Bayou Hero
Page 6
“Family,” she muttered to Jimmy as she headed out the door. She met Landry and Mary Ellen at the far end of the porch, only a few steps from his vehicle. “You can’t be here,” she said firmly, blocking their way, realizing she would have to break the news, wishing she’d sent Jimmy instead. She hadn’t had to make many death notifications, and she never knew what to say. Sweet-talker Jimmy always managed to find just the right words.
“B-but Miss Viola... All th-these police c-c-cars... What’s happened?” Mary Ellen didn’t look as if she’d rested last night. Her eyes were bloodshot, dark circles underneath them, and her chin was wobbling now. “Where is Miss Viola? Is she all right? We’ve got to see her. We’ve got to—Landry!”
There were no circles around his eyes, no sign that a single tear had fallen. He was dressed more formally today, in gray trousers and a blue button-down, with that same antique watch on his left wrist. A family heirloom, likely from the Landry side of the family. Had it come from the Jacksons, it would likely be buried in silt at the bottom of the Mississippi.
His mouth was hard, the look in his eyes even more so. “What happened?” His voice was low, soft as granite, devoid of emotion but, conversely, all the more touching for the lack of it.
“We don’t know yet. Miss Viola...” Alia looked away, noticing in some distant portion of her brain that the mother and child across the street had gone inside, then met Landry’s gaze. “She’s gone.”
She didn’t have to say more because a wail escaped Mary Ellen an instant before she swooned into her brother’s arms.
Chapter 4
Landry hadn’t shed a single tear or felt a moment’s regret for his father’s death. He hadn’t worried overly much about his mother’s whereabouts. But as he clung to Mary Ellen, keeping her limp body from collapsing to the ground, grief rose inside him.
Miss Viola had been like a grandmother to him. She was the only person in his entire life who’d taken a chance on him, who’d stood up to his father for him. She had protected him and Mary Ellen when their own mother wouldn’t, had made it possible for both of them to escape the hell their house had become.
“Was it—” He couldn’t finish the question. His voice was too husky, his throat too clogged.
“It appears she fell down the stairs.”
He began shaking his head before she finished. “She didn’t use the stairs—hadn’t been up there since she came home from the rehab hospital last year.”
Alia nodded as if she already knew that. “We’ll know more once the coroner has completed the autopsy.”
Mary Ellen stirred, and he glanced down at her, freeing one hand to pull his cell from his pocket. “Can you call my brother-in-law and ask him to come get her?”
Alia took the phone, scrolled through the directory, then moved back down the porch, her voice covering the distance in little more than a murmur.
Landry helped Mary Ellen to the nearest chair, crouching in front of her. Tears seeping from her eyes, she plaintively asked, “What’s going on, Landry? First Mama, then the admiral, and now Miss Viola. Why? She never hurt anyone. Everyone loved her.”
He noticed she didn’t include their father in those sentiments. Jeremiah had hurt everyone, and Landry couldn’t think of one person who’d honestly, wholeheartedly loved the bastard. “It was probably an accident,” he said, though the words felt like a lie. Maybe it was paranoia, with his life being all disrupted the past day, but there was an icy place inside him that suspected the worst. He continued for Mary Ellen’s sake, though. “Maybe her heart...”
Mary Ellen smiled through her tears. “You know she never had a thing wrong with her besides that blasted hip.”
He managed his own faint smile. It was true, and Miss Viola had been damned proud of it. No high blood pressure or cholesterol or blood sugar, no weight problems or allergies or senilities, none of the afflictions people her age tended to have. Just a few creaky joints and one blasted hip.
My doctor told me that one in four people die within the first year after breaking their hip, she’d told him not long after her own accident. I don’t plan on being that one.
She’d made it a little more than a year.
Alia joined them again, offering his phone. His fingers brushed hers when he took it, but the only thing he noticed was that hers were warm, while his felt so damn cold.
“Your husband will be here in a few minutes,” she said to Mary Ellen. “Can I get you a glass of water or anything?”
“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.” Mary Ellen’s voice wobbled on the last word. “Who found Miss Viola? Today is Molly’s day off.”
“I did.” Discomfort spread across Alia’s face, and she avoided glancing at Landry. “I came to ask her a few more questions.”
Come to question Miss Viola without him present, Landry thought with a scowl. Hoping to get the old lady to let something slip, to trip her into saying something today she wouldn’t normally give voice to, most especially with me right there.
“Oh, my Lord, to fall like that, all alone. That just breaks my heart.” His sister raised her watery gaze to Alia. “How long did she lie there? Was she in pain? Did she try to get to the phone? Brett and Mimi—those are her children—they tried to get her to wear one of those emergency call devices, but she was too stubborn. She said when it was her time, it was her time, and she would happily go.”
“I really don’t know, Mrs. Davison. Once we get some answers, we’ll share them with you.”
Mary Ellen nodded, satisfied for a moment, then her eyes widened. “Brett and Mimi... Has anyone told them yet?”
