The Great Beau

by O'Neil De Noux

  Jordan goes, “Aaaaa,” puts a hand up to lean on the vault door.

  Jessie shakes her ass at them on her way out.

  Jordan makes a high pitched noise.

  They get the Remingtons out of the crate as Claire arrives in jeans again and a flowery blouse. She steps to the paintings, runs a finger over the top of one.

  “Where did you find them?”

  “Edna Schwandorf, Countess Isenburg. Ever hear of her?”

  “No.”

  He tells her the countess’s story.

  “Any chance the old man could have told her she could have the Remington’s?”

  Claire shrugs.

  “She’ll have to prove it. Maybe she’s mentioned in his will. You did change the key and security code to the lock at your grandfather’s.”

  “Yes. Monday afternoon.”

  “Good. She had a key and the old code.”

  Claire looks pale.

  SITTING BEHIND HIS desk, Beau makes another phone call and is surprised she answers his grandfather’s phone after the first ring.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “Are you OK, Johnny?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  ‘Are you OK’ – a logical question. Two months AK, After Katrina, Beau called her from Ochsner Hospital after he was shot. Never overly affectionate, Laurie Raven Beau is known among the Oglala as Swift Raven – a strong woman, strong enough to raise a son, bury a husband, then go back to her family in South Dakota without looking back.

  He asks how she is doing and as always, she is fine. He asks about his grandfather and cousins and they are fine as well. He asks about the raven brushing him with its feathers.

  “You certain it was a raven.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then be wary, son. It is a warning. A squawking raven woke Crazy Horse the morning Custer’s men approached. When he stepped outside, the raven brushed his hair and the cavalry soon attacked.”

  “So, I should be on the lookout for horsemen?”

  “You are the man in blue now. Be wary of everyone.”

  “I usually am.”

  “Be extra wary and call me when it is over.”

  “I will, Mom. I love you.”

  “You know I love you, son.”

  When it is over? What am I into?

  Extra wary? His mother does not realize her son closely follows the most important NOPD rule. Be polite and professional and prepared to kill everyone you meet.

  STELLA STANDS ON the foyer table and gives Beau a loud ‘Meow’, starts chattering. He stops to pet her and she grabs his hand with her paw, drawing out her claws to keep his hand from pulling away.

  “What is it, Baby?”

  “Rowl. Aowl. Rowl!”

  “Food dish empty?”

  “Aowl. Aowl. Aowl. Aowl.”

  “Coyotes?”

  “Rowl. Aowl. AArowl.”

  He manages to get his hand under her chin and tickles her and she chatters again, swats his hand with claws sheathed and jumps off the table, heads into the hall for the dining room. Beau drops his briefcase on the dining room table and takes the paper bag with the po-boys and French fries into the kitchen, places it into the oven and turns it on – 200 degrees to warm up the food.

  He finds Jessie upstairs lying on their bed. She’s kicked off her shoes. He watches her for a couple seconds before she goes, “Did Miss Drama accost you yet?”

  “In the foyer. Chattering and rowling.”

  “Not that Miss Drama. The other one.”

  Rushing footsteps turn Beau to the door as Stefi – in a ragged LSU T-shirt and jeans – comes in the bedroom.

  “Johnny. Johnny. Johnny! I think Stella killed my new kitten.”

  New kitten?

  “OK. Where’s the body?”

  Stefi bounces on her toes. “Help me find it. You’re a natural tracker.”

  “Where was the last place you saw this kitten?”

  “Living room.” Stefi turns and runs away.

  Beau looks at Jessie whose eyes are still closed. He tickles her foot and goes after Stefi, finds her in the living room, looking behind a sofa.

  “Stella hissed at it and swatted the kittie. I think she murdered it when I wasn’t looking and hid the body.”

  “Unlikely. Female cats rarely kill kittens. She was just showing who’s boss.”

  Beau looks behind the loveseat and then over at the desks. Stefi searches behind the long curtains.

  “What did the kitten do when Stella swatted it?”

  “It jumped at her and she hissed louder and Stella shoved it. Hard.”

