Authors: Lynda La Plante
Elizabeth waited until all that was left were charred ashes and the acrid smell of burned plastic. She then went to her bedside and picked up Anna Louise’s photograph and held it to her chest. She lay down, clutching the picture, her face impassive, but gradulfy her eyes filled with tears and they trickled down her cheeks, until she’egan sobbing quietly, saying her daughter’s name over and over again, whispering that she was sorry, so very sorry.
Robert Caley had asked to see the body or what was left of it, but nothing had prepared him for the blackened, decomposed corpse. He was shocked and distressed, staying no more than a few moments. Like his wife, he wept for Anna Louise. He also asked for her forgiveness, knowing that in many ways he had been to blame. He was now on his way to accomplishing everything he had dreamed about, and he would without doubt be a very rich man, but he felt empty, drained and ashamed. Two young girls . had died as a result of his foolishness and selfishness. The woman he could love had seen him for what he was, and he knew the damage was irreparable. Just thinking of her made him look toward the connecting bedroom door, and his heart thudded as it opened.
“Excuse me, Mr. Caley, but the manager has asked if you will still be requiring the double suite as
“
“No, no, I will also be leaving by tonight.”
“Shall I tell the manager, then, Mr. Caley? Only with the Carnival coming up
“
“Yes, please, thank you.”
The maid shut the door and locked it, and he packed his bags, wanting to get out as soon as possible.
The bellboy was carrying them to his car when Saffron Dulay drove up in her convertible Rolls Corniche.
“Honey, you’re not leavin’, are you?”
He looked at her as she slid out of the driver’s seat and sashayed toward him, arms held out for a hug. Golden-brown, golden-haired, she reminded him of Anna Louise.
“Daddy, give me a hug, give me a big bear hug and tell me you love me lots, lots and whole lots.”
Caley wrapped his arms around Saffron; he was crying.
“Shush now, honey, I know, I know they found her,”
Saffron cooed, stroking his head.
He turned away, embarrassed by his tears, and she drew him close.
“Now, you’re not leaving, are you? Not when I have come all this way to see you, and Daddy and you being in business together, you are not upping and leaving, you have to celebrate.”
Saffron had already dismissed Anna Louise’s death. That was over, that was all in the past. She saw him waver, hesitate, and she turned to the bellboy.
“Put Mr. Caley’s bags in my car, would you?”
She gave him that wide, frosty smile.
“Hey, we are going to have a ball, it’s just starting, it’s Mardi Gras!”
She walked around to the driver’s seat as his luggage was placed in the trunk, slipping on her dark glasses as she started up the engine.
“My daddy says you’ve gone and left that lush you been tied to for more than twenty years. That true, Robert?”
He nodded, getting in beside her, and like her he slipped on his dark glasses as they eased out into the traffic. They headed toward the Esplanade, Robert with his arm lying loosely along the seat, his hand stroking Saffron’s slender neck.
“Oh yes, that is so nice.”
She laughed.
Caley smiled a sad smile, because he knew his life from now on would be filled with Saffrons. Money breeds money, breeds bastards. Lorraine stared from the window of FranŁois’s steaming hot car. She was sure Caley had not seen her, and she was glad, not because she looked bad, but because she might not have been able to hide her expression. Saffron’s blond head was tilted back, laughing, Robert Caley’s hand resting at the nape of her neck. A golden couple, seemingly with no remorse, no pain and no grief. She was more than glad, because it made her angry that she had been such a fool to have felt something for him, even for a moment. He was not worth it, not worth another thought, and whatever she felt would soon pass. He would soon be forgotten, just like poor misguided Anna Louise, whose skeleton lay covered in the morgue.
Lorraine walked in as Rosie snapped her last case shut on her pink frilled nylon bedspread.
“Right, that’s me packed. You know they want us out as soon as possible because they’re booked up?”
“How long did you book the room for?”
“Well, I did tell you we got a special rate so long as we leave before the hotel fills up. Mardi Gras is their busiest time.”
“I know that,”
Lorraine snapped.
Rosie crossed to the writing table.
“I did a provisional booking at a place way out of town in case we needed to stay on, bufwe don’t, do we?”
Rooney barged in and dumped down his bags.
“So, how did it go?”
