Bayou Hero

by Marilyn Pappano

  It hadn’t been so bad, confiding in her. He’d thought he would never tell his story to another soul, that Dr. Granville had been absolutely the last. She’d told him it was nothing to be ashamed of, that she wouldn’t advise opening conversations with strangers with it, but the only one paying the price of secrecy, she’d insisted, was him.

  In a sense, she’d been right. It must not have haunted any of the bastards responsible. But she’d been wrong, too. Two who’d done it and two who’d known were dead. They’d paid for what they’d done or, in the case of the women, not done.

  And he felt better for telling.

  He felt better for Alia’s response.

  The screen door closed with a bang seconds before she sat down beside him. She had a cold drink, too—something turquoise blue in a tall glass—and carried a handful of mini candy bars, offering him one. “I called Murphy and asked him to hold off on interviewing the Wallace daughters. He rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon.”

  Landry acknowledged the news with a nod. He hadn’t spoken to either of them since he’d left home and wasn’t likely to ever get a friendly word from them once they realized he’d told their secret, too.

  “I also checked the names you gave me.”

  Since they’d arrived at the house, he’d put the chicken in a brown-sugar-and-cinnamon marinade, cleaned the corn on the cob, sliced the tomatoes and kicked back with a beer, while she’d been on the computer. Shifting to one side, she pulled a piece of paper from her hip pocket and smoothed it one-handed. It was covered with blocks of chicken-scratch writing so tiny he couldn’t make out much more than a name here and there. He counted ten blocks. He and Mary Ellen, apparently, didn’t rate inclusion, he presumed, because the cops had already looked at them.

  “Of Wallace’s three kids, the oldest is married, no children, does all the same social stuff as her parents. Nothing questionable or notable about her. Daughter number two has been divorced six times, no kids and does none of the same social stuff as her parents. She’s got a few DUIs, a couple of arrests for public intox and a fondness for making a lot of public scenes. Jeffrey has a dozen drug busts, nothing major, and has apparently disappeared off the grid. No activity on his Social Security number, driver’s license is expired, nothing for a couple years.”

  Was he dead? God, Landry hoped not, but he’d been so damned lost the last time he’d seen him.

  Another sin to lay at their fathers’ feet.

  Plus a prayer that Jeffrey had cleaned up, changed his name and moved to a nice little town where he’d met a nice little girl who healed hearts and souls.

  Alia deciphered the next set of scratches. “The Anderson daughter committed suicide, like you said. Straight-A student, all kinds of activities—everyone loved her, teachers and students alike. She’d been scheduled to begin classes at Tulane that fall. Too close to home, maybe?”

  “Wouldn’t it be for you?”

  Her expression darkened, became implacable and driven and just a little bewildered. That was the part of her, he knew, that was asking, How could they do this?

  He’d asked how and why a thousand times. Had begged them to stop at least a thousand times.

  Clearing her throat, she went back to her notes. “Grayson’s daughters. The older one is married to another of New Orleans’s golden boys. Her husband has very public affairs, but she keeps a stiff upper lip and stands by her man. She has a ten-year-old son who’s been kicked out of two schools and is currently enrolled in a military-type boarding school. Her daughter is seven and goes to private school. The family goes to church with Mom and Dad, is regularly seen at Commander’s Palace with them for Sunday brunch and lives a block or two away.

  “Daughter number two is a barely functioning alcoholic. Divorced twice, one son who’s five and living with his father’s family. Doesn’t work, apparently supported by her family—a little blackmail there, you think?—and though she claims New Orleans as home, she spends most of her time traveling elsewhere.”

  Man, they were a depressing bunch, Landry thought. Coming from fine, respectable families, backed by power and influence and wealth—and a dozen loser kids.

  Except Mary Ellen. All she’d ever wanted was to get married and raise babies and be happy. It had taken a while, but she’d achieved those dreams.

  And he was all he’d ever wanted. He had a job he liked. He took care of himself. The only family he wanted was the one he chose for himself. The past was, most of the time, in the past, where he no longer had nightmares about it. His only true regret at this very moment was Miss Viola’s death.

  How many men could claim only one regret?

  Well, make that two, he thought with a glance at Alia. She was off-limits now but maybe someday...

  “The Gaudette kids,” she said, her tone sounding as if she was glad they were getting to the end. “The oldest daughter went to college in Virginia, married a man from London, moved there and stayed. According to Facebook and the mommy blog she does with her friends, she’s happy and productive and fiercely vocal on the matter of child abuse laws, there, here, everywhere.”

  That one’s going to run the world, her mother used to proudly say at those family dinners.

  Or ruin it, her father had always muttered to the other men, who’d laughed.

  “The second kid still lives in the area. She runs a no-kill animal shelter with her girlfriend. Her only presence online is for the shelter—fund-raisers, features on adoptable pets. She’s never been arrested, keeps her life private. She visits her sister in London once every year or so but doesn’t seem to have contact with her parents. The parents do, however, make a sizable donation to the shelter every year. Gets them platinum status on the website.”

  “Her father always believed if you threw enough money at a problem, it would eventually go away.”

