Million Dollar Road (14 page)

“I'm so glad,” Liz murmured. She tried not to look at the remains of her own dinner, a heap of sad little bones and too-pink, watery flesh. “It's a new recipe.” Never again, she decided. Quail were on her list of Big Mistakes now, like a great many other things.

Things
.

Roger wiped his mouth, putting his fork down with an air of finality. “Yes, ma'am, ol' Con says you're learning to be a gourmet cook. Now, I admire that in a woman. Too many of these gals today gotta have housekeepers, or, or . . . what d'you call 'em? Nannies, that's it. Way back when, we called those ‘nannies' babysitters. No ma'am, nowadays young ladies don't want to run a house or look after their man. They just want to go out to lunch and spend money all day, shopping. I told my Lacey that if she wants to keep that French husband of hers happy, she'd better learn to cook her some of that
cuisine
. Like my old mother used to say—”

“—Kissin' don't last but cookin' do,” CoCo finished for him, sounding bored. “There's nothing wrong with having help, Roger. Don't you have a maid, Lizzie? I'm sure I don't know how I'd get along without our Consuelo.”

Con walked back in the dining room with the wine in time to answer her question.

“But you're so busy, CoCo,” he said good-naturedly. “You really
need
a housekeeper. It's different for Liz and me. Back when we got married, we decided that since she's taking time off from work anyway, she could keep the house better than some Mexican could. It's a regular old, traditional marriage that way. I bring home the bacon, my wife's got my back, and we're both happier for it. Right, Liz?” Con picked up the corkscrew and stripped off the bottle's deep maroon foil.

Liz eyed the cabernet with longing. Would he please hurry the hell up? “Right,” she murmured. But that
wasn't
right. Ever since she'd left that cramped, disorganized house in Baton Rouge, where everybody sacrificed constantly to keep it from falling down around their ears, she'd promised herself that one day she'd have a nice house and a maid to take care of it for her. But in the heady days of Con's courtship she'd agreed to everything to close the deal, including laundry. At least none of her three older sisters had ever been well off enough to have a maid, but this fact afforded Liz little satisfaction. No maid, and now there were
things
.

“Aw,” Roger Hannigan sighed. “Ain't that the best thang ever? A hardworking man needs a smooth-runnin' home and a little woman in it, looking after him. It was just the same with me and my Aggie.”

Roger's first wife, Agnes, had died years ago after giving Hannigan five daughters, but before the farm had taken off like a cruise missile. Lizzie was certain long-suffering Aggie would have wanted a maid. Wife Number Two, Roger's blond trophy wife, had done a bunk with her Pilates instructor after only nine months of marriage: Roger was still paying ruinous alimony for that one. Burned once, he'd waited a few years to marry again and had settled on CoCo, an older, socially connected widow with her own money. Lizzie wondered if CoCo had had to sign a prenup, but at least she had gotten help around the house.

“Yep, those sure were the days,” Hannigan reminisced, leaning back in his chair, his wineglass almost disappearing in his wide paw. “I worked my behonkus off like a big ol' mule, so tired I couldn't even get to sleep some nights. Hail, I could go days at a time without talking to nobody but the gators. And do you know, ain't a soul ever give me a break I didn't make for myself. Did it all without those high-hat investors or the banks—sum-bitch banks wouldn't give me the time of day back when I was getting off the ground.”

He took another gulp of wine. “Well, no regular banks, that is. There was the ol' Ex-Im Bank and the SBA, a course. They might of put me on the map, but those guvment agencies didn't raise the gators, did they? No sir, just me and my Aggie, all on our own, and look at me now. I'm a got-damn millionaire, twenty times over! People today want everthang handed to 'em, don't know what hard work is anymore. Got so's a workingman can't hardly breathe with all the regulations and damned taxes y'gotta pay to keep these lazy welfare queens in cigarettes and beer. Now, those Bush tax cuts was a fine beginning, but there's gotta be a whole lot more, a whole lot. Bunch of folks who keep this country great are gonna make it happen, you just wait and see, ol' son. I'm hearing good news 'bout the election, good news. Now where we at on that wastewater thang?”

Con had finally gotten around the table after filling the Hannigans' glasses. He'd poured Liz's only half full.

Half a damned glass.

