Читать книгу Alligator Moon - Joanna Wayne - Страница 9

IT WAS HALF PAST EIGHT in the morning when Cassie padded to the front door of her fourth-floor condominium, stepped into the quiet hall and snagged her morning copy of the Times Picayune. She skimmed the headlines as she walked back to the kitchen for her first cup of coffee.

Drake and the Flanders case were beaten out for top billing by a three-car pileup on I-10, but they made honorable mention in smaller headlines about a third of the way down the page: Pierson Accuses Beau Pierre Sheriff Of Mishandling Evidence.

And whether he had or not—whether Drake believed he had or not—he could ride that horse for days. The bigger spectacle the pretrial hoopla, the less attention anyone actually paid to testimony or evidence once the trial itself got underway. And Drake was the master of spectacle.

Dr. Norman Guilliot was in for a fight.

Cassie dropped the paper to the kitchen table and poured the dark, chicory-laden brew into an oversize mug. But instead of taking it back to the table, she took it out on the balcony to watch the morning traffic of ferries, tug boats and barges along the muddy Mississippi.

The view from the balcony had been the factor that tipped the scale for buying this condo instead of the larger and more reasonably priced one on St. Charles Avenue. The view and the fact that she could walk the six blocks to work rather than take the streetcar.

She sipped her coffee and took in the sights. The ferry from Algiers to the foot of Canal Street passed a few yards in front of a slow-moving tanker heading downriver. A sleek cruise ship was docked at the River Walk and nearer the aquarium a much smaller boat was already loading tourists in shorts and sunglasses, their cameras around their necks and their cash stashed in fanny packs that hung under paunchy stomachs.

The activity was like a restless surge of energy, constantly moving, searching for the next bend in the river, the next port of call.

The next chapter in her life. Nothing like making an analogy personal.

She glanced at her watch. Almost nine. Moore’s Travel should be opening soon. Greece might be the answer to her need to go forward with her life, and she was so ready to get out of New Orleans for a while.

Besides, the trip would give her a chance to spend some quality time with her mother. They’d drifted apart during the seven years she’d spent married to Drake. Mainly because when they’d been together her mother had always cut to the chase and asked the dreaded question.

“Are you happy?”

Well, duh? I’m married to the hottest upcoming attorney in New Orleans if not the south. No one but a mother would even think to ask such a question. And if no one ever asked, Cassie didn’t have to answer.

You can ask now, Mom. The answer is not yet, but I’m getting there. Greece would be a nice step along the way. But with or without Greece, I’m taking back control of my life.

BUTCH HAVELIN rolled over in bed and stared at the ceiling of his Houston apartment. It was already late afternoon in Greece. Rhonda was probably getting ready for dinner with her friend. She liked to eat early, liked schedules and order and life that fit into neat little compartments and never got befuddled with spontaneity or excitement.

Opposites attract. The problem was the attraction wore thin over time, became frayed and faded, like an old shirt after too many washings. He and Rhonda had seen thirty years of washings.

Now they lived in the same house, slept in the same bed—at least, they did the nights he made it back to their home in The Woodlands—still saw some of the friends they’d known since the early days of their marriage. Rhonda still offered her cheek for a quick peck in the mornings when he left for work and they hugged each other when he left on business trips.

Sometimes they even went through the motions of making love. The saddest thing was that he didn’t even know when it had all slipped away. The passion had just crept from their lives like heat seeping from a hot bath, leaving nothing but tepidity.

Babs stretched beside him, but didn’t open her eyes. The sheet slipped down and her breasts peeked over the top, soft mounds of firm, golden flesh and pinkish nipples. Small, but all perky and perfect.

Butch never bothered with trying to convince himself that what he and Babs had now would last or even that he wanted it to. She was thirty-four, only a couple of years older than Cassie. He was sixty-one. They were a generation apart in music, memories and experiences. But none of that seemed to matter when they were together. She made him potent and alive, gave him back snatches of his youth, and made him feel as if he were some stud muffin she couldn’t get enough of.

He didn’t want a divorce, definitely didn’t want to split up his assets at this point in life. But he was glad Rhonda was in Greece, would be happy for her to stay there a few more months. Safe. Happy. And gone.

Truth was he’d never given her itinerary a thought, but he’d phone his daughter again today and feign a little concern so that Cassie wouldn’t get all upset and start bugging him about why he didn’t know exactly where her mother was.

The one thing he didn’t need in his personal life was complications. Not from Cassie. Not from Rhonda. Not even from Babs.

