Men Made in America Mega-Bundle

by Gayle Wilson, Marie Ferrarella, Jennifer Greene, Annette Broadrick, Judith Arnold, Rita Herron, Anne Stuart, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Bevarly, Patricia Rosemoor, Emilie Richards

  Sam had to be told. Antoinette couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen the truth, that none of them had seen the truth. Sam, protective and loyal to those he loved, however, would never consider his cousin a suspect. Just as he couldn’t see that Martin’s anger was eating away at his sanity, he couldn’t see that his cousin was capable of taking revenge on the company that, in Martin’s opinion, was destroying a way of life.

  Sam would have to believe it now. The evidence was frighteningly clear. Martin fit her profile. He had the motive. He had the skill. And here, stacked neatly in front of her, he had the weapon.

  Her heart rate accelerated, and her hands began to shake. She had to get to a telephone and call Sam before something else happened. She couldn’t wait until she returned to New Orleans. Sam had to be told right away. The closest phone was Didi’s. She would call Sam from there, and then she would leave. There was nothing she could do anymore. Sam would have to take care of this situation by himself, and she was sure he would rather take care of it without her.

  She was also aware that she was in danger. If Martin was still nearby, he would know that she’d been inside the boathouse. With danger quickening her thoughts, she remembered that both locks had been unsnapped. No one had been expected, but she imagined that, if Martin had planned to be away for long, he would have locked them tight. He could return momentarily, and at this point there was no telling what he would do if he found her there. Didi had been right all along. Martin was much, much sicker than any of them had seen.

  A tiny noise behind her increased her heart rate until it was pounding like the hooves of a runaway horse. It had been nothing more than the faintest whisper of sound, but every one of her faculties, magnified by a huge surge of adrenaline, was working overtime. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have even heard it. Now she knew for certain that she was no longer alone.

  She turned, an act that took more courage than anything she had ever done in her life. In the darkness of the boathouse, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her for a moment. The man standing in the doorway was shorter than Martin and heavier. Then relief flooded through her, making her knees turn to Jell-O.

  “My God,” she said, her eyelids dropping shut and her hand coming to her chest to cover her heart. “Leonce. You have no idea how happy I am to see you.”

  Chapter 15

  “What are you doin’ here, ’Toinette?” Leonce’s face was stern, and Antoinette knew he didn’t appreciate what surely looked like snooping, what surely was snooping.

  “I came to find your father. I wanted to talk to him about Martin.” She felt such a wave of remorse at having to be the one to tell Leonce about his brother that she stopped for a moment, trying to find the words. “Martin’s in serious trouble, Leonce,” she said finally. She stepped aside and gestured behind her to the closet filled with dynamite. “Martin’s the Omega Oil arsonist.” She watched Leonce’s face, but not a flicker of expression showed on it.

  “You shouldn’t be here. No one told you to come and start messin’ around in our lives.”

  She was surprised by his reaction, but the surprise was slowly turning into something else. She would have expected Leonce to be upset at what she’d found; she would never have expected this cold anger directed at her. “Leonce, I came at Didi’s invitation.”

  At the mention of his wife’s name, Leonce shook his head, his face still carefully expressionless. “You shoulda minded your business, ’Toinette. You shoulda.”

  “I know you’re upset. I don’t blame you. But we can’t change the truth. Martin’s in deep trouble, and you have to help me stop him before the trouble gets so bad he’ll never be able to get out of it.” For one moment Antoinette watched Leonce wrestle with her statement. Then his face changed back into a mask.

  “I can’t help you.”

  She couldn’t believe that Leonce’s loyalty to his brother was making him so blind. What was it about this family that they couldn’t see the truth when it was neatly stacked in wooden crates in front of them? “What are you going to do, then?” she asked in frustration. “Throw me in the bayou so I can’t tell anyone, either? Think, Leonce. Martin could get himself killed. He could end up in jail for the rest of his life. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “Leonce?”

