82 Desire (9 page)

He had a point. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was sure more than she could get any other way, and it would buy her more time to get her career going.

“What do I have to do?” she said.

“Just what you did before. That’s all there is to it. Get that file again.”

Talba exhaled. If he wanted the file, he probably wasn’t the murderer. “Are you saying you never got the file from Allred?”

“Girlfriend, he was dead when I got there. What does it take to get you to believe that?”

“Don’t ‘girlfriend’ me, asshole. You don’t have a real good record of telling the truth where I’m concerned. Besides, you roughed me up.”

“I didn’t kill Allred, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Who did?”

“Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I just want the damn file.” He hung up.

She turned to Lamar, whose nose was already wrinkled in disapproval. “Who the hell was that?” he asked.

“The guy in the ski mask. He just offered me a job.”

When she had outlined it for him, he said, “Uh-uh. No way. You’re not doing it.”

That irritated her. She said, “Oh, shut up, Lamar. I don’t know who you think you are.”

“Talba, Allred was killed for the damn file. Did you ever think about that?”

“How dumb do you think I am? Of course I thought about that.” She was steaming.

“If the client was supposed to get it and the place was ransacked, and now he doesn’t have it, what does that tell you? Whoever killed Allred for it would kill you to keep him from getting it. And that’s on the off-chance Ski Mask isn’t the murderer. Uh-uh. Too many variables. Uh-uh and no.”

“You go fuck yourself, Lamar.” Something about his attitude was making her downright evil.

He didn’t stalk out, as she’d intended. He enfolded her in his arms.
Perverse bastard
, she thought, and kissed him.

Nine

PUTTING THE CHECK under the mat was a risk, but worth it to Ray. From the looks of the cottage, Talba needed money the worst kind of way, and half of fifteen hundred dollars ought to be damn persuasive.

He needed her to do this job. He knew she could get hired again, he knew she could get the file, and besides, he liked her. She was bright and she was computer-literate and she had the right demographics. How many detectives had those qualifications?

Besides, now that Russell Fortier was high-profile, anybody Ray went to was going to be suspicious. He didn’t need that, and he didn’t need screw-ups. He needed to get the damn job done.

He was a good ten years older than these assholes and they’d outwitted him, betrayed him, cheated him, and caused him to lose everything.

His daughter was on scholarship at Vanderbilt, and she was working as a waitress to stay there.

His son was at UNO because there was no money to send him anywhere else.

He and Lucille were living in a stupid little rented house with only one bathroom.

A year ago they’d had a gorgeous, reproduction plantation-style house on the North Shore with four bedrooms, a sunroom, three baths, granite on the kitchen counters, and marble on the bathroom walls.

Not bad for a kid from Shreveport who lucked into a few things, like an education and a wife who more or less fell from heaven and landed at his feet. He’d had some luck; no question about it, he’d been lucky as hell.

He’d also worked his butt off. And he was smart. Or so Cille said, and it had to be, considering where he’d come from. He had to admit it might be true—he was the third son of an alcoholic electrician who used to beat him for studying. His dad absolutely could not stand watching him with a book in one hand and a pencil in the other. He had no idea why not, but Cille had theories. She said it had to do with low self-esteem and not wanting his son to do better than he had. Maybe, he thought.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

More likely it was just that he was there. Both his brothers had the sense to stay out of the house, and so did his mother, most of the time—she baby-sat for relatives and volunteered for projects at the church. So Ray was the only one home to hit, until he finally got his license and started going to the library or a friend’s house.

Anyway, he got no encouragement.

But he did well and he found Cille and he had a whole shitload of ambition. He not only wanted to be rich, he wanted to be filthy rich.

Texas-rich.

He majored in business and went to work for United Oil for a while. It was just coincidence he got that job—but oil suited him down to a T. He got sent out to Plaquemines Parish, where the whole countryside is crisscrossed with canals built only for the convenience of drilling—an ecological travesty. Even he could see it. But it was done fifty years ago or more and not his problem anyhow.

His problem was to figure out what to do with mature oil fields that weren’t producing like they used to—that were no longer profitable for a huge company like United, whose interests increasingly lay offshore, where the bucks were so big you couldn’t count the zeros.

One thing you could do was find small companies to sell the leases to. Another thing you could do—if you were smart and had endless ambition and absolutely no sense of reality—was start up your own small company and buy one yourself.

Only you couldn’t do that without a wife who dropped from heaven. Fortunately Ray had one. And now Cille had gone back to work and was supporting the whole family.

