A Sheetcake Named Desire (13 page)

“Did Philippe play?” He’d toyed around with the guitar when we were married. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he’d jammed with the band here.

Dog Leg nodded slowly. “Sometimes.”

“Was he any good?”

“Sometimes,” Dog Leg said with a grin. “He was tryin’. I’ll say that much for him. So how ’bout it?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Music’s not my thing, I’m afraid. I can barely carry a tune.”

“Ah, well, can’t blame an old man for tryin’.” He got to his feet, groaning as he did so. “I tell you who you could ask ’bout Philippe,” he said, jerking his head toward the Duke’s front door. “Talk to Rikki. She knows just ’bout everything goes on inside that place.”

I perked up at that. “Who’s Rikki?”

“Young lady servin’ da drinks.”

I glanced at the building behind us. “I just talked to some guy who had a few bad things to say about Philippe. Any idea who he is or why he’s so angry?”

Dog Leg shrugged. “That’s probably Guy LeBeau. Nasty piece a work, you ask me.”

“What’s his problem with Philippe?”

“Same problem he got with de rest of de worl’ I bet. He don’ like nobody. But if dere somethin’ to know, Rikki can tell you.”

“Is she in there now?”

“Could be. Just be careful, Miss Rita. You ask the wrong person, you might stir up trouble you don’t want.”

An icy finger traced a line up my spine, but I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. “How will I know her?”

“Nice lady. Whiskey voice. Smells like roses.” He gave a crisp nod and ran his handkerchief across the back of his neck. “Ask her.”

Oh good. All I had to do was chase down every harried woman carrying a tray of drinks until I found one who sounded like she drank too much and smelled like my grandmother’s garden. Piece of cake.

I watched Dog Leg shuffle away, amazed that he could navigate the narrow sidewalk without help. As I gazed after him, I gave some thought to his advice. Should I talk to Rikki and find out what she knew, or should I tell Detective Sullivan about my conversation with Dog Leg and let him question her?

I vacillated for a minute or two, but in the end, I decided not to bother Sullivan until I knew whether Rikki actually had information that might help with the investigation. I couldn’t see any reason to bother a busy cop unnecessarily.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

Sixteen

Dog Leg disappeared from sight, making me acutely aware that I was standing outside, alone, late at night, in a strange city. In spite of the heat, a breeze came out of nowhere, stirring the tops of the trees, and a shiver racked my body. I turned back toward the bar eagerly.

Inside, Edie had just taken the stage, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd as she launched into a speech that made Philippe sound like a candidate for sainthood. I worked my way back to the bar, where a fresh margarita waited for me.

I spotted Detective Sullivan, still sitting at his table and watching the reactions of the crowd as Edie spoke. Quinn was sobbing uncontrollably. Most of the other women dabbed at their eyes and blew their noses softly. A few of the men did the same, while others sat ramrod straight, trying not to show emotion.

“You going to say something?” Gabriel asked on his way past with half a dozen long-neck bottles in his hands.

I shook my head and licked salt from the rim of my glass. “Are you kidding? These people don’t want to hear from me.”

He grinned. “You don’t know that.
I’m
kind of curious to hear what you have to say.”

“That makes you a minority of one.” I licked again, once more appreciating Gabriel’s perfect salt-to-glass ratio. While I rated him on his margarita-making skills, Edie gave up the mike to Burt, who shared a story about Philippe that drew a few laughs and put smiles on most of the faces in the room.

Burt passed off to Isabeau, who thanked Philippe for hiring her, after which a young woman staggered up to the stage from a table near the bar and told everyone how Philippe had loaned her the money to fix her car a few months earlier.

I wanted to listen to all of the stories, but Dog Leg’s warning kept interfering, and I found myself watching the cocktail waitresses closely. I counted three of them on duty, any one of which might be Rikki.

Candidate number one was the woman who’d ignored me when I first arrived, a young-looking woman with long brown hair and a smile that revealed a row of teeth too small for her face. Number two: a woman barely out of her teens with spiky burgundy hair and a hip-to-hip walk that attracted a lot of male attention. Number three was a tired-looking woman about my age whose dirty-blonde hair had been seriously overprocessed.

While I waited for a chance to strike up a conversation with any one of them, I sucked down my third margarita. How hard could it be to find Rikki? All three women looked friendly enough, if a bit stressed and impatient. The more I drank, the less daunting the task in front of me became. That prompted me to order a fourth drink. Which may not have been the smartest decision I made that night.

