Fairbanks, Nancy

by Crime Brulee (lit)

  Crying? That didn't sound like the Philippe I had en­countered upstairs. Having heard the answer to my question, the orthodontists were staring at me suspiciously, and the manager looked smug. What were they thinking? That I had jumped off that balcony and then blamed Philippe when I survived? I myself interpreted the security man's news to mean that Philippe had locked some terrified hotel em­ployee in the closet and then escaped, which meant that he was still at large and could come after me. The thought of being thrown off another balcony or possibly fed to alliga­tors, as he had done to his sister, turned me cold with fear.

  "I don't think Dr. Delacroix seemed the type to throw anyone off a balcony," the manager murmured to Mort. "A very respectable person, that's how he struck me. However, if he did, I shall hold the Southern Orthodontists responsible for the damage to the tent."

  "He's not one of ours," Alistair protested. "You seem to have forgotten that our cake was ruined when she tore through your tent."

  Before I could argue with such a self-serving apportion­ment of blame, plainclothes detectives arrived, spotted and identified me, and asked for a statement. Having donned my raincoat to cover up the clothes provided by the hotel, I re­tired with the detectives to the manager's office for the in­terview.

  "You made the nine-eleven call, ma'am?" asked Detec­tive Dennis McCrow after inviting me to take off my rain­coat. Naturally, I refused, given the abominable suit I was wearing. Detective McCrow was a redheaded youth in his midtwenties with a face scarred, in all probability, by a seri­ous case of teenage acne. Why don't more parents avail themselves of the many treatments now available to prevent such disfigurement? Chris had been so plagued in his teens, and we promptly took him to a dermatologist. Although Chris persisted in referring to the specialist as Dr. Zit, he did cooperate in the rigorous skin-care and medication routine prescribed. Now twenty-one and acne-free, Chris has hardly a mark on his face. But poor Detective McCrow! Of course, one can't commiserate with a scarred person. One can only ignore the problem. I smiled and started to reply.

  "We need to establish her identity first," said Detective Virgie Rae Boutaire, a short, anorexic black woman with hair clipped to within an inch of her skull. She looked as if a passing breeze would blow her away, but I surmised that she was all wiry muscle, enabling her to deal with violent malefactors. At least, I hoped so. As for the haircut, it was rather startling, but I could see the advantages: coolness in hot weather, time saved in hair styling, and so forth.

  "You got a problem with mah hair?" she demanded.

  "I was thinking how pleasant it must be during hot and muggy weather."

  "You got that right," she agreed suspiciously. "Name?"

  "Carolyn Blue."

  "ID."

  Surprised, I fumbled through my handbag and produced my wallet with my Texas driver's license. Detective Boutaire took the whole wallet and called in the information on the license as well as my social security number. She had a cunning little microphone pinned to the shoulder of her jacket.

  "What are you doing?" I asked with interest. Up until this week I'd had very little to do with the police and found my­self intrigued by their work habits.

  "Checkin' your record."

  "Oh, I imagine you'll find me listed a good deal in your files," I said. "I was in several times to report a friend miss­ing and once to try to identify a body at your morgue." I had to blink back tears when I said that, because I was now rea­sonably sure that the body had been Julienne. "Also, I was accosted by a female practioner of voodoo; I was the in­tended victim of a purse snatcher; I was pushed off a pier in the swamp boat tour area, almost run off a country road; and finally, a man attempted to shoot me."

  "An' today you claim someone threw you off a balcony," Detective Boutaire finished for me. "You been havin' a real bad week." As she talked, her shoulder mike squawked at her, and she checked off the various attacks I had mentioned. "Anyone actually see any of these incidents?"

  I must admit that I was quite taken aback by her question, which seemed to imply that she thought I was making all my troubles up, including the plunge into the tent and the cake below. "They were all orchestrated by Dr. Philippe Delacroix," I replied. "With the help of someone named Claude. Philippe told me so before he threw me off his bal­cony."

  "An' why would he do that?" asked the detective.

  "Because I wouldn't stop looking for his sister, and he had pushed her off a boat in the swamp Sunday night, after which she was ... was eaten by an alligator." The thought of Julienne's fate sent a wave of nausea over me, and the two detectives, foreseeing an unpleasant event, teamed up to push my head down and advise me to breathe deeply. How­ever, that was as far as their concern went.