He had met her at a party in New Orleans, when he first started working for United. At that time, to say he was insecure was like saying the ocean was slightly damp. But he was tall and had broad shoulders—attributes Lucille had mentioned a few hundred times since—and he had a seersucker suit and a bow tie.

Cille said he reminded her of Gregory Peck that night—a little hunched over to disguise his height, a little “diffident,” as she called it. Terrified, he called it.

He could remember standing on one foot and then the other, holding a glass that had sweated all over his napkin, so that he had a cold, soggy mess in his hand, and trying to talk to somebody’s wife, when Cille fell from heaven. Or, more properly, when she floated up to him, actually to the woman he was talking to, but it felt so good to be in her presence it didn’t even matter.

She had one of those distinctly Southern faces that just look sympathetic. Her hair was some soft color—blondish-brown, maybe (later, it was quite blond, and later still, when the money ran out, it turned soft-colored again, but a different soft). It was long, parted in the middle, and, even in an age when women ironed their hair to straighten it, it was wavy. Or that was how he remembered it these days.

Everything about her had seemed soft and accepting. Her minidress was soft purple—lilac or lavender or something—but he barely noticed. Mostly, he noticed the sympathy in her face, the way she seemed to want to make him comfortable rather than banter or flirt or argue or try to impress him with long, boring anecdotes of which she was the heroine.

He made her talk, though, about her dogs (she had two golden retrievers) and about her job (she was a nurse) and about her ambition—she wanted to establish a foundation to “fight for medical rights for the elderly.” He had to laugh when she talked about fighting—her eyes got flashy and intense, her cheeks got red (and presumably hot), and she breathed more quickly. It only made him want to protect her.

He didn’t realize until their first date—three days later because that was the soonest she was free—that she was barely five feet tall.

Sometimes these days, at dinner in their hideous breakfast nook, she talked again about her foundation—something she hadn’t done for years. Poverty seemed to bring out the kindest, most generous side of her.

And at the moment he had such contempt for himself he could barely stand to look at her. The assholes had outwitted him again.

He knew what they were—he owed his present plight and that of his family to their deception and greed. But if you’d taken him before a grand jury and asked him to swear on the Bible, he’d have said they wouldn’t kill anyone. This was a Fortune 500 company, for Christ’s sake—these weren’t the kind of people who hired assassins.

Hiring Allred was the best thing he’d ever done, and simultaneously the worst. The detective was your basic sleazebag incompetent, but somehow he’d lucked into this Talba Wallis babe. Ray wasn’t sure where she came from and what her experience was—Allred never told him how long she’d been with him—but he’d seen her work and the girl was good.

He’d gone to see Allred every single day Talba worked for United Oil, and gotten a detailed report. He didn’t want to meet her for obvious reasons—the fewer people who knew who he was, the better. But he’d spied on her going to work and heard tapes of her conversations with Allred, and now he’d heard her read her poetry. He’d run a company a long time, and employees like her didn’t come along every day—smart, resourceful, able to think on their feet.

If she were the damn detective, everything would have been fine. But Allred had to mess it up by getting greedy. That last night, the night she came back with the disk, Allred broke his standing date with Ray. Said he was sick or some such bull. And then he called later and changed the terms.

Well, no problem. No fucking problem at all. Ray Boudreaux was as damn resourceful as Ms. Talba Wallis. He could break into a penny-ante dick’s office and steal what he had to.

But, Jesus, he nearly threw up when he saw those damn open, staring eyes with bugs trucking across them like they were the 1-10 of Bugland. And then, along came Talba Wallis herself. Well, he blew the whole damn thing, but he’d recovered nicely.

Impersonating Langdon was a good touch. Or it had seemed so at the time. Now it appeared that was what was pissing Talba off.

Goddammit, he had to get her. What if the seven-fifty didn’t work?

He sat down and he thought about it and, as always, the threads began to come together.

Once more, he dialed her number. “It’s me again.”

“Hello, asshole.”

He hated that. Just hated it. How dare she? “How’d you enjoy meeting Jane Storey?”

“You need to get to the point, asshole.”

She had courage, he had to give her that. She didn’t know if he was a murderer or what, and here she was calling him “asshole.”

“Is she going to do a story on you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because, Baroness, Ms. Storey happens to be a good friend of mine. Why do you think she went to your reading in the first place?”

“Something to do with Russell Fortier. Somehow, she thought I knew him or something. You responsible for that, shithead?”

He was going to have to backpedal—he had no idea Storey had showed her hand so fast.

“You want her to do a story or not?”

