Crimson Bayou

by C. L. Bevill

  But Mignon allowed as how she could ask Caraby questions. “Investigator,” she said.

  Caraby’s ice-cold eyes slid to her. “You can call me Simon, if you’d like.”

  Hard to believe he’s Creole, she thought. He’s got the drawl, but he’s lost the entire manner of speaking. His vocalization was so educated and thorough that it was easy to assume that that was why the Creoles thought he had turned his back on them. But others like Leelah Prudhomme had done the same, and she was clearly still one of them. Another interesting mystery. One that may not be answered anytime soon, especially if it turns out that he has nothing to do with Dara’s death. “Investigator,” she said again. “Did you know that the Creoles call you by a particular name?”

  John Henry’s eyes narrowed.

  A chilling smile barely curled Caraby’s lips. “I’ve heard the phrase. It’s not very flattering, is it?”

  Robert said nothing but turned his intent gaze from Mignon to Caraby.

  “You’re one of them,” she said. “A Creole.”

  “As are you,” he said softly.

  “But I wasn’t raised by the Creoles,” she said just as softly.

  “No, but they will accept you, I believe. They admire your determination,” Caraby stood by the edge of the living room wall, and his poise was admirable.

  Mignon actively tried to figure out how to ask Caraby how Dara came into possession of his insurance card without revealing that it was in the belly of her stove. John Henry opened his mouth to protest what she was doing but then shut it again. He gave his investigator a single probing glance. Finally, John Henry said, “What are you trying to get at, Mignon?”

  “Tomas Clovis took me to a spot where Dara and he spent time together,” Mignon said slowly. “He showed me things that she had written. Things that she had…collected.”

  Robert’s mouth made an “O” of understanding.

  “She liked to write down jump rope rhymes, you know,” Mignon continued. “Wrote a lot of them down. She kept letters that had been written to her. She kept a lot of things.” Her eagle-eyed gaze was fixed on Caraby.

  “I gather you’re trying to make a point, Miss Thibeaux,” Caraby said wryly.

  The little notch of amusement gave Mignon pause. It was as if he knew where she was going and he’d already been there days or weeks before.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Mignon?” John Henry demanded irately.

  “If you found something that belonged to someone else in Dara’s possessions, what could you assume about it?” Mignon deliberately hadn’t answered John Henry and instead stared at Caraby. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw that Robert’s face had gone pale and grim. His arm uncurled from behind his head and his hand slowly reached for the shotgun as if stretching out in silent repose. He rested his hand, on the barrel where he could easily jerk it to him.

  “I’d assume that they might have something to do with Dara herself,” Caraby answered unemotionally. “Like many aspects of these cases, many questions have to be asked of many people who are peripherally involved in a homicide investigation.” Then he added, and it was quite clear he was talking to John Henry, “Do you wish me to continue answering Miss Thibeaux’s questions?”

  “I’d like to see where she’s going, Simon,” John Henry said amicably as if they were discussing the weather. “I think, maybe, you would, too.”

  “I shore would,” Robert added.

  “Dara had a hidden stash of stuff,” Mignon said. “These were things that were valuable to her. I assume you know that she was trying to become emancipated from her parents so that she could make the choices herself about the baby she was going to have.”

  Caraby nodded. “We’ve seen the paperwork that Sister Helena submitted to the church attorneys. Blessed Heart has assisted in several emancipations in certain situations.”

  “Apparently, Dara took things from people that she felt would give her leverage over them,” Mignon added almost casually.

  “Like what?” John Henry snapped.

  “A letter of adolescent infatuation about an older man,” she said and added, “from a fellow student. A photograph that revealed certain indiscretions. An insurance card from someone prominent.”

  Caraby’s finally lost his cold expression. “An insurance card?” he said vehemently. “Dammit. I lost mine about a few months ago, and I had to wait two weeks to…” Then he trailed off in understanding. “Dara had my insurance card?”