  “Last ones. Daughter number three isn’t on the radar, not since she spent two years in a psychiatric hospital about five years ago. She left Louisiana for California—that’s where the hospital was—and never moved back. She’s living a totally unremarkable life there with a boyfriend and four cats. The son never married, has three kids, all in the custody of their mothers. He was in an accident a few years ago—motorcycle versus semi—and is a paraplegic. He lives, God love him, with Mom and Dad.”

  “Is that his punishment or theirs?”

  “You could make an argument either way.” Alia folded the paper again, creasing the lines. “You’re surprised by how much you remember.”

  Draining the last of the beer, he pointed the bottle at her. “I tried for years to forget every last detail. After years of therapy, I found a balance I could live with.”

  “Until the past week upset the balance.”

  “It did that.” He shook his head ruefully.

  After a moment, she met his gaze. “It seems you and Mary Ellen and the mommy blogger and her sister survived the best. No drugs, no arrests, no drinking—”

  He held up the beer bottle.

  “—to excess, and no messes in your personal lives. Excepting the murders.”

  “Those pesky little murders do tend to get messy.”

  She leaned back against the steps and drew a long suck of drink through the straw. She looked about fifteen years old. Maybe it was the Kool-Aid, or the absence of her weapons and badge—on the counter just inside the door—or her hair falling loose from its braid.

  She was the kind of girl he’d stopped dreaming about when he was fourteen. It was hard for a boy who was getting sexually assaulted every few weeks to think about normal boy-girl stuff like having crushes, holding hands, kissing with tongues. It had been impossible for a long time to even imagine willingly getting intimate.

  He’d made up for that during and after therapy. He’d been intimate, maybe with too many women, to forget how his first few years of sex h
ad gone.

  He wanted to get intimate with Alia. How did that work, given her job and his relation to four murder victims? Could it even work? Was she interested?

  His ego said yes. It wasn’t standard policy for her to spend so much time with someone like him. He didn’t see Jimmy DiBiase coming around on his time off or hear Jack Murphy sharing the details of his personal life.

  There was more than the job between him and Alia. He felt it. But the job between them was one hell of an obstacle. No more television than he watched, he knew cops weren’t supposed to get personally involved with the subjects of their investigations.

  And yet it sometimes happened. Jack and Evie Murphy were proof.

  Abruptly, as Alia popped another candy bar into her mouth, he asked, “Am I a suspect in these crimes?”

  She chewed the chocolate and crumpled the wrapper into a tiny ball. “You’re on my list, but your alibi keeps you from getting a big red question mark beside your name.”

  After a moment, he asked, “Do you really have an actual list?”

  “Yep.”

  “With red question marks?”

  “Yep. I’m a visual person.” She ate the last candy bar, then checked the time on her phone. “Aren’t you getting hungry?”

  He considered saying no, making her wait for another hour, but he’d be lying. He was always ready for corn on the cob and green tomatoes, hot off the grill. Besides, who knew how cranky she’d get if she was really hungry?

  While she watched, he removed the grill cover, lit the burners, scrubbed the grates and wiped them with oil-soaked paper towels. Together they brought out the food and utensils, then she stood nearby while the chicken sizzled in the hot spot, the corn browned and melting butter caused flare-ups under the grate. The tomatoes, basted with oil, went on last.

  “I’m surprised. I didn’t peg you for a cook.”

  “I’m not a cook. I’m a griller. Easiest way in the world to fix a burger, steak or fish.”

  She snorted. “Sometime I’ll introduce you to my binder full of take-out and delivery menus for every restaurant in a ten-mile radius.”

  He shook his head, and she gave him a warning finger. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty with that look. My mom gives it to me often. She’s the expert at it.”

  Her gaze settled on the food, and an expression came across her face—and it wasn’t admiring the crosshatch lines on the tomatoes, the black bits on the corn or the lovely sear on the chicken. The case was forefront in her mind again. Soon there would come a comment or a question he wouldn’t have an answer to, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t have a giant red question mark on her list, and that was enough for him.

  “Why kill Camilla first? Why not Jeremiah?”

  And there were the questions. Taking her glass, he pushed the straw aside and took a long drink of sweet liquid. “I don’t know. Opportunity? Jeremiah told people she was out of town. Maybe she really was planning on leaving, so that made her first.”

  She acknowledged the possibility with a nod. “I wonder if she was first. If there have been any other deaths associated with these people besides the daughter’s suicide. Maybe we just don’t know.”

  Landry carefully flipped a piece of chicken to the cooler side of the grill with tongs, then said, “Maybe Camilla intended to tell someone. Maybe it was finally time to clear her conscience.”

  Alia considered that. “Confession is good for the soul, they say. A friend, a pastor, a psychologist? And she could have unwisely—”

  She said the last word tactfully, but he corrected it. “Drunkenly.”

  “—admitted her plans. Your father—any of the men, all of them—could have put her in that crypt.”

  Landry wished for another beer, larger and stronger and colder then the last, then Alia laid her hand on his forearm. That was better than all the cold beer in the world.

