A Cajun Christmas Killing

by Ellen Byron

  Like his mother, JJ believed more was more, so he and the restaurant were resplendent with holiday decorations. Large ornaments hung from the tin-tiled ceiling, and small Christmas trees decorated each table. JJ wore a festive sequined red tunic and had clipped a sprig of holly to his hair.

  Maggie pulled up a barstool next to Gaynell. “Lia had some first trimester fatigue, so she went home,” Ione said. “What took you so long?”

  Before she could respond, Old Shari, the nonagenarian bartender, eyed Maggie and then placed a shot of bourbon in front of her. “You need this,” she declared. Maggie marveled at the ancient woman’s instincts and knocked back the shot.

  “It’s been a night,” she told her friends and filled them in on everything that had happened, from her ex-boyfriend’s sudden appearance to Bo getting decked by Harmon’s goon. She finished by recounting her strange rendezvous with Sandy.

  “It sure sounds like she has some kind of history with this Harmon man,” Gaynell said.

  “I know,” Maggie said. “She seemed almost terrified to see him.”

  “It must have been a shock for you, seeing Chris again after all this time,” Ione said. “And here of all places.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “It was.” Old Shari refilled Maggie’s shot glass and gave her a sympathetic wink. Helene Brevelle may be our town voodoo priestess, but Old Shari is definitely the Pelican cocktail psychic, a grateful Maggie thought to herself. She wasn’t ready to elaborate on her feelings about Chris’s unexpected reappearance in her life, and her friends were sensitive enough not to press for details. She assumed he would leave the next day with his boss, and she could file the experience under Life’s Little Surprises. Maggie suddenly felt a chill that countered the bar and grill’s clammy warmth. It was accompanied by a foreboding message: Never assume anything.

  The three women finished their drinks and said their good-nights. Maggie wrote off her anxiety as an aftereffect of the day’s disturbing events. But her ominous premonition was borne out when she returned home and found her mother hauling Steve Harmon’s suitcase onto Crozat’s veranda. The mogul watched as she refused his driver’s offer of help. “I want the satisfaction of throwing Mr. Harmon out myself,” Ninette said. She let go of the suitcase and gave it a shove with her small, sneakered foot. The pricey-looking bag tumbled down Crozat’s front steps.

  “You found out what Harmon’s up to, didn’t you?” Maggie asked her mother. “Uncle Tig and I have been trying to fight off his scheme to take over Preferred Properties. We didn’t want to tell you because we were afraid it would affect Dad’s health.”

  “Your father saw Uncle Tig’s address on an e-mail and thought it was for him, so he opened and read it. We know everything.” She marched down the stairs and faced off with Harmon. “I have never expelled a guest from our property, but doing so tonight has given me a great deal of satisfaction. Count your blessings that I made my husband take a sleeping pill or you’d be leaving here in an ambulance.”

  “I only stayed at Crozat to get a sense of how to monetize this place,” the multimillionaire replied. “I’ll be sending you a bill for any damage you caused to my suitcase when you drop-kicked it, and you can send the check for repairs to me at Belle Vista Plantation Resort and Spa. Come on, Dan.”

  Harmon grabbed his suitcase and got in the limo, which kicked up clouds of dust as it drove away. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot out their tires,” Ninette said.

  Maggie had never heard such a venomous tone from her kind and gracious mother.

  It scared her.

  *

  In the morning, Maggie readied herself for a day of bad acting at Doucet by applying a heavy coat of concealer to hide the bags lurking under her hazel eyes. She then pulled her thick brown hair into a ponytail that she could tuck under her Southern belle wig. As she got into her car, Marco pulled up beside her in his rental van. He hopped out and helped one of his Japanese charges from the van. Both looked exhausted. “Your mama’s cooking is so good that Akira tried to ignore the fact that he’s hypoglycemic and had a little too much dessert,” Marco told Maggie. “We spent the night at the hospital.”

  “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. Akira, I sympathize with how hard it is to resist my mother’s treats. If you need anything, let us know.” Both men nodded and yawned. They trudged toward the house, and Maggie took off for work.