  Beau turns and sees it sitting up next to the sofa. A white kitten with a gray ear, gray mask around its eyes and a stripped tail like a ringtail with gray, black and white bands. It stares up at Beau.

  “Is it a white kitten with gray?”

  Stefi scrambles over and snatches the kitten before it can get away.

  “Scamp. Scamp.” She kisses the kitten and pets it, brings it to Beau to pet. “You little scamp. Where were you?”

  The kitten starts purring.

  “Where did you find it?” asks Beau.

  “At the streetcar stop. It followed me from art class. I swear. I tried to discourage him.”

  “Awfully little. I bet its mother’s looking for it.”

  “She should be charged with child endangerment. He could have been run over by a streetcar or a car.”

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  She puts the kitten next to her cheek and the kitten nuzzles her.

  “Because he’s already fallen in love with me.”

  Beau thinks it’s the other way around. He heads into the kitchen to check on the food.

  “No, don’t feed him from Stella’s bowl. Get his own bowl for him, a new water bowl as well and a new litter box. Cats can be work. What’d your sister say?”

  He pulls three plates from the cabinet.

  “She doesn’t want him. Like she doesn’t want me. Nobody wants me.”

  “True. I asked around. Nobody wants you.”

  Stefi sticks her tongue out at Beau, opens a small can of cat food for Scamp and scoops it into a bowl and the little guy attacks it.

  Thank God it’s weaned. It’s a smaller kitten than Stella was when he found her in the rain.

  Stefi says, “I’d run away but you’d just track me down.”

  “Damn right. I need the practice.”

  She puts a bowl of water next to Scamp, leans against the counter, says, “There’s no chance I’ll run you off, is there?”

  Run me off? Thinks she’ll run me away from Jessie.

  “You got that right.”

  “Good. I think Jessie’s worried about me aggravating you so much you’ll go back to your houseboat.”

  “Sad Lisa is on her way across Lake Pontchartrain to Lake Maurepas. My cousin’s gonna live in her.” Man named Tijon Eddie Beau. A distant cousin of Beau’s father, Tijon is in his late 60s.

  Beau tells her to bring utensils as he pulls the bag from the oven.

  “What was that about an art class?”

  Jessie steps in wearing a cut-off T-shirt and shorts. She’s barefoot and fixes iced tea.

  “Art class,” Jessie says. “She means the one her sister – who doesn’t want her – paid for so Miss Drama can fulfill her 14-year old lifelong dream.”

  They gather around the table. Jessie with her meatball po-boy, Beau with his pané meat po-boy, Stefi with her fried shrimp. French fries are still hot, it takes a deep dip in ketchup to cool them enough to eat.

  Beau spots Stella atop one of the cabinets. She leans over and hisses and Scamp is on the floor looking up. Stefi jumps up and scoops her kitten, brings it back to the table, leaves him in her lap.

  “I’m still worried Stella will hurt him.”

  “It’s instinct. She won’t hurt him.”

  “But she hasn’t been around kittens since she was one. Maybe she was an only child.”

  “F
emale felines and canines, for that matter, are some of the best mothers in the world. That’s why their species are so successful.”

  Later he explains something about cats. They can find hiding places you’ll never find.

  “Know how small my houseboat is? Stella could hide from me, even full grown. I’d look everywhere and I’m a trained detective on how to search and couldn’t find her. Later she’d be sitting on the sofa or up on the foot of my bed looking at me.”

  Stella Blanche Beau, the pure-bred Turkish Angora blue, leaps from atop the cabinet to the table, slides across the far end – long haired cats have fur under their paws – and jumps out of the room.

  Beau looks at Jessie now, smiles, asks, “So how’d the rest of your day go?”

  “Not bad, until I got home.”

  Stefi’s tongue comes out again.

  “Keep that kitten in your lap.” To Beau now – “In three hours, I put together a merger of two banks in Luxembourg. When it goes though, the Louvier family will own the fifth largest bank in the world’s second largest investment banking center, after the US.”

  A pair or ears, followed by kitten eyes look over the lip of the table at Beau.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Stefi goes, “about Jessie worried I’d aggravate you so much you’ll move out.”