  "An' why would he dump his sister in a swamp?" Detec­tive Boutaire asked once I was upright again.

  "Because she wouldn't turn over her half of their mother's estate and give him back his daughter, whom she had adopted while he was in a mental institution."

  The two detectives exchanged glances of such skepticism that I was forced to review what I had just said. It did sound peculiar. "I believe that Philippe is manic-depressive, that is to say, bipolar. He was certainly manic this afternoon. He talked as if he controlled the world from his hotel room, and ... well... he threw me off the balcony because Father Claude hadn't succeeded in killing me. That's hardly the ac­tion of a sane person."

  "You say this Father Claude tried to kill you?"

  "Yes, he had a gun, but since it was plastic, I assumed, in­correctly as it happened, that his weapon was a toy. I hit his gun hand and, during the altercation, he lost his ear. Or so I assume. It was bleeding profusely when he ran away."

  "You shot a priest in the ear?" Detective McCrow asked disapprovingly.

  "I doubt that he was a priest, and, no, I didn't shoot him. The gun—"

  "The gun shot him? So you're one a them gun-control people? Guns shoot people, not people? You probably don't think citizens got a right to carry arms or hunters to—"

  "Oh, shut up, Dennis," snapped Detective Boutaire.

  "I guess you're one of those NRA people," I said angrily to Detective McCrow. "Well, for your information, I am quite unfamiliar with guns. If I belonged to the NRA, I'd have known that Father Claude was carrying a real gun. Then I wouldn't have tried to knock it out of his hand, and I'd be dead. And in answer to your first question, I am the person who called nine-eleven. The orthodontists were too busy making facetious remarks about ladies jumping in and out of cakes and trying to give me a margarita."

  "What orthodontists?" asked McCrow.

  "Can we get back to the interrogation?" Boutaire inter­rupted.

  "If that's what this is," I exclaimed indignantly, "maybe I need a lawyer."

  "Get one if you want," said Boutaire, "but we don't usu­ally bother to prosecute suicides. We might try to have you committed."

  "Me? You want to commit me? I assume you mean to a mental institution. You should be looking for Philippe. He's the one who needs help."

  "Far as we know, we found him," said McCrow. "All curled up in a corner of his closet and didn't hear a word we said to him, jus' kept sobbin' like a big baby an' sayin', 'she jumped.' Didn't seem too dangerous to me."

  "Shut up, McCrow," said his partner. "Now, ma'am, were there any witnesses to these alleged attacks on you?"

  "An' how come you're out shootin' priests?"

  "Shut up, McCrow."

  "I don' know why you keep tellin' me to shut up. Jus' be­cause Ah'm new on the squad don' mean I don' git to ask no questions."

  I took a deep, calming breath. It was hard to believe that somehow I had become the suspect after all my close calls with Philippe's minions. Or minion. For all I knew everyone who attacked me was Father Claude. "May I suggest the fol­lowing," I said, trying to sound as calm possible. "One. Check mental health records on Dr. Delacroix. He's unsta­ble and has been for years. Two. Compare DNA between the body in your morgue and Philippe. You'll find that they ar
e brother and sister. Three. Check the will of their mother, Mrs. Fannie Delacroix. That will provide you with Philippe's motive, other than insanity, for pushing his sister off the boat. He wanted all the money."

  I didn't mention Julienne's daughter having told me that and wouldn't unless I had to. The poor child didn't need to know that her uncle—no, her natural father—had killed her mother—well, adopted mother. Oh lord! It then occurred to me that Diane was the natural daughter of a man suffering from bipolarity, and that her father was fathered by a man who had probably suffered the same mental condition. The periods of silence, the wild plunge on the stock market, the car accident that might have been suicide—Maurice Delacroix had probably been bipolar just like his son Philippe. What did that say about Diane's chances of escap­ing the family curse? The situation seemed more tragic every time I thought further on it.

  With difficulty, I pulled myself together and went on. "Four. Show a picture of Philippe to Mr. Red at Red's Boat Rentals, or have Mr. Red pick Philippe out of a lineup. He rented Philippe the boat. Five. Check the fingerprints on the gun I turned over to the officers at the Vieux Carre substa­tion to see if the prints match those of a criminal named Fa­ther Claude. Six. Check Philippe's sleeves for fibers from my clothes, which are in the pool house downstairs because, Detectives, I did not jump! I changed clothes in the pool house because I was covered with cake frosting and had to—why are you laughing?"

