Now Let's Talk of Graves (36 page)

She was tougher than he thought. Besides, she had the right, didn't she?

“Deal.”

Madeline stood, walked over to an intercom panel, pushed a button. “Kim, another pot of coffee, please.” She settled back down in an extra-wide easy chair. “Now tell me what you know.”

Well, he knew about the duel between Church and Maynard. That Church had won her. That she'd left when Zoe was six.

“Ran away with Jack.” She pointed at a brass-framed photograph of a smiling, jolly-looking dark-haired man. “Did they tell you that?”

Harry nodded his head.

“Well.” And then she spread her hands, about to begin the storytelling. “Did you know that Peggy Patrick was fat too?”

“Peggy Patrick?”

“The first little girl Church and Maynard fought over when they were in grade school, the one over whom they began their lifelong feud.”

Ahh. And then the face of a third fat lady floated past a corner of Harry's mind's eye. Sister Nadine. He was beginning to see the pattern.

Madeline continued. “I don't know that either of them initially had a preference for big girls, big women, but that's the way it started, and that's the way it went. After Peggy there was a whole series, each larger than the next. The wags among their friends began to joke that pretty soon they'd be tracking down fat ladies in the circus. Now, I wasn't in that league, but I was a pretty hefty girl.”

Harry couldn't hold her gaze.

She caught him. “No, wait. Don't be embarrassed.
I'm
not. I've always been this way.
Fat
is not necessarily a dirty word, you know,
unless
you suffer from fatism.”

Harry winced. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. You're a man. You can't help it.”

“What?” Harry laughed.

Madeline just smiled. “Where was I, oh, then they both found me. Actually, Church found me first. Our families moved in the same circles.”

Harry remembered she was an heir to the Standard Fruit fortune.

“And Maynard's didn't?”

“Not
quite
,”
she sniffed. “And then there was the duel. The famous duel. I'll tell you, it's the kind of thing will turn any girl's head. Can you imagine?”

Harry couldn't.

“Foils at dawn under the oaks. Pretty sexy stuff. Besides, I loved Church.” Her voice melted on the words, then stiffened again as she added, “And I thought he loved me. Anyway, we had the most fabulous wedding. I mean, it stopped traffic in New Orleans. Even made
The New York Times
.”

“Big time.”

“Oh, yes, we definitely were. Though those same friends, the wags, tittered at the reception that it was as if Church were the highest bidder on a head of prime livestock. Of course, the simple fact of a wedding didn't make Maynard give up. We were no sooner back from our European honeymoon than Maynard started his campaign. All sub rosa, of course. But the flowers and the poems and tears caught in little crystal bottles and endless threats of suicide were enough. Especially since I was beginning to get the drift, not long after we'd sailed off on the
QE,
that my young husband didn't really adore me at all but had just won a point in an incredibly long tennis volley—love not being the name of the game.

“So eventually I capitulated. Maynard made sure we got caught, of course. Otherwise, what was the point? Though it took me several years of to-ing and fro-ing between the two of them before I realized the true deep sadness of the contest. I thought there for a long while that love aside, I must be the most desirable woman who'd ever been born in the state of Louisiana, though a quick look at my backside in a mirror would have to raise the hard question: Who was I kidding?

“By the time I woke up and smelled the coffee, Zoe had come along—definitely Church's, I made damn sure of that—and was about six years old.

“Then, like a bolt of lightning, I finally found true love in the person of one Jack Hebert. My barrel-chested dark-eyed Cajun was light on his feet. Jack could and would twirl me around a dance floor as easily as he carried six full orders of crawfish étouffée, iced tea, and coffee into the dining room. And he truly loved me.

“It was as simple as that. He loved my fat cheeks, my smile (which neither Church nor Maynard had seen for years). He loved to watch me eat. Jack loved everything about Madeline Villère Lee, though he didn't think he, a New Iberia Cajun and a waiter, had a chance in hell of ever winning me away from that big house on Prytania. In fact, that's what he told himself when he'd get off work late at night and drive his old car uptown, circling our block again and again like a teenager, saying to himself, looking up at that grand house, son, what the hell you thinking about, you stand a chance against that?

“Which shows how much he knew. One day I happened to be passing by the Pickwick Club on Canal, where both Church and Maynard lunched every day, at separate tables, of course—my husband and my off-again on-again lover—both three sheets to the wind, standing out on the sidewalk like two male dogs, feet braced, spit flying, yelling things like—well, whad'dyu think the fat bitch meant when she—I didn't wait around to hear more.

“I called Jack and said, If you want me, come and get me.

“He was there in ten minutes flat.

“We never looked back.

“Except, of course, for Zoe.”

Now it was Harry's turn to look off into the yard at someone Madeline couldn't see. Hadn't seen for years.

“Leaving her was such agony. But I couldn't stay. I just couldn't. And I knew if I took her, Church would track me down with bloodhounds. He'd
never
leave
us alone. But if I left her…” Madeline trailed off.

“He'd let you go.”

“He did. He did do that.”

“And you kept in touch through Ma Elise.”

“She writes me once a month. Sends me pictures. I have six albums of—” She looked over to a bookcase, shook her head. “And that's my story. Now you tell me.”

So Harry did. He told her all he knew, everything that Sam had seen and learned from the Lees about Church's death—but mostly about Zoe.

Madeline didn't flinch until it was all over, and she moaned, “Oh, God!” The tears brimmed over and ran down her round cheeks. “What can I do?”

