Roux the Day (7 page)

The driver was from Minnesota, a farm boy who had got sick of farming and wanted to sample the wicked ways of the Big Easy. “Enjoying them?” I asked him, and his languid “Yeah, I guess,” sounded as if he was tiring of the wild life already or else had not yet found any.

“Were you here for the Mardi Gras?” he asked.

“No, I missed it by a couple of days.”

“Too bad. It was really great.”

“It’s a big football game or something, isn’t it?”

He flashed me a skeptical look. “It’s a parade. Floats and stuff, bands, costumes.”

“Oh, yes, I think I’ve heard of it.”

We had traveled only a few blocks when he called out to me, “Hey, you with the CIA or something?”

It was an unusual query and though my culinary investigating occasionally engenders suspicions about my connections to the authorities, I don’t think the CIA has been mentioned yet. “No, I’m not. Why do you ask?”

He glanced at his rearview mirror anxiously. “Car back there seems to be following us.” I looked back but all I could see was a black car, ordinary looking.

“Want me to lose him?” the boy asked, hopefully. He probably hadn’t had this much excitement since he left the farm so I said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

He made a couple of sharp turns, one on a very dubious yellow, light. He glanced back and grinned. “Lost him!” he said triumphantly, but after two more blocks he looked back in disbelief. “He’s back!”

Perhaps Lieutenant Delancey had someone protecting me, I thought. Or maybe he wasn’t entirely satisfied with my story or was having me followed. The thought I had after that was one I didn’t like at all—it brought in the possibility of a person or persons unknown.

“When we get to the TV station, sit in front of it for a couple of minutes,” I told the young man. “See if that black car pulls in behind us.”

He nodded eagerly, and five minutes later he slid in behind a short line of vehicles. “He’ll either have to cruise on by or pull in behind us,” he said. We waited but no such vehicle appeared. I paid him and kept an eye open as he drove off. No sign of a tail.

WKNO was a remodeled building in a business part of the city and its roof bristled with a hedgehog arrangement of antennae of a dozen varieties and satellite dishes like a mushroom forest.

The receptionist took my name while answering the phone, pulling a roll of paper out of the fax machine, glancing at her computer screen and alternately nodding and shaking her head to questions tossed at her by staff members going by. She did it all without frenzy and I hoped she was getting paid well for all these jobs. I hoped she was being paid better than I might be, but then I pushed that sour thought aside.

A little lady came into the lobby, bright-eyed and lively as a cricket and the receptionist called to her and asked her to take me to Studio Five.

We went through a maze of passages and elevators and the little lady pointed to a large double-door with
STUDIO
5 written on it in large letters. “Know Elsa Goddard, do you?” asked the little lady, and I said, “Oh yes, I know her.” The doors thumped behind me.

An awful lot was going on. The studio was enormous and cleverly designed to accomplish many functions. There was a stage ringed with lights, a large polished table of the type that interviewers like to sit behind, and several small rooms with panels of lights and switches and microphones. Tall screens, light reflectors, lamps on high poles and snaky black cables were all over the floor. I wondered how many people tripped over one or another of the cables every day.

Plenty of people were there to be tripped. Mostly young and earnest, roughly equal numbers of each sex, many bespectacled and many more wild-haired and all moving pieces of equipment or carrying sheafs of paper or in earnest discussion or staring into cameras or pushing switches and juggling rheostats.

Were there any budding Ed Murrows or Milton Berles or Dan Rathers here? Hard to tell at this age, I supposed. I watched the blurs of movement for a while, fascinated. Nobody really took any notice of me. One young girl asked me politely if I would step aside as I was blocking the light. I did and nearly knocked over a ten-foot lamp stand.

I had expected to walk in and see Elsa Goddard somewhere but there was no sign of her. I saw a figure with its back to me inside one of the small rooms with lights and panels. It seemed to be the only one of the several rooms that was occupied and I moved closer to see if it was her, as jeans and a dark windbreaker jacket were no identifying help whatever.

Then the figure turned. It was a man. Not only that but … My breath caught in my throat.

