The Meriwether Murder Page 4

  “The owner,” I said.

  “I thought so.”

  “Were you planning to sell the property?” I asked.

  Nicholas DeLage shrugged. “I’ve had a few feelers. Nothing definite.”

  It isn’t polite to call your host a liar, so I just stuck out my hand and told him goodbye.

  “One more thing, Nick.”

  “Yes?”

  “How did you get my phone number?”

  DeLage looked faintly surprised. “It was on your business card. Old Flowers gave it to me when he called to tell me some archaeologists had come by.”

  We left the restaurant together. Nick’s car, I noticed, was a red Camaro. Clearly not the car that had followed me from Sam’s.

  FIVE

  Nick’s car was the wrong color and make, but maybe that other car hadn’t been following me after all. Because Nick was too good a suspect to pass up. He was a slimeball who’d put his old aunt in a home so he could control her assets. And now he wanted to know if there was something there that made the property worth more than he’d thought. Worse, the last person I’d given my business card to was his man Flowers, and Flowers had passed it to Nick.

  A threat via E-mail, from a man who sold insurance and thus had time of his own to cruise the university computer lab and find an open machine.

  So what was it about a man who’d been dead for almost a century and a half that made him worth all this trouble? I went over the stories DeLage had recounted: Our Louis wasn’t the Man Without a Country, because that story had been fiction. He may have been a wastrel younger son, fleeing from the East after some misdeeds, as the other account had it. And he might easily have traveled the Natchez Trace to reach the Mississippi River and taken a flatboat south.

  But was there truth in either of these two stories? I knew how unreliable family lore could be. A kernel of truth could be misinterpreted, twisted, embellished. A story set in one place or time could be inadvertently borrowed and made to fit another place and time. And yet often there was that single grain of truth.

  Was that the case here?

  I got back to the office just after one. The copies of the Hardin journal were neatly stacked by my computer, beside the original bound chapbooks.

  I lifted the receiver and punched in the number for my lawyer, Stanley Kirby, a.k.a. Dogbite. He’d earned his nickname when he’d taken the case of a three-hundred-pound center on the Southern football team who, after being savaged by a Pekingese, professed a phobia for small, furry animals. Most days, Dogbite spent his hours practicing putts on the rug of his office on France Street, waiting for a really good toxic spill or oil well fire, but true disasters were hard to come by. Like the Maytag Repairman, he sometimes seemed like the loneliest man in town, so I wasn’t surprised when he answered on the first ring.

  “Law Offices,” he said quickly.

  “Sorry, Stanley,” I said. “It’s just me, Alan.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Got a question for you,” I said. “Ever hear of a guy named Nicholas DeLage?”

  “DeLage? I saw him in court once. They had him up for coke possession, but he got out of it. I hope you didn’t do a deal with him. He owns slum property all over town, but his rent income goes up his nose. If he’s trying to get you to do some kind of historical assessment you’re gonna lose your ass.”

  I explained about the journals and my lunch at the Camelot Club.

  “Can he claim these journals for his own?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He says they’re part of his grandfather’s estate.”

  “Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Does the will mention them? Is there even a will at all? Louisiana probably still had forced heirship when the owner died; the law was only changed a few years ago. The administrator of the estate could have disposed of things like the journals. I’d have to see what the judgment of possession said. There’s a chance her father gave the journals to his daughter before he died, in which case they’re hers and not part of the estate.”

  “But if she’s been declared incompetent …”

  “Has he been appointed her curator?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Then he can take them into his possession if he thinks she’ll destroy them and they have some monetary value. Do they?”

  “It’s possible. Can he do anything he wants with her possessions?”

  “No. He’s required to take care of them and not to commingle her assets with his own. The court should have appointed an attorney to look after her interests.”

  “Can you find out who that is?”

  “No problem. Maybe he’ll sue you and I’ll make some money.”

  “Thanks, Stanley.”

  “Just joking, Alan.”

  I hung up and called Bertha Bomberg. She was in this time and I had to listen to a litany about how we never kept her up to date. I apologized and promised to mend my ways. Then I called Pepper at her Perkins Road office.

  “I read the journals,” I told her. Then I recounted the E-mail threat and my lunch with Nick DeLage.

  “You haven’t noticed anybody following you, have you?” When she said no, I told her about the dark-colored car on the way back from Sam’s place. “It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to keep far enough back so I couldn’t see the driver or the make and whenever I slowed down it did, too.”

  “You think DeLage is behind this?” she asked.

  “I keep coming back to my business card and wondering who else.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this, Alan. He’s up to no good and poor Ouida’s in his clutches. He has to have somebody at the nursing home reporting back to him to know about the journals.”

  “I agree. But all we can do now is bring the journals back to her. We can’t keep ’em.”

  “No.” Pepper hesitated. “Did you make copies?”

