Mystic Mayhem (11 page)

"Sergeant Mackelroy?" Quincy said softly.

A female deputy came from around a desk. She had big blue eyes, big blue eyes that looked awfully interested in Deputy Quincy. "Yes, Q? Whatcha'all need?"

He sort of shoved me at her. "This here is a dear friend of mine. She's not feelin' all that well, and I thought maybe we'd be well-advised to find her a nice place to rest awhile."

Sergeant Mackelroy nodded. "I see, Q." What was up with this Q stuff? Cat would certainly be interested to hear about it. "I know just the spot. Come with me, miss."

*   *   *

I spent almost an hour in the Jefferson Parish lockup. It was humiliating, but the cell was clean and didn't even smell. I didn't have any muscly, Russian wrestler-type roommates, just one little middle-aged woman who'd been brought in for dancing on the tables at Thierry's Crab Shack. She sported a gorgeous running sleeve of wild roses on her right arm and a vine of lush ivy on her left shoulder. By the time I'd exhausted all my good tattoo conversation with her and was just sitting in uncomfortable silence while she threw up in the toilet, Sergeant Mackelroy came and unlocked the door.

She crooked her finger at me, and I walked out.

Even she laughed when I turned in a circle and exulted, "Free at last. Free at last."

That was when the voice from behind me made by blood run cold.

"Funny. I wouldn't have taken you for the hardened criminal sort, Miss Hamilton."

I looked around to where Jack Stockton stood in the open doorway between the lockup area and the front counter.

My first thought was,
well, hell
.

My second was,
aw, what the heck. I've been on worse first dates
.

He said he'd come when Cat called him and told him I was upset about Fabrizio being in the parish lockup and just needed to settle down some. How did she even know about this?

It seemed that Cat had indeed caught a ride back to the ferry then on home to our place in the city. For some reason, she called Jack to come and pick me up.

I rode back to The Mansion with Jack in one of the hotel maintenance pickups. Saying it was a quiet ride was the understatement of the decade. I don't think either of us spoke a word until he parked the truck near the boathouse, and we started to walk back to The Mansion.

It was getting on to midnight. The ferry would have quit running by then, which was a good thing in the end because it would give both Cat and me a chance to cool off. Jack didn't seem to mind me staying at the resort yet another night. In fact, he seemed comfortable with the idea.

He walked me back to what I was beginning to think of as my room.

At the door, I turned to him. I was still pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. "I'm sorry you had to come break me out of the slammer," I said, trying to cast a humorous light on things.

"No big deal, really," he said softly. "Catalina said your visit with the Great Fabrizio left you pretty upset. She said Deputy Boudreaux was just trying to help you, as she put it, 'simmer down some.'"

Simmer down? I needed to have a talk with that girl.

"She also said you're a young woman of high passion with a lot of energy, and that I might consider trying to help you rechannel some of that energy."

I looked up at him. His eyes twinkled. Yes, I said
twinkled.
His mouth was quirked in a small twist of a smile. He lifted a hand to my face and pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. His hand stayed on my cheek. Soft. Warm.

"Rechannel, eh?" I said so softly I barely heard it myself.

He nodded.

I turned my face into his hand.

I swear he shuddered. I did.

But the moment passed without either of us acting further. How could we? He was Cap'n Jack, my boss, a man walking on the eggshell remains of the reputation he brought with him from the Big Apple. And me, I was a female hotel employee. I might as well have been wearing a sign around my neck saying
You can't touch this
.

Mystic Isle was awash in summer drizzle Thursday morning. It was a nice, soft rain. Not the socked-in downpour from previous days. Maybe the coffins would stay in the ground this time. I hoped so for Jack's sake.

My first appointment was at nine thirty, so I showered and dressed then went to Dragons and Deities by way of the employee lounge, where I brewed up a cup of chicory strong enough to grow hair on my chest, and carried it along with an almond bear claw to Dragons and Deities.

I arrived about fifteen minutes early, just enough time to break my fast, as Grandmama Ida would have said, and get set up for the day. Only a short while before the client was scheduled to arrive, Cat appeared with a bag from the Café du Monde. I could smell the beignets from where she stood in the open doorway.