  Antoinette watched a shadow deepen behind Leonce. She had jumped at the sound of another voice. Now she stared at the man standing behind him. He was tall and freckled, with a brown crew cut and eyes as cold as a bayou winter.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “She’s a friend of my cousin Sam’s. The policeman,” Leonce added for emphasis, never taking his eyes from Antoinette’s face. “She knows.”

  “Damn it to hell, this was supposed to be a safe place! You said nobody ever came out here except your father and brother.”

  “I know what I said.”

  Antoinette felt her body flood with fear again. “Leonce?”

  “Shut up,” the man with the crew cut snapped at her.

  “What’s going on?” A third man came up behind the other two and stared over their shoulders, his eyes narrowing behind wire-rimmed spectacles. “Damn, a woman.”

  “It’s been bad enough wondering if your father or brother were going to catch on and open this closet last night after we put the dynamite in,” the man with the crew cut said, “but now we’re stuck with this. You know she’s going to have to go,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Antoinette knew he wasn’t talking about a pleasant walk back to her car and a leisurely trip home. He was talking about murder. She refused to let them see how the words affected her. “So it was you and not Martin,” she said calmly to Leonce. “That thought never entered my mind.”

  “Shut up!” the man with the crew cut snarled again.

  “But it will enter Sam’s mind when I don’t show up in New Orleans this afternoon,” she went on, praying that Leonce didn’t know that she and Sam were no longer seeing each other. “He’ll come looking for me, and he’ll be suspicious if I’ve just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Leonce had never resembled his brother more. His expression was a scowl, his eyes haunted. “Sam would come,” he agreed. “If he knew you was here, he’d come.”

  “We’re having dinner together tonight,” she lied.

  “We’ll have to arrange an accident, then,” the man with the spectacles concluded.

  “No.” Leonce was adamant. “No killin’. We agreed.”

  “Everything’s changed.” The man with the crew cut pushed past Leonce and stood, hands on hips, observing Antoinette. “Too bad, too.”

  Antoinette wasn’t sure how it happened, but a split second later Leonce was in front of the other men again and the situation seemed to be firmly in his control. “No killin’. Anyone lays a hand on ’Toinette, they gonna have to kill me first. And killin’ me might not be a good idea because it would lead right back to you two.”

  “What do you plan to do with her, then?”

  Leonce appeared to be wondering the same thing. Finally the man with the crew cut spoke again. “There’s a place in the water right off the bayou road that’s real deep. Lew, you can drive her car to the edge and push it in so it looks like she left here.”

  “With her in it?” Lew, the man with the spectacles, asked.

  Leonce answered. “I tol’ you. Nobody gits killed. We’ll take ’Toinette with us, leave her on one of those cheniers down in the marshes on the back way to the rig. Somebody’ll find her next day or so.”

  Lew and the man with the crew cut looked at each other and nodded. Antoinette could see what was going through their heads. The spot they’d choose would be hopelessly remote. They fully expected her to die there. Or perhaps they would come back for her. Without Leonce.

  “Leonce,” she pleaded, “just give yourself up before you get into so much trouble you’ll never be able to get out of it.”

  “I’m in that kinda trouble now,” he said sorrowfully. “T
his is the last thing we’re gonna do. After this we’re gonna git out of this place forever.”

  “What about Didi? What about your baby?”

  “Better off without me.”

  “No, Leonce, you’re wrong. You can still get out of this. Sam will help. I know you, you didn’t start any of those fires yourself. You can turn state’s evidence. You’re the one who saved the little girl’s life, aren’t you? That’ll sway any jury.”

  “She’s not dumb, is she?” the man with the crew cut said admiringly. “But, honey, you’re wrong about one thing. There ain’t no way that Leonce here won’t take his share of the rap if we’re caught. That’s the way the system works, and your friend here knows it.”

  “He’s wrong!” Antoinette’s eyes begged Leonce to believe her. “Don’t get in any deeper.”

  “We’re due to leave in twenty minutes,” Lew told Leonce. “If we’re going to get rid of her car, I’d better do it right now.”