“We're working on it.” Con clapped Roger on a ham-like shoulder before he sat down again. “A couple of significant donations to the senator's re-election PAC and he tells me the whole problem's going to be buried in paper at the EPA. And I hear you talking, Rog, about how only some of us actually
work
.”

With that smooth segue, Con remarked, “You know, I was the seventh kid of eleven children, part of a big New Orleans Irish-Catholic family. My mother always used to say to me, ‘Work hard, Con, and grow up to be somebody.' Well, I took her words to heart. I figured I wasn't ever going to be lucky, since if it weren't for bad luck, we'd have had no luck at all.”

“I've always wondered, Con,” CoCo drawled, openly drunk now. Those glittering hazel eyes were having trouble focusing. “Your name's so unusual. Is it a family name?”

Con laughed. “Hardly. By the time my mom had me, the fifth boy, she'd run out of family names so she named me for her gynecologist at Charity Hospital—Greek guy, Dr. Hercules Constantine. Took a lot of flak for that when I was a kid, so when I got out of the neighborhood and went to Tulane, I decided to call myself Con instead of Hercules.”

Hannigan guffawed. “
Hercules
. Charity Hospital! I had no idear. Here I was, thinking you was some kind of Garden District, white-columns boy—you with your fancy law degree. I mean, look at what you got here.”

He waved his hand in a wide, encompassing gesture at the lavish dinner service, the spacious, high-ceilinged dining room dominated by Lizzie's full-length portrait over the gleaming walnut buffet. “I was just a-seeing you growing up on St. Charles Avenue with all the other New Orleans' society muckety-mucks.”

Taking a sip of wine, Con smiled. “St. Charles? Hell, no. Think the corner of Constance and St. Mary Street in the Irish Channel. We were so poor, Rog, sometimes all we had for dinner was day-old bread soaked in hot milk—powdered milk, at that. Dad died the day I turned ten and by then my older brothers were already offshore, tool-pushing out on the rigs to help the family get by. They never made it to college. I had their Holy Cross hand-me-downs to wear to school, but my feet were bigger than theirs and so I never had a pair of shoes that really fit, not until I went to college on Pop's Social Security. Money was tight, but I graduated top of my class at Tulane Law and it wasn't easy, making that happen. I treated school like a job, worked my ass off, and didn't owe anybody anything when I was done either.”

He sounded so irritatingly self-satisfied. Remembering her own student loans that had forced her to skimp and economize until Con had paid them off, Lizzie swigged her half-glass of cabernet. No Social Security survivor benefits had paid
her
way, she thought hotly.

“You're leaving out the part where Emma put you through law school,” she said with a tight smile, “working in the kitchen at Brennan's. You never had to borrow money, thanks to her and those thousands of Eggs Benedicts.”

CoCo leapt upon the remark, those glittering eyes focused now in avid curiosity. “And just who,” she drawled, “is Emma?”

“His first wife.” With a boardinghouse reach, Liz captured the bottle of cabernet and refilled her glass. “She's the reason we're all here tonight. Isn't that so, Con? I mean, she held down a job working the breakfast shift for four years while you were in law school and studying for the Bar.”

Con's face was immobile. Roger frowned. CoCo, however, looked intrigued for the first time all evening.

“Why, I never met her, did I? I'm sure I would have remembered if I did.”

Con shifted in his chair. “Oh,” he said casually, “we were divorced before I came to work for SGE, that's all.”

“And where is she now?” CoCo pressed.

“Running some kind of organic vegetable operation out in the country—not far from the alligator farm, in fact.” Con waved a hand in dismissal. “Emma's much happier.”

 

It was midnight and the Hannigans had finally gone home. Settled deep in a lawn chair, Con was outside on the brick patio smoking a cigar, a crystal glass of single-malt scotch held loosely in his hand. Lizzie was in the kitchen, washing up after dinner with what seemed like a lot of unnecessary banging and clanging of restaurant-grade copper cookware.

Con hadn't turned the floodlights on, wanting the night and the solitude unbroken. Hell—the food tonight had been well nigh inedible. Emma, Con reminisced, had been an excellent cook, due to her tenure at Brennan's. But the bad meal aside, what had gotten up Lizzie's ass, talking about his first wife at dinner? For a man who was on his third go-round, Roger was as uncompromising as the Pope about the sanctity of marriage. At least Con could write the whole evening off as business entertainment: these days, with all the new expenses and Emma's alimony, every little bit helped.