  He looks at Jessie.

  “I thought I answered that. Even you can’t be that aggravating.”

  Stefi chuckles and Jessie lets out a sound similar to Stella’s growl.

  THEIR SATURDAY PLANS change from Jessie and Beau dressing up for dinner and dancing to T-shirt and blue jeans, movie and dinner for three. Beau thinks of calling Hillel Jordan but the man’s moving into his new digs at the Lake Marina Tower high-rise condos and one child – Stefi – is enough to handle.

  “No, you can’t take your kitten.” Jessie says.

  “He’ll stay in my purse.”

  They both look at Beau who says, “Let’s vote.”

  It goes two to one against Stefi who says the vote’s rigged, sticks her tongue out then goes to find Stella to warn her to leave Scamp alone.

  Jessie’s in a dark red T-shirt with small black lettering that reads – Italian Woman: A Dangerous Breed. Her left knee protrudes from a hole in her jeans. Another hole below her left rear pocket shows a slice of her white panties. She wears black heels.

  Stefi’s jeans are even more ratty with both knees exposed and her white T-shirt reads – I’m Not Finished Yet. She wears black Nike running shoes.

  Beau’s black T-shirt has no lettering and his Wrangler jeans have no holes. His expertly-sighted G7B subcompact 9mm, better known as a baby Glock, sits in a holster on his belt next to his gold badge. This Glock has the same mottled camouflage finish and recoil dampening and is hidden by the dark blue dress shirt Beau wears unbuttoned over his T-shirt. His running shoes are black Sketchers.

  Straight to the metroplex theater in Metairie they are almost late for a movie Stefi has to see. Beau keeps nodding out through the flick and Stefi keeps waking him up. Thankfully it ends. Jessie and Stefi argue all the way to the restaurant.

  “It’s the same old story. Innocent natives overrun by greedy settlers.” Jessie touches Beau’s neck. “Sound familiar?”

  Stefi pokes Beau’s shoulder..

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it too.”

  “Ignorant movie.”

  Stefi sits back, snorts loudly.

  Beau goes, “OK. They have to destroy one tree. That’s it. They don’t send cruise missiles to knock it out.” He glances back at Stefi who sits with arms folded. “We’ve had cruise missiles since the 1970s.” He looks back at the road. “What do these great warriors send? Hovercraft slow enough to be caught by dragons and can be knocked out of the sky with spears.”

  He pulls off the interstate and heads toward the lake.

  “Great special effects,” Stefi argues.

  Jessie comes right back with, “Special effects don’t make movies great. The characters do.”

  “You don’t think Jake and Natiri weren’t the shit?”

  “Who?”

  “The blue people.”

  “Shit would describe them pretty well.”

  “Y’all are just too old. Avatar will make a billion dollars. Just watch.”

  THEY SIT AT a corner table in the new version of Jaeger’s Seafood Restaurant, a wooden building on concrete pilings at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The place is packed and they order seafood platters and sip iced tea until the food comes. Beau has his back to the corner and has to turn to look out the windows at the dark lake. He automatically checks out the people at the nearest tables. Families with lots of kids. Noisy people having a good time.

  Jessie gives him a flirtatious smile and he takes her hand.

  “Must be odd not working a murder case.”

  He nods, takes a sip of tea.

  “What’s that?” Stefi points to an animal crawling up a wooden piling just outside the restaurant.

  “Nutria.”

  “It’s big.”

  “Used to hunt them in the swamp back home.”

  This particular nutria is at least 15 pounds. Beaver-like rodent with a rat tail. Beau’s mother didn’t like to cook them. Took too much seasoning to get it to taste good. She preferred squirrels and birds in her gumbo – dove and blue jays and any ducks Beau and his Papa killed.

  Their platters arrived quicker than expected – boiled shrimp, fried catfish, softboiled crabs, broiled oysters and deep-fried cornbread hush puppies.

  Stefi gets Beau’s attention. “Your daddy taught you how to hunt?”

  “And fish.”

  Jessie spears an oyster, tells Beau, “We’ll talk later.”

