Ciji Ware (74 page)

“Later,
monsieur
…” she said with a throaty laugh.

For a long, quiet moment they stood silently with their arms wrapped around each other in the darkened room that had once been a tailor’s shop. Then King murmured into her hair, “I am so damned relieved… you came back.”

“Me, too. And I don’t need to go there again.”

King took a step back and said, “Well, then… come on, baby. Let’s go
dancing
!”

***

Long after midnight, Café LaCroix was packed to the rafters with members of the preservationist community, along with family, friends, and scores of supporters who had departed city hall and headed directly for the Decatur Street music club to raise a toast to the winning side. By the time Corlis and King arrived, bystanders from the neighborhood who merely wanted to be part of the triumphant celebration had joined in as well.

At the front of the hall, the band was wailing rock ’n’ roll and Dixieland favorites in response to requests shouted from dancers crowding the floor. A security guard off duty from the New Orleans City Council chambers, danced in and around the swaying couples, waving a confiscated “Save Our Selwyns!” picket sign like a giant fan. Aunt Marge and the preservation guerrillas jammed around a clutch of small cocktail tables, drinking beer and rehashing their triumph.

King and Corlis gyrated on the dance floor to loud and seriously funky music. “It is
so
sweet!” he chortled, tipping his brown beer bottle in a salute that enveloped the entire room. “This victory is ’bout as sweet as it gets!” Then he raised his Dixie once again. “To the gang who
could
shoot straight!”

“You betcha,” seconded Virgil nearby, waving his beer bottle in Corlis’s direction. He had stopped off at the party prior to his impending “vacation,” which she had ribbed him about unmercifully for a good ten minutes. Earlier he had asked King, “Are you tellin’ me that nothin’ nasty’s gonna happen to Jack Ebert, that little creep?”

“I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble from him. Jack’s just grateful he’s not in prison on federal kidnapping charges.”

“Yeah,” Corlis noted sourly, “but that still leaves him free to wield a poison pen again.”

“Oh, Jack’ll stay in line,” King guaranteed. “In Lafayette’s employment settlement with Jeffries, our PR czar’s acquiring
Arts This Week
.
Jack Ebert’s about to get a pink slip.”

“Lafayette Marchand is a regular horse trader,” Corlis commented dryly. She looked for King’s father. “Where is he, anyway?”

King pointed to the doorway at the back of the club where Lafayette had just reappeared with Bethany Kingsbury on his arm. Before Corlis could react, however, the noise level in the small, crowded café grew even more deafening as Althea LaCroix’s youngest brother, Julien, banged on the drums and cymbals to get everybody’s attention. When the throng had substantially quieted down, Althea leaned toward her microphone mounted on the piano.

“Parrrr-teee!” she shouted in her distinctive husky style, and received a roar of approval from the rowdy gathering.

Corlis surveyed the mass of acquaintances, colleagues, and news sources, each of whom had played some part in the day’s momentous events. A year ago she hadn’t known any of these people—except for King. Now she counted many of them among her closest friends.

Althea held up her hands and called for quiet amid piercing wolf whistles and catcalls.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she shouted into her microphone. “We have a surprise for everyone tonight. It’s only 2:00 a.m. so a little more jamming is in order, don’tcha think?”

The crowd went wild with delirious applause as patrons in the middle of the café took several steps backward, forming an aisle in the sea of revelers. Approaching the bandstand was a bear of a man dressed in black T-shirt and black pants, with a black mustache and beard to match, and sporting a red bandanna rolled into a 70s-style headband.

“Joinin’ us tonight,” purred Althea’s sexy voice over the club’s state-of-the-art sound system, “by special arrangement with Café LaCroix… is none other than…”

The crowd roared back in one voice,
“Doctor John!”

The jazz legend Mac Rabennack—known by everyone as Dr. John, the Night Tripper—approached Althea, who graciously slid to the end of the piano bench. He extended his fellow pianist a high-five greeting and pointed to an electric keyboard nearby, pantomiming that he wanted Althea to play along.

