by Linda Barnes
He opened the cab’s front door, rummaged in the pillowcase, and came out with a notebook, two pens for his breast pocket, and the cassette recorder he always traveled with when he was acting. He’d stuffed it in his luggage by mistake, from force of habit, ready to record his lines and cues. Now he was glad of the error. Grasping the recorder, he realized he felt comfortable in the reporter role. He’d played one in a TV cop show once. Then he’d worn horn-rimmed glasses and a cap.
“Come right in,” Mrs. Fontenot said when he climbed back onto the porch.
The foyer was dark and cool, and smelled of newly varnished wood floors. Several interior walls had been knocked down to make one large main dining area. Ceiling fans spun lazily overhead. The decor was haphazard, here and there a stab at elegance: flocked red wallpaper, gold wall sconces. But the floors were bare, and the walls covered with unframed maps and menus. Chairs and tables were crowded into the room as if Fontenot had anticipated an overflow crowd. The overall effect was contradiction, a ritzy diner.
“I can just hear my Joe say how fine the publicity would be.” Mrs. Fontenot let out a mournful sigh. “Only now, I don’t know. I doubt I’ll ever open this place. People would have come out to Gretna to eat Joe’s cooking. Yes, they would. They would’ve come miles and miles. Me, I’m a good cook myself. Pretty near good as Joe. But I haven’t got Joe’s reputation and now, well, I don’t know if I’ve got the strength.”
Spraggue made sympathetic noises and scribbled in his notebook.
“I suppose I could sell it,” she went on. “But it would seem like, oh, such a betrayal. Joe worked so damned hard for this place. It was his great dream. Just come see the kitchen.”
Spraggue got a guided tour, complete with relics (Fontenot’s favorite cast-iron griddle) and anecdotes (the time Fontenot had made bread pudding with bourbon and lemon sauce for, well, a very well-known actress who’s a trifle overweight, and she—well, Mrs. Fontenot wouldn’t want that in the paper!). Joe Fontenot hadn’t skimped in his kitchen; his restaurant was either deep in debt or well-endowed. His wife waxed eloquent over the eight-burner Vulcan gas ranges and the stacks of skillets. For a time she seemed to forget entirely the reason for his visit. Her plain face beamed and all the sharp separate parts blended into a whole that could only have been called attractive. She conjured up opening night, the first delighted customers—and then she remembered, and her face fell into sober defeated folds.
“And you and your husband lived here as well?” Spraggue prompted.
“On the second floor. We haven’t done a thing up there. All our time, all our energy, went into the restaurant.”
“I’d like to see your own place. Kind of a homey angle for the story.”
“But it’s a mess. Boxes still packed, no pictures on the walls—”
“I understand, Mrs. Fontenot. I won’t take any photos.”
She shrugged, as if no one could possibly understand. But she gave in, saying, “Well, at least up there, I can make some coffee. You’d like some coffee?”
“Very much.”
“I don’t think you told me your name. Or if you did, I don’t remember.”
“Ed,” Spraggue said. “Ed Adams.” It came to him as he said it that the name was from some forties Alan Ladd film noir, a journalist who found a body in a cheap hotel room.
“You’re not from around here.”
“No.”
“I can tell by the accent.”
Spraggue wasn’t used to thinking of himself as having an accent.
Upstairs, the paint was dingy yellow. No pictures on the walls, as Mrs. Fontenot had pointed out, but you could tell where the last tenants had hung theirs by the faded rectangles. The windows had plain white shades, no curtains. All the furniture looked hand-me-down—springs sprung, upholstery tattered.
“We were going to do so much up here,” Jeannine Fontenot shouted from the tiny galley kitchen. “I found the most perfect wallpaper, pale blue with yellow roses. We were going to furnish from scratch, just throw all this junk out.”
More money, Spraggue thought. He studied two Plexiglas-framed photographs on the dusty coffee table. One was Joseph Fontenot; the other a faded snapshot of a small child, a girl, as the frilly white dress and elaborate ringlets made clear. She smiled up at the photographer with such joyful innocence that Spraggue hated to think of her growing up.