Conner-Marsh was all he could handle right now, and if he let this merger get screwed up, his ass was grass. There were plenty of younger guys waiting around to knock the old man off the top.

JOHN ROBICHEAUX pulled the pillow over his head to block the jangling ring of the telephone. The whiskey from last night was blasting away inside his head like a jackhammer. His stomach didn’t feel so great, either. He reached across the bed, checking to be certain he was in it alone.

He was. Time was that would have been enough to send him back to the kitchen for a hair of the dog that was gnawing away at the base of his skull. These days it just brought a quick wave of relief.

The phone kept ringing. He reached for it, started to yank it from the wall connection, then changed his mind. It might be a guide job and he could use the business—as long as they didn’t expect him to ride those choppy waves today.

“John Robicheaux. Can I help you?”

“I got some bad news for you, John.”

John struggled to pull his mind from the mire. “Who is this?”

“Sheriff Babineaux.”

The sheriff. Shit. John must have gotten in a fight and busted up something last night. He tried to remember but only picked up bits and pieces of the night between the shattering blows of the jackhammer. “What’d I do?”

“It’s Dennis, John.”

“What did he do?”

“He’s dead.”

The words cut through the fog, jerking John from the stupor. He threw his legs over the side of the bed, the sudden move sending the room into a tailspin.

“You gotta be mistaken, Tom. I saw Dennis last night. He was fine.”

“It’s no mistake. I wouldn’t call you with this kind of news if I wasn’t certain.”

Damn. This was John’s fault. He should have stayed sober. Should have seen that his little brother got home safe. Now… “Did he hit another car or just run off the road?”

“Neither. It wasn’t an accident, John. Dennis ate a bullet.”

“Murdered?”

“Suicide.”

No! Hell no! Him, maybe, but never Dennis. Dennis had a life. Beer to drink. Women to screw. A big move all planned.

“I guess I should have come out there and told you myself, but it being Saturday and all, I thought I’d better catch you before you headed out into the Gulf on a fishing trip.”

“When did you find out?”

“A few minutes ago. Must have happened sometime during the night, but no one noticed the car over in the swamp until this morning. Hank LeBlanc and a couple of his sons found it and gave me a call. I’m here now.”

“Where’s here?”

“Bayou Road, a couple of miles before the turnoff to Dennis’s place.”

“Don’t move the body until I get there.”

“This ain’t a pretty sight, John. Why don’t you wait and see the body once it’s down at the funeral home and Dastague’s got it cleaned up?”

“Forget Dastague. I want an autopsy and I want it done in New Orleans.”

“No cause, John. There’s not a sign of foul play.”

“Yeah, well I call a bullet plenty sign of foul play. And the cause for the autopsy is that I said so. I want a full investigation, Tom, not some half-assed job that won’t get beyond the ridicule stage with a grand jury.”

“Calm down, John. I know how you felt about Dennis. Hell, we all loved him. He was good-time tonic in solid form. But he had his problems. You know that.”

“Yeah, well you’re the one who’s got them now, Tom. Full autopsy. Full investigation. Stay put. I’m on my way over there.”

“There’s no use. I checked—”

“I’m on my way. Be there.”

The jackhammer was still at work, pounding so that John stumbled as he went to the kitchen for drugs to kill the pain. He shook four extra-strength painkillers into his hand and chased them with a glass of water from the tap.

Images flashed through his mind, like stabs of glaring light. Dennis laughing. Dennis fishing. Dennis scared as shit the time he tipped the pirogue over when they were teasing the old gator with raw chicken wings.

Dennis shaking like an old man in detox a few hours after Ginny Lynn Flanders had died on the operating table.

Suicide, hell! This had the stench of Dr. Norman Guilliot all over it.

“I’M NOT SURE who I need to talk to,” Cassie explained once she got Moore’s Travel on the phone. “My mother is Mrs. Butch Havelin and my father said she books all her travel through your agency.”

“Sure. Rhonda Havelin. You must be Cassie.”

“Right.”

“I’ve heard so much about you from Rhonda, I feel as if I know you. Your mother and I are members of the same church and we’ve worked on a couple of committees together. She’s very efficient and organized, keeps us all on task.”

“That would be my mother.”

“So, what can I do for you?”

“I need to get in touch with Mom, but I don’t have her itinerary. Can you pull it up for me?”

“Are you talking about her Greece trip?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. She came in and picked up some pamphlets on the islands and sites of interest in and around Athens, but the friend she was going with booked the trip.”

