Cajun Waltz (23 page)

Lake Charles, late spring, 1957. Weeks have passed since Delly first got the feeling that someone was spying on her house. It's happened several times since, a car on her street late at night, and still she hasn't told the police. She worries that once she starts talking she'll be unable to keep quiet about R. J. Bainard being in town. She doesn't want to add to the hurt she's done to his brother. Better that she hurt instead.

Delly wasn't alone in delaying to do the right thing. It seemed everyone was awaiting the hand of God to sweep down and make it all better. The exception was Alvin Dupree. He remained a busy bee in his labors on Bonnie's behalf. She was in poor spirits. Her father clung to life, but with such piteous bouts of pain and dementia her most loving reaction was to contemplate smothering him with a pillow. When lucid, he continued to ask about seeing R.J. once more. She was tempted to lie and say that R.J. had committed suicide. It might put an end to his delusions. It might also end him, she feared.

Such calculations were ingrained in Bonnie, a reflection, no doubt, of her mother's precision with numbers. It was therefore inevitable that she acknowledge the potential upside of R.J. actually being dead. Alvin, sensitive to her ponderings, considered doing the black deed himself. R.J. was a wild card, bound to throw more slime on the Bainard name if no one moved to stop him. And there were Alvin's own interests at risk. He'd hired Freddy Baez to put a scare into R.J. that would send him out of Louisiana and maybe even the country. A change of plan—that is, waxing Freddy—had become necessary after the Bainard name passed his lips. R.J.'s witness of the unfortunate episode threatened Alvin's future with Bonnie like a serpent asleep in a toy box. Alvin had killed his nation's enemies in the Pacific and Korea. Could he do the same to an old comrade?

R.J. himself helped answer the question. After weeks of waiting for Corinne to set up a meeting with Delly, his impatience for action led him to drive his car to Georgia Hill as routinely as if the last years hadn't happened, as if he still lived at home like any unemployed heir. He trotted up the front steps and banged the knocker. Freddy's pistol was jammed under his shirt. He felt proud to be launching this frontal attack, though he knew that cowards sometimes leap into the fray simply to end the suspense.

A maid answered the door. Her cry of protest when he shoved past her carried down the breezeway to the sewing room where Bonnie sat in vigil at her father's bedside. Stepping out to the hall, she recognized her brother at once despite his beard and middleweight gauntness. “Surprised?” he said with a twisted smile that went far to conceal his fear.

“Never.” She smiled back.

Aware of the maid observing them, Bonnie stepped warily into his embrace. Feeling against her abdomen the pistol under his shirt, she mouthed something to the maid over his shoulder. “Please what?” the maid said.

He looked behind him. “You talking to her?”

“Miz Bonnie say ‘please' to me, but she no say what for.”

He realized his sister had tried to signal the woman to get help. “Please fetch my brother a whiskey, how about?”

“Yes,” Bonnie said, her smile still holding. “Two.”

The siblings eyed each other with the mutual suspicion of strangers dressed exactly alike. Not for them the proverbial bond of twins. Their one shared personality trait was needing only the voice in their head for company.

She pointed to the pistol bulge. “I know you shot that man we buried.”

He blinked but once. “Now where'd you hear such a thing?”

“From Alvin. And I saw him, too—face all gone.”

R.J. processed the information into columns of allegiance and treachery. “Daddy thinks it, too?”

“Daddy's ill. Right down the hall, but might as well be a million miles. Ah,” she said to the approaching maid. “Drinks. Shall we take them to the sewing room?”

*   *   *

R
ICHIE
B
AINARD HAD
many positive qualities. But he did beat his wives from time to time, and that fact alone doubtless condemns him in most people's minds. R.J., in no small paradox, fell into that category. His first thought on seeing his father withered and frail was of his mother, Esther. His second thought was
Good
.

The nurse discreetly stepped out. Sister and brother stood at opposite sides of Richie's bed, leaning inward like competing priests. The pistol in R.J.'s trousers felt redundant and juvenile. His father's breathing, soft as tidewater under a pier, made the scene feel timeless. “Son?”