“The police department will notify them if they haven’t already.”
Landry thought he detected the smallest suggestion of impatience in Alia’s voice. She’d come to pump an old lady for gossip, found a suspicious death instead, and then had to break the news to family members. He would bet she didn’t get stuck with breaking bad news very often. He would bet it was one of the few jobs she didn’t excel at.
A squeal on the street drew their attention that way as Scott parked behind Landry’s car. A few minutes, Alia had said. An extravagant guess, considering Scott’s nerves were twisted nearly as tight as Mary Ellen’s. Stunned and pale, he greeted Landry and Alia with troubled looks. Mumbling something about too much and doctor and sedatives, he hustled Mary Ellen into the car, then jumped in himself, backed up into the drive across the street and headed home.
“Do you mind going out back with me and answering some questions?”
Landry gazed at the half dozen or more chairs scattered along the gallery, every one of them with access to the open door and the front windows. Without knowing anything more about the way Miss Viola had died, he knew he didn’t want to see her while officers walked around her, talked about her and, eventually, zipped her into a bag and hauled her off.
He went to the back gate, wiggled his fingers inside the heavy growth until he found the key hidden there, then undid the lock. He turned away from the patio and led her back to the twin chairs hidden from sight by the rows of corn.
“Why did she grow such a big garden?” Apparently Special Agent Kingsley preferred to open with the least important of all the questions at her disposal.
“To give away.”
“Her family and friends must have been pleased.”
“Not to them. Miss Viola figured they could buy their organically grown stuff at their trendy farmers’ markets like everyone else. She donated hers to soup kitchens and to markets in lower-income neighborhoods.”
She’d done so much more: paid medical bills, made house repairs, provided single mothers with cars to get to their jobs and single fathers with after-school help. She’d bought uniforms to outfit a dozen school classes, stocked preschools with everything, located jobs, provided counseling and made life better.
“Where were you between midnight and three?” Alia asked.
The question was perfunctory, lacking even a fraction of the interest she’d shown when she asked him the same thing with regard to his father. Because she believed he was capable of killing Jeremiah but not Miss Viola?
Score a point for her, because she was right.
“The bar closed at 3:00 a.m. I cleaned up and was in bed by 3:30.” He checked the time on his great-grandfather Landry’s Patek Philippe. He and Mary Ellen had had an appointment fifteen minutes ago with the funeral director to plan Jeremiah’s funeral. Landry hadn’t wanted to go at all, and now he would be going alone. What did he know about planning a funeral? He’d be better off trusting the funeral director to make the right choices.
Now it was his turn to ask a question. “You were just here yesterday. Why did you come back this morning?”
Alia crossed her legs. Once again her hair was pulled straight back from her face in a ridiculously tight braid, but she’d traded the drab blue suit for a tan shirt and brown skirt. She still looked all business, but at least the clothes had a little style, and the open-toed shoes with straps around her slender ankles showed off her legs well.
“I thought she was a little too careful with her responses yesterday.”
“You thought she was telling you what I wanted her to.”
Alia nodded. The sunlight catching in her hair gave it a high sheen. “I thought she might be more comfortable speaking with me about your family if you weren’t present.”
Tension eased from his shoulders. “You would have been disappointed. Miss Viola was one of the great repositories of information in this town. She observed carefully, asked questions discreetly and shared judiciously. People confided in her because they trusted her. She knew all but never told it.”
“She might have made an exception this time to get justice for her dear cousins or vengeance against her hated enemy.”
“Hated enemy?” he echoed. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”
“I asked if she regretted his passing. She said that not regretting it would—quoting here—‘be unchristian of me, wouldn’t it? I’ve been a good Christian my entire life. God will forgive me this lapse.’”
It sounded just like Miss Viola. Of course God would forgive her for hating Jeremiah. She’d felt pretty certain that God Himself was none too fond of that particular reptile on His earth.
He envisioned the lower floor of the house, hidden now by cornstalks, and imagined the people working inside: a homicide detective, maybe more, a crime scene team, someone from the coroner’s office. A lot of people expending a lot of time in a city where deaths and crimes were always waiting for attention. Turning, he fixed his gaze on Alia. “Do you think she was murdered?”
She pressed her lips together, rubbing off what little lipstick remained there. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“But you have an idea.”
Evasively she looked toward the house, as he had, but her gaze followed the lines of empty windows marching in order across the second and third floors before turning back to him. “She told me yesterday that she doesn’t go upstairs, just as you said. And yet this morning I found her lying at the foot of the steps, with one of her slippers lying askew halfway up the stairs, leaving the appearance that she fell.”
Or was forced up and pushed down again. Carried up and thrown down. The how of it wasn’t important to Landry. It was the why. Why would anyone hurt Miss Viola?
Alia folded her hands in her lap and changed the subject. “I’ve known a few people in my life who practically qualified for sainthood, but even they had frenemies.” She gave the made-up word a sardonic twist. “People they were friendly but argued with. What about Miss Viola?”