It was Richie Mortensen, whom I had last seen sitting at the desk in the bookshop of Michael Gambrinus.

It couldn’t be. He was dead. He was, wasn’t he? Yes, he had to be; Lieutenant Delancey had told me that he had been identified. So if he was dead, what was he doing in a television studio? Several smart answers to that might be around but I could not lay hands on one at that moment.

I looked at him again. He had moved a bit and was now looking at me through the glass. When I had seen him in that chair in Gambrinus’ bookstore, his eyes had been closed in death. Death, I thought. What about that bullet hole in the middle of his chest? That was a sure sign of death, wasn’t it?

But now the eyes were staring at me with a feral intensity that I didn’t like. I moved to make sure and his eyes followed me. It was unmistakably me he was staring at, and now I saw his hand move inside the jacket—to come out immediately …

There was a gun in the hand. I was paralyzed. I tried to find a rational thought that would explain this. I was in a television studio—a man with a gun must be as common here as housewives at a Macy’s sale. Where were the cameras, though? None on him, that was for sure. On me? Yes, that must be it, they were filming me for a sequence that said,
Pan to victim, show face full of terror.
They had made a good choice with me—I must be showing more terror than all the Vincent Price movies ever made.

No, forget that, not a camera was on me. Hidden cameras? Don’t be paranoid. It didn’t leave me with much and none of that was reassuring. It meant that there was a man with a gun and he was looking at me. Worse yet, he was moving to the door of the tiny studio and coming out …

T
HE DOUBLE DOORS CLOSED
silently behind me as I made an exit in what must have been record time. I hurried along a corridor, made a turn and hurried along another. I didn’t recall the geography of the place from when the little lady had escorted me in, but it didn’t matter. When you’re escaping from a dead man with a gun, all roads lead to safety.

I was puzzling over that paradox as I narrowly evaded a wheeled cart piled with mysterious-looking equipment. He couldn’t be dead or he wouldn’t be chasing me. But he was chasing me—ergo, he couldn’t be dead. But I had seen him dead and Lieutenant Delancey had confirmed it. … Was the lieutenant playing some devious game? The thought brought to mind recollections of a Charlie Chan movie in which the Honolulu detective had an actor impersonate a murder victim so as to get the murderer to confess.

No, I decided. That didn’t sound like Delancey’s style. He just wasn’t the Charlie Chan type. On the other hand, there was more to him than met the eye.
Pay attention to getting out of here,
I told myself.
REFRESHMENT CENTER
, said a large sign, and a group of men and women clustered around several vending machines.

It was far from a madding crowd but it would have to do, and as a temporary refuge it wasn’t bad. I squeezed in among these people who gave us all our news, our education and our entertainment. None of them paid me any attention.

My breathing was returning to normal and I was even contemplating getting a cup of coffee so that I could stand with it and really look like I belonged. The line was long—it must be that good New Orleans coffee—and I was looking for the end of it when I saw my nemesis down the corridor.

He was coming this way.

His hand was inside his windbreaker so he wasn’t attracting any attention—except from me. I looked for an escape route. Emerging from the crowd was not a first step that appealed to me and even after that, I didn’t know where to go. I huddled deeper into the coffee and Coke drinkers and edged over to get some extra cover from the potato chip, nacho, peanut and cookie buyers.

He was looking this way and that but as he came closer, he turned and disappeared down a side corridor that must have looked like a probable hiding place for his quarry. I seized the opportunity and dashed off in the opposite direction.

I didn’t really have a plan—other than my primary strategy of avoiding being killed. Several approaches suggested themselves. For instance, I could find a security guard and complain about a man with a gun running loose in the building. The only problem with that would arise if the guard asked if I knew the man and I replied,
Yes, he’s dead.

I could just get out of the building and save Ms. Elsa Goddard for another day, when the outlook for escaping violence was more favorable. The faintest reek of timidity accompanied this—some might call it cowardice although I preferred “prudence.”

I could confront him, disarm him and—no, no, that was ridiculous. In the midst of all this mental turmoil, I found myself facing a bank of three elevators. This was not the way I had come in but that did not matter. I pressed the button and a door opened. I stepped in and went down to the ground floor.