  She arrived at Doucet with only a few minutes to spare. She threw on her wig and wriggled into the despised lime ball gown. “Well, hello, y’all.” Maggie greeted her first tour group with an accent thick as two-day-old gumbo and then launched into the tour’s new scripted patter. “I’m the mistress of Doucet Plantation. Welcome to my home. Did y’all bring me a gift of a pineapple? You may wonder why I ask. Well, I’ll tell you. A pineapple is a rare and exotic fruit here in the 1860s, so if you’ve brought me one, I know you are a family of wealth and pedigree. But even if you haven’t brought me one, as honored guests to my home, you’ll still be the ‘pine-apple’ of my eye.” Maggie sympathized with her visitors as they cringed at the terrible dialogue forced on her by Tannis. “Follow me, if you will.”

  Maggie spent the next twenty minutes leading her group from room to room, spewing Tannis’s clumsy mix of fact and fiction as she showed off the home’s antique doodads and ornate Victorian furnishings. The final stop on the ground floor was the men’s parlor. She noticed a long streak of water and dirt on the floor, which struck her as strange. It hadn’t been there the night before when she locked up the manor house.

  The last thing Maggie needed was a visitor slipping and getting injured, so she steered her group around the mysterious stain. Then she forced her attention back to the tour. “This is where the menfolk retire after a meal,” Maggie said as she pulled open the room’s pocket doors. “It’s where they do manly things like smoke cigars and play cards and drink whiskey. I miss my dear husband so very, very much.” Maggie laid on her accent even more and, following Tannis’s directions, added a shaky timbre to her voice to maximize the dramatic effect. “Oh, how I wish he’d return from the war.”

  A gawky teen visiting with his family chortled. “The dummy’s awesome,” he said, pointing into the room. “I like how the first thing your ‘husband’ did when he got back from the war was get wasted.”

  Puzzled, Maggie leaned into the room to see what he was talking about. A man sat slumped in a red velvet wingback chair. At first glance, she thought he was one of Tannis’s guest actors brought in to play a role in her ludicrous new format. She stepped closer and stifled a gasp.

  The man was Steve Harmon. And Maggie could tell from his waxy complexion that the ruthless businessman had done his last deal.

  Chapter Seven

  Maggie stood frozen.

  “I don’t think that’s a dummy,” an elderly woman on the tour said.

  A concerned murmur went through the group. Maggie collected herself. “Oh, boy, it looks like one of our cast members might have been the one to hit the whiskey. Which kinda makes him a dummy, doesn’t it?” She broke character and spoke in her regular voice, earning the first genuine chuckle of the tour. As she spoke, she pulled the pocket doors shut. “We’ll let him sleep it off. Anyhoo, now that we’ve completed exploring the ground floor of Doucet, why don’t we step outside for a breath of fresh air?”

  Maggie steered her group onto the veranda. She saw Gaynell, in her boy’s attire, leading a few guests up toward the house. With her was Little Earlie Waddell, editor in chief of the Penny Clipper, Pelican’s free community periodical. Ad sales were slow during the holidays, so the twentysomething was picking up extra cash by joining Doucet’s cast of characters on a part-time basis. “Why, there’s my son and his tutor,” Maggie riffed to her tour. “Excuse me for one minute.” Not wishing to alarm them, she walked rather than ran over to Gaynell and Little Earlie. “You need to take my group,” she told them in a whisper. “Something’s happened. I can’t explain right now, but make sure everybody stays out of the men’s par
lor.”

  “Okay,” Gaynell said as she and Little Earlie exchanged confused glances. They hustled the guests up the plantation home’s wide front stairs. Maggie waved to her group. “I must attend to some important plantation details,” she called to them, reverting to Southern belle mode. “Buh-bye, y’all! Enjoy the rest of your tour.”

  Maggie sauntered away. As soon as she was sure that she was out of the group’s eyeline, she dashed back to the house. She threw open the men’s parlor pocket doors and entered the room, closing the doors behind her. Maggie approached Steve Harmon’s body, careful not to disturb anything in the room, and put two fingers on his wrist dangling over the arm of the chair. She found no pulse and noticed the stain of a sticky red-brown liquid on his shirt pocket that she feared was congealed blood. She pulled her cell phone out of her décolletage and dialed 9-1-1. A dispatcher answered, and Maggie blurted out, “I need to report a male who appears to be deceased.”