“Now,” Fontenot’s widow said, settling onto the couch with a mug of chicory-flavored coffee in one hand, “what do you want me to tell you?”
“Everything,” Spraggue said easily. “Background. I hope you don’t mind the tape recorder. It helps my memory and I want to get any quotes just right. Anything that you say is off the record will stay off the record.” He smiled down at her and wondered if he weren’t overdoing the smarminess just a bit. His image of one of those gossip-sheet “reporters” was pretty negative, sort of a greased eel. If he’d had time to costume the part he would have chosen a shiny suit and a loud tie.
“I guess it’ll be okay. Makes me a little bit nervous. What do you mean by background?”
“I want to do the sort of piece that will let our readers know exactly what kind of a man your husband was. Where he came from. How he lived. His accomplishments. When someone is killed in such a spectacular fashion, right before the presentation of an award he might have won—”
“Would have won. No ‘might’ about it. In the category of best chef, my husband might as well have been running alone. There was no one close.”
Mrs. Fontenot did have something in common with her husband—a belief that he could do no culinary wrong. She bit her lip and continued, “Maybe that’s why …”
“Why what?”
She thought about her words before she spoke, and then she pitched her voice low, as if a whisper would outwit the tape recorder. “There is so much jealousy in this place. You wouldn’t think it. You would think there would always be room for one more, for a man or woman of talent and taste and style. But my husband—you wouldn’t think it to meet him, he was such a charming man …”
That would take some convincing, judging by that acceptance speech, and by Mary’s assessment of the man.
“He was charming,” Jeannine Fontenot repeated in her tense whisper, “but a lot of the other chefs didn’t appreciate him, because—well, it’s the truth and not boasting, he was better than they were.”
“And you think that—?”
“I know what you’re going to ask. Do I think that one of those other cooks killed him out of jealousy, out of spite?”
“Do you?”
“This part I want off the record,” she said. “But yes. Yes, me, I think there may be something in that. Jealousy is a very powerful feeling.”
She said the last few words with such intensity that Spraggue wondered how much she’d known about her husband and Dora.
“Now,” she said apologetically. “I’ve gotten way off the track. You wanted to start with my husband’s background?”
“Please, I’m interested in your theories about his death.”
She wasn’t to be led. She mumbled that possibly they could go back to that later.
Spraggue said, “Maybe I could start with the education of a great chef. Was your husband raised in a family that cared about cooking?”
She laughed. “He was raised in a family that cared about eating. Talk about poor! They didn’t have a pot to cook jambalaya in. My husband was born in the bayou. Bayou Cajun, like me.”
That identified the elusive accent. Spraggue was glad he was getting it on tape.
“He was the youngest,” she went on, “the only boy, and a wild one at that. Funny, with all those women, he was the one wound up doing the cooking. He always said if I’d ever tasted his mother’s cooking, I’d know why he cooked—out of self-defense. He always had a nose for food. You know, great cooks don’t smell or taste the way other people do. It’s a gift, the way that perfect pitch is a gift. It’s an art. People in New Orleans ap
preciate that more than the rest of this country, almost the way they do in France.”
“Your husband’s parents, are they still alive?”
“No. No. That Cajun bayou life moves fast. The girls are married and mothers at seventeen. At fifty they’re old, the way that others are at eighty. His parents died years ago. And his sisters are all married off, out of touch. Not a close family, like some. He had a half-brother—or was he a step-brother? Just about Joe’s age. They were real close, T-Bob and Joe, growing up. Two of the three musketeers. We owe a lot to T-Bob.”
“T-Bob? Why T?”
“You don’t know Cajun. A mixture of French, English, some words all our own. T-Bob was probably named for his father, and they would call him ‘Petit Bob,’ you know, Little Bob. And that would become ‘T-Bob.’
“I see.”
