Death Before Facebook (42 page)

“Was this before or after you knew the Heberts?”

“Before. He introduced me years later. What you have to understand is he was a different person then. He was an addict.”

“I see.”

“Oh, there never was any harm in him, not a bit. He’s a gentle soul—a very sweet man.” She stopped and stared at the wall. “Lord, lord.”

“What is it?”

“I was just thinking how much he and Grady are alike. Passive. Sweet, but ineffectual.”

Grady hadn’t struck Skip as sweet, but she kept her mouth shut.

“No wonder Reed and I hit it off so well. We’re like mirror images, one black, one white. Otherwise, we could be twins. Well, no, not exactly. I’m more of a rebel than she is. Good lord, Goody Two-Shoes is more of a rebel than she is. But how we’re alike is—we’re real obsessive. Can’t rest till everything’s done, and done perfectly.

“But her daddy criticized everything she did and to tell you the truth—” she dropped her voice “—her mama’s not much different. Reed never steps outside the lines they draw, and in the end, she can never really believe she can do anything very well. But of course she’s a whiz. Terrific mother, great cook, runs her house, runs the restaurant, supports Dennis in his little venture.”

“A nursery, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean about him being a gentle soul. Loves his plants to death.” Something in her voice sounded like contempt.

“Reed sounds like she’s wound pretty tightly.”

Nina shrugged. “I guess. She’s so busy being nice to everybody you wouldn’t notice.”

Paul Gottschalk came out, trailed by the two Heberts. He said, “The gun’s there all right. I’d be surprised if it’s been fired.”

Skip nodded. “Thanks, Paul. I’m going to leave you folks now.” She wanted to examine the crime scene. “But, Mrs. Hebert, I need you to walk with me through the house when we’re done, to see if anything’s missing. Are you thinking of staying with friends?”

“I might just stay at Reed and Dennis’s house—I don’t think they’d mind, do you?” She looked at Grady, holding her hands at breast level, rather like a prairie dog. She was beginning to look tired and very frightened. Skip thought the shock was starting to wear off.

Grady said, “My hovel certainly isn’t suitable.”

“Do you think you could maybe—” She let it hang, clearly not wanting to ask her son for something.

Grady looked meaningfully at Nina, and Skip realized he wanted her to come to his rescue. Nina ignored him. Finally, he said, “Yes, Mother, I’ll stay with you,” speaking not nearly so gently as the circumstances called for. To Skip, he said, “Can I take her there and bring her back when you call?”

“Sure, but one last thing. Can you point out Reed and Dennis’s car?”

“Of course.”

He and Skip walked up and down the street. “It’s not here.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s a beige Mercedes sedan—do you see one?”

She didn’t. She handed out her card, told everyone to call immediately if they saw or heard from Reed and Dennis, then said good-bye and went into the house.

The district officers who’d checked out Reed and Dennis’s, and Dennis’s parents’ house, reported no sign of any member of the Foucher family. Skip put out a bulletin for them and their car, asking any officers who spotted them to contact her immediately.

Because it was her case, it was her job to stay with the body till the coroner took it away. She was standing in the dining room, staring at the carnage, when Paul Gottschalk joined her. “What do you make of it?”

“I give up. You?”

“Well, I’ve got a theory. We’ll have to see if it checks out, but here’s what I think. He was shot first in the right leg—in the groin, actually, and the bullet hit his femoral artery. Blood spurted all over the floor and the impact threw him back and twisted him toward the right, toward the wall, where he touched his hand to the wound, then to the wall to steady himself.” He pointed to the handprint.

“Then more blood spurted all over the wall—that’s why it looks like a knife fight in here. And then he turned around, he might have even walked a couple of steps, and that time he got shot in the chest.”

Skip nodded, about to say something, but Gottschalk, strange bird, simply walked away looking satisfied.

When the body had been removed, Skip called Sugar to come examine her house. Nothing was missing.

The last step was to canvass the neighbors, a task she dreaded. People in the Garden District, with its mansions and its private patrol service, were probably the most frightened of crime in the whole city. She didn’t want to look at their dilated eyes and tight lips as they pressed her for details, as they wrung their manicured hands and begged her to tell them how to protect themselves.

She didn’t have the least idea how to reassure them, and right now she didn’t have time either.

As it happened, the neighbors on the right were on vacation, according to their own right-hand neighbors. The ones on the left had been out at the time of the shooting, and the ones across the street had been closeted in their air-conditioned house.

Two doors down, however, on the Heberts’ side of the street, a Mrs. Gandolfo did think she’d heard a shot, had even peeked out through her curtains. She called her neighbors, the Heberts’ left-hand ones, and, getting no answer, dialed the Heberts. A young man answered, and said everything was fine and he hadn’t heard a thing. Reassured, she’d given up.

“When you peeked out,” Skip said, “did you notice any cars parked in front of the Heberts’ house?”

“Not really,” said Mrs. Gandolfo. “No more than usual, anyway. Maybe a beige one, I guess, or white. And there might have been another one, but I really can’t remember anything about it You know how your mind registers something, but you don’t necessarily know what?”

“Can you say anything else about the beige one?”

“No. No, I can’t Except it might have been kind of small.” A Mercedes sedan was at least middle-sized, in Skip’s view.

Pulses pounding a wild tattoo in her ears, the wheel slick from her sweat, Reed drove the Mercedes like a sports car, finding it clumsy on the turns.

My fault, she thought. Dennis could do this better. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, anybody could
.