  “Maggie Crozat, is that you again?” Delphine Arnaud responded. Delphine always seemed to be the dispatcher on duty when Maggie stumbled across a dead body.

  “I’m not at Crozat, Delphine,” Maggie said. “I’m at Doucet.”

  “Well, that’s different.”

  “But,” Maggie had to acknowledge, “the man in question was one of our guests.”

  “Of course he was.” Delphine sighed. “Pelican PD is on its way, as are the EMTs.”

  Maggie ended the call and left the parlor. She pulled the pocket doors shut and dragged a carved black walnut bench in front of them, blocking access to the room. Then she hiked up her hoop skirt and ran to the gift shop. Ione was restocking a Christmas tree with ornaments for sale as Tannis retrieved credit card receipts from the cash register. Maggie checked to make sure there were no customers around and then told the women, “I need to talk to you. In private.” Ione and Tannis followed her into the gift shop office. “There’s a dead man in the manor house.”

  Both women gasped. Ione crossed herself. “Who? How? What exactly—”

  Maggie held up her hand. “No time for questions. The police are on their way. They may want to talk to people . . .”

  Maggie paused. Intuition and the red stain on his shirt told her Harmon didn’t die of natural causes, but it would be irresponsible to bring that up until it was confirmed by medical professionals. “. . . because what happened is so unusual,” she continued. “Anyway, we need to round up all the visitors and staff in a way that doesn’t create some kind of panic.”

  “Oh, no,” wailed Tannis, who seemed on the verge of panic herself. “What do we do?”

  Before Maggie could respond, Ione jumped in. “We’re going to tell them a man passed away on the property and the police may want to speak to them, just pro forma. We’ll gather everyone here in the gift shop and put out the chairs we use for rental events. We’ll refund the visitors’ money and give them free tickets for another visit. And little gift bags.” She called up a list of inventory on the gift shop computer. “Let’s see . . . bookmarks, postcards, Mardi Gras beads. The car decals aren’t selling, so we can throw those in too. And something real special. I know, the Christmas ornaments shaped like bonfires. Tannis, can you think of anything else?” The manager shook her head. “I’ll put in a ‘Visit Plantation Country’ brochure. Those are wonderful. And I’ll call Burnside Plantation, explain we have a situation here, and see if they’ll honor our tickets for today. It’ll funnel people into their restaurants and gift shop, so I don’t foresee a problem.”

  Maggie marveled at her friend’s efficiency. Ione’s demotion to Tannis’s lackey was unfathomable. “I’ll message the other guides and tell them to herd everyone this way,” she said, then headed out of the office.

  “Maggie, wait,” Ione said. Her tone was somber. “Was the man anyone we know?”

  “It was someone I know. A Crozat guest.” Maggie stopped, remembering Tannis’s relationship with the late financier. Then she said, “Steve Harmon.”

  Tannis let out a shriek and started to sway. Ione grabbed her, put a hand over the manager’s mouth, and guided her to a chair. “Control yourself. You’ll scare our visitors.”

  Tannis nodded and then burst into tears. Maggie heard the whine of a police siren grow louder as a patrol car approached. “You take care of Tannis,” she told Ione. “I’ll take care of everyone else.”

  *

  Once the other guides received Maggie’s text alert, they maneuvered their groups into the gift shop, where she explained the situation. The staff was more concerned than the guests, who seemed to view a dead man and police interview as a unique vacation story to bring home along with souvenirs and laundry. They were disappointed to hear the plantation would have to close for the day due to the emergency, but any ill will dissipated when Maggie handed them each a goody bag and announced that their tickets would be honored at Burnside Plantation. As insurance, she placed a call to Lia and ordered a buffet of pastries, which thrilled the staff even more than the guests.

  As she walked back to the manor house, Maggie’s cell phone rang. She looked down and read, “Private Caller.” “Hello?” she said, a little wary.

  “Hey, it’s me. I see you didn’t change your cell number.”

