Restoration (21 page)

I opened the passenger door and stepped outside. “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you, Rhys?”

“I think I do.”

“Have you figured out how you plan to get in the school?”

She opened the dashboard ashtray and retrieved a pair of shiny new keys. “One thing about Mrs. Wheeler,” she said, “she’s so busy running her mouth she doesn’t notice half of what’s going on around her. Somebody should warn that lady about leaving valuables out on her desk.” Rhys laughed and put the keys back in the tray. “Don’t worry, Jack. I made copies and returned the originals later in the day. She never even noticed them missing.”

She started the engine and leaned over in the seat. She was holding me with another of those stares meant to convey her commitment. “It can’t wait much longer, Jack. I had an interesting talk yesterday with Mr. Cherry. He says somebody was snooping around the building this week, asking questions about an old painting. Big guy in fancy clothes. Mr. Cherry had his accent down pat.”

“Smallwood?” I said.

“Smallwood,” she answered. “Are you in, Jack?”

“Hell yeah,” I said, then gave her a wave as she drove away.

Later that afternoon I left the city driving west on Interstate 10 and in minutes came to exit signs for the Huey P. Long Bridge. A cloverleaf led me around to Clearview Parkway heading toward the river. Past the usual suburban sprawl—the apartment complexes and strip malls, the donut shops and pay-at-the-pump gas stations—and suddenly there it was, blotting out the horizon.

Alone as I navigated a traffic circle and approached the on ramp, I straddled the center line and claimed both lanes as my own. The smooth ascent, tires thumping over reflector caps as I drifted from side to side. To my left a nest of gray steel suspended above a train track, to my right the river. More than six decades old and the bridge was no less an architectural wonder today than when the state dedicated
it to the former governor not long after he was shot by an assassin in the state capitol some sixty miles upriver. In the months after the bridge’s completion tourists had come from all over the South for the simple experience of driving across it. New York City had the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. New Orleans had the Huey P.

“Where was it?” I mumbled out loud, slowing below the posted speed limit. “Where, Levette? Where did you go to jump?”

The walkway to my right was barely wide enough to accommodate the body of a man. Had cars passed by as he climbed to the bridge’s summit? Had drivers blown their horns to distract him?

Descending now to the West Bank and the turnaround at Bridge City, I recalled the day some twenty-five years ago when Dad took Mom and me for the same drive, and I wondered now if a father must die before his son can become the man he was meant to be. “Tell us where to go,” Bonelle Louvrier had said when I asked her what genes were for. It seemed plausible. No, it seemed
right.
Bonelle knew what she was talking about. I’d never understood my father better than at this moment, as I made a U-turn and went back up, looking for Levette.

Before the bridge was built there would’ve been only a ferry boat connecting one side of the river to the other, and rather than motor inns and all-night package stores there would’ve been fields planted with cotton and sugarcane and broken by stands of swamp trees. My eyes were on the road and yet I kept seeing something else: the picture of a beautiful, paint-stained boy leaping to churning brown water.

I saw him throwing his body clear from the guardrail, his form a black speck against the sky, legs pedaling and arms flailing as if for purchase.

Why did he do it? What had compelled him to jump? Asmore’s suicide was made all the more difficult to understand by my own experience, and by my own good fortune. At his age I was way too busy enjoying myself to contemplate the possibility that the party might
end one day. Nights when I wasn’t covering a story for the paper I was out with friends, pursuing as many adventures as a young reporter’s salary could afford. I went to movies and little-theater productions, attended gallery openings and rock concerts, drank beer wherever it was cheap, shopped the Gap for discounted chinos and pocket Ts. I worked out three times a week at the Lee Circle Y, kept track of my bench press in a daybook and played league basketball. The phone rang incessantly, mostly girls calling. My biggest worries involved issues that now, in light of how Asmore must’ve suffered, seem so insignificant I’m embarrassed to acknowledge them: which Carnival krewe to join, whether to rent in Mid-City or the Lower Garden District, who among my out-of-town friends to invite to stay over during Jazz Fest. Except for those days when I was assigned to write an obit about one of the city’s leading citizens, death was never a consideration.

Crossing back over the river, I glanced in the rearview mirror and there he went over the side again.

I spotted the car as I was walking up Moss Street, returning home from my neighborhood coffee shop. In one hand I lugged an art book the size of a cinder block, in the other a
mocha grande
in a paper cup. The dark blue Mercedes-Benz station wagon was parked in front of the house with its rear door cocked open. I was about a hundred feet away when Lucinda Copeland came through the gate followed by Lowenstein’s maid. Lucinda, dressed in a gray business suit and wearing her long hair piled on top of her head, walked to the open door and leaned inside. When she appeared again she was holding what looked like a painting wrapped in a padded blanket, the kind movers use. The maid grabbed one side, Lucinda took the other, and together they ushered the painting through the gate. When Lucinda returned a few minutes later she was alone. She folded the blanket and placed it in back.

“Lucinda, it’s Jack,” I said, striding toward her on the sidewalk.

She glanced up with a startled expression. “Jack Charbonnet,” I said. “Rhys Goudeau’s friend. We met in the Louisiana Room at the gallery some weeks ago.”

“Oh, yes, Jack. Nice to see you again.”

“Making a delivery to Mr. Lowenstein, were you?”