  Both detectives were convulsed with mirth. I couldn't imagine why. I thought all my suggestions not only practical but impressively technological, perfectly in line with criminal investigation methodology I had seen on TV.

  "Lady, do you know what it costs to do DNA tests?" asked Detective Boutaire. "You think the department's gonna spring for that? It's not like we got a murder here. An' even—"

  "Julienne's been murdered," I said and began to cry again. At that moment, and much to my relief, Lieutenant Boudreaux walked in, checked us all out, and handed me a handkerchief. I was so embarrassed. I hadn't yet returned the last one.

  Then the interview started all over again. While I was getting myself together with the help of the lieutenant's handkerchief, he interviewed the two detectives, who treated him with much more deference than they had me. They didn't have that much to tell him. Philippe was in cus­tody, but he wasn't talking now, not even to say, "she jumped." As far as anyone could tell, he wasn't even hear­ing. Did that indicate deep depression, catatonia, or decep­tion? I wondered.

  Then the lieutenant interviewed me, showing every indi­cation of sympathy for my ordeal and great interest in what Philippe had told me about Julienne's death. "If we can't get him to talk, we'll have to do a DNA match on the two of them," he mused. His fellow officers looked shocked. I tried not to look smug. "Better yet, we can probably identify her by dental records."

  "Am I under suspicion?" I asked my police friend and champion.

  "No, ma'am, Ah wouldn't think so," said the lieutenant, patting my shoulder.

  "Say, she could be making the whole thing up," said Mc-Crow. "If it turns out the body is this Julienne, maybe Miz Blue pushed her off the boat an' then blamed it on that poor nut upstairs. Maybe she made up all those attacks. No one saw nothin'. We only got her word."

  "Except that the fingerprints on the Glock are Father Claude's," said the lieutenant. "Hers are only on the barrel. You can't shoot someone while you're holdin' the barrel of the gun. Anyway, the gun was stolen two years back in the robbery of a pawnshop, an' she's a professor's wife from El Paso, Texas. Not likely she was here two years ago holdin' up pawn shops, but that bastard—'scuse the language, ma'am—we got his fingerprints at crime scenes all over the Quarter. Nevah got him, not even a mug shot, but we're lookin', an' now we got a bettah handle on what he looks like. All those disguises not gonna hide the fact that he's missin' an ear, not when we catch him."

  Detective McCrow looked crestfallen that I was not guilty of killing my friend, manufacturing attacks on myself, and attempted suicide. I suppose he had believed Philippe and thought I'd been overcome by my guilty conscience and jumped. But then, even his partner, Detective Boutaire, didn't seem to value his intelligence highly. And what had Philippe meant when he said, "she jumped"? The antecedant of "she" could have been me, but it could also have been Julienne. Either way he was lying.

  "So detectives," said the lieutenant heartily, "Ah think you all bettah take yo' nutcase downtown an' see if you can get a confession out of him, an' Ah'll take charge of Miz Blue here, who's lookin' mighty peaked. She's had her a real hard week."

  Amen to that, I thought and left willingly with Lieutenant Boudreaux. When I thanked him for his kindness, he said, "Think nuthin' of it, ma'am. An' call me Al. You evah had crawfish boil an' hush puppies?"

  "I don't believe so," I replied.

  "Then Ah'm takin' you to the best place for crawfish an' hush puppies in the whole city, an' that's sayin' somethin'."

  34

  Crawfish Boil and Hush Puppies

  The lieutenant's car was parked squarely in the middle of the taxi zone in front of the hotel and guarded from ticket­ing by a uniformed officer. "They seemed to think I might be guilty of something," I said, amazed. Lieutenant Boudreaux nodded, helped me into the car, then took the wheel himself, and pulled out into very heavy traffic.

  "Most people we deal with are guilty of somethin'," he replied mildly. "They jus' din' know the background a the case."

  "But I told them."