  Maggie’s heart sank as she recognized the voice. “Hi, Chris. I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “Sorry, but I have a problem. I’m at St. Pierre Parish Airfield, and Steve hasn’t shown up. I know he checked out of Crozat last night, but I thought he might have gone back for some reason.”

  “I know where he is,” Maggie said, choosing her words carefully. “You need to meet me at Doucet Plantation.”

  “Your mom’s old place? Maggie, what’s going on?”

  “Just get here. I’ll give you directions.”

  “Don’t need them. I remember how to get there.”

  Maggie ended the call and rushed over to the Pelican EMTs, Cody Pugh and Regine Armitage. “This way,” she said as she led them and their gurney to the men’s parlor. Regine picked up Steve’s wrist to take his pulse, then let go of it. She looked at Cody and shook her head, confirming Maggie’s diagnosis.

  “Nothing for us to do now except turn this over to Pelican PD,” she said.

  “He was murdered, wasn’t he?” Maggie asked.

  Regine pointed to the darkening red splotch on the late mogul’s chest. “Unless a red pen burst in his shirt pocket, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance someone stuck a knife in him.”

  Maggie and the EMTs were distracted by the sound of heavy footsteps and men’s voices. Bo and acting Pelican police chief Hank Perske appeared in the room’s doorway. Bo gave Maggie a slight nod; they had learned to underplay their relationship when around the rigid, taciturn Perske. “We’ll take it from here,” Perske announced to the room.

  “He’s all yours,” Cody said as he and Regine packed up their gear.

  “Officer Belloise will take your statement,” Perske said to Maggie. “The coroner needs to determine the cause of death, which may or may not be from natural causes. Either way, it’s important to tap your memory while it’s fresh.”

  “Of course.”

  Maggie stepped outside the room, ducking under the police tape that Artie Belloise was threading across the parlor doorway. His Pelican PD partner, Cal Vichet, waved to Maggie. “Hey there, Maggie. We meet again.”

  “We meet all the time, Cal. My boyfriend works with you, plus you’re a regular at Junie’s.”

  “Well, if you know that, then you’re a regular too.”

  “True,” Maggie acknowledged.

  Artie finished blocking off the parlor and cut the tape. “All righty,” he said to Maggie. “Let’s find somewhere to talk.”

  “We can go to the employee lounge.”

  “They got any snacks there?” asked Artie, who was the chubby baseball to Cal’s lean bat.

  “Afraid not.”

  “Dang,” the officer grumped. “I like these murders better when they happen at
Crozat. Your mama’s one terrific cook.”

  “We don’t know it’s a murder,” Maggie said. Both officers gave her skeptical looks. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll start interviewing the other folk soon as I finish up here,” Cal said. “Come over when you’re done, Artie.”

  “I ordered a bunch of pastries from Fais Dough Dough for the visitors,” Maggie told Cal. “They should be there soon.”

  “And so will I,” Artie assured his partner. “Let’s get steppin’, Maggie. I see a Fais Dough Dough-nut in my future.”

  Maggie and Artie retreated to the employee lounge, where she recounted her discovery of Steve Harmon’s body. “Thinking about it, one important thing is that I didn’t see any evidence of forced entry,” she said. “I’ve opened all the doors to this place so many times, I’d notice if anything was different. And nothing was.”

  “Interesting,” Artie said. “Our techs will check, but it sure don’t sound like it was forced entry.”

  “No. Whoever did this had a key. Or made a copy of a key.”

  Maggie heard a sound coming from the bathroom. “Someone else is here,” she said and knocked on the bathroom door. No one responded. “We know you’re in there; we heard you.”

  Artie got up and pounded on the door. “Pelican PD, open up now,” he ordered.

  The bathroom door flew open, revealing Little Earlie. “I would have come out, but I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” Maggie scoffed. Little Earlie’s dream was to turn the Penny Clipper into a real newspaper, and there wasn’t a small story that he didn’t try to blow up into a big one. And if Harmon had been murdered, the story was already big.

  Artie extended his hand. “Give me your notebook.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “I’m light on collars this month. An arrest for obstruction of justice would put me right with my boss.”