Candles Burning (8 page)

Shrove Tuesday night, when I was supposed to be in bed, I listened at an open window to the cacophony in the streets. It was a lovely noise. I remember it still, and with more clarity than I do most of that bizarre passage in my life. Among the threads, I heard at one point someone drunkenly singing “You Are My Sunshine.”

“You Are My Sunshine” is the state song of Louisiana. Daddy told me.

Sunshine.

I saw more rain than sunshine in New Orleans. The newspapers and radio reported that snow had fallen in Alabama the day we left for Louisiana, and I was not there to see it. I told myself a story: Daddy had gone back home to take snapshots of the snow and would soon bring them to us, to prove the miracle to us. For my birthday. Maybe snow tasted like vanilla ice cream.

Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude brought a birthday cake and a Mile-High Pie to the Penthouse for me. The sight of the cake brought me nothing of the excitement and pleasure that I recalled from previous birthdays. I didn't want cake, let alone Mile-High Pie. I made my wish and blew out the seven yellow candles in one shaky blow, but Daddy did not return.

My uncle and aunt also provided a few presents wrapped in clown paper—a flat book shape that was probably a paper doll, a flat square that was probably one or two 45s, a small box that likely contained a charm bracelet or a bracelet of polished pebbles—but I just looked at them, and then I went to the door to wait for Daddy.

“Ain't you gone open your gifts?” Uncle Billy Cane asked me.

I shook my head no. “I'm waiting for Daddy.”

Ford sniggered.

Mamadee was disgusted with me. “Roberta Ann, you are indulging that child.”

Mamadee grabbed me by the shoulders to give me one of her patented shakes. I let out a wail that must have been heard back in Alabama. Uncle Billy Cane wrenched me from Mamadee's claws. Mamadee was diverted to abusing him as an interfering redneck white-trash no-account, which he ignored as if she were a mosquito.

Aunt Jude picked me up bodily to carry me away into my room. Mama followed her, and stood in the door hesitantly.

Aunt Jude felt my forehead as she sat on the bed and I sat in her lap.

“This child is clammy. She is shivering and shaking.” With a glance at Mama, Aunt Jude added, “Roberta, do something useful. Fetch a jigger of bourbon.”

Mama cocked an eyebrow at Aunt Jude's temerity but followed the instruction anyway.

Aunt Jude poured the jigger of bourbon into me.

“If that makes her sick,” Mama said, “you can clean it up.”

“The child has made herself ill, fretting after her daddy.” Aunt Jude spoke without acrimony, almost as if Mama had not said anything. “You might have a doctor for her. She is not right, Roberta, not right at all.”

Mama must have been worried that her fitness as a mother might be questioned, because she did summon the hotel doctor.

He examined me, had a low-voiced exchange with Mama and Aunt Jude, and gave me something, a sedative of some kind.

I didn't care that he had questioned Mama and Aunt Jude about my mental status. “Miz Dakin, I do not misunderstand, do I, this child is weak-minded? Highly suggestible? I see more of it with every passing day. Parents are mystified. Fortunately the cause is easily identified. Don't let her watch the television or listen to the radio, and never permit her to have comic books. Dear lady, you have more burdens than anyone ought to have to bear, but I must be frank with you. A child of her hysteric tendencies will become more difficult as she approaches puberty. You may have to consider special arrangements. If I can be any help.”

I just wanted him to go away and for Daddy to come back.

That doctor did me a kindness, though, as the sedative he gave me, with the bourbon, brought me a long, velvety oblivion.

The shift of the bed under Mama's weight when she came in to sleep woke me enough so that I could rub her feet, but I did it in a daze. Only after she was unconscious and I was lying next to her did anything like real mental clarity return. All at once I was fully awake, fully aware of Mama, of my every breath, of the reality in which I was cocooned. The scream that had yanked me to consciousness ached inside my skull. A lightbulb blowing out feels like this, I thought, and, of course, the lightbulb hurt when it died. There was no fear in me anymore, only an expanding unfamiliar silence, a sense that there was nothing more.

On Thursday, the sixth day, the second ransom note arrived.

Judy DeLucca delivered it herself when she brought up Mama's coffee and brioche that morning.

“I found this outside the door,” Judy told Mama and handed over a pink envelope.

Mamadee and Ford were still slugabed, so we had the new note to ourselves. Mama had a darkness around her eyes like a terrible illness was inside her. The nasty perfume on the note made me sick to my stomach again. Mama grimaced as if the smell hit her that way too. She opened the note.

“Well,
what
instructions?” Mama said. “What
damned
instructions?” She looked right at Judy as if she were asking her. “And who is Janice and who the hell is Judy?”

“Well, I'm Judy,” Judy said.

“Oh, not you,” said Mama impatiently.

Mama wadded up the note and threw it at me. “As soon as I finish my breakfast, Calley, I am calling the FBI.”

Judy was backing out of the room but Mama stopped her.

“You brought me three brioche yesterday, and this morning there are only two,” Mama said.

“Janice is having trouble with the oven heat,” Judy said. “It's uneven. She had five dozen brioche too tough to leave the kitchen.”

“Tell Janice I am not interested in her difficulties with the oven. Tell Janice I am worried to death about my kidnapped husband and I need three brioche in the morning, and not just two, to keep up my strength.”

When Judy left, I said to Mama, “Maybe they did it.”

Mama was buttering one of her brioche. “Maybe who did what?”

“That Judy, and the Janice that bakes your brioche. Maybe they're the ones that took Daddy.”

Mama snapped at me. “Calley, I am living in hell. I do not need this idiocy of yours.”

