The Devil Close Behind Read online

  George Tedesco was a sturdy man in his early sixties, his thinning brown hair going gray. I saw echoes of Davina in her mother’s face. Sabine Tedesco had the same vibrant red hair as her elder daughter, though it was streaked with silver and worn shorter than Davina’s wild mane. She was about the same age as her husband. Davina had told me that her mother managed a restaurant here in Mid-City, while her stepfather still worked at the busy New Orleans port, in an administrative job now, though he’d started out on the docks, loading and unloading freight.

  In our phone conversation last night, Davina had already given me an overview of the events leading up to the current situation. I went over this in more detail with the Tedescos.

  Laurette had graduated from a local high school and gone on to college at the University of New Orleans, which was part of the state university system. She had declared a major in English, planning to take some education classes, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Early in her sophomore year, Laurette met Chris Mason, who was a junior. He was from Covington, in St. Tammany Parish on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. A few years older than Laurette, Chris was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the university. That meant the Navy was paying for his education, with the caveat that when he graduated, he was commissioned as an officer on active duty. Laurette and Chris had married the summer before Chris started his senior year. That was Laurette’s junior year. In the middle of the fall semester, she discovered she was pregnant. She didn’t finish the term. Instead, she dropped out of school.

  “Her morning sickness was just awful,” Sabine said now. “She could barely sit through class without having to rush to the bathroom. Mine was the same, with all three of my children.”

  Sabine sat next to me on the sofa, with a photo album in her lap. Arrayed on the coffee table in front of us were more photos. Laurette and Chris at their wedding, with Laurette in a lacy white dress, her dark hair swept up and covered with a white veil. Chris, tall with broad shoulders and blond hair, had worn his uniform. Davina had been her sister’s maid of honor, in a pale green dress that set off her red hair. A group shot showed the Tedescos arrayed next to Laurette, with the Mason family clustering around the groom. More photos showed Chris on his graduation, the day he was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. And Laurette, next to him, beamed in a flowered maternity dress over her pregnant belly. Their daughter, Hannah, had been born a few weeks later, in June. Photos of the new parents showed the baby, nearly bald except for a few wisps of hair, looking chubby and sweet in a frilly pink dress, the kind that babies outgrow in an instant.

  “Chris went to school for several months over at Pensacola,” George said, mentioning the West Florida city about two hundred miles east. “They have a lot of Navy stuff over there. He and Laurette rented an apartment there in town. Then he got his orders. He was going to a ship in the Middle East. Once he went overseas, Laurette and the baby came back here and got an apartment here in Mid-City, about a mile away. Then we got the news. There was a fire aboard the ship. Chris and two other guys were killed.”

  We sat for a moment in silence, while a series of emotions played across the faces of Laurette’s parents. Then Sabine took up the story. “Hannah was just a year old when her daddy died. Laurette was devastated, of course. There was a counseling group for military wives offered through the VA. She went to that and it helped. At the time, I suggested that she go back to school and get her degree, but she said she wasn’t ready to do that. She got a job instead, at Entergy, the power company. They have a big office downtown. She worked as an admin assistant. She seemed to like it. A good job, with benefits. That’s what she called it.”

  Sabine picked up one of the framed photos. “This is Hannah, on her third birthday. That was nearly two years ago. She would have been five this year.”

  I nodded, acknowledging the sadness in her voice as I glanced at the little girl, blond like her father, smiling in a blue-and-yellow polka-dot dress. “The accident happened last year?”

  She nodded. “A year ago, in January. Laurette had just picked up Hannah from day care. That car ran a stop sign and crashed into Laurette’s car. Pushed it into a building. Hannah was in a car seat in the back, of course. But…she died in the emergency room. Laurette was badly hurt. She was in the hospital for nearly two weeks. And then…” Sabine’s voice trailed off.

  “She took some time off work,” George said. “Had to. The physical injuries healed, but she was so low.”

  “I’m sure it was devastating, for all of you.”

  “It was terrible.” Tears threatened to spill from Sabine’s eyes as she set the photograph of her granddaughter back on the coffee table.

  George put his hand on her shoulder. Then he looked at me. “Laurette got some counseling after Hannah died, like she did when she lost Chris. After a time, she went back to work. I asked if it was too soon and she said she couldn’t stand being at home all day. I thought things were getting better, or at least going along as well as could be expected. Then she met this guy. And believe me, he’s the wrong guy.”

  Worry shadowed both parents’ faces. Sabine grimaced. “Laurette says his first name is Eric but he prefers to go by his last name, which is Slade. I don’t even know for sure if that is his real name. It sounds made up. As far as I’m concerned, everything about him is phony.”

  It did sound like an alias, I thought. A nickname, perhaps, among musicians. As to whether everything about Slade was phony, I’d have to find out more about him before I could make that call. At one end of the coffee table was a folder containing printouts of digital photos taken on Christmas Day, when Laurette had brought Slade to her parents’ home for dinner. Most of the photos showed the Tedescos—the parents, plus Davina and her siblings. Very few of the shots showed Slade. It made me wonder if he didn’t like having his picture taken. There could be plenty of reasons for that. I looked at the few photos there were. He was good-looking, with dark brown hair that fell over his ears and the collar of his shirt and flopped over to obscure his forehead.

