Ciji Ware (8 page)

“Don’t tell me they’re ‘cause’ TV journalists?” she blurted. “Or one of those vanity TV stations where if you write a check, they put you on camera with your own cooking show!”

“No… they have a legit news organization,” he assured her. “They’re just pretty new in the market, and they’re not affiliated with any network yet.”

“And nonunion,” Corlis repeated glumly. “That means they pay zilch.”

“Well… it was just a thought,” King said, draining his glass while continuing to stroke Cagney Cat’s silky fur. “I was thinking that after the havoc that the Ebert-Duvallon wedding wrought in your professional life last night, maybe we—maybe I owed you one.”

“Considering our little run-in at UCLA, Mr. Duvallon, don’t you think you owe me at least two?” she replied archly, then flushed with mortification.

She’d gone and done it again!
Given him a zinger when he was being perfectly agreeable. Now,
why
did this man rankle her so? Well, she wasn’t herself this morning. Who
would
be after her miserable night and that awful dream she’d had?

King’s generous mouth had settled into a straight line. “I don’t think that now is really the time or place to go over ancient history,” he said coolly. “You might be forced to hear the other side of the story, and I understand that journalists
hate
doing that.”

“You mean tell the tale of how you and your fraternity broke into our office, plastered the place with ‘Keep ’em barefoot and pregnant’ posters, stole our logos, and produced a vicious lampoon of our magazine?
That
story?” she shot back. Her dander up, she added, “Or are you referring to the
way
you guys portrayed me on the cover of your bogus edition? Perhaps you’ve forgotten the awful cartoon of me that you and your buddies hawked all over campus?”

King set his glass carefully on the leather coaster that decorated the mahogany side table next to his chair. “Well…” he considered slowly.

“It was… humiliating,” Corlis replied, staring at her hands, which rested in her lap.

“So was reading in your magazine about my election as president of my fraternity,” he countered quietly. “Didn’t the headline of your story start something like ‘Redneck Gets the Nod at Sigma—’”

“Okay, okay,” Corlis interrupted, holding up her hands in front of her face. “I admit it. That piece came perilously close to a personal attack. I’d never do that now.” She stared at him earnestly. “But that was
after
you guys marched on our offices and challenged the
Ms. UCLA
staff to a naked mud-wrestling contest—and when we
refused
you kept that twenty-four-hour catcall brigade howling outside our door!”

“Well, at least give me credit for calling off all that harassment stuff when the sorority across the quad invited us to their swimsuit fashion show that weekend, remember?” King recalled, his lips twitching in a repressed smile.

Corlis shot him a disgusted look and tried not to laugh. Then she shifted her gaze and stared out the window, murmuring, “All those fraternities were
so
disgusting toward women back then.” She looked across at King and added, “Some still are.”

“No doubt about it… some of us were… pretty disrespectful,” King agreed softly. He cocked his head. “But, upon reflection, don’t you think getting me expelled from school and campaigning to permanently ban my fraternity from campus was kinda a case of overkill?”

“Well, the same thing might be said of that caricature of me!” she retorted. “But… yes… I think the whole thing spun out of control. Our side, too.”

King pursed his lips and after a long moment nodded.

“You might well be right there, Ms. California. And that cartoon of you
was
pretty vicious.” King sought her gaze and smiled faintly. “I expect we’ve both grown less hotheaded in our old age, don’t you imagine?” When Corlis didn’t reply, he added swiftly, “Well, maybe I have. The military knocked a lot of cockiness outta me, not to mention the attitude adjustment urged on me by a few women marine officers.”

“You were a marine?” The man seemed so uptown… so patrician. Hadn’t his family lived in New Orleans practically since the explorer Bienville plunked down the French flag in the swamp in 1718?

“You betcha!” he said, throwing his shoulders back military style. Cagney Cat was startled by this motion and hopped down from King’s lap. However, the feline immediately curled his portly body around the man’s ragged tennis shoes, resting his furry chin on the toe—and went back to sleep.

“Why would
you
join the marines?”

King grinned and shook his head. “You think I was gonna face my daddy after getting his national fraternity
banned forever
from the UCLA campus? Actually, going into the service was the best thing that ever happened to me. I came back to Tulane a disciplined studying machine. Like I tell my architectural history students at the university,” he added jocularly, “you gotta suck it up if you want to get ahead in this life. But then, you already know that, don’t you, Ace?” He rose from his chair and carefully eased his toe from beneath Cagney’s chin. “Well… I’d better get going. Only two and a half more shopping days till Christmas.”

Corlis rose to her feet as well.

“King?” she said uncertainly.

“Yes, sugar?”

Sugar?

“It was… very nice of you to come by here personally and tell me about the job possibility at WJAZ.” She visualized the stack of bills awaiting her immediate attention in her broom closet home office down the hall. She’d been so busy this month, she’d let them pile up. “Is there anyone in particular that I should talk to at the station?”

“Yeah. A guy named Andy Zamora.”

“Is he the news director?”

“That, and the station owner, and probably also the janitor. I got to know him when WJAZ covered a big controversy last year on lower Canal.”

“Another Grover Jeffries construction project? What
are
you, anyway, the Preservation Police?”

“That happens to be a very accurate description of the work I do,” King said, the corners of his lips quirking upward. “Last year I got into a tremendous flap about Jeffries’s biggest boondoggle to date. Have you seen the Good Times Shopping Plaza?”

“That hulking, half-finished megamall off Canal Street? Ug-ly!”

“The very one. It went bankrupt six months before you got here to the tune of nearly half a
billion
dollars. The cost overruns and the graft—even by New Orleans standards—were off the charts.”

