Gator Aide (8 page)

Considering where all the money for her house and furnishings had come from, it didn’t seem a very charitable statement. Dolores swayed in my direction, nearly losing her balance. I thrust out a hand to steady her, and Fifi lunged toward me like a hungry piranha as the door to Hillard’s office swung open, and the bristle-combed head of Gunter peered out. Catching sight of our powwow, he glided through the door as if he were skating on ice. Ignoring me, he caught Dolores by the arm and tried to veer her toward the stairs.

“Shouldn’t you be in your room resting? None of this need concern you.” Gunter’s voice wove a silky web. It was obvious he was a man used to getting his way. Fifi turned toward him and growled loudly as the stump of her leg began to twitch. He pulled away for a moment, uncertain as to what the dog might do. His appearance was vaguely reptilian in the afternoon light, and I noticed, for the first time, that his eyebrows were as white as his hair, while he lacked any eyelashes whatsoever. Gunter grabbed at Dolores again, causing Fifi to launch into frenzied high-pitched barking that could have been taken for a car alarm on the fritz.

The shrill yelping jerked Dolores out of her stupor. Pulling her arm out of Gunter’s grasp, she barked out her own command.

“I don’t want to rest. What I want is another drink!” She glared at Gunter as he stood ramrod straight. “Now!”

Analyzing the situation through lashless eyes, Gunter humored her for the moment. “I’ll see what I can do.” Turning on his heel, he left the hall.

“You do that!” Dolores barked after him. With Gunter out of the way, Fifi turned her attention back to me, baring her teeth in a warning growl. Swaying toward me, Dolores considerately placed her hand over the dog’s snout to keep me from being torn to bits.

“I’m a goddamn prisoner in my own home. There’s always somebody spying on me.” Dolores pulled back, contemplating me with glazed eyes before leaning in once again. “So, you’re new in town, huh? Good. Someone Hill hasn’t bought off yet. We can’t talk now, but come back tomorrow for lunch. We’ll talk then.” Dolores hiccuped a trail of good bourbon. “I’ll get Vincent to let you in.”

Southern Comfort promises. My pulse raced as Gunter returned, holding a glass filled with bourbon and ice.

“I suggest you drink this upstairs.” He handed Dolores the glass, his tone holding a thinly veiled threat as he grabbed her once again by the arm.

In a well-timed move, Dolores let go of the dog’s muzzle so that Fifi lunged like a cobra striking at its prey, zeroing in to lock her teeth into Gunter’s outstretched hand. For a moment the two froze in place, like a piece of performance art, until Gunter reached for Fifi’s muzzle to try and pry her jaw loose. The dog just held on tight, digging deeper into his flesh with a determined growl. Gunter cursed under his breath as he clamped his free hand tightly around Fifi’s throat. As he cut off the dog’s air supply, Dolores brought the standoff to an abrupt end by rapping Fifi on the nose, and then striking a well-placed kick to Gunter’s shins with the heel of her shoe. Releasing the hand with a look of triumph, Fifi came away with a chunk of flesh as blood ran from Gunter’s wound.

“Someone is going to kill that damn dog someday.” Ripping a handkerchief from his pocket, Gunter tightened it around the gash in an attempt to stop the spurt of blood that covered his hand and the cuff of his shirt.

“You just make sure that doesn’t happen, Gunter, or believe me, you’ll have a lot worse than Fifi to deal with.” Dolores held her drink in a rock-steady hand, having not spilled one drop during the melee. “You’ll have me on your German ass, and that’s something you don’t even want to think about.”

There was no time to imagine how Dolores could possibly be worse than Fifi on the prowl, as the door to the inner sanctum opened and Hillard and Santou walked out.

“You’re a good man, Jake. I knew I could count on ya to understand. And don’t you worry none. Once I get into office, that job is yours, and that’s a promise.” Ignoring both Gunter’s bloody hand and Fifi’s reddened muzzle, Hillard bounded over to me. “You remember my offer now, honey. Don’t be a stranger, ya hear? I just might have a place in my administration for a gal like yourself. It’s high time we had us a head of wildlife for whatever wildlife it is we got here in this city.”