People were coming and going and generally pursuing their business. It looked safe to get out of the elevator, but, before I could do so, a hand grasped my arm. I turned to see the one face I didn’t want to see.

“You killed my brother.”

The accusing voice should have terrified me but the funny thing was that the words came with a significance that was reassuring. His brother! So I had not been pursued by a dead man, after all! Well, of course not, that was absurd. Now, looking at this face, though, I could see that the mistake was understandable. This fellow and the one in Michael Gambrinus’s office did look very much alike. After all, I told myself, I had only seen Richie Mortensen dead and with his eyes closed. This man was a little different but the brotherly resemblance was clear.

The first thing to do was establish was my innocence. “I didn’t kill your brother,” I said to him firmly.

A young woman entering the elevator gave me a strange look.

“This is a funny place to rehearse,” she snapped. “Can’t you find a studio?”

“He was already dead when I went into the shop,” I said, putting all the conviction into the statement that I could muster and trying to ignore the young woman who was shaking her head and tut-tutting at my breach of broadcasting etiquette.

“Anyway, I had never met him, I had no reason to want to harm him.”

“That book.” That was all he said. At least he didn’t pull out the gun, although one hand remained menacingly inside his jacket. I looked him in the eyes. They were dark and, at the moment, threatening. He had the slight stubble of a beard on his face, a long but strong chin, and was in his mid-thirties.

The woman got out of the elevator at the next floor and shot us a final look of reprimand. “I had been to the auction to buy the book,” I went on, determined to get in all the points of view that might save my life. “I was told it had been sold already. I found that it had been sold to a Michael Gambrinus so I went right away to his shop. I found your brother dead in Gambrinus’s office—I didn’t know who he was, of course. In fact I thought he was Gambrinus—I called the police right away and told them that.”

His eyes searched my face. I must have looked honest to him; at least, his aggressive attitude relaxed a little. Most satisfying, he still did not pull out the gun. “Look,” I told him, “let’s sit down and talk about this.” I didn’t wait for him to agree. I just went to the one of the oases that dotted the lobby—a small round table with chairs around it. I sat in one of them. He hesitated then did likewise, half facing me.

I went over my story again, filling in bits like Van Linn’s name, emphasizing his importance as a New Orleans lawyer, telling who I was, why I was in New Orleans—trying to submerge him in corroborative detail that might help push me out of the line of fire.

I must have been more convincing than I had even hoped. He asked a question or two, nothing relevant to the death of his brother or my possible culpability, which was encouraging. I thought I saw a glimmer of doubt in his expression.

“Were you close to your brother?” I asked.

He looked away. “We didn’t see each other too often.”

I toyed with the idea of suggesting that he might be considered a suspect himself, but some very wise person writing mystery novels once said, “Never antagonize a character with a gun,” so I didn’t say that. The more I talked to him, though, the less resolute he seemed. It began to look increasingly as if his original attitude had been strictly impulsive.

He didn’t strike me as the type to want to kill someone in revenge for his brother’s death on sentimental family grounds, and I started to wonder if there was something else, some other reason for his attitude.

“You know about the book?” I asked conversationally.

He looked, well, not alarmed but certainly nervous at the question. “Most people in New Orleans know about the Belvedere family,” he said.

He was about to go on when a voice called out, “Why, hello, Larry! You’re early.”

It was a voice I had heard before and I was putting a name to it as she came into sight. It was Elsa Goddard—she of the combative attitude at the book auction, the designated buyer for my favorite group of lady chefs and kidnappers, “the Witches.”

She looked very fetching yet businesslike in a blue silk blouse, a russet-brown skirt and a short, darker brown jacket. She wasn’t the type to surprise easily but she looked just a touch taken aback as she saw me. I watched recognition creep into her face.

“My goodness!” she said. “Isn’t this fortunate? How did you know about the show?”

“Hard to keep anything quiet in New Orleans,” I told her heartily. “You know how this stuff gets around!”