nervous breakdown. Peter's complaining that Marcus isn't pulling his load on the honors issue. And Gloria and Phil are at it again, duking it out on the hiring committee."

  "As if hiring itself weren't demanding enough, right here at term's end,” Abby, a university research librarian, commiserated.

  "I know. We've got to make a decision this week on the new instructor. And snipe, snipe, snipe, that's all Gloria's done since Phil won the editorship of the journal. I wish she'd just go ahead and slash his tires, get it out of her system."

  Diana had called to see if Abby could give her a ride to pick up her car from the repair shop. Her friend couldn't, but while Diana had her ear, why not vent a little?

  Abby had laughed. “Well, you know what they say about academe."

  "The politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low? And we're locked together forever, like lifers with no parole."

  "Tell me about it. Despite the pain of hiring, if it weren't for the occasional new blood, I think I'd shoot my brains out. Speaking of which, did you see the new men's baseball coach? A dead ringer for the young George Clooney. Hubba hubba."

  "You're a naughty woman, Abigail Markson. I'm telling Steve on you."

  "How do you think we've stayed married twenty-six years? It's my dirty mind that keeps Steve panting."

  But Diana hadn't heard Abby's answer. Her friend's hubba hubba had taken her elsewhere.

  Taken her to thoughts of Rob, an adjunct in her own department and one of the candidates for the full-time position. The candidate she was rooting for. No, amend that. The candidate Diana was set on hiring, come hell or high water.

  Rob, Rob, Rob, that's where Diana's mind was now, while her body stood in the downpour, waiting for the streetcar. Behind her sprawled Audubon Park, its green lawns puddling, mighty spreading oaks spectral through the mist.

  "The bod of a thirty-year-old,” Rob had whispered to Diana more than once, the sweet words more intoxicating than the small crystal pitcher of Sazerac that had become part of their pre-loving pas de deux.

  Clever man, Rob.

  What words could a woman hovering on the cusp of fifty more want to hear?

  Now, from behind her, from Riverbend, Diana heard the hum of the streetcar approaching. Here it came, rain pelting off the top of the olive-green electric car from the 1920s trimmed with reddish mahogany. She climbed on impatiently, her black mood not improved by the dripping gaggle of tourists, the handful of laughing students.

  Thank God, there on the river side of the car was a pair of empty seats. Diana piled her things in the aisle seat to discourage takers. She turned, then frowned at her reflection in the window, her brunette curls gone to frizz.

  "Sexy, sexy hair” was another endearment Rob had murmured more than once, loosing it from the barrettes keeping it out of her face. Keeping it more professional.

  Certainly no paean to her intellect had ever flipped the same switch as Rob's honeyed pillow talk about her looks. Not for Diana, who'd been told since girlhood how smart she was.

  "This little girl of mine's gonna be a lawyer, you mark my words,” her daddy had said more than once. At seventy-five, he was finally retiring this year, crowned in glory, sheriff of the rural parish in the northern part of the state where she'd grown up. “Gonna be a lawyer and world-class skeet shooter."

  Her mother had given him a hard look when he'd talked like that. Smart girls, lawyers, didn't find husbands, and she'd never approved of his dragging their only child along with the dogs and the guns on hunting expeditions. Though Diana had been a pudgy child, her teeth a train wreck, so what were her chances of a decent husband anyway?

  But braces had fixed Diana's smile, and she'd grown out of the pudge into a rather attractive woman. When she'd returned south from Boston with a shiny new Ph.D. in hand, the engagement ring she'd sported was even more dazzling.

  "How long were you married?” Rob had asked her on their second date, about six months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.

  Their second surreptitious date. Dinner at a place out by the lake where no one ever went anymore.

  Diana closed her eyes and settled into the streetcar's mahogany slotted seat, rainwater dripping off her cherry-red raincoat. Audubon Park disappeared, and a bit of her anger, too, as she let the memory of that evening wash over her.

  It wasn't really the done thing, a department chair dating an adjunct, one of that roving band of academic gypsies who subsisted by stringing together a class at one college here, another there, praying for full-time faculty to retire or die so a real job, with benefits and decent pay, would open up.

  Also, Rob was twelve years her junior. Boy toy. Diana could just see the smirks.

  "Honey, I was divorced before you were born,” she'd laughed, that second date.

  "Awh, come on.” Rob had laid his slow grin on her. Cocked one eyebrow beneath dark golden locks.

  He was a near dead ringer for Harry Connick, Jr., that lean, languorous home-grown crooner, that hunka hunka burnin’ love. Rob had then tapped her hand with one long finger, his touch like heat lightning.

  * * * *

  Now the streetcar was passing Temple Sinai, a simple stone building with three tall iron doors. Diana never passed the temple without smiling at the memory of David Markson, Abby and Steve's son, manfully delivering his bar mitzvah speech from the bema with not a hint of the stutter that had tortured his childhood. He was an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon now, doing a post-doc. Diana couldn't be prouder of David.

  She had no children of her own.

  She often said that her students were her children. Not the same, of course, but she did invest enormous passion and energy in them. Something very much like love.

  "Nawh, really, tell me,” Rob had insisted. “How long did that lucky man enjoy the supreme pleasure of your company?” Exaggerating his south Alabama drawl.

  Sharecroppers, he'd said, his people. Po’ whites. Diana wasn't so sure that that was true, but it fit Rob's bad-boy image. The slightly dangerous English instructor/bartender/writer. He was working on a noir screenplay. L.A. C
onfidential meets The Big Easy.

  Diana had been writing a collection of short stories for a couple of years now, stories linked by various characters’ connections to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, just around the corner from her house.

  "And how could that fool stand to give you up?” Rob kept pushing. “Or did he die of consumption or somethin'?"

  No, that wasn't what happened to Richard, the smart-as-a-whip, thin-as-a-whippet, handsome young Jewish dentist she'd met in grad school in Cambridge. Richard had always thought New Orleans was “ever so romantic” and had been thrilled to pieces when the university had tendered Diana a position.

  He'd also been thrilled with the house they'd found in the heart of the Garden District, on Fourth near Coliseum.

  He'd been thrilled with fixing it up, spending endless hours in antiques and junk stores on Magazine Street. Talking fabrics and color chips with designers. Meeting with armies of landscapers, gardeners, painters, plasterers.

  What hadn't thrilled Richard was Diana's snuggling close to him after they switched off the ever-so-charming lamps he'd chosen for their ever-so-handsome bedside tables. He was the only man Diana had ever lived with, so it had taken her a long while to realize that she wasn't the problem.

  She'd been crushed, then furious, and, ultimately, humiliated when Richard, and the truth, finally came out.

  "Three years,” she'd answered Rob, letting him lead her onto the dance floor of the place out by the lake where nobody went anymore. Nobody she knew, anyway. “We were married three years from start to finish."

  Diana loved to dance. She and Richard had been like Fred and Ginger on the dance floor, one of the ways, she'd realized later, he'd seduced her into marrying him.

  And why? Now there was a mystery. Richard had said he'd loved her, truly, deeply loved her, but—

  It was a big but.

  She'd been talking about Richard earlier today in her creative-writing seminar. Obliquely, of course.

  Revenge was the theme she'd assigned the class for their next stories, and they'd spent nearly an hour discussing that primal urge: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  One girl recounted her humiliation by a bully at summer camp, and how she'd stolen the bully's diary and photocopied the juiciest pages, then turned them into mess-hall placemats.