^
“Check’s in my wallet, one million!”
f
Rosie whooped, and Rooney hit the flimsy wall with his fist.
“Yes, yes. One fucking million.”
Lorraine folded her arms.
“So you’re both leaving?”
Rooney frowned.
“Well, we all are, aren’t we? I mean, did you want to stay on for Mardi Gras?”
“Nope, I’m not crazy about the idea of being elbowed around the streets, but…”
“But what?”
Rosie said as she opened Lorraine’s wallet and took out the check.
“But, well, you think we’re all done here?”
Rosie passed the check to Rooney.
“You mean we should see if it’s good? I doubt if she’d bounce it on us,”
he said, squinting at the check.
Lorraine had that edgy feel, sort of shifting her weight from one foot to the next.
“Nick’s room booked, is it?”
“What?”
“I said, is Nick’s room taken?”
;p>
aaa
“Yeah, well, we stopped paying for it,”
Rosie said, becoming suspicious.
“His body collected by his sister?”
“Yes,”
Rooney said, frowning.
“You know it was, we told you it was, he’s probably buried by now.”
“And forgotten, just like that? Forgotten like that pitiful skeleton in the morgue? Well, for your information I have not forgotten Nick Bartello, I have not forgotten him in any way.”
“Shit, Lorraine, neither have we. If this is leading to us giving his relatives something from the one million, I don’t mind,”
Rooney said.
“We don’t need to give anybody else a cut of the one million,”
Lorraine said, slumping into a chair and leaning forward, her head in her hands.
“So what’s up?”
She shook her head and then leaned back, closing her eyes.
“What’s up is some piece of shit killed Nick, and that shit, whoever he is, is just walking, and nobody is doing anything about it, that’s what’s up.”
Rooney sighed, he could feel the carpet being tugged from under his big flat feet.
“Lorraine, the cops have nothing, we got nothing. What do you want us all to do now, stay on here and start up another investigation?”
“I want us to finish off what we started. I said I wanted you to visit Fryer Jones’s bar, I said I wanted his place searched with that cop you palmed five hundred bucks to, because some fucker got his necklace. Some bastard killed Nick Bartello, and I just want us to check out a few things before we all piss off back to Los Angeles and buy our own condominiums, okay?”
Rooney sighed, lifting up his hands to calm her.
“Okay, just stay cool. I’ll contact him right now, we can do it right away. But, Lorraine, if we come up with nothin’, then I don’t care what you say, I’m out of here. What about you, Rosie?”
Rosie nodded.
“Yes, I’ll leave with Bill.”
Lorraine stood up.
“Fine, but I might hang around until I am satisfied we gave Nick a run for his cut of the cash. So, we’ll keep one room for us allmake it mine because I haven’t started to pack.”
Lorraine slammed the bathroom door shut, and Rosie sighed.
“When she gets into these moods, I could punch her, I really could. I mean, how can we come up with something if the police got nothin’, huh? You tell me that? She just gets obsessive.”
Rooney rubbed his chin.
“If she wasn’t so obsessive, Rosie, we’d never have found Anna Louise Caley or be looking at a check for one million. So we get off our backsides and do like she says because we got to keep her sweet. I don’t want her suddenly saying she’s got a right to a bigger cut.”
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LYNDA LA PLANTE 383
“Are you saying she’d take Nick’s share?”
Rooney dangled the check.
“This is made out to her, Rosie. She’s gonna have to put it in her account, then pay us our share, so I’d say we do whatever she wants us to do.”
Rosie turned away from him.
“You’ve got her all wrong, Bill. I admit sometimes she gets me real uptightmore than uptightbut I trust her, and we shouldn’t even be thinking about who gets what.”
Rooney felt a rush of emotion for Nick, his poor dead crazy buddy.
“You’re right. I was wrong. Let’s give her all the help we can. Some bastard out there killed him, and I want him… .”
Lorraine showered and changed but didn’t feel very fresh or energized, just angry, and she knew it was connected to seeing Robert Cale. She glared at her reflection in the mirror.
“Hey, chill out of this one. Remember, he’s not worth one more second of your time, so stop this!”
Rooney tapped and she opened up.
“You got someone in here?”
“No, I was talking to myself.”
“Oh well, this cop’s downstairs, you want to talk to him?”