“I don’t suppose you know the name of the booking agency.”

“No. Did you check with your father?”

“I talked to him last night. He probably has the itinerary somewhere but can’t put his hands on it.”

“I hope this isn’t an emergency situation.”

“Nothing serious, but I would like to talk to her. Did Mom mention any specific hotels?”

“No, only that they planned to stay in smaller, family-owned establishments so they could experience more of the authentic Greek culture.”

“That doesn’t sound like Mom.”

“I cautioned her to be careful with that when I saw her at church before she left, but I got the feeling that her friend had traveled the area before. It’s a very safe part of the world.”

“Mom usually thinks anything less than a four-star hotel is roughing it.”

“Nothing like hooking up with an old high school friend to make you adventuresome.”

“Guess not.” But Cassie suspected it would take a lot more than that to make her mother adventuresome. She was probably sitting in some air-conditioned hotel calling for room service and reading a book while her friend did all the adventuring.

Cassie thanked the woman for her trouble and broke the connection. Who’d have ever thought that locating her mother would be the hardest part of planning her own vacation?

But Patsy David sounded as if she might be just what Cassie’s mother needed—bold and open to new experiences. Perhaps Cassie shouldn’t join them. It might throw her mother back into her maternal mode and spoil her fun. Cassie decided she’d give that further consideration if and when she actually got to talk to Rhonda.

And she wasn’t giving up on that yet. She still had her ace in the hole. If her mother’s next-door neighbor didn’t know the details of the Greece trip, Cassie was certain it wouldn’t be from lack of prying.

She retrieved Marianne Jefferies’s phone number from information and made the call. They exchanged the perfunctory hellos and Cassie got right to the point before Marianne had a chance to start her own round of questioning.

“I’m trying to get in touch with Mom. Did she leave you a copy of her itinerary?”

“Why? Is anything wrong?”

“No. I’d just like to give her a call and see how her vacation’s going.”

“You’ll have to talk to Butch then. As secretive as Rhonda was about this trip, I doubt anyone else would know how to find her.”

“What do you mean by secretive?”

“Well, anytime I asked her about the trip, she changed the subject. Might as well have just said it was none of my business.”

Imagine that. “So she didn’t mention any specific plans?”

“I got the impression they didn’t have any. I drove Rhonda to the airport when she left. She seemed really nervous that day, which made perfect sense to me. I mean, in this day and age, anything could happen to two women traveling alone.”

A morbid thought. Cassie wasn’t going to go there, but she was starting to feel a bit uneasy. “I don’t guess you have her friend Patsy’s home number.”

“No. I’m not even sure where the woman lives. Some little town in northern Louisiana.”

“Minden?”

“That sounds right.”

“I may try to find her phone number. See if her husband has an itinerary.”

“You’re out of luck there. I asked why Patsy wanted Rhonda to go to Greece with her instead of going with her husband and Rhonda said Patsy had never married.”

No wonder she still had energy to go on adventures.

“If you talk to Rhonda, let me know how she’s doing. I swear she and Patsy sound like the senior version of Thelma and Louise. Trouble, if you know what I mean. And with all those attractive Greek guys around looking for rich American women to seduce.”

Cassie finished the phone conversation, then walked to the counter, refilled her coffee cup and flicked on the radio. She switched the dial to her favorite light jazz station, tuning in just in time for the news break.

Dennis Robicheaux, anesthetist at the Magnolia Plantation Restorative and Therapeutic Center, shot and killed himself last night less than a mile from his home on the outskirts of Beau Pierre. Robicheaux had been part of the surgery team when Ginny Flanders died during a routine cosmetic surgery operation.

A suicide. Talk about stirring a handful of complications into the pot. The situation now reeked of guilt on the part of the surgery team and gave Drake and Reverend Evan Flanders a huge advantage in public opinion if not in the trial itself.

It might add a few insurmountable hurdles to Cassie’s plans, as well. Her boss would want human interest stories and some investigative articles on the new development. Olson was determined to turn the previously floundering Crescent Connection into a magazine no local citizen would want to be without.

He wanted in-your-face reporting on issues that mattered and up-close and personal articles on the kind of stories that the citizens just couldn’t get enough of. Dennis Robicheaux’s suicide would fit solidly into the latter category. Olson would have complained about an impromptu vacation before the suicide. He’d likely veto it now.

Instead of a week in the Greek Islands, she’d be tooling around the tiny south Louisiana town of Beau Pierre. It was a disgustingly poor tradeoff.

