Fairbanks, Nancy

by Crime Brulee (lit)

  'Torelli isn't her lover," I snapped.

  "When did he see her?" the sergeant asked with a smirk.

  "After she left the dinner party," I replied unwillingly, hoping I wouldn't have to enlarge on that.

  "And now Torelli's made an unexplained trip to Sweden, on which my wife undoubtedly accompanied him," said Nils bitterly. "Or maybe that's what he told his chair, and they've gone somewhere else together."

  "His chairman is here in New Orleans. Torelli told some­one else, who told the dean of science," I corrected. "And Julienne did not—"

  The sergeant had closed his notebook. "We don't go lookin' for no folks who's run off with lovers an' such.”

  “She hasn't—" I started to protest.

  "No problem checkin' that out," a voice from behind in­terrupted.

  I turned, and there was Lieutenant Boudreaux. I fear that my relief at his appearance was only too obvious, for Nils inspected him closely as the lieutenant told the sergeant that he would take over the interview and ushered me solici­tously into his office. Nils trailed behind. Only when we were seated was I able to introduce him to Alphonse Boudreaux.

  "Well now," said the lieutenant. "The missin' husband."

  "I'm not missing," snapped Nils defensively.

  "Took you long enough to report your wife among the missin'," said Boudreaux dryly. "This lady's been frettin' all week 'bout Miz Magnussen. Don' seem you have."

  "I'm not happy that my wife ran off with another man, but I don't know of any law that prevents her from doing so." Nils's tone was downright starchy.

  "Easy to check out." The lieutenant took down Julienne's name and what passport information Nils could supply after he agreed that she did have a valid passport, the information on Linus Torelli, the probable city of departure, and the probable destination. Then he made a call. To Customs or Immigration or whoever checks passports. "Computers sure have eased our burden, us in law enforcement," he observed as he waited, phone to ear, smiling companionably at me. "How you doin', Miz Carolyn?"

  "Very well, thank you, Lieutenant," I replied. Given the expression on Nils's face, I could only wish that I had been addressed as Miz Blue instead of Miz Carolyn. I didn't want any false impressions of my relationship with the lieutenant circulating in the academic community, although it occurred to me that Nils would love to tell Jason that I had an admirer in the New Orleans Police Department. Did I? Quickly, I put that thought aside.

  "Been doin' any more sleuthin'?" the lieutenant asked amiably. "Hope you haven' run into any more local crime waves."

  "Not today," I replied.

  "Uh-huh. Uh-huh," said the lieutenant into the telephone. "Much obliged." He hung up and turned to Nils. "Dr. Linus Torelli's sure 'nuff left for Sweden, but yo' wife hasn't left the country, sir, so maybe we bettah be worryin' 'bout where-all she might be. When did you last see yo' lady, Pro­fessor?"

  Nils sputtered and flushed. "Am I suspected of some­thing?" he demanded angrily.

  "Harm comes to a lady, husbands an' lovers are first on the list of suspects," the lieutenant replied. "So why don't you be cooperative an' answer man question, sir."

  Nils glared at me and replied, "The same time Carolyn saw her, when she stormed out of the dinner party Saturday night."

  "An' why did she storm out, as you say?"

  "We had words," Nils muttered.

  "About what?"

  "I don't know," Nils said, looking unhappy. "We're al­ways having words about something lately,"

  "About the fella you say's her lover?"

  "We didn't talk about that—not Saturday night, anyway," Nils replied in an almost inaudible voice.

  "You did once she'd left," I added.

  "But Miz Magnussen—she knows that's what you think?" the lieutenant pressed.

  "Yes," Nils admitted.

  "So what did you have words about?"

  "Her dress," I replied since Nils either wouldn't say or re­ally didn't remember. "He intimated that it was—improper. Actually, she looked lovely. And her decision to send their daughter to a private school. Nils said she was an indifferent mother, which is nonsense. Diane is a student at a very pres­tigious prep school in the East."

  The lieutenant nodded. He was making notes. "We'll put out an APB on her an' send all the information to Missing Persons. Since she was last seen in mah district, Ah'll have mah men askin' questions on the streets."

