Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (4 page)

“Then I tried insurance. That was a bust. Of course,
that’s where I met Janice, the one we’re going to pick up.
I helped her out of an insurance jam. Neither of us were
interested in getting serious, but we have fun together.” I
chuckled and took a sip of soda. “She’s rich, too rich for
someone like me. I’m just a dependable escort and confidant.”

Leroi arched an eyebrow. “Sounds intriguing.”

“Not really. We’re good friends, and we like being with
each other.”

“Ummm. And that’s it?”

I glanced at him, picking up the suggestive tone in his
question. “You know me, Cuz. I never kiss and tell.”

We both laughed.

A wrecker out of Lafayette was hooking up to the Miata
when we drove up. Janice waved. With her other hand, she
held her hair to keep the gusty wind from whipping it into
her eyes. She hugged me.

I introduced her to Leroi. “You’ve heard me talk about
Leroi.”

She looked from me to him and back, clearly puzzled,
but too much of a lady to ask the question on her mind.

I played innocent. “My cousin. Remember?”

“Your-your cousin?”

Leroi stepped forward and offered his hand. “I’m the one
nobody wants to talk about.” He laughed. “You know, the
black sheep in the family.”

Janice cut her eyes toward me in surprise, then reasserted
her self-control and took his hand. “Well, I’m very pleased to meet you, Leroi.” She shot me a dirty look. “The truth
is, Tony didn’t tell me everything about you.”

Leroi laughed again. “He never tells anybody the whole
truth, Janice. After thirty-eight years, I’ve become accustomed to that.”

The wrecker driver climbed out of his truck and strode
back to us. “I’m ready to go, Miss Morrison. I-”

“Coffman-Morrison.” She corrected him.

He rolled his eyes. “Coffman-Morrison. There ain’t no
dealer in Lafayette for these little things. You know where
you want me to take it?”

Leroi spoke up. “Beauchamp Motors is a dependable
place.” He looked to the driver for agreement.

The driver shrugged. “Hey, Beauchamp’s good. Expensive, but they stand behind their work.”

Janice nodded. “That’s it then.”

A strong gust of wind whipped across the bridge, carrying with it a few drops of rain. The driver nodded in the
direction of the Gulf. “You folks best get along. I just heard
over the radio the storm has turned into a hurricane. Belle,
they’re naming her.”

Once off the bridge and down among the trees, the wind
was not as noticeable, but according to the radio, the storm
was intensifying. Janice looked up at me. “How bad is it?”

“Not as bad as it looks.” I grinned at her.

Leroi chimed in. “Yeah. We get stuff like this two or
three times a year.”

When we hit the two-mile bridge, I saw the water had
risen almost a foot with the tide. I said nothing, just hoping
the family had started to evacuate.

Outside, trees swayed in every direction. Patches of rain
crashed against the windows. Then just as suddenly as it
started, the wind let up and the rain ceased. Moments later,
the cycle repeated itself, each time the duration and intensity of the rain and wind increasing.

“Hey, look at that idiot,” Leroi shouted, pointing to a towboat attempting to push a barge through the three-foot
waves.

“Where’s he going?” Janice leaned forward.

“Probably trying to make port before the storm hits.”

Leroi shook his head. “He’s in big trouble.”

“We can’t worry about him,” I said, pushing the pickup
as fast as I dared. “Let’s just get back and get everyone
out.”

A frown knit Leroi’s forehead. “I wonder why we
haven’t met some coming out already. Everything outside
has got to be soaked by now.”

I hadn’t voiced my own concern, but that very fact was
worrying me as well.

Just before we reached the end of the bridge, the entire
structure shuddered.

Leroi looked around. “What was that?”

I glanced in the side mirror. “Beats me.”

“Hey,” Leroi shouted, looking out the back window.
“The barge! It hit the bridge.”

I was too busy watching the two lanes ahead of me between gusts of blinding rain to worry about the barge.

“Look at that,” muttered Leroi, turning back to the front.
“There’s nobody out by the cars. You think they plan on
riding it out?”

Without warning, the rain ceased.

“Is it over?” Janice looked up at me.

“No. It comes in spurts. Bands of rain are caught up in
the circulation. The closer to the eye, the more intense and
constant the rain is.”

“Not counting the wind,” Leroi added with a wry laugh.

