by Chris Wiltz
“You’re not gonna lose anything.”
“I’m more concerned about what I’m going to make. At my age you had a multi-million dollar pipeline company.”
“If you’re trying to play catch-up, forget it unless you want to get into the oil business, and I got in when there was still wild-catters and independents a dollar a dozen. You’ll do fine with your restaurants and real estate. The truth is nobody needs as much money as I’ve got. All I do is sit around trying to figure out what to do with it.”
“James, you’re full of more bullshit than anyone I’ve ever known.”
Jimmy Johnpier grinned past his cigar. “And I’m in business with you. Must say something about yourself, Pascal. And here’s the crux of it, my young friend. If LaDonna’s got to go bust, I’d rather see you running La Costa Brava than anybody else. Got a soft spot for the old place. Met my almost first wife there.”
Jimmy had been almost married three or four times but every time the woman got close to the altar something stopped her. Pascal didn’t know if she realized she was seriously considering procreating with the ugliest man in New Orleans even if he was one of the richest, or if Jimmy had some kind of nasty pre-nup he whipped out a few weeks before the ceremony. Something to make sure she wasn’t marrying him just for the money. Couldn’t be, no. The man was a realist and like he’d said, he needed things to do with his money. A nice trophy wife contributed to the economy.
“But let’s talk about something really interesting, Pascal, like that gorgeous girl you’ve got welcoming our valued patrons to our cozy faux bordello.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I stopped to look. I wanted to linger so I got her to call up here and tell you I was on my way.”
“And I thought she was just being her efficient little self. Turns out she’s pretty sharp. She was only here a couple of days, right? And I see her, smooth as an old pro, slide a couple folded right down her cleavage from one of those real estate conventioneers to get him the eight-top under the big nude. And I know she handled him because first she shook her head like she didn’t have anything. Then he starts to schmooze. She says something else and next thing, he’s palming her the cash.”
“She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m trying to tell you there’s more to her than looks. If you care.”
“Sure.”
Pascal recrossed his legs, ankle over knee, the foot going like it had a motor in it. “Get this. She calls herself Raynie Devereux. Says she’s from Rayne, you know where that is? Grew up on a frog farm. But I had to get her social, the IRS forms and all, and that’s when she had to tell me Raynie Devereux isn’t her real name, though as soon as she gets the money together, she’s going to change it legally.”
“So where’re you going? Her real name’s a kicker, right?”
“Oh yeah. Real name is Earlene Dick.” Pascal sniggered over his port.
Jimmy’s face was as straight as his features allowed. “You are so fucking immature, Pascal. Damn straight that girl’s got more than looks. That’s real chutzpah. Leave the frog farm, change your name…new name, new life. I like that.”
“What did I say? There’s more than looks.” Pascal tried not to laugh. “She asked me, please, never to tell anyone.”
“So you never told me.” Jimmy chewed the cigar end. “I bet I can get her to tell me.”
Pascal stomped his wagging foot to the floor. “Ah ha, so he’s in a betting mood now. Let’s make this about what’s really in a name, Jimsy. You think you can get her to go on a date and tell you dick?”
Jimmy smiled. He leaned over to roll his smoking tip in the ashtray. He looked up from under that big brow bone. “Yes I do, dick face.”
“One large says you can’t. One large says you can’t even get her to go out with you. Two large if you can get her to whisper Earlene Dick in your ear.”
“You are cruisin for a losin, pawdna.” Jimmy sat back, arm stretched again, smoke curling all the way up to the fourteen-foot ceiling. “Earlene Dick. Whaddaya know. I kind of like it.”
Pascal made a rude noise, but Jimmy looked over at him quite contentedly, a fat-Elvis smile playing on his puffed lips.