  “On my desk. Why don’t I swing by? We can take back her originals.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Ten minutes later I pulled in at the little complex of offices off Perkins, in the southeast part of the city. Pepper had rented offices here when she came down from the East a year ago, though she seemed to spend more time at our shop these days than at her own. Still, I knew having her own suite gave her the sense of independence she needed, a place where she could have her own space and her privacy. Sometimes I didn’t see her for days and I knew at such times she was holed up, immersed in her studies and the occasional jobs that came her way.

  I was just opening my door when she came out, smiling, and I felt a brief surge of something I tried to keep hidden except when I was in active pursuit.

  Understand, I love women. But this was professional and P. E. Courtney, Ph.D., as she’d originally presented herself, wasn’t the most approachable woman I’d ever met. Over the past year I’d learned she wasn’t exactly the iceberg she’d pretended to be, either, but if we were going to work together there was no sense muddying the water with extracurricular feelings that would never go anywhere.

  “I ran down to the drugstore while I was waiting for you and got some chocolates,” she said, getting in. “I don’t think Miss Ouida gets many presents.”

  We drove to the nursing home in silence. It was midafternoon, and for all I knew the patients were sleeping, but I didn’t feel like hanging around the office. There was too much on my mind.

  I parked and we went to the reception window and asked for Ouida Mae Fabré. The thin receptionist lifted the phone, said Ouida Mae’s name, and listened. Then she replaced the receiver and turned back to me with an apologetic look.

  “I’m sorry. She’s having a bad day.”

  “Is she? That’s too bad, because we have something of hers we promised to bring back.”

  “Well, you can leave it right here,” the woman said, smiling. “I’ll see that she gets it.”

  “Fine. You’ll need to sign a receipt and I’ll need it to be witnessed,” I said, p
lacing the receipt on the counter for her to see.

  She held it up and frowned.

  “What’s all this In the matter of possible evidence …?”

  “Legal gobbledygook,” I said. “Chain of custody, they call it. When there’s a lawsuit, they call everybody who handled the evidence, who might have tampered with it …”

  The smile was replaced by alarm.

  “Lawsuit? Just a minute.” She left her desk and disappeared through a side door. I heard her heels in the corridor. I checked my watch and exchanged grins with Pepper. The receptionist was back in eight minutes.

  “The supervisor says you can give whatever it is to Miss Ouida,” she said. “Mrs. Krogh will take you to her room.”

  Unlike the sylphlike attendant who’d assisted us yesterday, Mrs. Krogh was six feet tall and weighed more than some football linemen. She did not seem eager to assist us.

  We followed her around a corner and down a corridor with a series of doors on both sides. She opened one at the end without knocking and stood aside as we entered.

  Miss Ouida sat in a chair, staring out the window, a shawl draped over her thin shoulders. At first I didn’t think she realized anyone was there. But then her head turned so that she was staring at us.

  “Miss Ouida,” I said. “We brought your books back.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Did you talk to Nicholas?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He was upset,” she said. “I don’t know why. I told him you’d bring them back. They’re not his anyway.”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes Nicholas can be so mean. My sister spoiled him, you know.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  Pepper handed her the chocolates and I laid the journals down on the bed.

  “We brought some more candy,” Pepper said and I heard Mrs. Krogh suck in her breath behind us.

  Miss Ouida reached out a frail hand and looked past us at the woman in the corner. “I’m not supposed to have candy, they tell me. Against the rules.” She started to open the box, but I took it, tore off the cellophane, and handed it back to her.

  She extracted a chocolate cherry. “Pooh. What do they know?”

  “I know it’s gonna mess up your blood sugar,” Mrs. Krogh pronounced.

  “Pooh,” Miss Ouida said again, fishing out a second cherry. I had a feeling the two pieces were all she was going to get, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  “Thank you for letting me borrow your journals,” I said, taking her hand in my own. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “I wish I had a nephew like you,” Miss Ouida said. “Sometimes I think Nicholas doesn’t care at all.”

  “Now, that ain’t true, Miss Ouida,” Krogh said, moving between us. The nurse turned to face me. “You’re going to have to leave now.”

  “Thank you, Miss Ouida,” I managed before the yeti-like attendant pushed us out.

  On our way to the car I checked my watch.

  “It’s just three now. I think I’d like to talk to Brady Flowers.”

  We crossed the Mississippi on the new bridge, just beating the Friday afternoon exodus from the city, and took the four-lane bypass north around the little riverbank community of Port Allen. There were stalks of cane littering the road where they’d dropped from the trucks, and twice we whipped past tractors pulling heavy burdens of cut sugarcane. I thought about the man called Louis and wondered what he would have made of the new mechanized harvesting process. According to the journals he’d been good at mechanical things, so I supposed he would have approved. Then I thought of John Clay Hardin, whose wealth depended on what slaves could harvest. What would he have made of labor-saving inventions? Would they have been welcomed or would they have been seen as a threat?

  At the end of the bypass we bumped across a railroad track and onto a narrow blacktop, with cane fields on either side.

