Lies Agreed Upon (33 page)

“
Frankly, I don’t remember much of what Guy told me about the woman,” he acknowledged. “But an anecdote does stick clearly in my mind, perhaps because I am an avid gardener. When asked why she left the design of the house to her husband and focused on the gardens, Thérèse Cabrera was reported to have answered, ‘Humanity started in a garden. Knowledge and eternity grew there. Is there a better place to spend my time?’ Perhaps your mother Joanne decided to honor her father’s unfulfilled name choice when you came along. ”

“I never heard that story before,” responded Tess, unsettled by this new view of Thérèse. Perhaps she had been overly influenced by the biased portraits provided by Lillian Vanderveld and Gloria Donovan, she admitted. It would be nice to think that she was named for a legacy of beauty rather than a legacy of ruthlessness.

“By the way, what name did my grandfather want if he had a boy?” she asked in idle curiosity.

“I believe it was Benjamin,” answered the doctor.

Tess pondered the aged doctor’s information as she left the hotel and began walking toward Brennan’s. While her grandfather’s character was a little clearer, the mystery of his murder remained impenetrable. A new musical salute from her cell slowed her steps. Was it Mac this time? She glanced nervously at the phone and registered that the call was from an unknown California number.

“Hello,” mumbled Tess.

“Hello, Mees Parnell. It is Gina Gomez. My mama says you called,” responded a contralto voice

“Oh, Gina, thanks so much for calling me back,”
said Tess. She strove for a pleasant tone but feared she sounded clipped. Her mind wanted to happily sail toward a romantic evening with Mac, but Gina had abruptly towed her back into the darker waters of her mother’s final day. She had to force herself to focus and start the dialog she had rehearsed.

“Before we talk any further, I want to apologize for being so unavailable right after my mom died. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I’m sorry I didn’t consider how upset you were to lose someone close
—”

“Oh, I only work for Mees
us Parnell.” Gina’s tone was dismissive. “We are not close, but, of course, I always respect her. She is tough, you know, hard to please, but I see she is that way even with family. It is her nature. You see anyone dead like that, it gets you upset. And such a shock! She was so strong. I always feel bad for you since you got no family. I hope you are OK now.” Tess realized suddenly from her gentled voice that Gina pitied her, and it felt startling to have her condescension rebound.

“Oh, well, I’m calling to ask about, um, the time right before my
mother’s, um, death.” stammered Tess. “I remembered you said she had a visitor on the day of her death. I’ve learned that it was a man called Philip Dreux who’s a partner in the law firm of Graham, Odom & Dreux. He was talking to her about an offer to buy her property in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans. The potential buyer was a company called Gulf Coast Refining. Does any of that ring a bell?”

“
Maybe,” hesitated Gina. “I can’t remember. It was long ago.”

“You mentioned she had a folder of papers
for that meeting. Do you remember anything about those papers?” Tess pressed. “Did you see that paperwork when you came the next morning?”

“No, everything was very neat. I think she filed away like always,” Gina answered quickly. Her concern for the orderly state of the house was clearly more ingrained than interest in her employer’s doings.

“So you have no idea what those papers were about or where they might have been filed?” quizzed Tess. She tried to keep the frustration from sharpening her tone.

“Well, maybe they
are the same papers as before,” Gina remarked after a short pause.

“What do you mean?” Tess shot back.

“Two weeks before that last day, Meesus Parnell makes a phone call about some land. I am sure because she tells me not to disturb her while she is on the phone. She says she must talk to a man because she wants to sell ‘family land,’ and she goes into her study and closes the door,” she answered.

“What does it have to do with the paperwork?” pressed Tess.

