Ciji Ware (17 page)

Suddenly she felt like hurtling herself against King’s chest and resting her cheek on his flamboyant striped tie, just to confirm that he really was a live human being. She raised both hands and rubbed her temples with her forefingers, as if to erase the images of a furious young man in starched collar and tail coat, a woman recovering from childbirth who reclined on a chaise longue upholstered resplendently in ruby red, and the angry Althea who had practically tossed the male intruder down the stairs!

Althea!

Wasn’t Althea the name of the African American woman who was Daphne Duvallon’s best friend and who had played the organ at her wedding? Yes, Althea LaCroix. How utterly bizarre! It had been the
white
man in the tail coat who had been addressed as Julien
LaCroix.
And why had the distraught characters on the second floor repeatedly referred to people named McCullough, Jeffries, and Duvallon?

Corlis watched silently as King drew nearer her side.

“Sorry that took so long,” he apologized.

“How long
did
it take?” she asked abruptly.

“The phone call?” King responded, looking at her curiously. “ ’Bout five minutes. Why?”

“Oh… nothing.”

King regarded her closely. “You okay, sugar?” he asked. “You look a little pale.”

Once again Corlis glanced at the bulb above their heads.

“I think there might be a small gas leak somewhere around here,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “I’ve suddenly got a bear of a headache.”

“Really?” King asked, concerned. “I’ll give a call to the gas company and have them check it out.”

Corlis shook her head. “I probably just need something to eat. I skipped lunch.” She looked at him expectantly and said quickly, “Oh, but you have a meeting to go to, right?”

“That’s what the phone call was about,” King said cheerfully. “It’s been postponed till seven thirty tonight. The guerrillas at the PRC have fanned out, gathering information we need to fight Grover’s order to demolish and petition for a zoning change in the historic district.”

“Guerrillas?” she echoed, wondering if there was a half-eaten bag of corn chips left in her car.

“That’s what I call the volunteer troops at the PRC.”

“Oh… yeah, right…” she said vaguely. She glanced down at her watch. “It’s almost three o’clock. I have forty-five minutes till I
have
to start editing my piece back at the station.”

“Don’t worry,” King said. “In New Orleans, a good meal is seconds away. Want to go to Casamento’s on Magazine Street for a quick po’boy? I’ve got my car outside. It’ll take us three minutes to get there.”

“I’ve left my car down near the Good Times Shopping Plaza.”

“I’ll drive you back to yours after lunch.”

“But I’m buying, okay?” She suddenly felt uncomfortable with her unprofessional behavior. “It’s strictly business. I want to talk about why you want to preserve these buildings. I can put it on my expense account.”

And maybe somehow I can figure out the reason I keep seeing folks who look like they belong in a Broadway production of
Showboat
!

She’d think about this disquieting episode later, she counseled herself. If she stopped now to consider what had just happened, she truly
would
lose her mind—or keel over in an embarrassing swoon.

Corlis bit her lip and asked awkwardly, “Is Casamento’s—is it an expensive restaurant? I do have to remember that I’m working for WJAZ now.”

“Trust me,” King said, laughing. “You and your expense account can afford it.” He gently seized her elbow and guided her down the shabby corridor and out into the full light of day.

***

True to his word, King made a quick call to the gas company then whisked Corlis to her desired destination: lunch. He soon turned his battered green station wagon into Magazine Street, heading for an establishment that blended Italian traditional cuisine with Louisiana seafood to create an iconic New Orleans eatery. He pulled in front of a tile-studded building and pointed to a huge overhead sign that declared simply “Oysters.”

“You wanted po’boys? Here’s one of the greatest po’boy emporiums on the planet!” he declared. He led her inside the building where the interiors, floor to ceiling, were also covered in tiles. “Old Joe Casamento founded the place in 1919 and wanted it spotlessly clean, so he commandeered tiles from four different companies across America to cover the floors and walls. People around here call it ‘the swimming pool.’”

“I thought most old families were either French or African American,” Corlis replied, pleased as a waiter in a long white apron immediately ushered them to a round table against one of the tiled walls.

“This is a port city, remember,” King said with a laugh. “Hordes of Italians came here after the turn of the twentieth century. Before that, a lot of immigrants from Haiti and Cuba arrived in New Orleans after the slave revolts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and brought all sorts of architectural styles with them. In fact, in the French Quarter a lot of the buildings are more Spanish-influenced than French! We’ve got folks from everywhere. In fact, it’s a gumbo, just like the dish!”

“Makes sense to me,” Corlis commented. “But no more lectures on architectural styles, Mr. Preservation. Feed me, please.”

Within minutes Corlis sank her teeth into her first po’boy sandwich at Casamento’s and thought she’d died and gone to heaven. King leaned back in his chair and appeared to be greatly amused while she groaned with ecstasy.

“Oh… m’God,” she said with her mouth half-full. “What
is
it? The mayo? The fried oysters? The crispy bread?”

“Casamento’s makes its own bread… says that’s the secret.”

“It’s the best thing I ever ate in my
life
!”

“You ever had oysters Rockefeller at Galatoire’s?” he demanded, alluding to one of New Orleans’s premier restaurants in the heart of the French Quarter.

“No,” she mumbled, licking a dollop of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth.

“Then you are not an authority
yet
on the best thing you ever ate in your life.”

“Mmmmm, I dunno,” she mumbled, trying to chew. “This is absolutely incredible!”

“At the risk of lecturing an expert,” he said, glancing at his watch and suddenly becoming all business, “would you like to know the most efficient way of going about researching the history of those Greek Revival buildings?”