***
He had propped himself against the leather counter, leaning on his elbow, one ankle crossed in front of the other, a jaunty look except he was the homeliest man Raynie had ever seen. Homely as a frog. And like a frog he always seemed to be smiling, at least on one side. He was waiting for her. She slipped behind the hostess station, her position there as comfortable now as home. Sometimes the lunch counter at the grocery store in Mamou would flash across her mind. She’d want to laugh. She’d come up in the world, little Earlene Dick, working in this classy restaurant, feeling as elegant when she left as when she arrived instead of going home smelling like a big old link of andouille sausage.
“Hi, Mr. Johnpier. Would you like dinner before the kitchen closes?”
“Thank you, dear, but Pascal and I had a few appetizers up in the office. Tell me your name so I don’t have to call you dear and sweetheart and all those sweet-thangs that young women these days don’t like.”
She was so used to flirting with men who came into the restaurant alone or with other men, getting a little lagniappe as she thought of it, to pad her paycheck, that she almost went into Marilyn-mode. Unsure of what his relationship to Pascal was, she pulled down her shoulder and leveled her head. “Please call me Raynie, Mr. Johnpier. I’m Raynie Devereux.” She put her hand out to him over the counter.
He took it and smiled at her, a big smile that gave him a face lift. “You’ll be seeing far too much of me around here, so call me Jimmy.”
He stayed another ten minutes, making small talk as the restaurant began clearing out, Raynie unapologetically interrupting to tell people goodbye. He told her he liked the way she made each exchange seem personal, that he didn’t quite know how she did it because she said more or less the same thing to everybody. He said it wasn’t easy to have a stand-out personal style based on being nice without being showy about it, people who acted nice but called all the attention to themselves doing it. He shrugged and said, “Maybe it has something to do with your looks,” but didn’t make a big deal out of it, turned his head and took in the action in the front part of the restaurant, a table of six getting ready to leave. Raynie let it pass; she didn’t answer him and wondered guiltily if that didn’t have something to do with his looks.
After he left, Harley Sands, one of the waiters who’d befriended Raynie and sometimes went with her for a drink after hours—the wind down, he called it—stuck his head around the piece of wall behind the counter. “How about I yell monkey throwing turds and get the rest of these people out of here?”
Since the wait staff wasn’t allowed anywhere near the hostess station, Raynie walked over to him. “Harley, who’s Mr. Johnpier? Is he a regular customer, Pascal’s friend…?
“You mean what happened to his face?”
Raynie put a hand on her hip. “Did I say that?”
“There I go, hearing things again. The word is he’s Pascal’s partner, only Pascal never says anyone owns the restaurant but him. If you ask me, which you did, I’d say he’s the money man. Bought himself a place to hang out.” Harley rubbed his fingers together. “Major cush.”
Raynie felt every hair on her body stand at attention and had no idea why.
***
Avery Legendre, who had managed to lose his cowboy hat along with a few thousand dollars at the Venetian in Las Vegas, drove straight from the airport and parked his Jaguar XF at the Royal Orleans instead of the private lot near his apartment, in a hurry to get to Le Tripot so he could eat before the restaurant closed. Chef had threatened to quit if he ever raided the kitchen after hours again. Crashing from a two-day coke binge and drinking heavily, Avery had trashed the kitchen when he couldn’t find a bottle of Ketchup. Two things he didn’t eat without Ketchup, steak and eggs, and he’d cooked up both
for himself near dawn in the empty restaurant. He didn’t give a shit about the prima donna chef, but his fat monthly paycheck depended on the restaurant’s four-star reputation, even if in his never-humble opinion, said reputation was inflated.
He raced the block to the restaurant and almost stopped dead in front of the glass doors. He had to do a double take—it was the girl, all right. She wasn’t a customer either. She stood behind the counter, talking to the phantom of the opera, Jimmy Johnpier. He ducked his head and went in the side entrance, down the alley and past the door to the kitchen. Too furious to wait for the service elevator, he stomped up the stairs to the third floor and burst into Pascal’s office. He stood across the room from where Pascal was working at the desk.
“When did that girl start working here?”