“Well, she had some papers that day, too” explained Gina. “I cannot hear what she is saying that day of the phone call. It is quiet for a long time. Then I hear her making too much noise. She is yelling and banging drawers. I come ask what is wrong. I have never seen her like that. She throws papers on the floor and she says, ‘Damn that devil.’ Excuse me, but that is what she said. She kicks the papers on the floor and they land at my feet, and I start to back out of the room. She sees she scared me, so she says sorry. I help her pick up the papers, and she keeps saying angry things, only soft so I am not sure she is talking to me. She says something I remember later, you know, because of the way she died. She says, ‘It always comes back to the suicide.’ I don’t understand what she means. I can’t remember the rest. Later I wonder if she is warning me about the terrible thing she plans.”

“Do you remember anything about the papers she was throwing around? What kinds of documents are we talking about?” Tess probed.

Gina initially denied paying any attention, perhaps concerned about being accused of prying into her employer’s private affairs. After Tess reassured her several times that it was only important because she was looking for some documents regarding the land in her mother’s files, Gina reluctantly conceded some details.

“Oh, I think it was mostly law papers, you know lots of pages with stamps and signing,”
she acknowledged. “But I saw some letters, too, with typing and handwriting, and a holiday card. A funny one. She put the letters in a folder in her desk.”

Tess racked her brain to see if she could recall finding such a folder in her mother’s desk. She wondered gloomily if she had thrown it away in her frantic purge of her mother’s o
ffice. If she had glanced at it and seen a “funny holiday card,” she might have assumed the folder was trash and tossed it.

Tess resisted the urge to draw a picture by connecting these random dots. Here was Gina describing a bundle of documents concerning the “family land,” enough for her mother to angr
ily throw around. Yet Tess had found very little about the Cabrera property in her mother’s usually meticulous files. And here was Dreux with a trove of paperwork. Could her mother have given papers to Dreux? It seemed unlikely. Could Dreux have stolen documents somehow? Given her mother’s eagle eye, that also seemed unlikely. And where was the folder of letters? She would need to look for it when she returned to Los Angeles.

There was something else that troubled Tess about Gina’s story. Gina had said that her mother phoned someone, probably Dreux, about selling the land weeks before the meeting in California. Joanne Parnell rather than Dreux had initiated c
ontact. And Desmond’s suicide—surely the meaning of the reference to “the suicide”—had been an issue in advance of Dreux’s arrival.

What had her mother been up to? She had been playing with the deadly past, even calling Dr. Lepore about Guy Cabrera’s murder. And then she died. Mimi’s warning
about the danger in poking at old secrets no longer seemed so inane.

Lepore’s and Gina’s calls had revived an anxiety that Tess had hoped to leave behind for her reunion wit
h Mac. Feeling the first twinges of stress in her gut, Tess halted and took a deep breath. She refused to let her family’s restless ghosts spoil her evening.

She pushed the sighing
spirits, including her protesting mother, into a far corner of her thoughts and entered Brennan’s with a determined smile on her lips.

Tess saw Mac
as soon as she entered the restaurant. She hesitated; she had forgotten how handsome he was. He banished her momentary insecurity with a broad grin and a hug that generated grateful warmth.

“Good to see you, Mr. Malcolm Reese,” teased Tess. Malcolm was Mac’
s real first name, but he did not like to use it.

“Ouch, I don’t know this Malcolm guy. I’m Mac, remember. I hope you’re not already tr
ying to get even for all the days I’ll have to spend on business here,” said Mac, looping his arm around her back and idly caressing the bare cap of her shoulder. Tess laughed, but she heard the warning; clinging demands were not welcome.

Brennan’s occupied a building constructed in 1795 and
thus offered just the right old-fashioned romantic ambiance for Tess’s fantasies. She felt her hopes for the evening burgeoning as they were seated on a gas-lamp-lined balcony overlooking a lush courtyard.

Mac generally liked to take charge in a restaurant, but he now seemed inclined to flatter Tess with an unusual passivity, urging her, as a tourist with several days’
lead, to order for them both. Tess selected New Orleans specialties like seafood okra gumbo, blackened redfish, and Bananas Foster. She watched Mac’s face carefully to make sure she did not misstep with his rather fussy food tastes, but he only nodded benignly. Mac was more interested in playing with Tess’s fingers caressingly and telling her about his latest business triumphs.