“Daddy?”

“That you?”

“I came home.”

“R.J.?” The question became an oath.
“R.J.!”

“What? What!” He looked vainly to Bonnie to clarify.

Richie arched off the mattress as if hit with high voltage. He gave a cry that was plain if not clear. “
Say sorry
.”

It confused R.J. He'd planned to bombard his father with end-of-life insults before leaving his presence forever. He hadn't planned to say sorry. He found that he very much wanted to.

But what appeared to him like an offer of absolution from a father to a wayward son looked otherwise to Bonnie. It offended her to see her brother fill with emotion as he formulated some plea for their father's forgiveness. She issued an opposite order. “Go on. Tell Daddy you forgive him.”

R.J. took this in sluggishly. “I thought he wants
me
to say sorry.”

“Why would he? He cares about his soul, not yours. He's saying sorry. Tell him okay and let him pass peaceful.”

“Forgive him why?”

“Because of Mama. Because of Angel. He's always felt terrible about how he treated them, and you and Seth just spit on his tries to make amends.”

“He hit Mama.”

“Yes, he did.”

“More than once.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Angel too?”

“Of course.” She told him about that last day when their stepmother, bloody and frightened, sped down the driveway into the oak tree. He'd known only what the public had been told, what the papers said—that accidents just happen sometimes. “Daddy was the one made her crash. He beat her up and she ran away and I guess he scared her from steering right.”

“Scared how?”

“He liked his guns.” She shrugged, not flippantly—it meant the worst was now out and there was no more to tell. She stroked her father's arm with fretful devotion, like a miser polishing silverware.

“I was fond of Angel,” R.J. said.

“You and every other man.”

“More than fond.”

“Like I said.”

Their father yanked his arm from her grip and raised it as if hailing a taxi. R.J. and Bonnie looked down at him. His eyes were fixed on things not there, like a dog that peers down an empty hallway where floorboards have inexplicably creaked.

R.J. drew his pistol from under his shirt. He studied it scornfully, as children do when they discover that something supposedly dangerous is not. With an air of attempting a casual experiment, he pointed the barrel at his father's face.

What can Richie have made of this? There wasn't much going on inside anymore, no reflections sorry or bitter, no thoughts beyond a dull animal sense that he was caged with no way out. His children's agitation around his bed must have seemed like a television playing snowily across the room or a weird flutter in the room's flowered wallpaper. Something hard and cold touched his lips. Like a baby tonguing a sharp pencil, he recoiled in reflex as it was pushed inside his mouth.

Bonnie watched aghast as R.J. bent over their father and stared into his wide eyes from inches away. Gagging on the pistol barrel at the back of his throat, Richie clutched at his son's wrist. R.J. cocked the hammer back. Bonnie lunged across the bed and shoved her brother off.

“Relax. Little scare, is all.” Of himself, R.J. meant.

“Daddy?” Her rubbing of Richie's arm became frenzied, as if scouring a hole to retrieve something inside. “Daddy!”

“He's asleep.”

He looked
too
asleep. The thought that he was dead struck them simultaneously. Bonnie's face took a classic
pietá
expression while R.J.'s had the aspect of child's after committing a hurtful prank, disbelieving the very bad thing he's done.

Richie stirred. His son strode from the room in relief he disguised with a smirk. Bonnie had seen enough. Her appalling brother could not be trusted to stay dead and out of trouble. She must end this once and for all.

*   *   *

O
N THE WARPATH
now, she subjected Alvin Dupree to such a grilling about R.J.'s activities in exile that he cracked like a sorority snitch. Alvin did his best to mix in believable lies with the unbelievable truth. His biggest lie was to reassert that R.J., not he, had shot Freddy Baez; the next biggest lie was that R.J. had assaulted another girl recently, Ethel Somebody at the Section Eight Gun Club. On the true side of the ledger, Alvin told her that R.J. was using the dead man's name as an alias and was dating the daughter-in-law of one of Richie's former business partners. Lastly he informed her of Abe Percy's extortion attempt on the family. Bonnie accepted Alvin's excuse that he'd deceived her out of protectiveness. She would take charge from here.