Pascal had glanced up when Avery threw open the office door. He went back to checking the day’s receipts. “Which girl would that be?”
“The one in front, Pascal. Don’t act like you don’t know.”
Pascal thwacked his pen down so Avery could hear his annoyance. If his father had never married that gold-digger after the divorce, he wouldn’t have to put up with this demented half-brother, and he would have ended up with a lot more money after the old man died. He reminded himself that he made plenty of money and that the calmer he stayed the quicker Avery would leave.
“We’ve hired a couple of new girls lately. If you mean the new hostess, she came on last week.”
“She’s gotta go. She’s bad news. I’m not kidding, get rid of her.”
“Bad news. Could you elaborate?”
“No. Just take my word.”
“Hm. Actually, Avery, she’s working out pretty well. What reason would I put on the pink slip?”
Avery walked over to the bar, the heels of his cowboy boots digging into the Tabriz. “Don’t fire her. Just make her uncomfortable, you know, so she quits.”
Pascal watched him make a drink. “So you know this girl.”
“Yeah.” He turned, took a sip of his drink. “We had a thing, got ugly.”
Pascal nodded. “She shot you off the saddle, huh cowboy? Say, what happened to your hat?”
Avery got red. “You fucking prick.” He threw his drink, along with the glass, into the sink. The glass broke. “If anyone did the shooting, I did. Fact is the little bitch is lucky she’s alive after what she did. So just shut the fuck up.”
“Get out, Avery, before I have you thrown out, you shit-faced lunatic.”
“I’ll get out when I’m ready. I own half this building, remember? I need five grand against the rent you owe me.”
“Buyout’s still available. You could have cash within a week.”
“You can’t pay me enough for this rat trap. Five. Now.”
“On the first. That’s the agreement.” Pascal went back to his receipts.
“I don’t think you heard me.”
Pascal looked up to see Avery holding a small gun on him. He must have had it down one of his boots. Pascal took out his checkbook.
As soon as he heard the elevator door close, Pascal picked up the phone but put it down before it reached his ear. He had in mind to call the cops, but he couldn’t get a restraining order to keep his brother out of a building he half owned; he didn’t think it was ever a good idea to call the cops, anyway. He wanted Avery out of this building and out of his life, permanently. That would take some serious thought.
Ten
It was the odd night when both Karen and Raynie were at home and awake at the same time. The late night air was cool and they’d opened the doors to the courtyard then sat on the sofa under the ceiling fan, sipping their nightcaps, as Raynie called them, which reminded Karen of her mother, who always made nightcaps or toddies for the bodies of the laughing and crying women. It also reminded her of the money club.
“Next Monday,” she told Raynie, “my mother is having the monthly meeting of her money club. She’s been nagging at me to come to it. She says it will change my life. Want to go have your life changed?”
“What do they do?”
“The way I understand it, they sit around, have drinks and dinner and talk about money—anything anyone wants to say about it. The theory is, if they think about money and learn about it, they’ll get it.”
“How do they learn about it?”
“They read books, and they have people come talk to them about it sometimes. My mother had a friend of hers who’s an accountant talk to them about their personal finances. They had an investment broker once too.”
“Those people,” Raynie said with disgust. “You might as well go to the horse races.”
“Sounds like you lost money in the stock market.”
“Not me. My dad. He gave all his savings to his nephew, my Uncle Dudley’s oldest boy—he worked for Merrill-Lynch—and he invested it in one of those dot-coms that went bust. It may be what killed my mother. She sure did think about money a lot, but she never got any.”
Karen wanted to ask Raynie about her family, only every time she did, Raynie answered her vaguely and changed the subject. She tried to say something that would keep Raynie talking about her parents, like, “Your mother sounds like my mother.”
Raynie’s thoughts seemed to have already drifted. “I guess you think about money a lot when you don’t have it.”
Karen wanted to tell her that she had a lot of it at the moment, and she couldn’t seem to think about much else either.