They dined above the fairy-lit garden, easily ignoring the shadowed movement of fellow diners and the muted riffs of other peoples’ conversations. Tess indulged herself with imagined pleasures, hearing only snatches of Mac’s lively but one-sided discussion of his plans.

He did ask her about her inheritance and “this family research stuff that I heard you’re doing,” but Tess gave a sketchy response. She did not want to bring old tragedies, and certainly not her mother’s suicide, into her romantic bower. She wrapped herself in the dreamy intoxication of the moment, sequestered from reality by aged walls, leafy shadows and golden lamplight.

By 8
p.m., Mac was handing her a Bloody Mary in the Funky Pirate as Big Al Carson and the Blues Masters entertained the mostly white tourist crowd. Big Al was a truly gargantuan man of close to 500 pounds, but he had an appealing personality that distracted from his freakish mass, including twinkling eyes and a wide naughty-boy smile above his goatee. More important, he had an intimate gravelly voice, and his expressions and lyrical innuendos animated his blues interpretations.

Standing by the bar with Mac, Tess drifted on the tide of Big Al’s husky baritone. Many of the songs had a dark undertone of sexua
l betrayal and disappointment—“The Killing Floor,” “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Black Cat Bone”—but Big Al’s voice was warm and mellow, a balm to the black comedy sting of male-female relations. At another time, Tess might have felt a twinge of familiar pain in the songs, but she was not among the solitary and undesired tonight.

When an audience member aske
d for repeat of a favorite she had missed by arriving late, Big Al laughingly declined, “I’m no jukebox, darlin’. If you wanna hear it again, come back tomorrow.”

“Maybe that’s what can
happen for us,” Tess said softly to Mac in the relatively quiet hiatus between songs. “We missed out the first time around, but we have another chance.”

Mac gave her an unreadable look. A moment later, he put his hand at the small of her back and started to move her toward the door. “I’m sorry to be a party pooper, but I’ll have to be
getting to bed soon. I have a day of prep work tomorrow to get ready for next week’s meetings. Let me walk you to your hotel.” He bent low to speak warmly in her ear and gave her neck a quick conciliatory kiss in the dark before they emerged into the merry bustle of Bourbon Street.

Mac escorted Tess as far as her lobby elevator and then wrapped her in a loose embrace. He kissed her deeply but broke the seal of his lips to whisper, “I really should go. But it’s not b
ecause I don’t want to stay.” His hips pressed against her with clear evidence of an erection.

Stricken that he was about to leave without a more intimate fulfillment of their tryst, Tess swiftly looped her arms around his neck and pleaded with all the warmth she could muster
with her voice, eyes and urgent body. “Please stay then. I’ve missed you so much.
(“No, no, no…”)
Come upstairs.”

“
You’ll regret it.”

They left a trail of clothing across the carpet of her hotel room, from the door of the mi
niature sitting room to the pillow-piled bed. Their lips and hands were so busy caressing, so eager for each hot touch, they barely tolerated the interruption required for the rough shedding of cloth impediments.

True to one of Tess’s imagined consumm
ations, they came together in haste, raced to ecstasy and finished panting, lying limply side by side. She laid her flushed cheek on Mac’s sweat-damp chest and listened, sated, to the drum tattoo of his heart.

She was drifting lethargically on the rise and fall of his rippled ribs when he sighed under her ear, “Well, now I really have to go.”

“What?” Tess raised her head and blinked at him.

“I told you, Tess. I have a lot of work to do to get ready for client meetings next week, and my teammates are expecting me to pull my weight. I’ve got to get home to bed so I’m not half asleep at the morning work session.” Mac rose, stretched and proceeded to gather up his clot
hing. Eschewing the over-high bed, he sat on the sitting room’s little sofa and began to methodically re-dress. Tess slid from the bed, wrapped herself swiftly in a robe and followed him out of the bedroom.