Courir De Mardi Gras (19 page)

He set the tray on the nightstand and herded his elderly aunts toward the door. Suzanne mouthed a “thank you” to him when he turned back to her for a second. George smiled, rather sweetly, and reminding her to take her medicine, shut the door.

Suzanne swallowed the pills and ate the soup because Birdie wasn’t around to ply her with food. She fell into a sleep so deep that whatever she dreamed this time evaporated when she opened her eyes.

This time, chaos in the kitchen awakened her. The setting of the sun left her room in darkness. According to the glowing hands of her travel clock, supper time had come and gone. She put on a thick robe and her slippers and made her way to the center of the disturbance, or—the scene of the crime.

The chandelier in the dining room illuminated the empty drawers and cabinets of the Renaissance revival sideboard. Every fish knife and asparagus tong had gone missing. The shelves sat bare of punch bowls and candelabrum. A fine black dust edged the drawers, coated the usually gleaming surface, and spilled down on the Oriental rug.

In the kitchen, Sheriff Duval loomed over a wailing Birdie. Unobtrusively taking notes, one of the deputies hunched in a corner. George hovered in the background.

“I been working here over thirty years. I never took nothing that wasn’t give to me.”

George intervened. “That’s right, Sheriff. I had as much chance to steal that silver as Birdie. Why aren’t you questioning me?”

“Why would a man steal his own silver? Besides, I already checked with the insurance company. They said your mother never upgraded the policy when the price of silver went sky high, so you are losing out. You’ll get about $100,000 if the stuff isn’t recovered, but you might have gotten more on the open market right now.”

His deep-set dark eyes shrewd and considering Sheriff Duval looked closely at George. “You could be trying to collect the insurance and sell it both, but that stuff is traceable. We’ll have alerts out to all the antique dealers in the state tomorrow. Miss Hudson, just the person I wanted to see. George was feeling protective, I guess, and wouldn’t let me wake you, but Birdie took care of that. This has been quite a couple of days for you, now hasn’t it?”

“Mrs. St. Julien’s silver has been stolen?” Suzanne’s mind felt as fuzzy as her dry mouth, but she could have answered the sheriff’s question. Why would a man want to steal his own silver? Why? She knew.

“Correct. And you were in the house all day, right? Hear anything? See anything?”

“Not after lunch. I was sleeping.”

“So soundly that stealing $100,000 worth of silver wouldn’t wake you?”

“I’ll answer that,” George cut in. “She took a sleeping pill on doctor’s orders.”

Suzanne stared at George, amazed he would lie to keep her out of it. He noticed the expression on her face. “You did. Dr. Sonnier said young women couldn’t be trusted to stay in bed even when they needed the rest. That’s why I gave you two pills, an antibiotic and one to put you to sleep. I figured you would balk if I told you. The prescriptions are on file at the pharmacy. You can check, Sheriff.”

“Guess that leaves you out of the questioning, Miss. I could use any notes you have about that silver, that being your job here, I’m told.” Sheriff Duval eyed the inch of peach-colored lace her robe did not cover. He turned back to Birdie.

“So you were gone all afternoon because of a family emergency?”

“That’s right, Sheriff Duval, sir.”

“What was the nature of this emergency?”

“One of my boys crashed his car. Lionel, that’s my husband, called right when I was serving coffee to Dr. Sonnier. He’ll tell you. Doc Sonny waited in this kitchen here ’til Lionel come to take me to the hospital. My boy went into surgery for three hours, but he’s gonna be all right.”

“You left the invalid Miss Hudson alone in the house, and the back door wide open.”

“Guess I did forget to lock the door since it stood open come noon, but this here is Port Jefferson. Hardly no one locks. And Doc Sonny said Miss Suzanne had nothing serious and didn’t need no watching. I called Mr. George to tell him to check in on her at lunchtime.”

“Did you take the key to the sideboard with you?”

“No. I never does. I keeps it on a nail up under the sink. Even Miss Suzanne don’t know that, just Mr. George, me, and Miss Virginia when she was living.”

“Well, whoever took the loot knew. There isn’t a mark on that cabinet or a fingerprint either. They opened her up, hauled it out, and wiped her clean while Sleeping Beauty here was knocked out. I’ll want you down at the station tomorrow, Birdie Jones, to make a signed statement. A lie detector test might be in order, too.”