"Peace offering?" She held up the bag.

I laid a towel on top of the bear claw and nodded. "Come on in,
chère
," I said. "How'd you know I was dying for some beignets this morning?"

We made up.

Before she headed off to her own little den to divine the fortunes of the general population, she gave me a hug.

"I hate it when we fight," I said.

She laughed. "You call that fighting? Oh, by the way, Beauregard has to go out of town to visit his sick uncle in Savannah, which means Satchmo is heading on back home tonight."

"So we have to be there."

"Well, one of us does, anyway." Her eyes were kind. "Look,
chère
, I know how much Fabrizio means to you, and I know how bad you're wanting to help him get out of the clinker. I'll travel back and forth like normal to take care of Satchmo and anything else that comes up on the home front. But if you can get Cap'n Jack to agree to it, whyn't you just plan to stay here until you get the Great Fabrizio back where he belongs? I even packed you a bag—all those little things a girl needs when she's roughing it."

Smart thinking on Cat's part. Staying at the resort would make my investigation a whole lot easier.

"So how was your quality time with Cap'n Jack?" Her back was to me as she walked the room, looking at my sample artwork on the walls, but I could tell by the pitch of her voice she was being coy.

It hit me then. "You!" I said. "You set me up, didn't you? The quiet time in the slammer, the ride back to The Mansion? You were playing matchmaker again."

She turned, and from her smug grin, I knew it was true. "It worked, didn't it? You and Cap'n Jack were all cozy on the ride back? Did you…?" She made little kissy noises.

"I can't believe you did that. How the heck did you get Quincy to go along with it?"

She smiled and cupped her hands beneath her breasts. "Me and the girls have our special ways. Let's eat."

The beignets were a work of art. The chicory coffee I'd brewed, divine. The tattoo I designed for my new client, sheer genius.

But throughout the whole morning, all I could think about was getting Fabrizio out of that dismal place. It was obvious, to me anyway, that the law had few, if any, intentions of looking beyond my friend for suspects. Quincy, normally a reasonable, likable guy, had turned into a bullheaded son of a gun who not only intended to see Fabrizio prosecuted for stealing a hundred thousand dollars, he was looking to get him on murder charges too.

That was something I didn't intend to see happen. Toward that end, I used my lunch break to seek out the Elways.

I found Billy first.

I was on my way to his mother's room on the second floor when I saw him go into the House of Cards to see Cat. He was having his fortune read—again. If Cat counted right, this was the sixth time in four days. Wouldn't you think he'd take notes or something? Or at least take a picture of Cat to carry around with him in case any other hotel guests might want to set up an appointment with her.

I hung around in the outer room amusing myself with a copy of
Soothsayers' Journal
while she took him back to her "office" for the reading. When they came out twenty minutes later, Billy looked peeved, and Cat looked fed up.

"Don't y'all forget what I've been telling you, Mr. Whitlock." Cat shook her finger at him. "Stay away from those loose women. They may tell you they're having safe sex, but they don't even know the meaning of the term."

He shrugged and lifted his hands sadly. "I wouldn't need any loose women if you'd just be my woman, Catalina."

"Now, now," she said, hustling him toward the door. In a low-pitched aside, I heard, "Like that's gonna happen before hell freezes over."

I stood. "Billy?"

He looked over, just noticing me.

"I was wondering if maybe you had a minute to talk." When he looked me up and down and grinned, I hurried to add, "I have a few questions about…you know…what happened at the séance Sunday night."

"Sure," he said, tossing a
take that
sort of look in Cat's direction. "How 'bout you buy me a drink?"

We went downstairs to the Presto-Change-o Room, where we sat at the bar and ordered drinks—a hurricane for Billy and a Diet Dr Pepper for me.

He took out the straw and drank it in big gulps. He lifted the empty glass toward the waitress on shift, signaling for another.

"You might want to slow down there, Billy," I said. "Those things'll sneak up on you." It was a mixed bag, wasn't it? I wanted him a little loosey-goosey so he'd tell me what I wanted to know, but at the same time, it didn't seem like a great idea to be the reason a hotel guest had to crawl back to his room.