  Leonce pulled a bandanna out of his jeans pocket and walked toward Antoinette. “You shoulda stayed out of this, ’Toinette,” he said sorrowfully. “Omega’s a bad company. They worked us till we dropped, left a crew of men to die in that hurricane, shut down the marsh and now they’re shuttin’ down the rigs because oil prices went down. Didi don’t know it, but I haven’t worked for weeks. Lew and Jerry haven’t worked for months.”

  “That’s no reason to kill people.” She tried to reason with him.

  “No one was supposed to git killed. Lew and Jerry, they wanted to teach ’em a lesson.” He was one step away. “No one was even supposed to git hurt.” His arms circled Antoinette in an embrace that was sadly affectionate. Then he lifted the bandanna to her mouth. “Sa me fait de la pain. C’est ein affaire a pus finir.”

  Antoinette still wasn’t home. Sam banged down the telephone receiver, missing the cradle entirely. It was Sunday morning. Apparently she had gone somewhere for the weekend. Where? Why? Alone?

  He realized he was being irrational. Antoinette had every right to spend her weekends away from the city. He had no rights over her. He had very carefully, very methodically, made that clear from the beginning of their relationship. He had wanted nothing from her. That’s exactly what he had now. And nothing was a terrible thing to have.

  He’d spent a restless night rehearsing what he’d say to her when she answered the phone this morning. The words, with no one to hear them, stuck in his throat as if they were objects waiting to be expelled. He went into the bathroom to shower and shave, and the man staring back at him from the fogged-up mirror was someone he didn’t know. The man was vulnerable, emotional, eaten up with regrets. It was going to take some time to get used to him, but Sam figured he had the rest of his life.

  He was selecting clothes to wear when he realized that he didn’t have to continue suffering. Finding out where Antoinette was wouldn’t be hard. He was, after all, a policeman with a policeman’s skills. He had a mind that filed everything away in case he needed it. He remembered the name of Antoinette’s secretary. He could call her, tell her it was police business and find out what she knew.

  A listing for R. Madison on Banks Street, right off Carrollton, looked promising. When a woman answered, he recognized the voice instantly. Succinctly he explained that he needed to get in touch with Antoinette right away. Did Rosy know where to reach her?

  Rosy was less than accommodating. Sam listened to a long lecture about what a good woman Dr. D was and about how badly she’d been treated. He had the grace to wince when Rosy told him that Antoinette had started smoking again and that he was the cause.

  “I don’t care what kind of business you think you have with her,” Rosy said finally, “I’m not telling you where she is!”

  Sam was sitting by now. “Not even if I tell you I want to propose to her?”

  Rosy didn’t miss a beat. “She called me yesterday morning to tell me she was going to visit some woman down in the bayous. And it sure took you long enough to make up your mind, dahlin’.”

  Sam hung up, happy that Antoinette was not with a new man somewhere, and confused about why she’d be with Didi. It was Didi’s phone number Rosy had given him; he’d recognized it immediately. He tried the number, not even sure what he would say to Antoinette when she was so far away, but he was anxious to make contact. There was no answer, and he decided to try again in a half hour.

  He had just finished dressing when the doorbell rang. He knew it wouldn’t be Antoinette, but he couldn’t keep himself from hoping. Skeeter stood at the door instead, and Sam motioned him inside.

  “I have to look twice these days to believe it’s you,” Sam told his friend. “You’re actually respectable.”

  Skeeter was dressed in a conservative suit. Only his tie, a tidy repeated print of Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding hands, said anything about the real Skeeter. “I am respectable,” he said with a grin. “So respectable that I’ve been asked to do a one-man show at the Harrigan Art Gallery. I’ve just been negotiating the details over breakfast at Brennans.”

  Sam whistled softly. Skeeter had come a long way in the past years. Of the three boyhood friends, it had taken longer for Skeeter to find himself than it had for either Sam or Joshua. Skeeter had been the least lucky. No one had reached out a hand to pull him out of the mire of his background. Prison and his own indomitable spirit had made the change in Skeeter. And it seemed that now he had taken one more step. “So you’re finally going to get serious about your talent?”