Birdie’s bulk trembled. The sheriff took note of it.

“Is that necessary? The lie detector test?” George asked.

“I think the insurance company will demand it, George. They may ask you to take one, too, but neither of you can be forced.”

George’s brow wrinkled, but he kept quiet.

“Step outside with me a minute, George. I want to have a talk with you.”

The two men went out into the night, the note-taking deputy shadowing them through the kitchen door without closing it entirely. Suzanne went to put an arm around Birdie and watched George and Sheriff Duval through the crack left by the deputy.

Sheriff Duval did not bother to lower his voice. She suspected that the crack in the door had been left for her benefit.

“Judging by what she has on under that robe, your Miss Hudson might be an expensive piece of ass up from New Orleans, though she sounds Yankee enough to me. I’m going to be checking her credentials, you know. Now what goes on in a man’s home is his own business, but that little caper yesterday set me to thinking. You know Jules Badeaux, the Capitaine, and he wasn’t drinking. He says that rider stood way over six feet tall, real long in the leg. Now us Cajuns aren’t known for our height. The only other man your size in Port Jefferson is black. So if you and Miss Hudson got yourself a little sex fantasy going, I say okay, fine, that’s your business. But if you’re planning to pay for it with your mama’s silver, I’ll be on your tail. Got me?”

George leaned over Sheriff Duval, looking directly down on the top of the lawman’s Stetson, his neck so bent he resembled a shamefaced child. “Yes, sir,” he answered.

Suzanne glanced at Birdie whose tears had dried. The housekeeper leaned close to the crack in the door and watched with the same amount of fascination she showed for the afternoon soap operas on the little portable television in the kitchen while she cleaned up the lunch dishes. Birdie rolled her eyes.

“Sex fantasies,” Suzanne whispered. They shared a good giggle.

Chapter Twelve

Suzanne’s story

As it turned out, the insurance company demanded a polygraph test of all three persons in the house. They had nothing to hide, right?

Birdie exited her test in tears, and George came out of the grim little room, serious and pale. The deputy, making sure they did not collude beforehand, led each person past Suzanne and directly into Sheriff Duval’s office after their ordeal. The test administrator, brought in for the occasion and dressed as meticulously as an IBM salesman, beckoned her from the bench in the hallway. A little paunchy, a little balding, he looked to be around George’s age but not as fit.

Her palms started sweating early. She felt guilty for no reason at all. The white-walled, windowless room with its single table and two chairs reeked of criminal intent. The light bulb overhead was not naked, but should have been. The man who hooked her up to the machine as professionally as Doc Sonny had done her exam was not a police officer, but an examiner sent out by Mutual Trust, Life, and Casualty. This came out in the chitchat as he attached the electrodes. “Call me Bill,” he said.

Actually, the beginning of the test went no worse than a job interview. He ran over her name, address, age, and educational background. Suzanne began to relax when out of the blue, “Call me Bill” asked if she was having an affair with George St. Julien. That threw her for a moment, but she answered, “no”, calmly and firmly, very pleased with herself until good old Bill started prodding about other affairs. How many? One, two? A dozen?

“Two,” she answered truthfully.

How did they do it? The regular way? Oral sex? Whips and chains?

“Yes, yes, NO! It’s none of your damned business!”

When he finally asked about the silver, Suzanne was so relieved to get away from the subject of sex that she would have confessed to anything. Aha, a tactic exposed. She gathered her emotions and clamped the lid down tight. She tensed only for a second when he asked her to estimate the value of the stolen items. Replying neutrally, she said she did not do antiques appraisals, had been hired to inventory and document the collection for historical purposes. Choosing her words carefully and telling no lies, she informed him that she’d heard the appraiser for the insurance company assigned a value of $100,000 some years ago.

Being out cold, Suzanne didn’t have to lie about hearing and seeing nothing the afternoon of the crime. To a direct question on being involved with the theft, she gave a simple, quiet, “no.” She rejoiced when he did not ask about that morning spent dreaming of a masked man, or if she had any suspicions on whom the culprit might be. The questions diminished down to the ordinary again, and then the ordeal ended.

Bill, detaching the electrodes, stroked her arm for a second, gazed into her eyes, and asked if she’d like to do an evening in Lafayette with him before he blew this hick town and got back to Baton Rouge. So much for professionalism. She gave him the most emphatic “no” of the interview. He ripped off the last electrode and showed her to the door. Sheriff Duval would receive a copy of the test results.

