4 DEAD ... If Only Read online

  “Okay.”

  “Have I explained this clearly enough?”

  “Yes. You’re being a good guy. Dudley Do Right to the rescue.”

  “Dudley Do Right maybe to the rescue; it’s a long shot. But I will return to the Big Easy with any information I can find, around two, tomorrow afternoon. How’s that?”

  “Great, Dudley,” I said with a smile.

  “Does that make you Little Nell?”

  “No way.” I laughed and so did he. I kissed him. He kissed back. Man, did he kiss back. Laudie, laudie, laudie, he was a good kisser. I let out a sigh for the long night I’d spend without him.

  “I love you. Keep that in mind as you fly over the Lincoln Memorial.”

  “And I love you. Keep that in mind as you drink your first Sazerac in the morning.”

  “I don’t drink Sazeracs in the morning,” I protested.

  “No? Then you should. Such a lovely way to start the day.”

  We kissed deeply.

  I broke away and looked around me. “Feel that?”

  “What?” Gurn looked around him, puzzled.

  I leaned in again, gazing up at him. “The temperature in the room actually starts to climb when we kiss. I think it’s a scientific phenomenon.”

  He smiled down at me and drew me closer. “Should I alert National Geographic or maybe Ripley’s Believe It Or Not?

  “Just kiss me again,” I whispered. And he did.

  Chapter Ten

  The Facts, Nothing But The Facts

  After a night of cuddling with two warm cats and several pillows, I still felt lonely and anxious. Well, maybe not anxious exactly, but I woke up repeatedly wondering how Gurn was doing and exactly what kind of information he would manage to find.

  I finally got up at around six a.m., which is four a.m. by my internal clock. I dressed in my practice leotard and ballet slippers, freed my mind, and did my morning ballet barre. Nothing gets the kinks out and centers me as much as my morning barre. All I need is an even floor and a wall to lean against occasionally to keep my balance. Tugger and Baba watched me from the bed beneath heavy lidded eyes. No one needed to tell them the time of their internal clocks.

  Thoughts of Vicki, a young life filled with promise and her sister, Robin, a young life robbed of promise, crowded in on me as I did a series of stretches. I had to make things right. Or as much as I could make right. Some things can never be put back together. Just ask Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

  Then there was this horse pucky about Vicki possibly being arrested for killing the man in the alley. I mean, seriously? Here was a five-month pregnant woman, knocked out herself, who didn’t even know the man, and she’s being considered a suspect in his murder? There wasn’t a self-respecting defense attorney in the world that couldn’t rip that scenario to shreds. So what was really going on?

  I felt my energy drain, my arabesque droop. That’s the thing about not allowing your mind to be free. It affects the sanctity of the ballet. I forced myself to do several pirouettes, spotting my turns on the sleeping cats. The turns are difficult and can be dangerous if you don’t concentrate, so concentrate I did. I ended with a double and almost landed pure.

  That’s the problem with being a not so great dancer. The heart is aching for perfection, the body gives its best shot, but they don’t quite match up. Fortunately, I love the art for its own sake. Ballet will always be my first love, no matter what.

  After a forty-five minute barre then a shower, I fed the cats, changed their litter pan, and went through my suitcase of vacation clothes. I had done some last minute shopping before we left for Napa after downing a martini. Given my mother’s proclivity for them as well as mine, a well-chilled martini might be the downfall of the Alvarez women.

  It’s still no excuse for allowing myself to be talked into several sleazy outfits by sales ladies who should hang their heads in shame. Leave it to me to have a suitcase full of cruise wear for the tastefully challenged.

  My first clue was when I donned what I thought to be a charming little number the first night Gurn and I were in Napa. Yes, cobalt blue Capri pants covered with white polka dots, topped off by a striped halter in the same colors. It’s my suspicion that designers throw remnants of fabrics together, heedless of the patterns, as long as they are the same color. Then fashion school dropouts hope to convince the wearer the pieces go together when they actually don’t.

