Death by the Riverside

by J. M. Redmann; Jean M. Redmann

  He stood up, sweeping a few dropped crawfish shells into the Mississippi. He carefully put the silver flask into his pocket and folded up the paper bag.

  “Thank you for the crawfish and talking to me,” I said as I stood up.

  “Talk’s cheap, chil’. The day I stop talkin’ be the day I die. Now you be on your way. The next couple of days when you finally able to smile, you think of me and my crawdad pointers. I know you got sadness today and tomorrow. But someday you start to remember it all together and the bad times won’t seem so big and the good times grow to their right size.”

  I nodded slowly. He was right, I suspected, but I wondered if time was different to an ninety-year-old man than to a woman almost thirty.

  We walked back to where the pier touched ground, he turned to me and said, “Now you be good, chil’. There’s a world out there, full of sadness and joy. Take what you want, don’t just let it hand things to you.” He extended his hand. I took it and we shook hands.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know when, and it may take some time, but I’ll pass your kindness on.”

  “You a good kid,” he said, echoing Ben’s words.

  I nodded and smiled at him. Maybe I wasn’t too bad a kid. He turned and walked away, slowly, not with the infirmity of age, but with an understanding of the uselessness of haste. I stood watching him until he was almost out of sight. Then I turned abruptly and walked in the direction I had to go. I didn’t want to see the horizon with him not in it.

  It was late in the day and I had a long walk. I found two dimes in one pocket. Not enough to even make a phone call. I found the keys to my apartment in the jacket pocket where I had put them for safekeeping. My apartment, at least, was closer than Ranson’s. I supposed that I would call her and let her chew me out and get it over with, but the thought didn’t make me happy.

  The gray clouds kept their promise and a light drizzle started at around the halfway point in my walk. I turned up my jacket collar and hunched my shoulders against it. I hoped the old man was inside, safe and warm, sipping his bourbon and telling his favorite granddaughter joyous stories.

  I wanted that. To know that life had done what it could to me, but that, no matter what, there were always possibilities. Even the gray of this day no longer seemed so bleakly relentless, but rather a fitting tribute to a man who had died. I would take it as that.

  Would I trade the time I had had with my father to avoid the tragedy of his death? What if he had never been?

  No, if that was the deal, the ten years with a kind, gentle man who loved me, to be ended with the horror of that night, I would take it again. By denying the night, I denied all the days before. Don’t ever let them take the joy away from you, the old man said. I had. I had let them take both pain and joy. If I had been able to cry at my father’s death, all the tears that needed to be cried, not just the few that Aunt Greta thought appropriate for public display, then maybe the next day, the next year, I could have laughed. I could have held on to the joy.

  Maybe if I stopped running from the memory of his loving me, I could stop running from the possibility of others loving me.

  Chapter 21

  It was dark and the drizzle was veering toward rain when I got to my apartment. After letting myself in the bottom door, I shook myself like a dog, trying to get some of the wet out of my hair and off my shoulders. I decided to make myself some coffee and change clothes before I called Ranson.

  I walked up the stairs, slowly, tired from the walk and the day. I had passed the second floor landing before I noticed a shadow above me on the stairs. Shit, I thought. They must have seen me, certainly heard me. Reality intrudes, as it usually does. But I must say, fate has an exquisite sense of timing.

  I hung motionless on the landing, trying to decide whether I wanted to get shot in the back running down the stairs or in front charging up them. “There are ten cops behind me and I’ve got a shotgun,” I said in a loud, and I hoped, threatening, voice.

  “No, there aren’t,” the shadow said. “I just phoned Joanne ten minutes ago and she said she had no idea where you were.”

  I think I would have preferred Milo and his minions. The last person I wanted to see was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. I came around the landing and looked up at her.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you,” Cordelia said. She was sitting on the stairs waiting for me. “You look wet.”

  “I am wet,” I said, as I slowly climbed the stairs to where she was sitting. “Why are you here?” I asked, looking at her.

  “I don’t really know. I had to see you,” she answered.

  “I have a lot of regrets about that night, but my biggest one is that I didn’t pull the trigger sooner,” I said bluntly, angry at her for being here and ambushing my raw feelings. I did wish I had pulled the trigger sooner. I had no regrets or remorse concerning Jefferson Holloway’s death. Even if he was Cordelia’s father. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  She turned her head slightly, away from my direct gaze. The light caught her eyes and cheeks. She had the look of someone who had cried, washed her face and made herself as presentable as possible for company, but the traces still showed. It made me regret my harshness.

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “Of course, it’s true. How could it not be?” She turned to look at me. “I wish you had pulled the trigger sooner, too.”

  “Why?” I demanded. People aren’t usually glad that you killed their father.

  “I won’t bother with the altruistic bullshit,” she said. “There are selfish motives.” She paused and took a breath. “My father murdered his mistress. He had probably intended that all along. She was blackmailing him. So, no matter what, I have to live with that. I’m the daughter of a cheat and a scoundrel and a murderer. But he was worried about losing all the money he got from my grandfather. So he added three more people to his list. The woman was pregnant, wasn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Eight months.”

