“I’m sorry, Joanne,” I said, following her. “I couldn’t get the image of Frankie out of my head. I had just washed off his blood. And…and I can be paranoid even on a good day,” I finished lamely.
She turned to me. “It is okay, Micky. It really is. Someone I know probably arranged that killing. Perhaps someone I trust with my life. I was upset at first, when I realized you suspected me, but that was my petty ego at work. You and I don’t have time for petty egos. There’s a murderer to catch. Okay? Now, come help me with the dishes.”
“You sure?” I asked, still uncertain.
To assure me, she came to me and put her hands on my shoulders. Then, unexpectedly, she kissed me gently on the cheek.
I kissed her on the mouth. Then I put my arms around her and held her. She returned the embrace and the kiss for a moment, then she broke off.
“No, Micky, this isn’t right,” she said, still in my arms.
“But it’s not so wrong,” I answered.
“No, it’s not.”
“Alex?” I questioned.
“No, not really.” And she let go of me, pulling away. “Sleeping with you wouldn’t change my love for her.” She looked out the window for an instant, then turned back to me. “I won’t sleep with you because I can’t walk away from you. I like you too much to sleep with you, does that make sense?”
“No, but it’s original. A lot of people have said no, but none of them because they liked me too much.”
“If you ever need someone, really need someone to hold you through the night, I will. I’ll be there for you. Through the night and into the morning. Do you need me now or do you just want me?”
“Want,” I answered, afraid of the morning. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t, couldn’t admit I needed her. If I did.
“Okay, then go put away the dishes.”
“Show me where.” She led the way back into the kitchen. “Oh, and Joanne? That’s the nicest rejection I’ve ever had,” I said.
“It wasn’t a rejection. Pots and pans next to the stove,” she directed.
We had just finished making the kitchen spic-and-span when Ranson’s doorbell rang. The door opened and Alex’s voice called out a hello.
“Good thing we’re doing the dishes,” Ranson commented dryly. Then she went into the living room. I didn’t hear what she said to Alex, but Alex’s reply was, “Oh, I know. But I figured I could only make the two of you safer. What mobster in his right mind would risk harming Bo and Marcia Sayers’ little girl? Football alums are a bigger mob than the mob, and they take their old stars seriously. Besides, my picture was in the paper just last week. I’m too public to be killed easily.”
“Hi, Alex,” I said. “Did you play football?”
Ranson had a look of mixed exasperation and amusement on her face and was shaking her head.
“Micky, you mean you don’t know the star quarterback of the 1947 Tigers was my dad? It never fails, any man I meet over the age of thirty-five always asks if I’m number eleven’s daughter,” Alex explained. “And yes, I play football. I love tackling women.” She flashed a smile at both of us. “Besides, I’m in the mood for a disaster. Better your kitchen than mine.” She had two shopping bags with her, which she handed to Ranson, who handed them to me. “Mexican. Want to make bets on whether it will be edible or not?”
It wasn’t a disaster, it was delicious. Fortunately, neither Ranson nor I had bet on it being inedible.
When Ranson finally commented on how late it was, Alex smiled.
“I’ve brought my pajamas. I’ll go change.”
Ranson started to argue with her about the safety of staying the night.
“It’s not safe leaving you with tall, good-looking women, Joanne, dear,” she answered.
Ranson and I carefully avoided looking at each other.
“Besides,” Alex continued, “I know you silent, butch types. You’ll never eat breakfast and spend the rest of the week ordering pizzas for dinner.”
Ranson relented. After seeing her around Alex for the evening, I finally began to think of her as Joanne, because she seemed more relaxed and informal than I’d ever seen her. There was a companionableness between them that I could only envy.
I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. When I came back out, most of the lights had been turned off. Alex was standing behind Joanne rubbing her shoulders, then Joanne turned to her and they kissed for a long time. I crept back into the bathroom, not wanting to intrude. After what seemed like a decent interval, I made a noisy exit back out to the living room.