  And they have me to prove this form of brainwashing works very well. However, I take the fifth on the blue suede Roman gladiator style sandals with leather ties crisscrossing up mid-calf. The devil made me do it.

  In any event, after parading around in front of Gurn and asking him how he liked the outfit, he said it didn’t matter what I wore, I was beautiful, anyway. Then he shoved a glass of Chardonnay in my hand, and planted a big kiss on my lips. Never trust a designer label that’s seventy-five percent off. I’m just sayin’.

  I didn’t know what I’d be getting myself into in chasing down Dennis Manning, and as these were the only pants I had on hand, I climbed into this getup. After looking at myself in the mirror, I threw one of Gurn’s denim shirts on to cover the bulk of it. I even put on the silly looking gladiator sandals, trusting I wouldn’t run into Russell Crowe on the streets of New Orleans. I’m sure he’d tell me to give them back to the Coliseum. Unfortunately, these were the most comfortable shoes I’ve had on my feet in a long time. Life is filled with these little ironies.

  Before leaving, I opened the room safe and pulled out Lady Blue, the gun I use when I carry. Something told me I should have it on me, so I grabbed my fanny pack, threw in the holstered gun, a bottle of water, my phone, other life essentials, and wrapped it around my waist.

  Regarding the piece, Gurn thinks I should carry a newer, more accurate gun. I want none of it. I drive a vintage 1957 Chevy convertible, and carry a 1964 Colt Detective Special, both gifts from my late father. You can say a lot of things are quirky about me, the least of which is I’m stuck in the past.

  I skipped the idea of room service by our own little pool, and had some coffee with chicory in it at a corner booth of the coffee shop, rereading the police report Richard had sent the night before on my phone.

  The report outlined one of those frustrating situations cops are powerless to do anything about. The year before Robin’s attack, Manning had been brought in for questioning regarding him following a twelve-year old girl home from school. According to what the girl said, Manning approached her and offered her money for sex. She ran home, told her parents, and they filed charges. Several weeks later the charges were dropped and the family moved out of the area.

  The report begged a lot of questions, but I suspected I knew some of the answers. Manning certainly had the money to pay the family off and send them packing. Maybe Richard could delve into Manning’s finances and see if there was a large sum of money taken out of his bank account around the time of the girl’s family departure. Then again, was that necessary? At this point in time, let’s just assume Manning was guilty as sin and move on to finding the bastard.

  I phoned Richard for an update on Vicki while eating a Beignet, a local delicacy around here. My brother was happy, almost bubbly. Vicki and the baby were officially out of danger. Now if I could only keep her from being arrested for murder, it would be a good day.

  By eight, it was already around eighty-five degrees and climbing. I was on Bourbon Street and making my way to the junction of St. Claude Avenue and Spain Street. The distance was one point four miles from Vicky’s new shop on Royal and across the street from where she’d spotted Manning. The trek was certainly doable by a woman five month pregnant, even in this heat.

  I was following a moving dot and verbal directions given to me by That Aspen Bitch, as I like to call her. That’s the voicemail system that uses a woman’s voice to boss everybody around. She started out doing telephone trees and has now worked her way up to being the voice of the GPS. She’s everywhere
. One cannot be free of her.

  I tramped four blocks to North Rampart Street, turned right and followed her and the beeping sound. Eventually this street became McShane Place. That turned into St. Claude Avenue. All the while, the area became less affluent with pockets of definitely run-down. Whether the neighborhood was still in post-Katrina recovery or this was the way it was, I couldn’t tell. One thing for sure, the birds kept singing no matter where they lived; they don’t know the difference. I hung a left at Pauger Street and kept walking for a couple of more blocks.

  Following the beckoning of the GPS, and at exactly one point four miles, I rounded a corner and came to the back side of a block and a row of buildings side by side on long, narrow lots. Not more than fifty to seventy-five feet wide, two and three story houses sat at the front end jammed next to one another. Each unique in style, height and character, most were kept up, but some were in serious need of a paint job.