A soft breeze was blowing out of the west, fresh with the clean resin smell of the surrounding pines. The low landscape lighting illuminated the lush plantings of camellias, azaleas, and sweet olive, the banked beds of liriope and white impatiens stirring in the gentle wind. Its underwater spots glowing, beyond the lap-pool's slender aquamarine oblong Lizzie's new trampoline hulked like a moon lander.

Con stretched in his chair, turning his gaze upward. Tonight the sky was a mix of high clouds and stars, diamonds and translucent gauze stitched on a black velvet shawl. He yawned, settled deeper into the lawn chair, and took another long pull on his scotch.

Con was deep in thought. Yeah, it was nice and peaceful out here, but he honestly couldn't fathom Liz's damage. Except for the maid, he gave her every damned thing she wanted. Why had she turned into such a bitch? For the first two years they were together she'd been an ideal partner—hungry as he for all of life that she could grab, sexually adventurous, worldly far beyond her twenty-nine years.

They'd had such fun, Con thought with nostalgia. He remembered staying up till dawn playing poker—a game Liz was surprisingly good at—hitting the New Orleans bar scene until the wee hours, eating caviar on crackers and drinking champagne in bed. Bed. Con had enjoyed plenty of women in his life, but nothing had prepared him for Liz's inventiveness. Christ, she'd kept him wound so tight that even his own unparalleled libido had to sprint to keep up with her. He hadn't wanted another woman for the first six months of their relationship, and for him that was some kind of record.

But Lizzie's real attraction, Con saw now in hindsight, had been the
fun
. Life with Emma had never been about fun, and as he'd turned forty, Con found he needed fun, needed it badly enough to begin to think about making some changes. The daily grind of his law practice had become an ox yoke around his neck, his otherwise solid marriage unremarkable and stale. Even before he'd met Liz, Con had known he wasn't ready to surrender his youth to middle age. The deep, uncompromising bell toll of his fortieth birthday had rung, announcing that almost half his life had passed.

And Liz was a hell of a lot of woman, built like a Swiss bank, a damned good-looking armful, and he was the guy who'd landed her. It was a real triumph, being seen around town with Lizzie on his arm. But now, although she was as magnificent as ever, it was as though marriage with Liz had become a five-course meal from an overly ambitious kitchen—too much on the plate, too much to digest, just . . . too much of an unhappy muchness. He was damned tired of it all.

But he could never tire of Lireinne. Con's thoughts turned happily to his new personal assistant.

Lireinne. Wearing that enigmatic expression (and, truth be told, rarely anything else) once again she was waiting for him inside his head. No matter how many times he told himself it would only be sensible to forget her, a girl so far out-of-bounds as to be laughable, she was always there.

She was much too young for him, of course. Con knew that. He was no cradle-robber, for God's sake. Con took a sip of his scotch and grimaced, reminding himself that his girls had always been at least old enough to have a legal drink. Then there was the difference in their circumstances: before he'd managed to promote her, Lireinne had been the farm's
hoser
. She lived in a trailer, was a high-school dropout, was maybe on drugs—all circumstances that ought to have made this infatuation of his a no-brainer. Con really ought to forget about Lireinne before this got out of hand. He really should.

Except he couldn't. Oh, hell, tell it like it is: he wasn't even remotely going to forget about her. He would get to see her again tomorrow, and he could hardly contain his impatience.

With a faraway smile, now Con imagined Lireinne here in the backyard, swimming nude while he watched, slowly climbing up the steps out of the glowing lap pool, water streaming down her beautiful body, coming to sit on his lap in the lawn chair. He shook his head, already half aroused. Down, boy, he thought with an inward laugh. At dinner, only a concerted Obi-Wan offensive had saved the dinner party from becoming a total disaster because he couldn't seem to quit thinking about Lireinne. During that delicate, all-important conversation with Roger about the EPA and the bribable senator, Con had almost forgotten how much money that matter was going to require—a substantial amount. While Roger droned on about wastewater, he'd been daydreaming like a moony teenager. Con grinned. This thing with Lireinne really was like being a kid again.