  “That’s right,” Mignon confirmed and saw Robert grasp his shotgun firmly in his fist, his eyes locked on Caraby and what his reaction was going to be.

  The reaction wasn’t what Mignon thought. Simon Caraby’s face showed a moment of pure confusion where he puzzled over how Dara Honore could have possibly gotten her hands on his insurance card. The bewilderment contained there was so obvious that it was comical.

  Caraby glanced at John Henry. “Good God, she thinks I had something to do with the girl’s murder, doesn’t she?”

  “And I’d appreciate it ifin you’d keep your hands away from your sidearm there, buddy boy,” Robert said. The shotgun was in his capable arms, pointing at the floor between where he was sitting and Caraby. “Mignon’s gonna have to work on her timing a mite better. She don’t know how stupid it is to ask a man if he’s responsible for somebody’s death when he happens to have a gun in his vicinity.”

  “She asked you, too?” John Henry said dryly. Without apparent visibility of motion, his pistol was out and pointed determinedly in Robert’s direction. Then he added, “Keep that shotgun pointed at the floor, and I won’t have to shoot you, Robert. I’d hate like hell to have to have someone else killed in Mignon’s house. It’s got enough ghosts in it.”

  Mignon sat very still. She wanted to explain that she’d been quite sure that Robert wasn’t guilty when she’d asked him. Having just saved her life from a pack of wild dogs and from drowning in the bayou, she was certain about it. But John Henry didn’t know that.

  Robert said, “Yeah, she asked me. I don’t think I was right polite in my answer neither. However, I’m a friendly forgiving fella, and I happen to like my cousin a whole bunch. But I be more interested in what Le Père Des Cocodries has to say.”

  “Me, too,” John Henry said. “Simon, let’s just assume for a moment that we have to consider that you might be involved. Give me an answer.”

  “I think I lost the card around the last time I went up to the school,” Caraby said slowly. He kept his hands at his sides and didn’t move. His voice was level, and Mignon could detect no antagonism or even hesitation. “I didn’t notice it then. But I do keep my wallet in the parish car in the glove box. Most people know not to mess with a parish vehicle.”

  “I guess you’ll need to lock that glove box from here on out, that or the car itself,” John Henry said. “Negligent of you, Simon.”

  “Did you see Dara when you went to the school then?” Mignon interjected quietly.

  “No,” Caraby answered with a puzzled tone. “No, that’s what I don’t get. I didn’t go to the school to see her because she wasn’t there yet. That was right around Christmas. Dara didn’t come to the school until after Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

  Mignon said, “How can you be sure about the date?”

  Caraby looked at her with a dry expression on his face. There wasn’t a bit of doubt to be found there. He was confident about himself. “It’s my mother’s birthday, chère. She turned sixty, and she threw a fit that I wasn’t at her party on time.”

  “I thought,” she started and immediately stopped.

  “That I was completely cut off from the Creoles,” Caraby finished for her. “Not hardly. Although some would like to think so. There’s more to a story than just the bread and butter, Miss Thibeaux. Even the basest amateur knows that.”

  “How did Dara get the card, then?” John Henry said. The pistol didn’t waver from center of mass on Robert.

  “I don’t know,” Caraby answ
ered. “Someone obviously took it from my wallet. It’s got my social security number on it. Identity theft is a big crime nowadays. I thought I’d misplaced it. After all, there wasn’t anything else missing that I’ve noticed. Why would anyone want to take an insurance card when they could take credit cards and money?”

  “Do you think your investigator is capable of having murdered Dara Honore, John Henry?” Mignon asked. She hated to play devil’s advocate, but the question had to be asked, and if she waited for John Henry to ask it of himself, then she’d never get the answer from him.

  There wasn’t even the barest increment of a hesitation in John Henry’s answer. “No. Simon Caraby isn’t like that. If he had an issue with someone, it would be upfront and in their face. I wouldn’t believe it for a moment. I hired him, Mignon, and you might think you’re the budding psychologist lately, but I know him.”

  Robert slowly put the shotgun back against the wall. “That’s good enough for me.”