  The blacktop dead-ended a quarter mile ahead at a cluster of tenant houses and rising up on our right was a pair of brick pillars, marking the entrance to Désirée. I turned into the shell drive. Someone had lowered the chain that usually blocked the entrance and we drove up to the front of the house and parked.

  The great mansion loomed in front of us, its shadows deepened by the failing light. I looked up at the boarded windows and the sagging shutters. Everything seemed the same as the last time we’d been here.

  “Should we go to the back and try to find Flowers?” Pepper asked.

  I nodded. “You want to wait here?”

  “Not on your life.”

  We walked around the side of the house and looked out over the pond, but Flowers was nowhere in view.

  Without speaking, Pepper started back toward the mound and I followed. We took the little path between the pond on our left and the old wooden chapel on our right, and when we reached the foot of the mound Pepper hesitated a second, as if uncertain. She looked over at me.

  “Want to say hello to our friend?”

  “Why not?”

  We trudged up the side of the hill and emerged in front of the little cluster of brick vaults that marked the family graves.

  “Hi, Louis,” she said. “Just thought we’d pay our respects.”

  I stared down at the grave and knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it, too. But we were both wrong. Nothing had changed, no one had been up here to dig him up, everything was the same as when we’d last been here.

  I looked past the graves to the bee boxes at the foot of the levee. No sign of the caretaker. The place seemed deserted.

  We made our way down the side of the mound and started toward the river. As we neared the bee boxes a menacing buzz greeted us and I saw tiny black bodies darting about in the air. I hurried past them and stumped my way up the levee to stand looking out over the river.

  “You must not like bees,” she said.

  “I’ve stepped on too many hornet nests during surveys to feel very close to the little buggers.”

  She laughed. “You have a way with words.”

  “Yeah.”

  In front of us was a willow-fringed borrow pit from which the earth had been taken to make the levee. The pit was almost dry now and a small dirt bridge connected it with the riverbank. We went down the slope and across the dug-out area to the water’s edge.

  “You really want to find out who he was, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I always said I was an unreconstructed romantic.” I gave her a half smile. “And it looks like you’re becoming one, too.”

  She smiled, picked up a piece of wood, and spun it out over the speeding water. It made a splash, bobbed to the surface, and then headed downstream.

  “It must’ve been a lonely life, living all those years as somebody’s guest and not knowing who he was.” She swept her hair away from her sunglasses as she stared out over the waters. “I wonder if he ever fell in love, wanted to get married.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’d have made a lousy husband.”

  She turned to look at me.

  “Is that why you never remarried?” she asked. “Were you afraid you wouldn’t make a good husband?”

  I exhaled. I didn’t like to remember Felicia and our divorce.

  “You never mention her,” she said. “Does it still hurt that much?”

  I shrugged. “It did for a while. I’d kind of gotten used to feeling that way until …”

  “Until what?”

  “I dunno.” I felt myself grinning. “I guess life just got more interesting.”

  “Really.” She smiled again and I wished I could see her eyes behind the dark lenses.

  “You know, Alan, the first time I saw the name Mound-masters and realized it was an archaeological company I thought it was silly,” she said. “Then I realized it wasn’t silly at all. It just took me a while to figure out what it meant.”

  “Which is?”

  “I think you were reminding everybody—and yourself—not to take the world so seriously. That a
rchaeology could still be fun.”

  “You read me like a book,” I said.

  “When I came here I’d just about forgotten,” she said, turning back to the water. “They leach so much humanity out of you in graduate school.”

  “It’s called professionalism,” I said dryly.

  “And I was so determined to find my brother.”

  Her older brother, the only link to her family past, had taken off while she was in high school, and the last she’d heard he was driving a truck somewhere in the South. She’d gotten a card from him, postmarked Monroe, Louisiana, and had come south hoping to locate him. But I knew she hadn’t had any luck.

  “Someday,” I said, trying to offer hope.

  “Yes.” We stood side by side watching the driftwood bob past on the current. “Do you think he really could have been some traveler on the Natchez Trace?” she asked.

  My turn to kick at the ground. “I don’t know. All we can do is follow where the trail leads.”

  “And if it doesn’t go anywhere?”

  “Then we turn it loose.”

  “Alan …” I felt her hand on my arm and goose bumps prickled my flesh.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m glad things have gotten better—about Felicia, I mean.”

  I drew in my breath. “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as glad as I am.”

  She took a step toward me and I gently lifted off her sunglasses. A cloud of butterflies suddenly fluttered through my belly. My God, was it really happening? Was she really inviting me to reach out, touch her?

  “Pepper …” My mouth went dry. Her hands came toward me and then quickly drew back as I heard steps behind us. I wheeled.

  Brady Flowers, armed with a heavy stick, was standing a few feet behind us and he didn’t look happy.

  SIX

  The old man glared at us from deep-set eyes.

  “What you doing here?”

  “We were just checking some things,” I said.

  “Before you come on this land, you talk to me.”

  “You weren’t around,” Pepper said.

  “People come here, they dig holes, steal things, take gravestones. I won’t have none of that.”