Hillard once more felt comfortable enough to address me with endearments. I took this as a sign that their meeting had gone well. As for “head of wildlife,” I was pretty sure he meant local dogcatcher to clean up whatever mess might be made. So far, there seemed to be plenty of them.

“So, how’d it go with Dolores Williams? I see that she was in her usual stewed state.” Santou sounded awfully chipper.

“Gee, I don’t know. What can you expect to get from a woman who’s drunk and has her hands full with a psychotic dog? But enough about me. How was your private meeting with Hillard? He certainly seemed satisfied with the outcome.” I had given Santou more than enough information for today, and had come to the decision that unless we played this straight, we might as well each work on our own. “What was all that about making me leave the room?”

Santou grinned. “It’s known as Southern manners,
c
hèr
e
. There are certain things Southern gentlemen don’t talk about in front of a lady.”

I had reached my bursting point as far as Southern charm was concerned. “Don’t hand me that crap, Santou. Either we work on this together, or we’re wasting each other’s time.”

The sun highlighted the silver streaks in his hair and deepened his sallow complexion to a rich golden brown. As we approached the car Santou took off his jacket, casually tossing it over his shoulder as he leaned against the passenger door, his eyes narrowing as they homed in on me.

“Good. I’ve never liked having to deal with some fragile lady. My day is now officially over, so how about having some Cajun food with me and seeing what life in Louisiana is really like? I don’t imagine you’ve come across much of that living in the French Quarter.”

His remark took me by surprise. “How did you know I live in the Quarter?”

Santou stared at me a moment, then smiled. “You told me. Last night.”

“No, I didn’t.” Growing up in New York, the first thing you learned was never to tell anybody where you lived right away.

Santou shrugged, the smile still lingering on his lips. “Lucky guess, then.”

I could feel the tension radiating off Santou’s hot-wired veneer. If he was all that curious about my address, it would have been easy enough for him to find out. In spite of myself, I found I was flattered. But not enough to let him off the hook right away.

“I thought I’d been invited along on a business meeting, Santou. Not to be shunted around like some Southern belle from one room to another. You made me look like a fool back there while you and Hillard were busy playing country boys.”

Whatever Santou was about to say, he consciously repressed it, wrapping his arms across his chest as though to bottle it in. Studying him in the afternoon light, I didn’t see any one physical characteristic that could be called attractive all on its own, but there was something about the man that exuded sensuality.

“
Chè
re
, don’t you know how to get along with people? Make them feel comfortable? Hillard and I are just two ol’ country boys playing a bit of round-robin with each other. Nothing wrong with that.” Santou’s body still blocked my entrance to the passenger door. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Let’s go for a ride.”

“If all this was just to get me out on a date, you should have saved yourself the trouble. I’m not interested.” I made a move for the door handle but Santou didn’t budge.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Porter. You’re a good-looking woman, but I just got out of one mess. I don’t need to get myself right back into another.”

It struck a chord, echoing one of my reasons for leaving New York. In truth, I had run away. I needed to believe that if I picked up and moved, somehow my life would change—or at least my pattern of failed relationships with men. While I had always thought of myself as an independent woman, I kept making the same fatal mistake time and again. I tended to define myself by the way each man had wanted me to be.

“Listen, Porter, I’m talking dinner between two people working on the same case, that’s all. But it’s up to you. As far as Hillard is concerned, I knew I’d get more out of him if you weren’t in the room.”

“I’d expect you to tell me what you found out whether we went to dinner or not. That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

Santou stepped away from the car. Opening the door, I sat down on a hot plastic cover that melted into my skin.

“Yeah, that was the deal.”

Santou slid in behind the wheel and reached beneath his seat. “Jesus, Porter. What’s the big deal? We’re not talking date rape, just relaxing over a decent Cajun meal in a setting a whole lot nicer than this while I fill you in on the details. Is that considered torture where you come from?”

Pulling out a bottle of Mylanta, he twirled off the top and took a swig, making him seem more human. I told myself I could use a break from my daily routine of chocolate bars and po’boy sandwiches. But deep down inside, I knew it was much more than that.