“About time,” Ranson commented. Alex winked at me.
“Mexican food always slows me down,” I said and winked back.
They finished in the bathroom, said good night, and then shut the bedroom door, leaving me on the couch.
They were pretty quiet, but I did hear an occasional noise from beyond the door and I knew they were making love.
I felt like an intruder; I imagined that they were being quiet for my sake. They had waited for a while before they started, probably hoping that I would be asleep.
But I couldn’t sleep. Memories of both Frankie and Barbara were too clear, too sharply etched to allow the blur of sleep to overtake me. It was probably the sharp edge of my senses that allowed me to hear Joanne and Alex make love.
Hearing them only made me sad, not in an envious way, but with a wistfulness for something I never had and probably never would. I knew Joanne meant what she said about holding me in the night if I really needed it, but there is a difference in being held by arms that are close and always there and arms that aren’t.
After their quiet rustlings had stopped and been still for a while, I found my suitcase and the bottle of Scotch. I badly needed to dull my edges. I lay in the dark drinking Scotch out of the bottle.
I heard the bedroom door open. I lay motionless, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t notice my wakefulness.
It was Alex who walked past me to the bathroom. I put the bottle down on the floor, hoping to make it invisible in the dark.
The door clicked open and Alex came back out, but I didn’t hear her footsteps pass me. I lay still, hoping she would think I was asleep. I heard a soft swish and realized that she was standing next to me.
“I saw the bottle,” she said softly.
Damn it.
“Can I turn on the reading light?” she asked.
I reached up and did it for her.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I mumbled.
She picked up the bottle and looked at it.
“Three fingers’ worth,” she said. “Joanne’s parents were alcoholics. She knows all the tricks. She found it earlier.”
“I’m not an alcoholic. I just don’t sleep very well when my friends have been murdered,” I answered back.
“This isn’t the solution,” she said. She was kneeling on the floor next to me.
“Then give me one,” I demanded in a low voice. I didn’t want Ranson to come out here and find me with the bottle.
Alex sighed. “I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve known Joanne for a long time now and held her through a lot of nights, but I can’t make her pain go away. I couldn’t presume to touch yours.”
“Which is?” I wanted to know what Ranson had told her.
“I don’t know. Only you do. Want to talk?”
“No, I’m okay. Just thinking too much. The Scotch helps.”
“For a while.”
“Every bit helps. It’s a distraction.”
“There are better ways to be distracted,” Alex said.
“Not at hand.”
“How about a bedtime story?” she suggested.
I looked at her like she was crazy.
She tiptoed to one of Joanne’s bookcases and after a minute pulled out a battered old book.
“This is one of the books from her happy days,” Alex said.
She read me the tale of Peter Rabbit. I can vaguely remember my mother reading to me as we sat in f
ront of the fireplace. My dad was probably hunched over his desk, doing the books for the shipyard or paying bills. I don’t see him in the picture with my mother, but I remember him later doing that and the memories blur.
Alex had a soft, expressive voice. For the minutes that she read to me, I felt warm and cozy, away from my clangorous and hostile adult world. Maybe Joanne was right, maybe you can’t go back to your childhood, but tonight I caught a glimpse of it.
Two months ago I would have been, at best, indulgent at the idea of someone reading me a children’s story. Now I desperately needed a hint of innocence and an act of simple kindness.
Alex finished reading and smiled at me. She was sitting on the floor like a big sister reading to a little sister. Her hand was resting on my shoulder.
“Thank you.” I smiled back.
“Sometimes we all could use a bedtime story,” she said as she stood up. “Good night, Micky, sleep well.” She kissed me on the forehead.
“Good night, Alex.”
She went back into the bedroom. I quietly hid my bottle of Scotch back in my suitcase, then I lay down and fell asleep.