Then, to hoarse cheers from the assembled crowd, Dr. John laid his big, beefy paws on the piano’s keys. Within seconds he and all six members of the LaCroix family swung into the raucous, howling tune everybody was waiting to hear: “Goin’ Back to New Orleans.”

Nearly everyone was on the dance floor. Horns wailing, drums beating, Corlis whirled under King’s arm. She lowered her lids and cast her dance partner a distinctly vampish, come-hither glance, stomping her feet and rotating her hips with heathen abandon.

“Ace, you’re gonna pay for that later, big-time,” King shouted with an appreciative smirk.

Goin’ back to New Orleans?
Corlis thought joyfully.

How could a person ever really leave?

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

This is a work of fiction, first page to last.

However, much of the story has been inspired by the passion, knowledge, and perseverance of a host of people dedicated to preserving our nation’s architectural heritage and culture.

My undying thanks and appreciation go to reference librarian Pamela D. Arceneaux at the incomparable Historic New Orleans Collection, the researchers and historians at Louisiana State University’s sugarcane archive, the Louisiana Historical Society, the Louisiana Landmarks Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the African American Heritage Preservation Council, and the other institutions and organizations that make up America’s preservation community. After some four months spent in New Orleans in 1996—and then later when I purchased a small cottage in the French Quarter—I realized that most Americans have no idea of the debt we owe these guardians of our country’s historic buildings, artifacts, and written history.

Deep appreciation is also due William E. Borah, land-use attorney, architectural historian, and seasoned trench fighter who—along with his childhood friend and colleague the late Richard O. Baumbach Jr.—wrote the seminal work
The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway Controversy
(University of Alabama Press). Together, Borah and Baumbach led a ten-year battle to save the French Quarter from a six-lane elevated highway that would have destroyed forever a national treasure. Counselor Borah, whose family is one of those “livin’ in New Orleans since the Year One” clans, was at the forefront of a more recent skirmish to rescue from the wrecking ball a block of Greek Revival buildings in the downtown business district, the historic origins of which provided the inspiration for this novel. After the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, Bill Borah spearheaded a successful campaign to create a Master Plan for New Orleans aimed at protecting the historic built environment that would finally have the force of law. One of these days, Big Easy politicians should give him a shiny gold “Key to the City” in appreciation for his stewardship in a town where the tourists
don’t
come to gaze in awe at glass-and-steel monstrosities.

Among other “preservation guerrillas,” I particularly wish to thank historians Sally K. and William D. Reeves, the staff and executive director, Patricia H. Gay, of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (as noted in the novel, formerly headquartered on Julia Street), and the thousands who support the preservation movement in Louisiana and across the nation. I am deeply grateful to PRC member extraordinaire Jeannette Bell. During a week when her daughter was graduating from law school, she was kind enough to read a late draft of the manuscript for accuracy regarding the Free People of Color and the role African Americans have played in building and preserving many of New Orleans’ historic structures. Any remaining errors, however, are the author’s responsibility.

Fellow writer and former New Orleanian Michael Llewellyn, author of the historical novel
Twelfth Night
(Kensington Publishers)—a work set in the Crescent City ten years after the historical portion of
Midnight on Julia Street
—has also earned the title “preservationist,” in my opinion, for his ability to describe and animate a world long past. He is a master of the telling detail, and I doubt very much I could have completed this novel without his knowledge, wisdom, treasured friendship, culinary mastery—and those Welsh curses he is apt to cast when provoked. His boundless hospitality on Dauphine Street proved both a refuge and the inspiration for Kingsbury Duvallon’s wonderful living quarters. Deepest gratitude for showing this author the “real” New Orleans is also due my great pal Samara Poche of French Quarter Realty, along with Quarterites Chuck Ransdell and Leslie Perrin, as well as Lee Pryor and New Orleans mystery writer Julie Smith.