  "Thank you," I said, and believe me, my thanks were heartfelt. Maybe now, at last, Julienne would be found. A shiver went up my spine because I was so afraid that she wouldn't be found alive, that someone—some criminal, the missing Torelli, or even Nils—might have hurt or killed her. But I just couldn't let myself consider that terrible possibil­ity. Julienne was the best, dearest friend I'd ever had, and I couldn't imagine life without our phone calls and E-mails and occasional meetings. I just couldn't.

  "Bitch," Nils snarled at me as we exited the station. Hav­ing expressed his anger at a woman he must be holding re­sponsible for the lieutenant's suspicions, Nils turned and strode away from me. I was stunned. I don't think anyone has ever called me that, certainly not anyone I've known for years. Of course, there was the purse snatcher. I recalled that he had called me a bitch. A stupid bitch, I believe, although one needn't be concerned with the opinions of criminals. And then there are motorists. Who knows what other mo­torists call one in the heat of that new bane of society, road rage? Sadly, I turned toward the hotel. I don't know where Nils was headed, but it wasn't there.

  23

  Chocolate Cake and Red Wine

  AS I stood in front of the police station contemplating Nils's unpleasant farewell, the memory of my dream came back. I was now glad that I hadn't mentioned it to the lieu­tenant. He was obviously a man who would put more faith in messages from the INS than those from the subcon­scious. In my dream Julienne had rescued me from a boat in the swamp. Did that mean she had gone there by her­self? Or that someone had taken her there? And if so, who?

  I went back into the station and asked to use their tele­phone. The desk officer refused and directed me to a pub­lic telephone, from which I called Philippe's room once more. He still wasn't answering. Could he and Julienne be in the swamp together? Philippe had been a fisherman once, morose but often successful. I personally hadn't wanted to share a boat with him because he never said anything and often didn't answer when spoken to. De­pression, no doubt. So why didn't he take one of the many prescription drugs that relieved depression? His chairman had said, as an aside, something about Philippe's not being suited to the private practice of medicine. Small wonder. Who would want a doctor who neither spoke nor answered questions?

  I tried to imagine being the patient of a silent doctor, one who conducted an examination, wrote a prescription, and walked out. That wouldn't be a successful approach to sick people. When you were telling Philippe your symptoms, you'd never be sure that he was listening. I can remember Julienne warning him that there was a black widow spider on his shirt collar. He never replied. Of course, there was no spider, but that was beside the point. Any normal person would have looked.

  And how did he teach his classes if he didn't speak? Obviously, he now condescended to say something. Maybe depression allowed one to lecture but not to answer ques­tions.

  "You lost, ma'am?"

  Good heavens! A helpful New Orleans policeman, other than Lieutenant Boudreaux. How long had I been standing by the telephone neither using it nor leaving? "Where can I find a car rental agency, officer?" I asked, pleased to have been approached by someone who might know.

  He gave me a lecture on hogging public telephones, then directions to a Hertz office, where I rented a car with no trouble. All one needed was a valid license and a credit card. I fear that having completed my transaction, I took up more than my fair share of time with the personnel, for I also needed maps, directions, and photocopies of the yellow pages that listed boat rental facilities. A short, stocky man waiting in the office became im
pa­tient and left, much to the dismay of the clerk who had been helping me, albeit somewhat impatiently, when I showed no aptitude for map reading and little confidence in my ability to drive their car to any given destination. Perhaps the clerk's attitude indicated a gloomy presenti­ment that I would wreck their red Ford Escort rather than irritation over the loss of a potential customer. Have you ever wondered why so many rental cars are red? Is it to warn locals that tourists are wandering the roads, lost and befuddled?

  At any rate, I set off in my rental car and promptly became lost, not an unusual occurrence for me. I had to make inquiries of several policemen. Some were in cars that pulled up beside me and asked why I was looking at a map instead of crossing on green. Some were on foot. One was on a motorcycle and every bit as sarcastic as the police cy­clist I had asked for a ride to the convention center. And the last was directing traffic at an intersection jammed with drivers attempting to visit the drive-in daiquiri establish­ment.

  That incident gave me pause. I did not find it reassuring to think that I was sharing the streets with motorists imbib­ing daiquiris; the policeman did not find it reassuring that I had got into the daiquiri line by mistake.