I awoke sometime later, when the gray is still so dense that it is more night than morning. I had been dreaming. I could only remember the last bit. A soft brown rabbit was running down a trail in the woods. The rabbit was slowing, having escaped whatever was chasing it. Then it turned the corner—I could still feel the jolt of fear—and found a rattlesnake. It was not just a snake, but a nightmare snake. Large, the size of a python with red eyes and fangs dripping blood. It was coiled to strike. That was when I woke up. I looked about the gray room, wanting the dawn to come. I knew what the snake represented. But who was the rabbit? Barbara? Frankie? Or me?
Chapter 20
Ranson would not let me out of her apartment all week. I kept waking up from dreams that I couldn’t quite remember, just snatches of images. Running down a dark street, or in the sunlit woods. But I never knew what was chasing me. I tried not to drink, but sometimes I had to just to get to sleep.
We argued about my going to Frankie’s funeral. I was sure that between those masters of disguise, Richard and Torbin, no one would be able to recognize me, but, with a little help from Hutch (he threatened to sit on me), she kept me away. I got to stay in and read the obituaries in the Times-Picayune. Frankie’s was small and brief for a small and brief life. Ignatious Holloway got a big spread, picture and all. Life was not fair.
Hutch sat with me during Frankie’s funeral, to make sure I didn’t get any bright ideas. We played chess, but, because I was distracted, he beat me two out of three times.
By the end of the week, I was stir-crazy. Better stir-crazy than dead was all the sympathy I got out of Ranson. She was out most of the time and I couldn’t have visitors over because I wasn’t supposed to be here. Occasionally I could hear the distant sounds of the parades and the drunken camaraderie of Mardi Gras. All at a distance. For me, of course, it was verboten. It’s too easy to knife someone in a crowd, Ranson told me. I should have told her that death from boredom is a much worse fate.
The weekend was a little better. Ranson turned into a social butterfly (well, moth) and invited Danny and Elly over on Saturday. Alex, too, of course. It was a wonderful evening. I got to hear about all the places everyone else went during the week. What parades they saw or had to avoid. Bookstores, movies, concerts. Danny and Elly were going bicycling with Cordelia and Thoreau on Sunday. They invited us along, but Ranson turned it down. I hadn’t gone cycling since I was a kid. It sounded like fun. All I could do was sit and wait, read, watch television, fight boredom, just wait.
Monday morning Ranson threw the paper on top of me. She was dressed and ready to go. I was still abed, albeit on the couch. Just because she had to keep policeman’s hours didn’t mean I had to.
“Read it and weep,” she said.
I looked at the page she indicated. There was a wedding announcement for Cordelia James and Thoreau Hathaway. What a name, his not hers. Both theirs, really. Daughter of Holloway, granddaughter of Holloway. Them rich Holloways. Ben was right. Bayou rats should stick with bayou people. “Damn heteros,” I commented. “Some people are just born straight.”
“And others have the angles knocked out of them,” Ranson said.
I wondered what she meant by that, but she was out the door before I got a chance to ask.
I slowly got up, poured myself a cup of coffee, and proceeded to read the paper at my leisure. There was not much else to do. A line caught my eye. “Twenty years ago today…” I read, but I never got to what happened in the article.
Twenty years ago today. I looked at the date on the paper, but I knew what it was. February 25th. The anniversary of my father’s death and my life stopping and starting over again. I never thought it fair that this day should happen every year and that my birthday, on the 29th, happens only once every four years.
I got up, but there was nowhere to go. Damn Ranson and damn this tiny apartment. It wasn’t small, really, but I felt caged and chained in. I paced back and forth. I wanted out. I wanted to run as far and fast as I could. Like I had been running in my dreams. But you can’t run from yourself.
Ranson’s car pulled up. Odd. I wondered what was so important for her to come rushing back so quickly.
“Get your coat. I need you,” she said, only sticking her head in the doorway.
I grabbed my jacket and followed her. She was back in the car and had it started by the time I got there. She didn’t say anything as we drove off, her face set with the hard lines of tension and worry. Finally, she handed me a file. “Can you talk to him?”