“But what T-Bob’s last name would be, I don’t even remember.”
She was starting to talk to herself.
“You said you owed this T-Bob a lot,” he said.
She looked up at him in surprise, as if she had forgotten he was there.
“We owe him the restaurant,” she said simply, “the dream. All this is our legacy from T-Bob. He was so close to my husband.”
“Your husband must have been very sad to lose such a friend.”
“Well, it had been a long time since he’d seen T-Bob.” She hesitated uncomfortably. “And the money, it was a wonderful surprise, the answer to so many prayers.”
“When was this? When did T-Bob die?”
“I’m not sure when he died, but the money came maybe six months ago. We did a lot in six months, finding this place, changing it—”
“You mentioned ‘three musketeers.’ Your husband and T-Bob and …?”
“It’s a long time ago,” she said. “I have a bad memory for names. You wanted to know about my husband’s cooking?”
Spraggue smiled blankly, inwardly cursing Mrs. Fontenot’s devotion to the straight line. “When did your husband start to cook for a living?”
“Friends would always happen to drop in at meal time if they knew Joseph was cooking. They’d bring something for the pot. You know, ‘I got a rabbit. If your boy Joseph wants to season up a rabbit stew like he knows how to make so special, my family’d sure be happy to help y’all eat it.’ He learned to cook with nothing and he had no training. He made things up as he went along. Whatever got trapped, he cooked. Later, of course, he had formal training, in France.”
“Before you were married?”
“No. No. Nothing happened before we were married. He was only eighteen when we married, and me, I was one week past my seventeenth birthday.” The shadow of a smile flickered across her face, and for the first time, Spraggue had a sense that she must have loved the murdered man.
But how long ago?
“I see,” he said. It was a verbal nod, a prompt—and she went on.
“We live the way our parents live. We speak mostly Cajun French and we trap and catch fish and get by. There’s always enough to eat, but it’s a long way from where we started to here, believe me.”
“This is terrific coffee,” Spraggue said encouragingly. He wondered how much blank tape was left on the cassette.
“Thank you,” she said. “It is quite a story but it’s not my story. It’s Joe’s story. There was always more that he wanted. He wasn’t happy in the bayou, always dreaming big city, and not Abbeville either. Dreaming Paris. And one day he says to me he must go to France. He says, would you be okay on your own for awhile? See, we didn’t have money for us both to go. You know, he says, I’ll come back for you, but I gotta learn something else. I can’t spend my life here.”
She paused, lost in an earlier time.
“It was hard for me when he left. I thought I’d die, and the baby, well …” She smiled at the photograph on the coffee table. “The baby was so young. Me, I have my family and I knew he’d come back—but I didn’t think he would be so long away.”
“How long?” Spraggue said quickly, thinking of the missing years Aunt Mary hadn’t been able to chart.
“Oh,” Jeannine said, uncomfortable again, “a long time.”
“And during that time what did your husband do?”
“All the things he dreamed about, I guess. He lived in Paris and he learned to be a chef. He lived all over France.”
And in New Orleans with Dora. “He wrote you?”
She swallowed coffee. “My husband is not—was not a writing man.”
“But you waited.”
“He said he’d come back and he did. I almost didn’t know him at first—he’d been sick. But after a while, when he was strong again, we packed up and came to New Orleans and he got a job as a cook, and he worked very hard and became so well known—and then his own restaurant, and there was gonna be a cookbook with a fancy New York publisher—and now—”
The doorbell rang. It echoed through the downstairs restaurant like a Chinese gong.
“That must be my photographer,” Spraggue said. Or the real reporter, he thought.
“Oh.” Mrs. Fontenot pushed at a few stray hairs on her forehead, tested out a smile. “Would you want pictures just of the restaurant or—”
“It would be wonderful if we could include you in a few shots. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well …” she said uncertainly.
“Think about it,” Spraggue urged as they went down the stairs. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.” He shuddered slightly as he said it. Was there nothing this reporter fellow wouldn’t stoop to?