Landry rubbed the ache in his temple. Too little sleep, too much drama, too much bright sun and loud noises and ugly thoughts. He needed the cool quiet of his bedroom for a few days, at least until Jeremiah had been planted in the family tomb.
“The only person I ever heard say anything bad about her was Jeremiah. They hadn’t had any contact with each other since—” He clenched his jaw shut on the words.
“Since you left home.”
He refused to answer.
Now Alia was watching him, curiosity in her eyes. “I’ve known some kids who left at home at fifteen, sixteen. I’ve investigated a few others. I even considered it a couple times myself, back in the day. But in my experience, it was never such a big deal that family members stopped speaking because of it, especially when it was a well-known fact that the kid was okay. So why are you different? What was special about your leaving home?”
He watched the cornstalks sway in a lazy breeze. Miss Viola had put the chairs back in this corner because, she swore, under the right conditions, the corn grew so fast that a body could actually hear it. He didn’t hear anything right now but the heavy cadence of his heart and Alia’s even breathing.
“There was nothing special about it. I’d had enough, and I moved out.” Miss Viola had helped him rent a tiny apartment in a French Quarter building owned by a friend of hers and had continued to give him money until he was grown. For a runaway, he’d had it damn good.
The only thing special was that at the same time, she’d coerced Camilla and Jeremiah into sending Mary Ellen to a boarding school in Europe.
“Where was the admiral stationed at the time?”
“He’d just come back here. He’d pulled some strings to be close to his family.”
Between the two of them, he and Miss Viola had made the string-pulling all for nothing, and Jeremiah had hated them since. Had it ever bothered him that neither of them had given a damn?
Abruptly Alia gestured to Landry’s clothes. “You have an appointment?”
“Funeral home,” he said shortly.
“I can accompany you. We can talk on the way.”
“I’ve got nothing else to tell you.”
As she stood, she smiled, a professional kind of smile, not insincere, exactly, but not really sincere, either. “Then you shouldn’t mind the company.”
* * *
After checking in with Jimmy, Alia left the Fulsom mansion for the last time with a deep sense of relief. The house she had admired yesterday was cold today, less welcoming, more intimidating. Miss Viola’s imprint was everywhere, which made the fact that she was dead more chilling.
The fact that she likely had been murdered...
“Don’t you fidget?”
She glanced at Landry. He was sprawled in the driver’s seat, his right wrist resting at the top of the steering wheel, with his left arm on the window frame, his fingers tapping a quiet rhythm to music only he heard.
“You prefer your passengers on the hyperactive side?”
“No. But you’re awfully still. And quiet.”
“Next time I can ask Detective DiBiase to accompany you. He’s never still or quiet.”
Half a block passed before he asked, “How long were you married?”
Alia stiffened, looked at him, out the window, then back at him. It wasn’t a deep secret. Pretty much everyone in her life knew, including a fair number of people she’d investigated. The NCIS and local law enforcement communities were close-knit, and word got around.
Still, heat warmed the skin at the base of her throat. “Three years.”
“And in that whole time, you didn’t try to kill him.”
“No.” In a softer voice, she added, “Though there were times...”
Landry smiled. It was a really good look
on him. Good enough to make a woman spend extra time checking him out. She imagined on a warm evening, when relentless rain had put a dint in the Quarter’s usual nightlife, a woman looking for a good time knew she’d found it when she walked into his bar and he welcomed her with that smile.
Further conversation was delayed as he cut across traffic and pulled into the parking lot of what appeared to be another fabulous period mansion. Only the three dozen parking spaces and a discreet sign announcing its name and business gave it away as a funeral home. It was red brick, a bigger-than-life Southern beauty, bright flowers dancing in their beds, Spanish moss trailing from oaks, graceful paths leading from parking lot to doors to small breathtaking gardens.
“Welcome to DeVille and Sons,” Landry said drily.
“The Cadillac of funeral services.”
He cracked a tiny grin. “Yeah, Mary Ellen says they take their ‘end-of-life transition services’ very serious, so don’t repeat that inside.” He opened the door, slid out and frowned at her over the car roof. “Do you know anything about planning a funeral?”
Alia’s brows arched. “My parents are alive and well in San Diego, my maternal grandparents in Chicago and my paternal grandparents in Miami Beach. I’ve never even been to a funeral. In fact, I was thinking I could wait in the gardens—”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He came around the car, caught her arm and started toward the building.
Letting a man take her arm and guide her anywhere had been unheard of since she was a toddler and learned she’d rather fall on her diapered butt than have her father, or anyone else, holding her up. But her automatic impulse to shrug away from Landry’s grip didn’t manifest. Not until she’d felt the strength in his fingers, warm, not callused, not smooth, either. Not until she’d identified the tiny tremor that shot through her as something more purely feminine than she’d allowed herself to feel in a very long time.