  “Four, then, really. His mistress, the woman you heard him beat, well, maybe I could have rationalized her death. She hooked up with him for his money and what she could get out of him. He didn’t get a chance to destroy her letters, that’s how I found out. But he added three innocent people and an unborn child.” She paused. Suddenly, she pounded her fist against her knee. “Damn him! I hate him!” She was crying. “See, I have selfish reasons. I hate living my life under his shadow. Goddamn him!” She hit the wall.

  “Cordelia,” I said. I gripped her shoulders in my hands, not wanting her to hurt herself. “Cordelia, we’ve got to stop…don’t hurt yourself.”

  She shook herself and wiped her tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re dripping wet. Let’s go inside. You need some dry clothes.” She put a hand over one of mine, pressed it, then let it go and got up.

  “Yes, I must look like a drowned rat,” I said as I opened my door.

  “No, not a rat,” she said following behind me. “Rats don’t have curly hair.”

  I turned on a few lights. Hepplewhite winked an eye at me, stretched, and then curled up and went back to sleep. Thanks, Hep, glad to know you’ve missed me. Hutch and Ms. Clavish must have been taking good care of her.

  “Can you make some coffee while I get changed?” I asked Cordelia. I started looking in my closet.

  She went into the kitchen. I found an old pair of jeans. They had a ripped knee, but were clean and would fit.

  “Micky,” Cordelia said, poking her head out of the kitchen. “Devastating news. There is no coffee of any kind.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Lousy cops. They must have drunk it all. I don’t guess they expected me back so soon.” Hutch had probably used up my coffee, figuring he would pay me back before I even knew it was missing.

  “Why are you packing?” she asked, looking at me.

  I had thrown a couple of pairs of underwear and a T-shirt or two into a small duffel bag.

  “I’m going out to the shipyard. I’m going to spend
the night there,” I said, realizing it had been my intention all along. I didn’t want Cordelia here, because she would stop me. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I justified. “And I’ll call Ranson and let her scream and yell at me as much as she likes. There are some good-byes that I never said properly,” I continued, “and I have to go. Please don’t try to stop me.”

  “No, I won’t,” she answered. “Can I help?”

  “I think I’ve got everything, but thanks.”

  “Can I drive you somewhere?”

  “My car is a few blocks over, hidden in a friend’s garage.”

  “Mine’s in front. I’ll take you.”

  I nodded agreement. I didn’t have many more dry clothes to change into and my raincoat was at Ranson’s.

  I finished what little packing I had to do, scratched Hep’s ears, turned out the lights, and we left.

  Cordelia’s car was parked right across the street. I should have noticed it on my way here, but I hadn’t. We got in and I gave her directions to my car.

  “Micky,” she said as we pulled away from the curb. “I’m so sorry.” She glanced quickly at me, then back to her driving.

  “For what? You’ve done nothing,” I answered.

  “Someone from my family needs to apologize to you. I doubt anyone else has.”

  “You can’t make up for somebody else’s sins. You will spend your whole life trying and never get close. It’s nearly impossible to make up for our own,” I said more for myself than for her.

  “I need this. I need a closure. I need…forgiveness,” she said. “You’re the only person who can give it to me.”

  “You’ve done nothing that requires forgiveness,” I replied. “At least, not to me,” I added.

  “If he had been five minutes later down that road…” She trailed off. We came to where my car was.

  “Yeah, and if we had been five minutes later or earlier. If David didn’t need to pee one more time before he left his grandmother’s or if I had decided I needed to or any other number of things, this wouldn’t have happened,” I said. “You and I are not responsible,” I added with finality. I picked up my duffel bag from the floor. A car behind us honked. Cordelia put a hand on my arm to restrain me.

  “Let me go with you,” she said. She pulled the car forward to let the honking car pass. “Somehow, you and I are intertwined. Now that I’ve finally been able to bring the subject up,” she said with a rueful look, “I can’t let it or you go just yet.”

  I puzzled for a minute.

  “Ranson told you who I was, didn’t she?” I demanded.

  “No, I knew. We never discussed it. I didn’t know that Joanne knew anything about your past.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I’ll tell you on the drive out. It’s a long story.”

  “Aren’t they all?” I answered. “Okay, you can come along for the ride.” I gave her directions out of the city.

  Traffic was heavy on the rain-slicked road. We didn’t talk about much except traffic and navigation until we got out of the city. I was trying to figure out whether I wanted Cordelia with me and whether or not there was anything I could do about it at this point. I decided there wasn’t, and besides that I was curious.

  “You hungry?” she asked as we got to the outskirts of the city. “Maybe we should pick up some food on the way.”

  I was hungry. All I’d had to eat so far today were the crawfish on the pier.

  She pulled into the parking lot of a small grocery store.

  “I’m starved,” Cordelia continued. “Anything you positively won’t eat?”

