“What, we’re you makin’ a date? I got a hot tip. Let’s go.”
“You also got someone else’s truck and someone else’s boat. I’m confused. I thought you were drinking today.”
“Yeah, well, you and the River King ruined that one.”
“Doesn’t smell like it.”
“Fine. You drive. I’m not good with towin’ anyway.” Marissa hopped out from behind the driver’s seat but she left the engine running and the keys in the ignition.
“What’s happening right now?” Ben asked the surrounding houses as much as he asked his boss.
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way
“Beau Chene. You ever been to Beau Chene? It’s lovely.”
Ben got behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. He wasn’t in the habit of towing boats either, but the thing wasn’t exactly a yacht, so as long as he took corners slowly . . . “It’s my neighbor Clem’s. He told me if there’s a levee failure before we get it back, he’s going to haunt my dreams. He just keeps it in his driveway. Thinks it’s gonna scare hurricanes away.”
“What the hot tip?”
“Looks like some banker killed his wife and then hit the road. It’s a crime scene, Ben, and we’re gonna crash it.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea . . .”
“Not sure
“For you to come along.”
“Oh, really?”
“Marissa, you smell like rum.”
“I’m a child of the Caribbean. Leave me alone.”
Marissa threw up her hand as if preparing some big lecture, but instead her chest heaved and her breaths sputtered out of her and for a few minutes, they just sat there, the tinny voices of WWL News Radio playing faintly in the background. “Let’s just say Hilda Lane picked the wrong morning to warn me off another story.”
“Oh dear.”
“Banker’s name is Daniel J. Stevens. Son came home a few hours ago, found his mother beaten to death. TV hasn’t gotten wind of it, but Hilda’s friends with the family and she said she doesn’t want us digging into it.”
“So you dug into it?”
“Yep. Got an off-the-record source with St. Tammany Sheriff says they found something open on the computer, something about Mr. Stevens stealing from one of the trusts he managed. They think the wife saw it too, and that’s why she’s dead.”
“I still don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go with me.”
“Well, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to go at all, given the man manages a trust that belongs to Marshall Ferriot.” She let Ben absorb the impact of this body blow for a few seconds. Then, with a leering smile, she added, “Who knows? Maybe it was the one he was stealing from . . . That’s right. How ’bout you thank me instead of acting like my daddy?”
“I hear he was a lot taller. Okay. The boat?”
“Gated community, but the Tchefuncte runs right through it and it’s not gated.”
“I see . . .”
“I’m going, Uptown Girl. You can do the driving. But I’m going.”
“Why?”
“?’Cause it might be the last story we work on together for a while.”
“Oh, Jesus. What did you say to Hilda?”
“I told her if she didn’t like the way journalism worked, maybe she should get her husband to buy her a store so she could sell shiny things to other white ladies and leave me to do my goddamn job.”
“You might be able to recover from that one.”
“Yeah . . . not the part about how I held her personally responsible for all those deaths out in Ascension Parish. That one’s gonna stick, I think.”
Ben was speechless, suddenly imagining a future at
“Come on, Ben. Time’s a wastin’. We don’t want WDSU catchin’ this thing before we do.”
Ben took the truck out of park and placed his foot on the gas.
“What was that phone call about?” Marissa asked, once they’d gone a few blocks and the shock of her revelation seemed further away.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, it’s a day for that, isn’t it?”
“You got that right,” Ben whispered. “Marissa, if they fire you, I’ll—”
“Don’t. Not yet. We’ll talk about it later. Just drive.”
A few minutes later, Ben’s phone let out a small chime that told him he had a new email. The message was from Alison Cross, and the attachment was a photograph of her and her missing husband, standing on a windswept beach in the light of dusk. She was a plump, fading beauty with flame-red hair, and he was a foot taller than her, with thick, ink-black eyebrows and a deeply recessed brow that looked poised to swallow his pinprick eyes.
Ben had seen the man before, in an old photograph the Delongpres used to keep on the living room wall. It had been taken on the night Nikki’s father had proposed to her mother, back when Elysium was just a muddy acreage with two trailers parked a few yards from each other and string lights running through the low-hanging branches, all of it powered by a gas generator. In it, the happy couple and several of their close friends were crowded around a lounge chair as a young Millie Delongpre extended her ring finger toward the camera. Jeffrey Cross has been one of the friends featured in that photo. But that was the extent of his contact with the man—a picture on the wall of a friend’s house, a friend who had been declared legally dead a few years before. And he was too distracted by the strong scent of booze coming off his boss to spend his afternoon wandering down the darkest part of memory lane.
• • •
Ben was glad they weren’t the only boat launching from Madisonville that day. It meant the police hadn’t closed off the Tchefuncte farther upriver. As he did his best to obey the no-wake rule posted on buoys that bobbed in the dark green water on either side of the tiny boat, Marissa fussed with her iPhone, cupping one hand over the screen to shield it from the sun while she tapped it with the other. The boat had a tiny tarp that only covered the captain’s chair.
“Any idea how far into Beau Chene we have to go?” Ben shouted over the motor.
“I’m workin’ on it.”
“Is that a no?”
“We’re workin’ to beat the clock here. I didn’t exactly have time to pull out my swamp atlas, all right?”
She had a point, and to her credit, she’d tried ceaselessly on the ride there to get her phone to connect to Google Maps, only to have her signal drop every few minutes or so.
After just a little while on the water, walls of cypress rose on either side of the river, and it was easy to believe they were in the middle of a vast unending swamp. But the palatial homes of Beau Chene would rise on the eastern bank in just another few minutes. They had only about another hour before dark and the setting sun laced the rippling green water with elongated tree shadows and great blades of orange.
“We could go it on our own,” Ben said.
“Ben—”
“We could. Seriously. The whole online advertising thing’s a whole ’nother ball game. We’d figure it out . . . eventually.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Okay, now, I’m guessing we get two bends in the river before we hit the Stevens place. So why don’t you—”
