Читать книгу Murder Jambalaya - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

I knew something was wrong the moment I stepped out of the arrival gate at the New Orleans International Airport. It was a dreary, drizzly morning in mid-November, and Raina Lambert was there to meet me. Even in good weather, she doesn’t make a practice of meeting airplanes or anything else, and I rarely see her when we are working on a case together. She had her red hair piled up in a new style that would have seriously interfered with her halo if she’d had one, and at seven in the morning, in a situation where beauty and glamour were entirely irrelevant, she managed to look both beautiful and glamorous, not to mention stylish. Stepping off a plane after a night of cramped travel, I was none of those things.

“What is it now?” I growled.

She took my arm and walked with me to the baggage area, and we talked in low tones along the way.

“There’s a rumor that Marc DeVarnay was seen by someone a few days after he disappeared,” she said.

“Where was he seen?” I asked.

“In a little fishing village called Pointe Neuve. This has to be verified at once. A man named Charlie Tosche is waiting outside for you. He’ll take you to your hotel so you can check in and leave your luggage, and then he’ll drive you down to Pointe Neuve.”

It was an order. In the firm of Lambert and Associates, Investigative Consultants, Raina is the Lambert and I am one of the associates. She is not merely the chairperson of the board; she is the board.

Even so, I consider it my duty to temper her more irrational edicts with logic. “According to Confucius, or maybe it was Karl Marx, the best rumor is half a lie,” I said. “Who claims to have seen DeVarnay?”

“Maybe no one. A family friend who knew DeVarnay was missing heard it from someone and told DeVarnay’s mother. We’ve got to find out quickly whether there’s anything in it.”

“Who is Charlie Tosche?”

“A local man I hired. A game warden. He knows the area and the people there, and he’ll give you any help he can.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” I said. “I don’t believe there is any such person as Marc DeVarnay. He’s a figment of everyone’s imagination. I’ve just finished the most preposterous wild goose chase you’ve ever involved me in, and now you’re sending me down to the swamp and bayou country to start the whole thing over again.”

She gave me a severe look. “You did a good job in Savannah. Even the client admitted it. What are you groused about?”

“All the time I was there, I was counting on a few free days to enjoy the place. Instead, I’ve been slogging across the country to no effect whatsoever, and now I’ll be mucking around in a God-forsaken fishing village where it’ll start raining pitchforks and alligators the moment I arrive. That’s today’s official Southern Louisiana weather forecast—pitchforks and alligators. I’ve checked it. The forecast for Savannah calls for pleasantly warm temperatures and bright sunshine. I’ve checked that, too. Ten to one Pointe Neuve won’t even have rudimentary modern conveniences like sidewalks and indoor plumbing, and it’ll be thirty miles to the nearest McDonald’s.”

“You can go back to Savannah when this is finished,” Raina said. She added apologetically, “I’m not through in Minneapolis. I’m flying back this morning. Hopefully, another day or two will do it. By then you should be able to tell me how you’re going to find DeVarnay and how long you expect it to take. If you turn up anything at Pointe Neuve, use this phone number and tell Lieutenant Keig about it. That’s Lieutenant George Keig. He’s the New Orleans police officer in charge of the DeVarnay case. It shouldn’t take you more than a couple of hours down there.”

“If it’s a fishing village, it can’t be very large,” I said. “Forty-five minutes should do it.”

“It’ll be spread out along a bayou. Better allow two hours. Maybe even three. When you get back to your hotel, remember you’re not here to play. You have no excuse for investigating anything at all on Bourbon Street. DeVarnay never went there.”

“Poor boy,” I said. “His mother must have kept him in a straight jacket.”

My suitcases arrived, and we went outside to meet Charlie Tosche, a tall, lank, sunburned man with disconcertingly blue eyes. He was wearing a khaki jacket, khaki trousers, and a khaki billed cap that bore the motto, “Cajuns Are Better Lovers.” His natural habitat was the swamp and bayou country, but his battered jeep looked like a relic from Desert Storm.

Raina introduced me. “This is J. Pletcher, one of my investigators.”

Tosche nodded politely and shook my hand. He said nothing. When I got better acquainted with him, I learned that he usually said nothing. He was invariably polite and soft-spoken when he did speak, but that was seldom.

I took my leave of Raina, and Tosche drove me toward downtown New Orleans.

I marveled, as I had on previous visits, that a city with such a variety of fascinating places could look so humdrum along its main traffic arteries.