Blind with her own tears, she tried not to think, just drive. Oddly, the streets were nearly deserted, or the Tercel might have hit another car. She might have as well; a cop might have stopped either one.

But it was a lazy night in the Big Easy—everyone was home from work and staying in, it looked like.

She thought she could remember these words: “If anybody follows me, I’ll shoot them through the head, I swear to God I will.”

But she wasn’t sure. At the time, the words hadn’t even registered. Nothing had. Thought had taken a holiday. Reed simply acted on automatic pilot.

Her feet had worked. It was that simple.

She had given chase, seen Sally thrown roughly into the Tercel, as if car seats hadn’t been invented, and gotten there too late. The car door was locked.

Reed was getting flashbacks of the scene, as if they were part of a dream. In her mind, she saw herself, as she couldn’t have in real life: tearing out the door, nearly falling down on the front steps and pausing to right herself, losing precious milliseconds, tugging at the car handle, through the window seeing Sally’s small brown head hit the door on the other side, calling out her name—
Sally!
—before hearing the Tercel’s ignition. The key had been left in it, ready to go.

She had had to grapple for her own extra key from under the right fender, a tiny delay that had made the difference. Then began the chase, Reed still on automatic, just doing what she had to to get her child back. She paid no attention at all to where she was being led, what neighborhoods she went through, where she got on the expressway—she just drove; and now these scenes had started flashing, perhaps the first sign of sanity returning.

Could this really be she. Reed Hebert? What did she think she was doing?

She thought she should stop and call the police, but she knew she wasn’t about to. She might not be able to find a phone booth. If she did, 911 might be busy; might not answer right away. She’d lose the Tercel.

What if she had stayed at her parents’ and called the police from there? That was the only sane thing to do, but she hadn’t thought of it; hadn’t thought anything at the time, had simply been the burden her feet were carrying. But it now occurred to her that she wouldn’t have known anything about the car if she had, not its color or model or license number, all of which she knew now.

So I must be doing the right thing.

She neither believed that nor disbelieved it. It was just something to think while she drove.

They were near Bayou St. John, she noticed.

She thought:
This isn’t right. What the hell are we doing here?

She realized that she thought she understood why Sally had been taken, but a place like this didn’t begin to enter into it. Gentilly. The posh, newer part, about two blocks from near slums.

The Tercel stopped in front of an enormous house, an absurdly huge house, as big as any on St. Charles Avenue, built of gray stone and surrounded by a fence of iron bars standing dignified as deacons. A group of men walked out of the gate and turned left on the sidewalk.

The Tercel driver got out of the car and, clutching Sally, raced to the gate, now being closed by a man in a suit who still managed somehow to look like a servant. Sally was screaming:
Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!

Reed certainly wasn’t going to bother to park. Simply abandoned her car in the street. As she rounded it, she found herself staring straight into the eyes of one of the men in the little group, who had all turned toward the screams.

It was Bruce Smallwood, whom she knew from her pleadings before the casino board. With him was Lafayette Goodyear, another member of the board, and she thought a third was Barron Piggott, a colleague of theirs, but she couldn’t be sure.

Thank God.

She closed her eyes for a second, in relief or silent prayer. “Bruce! Lafayette! Help!”

None of them moved.

Men she had been to lunch with, sat across a table from. Smiled for.

Barron had even tried to grab her thigh, but she’d seen it coming and crossed her legs.

The kidnapper was screaming above Sally: “Goddammit, let me in. Get Mo. Tell Mo I’m here, goddammit. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The entire group of able-bodied men, civic leaders, stood as if nailed to the spot, looking as frightened as she was.

If her child were to be rescued, it was up to Reed.

She reached for Sally, but the kidnapper’s body was in the way. She closed her fists and began beating that body as hard as she could—the shoulders, the back, the kidneys, she hoped. But she didn’t feel the slightest yield.

“Give her back to me, goddammit! Sally, baby, it’s okay. Mommy’s here. Everything’s going to be—” She couldn’t get the last word out She had intended to say “fine,” but she was out of breath. And besides, she hadn’t the heart. She didn’t believe it. Woefully, she looked again at the group of men.

One had broken from the group, Lafayette, the only black one, who was running toward her, finally moving his fucking ass.

But the gate swung open and the kidnapper fell away from Reed.

Startled, she swiveled and saw that two men had pulled the kidnapper through the gate, Sally kicking as hard as she could.

They pulled Reed in, too.

BUY HOUSE OF BLUES at
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NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

JAZZ FUNERAL

DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

HOUSE OF BLUES

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

82 DESIRE

MEAN WOMAN BLUES

The Rebecca Schwartz Series

DEATH TURNS A TRICK

THE SOURDOUGH WARS

TOURIST TRAP

DEAD IN THE WATER

OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

The Paul Macdonald Series

TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

And don’t miss ALWAYS OTHELLO, a Skip Langdon story, as well as the brand new short story, PRIVATE CHICK, which asks the question, is this country ready for a drag queen detective? More info at
www.booksBnimble.com
.

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JULIE SMITH is a New Orleans writer and former reporter for the San Francisco
Chronicle
and the
Times-Picayune
.
New Orleans Mourning
, her first novel featuring New Orleans cop Skip Langdon, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, and she has since published eight more highly-acclaimed books in the series, plus spun off a second New Orleans series featuring PI and poet Talba Wallis.

She is also the author of the Rebecca Schwartz series and the Paul Mcdonald series, plus the YA novels CURSEBUSTERS! and EXPOSED. In addition to her novels, she’s written numerous essays and short stories and is the editor of NEW ORLEANS NOIR.