  “Okra, except in gumbo,” I answered. “There’s no electricity out there. I’m also broke.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a rich heiress. Take advantage of it. I’ll be right back.” She got out and went into the store. I waited in the car. When and how did she know that I was Lemoyne Robedeaux’s daughter? She couldn’t have known until this morning that I had killed her father. Could she? I had blanked out so much of that night that I couldn’t remember what was possible for anyone to know. Of course, I had talked to the police, but never admitted that I had been in the truck. I always thought I had denied everything. But maybe that was only to myself.

  Cordelia came back and put a sack of groceries in the back seat. “No okra,” she said as she got in. She started the car and pulled out.

  “Time for a long story?” I inquired as we left the sparse traffic from the store and gas station behind.

  She nodded, cast a glance at me, and began. “My father was a very charming scoundrel. I was thirteen when he died. Everyone liked him, at least at first. There had been tension between my parents for a long time.

  “After he died, my mother seemed kind of…relieved. I was angry at her for feeling like that. We got into an argument and she told me that one day, she would explain it all. When I was nineteen, she told me, saying that I had a right to know, not to be handed the whitewashed Holloway version. She showed me the letters from his mistress. There were several, including the blackmail letters. I remember how shocked I was. I thought adultery happened somewhere else, not in our family.

  “Then she told me how he died. That he had deserved it.”

  “What could you know?” I asked, “About that night?”

  “What should have been in the police reports. Grandpa Holloway had access to all the real ones. The woman in the back of the truck was identified as the mistress. The gas can was from my father’s car, had his fingerprints all over it. Skid marks indicated that he was in the wrong lane and caused the accident. He had matches and a cigarette still in his hand. An autopsy revealed his mistress, I can’t remember her name, had been beaten to death and that the others…”

  I put my hand on her arm to stop her.

  “I don’t want to know. I want to think they died in the accident.”

  “Okay,” she answered and then didn’t say anything.

  Her silence told me that they hadn’t died in the crash, but in the fire. I tried to stare straight ahead at the road, to concentrate on anything but the grisly detail I had learned. There had been no kindness, no hint of mercy that night. I crumpled, crying like a child in pain.

  “Micky…” Cordelia started. But there was nothing to say. I heard my harsh sobbing in the stillness of the rain.

  “Turn here,” I said, trying to gain control, to pay attention to where we were going instead of my anguish. But I couldn’t stop crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “I shouldn’t have let you know.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault,” I finally said. “I’ve had a nightmare confirmed. If no one knew, I would have let it rest, but since there was an autopsy that did say whether they died by fire… I would have to know. Some day.” I paused. We drove on in the rain. “Here,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “It happened here,” I explained.

  “My God,” Cordelia whispered under her breath, slowing the car.

  There were no traces, nothing to mark this as the spot, save for my memory.

  “Do you want me to stop?” she asked.

  “No, there’s nothing to see,” I replied. “You were telling a story,” I said as we passed the curves and left them behind.

  “The police reports. Someone had to have shot my father. They knew you were in the truck, since the other woman…”

  “Alma. Alma Beaugez.”

  “Her mother said you were. That you had been there when your father stopped by to pick up Alma and her son. By process of elimination, the police figured you were the one who had fired the gun, but they were never sure. Grandpa didn’t want it investigated. Dad was…well, not interested in settling down, to use the Southern euphemism.”

  “He cheated on your mother.”

  Cordelia paused, then replied, “Regularly, it appeared. Granddad is…was of the old school and had some very strict ideas about family and the like. The problem wasn’t that Dad murdered the woman; you c
an’t really murder a prostitute, not according to…” She paused, calming herself.

  “Not in the South your grandfather knew,” I supplied.

  “Yes. Women were either virgins to be protected at all costs or whores to be trampled underfoot. My mother, being a proper married woman, was to be protected.”

  “At all costs.”

  “Yes, mother and child, a daughter, no less. God forbid that she be exposed to sex,” Cordelia commented sardonically, then she was silent for a moment, before saying quietly, “I don’t think Dad ever thought there really were consequences. There was always a way out. At least for him. Anyway, Granddad had repeatedly warned him and had finally used the only real leverage he had—money. If Dad were found in an even vaguely compromising situation, that was it. Granddad would take my mother’s side in the divorce and Dad would be out without a penny. Granddad knew that that would change Dad’s behavior. But I don’t guess he knew it would make him a murderer.”

  “So it wasn’t murdering the woman, but just being seen with her,” I interjected.

  “It’s insane, isn’t it? Dad had to avoid being reported in an accident in the middle of nowhere in the company of a woman not his wife. But…if the woman was in the truck…with the other accident victims…”

  “And he sets a goddamn fire so that none of the people left in the truck will ever wake up and wonder how another woman ended up with them…how fucking convenient. His mistress is killed in an accident he had nothing to do with,” I finished bitterly.

  “Dad wouldn’t have to face the consequences,” Cordelia said quietly. “He could just drive away from it all.”

  “It almost worked. Too bad I was hanging around with a shotgun. But I wasn’t really there, was I? Not according to the version Holloway money bought,” I said acidly. Then I realized that Cordelia wasn’t the right person to hate, that she was letting me throw my anger at her simply because she knew she was the only target left for me.