Since there was nothing worth seeing, I occupied myself with trying to imagine what a fugitive New Orleans millionaire and businessman could find to do in a tiny fishing village—except, perhaps, fish, and there had been nothing in his dossier to suggest he had the slightest interest in that. I couldn’t even hazard a guess.

At least I was able to do my imagining without interruptions. Between the airport and my hotel, Charlie Tosche didn’t utter a word.

We reached Canal Street, whose 171 feet of width accommodates four lanes of traffic on either side of a tree-lined center strip reserved for an additional two lanes of busses, all of which gives it high ranking among the world’s broadest main streets. Locally, it isn’t even the widest street in New Orleans, but it certainly is one of the most important. It marks the boundary of another dimension. Beyond it one encounters different architecture, different people, different kinds of businesses. Crossing into the French Quarter is like going from one country to another. Even the streets can’t pass that Canal Street frontier without changing their names.

The French Quarter, the Vieux Carré or old square, is the city’s premier tourist attraction, a fascinating blend of residences, businesses, entertainment establishments, historical monuments and legends, and artistic and musical activity, all housed in lovely old buildings that are Spanish in origin rather than French. At that hour of a damp, gloomy morning, however, it looked bleak and deserted and as unlike a mecca for tourists as a back alley in New York City. Its streets, cluttered with the debris of last night’s merrymaking, badly needed the washing they were about to get. The tourists were still in bed nursing hangovers.

Hotel Maria Theresa, a small, family-run establishment, had a lovely, gallery-surrounded courtyard—balconies are called galleries in New Orleans—and, since I had no idea when I would see it again, I gave myself a treat and stood on my own private, second-floor gallery for all of ten seconds to admire the view. In the courtyard below, amidst a stylish arrangement of potted tropical plants, there was a heated swimming pool surrounded by a clutter of tables, chairs, and chaise lounges, all deserted at that hour except for a custodian who was rearranging the clutter in a disinterested manner. I quickly changed into the most appropriate clothes I had for a visit to a fishing village in threatening weather, slipped several photos of Marc DeVarnay into an inside pocket, and hurried back downstairs.

“Here I go again,” I said to Tosche, not cheerfully. “Wild goose chase the second.”

He made no comment.

During my flight, I had wondered whether the predicted bad weather would dampen my enjoyment of New Orleans. The question was no longer relevant because I would shortly be contemplating an entirely different kind of wildlife. I could see only one bright side to the stupid case I was trapped in. If we got completely bogged down, which seemed likely, we would still be in New Orleans for next spring’s Mardi Gras. At least I could work with something to look forward to.

By the time we reached the lengthy Greater New Orleans Bridge over the Mississippi River, rain was coming down hard. We headed toward a landscape that made my fleeting glimpse of the Vieux Carré seem like a drizzly hallucination.

Pristine, lush beauty fills the Mississippi Delta except where corrosive touches of civilization, in the form of factories, shopping centers, housing developments, warehouses, oil depots, offices, trailer camps, and bars advertising cutesy drinks called “Sex on the Beach,” or “Jungle Juice,” or “Cement Mixer,” ooze into it from the New Orleans metropolis. When we finally put the corrosion behind us, we entered a different world—and a very wet one.

I had thought I knew all about swamps and bayous. Now I discovered how different the two things are. A swamp is a swamp. A bayou may look like a wide canal with low banks and carry an enormous quantity of shipping, or it may look like an almost overgrown stream leading into a wilderness.

Where there are roads, this is a land of bridges. Water laps the edges of embankments, and thick vegetation conceals the swamps just beyond. The bridges carry the roads over bayous. Looking about me, I became increasingly skeptical that the cultured, highly educated, extremely wealthy Marc DeVarnay would have ventured into this soggy landscape or that I could find a trace of him if he had.

My guide and chauffeur remarked that the water level was up half a foot. I looked about me—gray sky pouring rain, grayer land, gray water where it was visible—and pondered the difference another six inches of wet could have made.

Road signs suddenly got exotic, with drawings of alligators and advertisements of swamp tours. An unlikely looking restaurant, a shack in the middle of nowhere, called itself the Gator Inn and bragged about its alligator dishes. There was one glimpse of history in a reference to the Jean Lafitte National Park, Lafitte being the pirate-cum-hero who is alleged to have won the Battle of New Orleans for General Andrew Jackson in 1815—a truly notable achievement since he wasn’t there at the time.

I asked Tosche about the gourmet qualities of alligator meat.