  Skeeter shrugged, and his grin turned sheepish. “I’ve been discovered. One of the portraits I did for a customer on Jackson Square was sold to a gallery owner in New York. Looks like I’m going to be in demand.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Skeeter flopped down on Sam’s sofa. “I hear you were wounded Friday.”

  “News travels fast.” Sam sat across from him and waited for Skeeter to get to the point. The two were firm friends, but neither of them had much time for social calls. When Skeeter visited, there was always a reason.

  “Are you all right?”

  Sam nodded.

  “While you were getting shot, I was getting information.”

  This wasn’t the first time that Sam had been grateful for Skeeter’s talent for sleuthing. Skeeter wasn’t personally involved in the New Orleans underworld, but he always seemed to be places where he heard things that even Sam’s best informants didn’t hear. He drew portraits at a bar on Bourbon Street in the evenings; he lived in a neighborhood that was not the best; in pursuit of subjects to sketch, he haunted areas of town where even the bravest cops didn’t want to go. He was just available. And his availability often paid off. “What kind of information?” Sam asked him.

  “I sat in a bar across the river last night and drank with a Cajun fellow who’s up here looking for work.”

  “And?”

  “This guy says that everybody where he comes from thinks the Omega Oil sabotage originates from down there.”

  “That’s nothing more than a rumor.”

  “Try this, then. The guy’s from the area around Bayou Midnight.” Skeeter had been down to Sam’s cabin enough times to know exactly what the information would mean to his friend. His expression was sympathetic.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Skeeter shrugged. “Do you have any better leads?”

  “The guy who shot me is a professional arsonist. He was seen in the vicinity of the Omega Oil building several nights before the fire.” Sam was thinking out loud. He didn’t want to believe that anyone he knew—and he knew everyone up and down Bayou Midnight—could have been involved in the campaign of arson against Omega.

  “You haven’t seen the paper this morning, have you?”

  Sam looked up and saw compassion in Skeeter’s eyes. “No.”

  “The guy who shot you confessed to killing somebody up in Shreveport the night of the Omega fire. He couldn’t have been two places at once. He’s a lowlife, but not the right lowlife. You’re back
to square one, pal.”

  Sam hadn’t even called the station to find out what was happening. He’d been so preoccupied with Antoinette. And no one had called him because they knew he was recovering. He slammed his fist into his open hand. “Damn!”

  “I’ll leave you to ponder the eccentricities of your job. Take care of yourself.” Skeeter stood and waved Sam back to the sofa when he started to stand. At the door he turned as if he’d thought better about leaving without saying one more thing. “Loyalty’s a fine thing, Sam, but I think this guy at the bar last night knew something. Don’t let your personal blinders keep you from checking out what’s going on down south. Even the safest haven has its share of problems.”

  Sam sat with his head in his hands long after Skeeter had gone and wondered how many other times in his life he’d let his loyalties and his prejudices determine his actions. The Omega Oil case had been full of twists and turns and an overwhelming amount of evidence that had led him in circles. But all along he had ignored some of the most important evidence he had. Laurie had repeated a phrase spoken in Cajun French by the suspected arsonist, but he had let other clues lead him in a different direction. His uncle had warned him that something was going on in the basin, but he had only paid the most minimal attention to Claude’s words. Now the warning was being repeated, and he had tried, once again, to discount it.

  What other warnings had he discounted?

  The answer was so shocking that he winced in pain. Martin. Antoinette and Didi had both tried to tell him that something serious was bothering his cousin. But Martin was his beloved friend and teacher; Martin had been on a pedestal since Sam was sixteen years old. He had refused to see the truth of anyone’s observations about him, just as he had refused to give Laurie’s phrases or Claude’s words the attention they deserved.

  Martin, who spoke Cajun French better than he spoke English, Martin with his hatred of Omega and his training in Vietnam. Martin who fit the description in Antoinette’s profile exactly.

  Sam had ignored it all because he didn’t want to believe that anything bad could touch the people and the place that he loved best in the world.