Comparatively, the exit interview amounted to nothing. Sheriff Duval sat with his chair leaning against the wall, his Stetson pulled low over his eyes, and his feet in alligator boots propped on his desk. “I reckon none of ya’ll are guilty, but I’ll have to see about those test results first. Might be calling all ya’ll back in. Something funny is going on up at the Hill, and I aim to find out what.”

Leaving after that trite comment, Suzanne thought they might as well have acting out a scene from a Grade B western or a poorly written mystery and had to curb her smile as she exited the station. Her laughter bubbled up until she saw George and Birdie waiting for her in the gray sedan. In the back seat, Birdie wrung a wet handkerchief in her hands. George behind the wheel looked as if he prepared to drive in a funeral procession. The man was so transparent, so obvious at least when it came to her, Suzanne wondered how he survived the test. In fact, she half expected the examiner to throw open the station door as they drove away and shout, “I’ve found the guilty party, Sheriff. Arrest that man!”—another bad line from a poor script. But no one stopped them from leaving.

George’s still sweaty palms slipped on the wheel of the car as he took the corners back to Magnolia Hill. Suzanne pitied this sweet man who had taken care of his sick mother and broke himself to save her estate. He simply was not cut out for intrigue or a life of crime. Still, some of the respect and liking she’d been feeling for George St. Julien had ebbed since he stole the silver.

****

Days passed. No one showed up at Magnolia Hill with a warrant for George’s arrest. Suzanne stopped joining him in the den for a nightcap under the pretext of working diligently on her paper, which she did. Still, he rapped on her bedroom door three nights in a row and waylaid her in the hall to invite her for a drink. She refused to toast his clever solution to the problem of the fake silver. If the man wanted to steal his own silver, fine. Sheriff Duval would figure it out. Disguised by his drawl and his alligator boots, he did have a sharp brain under that Stetson, she suspected.

How the crime had been committed became all too clear to her as she worked over the facts in her mind. George knew Birdie left the house because of her family emergency. He gave her the sleeping pill and drove his aunts’ home while the drug took effect. Returning, he unlocked the cabinet and hauled off the loot, hiding it somewhere or perhaps, simply dumping it, bobeches, grape shears, and all in the bayou. At least, he’d had the decency and enough wit to wipe off all of the fingerprints, most of which belonged to Birdie and her. With a scheme so plain and simple, she wondered why Sheriff Duval’s squad car hadn’t torn up the lane in a spray of shell and with red lights flashing to take George away.

A man connected with the case did arrive one Friday. A claims adjuster, he presented a check for $100,000 and a paper to be witnessed and notarized when he handed the money over to George. Summoned from her room, Suzanne signed as a witness, though Birdie could have done it just as well. She wondered if having her signature on legal papers made George feel safe from any accusations she might voice later.

George held steady throughout the signing, ironically taking place in the same room where the theft had been committed. They sat at the immense dining room table, George and Suzanne on one side, the adjustor and the notary on the other. At one point, she noticed Birdie’s reflection in the sideboard mirror. She stood in the kitchen doorway and smiled as George seized the check.

As soon as the officials left after a series of solemn handshakes, George whooped in a way that shook the chandelier and bounded toward Suzanne, arms out, the slightly crumpled check still in one hand. She took a step back, so he grabbed Birdie instead and danced her around the table. “This pays off the second mortgage!” he hollered.

Suzanne looked on at what could have been a scene from a nineteenth century novel—master and servant rejoicing that the ole plantation had been saved. What did it matter if you took advantage of a few Yankees along the way? She felt used, more used than she had been by Barry Cashman, used by this clumsy conniver who had just knocked over an antique dining room chair. If George cashed that check, he’d commit fraud, and yet, she couldn’t bring herself to turn him in.

She stalked off to her room while Birdie and George shared a glass of sweet wine in the kitchen, and answered a long, newsy message from her mother. Mom rattled on and on, saying again among other things, how great her daughter lived in a small, safe southern town for the moment. In Philadelphia, the Slasher continued to carve young women to pieces in their own bedrooms, such cheery news from back home. The Slasher was escalating, Mom said, having watched too many episodes of
Criminal Minds
.