“Some think it tastes like chicken,” he said.

“You don’t think so?”

“Tastes like duck to me. You should cook it the same way you cook duck.”

“At the airport, I heard a tourist say alligator was very good, but she might have enjoyed it more if she hadn’t known what it was. I thought alligators were an endangered species.”

“Not any longer—not in Louisiana. They’re protected, but they’re not endangered. Regulated hunting is allowed to control the population.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said.

He shook his head. “You couldn’t qualify. You have to own the place you hunt and live there.”

He lapsed into silence. As the road became lonelier, the soggy landscape showed fewer and fewer contours. White herons patrolled the water at the edge of the embankment. They were the wrong species, but they somehow seemed symbolic of this new wild goose chase I had been launched on. The entire watery wilderness unrolled before us like a vast plagiarism. The further we penetrated into it, the samer it looked. Eventually we turned onto a side road—I had thought we were on a side road—and reached the fishing village of Pointe Neuve.

The road paralleled the bayou, which was at least a hundred yards wide there, and the village consisted of a scattering of houses strung out along the two of them. Those on the bayou side of the road were built on the edge of the water, with large front yards that haphazardly displayed heaps of junk as well as boats in varying stages of salvage or disintegration. Across the bayou, and almost out of sight around a bend, an industrial wasteland had flowered in the wilderness, thrusting up a clutter of warehouses, derricks, and the ungainly shapes of oil tanks. Barges and good-sized ships as well as a tug or two were tied up at its docks.

Most of the ships docked at the village were shrimp boats with high booms suspending nets. The houses, which ranged from neat, well-built cottages to shacks, were constructed on posts that raised their living floors six or eight feet or more above the ground. Those along the bayou extended out over the water, and the lower level served as a double garage, housing a boat at one end and a car at the other. Across the road—and on higher ground—a few bold souls had houses that were supported on pillars of cement blocks or bricks that raised them only two or three feet.

Tosche summarized the area’s economy succinctly—fishing (for shrimp, fish, crabs, and oysters); oil (the industry was a huge presence throughout the delta as well as offshore, with reminders everywhere); and the hunting, fishing, and trapping carried on by visiting sportsmen as well as residents.

When I commented on the elevated houses, he grinned. “That’s a lesson Cajuns learned. In storms, the tide can be raised six or seven feet—or even more if a hurricane was to hit directly.”

Corrugated iron streaked with rust was the “in” thing for fishing village roofs. The generic Pointe Neuve home had a high peaked corrugated roof, a slightly pitched corrugated extension over the front porch, and a similar extension over the rear porch if the owner enjoyed the luxury of having two. Those who lived along the bayou could fish from their rear porches.

Midway through the village, we passed the only business establishment I saw there, a combination grocery store, café, and gas station housed in a long, shack-like building. The sign said, “Community Store and Café.” The gasoline side of its business went unadvertised except by its two weathered-looking pumps.

At the far end of the village and somewhat remote from the other homes, several rustic palaces were set far back from the water, each with its own dock and boathouse. The boathouses looked more homelike than some of the shacks I had seen elsewhere in the village. There were cabin cruisers parked at the docks and sport cars parked in the driveways. The docks had shelters built over a picnic table. These were summer or year-around retreats for families whose wage earner—or earners—had lucrative jobs in New Orleans.

On one of the docks, children sat under the shelter watching two small radio-controlled boats race down the rain-swept bayou. When an enclosed tourist boat came into view, they sent the toy boats speeding to meet it. Then both radio-controlled boats raced the tourist boat, outdistancing it easily.

Having shown me the village, Tosche turned around and started back. He asked, “How do you want to proceed?”

I hardly knew myself. The bayou was more of a main thoroughfare than the road, but only about half of the houses were located there. There was no observation point from which one could see everything that went on in the village. “I don’t suppose there’s an elderly resident who sits around all day watching to see who comes and goes,” I said.

Tosche shook his head. “No. There’s no one like that.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I live in hope that someday, right at the beginning of an investigation, I’ll discover a witness with unlimited time on his hands who keeps a log of everyone and everything that passes by. Sherlock Holmes never had any trouble finding one, but it doesn’t happen to me. What about an indolent housewife with excessive curiosity about her neighbors?”

He shook his head again.

“I’ll even settle for a business establishment where someone keeps a lookout for prospective customers.”