“Yeah, and I want to win the Pulitzer for poetry. She made it clear that’s just about as likely.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Uh-uh? What you mean, ‘uh-uh’? You speak English or not?”

“You help me and Jane Storey’ll make you famous. That’s a promise.”

“Ho and hum.”

“And maybe we could get an art critic to take a look at the boyfriend’s work.”

“What are you talking about? What do you know about Lamar?”

He hung up, thinking maybe he’d overplayed his hand. She might realize he’d seen Lamar at the reading.

But probably she hadn’t noticed him. Probably he was just another white potato face.

***

I’m beginning
, Jane Storey thought,
to feel like a windup doll.

Worse, she was feeling sheepish about it. She was starting to live for the tipster’s calls.
It’s like dating a married man
, she thought.
And I ought to know
. You don’t go out because he might call. You don’t even want to take a shower because you might not hear the phone ring and he might not leave a message. You spend ninety percent of your time waiting to hear from him and one-tenth of one percent actually with him.

Only she’d never been with the tipster at all, to her knowledge; she’d gotten a great many more promises than stories; and she still didn’t know what any of it was all about. How, for instance, did he know about Russell Fortier’s disappearance, and how did he know about Cindy Lou, and what did he know about Talba Wallis? And, most worrisome of all, how did he know Gene Allred was dead unless he killed him?

She wasn’t at all sure why she’d wasted an evening going to a poetry reading. True, Talba Wallis was probably a story—not only had Jane heard about the black names for years, she’d been as intrigued as she was horrified by it. But she’d assumed it was an urban myth. And now here was a woman named Urethra. A woman whose art came out of her trouble in such a unique way that Jane could easily shape a story about her for the Living or Book section.

Normally, she’d have jumped at it. Yet she’d rather crossly put Wallis off. She was damned if she was going to write a story about The Baroness just because the tipster wanted her to—if indeed that was what he wanted. Perhaps he just wanted to get her and Langdon and Cindy Lou Wootten all in a room together.

Though why, Jane couldn’t have said.

She was fed up with being at his beck and call, yet when he’d called with this new little tidbit about Bebe she couldn’t resist. She’d gone out and gotten in her car and driven to Bebe’s and parked in front of the councilwoman’s house until Bebe had come out at two-thirty, just exactly as the tipster said she would. She was wearing white silk pants and a matching tunic with little gold sandals, a good outfit for a courtyard cocktail party—a destination for which she couldn’t possibly be headed at that time of day and at the beginning of the week and with her husband missing. The gold sandals were an odd touch, Jane thought—a bit out of character for a city councilwoman. That intrigued her even further.

She followed Bebe out to Veterans Highway and into the parking lot of one of the many motels that bloomed there like so many weeds.

She saw Bebe disappear into one of the rooms and she waited an hour. In fact, almost exactly an hour—and that part did indeed seem in character, another fact that intrigued Jane. She wondered if Bebe had set the alarm on her watch: Oops, sorry, darling. Committee meeting in half an hour.

While she was waiting, she happened to remember she had a camera in her trunk—left over from a recent weekend in Florida.
I wonder,
she thought,
if it has any film in it.

Just to pass the time, she decided to check it out. There were maybe two exposures left after the Florida photos, but there was also a whole new roll of film. Feeling sheepish, yet unable to resist, she got back in the car with the camera. Again, just to pass the time, she photographed Bebe’s car, seedily parked in the motel lot.

After that, she held the camera in front of her and looked at it as if it were a meteorite that had just fallen to Earth. She tried to think of a reason she might need pictures of Bebe emerging from the motel room. There couldn’t possibly be any story in this.

And yet… and yet… one never knew.

Even if this wasn’t a story in itself—and how could it possibly be?—it might somehow be part of the emerging story of Russell Fortier’s disappearance. How, she didn’t know, but she’d gotten a tip to come here, and surely there was some sort of method to the tipster’s madness.

There was no doubt this was a tryst—what other explanation was possible? Unless, of course, Bebe, for reasons best known to herself, was meeting at this cheapjack hotel with her own husband.

Jane’s heart pounded at the thought.
If Russell’s in there
, she thought,
I’ll kiss the feet of the damn tipster. I’ll propose marriage, maybe.

If this whole thing were anything other than a wild goose chase, she was going to need proof. In fact, now that she thought about it, she probably should have planned to bring the damn camera.

Bebe came out alone, wearing sunglasses, and Jane snapped her picture—several times: coming out of the room, running down the stairs, getting into her car. What there was to get, she got.