  “What about?” goes Stefi. “I wanna hear.”

  “Adult stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Stefi thinks – these two are more entertaining than the movie.

  The catfish is very good and Beau’s glad he got the large platter instead of the medium one the girls got.

  Stefi goes, “You killed a lot of animals when you lived on the swamp.”

  “We had to eat.”

  “Nutria, coons, squirrels, gators. Your father teach you how to kill an alligator?”

  “It’s good eating.”

  Stefi narrows an eye, staring at Beau as if she’s looking through gun sights.

  “So how’d you learn how to kill men?”

  She catches Jessie with a mouthful.

  Beau bites a hush puppy and says, “I’ll tell you a story.”

  Stefi almost bounces in her seat. “Oh, good. I love your stories.”

  Jessie opens her mouth, then shuts its, pulls her hair back and starts in on her soft-shell crab.

  Beau keeps his voice low. “I was eight years old when a boy my age named Eddie Brown wandered away from his Aunt Bella Granier’s house and into the swamp where I was raised. Eddie was from the big city, Baton Rouge, and didn’t know better than to wander too far from the house.

  “I was sitting on the dock behind our house with my Daddy and my mother’s youngest brother James who had come down from South Dakota to stay the summer with us in our daubed house off Vermilion Bay. My great-grandfather Beau built the house by hand, built it two feet off the ground, filling its walls with swamp mud to keep it cool in summer and warm during the wet winters. James was staying with me in my room upstairs. At night he would tell me tales of the great plains warriors who were our ancestors.

  “That day, we were cleaning the trout we’d caught when a sheriff’s deputy my Daddy knew came up and told us about Eddie Brown, asked if we’d seen anything, asked if we could help look for the boy. We went in and told my Mama, my Daddy grabbing his pump action twenty gauge shotgun, passing our twenty-two rifle to James. I hurried upstairs to get the knife James had brought me – a gift from my grandfather up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was my first obsidian knife – black volcanic rock-glass sharpened on one side as all good Sioux knives are
honed. It had a handle made from elk bone. A knife made for skinning buffalo and scalping the white eyes.”

  “Like the one you carry now?” Stefi asks as Beau starts in on his crab. He nods.

  “We walked past the Granier camp and a sheriff’s car was parked there. I think I heard a woman crying, but it could have been my eight year old imagination. James and my Daddy moved to a small ridge we call a cheniére and James went down on his knees, examined the ground before moving away, looking down every few steps. I moved up to him and asked what he was seeing.

  “He said he was looking for sign. ‘See the grass. The boy walked here. See the big impressions over there? That’s where the sheriff’s men walked’.

  “The boy’s impressions in the grass were slight but there all right and we followed them along the bayou and into the swamp. After a while the footprints of the sheriff’s man turned around. We followed the smaller prints. I knew the area and noticed the change in the heat as the humidity gripped us at nearly one hundred percent. The familiar sounds of animals rustling, bird wings flapping and the incessant buzz of insects filled the fetid air that smelled of sweet chlorophyll and sour from rotting plants.”

  Beau moves his hand around.

  “This was Crooked Bayou and the canopy of trees closed over us, tall bottom-land hardwoods – cypress, oaks and sweetgum trees, the occasional elderberry and sugarberry tree. The tracks moved away from the cheniére into the marsh. Eddie Brown most likely did it to avoid the prickly palmetto bushes whose fruit is favored by raccoons, which my Daddy and I hunted at night with the twenty-two. The trees were connected by trumpet vines we had to crawl through and it was harder to read sign but James pointed out broken leaves and bent branches. It wasn’t long before we passed the camp of my Daddy’s old friend, Luke Fenice.

  “My Daddy told us to hold up and he went over to talk to Luke. I remember smelling the strong, spicy scent of gumbo from two pots Luke had boiling on his front gallery that surrounded the unpainted wooden building with its rusted metal roof. The place stood perched on creosote piling a good ten feet above the bayou. The gallery running around the place was dotted with nets drying in the sun, crab nets, crawfish nets, fish nets. Beyond the place stood a ramshackle dock with a couple pirogues.”