I turned on my stool to place my order and found Gabriel watching me as he poured scotch over ice for a thin man at the end of the bar. The look in his eye brought on a little flush of pleasure that was probably heightened by the high blood-alcohol level coursing through my veins.

I tossed him a jaunty smile—at least I hoped it looked jaunty. After three margaritas, I couldn’t be sure. While I was at it, I tried to get a look at his ring finger. Just in case. A woman needs to know what she’s working with.

The finger was bare, which made me happy. I blame the tequila for that, too. When he came closer, I decided to find out a little more about him. It seemed like the logical thing to do if he was going to keep looking at me like that.

I lobbed the best conversation starter I could come up with onto the bar between us. “Have you worked here long?” Tequila, remember? Working with diminished capacity.

His lips quirked as if I’d said something funny. “Since college.”

“How long is that?”

“I’m thirty-two, if that’s what you’re asking.” He swiped at the bar with a towel and stuffed tip money someone had left on the bar into his pocket. “And no, I’m not married.”

My face flamed, and somehow I lost my balance on the bar stool. I tilted like a Mad Hatter cake and grabbed for the bar in front of me. “I wasn’t asking,” I said, trying to regain a little dignity.

“No, but you were wondering.”

“I was not.”

He held up his left hand and wiggled his fingers in front of my face. “You could have asked.”

The fire in my face grew even hotter. I pushed my glass away and decided I’d had enough. “Okay. So I looked. That doesn’t mean anything. For the record, I’m not interested. I’m not going to be around long enough to care.”

His grin grew a little broader. “Right.”

I looked away in embarrassment and noticed that Sullivan was watching us both. He turned in his chair and faced the bar, giving him a straight-on view of me blushing and Gabriel smiling. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I didn’t want the cop investigating Philippe’s murder to think that I was on the make less than forty-eight hours after my ex-husband’s brutal murder. I pushed the drink farther away, gathered what was left of my pride around me, and stood. “I think you have the wrong impression.”

Gabriel threw back his head and laughed. It was a great laugh, and under different circumstances, I might have liked the sound. Right then, it made me want to hit him with something. “You’re pretty full of yourself, aren’t you?” I said.

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

“Where I come from, it is.”

Still grinning, he leaned in so close I could feel his breath on my neck. “Far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with confidence. In fact, I think it’s kind of sexy.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Detective Sullivan scowling at me, and I pulled away from Gabriel. But I moved too quickly, and the stool tilted beneath me. For real. I grabbed for the bar, but I wasn’t quick enough. The stool, the margarita, and I all fell over in what felt like slow motion.

I heard a woman’s voice swearing as I continued toward the floor, and I found myself looking up into the very angry eyes of Possible Rikki number one. She’d looked about twenty-five from a distance, but now that I was closer, I realized she hadn’t seen her twenties in at least a decade—maybe longer.

“Son of a—” she shouted, and jumped back in a vain attempt to escape the slush flying out of my glass. I watched in horror as the mixture hit her in the neck and then slid down, down, down, into her substantial cleavage.

She glared at me for what felt like eternity then turned a vicious stare on Gabriel. “I’ve had it. I can’t do this tonight. I’m out of here.”

“You can’t go! We’re already shorthanded.”

“Bite me.”

She stepped over me and snagged her purse from behind the bar, then pushed out into the night.

Gabriel muttered something under his breath and shouted for the other two waitresses, but I no longer cared about them. In the angry waitress’s wake, she’d left the unmistakable scent of roses.

“Need a ride?”

The familiar voice sounded right in my ear as I struggled to my feet. I turned to find Detective Sullivan standing behind me. His blue eyes crinkled at the corners, but that was the only indication that he found my situation amusing.

He was one up on me. I didn’t find it at all funny. I brushed pieces of dirt from my jeans and shook my head. “No. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not driving, are you?”

I tugged my blouse back into position and made a point of looking sober and in control. “I’ll call a cab. I repeat, I’ll be fine.”

He put a hand on my arm. “I’ll drive you home.”

Now he was just making me mad. “I’ll be fine,” I said for the third time. “My purse . . . it’s over at the table. I’ll just go grab it.” I was perfectly capable of crossing the room on my own—at least I thought I was—but I made it a point not to make eye contact with anyone as I did. I’d embarrassed myself enough for one night.

Sullivan was still there when I came back, and he jerked his head toward the front door. I headed for it like a puppy with its tail between its legs.