  At the rear, porches, tool sheds, and makeshift garages pretty much let nature do its thing. In between an occasional corroding refrigerator or washing machine, tropical vines with vibrant flowers in shades of orange, yellow, purple, and red twisted and crawled around, making even rusting buckets look like works of art.

  A line of short dilapidated, wooden fences differed slightly in height and color, marking the boundaries of each yard. Running alongside the fences was the remnants of a sidewalk now more dirt than cement.

  Across the street were mostly ex-businesses. Buildings looked ignored for decades, wearing faded and broken signs of yesteryear, with one small shoe repair inexplicably still in business. Three cars and one truck stood in the small parking lot, while a lone man wearing a leather apron leaned against the open front door smoking a cigarette.

  I made a mental note to visit the place to see if anyone had heard anything the day before. Otherwise, the structures looked forlorn and deserted.

  I could hear the traffic from St. Claude Street, but it was almost like being in another world. Eerily so. In contrast to the distressed scene below, a canopy of majestic tropical trees dripping with either vivid flowers or exotic fruits shaded the walk. The sight made me want to burst out into Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, if I had but known more than I Think That I Shall Never See A Poem Lovely As A Tree. I listened to the leaves rustle quietly in the welcomed breeze and marveled that if you just left nature alone for a minute, it’s amazing how well it worked on its own.

  The dot and blinking closed in and I knew I was nearing my destination, enough so I could turn off the vocal directives. Take that, Aspen Bitch.

  In the middle of the block rose a tall fence in better shape than the rest, with an opening wide enough to accommodate a car. A thin metal chain crossed the void. It served more as a reminder of private property than a deterrent. I stepped over the sagging chain and onto the grass, well aware that I was now trespassing. The red dot and blinking aligned perfectly.

  About forty feet in, and running the entire width of the lot, was a row of palm trees of at least six distinctively different varietals. They ranged in height from twelve to forty feet tall, with trunks that were fat or skinny, smooth or pocked, intricate or plain, depending on the type. Each was topped off with bright green fronds that fanned, draped or straggled against the blue of the sky. Clumped together, they shared the sun and rain as one.

  As probably suspected, I love trees and of the twenty-five hundred or so species of palms growing around the world, nothing said the tropics to me more than one of them. Despite anything my mother could do or say and much to her horror, when I was a little girl I shinnied up many a palm tree, including an Indian Date Palm on a family vacation in the island of Turks and Caicos. I still remember the handful of dates I grabbed from the top of the tree as the sweetest I’ve eaten to this day. My regard for these swaying arbors borders on the religious. Obviously, someone else felt much the same way.

  Aside from the gloriousness of them, their presence afforded a lot of privacy in this section of the lot from any prying eyes of the house. Unless you stepped back onto the sidewalk, you couldn’t see the brick-colored, four-story wood-slat building looming in front of them. If I couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see me. Seemed reasonable to me.

  I relaxed and began to look around for where the crime had been committed. I pretty much knew where it had happened, because Richard had taken several images of the dead man, while waiting for the ambulance and police to arrive. For as freaked out as he must have been, that was pretty smart thinking.

  As in the photos, the dilapidated Adirondack chair was still sitting on three legs, the fourth missing, with two stacked cinderblocks taking its place. The chair’s companion was a sad coffee table, dark wood bleached nearly white by the rain and sun. Stripped of any former glory it may have possessed inside, it was now subject to the elements of the outside world and not looking too happy about it. I sought out the yellow crime scene ribbon that should have been at the corner of the property line near the chair and table. Nada.

  I swung around and studied the opposite corner of the property, where a child’s metal swing and slide set in lively colors of red, blue, and green sat. Tufts of grass dotted the brownish clay soil beneath it, but no yellow tape was to be seen.