The door opened on a Flowers transformed, a Flowers whose experience of professional photographers must have been bizarre indeed.
He wore what could have been a flak jacket from an old Army movie, and had so much paraphernalia strung and strapped about his person that he had to slide sideways through the door. A light meter swung from his neck like an oversized medallion. Thirty-five-millimeter film cans hung on his belt like shells on a bandolier. He sported mirrored sunglasses, and he was all brisk cheerfulness.
“What kind of shots you have in mind?” he asked Spraggue immediately, nodding a hello at Jeannine Fontenot. “House Beautiful spread?” He was terse and businesslike, a pro. He was having a great time.
“Get a few shots of each room,” Spraggue said. “I’ll trust your judgment.” Under his breath, he added, “Take your time.”
As long as Flowers was going to play along with such gusto, he’d see what personal items he could find up in the apartment. He patted his back pocket absent-mindedly and said, “I’ll be down in a minute. I dropped my notebook upstairs.”
This last was untrue, but Mrs. Fontenot was already engaged with Flowers, discussing camera angles. Spraggue wondered if Flowers could take pictures. He certainly talked a good game.
Once upstairs, Spraggue wondered how long he could justify searching for a lost notebook. He tucked it under a sofa cushion.
The brown cardboard boxes stacked in one corner were labeled, but the masking tape stickers told only the room each should be deposited in: SECOND FLOOR LIVING ROOM was all the information they gave. The tape fastening the top box was loose, so Spraggue helped it along.
Books. Large ones. At first he thought they were all cookbooks, but one, stuck in vertically, had the thickness of a scrapbook.
A photograph album. An old one judging by the yellowed leaves. Yes. If that were Mrs. Fontenot, it would have to be, oh, twenty years old. He thumbed through the pages quickly. Joe Fontenot liked taking pictures of his wife. He took a decent snapshot. Had she been his wife yet? She had a photogenic smile. Sheet after sheet of Jeannine Fontenot. Then sheet after sheet of the daughter, the little girl in the coffee table photograph, the pictures markedly fuzzier.
The telephone rang. Spraggue stuck the book back in the cardboard box and resealed the tape. Two rings and it died, answered below in the restaurant. He breathed again.
Then he started down the hall.
Flowers raised his voice so that Spraggue could hear him from the stairwell. “Well, I’d like to get some more shots of the kitchen, but if you’re sure that’s all …”
Spraggue turned and fled back to the living room. He flipped the safety catch on a back window open. The shade, after he pulled it down another half inch, hid the lock. Then he knelt in front of the sofa and thrust his hand under the cushion.
“There,” he said triumphantly, pulling out the notebook, and turning when he heard footsteps on the stairs. “It must have slid down here. You didn’t have to worry about me.”
Mrs. Fontenot was jumpy. Either the phone call or Flowers had upset her. “No,” she said hurriedly, “it’s not that. It’s just that I didn’t realize the time. I have to ask you to leave now.”
He held out the tape recorder. “But I still have a few questions.”
She stared at her wristwatch. “A couple more,” she said.
“You know they’ve arrested a woman, Dora Levoyer, for your husband’s murder.”
“I was told that.”
“Did the police tell you why they arrested her?”
“Turn that machine off.”
“Okay.”
“Yes, I know what they say, that this woman was his mistress long ago—”
“His wife.”
“Ridiculous. I don’t believe it. That’s all. I think it’s easier to arrest her than to look for the jealous one, the one who couldn’t stand my husband’s success. This woman, this Miss Levoyer, she’s not from around here, she’s not well known. The police want to keep this nice and quiet. I don’t believe it. That’s all.”
“Who else would you suggest I talk to, to get a complete picture of your husband?”
“Well, you could talk to Paul Armand. At the Café Creole. He worked with Joe. He can tell you about Joe’s cooking.”
“And?”
“Oh, a lot of cooks around here. Talk to the people at the Great Chefs, they’ll tell you he would have won.”