  “I’d like to think he had some sort of feelings for her that wouldn’t let him do that,” he said regretfully. “They were married more than thirty years. They had children, grandchildren. But he traded his kids to his friends for sex, so hell, what do I know?”

  After a few more moments, he removed the food from the grill, and they settled at the small kitchen table to eat. Much as he liked sunshine and heat, air-conditioning had a lot going for it.

  Everything was smoky, the chicken tender, the corn buttery, the tomatoes tangy. He’d cooked enough for three, and all the plates were empty when they finished. Where did she put it all?

  She gave a satisfied sigh. “If I married you, would you grill dinner every night?”

  He stilled in the act of reaching for dishes to carry to the sink. It was a silly question, based on her affection for food rather than her fondness for him. But it touched the part of him that had found intimacy a problem. It made him feel normal. “Maybe every other night. Odd nights we grill. Even nights we get Vietnamese.”

  “Excellent compromise.” She moved the beers to the countertop, then got a pop-up wipe to clean the table. “With beignets on Sunday mornings and oysters on the half shell every Friday night.”

  His hands in sudsy water, Landry studied her. While prepping dinner, he’d seen all the candy dishes, had found a cabinet full of potato chips and cereal. There hadn’t been much else in the way of food besides canned and frozen vegetables and six half gallons of almond milk. “Your father starved you as a child, didn’t he?” he teased.

  She stuck out her tongue. “He brought me a scooter pie home from work every single day. When he was deployed, he mailed them to me every day...though now that I think of it, my mom may have just told me to make me happy because they were never crushed or melty.”

  “And I’m sure your mother fed you as often and as much as possible.”

  Alia rinsed the first dish he’d washed, then dried and put it away. “Mom says every Vietnamese mother needs a village to feed. I was hers.” She gave the towel a warning wave in his direction. “I know what you’re doing. Jimmy teased me about how much I ate every single day we were married. You’re just a little more tactful than him. He was always saying, ‘Damn, girl, you eat a lot.’ I do. I always have. Mom says I begged for extra bottles of formula when I was six months old. Jimmy says one day my metabolism is going to fail and my ass is going to explode to two ax handles’ wide.”

  Landry handed the last dish to her. “I like your ass just fine.”

  After putting the plate away, she swatted him with the towel. “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, but thank you.”

  Still teasing, he said, “Now you say something nice about me.”

  “Oh, you are fishing for compliments.” She hung up the towel, smoothed it neatly, then looked up. “I like you—” After a moment, she changed the inflection and simply, quietly repeated it. “I like you.”

  * * *

  It was nearly ten when Landry rose from the couch and stretched. “I should go.”

  Yes, you should, Alia thought, but she didn’t want him to. Which was exactly why he should. She had already spent way more time with him than she could justify, doing things far better suited to boyfriend/girlfriend than special agent/subject. The only claim she could make with a clear conscience was that things hadn’t gotten physical. Yet.

  She slid to her feet, turned off the music and walked barefoot with him to the door and outside. Nocturnal insects sang in a chorus of buzzes. A soft breeze carried fragrances from a neighbor’s garden, and somewhere distant a train whistle sounded.

  They stopped at the edge of the steps, the boards warm and worn smooth against her feet by generations of feet traveling across them. He was near enough for her to feel the energy radiating from him, to touch if she swayed just the tiniest bit to her left. She could lay her head on his shoulder, feel his warmth and strength and breathe in the scent of him. She could then lift her
head from his shoulder and find herself exactly where she wanted to be.

  Wrapped in intimacy with him.

  He gazed at her a long time in the dim glow of the porch light, and she knew—not wishful thinking but knew as sure as she stood there that he was thinking the same thing. He wanted intimacy, and he wanted it with her.

  Confirming her thought, he leaned closer, a slow encroaching that gave her plenty of time to step back. She didn’t. His mouth was only an inch away, almost near enough to kiss, to taste, but before she closed the distance between them, he spoke.

  “I like you, too,” he murmured in a raspy voice. “So what do we do about it?”

  Her breath caught. A frivolous part of her that so rarely showed itself did a silent Yes! while another part sighed with relief. If she were a different person, a more overtly emotional person, she might even call it a swoon.

  “Do we wait until the case is over and done with and then see...?” He arched one brow.

  Tilting her head to the side, she replied, “That’s one option.”

  “It could be weeks.”

  “Months,” she agreed. “Or...”

  “Or?”

  The thought played in her head, tempting her with the possibilities, stunning her with the idea of making such a commitment to a man who might be nothing more than a short-term fling. Though in her gut, she knew there was nothing short-term about what she felt. What she was pretty sure he felt.

  He was waiting for her to suggest option two, still standing impossibly close, his dark gaze locked with hers. A slow smile formed, softening the lines of his face. “Guess I’ll have to wait to find out.”

  She smiled, too.

  “I’ll be going to the funeral home again tomorrow. I’ll give the guy Scott’s credit card information and ask him to outdo the old man’s send-off.” Hands in his pockets, he gazed into the night. “The good thing about them finding her body when they did...with the year-and-a-day rule, she can’t be buried in the same crypt as him. Her life with him might have seemed like an eternity in hell, but at least she won’t have to really spend eternity with him.”