  Ah, well. Finally, I reached the first boat rental facility. And the second. And the third. I lost count. No one had rented a boat for night fishing or photography to a woman matching Julienne's description, not on Sunday night or any recent night. Or to a man accompanied by a woman. I was driving along a barely paved road in a light rain, heading for the last place on my list, when I saw, in my rearview mirror, a dusty pickup truck roaring toward my rear bumper. Alarmed, I edged my rental car over a bit toward the shoul­der, but not too far because I could see, in my peripheral vi­sion, black water among the weeds.

  The truck, revving its engine, pulled out to pass, and on a narrow, two-lane road! The driver must have been some mad-yokel type. Or perhaps he was drunk. I glanced ner­vously to the left and noticed, to my horror, that his truck was only inches from my front bumper and closing in. My heart accelerated madly as I cut the wheel sharply to the right and—the gods must have been with me that day—onto a rutted dirt road. As my car slewed in mud, I caught just a glimpse of a long-billed cap obscuring the head of the mad­man at the wheel of the pickup.

  Then he was gone, and I was occupied with trying to keep my vehicle from flying off first one side of the miser­able road, then the other. Because my wheels were sliding in the mud, I dared not brake, so I took my foot off the gas and steered, ultimately bumping to a stop in front of—I could hardly believe it!—the very boating establishment I had been seeking. Were it not for the drunk in the pickup truck, I would surely have missed the turnoff to the only place where I got so much as a nibble.

  Shaking like an aspen leaf in a fall wind, I killed the en­gine and leaned my head on the steering wheel for a mo­ment. Never have I experienced so frightening a near accident. When I looked up, somewhat recovered, I saw the unshaven owner of a rickety pier that had no boats tied to it. He was leaning against the frame of his door as he smoked a very odoriferous brown cigarette. I had to breathe through my mouth when I approached him. Then, before I could say a word, he asked what I thought I was doing, speeding my fancy red car on his private road. If he thought an Escort was fancy, what did he drive?

  "I was almost run off the highway—" I waved vaguely in the direction from which I had come. "—by a madman in a pickup."

  "Comin' which way?" he asked.

  "I turned right into your road."

  "Lucky for you, lady, you wasn' run off into dat dere slough along da highway. It's deep, dat one. You'd been breathin' mud by now, you drove into dere."

  "Then I was fortunate indeed," I answered in a weak voice. "Doubly fortunate because I believe your establish­ment is the very place I am looking for."

  "Won't do you no good. Catfish is bitin', an' Ah ain' got a single boat left for hire."

  I speculated that savvy locals must think fish are put off their guard by rain. Had I been a catfish, I would have as­sumed that no sensible fisherman would be tooling around the swamp in an open boat on a rainy day. I certainly wasn't happy about being rained on. I had to go back to the car for my umbrella since the man in the doorway did not step aside to let me in. There wasn't even an overhang on his porch to protect visitor or inhabitant. His undershirt and the raggedy plaid shirt over it, not to mention his stained canvas pants, were getting wet. He didn't have to worry about his shoes because he was barefooted.

  I returned with my new umbrella to inquire about recent rentals. (I had given in to necessity and purchased a new one to replace the one damaged against the purse-snatching mugger's head.)

  "You don' wanna rent a boat, you?" he asked, evidently disgusted.

  "You don't have any to rent," I retorted. "You just told me that."

  Accepting the truth of my observation, he simmered down and answered my questions, ending every sentence with a pronoun. What an interesting speech pattern. Had it evolved from the French spoken by the original Arcadian immigrants to the swamps? I didn't recall any such sen­tence structure from high school French classes or from the bit of conversational French I had picked up from Julienne and her family. Of course, they weren't Cajuns; they were Creoles.

  What I found out from the soggy boat owner was that he had indeed rented a boat to a man who wanted to do some night fishing. This was on Sunday.

  "Was he accompanied by a lady?" I asked eagerly.

  The owner rolled a second cigarette, lit it from the first, which had dangled from his mouth during the rolling, lick­ing, pinching process—quite a feat, I thought—and then he shrugged. "Coulda been."

  In other words, he hadn't seen Julienne.

  "What was your customer's name?"