“There are a couple of businesses located on the bayou. They mostly sell stuff fishermen need, like bait and gas, and most of their customers come in boats. Otherwise, the only business establishment is the store and café, but no one there bothers to look outside unless someone buys gas. There is one thing you should consider—people in these parts get suspicious if anyone seems overly interested in what they’re doing. Especially strangers.” He paused. “If you don’t mind my asking—what are you trying to find out? Maybe I could be more helpful if I knew.”

“Didn’t Miss Lambert tell you anything about it?”

“She hired me to bring you down here and give you any help I could.”

Along the way, he hadn’t asked a single question. Obviously he had a remarkable reticence. “There’s a man missing,” I said. “Someone heard someone say he’d overheard someone else mention that someone or other had seen him down here.”

Tosche turned his intense blue eyes on me. “That’s a bit vague, isn’t it?”

“Extremely so. Like most rumors, it probably doesn’t amount to anything. On the other hand, since there haven’t been any other clues, it has to be checked carefully.”

“If it isn’t classified information, who’s missing?”

“A man named Marc DeVarnay. He owns and operates an antique store on Royal Street in the New Orleans French Quarter. Comes from an old and prominent New Orleans family.”

“Never heard of him,” Tosche said matter-of-factly, dismissing all of the old and prominent families of New Orleans with one eloquent shrug. “We get plenty of that kind down here fishing and hunting. I suppose it was one of his own crowd that saw him. Locals wouldn’t have known who he was.”

I made no comment. I still didn’t know enough about DeVarnay to know the sort of a crowd he ran with.

“How long has he been missing?” Tosche asked.

“About two and a half weeks.”

“When was he supposed to have been seen here?”

“That’s as vague as the rumor. Maybe a couple weeks ago.”

“All we can do is ask, but it’d be better if you let me do the asking. Everyone down here has a secret or two, and a snoopy outsider wouldn’t get very far. I suppose that’s why Miss Lambert hired me. Do you have a photo?”

“Of course.”

He parked at the end of the village, and we got out. The rain was coming down harder, now. I was wearing a raincoat with a hood, but that did nothing to protect my shoes and trouser legs. Tosche was still in his khaki jacket and trousers, but there was an all-weather look about him. He seemed to shed water. Fortunately Marc DeVarnay’s photos were in plastic sleeves, or they would have got as wet as I did.

We began going from door to door, marching up to one house after another and knocking. When there was any response, Tosche, who was Charlie to everyone and knew everyone’s name, displayed one of the photos and asked if this étranger had passed through Pointe Neuve in the past couple of weeks.

DeVarnay’s name wasn’t mentioned. I drew a few suspicious looks, but it was Tosche who was asking, and he got straight answers. All of them were spelled N-O if in English or N-O-N if in French.

We tackled the houses along the road first because zigzagging between them and the bayou houses would have quadrupled the distance we had to cover. After the tenth negative, Tosche turned to me with a frown. “Maybe we should talk about this before we go any further. Did the rumor say anything about what this guy was doing down here?”

I shook my head. “A friend of the family who knew he was missing heard about it tenth or twentieth hand and told DeVarnay’s mother. That’s as much as we know.”

Tosche pondered this for a moment. “Both the missing man and the person who saw him could have been in boats that passed on the bayou. In that case, people living here wouldn’t have seen him at all.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But regardless of where he was or what he was doing, we have to inquire.”

Tosche shrugged indifferently. “We might as well get on with it, then.”

We continued knocking on doors, taking a stretch of houses along the road and then crossing to check houses by the bayou. I got wetter and wetter.

Out on the bayou, a flotilla of oil pipes hoved into sight. The pipes looked huge—maybe two feet in diameter and twenty or thirty feet long. They also looked old and rusty. Evidently a pipe line had been disassembled and the components were being moved elsewhere. Several lengths of pipe had been placed side by side on special floats. There were a number of such units arranged end-to-end, with tugs interspersed, and they made a long and thoroughly tedious procession. We were half way through Pointe Neuve before the flotilla disappeared from sight.

Watching it gave me something to occupy my mind with. As for the investigation, it was already a washout, and the only other thing that could be said about it was that we’d picked an appropriate day.

The rain suddenly gathered intensity, as though someone had turned the volume up a notch. I huddled in my raincoat and listened to Tosche ask the same questions and get the same answers while I thought, for no reason at all, about the historic parks and squares of Savannah and the splendid weather it was having. If a flock of wild geese had flown over, I would have been severely tempted to join up.