We rolled past a succession of sugarcane fields as Santou regaled me with stories from his childhood on Bayou Teche. I heard about his father, who had worked the swamps collecting crawfish and frogs to be sold to pricey New Orleans restaurants, and of his grandmother, who had been a fountain of Cajun folklore for the region. As a blue heron took flight from the bayou’s edge, Santou told me to quickly make a wish before the bird flew out of sight and it would come true.

“I wish you’d tell me what was so confidential that I had to leave the room for.”

Santou gave wide berth to a dead cat lying in the middle of the road, all four legs stiffly raised in a salute to the setting sun. “Hillard admitted to sleeping with Vaughn a few times. Says she tempted him till he just broke down and sinned. Made it sound like that little girl couldn’t keep her hands off him. But then Jesus spoke to Hillard and told him to clean up his act, what with the election coming up and all, you know.”

Santou’s expression remained deadpan.

“So now, while he lusts after other women in his heart, he’s taken a vow to lie only in the arms of that sweet little wife of his. Hillard said he’s truly sorry about what happened to Vaughn, that he doesn’t know anything, and he sorely hopes she found the comfort of God before she died. Of course, the whole time he was quaking in that big leather chair of his. Seems he’s worried what this kind of information could do to his campaign if it leaked out, to say nothing of his newly acquired upstanding reputation.”

It was no wonder that Gunter had felt safe leaving the room. I remembered Hillard’s parting promise to Santou of better things to come.

“And you swallowed that line?”

Santou pointed out an egret camouflaged in the tall grass, taking in the last rays of day. Behind the bird was a factory exuding exhaust flames as bright as the setting sun.

“I’m just throwing Hillard a little rope, is all. I thought he might have been paying her rent, but that theory went up in flames.”

“Why is that?”

Santou flashed a smile. “I paid a visit to Vaughn’s landlord this morning. He said he always got a check from her promptly on the first of the month. So, there’s no proof there. And Hillard swears he stopped seeing her when he announced his candidacy for mayor and became a soldier for Christ.”

“Do we have any reason to believe anything Hillard says?”

“I don’t know,
ch
èr
e
. We have here a former poacher whose previous partner still conducts his business out of a social club in Queens. Then there’s Vinnie Bertucci, who’s playing butler but looks like he cracks heads for a living. And all this is without even taking into account Hillard’s so-called advisor on foreign affairs, Adolph or Gunter or whatever his name is. That guy strikes me as any number of things. Unfortunately, a liaison for business isn’t one of them.”

The sun had just set, dousing the sky a fluorescent shade of purple as we pulled up to a plain concrete building in Breaux Bridge. The pounding of music telegraphed the fact that there was more to the place than could be seen from outside. The soaring strain of fiddles and the honky-tonk notes of an accordion filled a parking lot jammed with pickup trucks, complete with hound dogs lying in the back, parked next to Grand Ams with couples necking in the front.

We made our way through the door, squeezing past countless bodies to enter a rustic room lined with long picnic tables set end to end, where the crowd sat together family-style. Overhead fans twirled as men, women, and children two-stepped around the floor in an oblong circle. A flock of business cards tacked to the ceiling fluttered in unison in the artificial breeze, their clatter mimicking an invading army of locusts. The ceiling was low enough so that, by looking up, you could take a survey of who generally occupied the place. If you lay down on your back for a few hours with pencil and paper in hand, you’d have been able to fill a couple of Rolodexes with the names and numbers of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, fishermen, hardware stores, bait and tackle shops, and traveling salesmen. Cartoon murals of the swamp decorated the walls with chartreuse alligators, jaws looming wide open in readiness to swallow up the giddy crowd.

The band onstage, playing loud and nonstop, consisted of three generations of women costumed in red-and-white polka-dot dresses that flared out like bells, while the men wore blue-and-white striped shirts, with white pants held up by flame red suspenders. A lanky reed of a man with a drooping mustache and dark, soulful eyes sang in French, the melancholy lyrics soaring up to the rafters in a blend both piercing and nasal.

Santou grabbed my hand and pushed his way through the crowd until he found a spot big enough for one, squeezing us both in at a long wooden table. A giant bowl of steaming red crawfish and a pitcher of beer appeared just as a Cajun square dance began.