He didn’t say another word until we were outside and next to his car, but then he took my arm again, pulling me around to face him. There was no force in the action. No anger or irritation, either. In fact, the look on his face was almost friendly. “You’re really okay?”

I nodded up at him, determinedly ignoring the sudden rolling of my stomach. “I had a couple of drinks. I’m not drunk.”

“Four,” he said. “You had four. Including the one that spilled. And you’re at sea level. That can make a difference in how your body reacts to alcohol.”

I ignored 99 percent of what he said and zeroed in on the part that struck me as odd. “You were counting how many drinks I had?”

He shrugged. “I was concerned.”

“About me? Why?”

“You need to ask? Have you had anything to eat lately?”

I shook my head reluctantly. “Not since breakfast.”

“Figures.” He started walking slowly to the driver’s side. “And you wonder why I was concerned.”

Beads of sweat popped up on my nose and forehead—not odd, since it was about two hundred degrees outside. I ignored them and opened the passenger-side door. “Well, yeah. Actually. I do. I was fine in there.”

“Except for the part where you fell over.”

“That was an accident,” I informed him.

“And the part where Quinn called you out.”

“Yeah. Well there was that. But she’s wrong, you know. I didn’t come here to get my hands on Philippe’s stuff.”

He slid a grin at me as he started up the car. “So you’ve said, more than once.”

“Because it’s true! And I’ll keep saying it until you believe that I didn’t kill Philippe.”

“Well, then, you can stop. Unless you have some kind of superpowers, I don’t think you
could
have killed him. You were with Edie when the fight broke out, and within eyesight of at least one other person until about three minutes before you found the body. Philippe hadn’t been dead long, but the absence of blood spatter on your clothes makes a pretty strong argument in your favor.”

The weight that lifted off my shoulders made me a little dizzy. “Really? You believe I’m innocent? Thank God.”

He dipped his head once and turned his gaze to the street in front of us. “You weren’t sitting with the folks from Zydeco in there. Any special reason?”

I made a face. “Yeah, a big-busted blonde one.”

“You don’t care for your ex-husband’s new girlfriend?”

“She’s just a bit over the top for my taste.” I decided to change the subject to something less personal. “What about you? Did you learn anything useful in there?”

“Not really, but you have to look at everything in an investigation like this one. Turn it over and see what shakes out.”

Both Miss Frankie and Old Dog Leg had expressed doubt over the outcome of the investigation, but I wasn’t ready to give up on New Orleans’ finest. “How often do you find the answers?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Not often enough. Sometimes you catch a case with an easy solution, but too many cases are like this one. No obvious solutions. No easy answers.”

“So what do you think the chances are of actually finding Philippe’s murderer?”

“You want the stock answer, or the truth?”

“The truth, please.”

“I think we have a good chance. I’m sure going to give it hell. I figure somebody must have seen something that morning.” He checked for oncoming traffic and pulled away from the curb. “The trick will be finding that person and then praying that he or she will be brave enough to speak up.”

“You pray?”

He looked away from the street just long enough to grin at me again. “That surprises you?”

“A little, I guess. I didn’t realize that cops and God could coexist.”

“Guess that depends on the cop. My father is a Pentecostal pastor, and my mother taught me that there’s eternal hellfire in store for disobedient kids. God and I have been on speaking terms since I was a small boy.”

I laughed and leaned my head against the seat. The slight breeze I’d noticed outside the Duke had gained strength, and a few drops of rain splattered the windshield. But the swaying of the car wasn’t helping my stomach or my head. I felt around for the controls on my door panel and rolled down the window, hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air. What can I say? Where I come from, rain cools things down. Apparently, that’s not how it works in Louisiana. I got a blast of greenhouse-quality air: hot, wet, and stale. My stomach pitched dangerously.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what we were talking about. Right. God. Who was probably making notes in my permanent record that very minute. “So you’re a believer,” I said, inching open one eye. “Does that mean he helps you solve cases?”

His eyebrow winged upward. “Are you mocking?”

I held up both hands to ward off the suggestion. “Raised by a Catholic aunt. I wouldn’t dare.”

He actually chuckled. “Still want to meet tomorrow, or do you want to tell me what’s on your mind right now?”

I’d have preferred waiting until my head was clear, but I didn’t want to admit just how cloudy it was. “Now’s fine,” I said, and gave him a brief rundown on Dmitri Wolff’s visit to Zydeco. “If you haven’t already,” I said when I finished, “you might want to find out where he was yesterday morning.”