“Yep.”
Rooney held open the door. All their bags were littered around the room.
“Lemme warn you, he’s no Burt Lancaster, he’s kind of freakylookin.’”
^
“Oh yeah?”
J
“Yeah, his neck is as wide as his ass!”
Harper sat with Rosie, well beamed herself; they made a good couple. He had a beer in his pudgy hand, and lifted half a cheek of his ass as Lorraine joined them. They were sitting under an umbrella on thet?lue-and-white plastic furniture of a cheap sidewalk cafe, its neon signs glowing weakly in the daylight. The pavement in front of them was thronging with people.
“This is Lorraine Page.”
“Hi, how you doing?”
“Fine, thanks for coming over.”
She looked across at hint over her dark shades. Rooney was right, the guy was obese.
“No problem, you want a beer or”
“Coffee,”
she said, and lit a cigarette.
“Place is heating up. Pity you aren’t sticking around for Carnival.”
Lorraine stubbed out her cigarette.
“Okay, can we get down to why we wanted to see you?” “Sure, fire away.”
Lorraine spoke quickly, detailing the events that led up to Nick Bartello’s death and mentioning the fact that he had been in Fryer Jones’s bar the previous night, and might possibly have returned.
“Look, I know he was your pal, right? But he was crazy to go to ward nine late at night and to get involved with anyone there. Now, I know we investigated this, we asked around, because he was found close to the bar, you know, about a block away down an alley, but nobody there saw him. Nobody saw him down the alley either.”
Lorraine leaned forward.
“Okay, so you’re sayin’ with Mardi Gras comin’ some poor fucker is gonna walk off the main drag by accident, go into Fryer Jones’s bar, have a few beers, walk out and get his throat cut? And all the cops are gonna say is that he shouldn’t have been in that district? You got notices up there saying, ‘Beware, you could end up fucking dead’?”
Harper wrinkled his pig-nose, annoyed at being spoken to by a woman in that tone.
Lorraine ticked off on her fingers.
“We know he went there, we know he pissed off some kids because they were shooting a pistol and shoving it up Fryer Jones’s nose. We know he made them look dumb, we know all of that. We know that Fryer Jones gave Nick a necklace, a grisgris, which wasn’t on his body when he was found, nor were his wallet or his driver’s license. He used to keep them in separate back pockets.”
“Uh-huh.”
The fat face wobbled.
“Fryer Jones admitted to me that he had met Nick, and I want to know who was in the bar that night. I want to know who was in the bar the following nightin other words I want to know if Nick Bartello went back to Fryer Jones’s bar and somebody there cut his throat. So if it means getting a search warrant, if it means”
Harper shook his head.
“You are an impatient lady, that’s for sure.”
“Well, we only got the room booked for one more night,”
she said with a tight-lipped smile.
“Okeydokey. This area that your friend went into is well known as the wrong neighborhood for whites to go drinking in the early hours, unless they are known or trying to score dope. Your friend use dope, did he?”
“No, he didn’t,”
snapped Rooney.
“Okay, so he was acting dumb. But we don’t like going into bars like Fryer Jones’s without real good evidence. We don’t like doing that, because Fryer is an informant.”
Lorraine leaned back.
“Is he? That’s why you arrested him on the night Anna Louise Caley was missing?”
LYNDA LA pLA^TE 3BS
“Yes, ma’am, we did arrest him and we hadda knock \^m around a bit We needed to ask old Fryer if he had heard anythin’, you know if he knew where she might have disappeared to, because there is nothing down in that section of town that Fryer Jones don’t know about. But we have to always make it look real good, because if it was known, thei^ jt’d be old Frver with his throat cut like your friend.”
Harper rested back jn his chair and belched; he thumped his chest with a curled fist.
“Better out than in
“
Lorraine lit another cigarette and looked up and dovyn the street inhaling the smoke.
“Okay, let’s try this another way. You’re telling me you couldn’t get a warrant to search that bar, maybe haul a couple of guys into the station? That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. We don’t like to rock the boat.”
“Right, so what would it cost to rock it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Come on, you heard me. I am asking you what it \vould cost to get maybe four or five of you to back me up, get yourselves a^ed with more than your wooden bars. They can be cops, or they can be cops not acting as cops, if you follow me?”