  John Henry’s pistol dipped toward the floor. “You got anything to say to me, Simon?”

  “I don’t like Bob Dubeaux pulling a shotgun on me,” Caraby said with a frown. “He can be sure he’ll wake up in a hospital after the next time he tries it.”

  “Fair ‘nuff,” Robert said and crossed his arms over his chest with an agreeable smile.

  “And I sure as hell didn’t murder Dara Honore,” Caraby added. Then he muttered, “And I don’t know why I have to defend myself.”

  “Join the club, fella,” Robert said ironically.

  “Could you find the place Tomas took you to, Mignon?” John Henry said. He put his service pistol away with a fluid movement. He said to Caraby, “By the way, think about the date, Simon. The date Dara was murdered.”

  Mignon hesitated. “It looked like the rest of the bayou to me,” she said truthfully, then added silently to herself, Except for the old church with the crimson glass window and the gravestones moldering into the earth and the black waters. That sure didn’t look like the rest of the bayous I’ve seen. “I have no idea where it is.” At least that part is true.

  “We need to see these documents,” John Henry said frankly. “You know we do. If there’s more to Dara’s murder than meets the eye, then we need all the documentation.”

  Mignon bit her lip. She deliberately resisted looking at the Ben Franklin stove with its little closed door.

  Caraby said suddenly, “It was the fifth. Oh yes, the accident with the eighteen-wheeler. TV dinners all over the highway until 6 the next morning.”

  John Henry said, “Medical examiner said Dara was murdered somewhere between midnight and 2 a.m. on the fifth. Never had to think up your own alibi, did you, Simon?”

  Mignon figured it out before anyone else could say anything. “You mean the night you went out, Investigator Caraby was with you at the accident scene.”

  “He was there when I arrived around 11:30 p.m., and he was there when I left around 3 a.m.” They both left it unsaid that didn’t clear Caraby’s possible involvement, but it certainly meant that the man wasn’t the actual murderer.

  “You know,” she said suddenly, “if you thought that Robert was the one who killed Dara, then why did you let him keep the shotgun?”

  “I took some paint samples off his pirogue,” John Henry said. “The red paint looked the same as the type that was under her fingernails.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Robert swore vividly. “Were that you who went and scratched up my brand new paint job? Man, ifin you weren’t the sheriff, I’d clean your clock!”

  John Henry spared him a brief intense look, and Robert promptly shut his mouth.

  But Mignon appeared confused. “The red paint on his pirogue,” she repeated. Then she said forcefully, “But that’s not the same kind of paint that was on Dara.”

  “How in hell could you know that?” John Henry demanded. “We got the report back from the forensics lab only about an hour ago.”

  “Duh,” Mignon said. “I’m an artist. I can name two dozen different shades of red without blinking an eye. Anyone could see the shade was different. Robert used a candy apple red. The kind on Dara was alizarin crimson. It’s a very specific shade of red. It’s just like the color of blood.”

  Chapter Twenty–five

  Tuesday, March 18th

  There once lived a Creole maiden,

  And she stood about ten feet high,

  And the color of her hair was black night waving,

  And she only had one big fat eye.

  Rick-a-doo-dum-dae,

  Rick-a-doo-dum-dae,

  High, low, rick-a-doo-dum dae.

  - Children’s ball-bouncing rhyme

  At about 11 a.m., her Ford Explorer was returned to her door by a local towing company that had replaced the tires, as well. Their fee hadn’t been too astronomical, and Mignon was happy to have her vehicle back. They didn’t have the glass for the broken window so it was taped over with duct tape and plastic until she could get the SUV to a glass repair business.

  In the afternoon, Mignon taught a class at Blessed Heart and helped all of the budding artists with lessons on perspective and proportion. Some of the girls were still working on basic shapes, but others like Callie and Beadie had progressed rapidly.