“Well, Church is dead now, isn't he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Get in touch with her. She sure as hell needs all the help she can get right now.”

“But don't you think she hates me?”

“Zoe? Why would she?”

“I left
her, deserted her.” Her voice was anguished.

“The good part is you're not too late. You're both still alive and kicking. Just because you left doesn't mean you have to stay gone forever. Hell, you know New Orleans. You from there, never any problem going home.”

Twenty-Nine

WELL, IT WAS time, wasn't it, thought Sam, to go to see Maynard Dupree. Unless she wanted to spend some more time tiptoeing around him. She
could
go see his wife.

What had Harry said her name was?

Stopped at a red light, she flipped open her notebook. There were coffee stains on the page from her last meeting with Harry.

Marietta Duchamps Dupree.

Harry.

Maynard's office was on Carondelet. She could drop in and beard him in his den
if
he were home. Otherwise, she was great at pumping secretaries.

Of course, some of them, like Cissy, were so primed you hardly had to lay a finger on.

She'd bet that wouldn't be the case with Mr. Dupree's.

She threw her mind back to Maynard, to the piggy-red face she'd seen that night in the Sazerac bar. The one who'd stirred up Church so.

That night she'd first met Harry.

Goddammit! Goddamn his eyes! Bedroom eyes. Get you a young one with bedroom eyes. That's what her friend Marie always said.

For what?

For fun.

She didn't have time for fun.

Balls.

On that note, Sam pulled over to the curb.

*

Billy Jack, having bargained himself away from the traffic cop with a little gift of nose candy, almost hit a truck trying to catch up with the curly-headed DEA bitch.

But then, maybe he ought to let her go. It looked like he was going to have to anyway; he'd lost sight of her ahead. But what if this was a trick, the traffic cop just pulling him over till another fed could get on
his
tail. Maybe there was somebody closing in behind
him
now. Somebody in a big heavy car like that big nigger.

Even with the air-conditioning, he felt the sweat running down inside his shirt. So what should he do? Speed up or slow down? Fish or cut bait, he could hear his mama saying. She'd always said that. Fish or cut bait, son. You can't always be sitting on the bank, racked with indecision. She said that cute, his mama. Like she was French, through her nose.
In-de-ci-sion.
Mama, mama. What to do? He closed his eyes and saw her sweet face. Her pillowy chest. Laid his head on it, got lost in it for just a minute. Then snapped to.

Run, she'd whispered in his ear.

Run, Billy. Run for cover.

He threw the car into gear, gunned it.

*

Okay, lady. Sam was jerked back from her daydream to the here and now by an idiot in a car speeding too-close-for-comfort past her. She opened her eyes.

And there, lo and behold, right before her, was a telephone booth. Ma Bell was just waiting for this Southern belle's dimes.

Out of the car, she listened to them drop. Boing. Boing. She flipped the pages of her book, back and forth. Who to call? Where? Maynard Dupree. Harry's home-away-from-home, the Esplanade Lounge. Harry's home number.

One potato.

Two potato.

She punched the buttons.

Harry wasn't home, but he had an answering machine. “Hi, Harry? It's Sam. Listen, about yesterday. I'm real sorry—”

Thirty

“SHE SAY SHE need anything?” Joey asked Lavert.

“Some mozzarella. I already got it.” Lavert was talking through the window that separated the back and the front of the white stretch limousine.

“At the Central?”

“Right. I got her some noodles and some tomato paste too. Kind comes in a tube.”

“What you mean?” Frankie Zito was in the back with Joey, filing his daily report. “Paste don't come in no tube.”

“Just like toothpaste.” Lavert's head bobbed. “Use what you want, screw the top back on.”

Frankie said to Joey, “Man knows more about being a wop than I do.”

Joey laughed. “You hear that, Lavert?”

Lavert nodded his big head, keeping his eye on traffic as they turned onto Elysian Fields headed toward Joey's mama's house on Perlita out by the lake.

“Know more about wop
food,
anyway, huh, my man?”

“That's right.” Lavert smiled, thinking about how he was gonna bring up the subject of Billy Jack real gentle, find out his last name, meanwhile not get Harry fitted for some cement house slippers, poking his nose where he shouldn't.

“You get Mama some cookies?” Joey asked.

“Sure did.”

“Those almond ones she likes?”

“In the red can,” said Lavert.

“I ever show you that trick with the cookie wrapper and a match?” Joey asked.

About a hundred times. “No,” said Lavert. “What's that?”

“Remind me we get to Mama's house. We have our coffee, I'll show you.”

“Good.” Lavert smiled into the rearview mirror. Lots of teeth.

“So tell me, Frankie.” Joey turned to the little man. “What you doing about that punk you telling me about? That fairy you got moving product?”

“Awh, Joyner ain't no fairy.”

Bingo. That was the name Lavert had heard before.

Joyner. Billy Jack Joyner.

“How you know? You seen him with the girls?”

“Come on, Joey. I seen him all the time, hanging out Mr. Kush's poolhall. He ain't no fag.”

“
Come on, Joey,
my ass. You upsetting me, Frankie. I don't like talk. No kind of talk, you know what I mean?”

“I know.”

“So? I want the talk should shut up.”

“Right, boss.”

“So? You take care of it.”

“Right, boss.”

“Lavert.” Joey was tapping on the glass.

“Yes?”

“Pull over here. Frankie needs to get out.”

“Whaaat?” Frankie's whine went off the chart. “Boss, we here in the middle of nig—we nowhere here. I don't need to go nowhere.”