Who? I looked at the file. Ben Beaugez. Oh, God, Ben, what has life broken you to now?
We were driving toward a dilapidated section of wharves, a part of the river docks that had long ago fallen into disuse. Perhaps they had been slapped together in some burst of optimism, but when the expected ships arrived slowly or not at all, they were abandoned to the passing of time. The only other car in sight was a derelict, long since picked over by the scavengers. I could see no other people.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Revenge,” Ranson answered. “Your friend is out to get the man he claims killed his wife and two kids twenty years ago today.”
She parked next to a deserted warehouse.
I felt numb. This had to be a dream. A nightmare. “But Cordelia’s father is dead,” I blurted out.
“You tell him that.” Ranson continued, “Cordelia called me. He let her use a phone long enough to demand that her father show up. She asked me to get a death certificate—anything—to prove that he’s really dead. I don’t think Beaugez will believe a piece of paper.” She gave me a pointed look.
I glanced away from her, staring instead at the dilapidated warehouse. Letters once named it, but they were weathered away to dingy smudges, a shadow noticeable only in the strong light of day.
We got out of the car and Ranson led me around the side of the warehouse toward the freight doors. They were partly open, narrowly framing a jumble of empty and broken crates inside, piles of unwanted and unused debris. Through the window Ranson pointed to a far corner.
The warehouse was huge, its floor sagging lumber, the high ceilings bisected almost at random by the weathered rafters. It held only two people—an older man and a younger woman. I could only glimpse them through the cracked and dirt-stained window.
Ranson stepped up to the open door. “Ben,” she called, “I’ve brought Micky…Robedeaux.”
For a moment, Ben didn’t answer, as if he couldn’t remember who Micky Robedeaux was. When it came, Ben’s reply was bitter and angry. And perhaps drunk. “You shouldn’t have brought her. I want the man that killed my wife and kids. You lied to me!” I tried to focus on him, to block out the dirt and distance that kept his face a blur—only a drunken old man, not someone I recognized from the sharply etched memories of childhood.
“I can’t bring you Jefferson Hollowa
y. He’s dead,” Ranson replied.
“You’re lyin’. Bring that damn coward.”
I called out to him, “She’s right, Ben. Holloway died years ago.”
“I don’t want Micky here.”
I saw Ben move, a tense motion of his hand. He had a gun. Ranson saw it, too. I suddenly wondered who he was, whether I knew him at all, or if I only knew some frail memory from very long ago.
I didn’t want anything to happen to Cordelia. Or Ben either. It seemed as if he wanted some victory, a final triumph over fate. But he didn’t look victorious, only lonely and scared in all that space. “He won’t pull the trigger,” I said, moving toward the door so that Ben could see me.
“Look at that file, dammit.” Ranson backed away from the door to block my way. Without giving me time to open the folder I still had in my hand, she continued, “He spent the last twelve years in prison for manslaughter. He lost his temper in a bar and hit a man in the head with a vodka bottle. Still sure he won’t pull the trigger?”
“I don’t… It was a mistake. He lost his temper, you said. Ben’s not…he’s a decent person.”
“Decent people don’t hold guns to people’s heads and threaten them.”
“Let me get closer so that I can talk to him.”
“What if you fail?”
“I can’t…I won’t.”
“Not good enough. I’m calling backup. I can’t risk Cordelia’s life because the man you knew twenty years ago might not pull the trigger.”
“And then what? You blow his brains out to save her?”
“If I have to,” Ranson replied bluntly. “I’m sorry, Micky.” She led me back around the corner of the warehouse to her car. “Stay here,” she ordered me as she opened her car door to use the radio.
There would be no ending that I cared to witness. I didn’t want to watch Ben gunned down like some mangy animal. I didn’t think he would kill Cordelia, but… What revenge was he seeking? Was it only Jefferson Holloway? Or, having lost two children, would he include a daughter? Would the man I knew twenty years ago hold a hostage at gunpoint? And accidents could happen. I shuddered.
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