  Sharla had started penciling in a design on her cast. It was all-encompassing in nature, including all the girls at the school, all of the teachers and staff, a rainbow, and Mignon wasn’t positive, what appeared to be a dinosaur. Unhappy with her first attempt, Sharla was erasing its massive head when the thirteen-year-old said pertly, “You know, I’d much rather learn how to drive than draw.”

  “Drive?” Mignon repeated. She helped with the erasing while another girl was penciling the design on the side of the cast that Sharla couldn’t reach. Mignon was privately reflecting that it was going to be a really colorful leg cast.

  “Yep. We got a choice between your class and driving. But only girls who are over sixteen get driver’s education.” Sharla bit her lip. “We got to start coloring it soon. Else this cast be coming right off afore I can finish the painting.”

  Callie said, “I already took driver’s education last year, and besides, Miz Thibeaux is much more interesting than the lady from Northwestern who tried to teach us to draw last year. We had to draw a ball over and over until we could get it perfectly round. Do you know how boring that is?”

  “Pretty boring,” Mignon imagined aloud. Some of the girls would rather draw dragons than balls. It was all right with Mignon. The intrinsic lessons that taught artists to draw could be learned by drawing just about anything. After all, she had taught herself at an early age, long before she took classes to teach her more of the same. “You get to practice driving in that big van? Looks like it would be difficult to drive. I’d hate to try to parallel park it.”

  “Nope,” Callie said, concentrating on her work. It was a drawing of a photograph that Callie had found in a magazine. The picture showed an alcoholic drink in a glass filled with ice cubes, but it was the complicated set of shadows and reflections that had caught Callie’s eye. She had showed it to Mignon and asked if she could try to replicate it. So far Callie was doing an excellent job. The lesson had been learned, and Callie was head and shoulders above the rest of the class. “There’s four cars that got donated to the school out back. I like the Altima the best. It’s an automatic. There’s a Jeep out there that’s a five speed, and it’s a son of a…” Callie cut herself off and looked up at Mignon with wide-open eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Mignon said. “I get the drift. You don’t like a manual transmission.”

  Sharla was carefully re-drawing the head of her dinosaur; her tongue was a half-inch out of her mouth in studied attentiveness. “Man-well what?”

  “She means a stick shift,” Beadie said. “I can drive one of them. I can drive a tractor.”

  An Altima, Mignon mused idly, thinking about the previous day with all the things that had happened. Where have I seen one of those lately?


  The answer didn’t come to her readily. Mignon was lost in her thoughts. She’d already decided that Robert wasn’t the culprit, but John Henry had readily preempted her with the evidence about his pirogue. Robert didn’t have an alibi for that night because he’d said he’d been out on the dock half the night tuning up his mother’s power boat so she could have reliable transportation. But most of the suspects didn’t have alibis. The one that John Henry and Caraby liked so well, Tomas, certainly didn’t. He’d been out in the bayous waiting on Dara, who had never appeared because she’d been busy being murdered.

  Then there was Sister Helena, who had vehemently denied that she’d murdered Dara or had anything to do with her death. She had freely talked about the photograph of herself and her former lover, knowing very well about Mignon’s relationship with John Henry, the sheriff of St. Germaine Parish. The sister had known that Mignon would most likely tell him. Mignon hadn’t but that was because she didn’t want to put John Henry between a rock and a hard place when she refused to produce the photograph. Her promise wouldn’t mean anything when he compared it to the investigation of Dara’s death, and he would be right, even if she didn’t want to admit it. A murderer probably wouldn’t admit to the motivation that had prompted the killing. Regardless, the slender sister probably wasn’t up to strangulation.

  Father William was, but there was nothing to tie him to the crime. There hadn’t been anything in Dara’s possession about the financial situation of the school. As a matter of fact, upon Mignon’s arrival that morning Gail Harper had mentioned that Father William had been successful in procuring two new sponsors for the school. Specifically, they would be funding the school’s continued existence for the next five years. Everyone was very pleased. Mignon had dismissed the priest as a suspect because he was so squeaky clean it was like thinking Mother Theresa was capable of homicide.