A partial list of the outstanding resources and books I consulted includes:
New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence
by Richard Sexton and Randolph Delehanty (Chronicle Books);
Classic New Orleans
by William R. Mitchell, Jr., photography by James R. Lockhart (Martin-St. Martin Publishing Company);
New Orleans Interiors
by Mary Louise Christovich, photography by N. Jane Iseley (published by Friends of the Cabildo, Louisiana State Museum, and The Historic New Orleans Collection);
The French Quarter
by Herbert Asbury (1938 edition, Garden City Publishing Company);
The Free People of
Color of New Orleans
by Mary Gehman (published by Margaret Media, Inc., New Orleans);
Louisiana’s Plantation Homes: The Grace and Grandeur
by Joseph Arrigo, photography by Dick Dietrich (Voyageur Press).

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I have been a reader in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European and American studies since 1983, proved to have its usual treasure trove of historical documents and secondary texts.

I also wish to pay homage to the raft of hardworking, ethical, and often courageous electronic and print reporters I’ve known and worked with during my years as a radio and television broadcaster. These journalists continue (despite unholy pressure from some of the “suits” upstairs) to get their facts straight and their sentences parsed correctly. Thanks especially to the “top news hens,” my buddies Suzanne LaCock Browning, Peggy Holter, and Mary Murphy for adding to my own storehouse of dopey decisions made in the executive suites of the nation’s news organizations.

Friends who served virtually as my guardian angels during the years it took to create this novel cannot all be thanked here, but you know who you are. The ones with double halos include: Tamara Asseyev, Barbara Babcock, Michi Blake, Ellie Cabot, Colin and Louise Campbell, Natches bookstore maven Mary Lou England (now living in Florida), harpist Rachel Van Voorhees, Mary and Edmund Fry, Jan Gough and Seamus Malin, John and Linda Grenner, Taylor Hackford and Helen Mirren, Diane Hister, Anthony and Susanna Jennens, Wendy Kout and Dennis Koenig, Nicki and Michael McMahan, Terry Cagney Morrison, Joanne Forbes Nelson and Dale Nelson, Paul Nevski of the late, lamented Le Monde Créole, Elberta Pate, Dan and the Rev. Diana Phillips, Meryl Sawyer, Jackie and Dean Stolber, Barbara and Andy Thornburg, Garden District Book Shop’s Britton Trice and Deb Wehmeir, the late Catherine Turney, Gayle and Wayne Van Dyck, Nancy Wagner, C.K. and Mary Williams, Elizabeth Booth, John Woodward, Michael and Diane Worthington, Cynthia Challed, Marilee and Al Zdenek.

Regarding the first edition of this novel, I am thankful for the talent and high-level skills of publicists Jennifer Richards and Marie Coolman, and a former publishing executive who is no relation—though I wish she were—editor, Elisa Wares. Thanks, too, to Carolyn Nichols, who brought me into the Random House family where my father, the late Harlan Ware, published a novel there a half century ago. Jane Chelius agented the original edition and has my thanks, as does my current representative, Celeste Fine of Folio Literary Management, who deserves all the credit for seeing that
Midnight on Julia Street
had a new life in this beautiful edition by Sourcebooks Landmark.

At Sourcebooks, I was so fortunate to land in the talented hands of my stellar editor, Deb Werksman; her stalwart deputy, Susie Benton; ace publicist Beth Pehlke; and the fabulous team there headed by the indefatigable CEO, Dominique Raccah, who “gets” the new publishing paradigm in this brave, new digital world of ours. I can never express enough gratitude for making me part of the Sourcebooks family.

During the preparation of the second edition, I offer my appreciation to another “family,” my fellow board members of the Sausalito Woman’s Club Preservation Society whose mission is to guard the legacy of our irreplaceable Clubhouse, designed and completed in 1918 by Julia Morgan of Hearst Castle fame and the first licensed woman architect in California. New Orleans was just a warm-up for what these amazing ladies have taught me about fiercely protecting our “built environment.”