“Yes, making a delivery. The first of many today, actually.”

“I live here. I rent the garçonnière in back—that is, the old quarters that connect with the house. The old man’s got quite a collection, doesn’t he?”

“Does he?” she said and bubbled out the nervous suggestion of a laugh. “If so, he certainly has the showcase for it. What a house. Well, it was good seeing you again, Jack. Take care, you hear?”

“Lucinda,” I said, “was Mr. Lowenstein the one who bought
Beloved Dorothy?”

She looked at me and smiled, the smile of one who recognizes when she’s being led in a direction she had better not go, and lured there by a person she would be smart not to trust. “Jack, why don’t you ask Mr. Lowenstein what he bought at the auction? It’s really unethical of me to disclose information about purchases without a client’s consent. I could lose my job. I hope you don’t take offense.”

“Sure, Lucinda, I understand.”

“It’s just that collectors are very secretive about what they buy.”

“Really? I would think they’d be proud of it and want to show it off.”

“Actually, the opposite is true. No one is more paranoid than a committed collector. He has insurance considerations, security issues, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, you start advertising what you have, and there’s no telling who’ll be paying a visit.” I let her have a big, toothy smile, then said, “Maybe even the thief you have living in your apartment out back.”

“Jack, I hope you didn’t think… it wasn’t my intention to insinuate that you might want to
steal
Mr. Lowenstein’s painting—”

“So it is a painting,” I said.

“Well, it isn’t an antique hobby horse, I will say that.”

“Sorry for putting you on the spot,” I said. “Good to see you again, Lucinda.”

“You, too, Jack. Now have a nice day. And say hi to Rhys for me.”

I cleared the gate and immediately went to the front door. Past the screen the only paintings I saw were those already hanging on the walls of the long hallway, and the few miniatures standing on photo easels on the buffet. I banged a fist against the frame and the maid shuffled to the door. Small and delicately built, she stood wiping her hands with a dish towel as she waited for me to say something. “Is Mr. Lowenstein’s nurse here today?” I gave my coffee a careful sip to advance an appearance of insouciance and calm.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forget we haven’t been introduced. I’m the tenant who rents the garçonnière. Jack Charbonnet. Maybe you’ve seen me in the garden.”

She stepped up closer to the screen and met my eyes with hers. “The nurse doesn’t work here anymore. Can I help you with something?” Hers was a voice like Butterfly McQueen’s, from
Gone With the Wind.
It was the voice of a child in the body of a woman, and an edgy, conspiratorial child, at that.

“What happened to the nurse?” I whispered, moving closer.

She looked back at the hallway, to make sure she was alone. “Mr. Lowenstein had to let her go,” she said. “He told me that, anyway.” She shook her head and shot another glance backward. “Things aren’t good.”

“Ma’am…”

“Sally.”

“Sally, when you have a minute, please tell Mr. Lowenstein I send my congratulations. I’m sure he’ll know what I mean.”

“That you send your congratulations? Mr. Charbonnet from the apartment?”

“That’s right.”

“For what? I mean, he might want to know.”

“For the painting, the one the lady from the auction house just delivered.”

She blinked a few times, as if certain now that I really was out of my mind.

“The portrait,” I said, “the pretty picture of the girl…?”

“Yes, okay. I’ll tell him.”

“Also, if you wouldn’t mind, please tell Mr. Lowenstein—”

“Tell Mr. Lowenstein
what?”
came a man’s voice, so loud and unexpected that I nearly dropped both my book and coffee to the ground. It was Lowenstein, revealing himself in one of the doorways. His wheelchair clattered as he pushed out into the hall and charged toward me. “You’ve interrupted my quiet time, Mr. Charbonnet. What is it you could possibly want now?”

“Only to let you know how pleased I am that it was you who bought the Asmore, Mr. Lowenstein. I could tell from your visit how well you thought of the painting, and I’m glad she’s back on Moss Street where she belongs.”

Sally seemed to understand that she wasn’t needed any longer, and perhaps that by hanging around she risked witnessing something she was better off not seeing. Lowenstein waited until she was gone before he said, “You assume too much. I would warn against that.”

“You got a great painting, a masterpiece.”

“Did I? Well, I’ll accept that, if you say so. Is there anything else?”

“Just one more question, please. Mr. Lowenstein, if a portrait by Levette Asmore fetches more than four hundred thousand dollars at auction, my question is, how much do you think a twenty-foot-long mural by the same artist is worth?”

He was silent for a moment, then rolled up closer to the door, exciting a smell of someone who’s been days since his last wash. “Is this a hypothetical question, or do you know of such a painting? If you’re talking about the post office mural, it’s a waste of time. It was destroyed before anyone but a few had a chance to see it.”

“Anyone but a few?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Lowenstein, were you one of these few, by chance?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I was. Now allow me to ask you a question, since I was kind enough to answer yours. What were you doing with Levette’s portrait, the one of the girl? Did it belong to you?”

“It was Patrick Marion’s, something he inherited. The sitter was his aunt.”

His mouth dropped open slightly as he pondered the connection.

“Mr. Lowenstein, did I hear you right? Did you say you saw the Asmore mural in the post office? The Magazine Street post office?”

“Is that where it was?” He looked down at his hands in his lap as if the answer lay there. “Well, if you say so. You know everything else.”