NORMAN GUILLIOT stepped into the shower, his body still humming from the orgasm he’d reached a few minutes ago with his wife. Fifteen years of marriage, and Annabeth could still touch all the right buttons to get him off.

She wasn’t as hot as she’d been when he’d first met her, but at thirty-six she still had a body that turned heads. She was smart, too, a lot smarter than most folks gave her credit for being. Her worst fault was probably her extravagance. If one fur coat was too much for a climate that never saw a real winter, buy two. But he could afford her, so what the hell.

The goal now was to stay wealthy. He’d worked damn hard to get where he was, and he wasn’t letting some two-bit lawyer and a TV Bible thumper yank it away from him. He was fifty-eight, years too old to start over.

Norman adjusted the stream of water until it was as hot as he could stand it, then let it pulsate onto his shoulders and roll down his taut stomach and over his private parts, washing his and Annabeth’s juices right down the drain. That was okay. They were in endless supply. He squirted some shampoo into his thinning hair and worked it into peaks of lather.

The shower door opened and Annabeth poked her head inside, looking like some blond apparition floating in the fog of vapors.

“You have a phone call.”

“Get the name and number. I’ll call them back when I get out of the shower.”

“It’s Sheriff Babineaux. He says it’s important.”

Norman’s muscles tightened and his breath seemed to be sucked into the steamy vapor that whirled around him. “Did he say what this is about?”

“No.”

He rinsed the shampoo from his hair, then left the water running when he stepped onto the wine-colored carpet to take the receiver from Annabeth.

“What’s up, Tom?”

“Your anesthetist killed himself.”

“Dennis?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure. I’m looking at the body right now.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sometime during the early hours of the morning. Apparently he was driving home from somewhere. He ran his car off the road just south of the Tortue Bayou.”

“But you said he shot himself.”

“He did. Shot himself right in the head. The gun was still lying there in the swamp when Hank LeBlanc found him this morning. He was heading out to do some fishing and saw the car. Stopped to check it out, and there was Dennis. Dead.”

“Dennis? Dead?” The words tumbled about in Norman’s brain, and for a second he wasn’t sure if he’d said them out loud or merely thought them.

“I know this is a shocker, Doc.”

“Are you certain it was suicide?”

“No doubt. Of course, his brother John isn’t buying that, but the evidence is here. It’s open and shut to my mind, and my mind is the one that counts in this parish.”

“Is John there with you?”

“No, but he’s on his way.”

“So am I. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“Dennis blew his brains out with a .45. That ain’t the best accompaniment to breakfast.”

“It won’t be my first sight of blood—brains either, for that matter.”

Annabeth was staring at him when he broke the connection.

He’d like to spare her this, but that was the thing about fame and wealth. It set you inside this giant ball and everybody who walked by felt compelled to give it a kick. She was in the ball with him, so she’d have to prepare herself for a new onslaught of reporters’ feet slamming into their ball.

“What is it now?” she asked.

“Dennis Robicheaux shot and killed himself last night.”

“Oh, no! Not Dennis.”

His towel slipped from his waist as he reached for her and pulled her into his arms.

“Not Dennis. Please. Not Dennis.”

“I know it doesn’t seem possible, but these things happen.”

“He didn’t kill himself. I know he didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

“You don’t know him that well, sweetheart. He had some problems.”

“No. Not Dennis. He wouldn’t kill himself. Why would he?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s the Robicheaux blood. Look at his brother. As soon as the first blast of adversity hit, John came running home to drown himself in whiskey and the same stinking life he’d worked to escape.”

“Dennis wasn’t like John.”

“I’m not saying he was, but he was still a Robicheaux.”

“It was the reporters who did this to him, Norman, not his Robicheaux blood. They kept hammering away at him, determined to blame Ginny Lynn Flanders’s death on him.” She pulled away, looked in the mirror, then dabbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “What will this do to the lawsuit?”

“Nothing. The reporters will howl and make a big show about it, but in the end, it won’t have a thing to do with the legal proceedings.”

“I hope you’re right.”

So did he. “I’m going to finish my shower and meet the sheriff out where they found the body.”

“I want to go, too.”

“It’s no place for a woman.”

She barely knew Dennis, but she had a tender heart, cried over dead goldfish. He’d like to stay here with her. He sure had no desire to see the body, but he had to be certain John didn’t throw some of the stinking Robicheaux shit into the mix.

This was suicide. And a suicide it would stay.