Eventually we reached the Community Store and Café. Like the nearby houses, it was set on cement block supports. There were only three small, high windows visible from the road. The paint was peeling and the corrugated roof was a mass of rust. The two gas pumps were in the open. Some of Pointe Neuve’s buildings had seen better days, but the Community Store and Café had the defeated air of always having been a wreck. A notice tacked to the side of the building had once read “Pizza,” but half of it had blown away.

“Could you do with coffee?” Tosche asked me.

“About four cups,” I said. “Maybe a sandwich, too. The breakfast I had on the plane was about as substantial as this rumor we’re chasing.”

We entered. There was no one in sight, but a cowbell clanged when we opened the door. Half of the long room was given over to the café, with a counter at one end, a few tables, and two booths, one on either side. The other half was the store, with a cabinet for frozen foods, one for refrigeration, and a couple of rows of shelves containing cans and boxes. It wasn’t much of a store; but then, it wasn’t much of a café, either. There was one unlikely ornament: Against the wall, on the boundary between café and grocery store, was a video poker machine.

A door opened behind the counter, and a tired-looking, very faded blonde rewarded our presence with a disinterested glance. The door closed again for a few moments, and then she came out. She was of hefty build, big-bosomed and big-armed, and her face and arms looked reddened by the wind. She had the look of having spent the previous night hauling on shrimp nets. She was wearing jeans with a frilly blouse.

She said, “Hi, Charlie.”

“Hi, Eva. Coffee pot functioning?”

“It’s the only thing I sell much of,” she grumbled.

We sat at the counter. She placed cups of coffee in front of us, and we ordered sandwiches. When she brought them, Tosche asked, “Seen any strangers around recently?”

“How recently?”

“In the past couple of weeks.”

She shook her head. “Just the usual hunting and fishing crowd. Some of ‘em are pretty strange, but they aren’t strangers.” She giggled.

I slid DeVarnay’s photo across the counter. The instant she saw what it was, she decided not to recognize it. She was already shaking her head when she took a quick look, and she kept on shaking it.

Resignedly I pulled the photo back.

“Just a minute,” she said suddenly. “Lemme see that again.”

I handed it to her. She squinted at it, eyes narrowed with effort.

“Old Jake,” she said suddenly.

“What about him?” Tosche asked.

“He was in here with this dude. At least—I think it was this dude.”

“When?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed again. She reflected for a moment. “Wasn’t last week. Must have been two weeks ago. Monday or Tuesday. Early in the week, anyway. What day does Old Jake surface? I never keep track, but he shows up regular once a week. Buys a few staples like oatmeal, and bread, and canned stuff. And beer—plenty of beer. Then he disappears for another week.” She paused. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him since. Maybe that’s because he bought so much stuff that day.”

“Are you certain this dude was with him?” I asked.

“As good as,” she said. “They sat over there in that booth.” She pointed. “Old Jake always sits at the counter and has nothing but coffee. That time he sat in the booth with this dude or someone a lot like him.” She nodded at the photo. “The dude was wearing a tourist cap that said ‘New Orleans’ on it, but he took it off while he was eating. Looked just like the picture. Same build, too. Pretty good looking chap, actually. They had the special, took their time eating, and the dude talked a blue streak but in a low voice. Old Jake mostly listened with a silly grin on his face, which was odd for him. Normally he won’t shut up and listen to anyone, but the dude was buying, so he listened. When they were half finished, he ordered a pizza to go, and the dude paid for that, too, and also anted up for the groceries Old Jake bought.”

“What was the dude talking about?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Whatever it was, he didn’t want me to hear. Kept his voice down almost to a whisper.” She seemed piqued about that. “There was something funny about him,” she went on. “I mean—something really strange. He was buying for Old Jake, which was odd enough. And he was acting a part—he’d put on old clothes for it, but they were new old clothes, see what I mean? And he talked and talked like he was promoting something, which was screwy. Who with any sense would try to con Old Jake?”

“Did this dude have a car?” I asked.

“Didn’t see or hear one. They left together in Old Jake’s boat—I’m sure about that. You know the racket it makes. I heard it start up, and I looked out and saw them heading up the bayou.”

“Did anyone else see them that day?”

“Don’t know. If anyone was around the dock when they came or went, he must have seem them. Ask Bert—he may have been working on his boat.”

“Thanks,” Tosche said. “We will.”

We gulped the sandwiches and finished our coffee. We were in a hurry, now, to see whether there were any more witnesses. The elusive wild goose had suddenly laid a golden egg.