  “How did they meet?” I asked. “And when?”

  “She first mentioned him last fall,” Sabine said. “It was before Thanksgiving, I think. She could have been going out with him before that. We used to talk more, but since the accident, well, Laurette’s had a hard time. I understand that. Recovering from the loss, even though we’re here for her, she’s been keeping us at arm’s length, and that upsets me, and her father.” She glanced at her husband. “She hasn’t been forthcoming about what she’s doing, or who she’s with. When I ask, she acts like I’m prying. And I don’t mean to, really, I don’t.” She sighed. “As for where she met Slade, she was out with some people from work, going to clubs on Frenchmen Street.”

  I nodded. Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny district was famed for its music venues, bars and restaurants, a place where locals went to hear the music, rather than the crazy, touristy and sometimes raunchy scene on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter.

  “He was playing guitar at one of the clubs,” Sabine continued. “He asked for her phone number and later he called her. They started going out. She really seemed to like him. And it was good to see her smile again. But when she brought him over for Christmas dinner, I just didn’t like him.”

  “Neither did I,” George said.

  Why did they dislike Slade so much? I really needed to find out. “Why? Is it because he’s a musician?”

  “It’s not that,” Sabine protested. “I really don’t have anything against musicians. I’ve got a couple of cousins who are musicians. But I do have some concerns about the lifestyle some of those musicians have. Playing gigs, night after night in the clubs can lead to a lot of drinking and a lot of drugs. I know, firsthand. My cousin Alfie, the one who plays trumpet, he had problems with drugs for years. He’s clean now, thank goodness.”

  “And I don’t like Slade because there’s something about him that’s slippery,” George added. “I can’t describe it any
better than that. You know that feeling you get when something’s off? That’s the feeling I get when Slade’s in the room.”

  I knew the feeling very well. It had steered me right through many years of doing investigative work. For now, Slade was slippery to me as well. I didn’t have enough information to get a clear picture of the man. But I would get there.

  “He bosses her around a lot,” Sabine added. “And she lets him. That bothers me. Her husband, Chris, he wasn’t like that. They had a good marriage, a marriage of equals, and if they got into it, Laurette could give as good as she got. But when she’s with Slade, it seems like she goes out of her way to defer to him. It’s as though she’s afraid of him. And I certainly don’t like that.”

  I nodded. Davina had said much the same thing during our phone conversation last night.

  Slade had moved into Laurette’s apartment at the end of February, much to her parents’ dismay. They didn’t understand what Laurette saw in this man. Besides, she hadn’t known him all that long, just a few months. Pressed for a reason why the musician was now living with her, Laurette told her mother that Slade had to move out of his Treme apartment because the owner wanted the apartment for a relative.

  “I’m not sure I believed that story,” Sabine added.

  Her husband scowled. “I certainly don’t. This fellow had a job when Laurette met him. Working in a warehouse somewhere, according to Laurette. When I asked him about it at Christmas, he said he was going to quit that job. So he could focus on his music, that’s the way he put it. I have to wonder if he moved in with Laurette because he couldn’t afford his own place.”

  “That’s a possibility. I’ll check it out. Now, tell me what happened this weekend.”

  “Henry, that’s our son, had four days off from his job on the oil rig,” Sabine said. “His birthday was on Saturday. We planned a big party that afternoon, with a lot of relatives and a bunch of Henry’s friends. Laurette was supposed to be there. I’d mentioned it to her the week before. I called her cell phone several times. She’s one of those people who gave up having a land line, so she just used her cell. She didn’t answer the phone and she didn’t call me back. I left several voice mails.”

  “I drove over to her place that night,” George said. “But her car was gone and nobody answered the door. It was late, and I figured she’d gone out, but I was upset that she hadn’t called us back. Sunday morning, we still hadn’t heard from her. Sabine and I drove over to the apartment. They’ve got a resident manager, name of Bert. He told us Laurette had given up the apartment. She and Slade packed up everything into a big SUV on Friday, he said, and left. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

  Tears spilled down Sabine’s cheeks. “I had a phone number for someone she worked with. A woman named Brenda. I called and left a message and later Sunday night, Brenda called me back. She told me Laurette gave notice and quit her job at Entergy. And Brenda said she had no idea where Laurette was. Gone. Just like that. Without a word to any of us.”

  There was something odd about Laurette’s actions, I thought. Maybe I could get some answers, or at least a lead as to where Laurette had gone. But I couldn’t make her come home if she didn’t want to return.

  “I’d like to talk with Brenda, and Laurette’s other friends,” I said. Davina had already steered me to Laurette’s Facebook page, which was of little help. There were lots of posts and photos of Laurette and her husband, from a few years back, the photos of Laurette and her daughter—up until a year ago, when Hannah died in the car accident. Since then, the page had been neglected. Laurette lost interest in sharing her life on the Internet.

  Sabine reached for a notepad on the coffee table, tore off a sheet and handed it to me. “I made a list. Brenda Kohl is the woman who worked with Laurette at Entergy. Grace Boudreaux is a friend she met at the university. They stayed in touch and they get together now and then. And Mary Abbott, that third name, she and Laurette were in that counseling group for military wives.”