“Wow…” she said, awed by the size of the dollar amount. “Then how can Grover Jeffries afford to be making any more mischief in this town?”

“This is Louisiana, darlin’,” he drawled. “Grover and his slick lawyers made sure that in his contract with the city, taxpayers like you and me are footing the bill for that financial catastrophe—not Jeffries Industries. In the end they couldn’t pin a thing on him.”

“And WJAZ covered the story as it went along?” Corlis asked with admiration.

“In the beginning they were just about the only news outfit that did—that is, until the whole thing blew sky-high, and the
New York Times
financial section picked up the story. Then the big stations around here and the newspapers couldn’t ignore it any longer,” he said with a hard, angry edge to his voice. “But, like I said, WJAZ’s an upstart outfit.”

“I wonder if Zamora could also use a crackerjack cameraman and sound technician?”

“Manny and Virgil? I can personally assure you that they’d be mighty grateful for your recommendation.”

“How do
you
know?”

“Virgil told me how to get hold of you when I called him this morning.”

“You’re a friend of Virgil’s?” she asked, astonished.

“Sugar…” he repeated the endearment that Corlis sensed was merely meant to sound ironic. “In some significant ways, New Orleans is a
very
small town. Everybody knows everybody else—you know what I mean?”

“
Now
I do,” she replied ruefully, recalling that she had been fired by the
janitor
at WWEZ-TV.

“During the media hullabaloo about the Good Times megamall controversy, I got pretty friendly with most of the TV crews that covered the story. So I know firsthand that Virgil is a very good guy.”

“And now he’s out of a job just before Christmas,” she said, a bleak expression on her face.

“I’ll give Andy Zamora a call when I get back home this morning,” King assured her as he headed down the hallway, Corlis and Cagney trailing in his wake. “Tell him to expect your call, okay? And Manny and Virgil’s, too.”

“On a Sunday?” she asked, touched. He must really have a lot of respect for Virgil and Manny.

“Sure, why not?” Grinning over his shoulder, he added, “I’ll tell him he’d better hustle to get a shot at hiring such a dynamite package deal.”

When King arrived at her front door, he turned around without warning, prompting Corlis to back away and inadvertently step on Cagney’s paw. The indignant animal emitted a yowl and ran into her bedroom.

“Oh, gosh! Sorry, Cag! Oh… do you think I hurt him?” she asked, distressed.

“He’s got plenty of padding,” King assured her as they watched the cat scamper under the bed. “See? He’s not even limping.” Then he peered more closely through her bedroom door at the massive four-poster dominating the room. “Well, I’ll be…”

“What?” she asked, watching him take note of the bed’s yellow brocade canopy that spilled down from a top brace decorated with a carved mahogany wooden crest.

“Did you buy this bed in New Orleans?”

“Yes. I probably paid too much for it, but I just couldn’t resist. When I sleep in it, I feel like the princess and the pea.”

“I have one
exactly
like it in my apartment,” he pronounced.

“You’re kidding?”

“No, I’m not,” he said, advancing a step inside the room.

“Where’d you get yours? From your mother’s side of your family or the Duvallons?” she asked, suddenly recalling the scene in which someone named André Duvallon burst into the apartment on Royal Street where a corpse lay cold in its coffin.

“Neither,” King replied. “My godfather gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday. Mine was made on his family’s plantation, upriver, way back when.” He angled his head in the direction of Corlis’s bed. “This one probably was crafted by the same slave cabinetmaker that mine was—either at the Marchand plantation or on one of the places owned by a collateral cousin—and the two were handed down to succeeding generations through different family lines. Nineteenth century, right?”

Corlis nodded. “Well, whoever inherited this one must have fallen on dark days, because it was sold at auction in the French Quarter a couple of months ago.”

“It’s got the exact same carvings that mine does,” King marveled, peering at it closely. “Lafayette Marchand had no son to give it to, so I was the lucky guy.”

“Didn’t he have a daughter?” Corlis demanded.

“He never married.”

“Oh. Well, it was nice of him to give you such a beautiful piece of his family’s furniture,” she ventured lamely.

“I don’t think ‘nice’ quite applies in Marchand’s case.”

“No?” she asked as she observed an angry furrow creasing his forehead.

“No,” King echoed shortly. “My godfather went to work for Grover Jeffries a few years back. As his
public relations
adviser,” he added, bitter sarcasm edging his voice.

“If Jeffries has such a sleazy reputation, why’d your godfather decide to do that?”

King gave her an appraising stare. “The Marchands are an old, distinguished family, but by the late 1980s, there wasn’t much left of the estate. After the big oil bust—fifteen or twenty years ago—Laf’s law practice wasn’t thriving either. However, the man knows all the important political players in New Orleans—black and white. So, he transformed himself into a fixer. The very mention of Lafayette Marchand’s name has been enough to open many doors for Jeffries in the last ten years. And opening doors for a wealthy developer can be a very lucrative business in these parts.”

“And Marchand is your godfather,” she murmured.

“I fired him from that job.”

“I’m sorry,” she offered simply. “It must be hard for you to run into him all the time, since you make a habit of fighting to save historic buildings from the Jeffries style of urban renewal.” King remained silent, so Corlis thrust out her hand. “Well… thanks again for stopping by,” she said, feeling unaccountably shy. “And thanks, too, for telling me about WJAZ.”

“What are old friends for?” he replied with a wink, his good humor apparently returning. Then he seized her hand and gave it a friendly squeeze. It felt warm and oddly comforting.