Corlis nodded emphatically and took another bite out of her sandwich. She peered at the remains of King’s po’boy. “You gonna eat that?” she asked, leaning into his shoulder.

“Be my guest,” he replied, a faint smile on his lips.

Corlis already felt her spirits rising. Nothing like feeding the brain ambrosia, she thought happily. Perhaps the little vignette she thought she’d witnessed on the second floor of those old derelicts was just that: a hallucination caused by food deprivation and too many weird aromas floating in the New Orleans air! At least she hoped that’s what it was.

But what about the corpse?
she asked herself. And the couple at the cathedral? Missing a few calories couldn’t possibly be the cause of all this bizarre behavior!

Just don’t think about it!

“My team’s just scratched the surface looking into the history of the Selwyn properties,” King disclosed. “Remember, we only recently got wind that Grover Jeffries has been sniffing round about a possible development project in the block.”

Corlis swallowed a bite of his sandwich and asked, “What have your guys found out so far?”

“Not much. We just don’t have the staff to go digging up the entire historical background of every building that’s in jeopardy. The Historic New Orleans Collection at the Williams Library on Chartres Street in the French Quarter is another place you could check out. That is, if you’re
really
interested in tracing the descendants of the original builders and owners.”

Would those libraries also have birth and date records going back to the early 1800s? Corlis wondered. Perhaps she could look for the names Henri Girard or Julien LaCroix…

Forget it!

“This sounds like a pretty big project,” she said slowly. Zamora was decent, but he was short-staffed and had a newscast to fill each night. “Would you be willing to show me the ropes about this specialized kind of research? At least get me started by introducing me to the librarians and city archivists? It could save a lot of time.”

King regarded her with an appraising stare. Instinctively Corlis could read in his glance her very own thoughts. This story was bound to throw them into close proximity—and neither of them knew if this was going to be a good or a bad thing considering their past. On the other hand, if she took into account the fluttering sensations she was experiencing suddenly, her anatomy, at least, was voting yes on this particular research project.

“Sure,” King said finally. “I’ll point you in the right direction.” He glanced at his watch. “Can’t do it today though.”

She, too, glanced at her watch. “Oh boy, me neither! I’ve got to get back and cut the piece we shot this morning!”

“I’ll drive you to your car,” he offered.

King made as if to push back his chair in the noisy restaurant then paused. “I’m afraid I can’t meet you at the library till later in the week. Tomorrow I have meetings at the PRC all morning and have a class to teach in the afternoon.”

“You know?” she commented thoughtfully. “You preservation folks are pretty fearless, aren’t you?”

“Have to be. In the preservation biz we have to take it to the mat and pull the trigger all the time,” he said matter-of-factly. “If we don’t keep up the pressure, these priceless buildings come down, and they can never be replaced.”

“Tell me something, Professor,” she asked. “You’ve just been arrested on order of the university’s president. All this protesting stuff can’t be good for the career aspirations of someone like you on tenure track. Aren’t you worried that the school’s going to can you?”

“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “But, you, of all people, should understand a thing like this. It’s happened to
you
often enough, hasn’t it?”

“You had to remind me,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Even so, you do your thing anyway, don’t you?”

“Yep. But still, in the middle of the night I’ve been known to worry about the old mortgage payments,” she admitted. Then she laughed. “I
worry
,
but you’re right. I do what I have to do, no matter what.”

“Same for me,” he said.

“Hmmm,” was all she replied.

“What does ‘hmmmm’ mean?”

“It means I admire that.”

“Well, me-too-you, sugar.”

She regarded him for a long moment before plunging ahead with something that had been bothering her for some time.

“Let me ask you this,” she proposed and paused. She gazed at him intently. “It’s way off the subject, but there’s something I want to know.” She hesitated again then asked, “Were you the one who actually drew that insulting cartoon of me for the lampoon edition of
Ms.
UCLA
?”

“You mean the one on the cover showing you sitting at a typewriter?”

“Yeah… where I look like a gargoyle with grotesquely fat legs,” she reminded him.

King hesitated, as if he were checking his answer for air leaks before speaking. “No… I didn’t draw it.”

Corlis waited. Her reporter’s instincts told her that wasn’t the complete story.

“However?” she pressed.

“I gave my buddy Fred Barber the
idea
for it.”

“I see.” She continued to look at him steadily. “That was pretty mean.”

“It surely was,” he replied soberly. “I’m sorry for it now. It must have hurt when all the other students ribbed you about it.”

Corlis gazed into his eyes and allowed the moment to sink in.

“Mama Roux!” King said with a droll smile. “Those po’boys sure do pack a punch!”

Corlis glanced down at her empty plate and flushed. “It’s not the po’boys. I realize now that I owe you a genuine apology for the way I behaved, too.”

“Look, sugar, that goes both ways. As I think back on that whole affair, I can honestly say that I’m ashamed to have been a party to such a personal attack.” He gave her legs an appraising, sidelong glance. “And besides, if you’d only worn skirts like the one you’ve got on today, I’d have known that caricature of you was
so
inaccurate,” he added in a teasing drawl.

“Well… thanks… I guess,” she replied uncertainly. “Ah… look, King… I don’t mean to still sound doctrinaire or anything, but…” She paused once again then blurted, “I
really
don’t think you should call me ‘sugar’ so often.” A smile tugged at King’s mouth, but he remained silent, apparently enjoying her struggle for words. “We’re just two people involved in a story together, you know? Just two professionals… who are… ah… professional, and—”