A moment later she asked, “Do you suppose that Judy the nitwit and this Janice the cook wrote these notes as a joke?”

“But where's Daddy?”

Her face clouded. She lit a cigarette while she brooded and then she went to put on her makeup.

As soon as Mamadee and Ford appeared for breakfast, she showed them the note. Then Lawyer Weems had to see it. He observed, as we all had, that it was very like the first one, and advised that the FBI be informed. Eventually he billed Mama for that advice, and got what he deserved: no payment at all.

An FBI agent came, took the note into custody, and asked Mama, “What instructions?”

“I asked the very same question. I asked the girl who brought me my breakfast this morning. I asked my seven-year-old child. They could not tell me. I have no idea what instructions I am supposed to follow.”

“Then we wait for the instructions.”

“I hope they come soon,” Mama said. “Because I'd like to see the FBI pay for what this hotel is costing.”

No instructions came that night or the next morning. Judy came though, bringing only one brioche.

Mama was almost too furious to speak. I thought for a minute that she might put her cigarette out between Judy's eyes.

Judy saw Mama was mad and said quickly, “Something happened to the oven. Janice said it about nearly exploded in her face when she tried to light the pilot.”

“There is no excuse for bringing me teensy, tough brioche and undrinkable coffee, not at this hotel's prices!” Mama snarled.

But after Judy left, Mama called the FBI and said, “There is a Judy Somebody-or-other who is a chambermaid in this hotel, and there is a Janice Something-else who works in the kitchen, and I don't know why I have to do your business for you, but if I were J. Edgar Hoover, I would ask them what they would do with a million dollars if it fell down on them out of the sky.”

When she heard of all this, Mamadee was first incredulous and then appalled. She had not known, as Mama and I had, that the hotel chambermaid and the pastry cook bore the same first names as the signers of the notes. Nor had Ford. He was shocked, and even angrier than Mamadee that no one had made the connection.

“I tried to tell Mama,” I tried to tell him.

He paid no more attention to me than she had.

“How could you not realize?” Mamadee hissed at Mama, while Lawyer Weems frowned his disapproval.

“Maybe because I've had everybody in the world telling me what to do for the last seven days!” Mama shouted. “That girl is a moron, I caint see how she could manage to kidnap an ashtray!”

By this time, Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks had broken all Daddy's bones, beating his corpse for more than forty minutes with the bottom of a Black Maria cast-iron frying pan stolen from the hotel kitchen and wielded in turn by each. By pressing hard, and cutting off his head, both feet, then his legs, and his hands and arms, with a cleaver also stolen from the hotel kitchen, they succeeded in squeezing most of Daddy into the footlocker. When she was arrested, Janice had Daddy's left foot in her imitation alligator-skin purse. His head, left forearm and right foot would remain missing.

Judy and Janice confessed immediately to the kidnapping, torture, murder and dismemberment of Joe Cane Dakin.

Judy told the police that someone had broken into the apartment and stolen the missing parts. Janice's baby brother, Jerome, wrote a letter to the
Times-Picayune
complaining that the police had done nothing at all to investigate the robbery next door.

Not surprisingly, the details were kept from me at the time. I am not sure that even Mama knew them all. I have patched the story together from a crazy quilt of the contemporary newspapers and periodicals, from court records and the reports of private investigators. In the yellowed old newsprint, the pictures of Daddy, of Mama being taken into the police station for questioning, and of Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks at the trial, they all look as if they are playing parts in a black-and-white James M. Cain film.

In 1958, the world was still largely black-and-white, and not just racially. People still read newspapers and magazines and listened to the radio. Only a minority of people owned a television set, and those sets were mostly black-and-white. Since the triumph of living color, it is the past that is rendered in black-and-white, and olden times in sepia. Even if still living, a person photographed in black-and-white is now dead to the eye, as if film and print mirrored the ghost to be.

I hardly know Mama. She is so young, too young to have been my mama, or Ford's. In these photographs, she is a tabloid starlet. She brings to mind those early photographs of Marilyn, hardly out of her teens.

Mamadee looks at Mama and sees herself thirty years younger. Hair in glassy waves, a fur tippet flashing a diamante fur clip around her shoulders, Mamadee is the ghost of Mama Future, if Mama lives so long, and allowing for changes in fashion. Mamadee's upper lip is furrowed with bitterness, her spine stiff with resentment. There is a glint of something like panic in Mamadee's eyes, as if she feels a heel wobbling under her. Perhaps it is only an accident of the photograph.

Lawyer Weems, with his slicked-back hair and in his three-piece suit, seemingly made for a larger man, could be some congressman interrogating suspected Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Most boys on the cusp of puberty are anything but beautiful. Ford was. I was too young to see it. And now I see the acute awareness of a feral creature, ready to bolt at the snap of a twig. The photographs cannot quite catch him; some part of him seems always surging into motion. The film is too slow, the flash too weak, the aperture too small to fix him, physically, as he was escaping the Ford of then, evolving into the new model Ford.

I look into Daddy's faded eyes in the formal headshots taken for business purposes, the snapshots from the convention or retrieved from Alabama newspaper archives. I see now that they are like my own. They are the eyes of a ghost, interrupted and restless. His dead lips tell me nothing.

What the articles, the accounts, the chapters in the books, and the testimony at the trial did not reveal was the motive for the kidnapping.

The million dollars would have been a motive, it's true, but only if Janice and Judy had attempted to collect it. They knew Mama had it. Everybody in the hotel, and everybody in New Orleans, knew Mama had the money, in small bills, in a footlocker brought by Lawyer Weems on the Dixie Hummingbird from Montgomery.