  The owner didn't remember. He didn't take credit cards, so he had no record, and he didn't worry about customers stealing his boats, because why would anyone want one and where would they go with it that some friend or cousin of his wouldn't see the boat, know it was missing, and reclaim it for him.

  "Did your customer return the boat?" I asked.

  He hadn't seen the return, that having occurred sometime between ten and dawn, but he'd rented that same boat out this morning to a man hungry for a mess of catfish.

  "What did the man look like?" I asked patiently.

  "Ray Ralph? Ray Ralph got him a glass eye an'—"

  "So you do know the name of the man who rented your boat Sunday night?" I doubted that Julienne would have been with glass-eyed Ray Ralph.

  "Ray Ralph Otis dun rented mah boat dis morning."

  I sighed. "What did the man who rented it Sunday night look like?"

  He stared at me suspiciously. "You a cop, you?" Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Naw, you ain't no cop. Why you care—"

  "I'm looking for a friend of mine."

  "What yo' friend look like?"

  Patiently, I described Julienne. He pointed out that the Sunday renter had been a man, not a woman, and he didn't remember what the man looked like, just that he had cash money and wanted to rent fishing equipment as well. I showed him the pictures. He didn't recognize anyone. Then the roll-his-own entrepreneur closed the door in my face because, as he pointed out, "wrastlin'" was coming on TV, and he had a mess of gumbo in the pot calling him to lunch.

  I could smell the gumbo and, being very hungry my­self, decided that it would make an interesting chapter for my book if I survived the experience. Cajun boatman gumbo. Did he use catfish in it? However, that plan was not to materialize. He didn't answer when I knocked on his door again. Maybe it was just as well. He really had looked to be a disreputable character. Jason would have been horrified to think I'd invited myself to lunch with such a man.

  As I drove back to town, the rain abated, and I let my imagination linger over the little information I had collected.

  A man had rented a boat, using cash, before midnight Sun­day and returned it before dawn Monday. It could have been Linus Torelli, the che
mist who had reputedly disappeared into the cold wastes of Sweden (actually, he was probably in Stockholm, but I didn't know that). Torelli had claimed that Julienne left his room in a huff because he wouldn't take her into the swamp, but he could have lied, either because some­thing had happened to her there or because she had him drop her off somewhere and swear not to tell where she was. He might even still be in New Orleans, registered at some other hotel under an assumed name, although why he would—oh well, that was a useless avenue of speculation, and Lieu­tenant Boudreaux's sources said that Torelli had gone to Sweden.

  It could have been Nils under the same circumstances, but I couldn't imagine why he wouldn't then admit that he knew where she was. After all, he'd finally reported her missing just this morning. And I suppose it could have been her brother. Maybe he was still in town because he had promised to rent another boat and pick her up from wher­ever she was hiding out. It might even have been Julienne, disguised as a man, who rented the boat, but then who had returned it? And if she had, where was she now? Not in Sweden. That's all I knew.

  I imagined her meeting her brother, perhaps in a rented car, their going somewhere to talk about their mother's will, Philippe agreeing that he'd been out of line to think that everything should be his. "The silver? The china? Do you want those, too, Philippe?" she'd ask teasingly, and he'd have to laugh. Did Philippe ever laugh? How could he help it, at least occasionally, when he had a sister like Julienne, who could coax laughter from a statue?

  They'd stop somewhere and have gumbo, which they had both loved since childhood, recall events from their early life in New Orleans, perhaps reminisce about trips to the lake cabin in Michigan. Did Philippe remember those summers with fondness? Then Julienne would say, "Philippe, let's go fishing again the way we used to. Re­member going to the swamp with Papa? I'll take pictures, and you catch us some catfish. We'll find a place to cook them up in the morning," and Philippe would smile and agree. And off they'd go, out of the city, stomachs full of gumbo, minds filled with happy memories, traveling bumpy roads they'd taken in childhood until they came to that shack and rickety pier that belonged to the roll-your-own man. I should have asked Mr. Red (his sign said Red's Boats/Cash Only) whether he knew the late Mr. Delacroix. He might have been a fishing buddy or guide of their fa­ther's when he was a younger, less scruffy-looking version of himself.