As we reached the end of the bridge, a car passed us
heading out. It was Uncle Henry Broussard. He was alone.
I waved for him to stop, to tell him to look out for possible
damage to the bridge, but he ignored me.

When we came within sight of the old mansion, Janice
caught her breath. “Tony, it’s beautiful. Just like some I’ve
seen along River Road near New Orleans.”

A sense of pride welled up in my chest. Leroi and I
grinned at each other. “It’s old. Built before the Civil War.
Great-Grandfather Thibodeaux bought it back in the 1920s
according to my mother. Grandma claims he got his money
by bootlegging. The first floor is actually about ten or
twelve feet above ground. Underneath is open storage. In
the old days, that’s where the kitchen and dining areas for
field hands were. We always heard there were secret passages in the old house.”

Leroi chuckled. “Yeah, but we never found any. And we
looked.”

“Yeah. We sure did.”

“Hey, remember the games of hide-and-seek we’d play?
And hey, remember how we used to hide secret messages
in the clean-out bin in the fireplace in the library?”

I grinned as memories of some of those carefree days at
Whiskey Bend came back to me. “Yeah. And remember
the time we left Ozzy down under the house and he got
scared?”

Janice looked up at me. “Ozzy?”

“Osmond Thibodeaux,” Leroi replied.

“Our cousin,” I explained.

“The real black sheep in the family,” Leroi said, laughing. I joined in.

The grounds around the house were empty except for
overturned chairs and tables. I parked close to the front
steps.

Family members on the veranda turned to look at us.

“Looks like something’s going on inside,” Leroi said.

Bailey Thibodeaux stood on the veranda, his thin hair
plastered to his head by the rain. Hands clenched into fists,
he stood nose to nose with Patric Thibodeaux. When he
spotted my pickup, he jabbed a finger at us. “There he is.
Down there,” I could hear him say.

Patric grabbed at his shoulder, but Bailey shook his
cousin’s hand off and stumbled down the steps, followed by three or four other men, Osmond Thibodeaux among
them. The grin on my face vanished when I saw the rage
contorting theirs. They yanked the passenger door open and
jerked Leroi from the pickup.

“He’s the one,” a voice shouted. Ozzy Thibodeaux threw
a wild punch that missed Leroi by a foot. Janice cringed
against me.

“Someone get a rope,” another yelled.

Another voice called for reason.

I crawled over Janice and tumbled out the door. “Stop
it,” I shouted, jumping to my feet and pushing one of my
uncles away from Leroi.

A general pushing, shoving match took place as more
family members crowded around, shouting obscenities and
oaths. Several fights broke out among them.

Grumbling under my breath, I fumbled in the glove compartment. I jerked my .38 out, and in a move reminiscent
of the old West, fired three shots into the air.

Everyone froze.

I pulled Leroi behind me. “Now what are you idiots up
to? What’s going on?”

Bailey, his shirt hanging open to reveal his protruding
belly, pointed at Leroi. Gasping for breath, he snarled. “I’ll
tell you what’s going on. He killed my brother. He killed
A. D.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.

“We found A.D. dead upstairs, stabbed with a screwdriver.”

“Yeah. He killed my pa,” shouted Ozzy, pushing forward. “And we’re going to get him for it.”

I shoved him back. “Leroi was with me. He couldn’t
have done it.”

“I saw him go upstairs,” Ozzy said, jabbing a finger at
Leroi. “Before you two left, he went upstairs.”

Leroi pushed around me. “So what? I had to use the
bathroom.”

Someone snorted. “I bet.”

From the rear of the crowd, another voice shouted.
“Lynch him.”

Patric, Leroi’s father, spun and fixed his eyes on the agitator. He wrinkled his button nose until it was almost flat
against his face. “You try that, George, and I’ll wrap that
rope around your scrawny neck.”

“Hanging’s a good idea,” shouted Ozzy, who was a couple years older than me, but he’d been spoiled by his daddy.
I put my hand on his chest and shoved him back. “Shut
your mouth, Ozzy. You’re not going to do a thing, and you
know it.” About then I wished Giselle had not stopped him
from eating that locoweed years earlier. Or maybe that was
his problem. He had ingested a touch of it, and it addled
him.

He grimaced, but remained silent.

Bailey shouted. “Lynching is better than he deserves. We
ought to-”

I shouted, “Shut your mouth, Uncle Bailey.”