Raynie looked far out into the courtyard. It was quiet and still for a few moments, not even a car passing, as if the world had stopped around them until she said, “Have you heard of a man named Jimmy Johnpier? He’s really rich. My friend at the restaurant, Harley Sands, says he’s the richest, ugliest man in New Orleans, and he’s pretty sure he’s Pascal’s partner in the restaurant. He’s been coming in almost every night, hanging around, talking to me. I’m afraid he’s going to ask me out.”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Well, he’s old…”
“And he’s ugly.”
“I hate to say it, but yeah, and besides, he’s Pascal’s partner, the silent partner, Harley says. That kind of puts me in a weird position.”
“No it doesn’t. Tell him no. Say no as much as you can. I hear it gets easier. Then you won’t run off with a Jack O’Leary and find three years of your life in the trash can like I did.”
“This would be more like flying off,” Raynie said. “Jimmy has his own jet.”
“For fucksake. You’re gonna do it.”
“No I’m not. I’m just telling you the man owns a jet.”
“And next you’ll tell me you feel fucking obligated to go out with him because he owns part of the restaurant.”
“Karen, I have to tell you, you have the worst mouth I’ve ever heard on a woman.”
Karen laughed. “And you, Raynie, are pretty fucking sharp the way you slide out of a conversation. So, look, do you want to go with me to Mom’s money club? Think of it like this—you make your own money, there’re no strings attached. You’re your own woman, no ugly men required.”
“Am I going to have to read anything?”
“You don’t want to read Think and Grow Rich!? All you have to do is think and the money attaches itself to you.” Karen held her hands out in front of her, beckoning the money. “It’s one of the group’s favorites. Okay, I can see that title isn’t getting you off. How about Suze Orman, The Courage to Be Rich. The club likes her, and she’s one of Oprah’s favorites. No? I know—I’ve got this great thriller you can read called A Simple Plan. It’s about these two guys who steal a bunch of money—guess from where. A plane that crashes! You won’t believe how fucked up things get after that. Bad money, bad motivation, bad luck. This one will speak to you, I promise.” Karen shuddered thinking about the book. All of sudden she couldn’t wait for Jack to get to town so she could give him the money. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about what bad luck the money might bring down upon her. She could go bac
k to worrying about not having enough.
Raynie said she’d go to the money club with Karen if she tried not to say fuck for a week.
Karen said, “Deal. Now, want to help me catch a thief?”
***
Raynie was in love with her new life. She loved working at the restaurant, and she was good at her job. After she told Pascal she preferred working the late shift, he arranged the schedule so she could work as many nights as she wanted. He liked her there on the busiest ones, and that made her feel important. She’d found two advantages to night work. She made more money on the side at night, and it left fewer of the lonely dark evening hours. Since she’d started the hostess job she hadn’t been lonely at all. She felt no need for a love life. For the first time in years, her life not only didn’t revolve around a boyfriend, but she’d been startled to realize she was happy without one. She had good action on her own, and now Karen had asked for her help figuring out how one of the bartenders at La Costa Brava was stealing. She was learning about a different kind of power than the kind you got from having a good-looking guy in love with you. This was hers alone, and it was heady stuff.
After work the next night, Raynie told Harley Sands they were on a mission. She told him about Little Joe the bartender and the disappearing liquor as they walked to Frenchman Street.
“I don’t guess he’s ever alone in the club,” Harley said. “I heard of one guy who brought his own cash register.”
“Karen thinks he’s just pocketing the money, one for the bar, one for Little Joe. We need to pretend we’re in love so he won’t notice us watching him.”
“Not mission impossible, but a dangerous mission, melove.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because if my skinny boat wants to take a ride to tuna town, it could get painful.”
Raynie stopped walking. “Harley, half the time, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know. You’re so sweet and innocent, your most endearing qualities.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“Let me put it this way. If the purple-helmeted monster has his way, my wife will kill you and castrate me.”