On her order, Alvin arranged to meet Abe at the same diner where, by coincidence, Abe had met Hollis Jenks three months earlier; the old lawyer, desperate for straws to grab, took it as a positive omen. “Thirty thousand dollars,” he said as they slid into the booth across from each other, “is all I require to go away happy. My word is gold on that.”

“It can be done,” Alvin said, “providin' you come through for us.”

“
Us
. Aha!” Alvin's insinuation, at Hollis Jenks's wake, about drowning the Chief had filled the lawyer with dread of the Bainards doing him likewise. Leaving the note with Delly about Tarzy Hooker had been an attempt to establish a fail-safe.

“You're right,” Alvin conceded. “R. J. Bainard is alive.” Still smarting from Bonnie's tongue-lashing, he was antsy with the nervousness that comes when a dream so near resists coming true. “You told me there's another person out there could confirm the fact.”

“There are, yes.”

“More than one?”

Abe was mortified by his loose mouth. “I shouldn't say.”

“I shouldn't give you a pile of money.”

“If I tell, what's left to protect me?”

“Honor. Yours and mine.”

“We may have a problem in that case.”

Alvin glanced around as if to summon a waitress. It was a signal. A young woman with the presence of an Amazon queen joined them from two booths away. “May I introduce Miss Bonnie Bainard,” Alvin said with formality.

She extended her hand. “It's been a long time, Mr. Percy.”

“You know him?” Alvin asked her.

“My mother's best friend.”

“Dear Esther,” Abe said.

Bonnie's smile was sweet. Alvin, from experience, knew the lawyer was in for it now. “If you're broke,” she told Abe, “I wish you'd have come to us. You're practically family.”

“Please. Your father never liked me.”

“He never liked anyone, so what? I decide things.”

“A lady of stature now?”

“I always had stature. Shame no one noticed before.”

“I noticed,” Alvin said. Her cutting glance said don't be pathetic.

Abe ventured, “I saw you at your brother's funeral.”

“Yet here in my grief you're blackmailing me?”

Abe winced at the change in tone. “But your brother isn't dead—rather the point of this meeting, I'd thought. You want him protected, right?”

“I want him incarcerated, Mr. Percy.”

Abe's dream of a windfall vaporized. “Then why am I here?”

“To earn your reward for helping me bring him to justice.”

“Your own brother?”

“Are you passing judgment?”

“It's just for years you obstructed the search at every turn.”

“My father did, not me. Now you'll get paid for catching a crook instead of protecting one.”

Abe already was spending the thousands in his head when Bonnie asked for the names of others who could testify to R.J.'s being alive; she would pass the names to the police and demand they reopen the case. Abe named Delly Franklin and Tarzy Hooker. He almost expected to get his cash right there. “I gave her a note about the boy's importance to the case.”

“I want that note,” Bonnie said. “Does she keep it with her? This…”

“Delly's her name.” Abe elaborated, “The former Adele Billodeau.”

“From my brother?”

“The same.”

“Little troublemaker, that one.”

Alvin said to Abe, “You'll take me to this Tarzy?”

“Why?”

“I want to know what he knows.”

“Sure.” Spoken with barely a twitch.

Alvin nodded. He was more comfortable now that matters had moved to the A-B-C stage, when steps proceed one at a time to their destination. “Might gain you your first installment.”

Abe's mouth had gone dry with the inkling that he'd just sold his soul. He didn't know what Bonnie and Alvin would do with the information he'd given them. He didn't want to know. He would get his money and they'd get whatever; later he could contact the authorities and turn in the Bainards for their foul ways. The rationalization helped him slide out of the booth with an air of confidence despite the table edge creasing his gut.

Bonnie fished a hand into Alvin's lap as they watched the lawyer leave. Her manipulations weren't for his pleasure. She was piggybacking one stirring event on another. Had she been fond of tobacco or alcohol, now would have been the moment to light up or pour. Alvin was the only vice she'd ever known, until today's little caper. She mused, “He would've taken less.” Her hand stayed busy under the table.