  Two trashcans and an oil drum were lined up against the inside of the fence on the right. I opened the lid of one of the garbage cans looking for the tape and nearly gagged. Even though the garbage was contained in a black plastic bag, it still packed a mighty wallop in the heat. Before I rifled through the trash – a big downside to being a P.I. – I closed the lid in the hopes the tape might be inside the second trashcan. Sure enough it was, ripped but coiled up, lying on top of several pieces of lumber and remnants of other non-smelling trash. Some days it pays to get up.

  This struck me as odd, though. It wasn’t quite twenty-four hours since Mr. Nameless was murdered. Where was the watchful eye of the law to make danged sure no one was trampling around or interfering with the integrity of a crime scene? Waiting for forensics to give the okay usually takes around forty-eight hours. Had they already been here and given the okay? Fast work for such a hot climate.

  Puzzled, I replaced the lid, and moved back to the Adirondack chair. Several scraps of paper and a crumpled newspaper lying under the warped coffee table caught my eye. They probably meant nothing, but I dropped down to my hands and knees, and crawled under the table.

  As I reached out my hand, a shrill, high-pitched sound, scaling up to ‘E’ above birdcall, assailed my ears. Startled, I banged my head against the underside of the table.

  “Ow!” I scooted out back-assward, rubbing my head. I heard a child’s giggle. Sitting down on the dirt, I looked up into the face of a nine or ten-year old boy holding a clarinet.

  The slender boy’s features were aquiline and elegant, especially for a kid, and his smile was marvelous. Possibly he had Creole in his African-American lineage. Whatever, he was a good-looking child and would probably grow up to break a lot of hearts. He put the offending instrument back in his mouth and trilled another set of notes up into the stratosphere, this time scaling back down to the note where he started.

  “Hi,” I said, impressed with the sounds he made come out of that glorified stick.

  “Hi, yourself, ma’am. What are you doing in our backyard?”

  There was something about the assuredness with which he spoke and the maturity in his eyes, that caused me to reevaluate his age. He was probably more like twelve or thirteen, just small for his age.

  I began to stutter, which is my wont, when caught off-guard. “I…I…I’m looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “I was looking for a…didn’t a man…wasn’t a man…uh… listen, aren’t you supposed to be in school or something?”

  “It’s Saturday.” He stared at me.

  I stared back then tried to stand, clumsy and stiff. This made the kid giggle again. For a person who lives for ballet and does a barre every day, I should really be more graceful in
getting up. As residents of the Big Easy would say, what’s up with that?

  Regarding the kid, I decided to stop being cagy, not that I was doing such a hot job of it, but honesty is the best policy. “Look, my name is Lee Alvarez and I’m a private detective.”

  “Any relation to Robert E. Lee? I hear he got around.”

  “Not that I know of. So now that you know my name, what’s yours?”

  “Jasper, but everybody calls me Reed on account of I play the clarinet. You got a card?”

  “Card? Ah…sure.” I fumbled around in my fanny pack for one of my business cards. “Here you go.”

  He took it from me and scrutinized it with a jaundiced eye. He folded it in half and crammed it into his pants’ pocket. Then he looked up at me inquisitively. “You’re here about the guy who got offed yesterday? We still don’t know what Mr. Gold was doing in our yard.”

  Bingo! I got a name!

  “You don’t happen to know Mr. Gold’s first name, do you?”

  “Bernie, I think. Mama didn’t like him. He’s from Chicago and said something to her once and she was offended. It don’t do to offend Mama.”

  He pulled the clarinet toward his mouth, licked the tip of it, and began to do the scales again, this time with rhythm and feeling. This, too, sounded pretty good. I waited until he finished even though I was champing at the bit to learn more about Bernie Gold.

  “You think your mama would be willing to talk to me about this Bernie Gold?”

  He shrugged and started a song, ‘String of Pearls’ maybe. He was thinking. He stopped mid-stanza, took the instrument from his mouth, and looked at me. “She isn’t really my mama, you know. She’s my aunt, but I guess she would talk to you.”