He looked at me in surprise.

“And shut it now,” I added.

Bailey glared at me. He snorted. “I heard you was some
kind of private eye or something. You got no jurisdiction
here.”

I eyed the crowd. It’s amazing how anger can so twist a
face that you can’t recognize it. “You’re right, Bailey. I’ve
got no jurisdiction, but you aren’t the law either. What we
need to do is call the police. What about Whiskey Bend?
Is there a constable?”

“No.” George Miller stepped forward. A shrimper, he
was short and wiry, his sun-blackened face filled with wrinkles caused by squinting into the sun. “We use the state
police.”

“Then that’s who we need to call.”

“We tried, but the line’s down. Henry went to get them.”

Walter Venable spoke up. “Phone went out when the
electricity went out.”

I noted the lights in the house. “Looks like there’s electricity now.”

lolande, A.D.‘s sister, spoke up. “A.D., he put a generator in the shed. Fixed it to go on when the power went
off.”

“There’s lights, all right, but the TV’s garbled. Can’t
make nothing from it,” Uncle George said. “Radio works
so far.”

“Who has cell phones?”

Three had them. Naturally, they couldn’t reach their
server. So much for the luck of the Boudreauxs.

I studied the crowd a moment. “All right, folks. Let’s go
back inside. I-”

“What about him?” Ozzy pointed to Leroi.

With a sigh of frustration, I shook my head. “What about
him, Ozzy? You think he’s going to run away?” I blew
through my lips. “After all these years, you aren’t any
smarter, just uglier. He isn’t going anywhere. Now just
back off.” I addressed the crowd again. “I’ve got a laptop
and cell phone. Maybe my phone will work. We can contact the state police. We’ll get them out here.”

A voice sounded from the rear of the crowd. “Won’t do
no good.”

I looked around.

Uncle Henry pushed through the crowd and nodded to
the bridge. “We’re stranded.”

“Stranded? What do you mean?”

“Yep. Barge hit the bridge. Knocked a ten-foot span out.
Two minutes sooner, and I’d of been across.”

Taking a deep breath, I considered the situation. Right
now, these folks were not family, they were a mob. I had
to settle them down. “All right. The bridge is out. That
means no one can come in or go out. Whoever did this
can’t get away.”

Ozzy jabbed his finger at Leroi and shouted. “He did it.
It was his screwdriver.”

I shouted back. “Shut up, Ozzy. You got no proof. None of you.” I glared at them. “We’re family here. Not a mob.”
Another band of rain hit, even more intense this time. By
now, we were all soaked.

George Miller blew through his lips. “You right, Tony.”
He stepped forward and took Leroi’s hand. “Me, I’m sorry,
Leroi. Tony, he right. We got no proof.” He glanced around
at those behind him. “Any one of us could have snuck that
screwdriver from Leroi’s pickup truck.” He paused, studying the grim faces staring at him. “Me, I look around here,
and I see some who don’t cry about A.D.”

Another blast of wind struck, almost knocking us off our
feet. “We’re stuck here, folks. No one is going anywhere,”
I shouted above the pounding of the rain. “So we best make
ready. We all need to pitch in and help put storm shutters
up. Button the house up tight.”

Walter Venable shouted to George Miller, “You and
your family give us a hand, George. My folks’ll bring out
the shutters and you and yours start putting them up.”

George wiped the rain from his angular face and grinned.
“We’ll put them up faster than you can get them out, Walter.”

“Think so? Bet you a cold one. Leave a couple doors
open for the time being. It gets real bad, we can fasten
them down right fast.”

Bailey headed for the house. “I’ll haul some tools up
from below. Hammers, nails, saws. Whatever we might
need.”

I grinned. “Good, now the rest of you. Back inside. Back
inside.” I helped Janice from the truck and we hurried up
the steps.

Patric Thibodeaux tagged after Bailey. “I told you Leroi
wasn’t the killer. You blamed him because you never had
any use for us anyway.”

Remembering the bad blood between Patric and Bailey,
I tried to stay close just in case their heated words exploded
into action.

Bailey snorted. “Bull! Just leave me alone unless you
want more trouble than you can handle.”

Patric followed the larger man into the living room. “You
know who killed A.D. It was John Roney. We all heard
him threaten A.D. before they went upstairs to play poker.”