  "Sure, but you're a civilian. Don' take offense, Miz Car­olyn. Cops get lied to so much, they come to expect it, an' Ah'm not gonna let you be arrested. So you jus' try not to think about all that bad stuff. Think about hush puppies and crawdaddies."

  But that was hard. As depression settled over me, my in­terest in food disappeared. I was sure the crawfish and hush puppies would be delicious, but I was about to ask that he take me back to my hotel when Lieutenant Boudreaux said, "Sorry fo' the loss of you friend, Miz Magnussen. Reckon we're gonna' find that's who our unidentified body is."

  I nodded. How terrible that Julienne, so beautiful and vi­vacious in life, should be lying in a drawer in a cold room, unrecognizable even to me, her best friend. "They won't let Philippe go, will they? He might hurt someone else."

  "Not from what Butaire and McCrow had to say. Man who won't move or talk, he's not likely to—"

  "He could be faking. When I was up there, he was ... he was like a ... malicious spider. He called himself a spider, luring us into his web, using that... that Claude—"

  "Claude was workin' for him? He said that?" The lieu­tenant glanced from the traffic on a narrow neighborhood street we had entered to my face and caught my nod. "Won­der what their connection is?"

  "Goodness only knows. Philippe did live here until he was almost a teenager. Maybe they knew each other from childhood."

  Boudreaux nodded. "Could be. We don' know hardly anythin' about Claude ourselves, jus' talk among criminals an' crimes we think he committed. Don' even know if that's his real name, but if Delacroix called him that, maybe we can trace them back."

  "Is he a... a... killer?"

  "He seems to do whatever comes to hand long as there's money in it."

  "Then Philippe was paying him to stalk me?"

  "Likely, unless Claude owes him favors, somethin' like that."

  He swung the police car into a bus zone near a small neighborhood grocery store that had a hand-lettered sign of­fering Best Crawfish Boil in Town—Take Home a Pound or Four. While talking, I had forgotten to ask for a ride to the hotel instead of lunch. What did the lieutenant expect me to do, stand in the aisles of the store eating crawfish with my fingers? Maybe he planned to go back to the Moonwalk, sit on a bench as we had with the muffulettas, and eat the repast. If so, I hoped the crawfish were shelled. Otherwise, we'd make a spectacle of ourselves and ruin our clothes.

  He came around and handed me out of the car and into the little store, where he was greeted with enthusiasm and jokes by the
proprietors, two short, rounded people, an Asian female and a Cajun male.

  "This here's Miz Carolyn. She's a woman had a real hard week. What she needs is some of your fine, spicy crawdads an' a bag of de-licious hush puppies, Pierre."

  Pierre swept me a bow and told me that his "crawdad-dies" were good for whatever ailed me. I doubted that, al­though the place smelled enticing. His wife, giggling girlishly behind her hand, began to scoop hush puppies from a deep pot of bubbling fat and drop them into a bag.

  The lieutenant snatched one from the bag and held it out to me. "Blow on it first so you don't burn your mouth," he cautioned.

  I felt very foolish and not a little self-conscious about blowing on a hush puppy held in the fingers of a police lieu­tenant while the lady, whose name was Yashi, beamed ma­ternally at us. However, her hush puppy was amazingly good: hot and crunchy outside, light and oniony inside. The tears came to my eyes when I thought of how Julienne would have loved this experience.

  "Why she cry, her?" asked Pierre, who had been fishing spice-encrusted crawfish from the crab boil.

  "She jus' lost a friend," said the lieutenant, who then peeled and fed me a crawfish. "Best crawdaddy you're ever likely to taste, " he announced, smiling.

  I nodded. It really was, and I wanted to ask Pierre for his recipe, but somehow I didn't have the heart because I'd never be able to pass it on to Julienne. I could imagine the conversation we'd have had. "You couldn't possibly have a better crawfish recipe than I have," Julienne would have said, and I'd have replied, "Winner has to do the rowing next summer?" The tears rolled down my cheeks at the thought that we'd never have that conversation, never go out together on the lake again on a fine summer day.

  "She still cryin', her," said Pierre.

  "Better you buy beer, too," Pierre's wife advised Lieu­tenant Boudreaux.

  The lieutenant went to inspect the beer selection. "Well now, we got Turbo Dog, Voodoo. Here we go ... How about a Dixie longneck?"