  It was a short list, I thought, examining the names and phone numbers. It appeared that Laurette didn’t have that many friends. I could understand how that could happen. When she was married, her focus had been on her husband and child. As a widow, the focus had narrowed to her child. With the death of her daughter, Laurette had been floundering, according to her sister, Davina, trying to make sense of her world.

  More tears swam in Sabine’s eyes. “How could she just leave like that, without letting us know? And with that man. Laurette wouldn’t talk about him much, not to us, not to Davina. She knew we didn’t approve of him. So she was very closed-mouth about him. We had an argument about it, after he moved in with her. She told me I was suffocating her.” As she said this, her eyes filled with tears again. “I don’t mean to do that. She’s a grown woman, of course. But I just have a bad feeling about this. Call it mother’s instinct, call it what you will. I wish my little girl would come back. Not just from wherever she’s gone right now. But the way she was, before her husband and baby died.”

  I knew what Sabine Tedesco was saying and I thought I understood her sense of loss. Laurette wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a woman who’d had a husband and child—and lost both. The old Laurette wasn’t coming back. It would never be the same. The Tedescos would have to come to terms with that, to get used to the new Laurette and accept her choices.

  As for me, I was only doing this as a favor to Davina, my friend. Though right now I wondered if this was a wild goose chase.

  Chapter Four

  The Tedescos didn’t know what had happened to Laurette’s car. She drove a green Honda Civic, purchased after her other car had been destroyed in the car accident that killed Hannah. The resident manager at Laurette’s building had told her parents that Laurette and Slade had loaded their belongings into an SUV. I was guessing that Laurette had sold the Honda and used the money to purchase the vehicle. I copied down the information on the Civic and hoped that Antoine Lasalle, if he called me back, could help me trace it.

  I said good-bye to Laurette’s parents and left the house. The car I’d rented was a Nissan sedan, metallic green, and I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment, taking a sip from the water bottle I’d left on the console. It was warm on this sunny day in April, but not unpleasantly so. During my week-long visit to the Big Easy, the temperatures had been in the high 70s, with the nights in the high 60s, and we’d had a few rain showers. I’d been told the mild spring weather was quite different from the heat and humidity of the summer and the early fall. It was also very different from the climate back home in the Bay Area, where microclimates vary by town and neighborhood. This spring in Oakland had been a season of contrasts. A couple of weeks ago, we’d had a hot spell, then it had given way to several days of wind, rain and chilly temperatures.

  After another sip of water, I took out my cell phone and turned up the ringer. I saw three missed calls and one voice mail. Two calls were from the Bay Area and the third showed a New Orleans area code.

  The voice mail was from Antoine Lasalle. His message said he had an appointment in the Sixth Ward this morning and was planning to have lunch around noon. “If you’re in town, you have to try Willie Mae’s Scotch House. Meet me for lunch at noon,” he added, and rattled off the address. “Text me at this number to confirm.”

  I sent a text telling him I’d meet him there, then I started the car and took off, heading out of Mid-City into the Sixth Ward. Dad and I had eaten at Willie Mae’s twice during our week in New Orleans. The restaurant served what many customers viewed as the best fried chicken on the planet. It was located on the corner of St. Ann and North Tonti streets. As had been the case on my previous visits, customers were queued up outside the white building. I joined them. A young woman came out of the restaurant and went down the line, asking how many people were in each party. I told her there would be two of us. Then I sent another text to Antoine, telling him I was at the restaurant. Soon after, my phone pinged with a response— �
�ETA 15.”

  About ten minutes later, I was admitted to the inner sanctum and seated at one of the tables. The interior walls were caramel-colored, decorated with framed art and copies of the restaurant’s various awards. In 2005, owner Willie Mae Seaton received the James Beard Award denoting her eatery as “America’s Classic Restaurant for the Southern Region.” The restaurant had been badly damaged later that year, when Hurricane Katrina wrought destruction all over the city. Willie Mae’s had reopened in 2007, to more accolades from the Food Network and the Travel Channel.

  I’d just gotten my glass of unsweetened iced tea when the door opened and Antoine walked in. He looked much as I remembered him, tall and lean, with a café au lait complexion and his hair cropped close to his head. I knew from our earlier meeting at the convention a couple of years ago that he was a native of the Big Easy. He was also an Army veteran who had served in Iraq and other duty stations, in a criminal investigation capacity. When he returned to New Orleans after mustering out of the service, he’d gone to work for a local investigative firm, the one he’d left to start his own business.

  Today he wore gray slacks and a lightweight jacket over a blue shirt, open at the neck. He spotted me and crossed the dining room to join me. “Jeri, good to see you. What are you doing in town? Vacation?”

  “That’s how it started. It’s gotten complicated. It’s a case, and I hope you can help me.”

  Interest sparked in his dark brown eyes. He pulled out a chair. “Sure thing. Let’s order first, though.” He signaled to a server, who greeted him by name. “Bring me some of that iced tea. You know I like it sweet.”