At least he was taking a little more time with the second cocktail. Maybe I wouldn't have to carry him upstairs after all.

"So, Billy," I began. "Have you heard the police are calling Cecile's death a homicide?"

He licked the red stain of the grenadine off his upper lip, plucked the Maraschino cherry from the glass, and began to suck on it suggestively while staring into my eyes. Really?

"Yeah, I heard. Too bad for her, huh?"

"Why do you think someone would want to murder her?"

He crunched some ice and seemed to be considering my question. "I'm sorry she's gone. She was in charge of my trust, you know." He rolled his eyes. "Can you believe the old codger, my grandfather, had my inheritance held in trust until I'm thirty? Thirty! Hell, I might as well be ninety. All those years, wasted."

"Imagine that." I steered him back on track. "What does Cecile's murder have to do with your trust?"

"Well, she was administrator, you see." He leaned an elbow on the bar and attempted to rest his head on his upturned palm but somehow missed and nearly smashed his chin onto the bar. He recovered admirably and went on talking as if nothing had happened. He was three sheets gone already.
I better hurry and get what I need out of him.
"But it was working out pretty sweet for me. I had the old biddy wrapped around my pinky." He wiggled said digit at me. "When I needed money, she was Johnny-on-the-spot with the checkbook." He looked down the bar and lifted his hand to signal the bartender. I reached over and lowered his hand.

"But nobody else seemed to like her much, except Terrence the Caterpillar Man." He giggled. "The Society of the Lepidop-whatsit Alien Caterpillar, yada yada yada. Baby, did he have her snowed. Ya gotta hand it to him."

"Him?"

"You know, Terrence. That worm—get it, worm?—was soaking the old girl for every nickel he could get out of her."

"He was?"

His lids were getting droopy. I hoped he didn't nod off to sleep while I was trying to interview him. "Mmm, he thought she was going to boogie down the aisle with him, and he'd be Mr. Moneybags. Sucker."

"She wasn't going to marry him?"

"Hell no. She found out his fuzzy little caterpillars weren't exactly endangered after all. In some places they're so hardy, they're trying to get rid of them. She was going to break it off with him and find herself a new squeeze to keep her warm at night. Maybe one who didn't take money from her under false pretenses."

"Oh." Sounded like excellent motive to me—about to lose your payday and murdering your intended before she could cut the purse strings and change her will. People kill for less. At least that's what they say on TV.

And speaking of money… "Billy, were you aware your grandmother—"

"Cecile was my stepgrandmother. You know step—like Cinderella? Snow White? Only she didn't make me scrub floors or try to poison me with apples." He seemed to realize what he'd said and sat pensively while the moment passed.

"Did you know she had a hundred thousand dollars in cash with her?"

"I do now," he said. "But she didn't tell me about it, if that's what you want to know. I heard it from that swamp cop." He must have liked the sound of that. He said it a few times. "Swamp cop. Swamp cop. He said she had it, and someone took it." He shrugged. "That's all I know. She had it. I'd like to have it, but someone else beat me to it."

Billy leaned closer, squinting at me. He nearly fell off his barstool. "So whatcha think 'bout that, sugar britches?" He was slurring now.

Sugar britches. That was a new one. For some reason, an image of Cap'n Jack popped into my head. Now that was some sugar britches, all right.

"What I think is," I said, "we need to get you upstairs to bed."

"Hallelujah!" He slid off the stool. I caught him under the arms, but he still draped all over me like an old quilt.

The bartender, a pretty girl I didn't remember meeting before this, walked over and shoved her princess hat back off her forehead. "You need me to call someone?"

I nodded. "Mr. Whitlock's had a little more than he can handle."

"No, no." He looked up at me through unfocused eyes. "I can handle it." He lifted his right hand and put it square on top of my boob. "See?"

*   *   *

Lurch picked up Billy like he was a six-year-old and put him over his shoulder. He grumbled all the way up the stairs, down the hall, and into the room. Billy hummed the theme song from the
Addams Family
, snapping his fingers at the appropriate moment.