Death of a Beauty Queen. Mallory Kane
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and he loved her for it. He sat down in a glider and gently rocked back and forth as he enjoyed that first swallow of coffee of the day. It was the best.
His phone rang again. He took another long swallow before leisurely retrieving it. He checked the display. Wexler again.
“Bruce? Twice before seven? This better be good.” Wasabe allowed a slight irritation to color his voice, just enough to worry the president of his accounting firm.
“It’s important, Mr. Wasabe. There’s a kid running his mouth. Says he saw the Delancey girl. The one who was murdered twelve years ago. The Carnival Queen?”
Wasabe’s throat closed on a sip of coffee. He coughed. “So?” he asked, clearing his throat and trying to sound casual, but hearing the anxiety in his voice. “That’s what you woke me up for? Some yahoo trying to sell a bill of goods, like we hear every week?”
It couldn’t be true. Rosemary Delancey couldn’t be alive. Not after all this time. But a flutter of hope tickled the back of his throat. If she were …
“I know how you like Delancey stuff,” Wexler went on. “So I knew you’d want to hear about this.”
Wasabe had given his employees and associates hints over the years of his interest in the Delancey family. He’d never explained why. He’d left it to them to draw their own conclusions. Apparently, the majority of them believed he was obsessed with the infamous late-patriarch of the clan, Con Delancey.
Wexler was still talking and he’d missed most of it. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said the kid is James Fulbright’s boy.”
“The loudmouth? He’s Councilman Fulbright’s son?”
“Yeah. He’s saying his pop was King of Krewe Ti Malice the year the Delancey girl was Carnival Queen.”
“Was he?” Wasabe asked. Wexler should know. The Wexlers had ridden in Mardi Gras parades for decades.
“Yes, sir. He sure was. Junior was probably about twelve. He claims she was his first crush. Said he’d recognize her in a whorehouse under a sweaty fat john.”
“How’d you hear about this?”
“Junior was bragging. He told me T-Bo Pereau was hanging around. Said Pereau sneaked off like a pup that had just snatched a bone away from a big dog.”
“And who the hell is T-Bo Pereau?”
“A nobody. In and out of prison for possession and small-time dealing.”
“Keep an eye on Pereau, and bring Junior Fulbright to the office. Noon. He knows Rosemary so well, he can find her for us. And if he talks to anybody else I’ll cut off his thumbs.” Wasabe grimaced. “And don’t be late. I’m going to my daughter’s soccer game at six.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wasabe hung up and picked up his coffee with a shaky hand. Twelve years ago, while working as a small-time collector for a loan shark, he’d made a choice that earned him a lucrative career as a contract killer. However, it left him effectively indentured to a powerful and ruthless man.
Was this his chance to close the book on that first botched job? If Rosemary Delancey really was alive, maybe he could finally earn his freedom by delivering her to The Boss.
IT WAS HER. He was sure of it. Detective Dixon Lloyd’s pulse hammered in his ears. That two-bit drug dealer he and his partner, Ethan Delancey, had collared for parole violation was right, and Ethan was wrong.
T-Bo Pereau had sworn he could tell them where Rosemary Delancey, the supposedly murdered Carnival Queen, was, in exchange for not putting him back in prison. Dixon had wanted to make the deal, but Ethan had scoffed.
You’re being suckered by the Delancey mystique, he’d told him. As soon as Pereau heard my name, I saw the wheels turning in his brain and the dollar signs in his eyes. Trust me. When you’re dealing with the Delancey name there’s always a story. A few years ago a murderer tried to get immunity by telling my brother Lucas who really killed our granddad. A couple of times a year the local tabloids will carry a photo that “proves” that Con Delancey is alive and living with a Cajun woman in the bayou or something just as outrageous.
Dixon had heard the stories himself, so he figured Ethan was right. Still, he hadn’t wanted to take a chance. Poor T-Bo Pereau had gone back to Angola, but Dixon had quietly called in a favor and gotten him a few perks in exchange for what he knew about Rosemary Delancey.
T-Bo’s information had been disappointing to say the least. All he’d given Dixon was a weak story about seeing a woman who’d looked like the murdered Carnival Queen catching the Prytania streetcar on Canal. When Dixon asked him how he could be sure it was Rosemary Delancey, T-Bo had replied, Everybody knows the Delanceys.
Dixon had figured he could write off his time and the favor he’d called in.
But now, as Dixon watched the woman walking down the street, he sent up thanks that he’d followed up on the two-bit dealer’s story.
Her hair was inky black and captured into a long, loose braid. She was covered from neck to fingertips to toes by a long skirt, a gauzy long-sleeved blouse and some kind of lacy gloves. But there was no mistaking that tilt of her head or that walk.
Dixon unconsciously touched his wallet, where he carried the photo he’d taken from her apartment all those years ago. A deep sadness still weighed on his chest each time he thought about that horrific, bloody crime scene. It had been his first homicide. The upscale Garden District apartment had been drenched in her blood, but Rosemary Delancey’s body had never been found.
The woman slowed down, so he did, too, keeping her in sight but not getting too close. She glided along as if the narrow, uneven sidewalk were a beauty pageant runway, cradling a long loaf of French bread like an armful of roses.
Dixon was no expert on beauty pageants or Mardi Gras Carnival queens, but after her murder he’d searched out every photograph and video ever taken of Rosemary Delancey. He’d become an expert on what she looked like and how she walked.
At that moment she turned her head to check the traffic before crossing Prytania Street. When he saw her full-face for the first time, his certainty melted like cotton candy in the rain.
Viewed straight-on, there was something not quite right about her features. Before he had time to figure out what it was, however, she’d turned away again and crossed the street.
She said something to a newspaper kiosk vendor and he laughed. She continued on. At the door of a two-story shotgun house three doors down she produced a key from a hidden pocket in her skirt and unlocked the door.
Dixon’s pulse raced. Had he really found Rosemary Delancey? Because T-Bo Pereau’s information had her boarding the Prytania streetcar, Dixon had checked the public records of every single resident within a twenty-block radius, without much hope of success. He’d found three people with names similar to Rosemary.
Rosalie Adams, who was eighty-three; Rosemary Marsden, forty-eight, who owned a dress shop on Magazine Street; and Rose Bohème, thirty, whose signature was on Renée Pettitpas’s permit renewal for a display space on Jackson Square. Of the three, only Rose Bohème held any promise, although she was too young to be Rosemary Delancey, who would have been thirty-four. Still, it had been a place to start.
Now here he was, standing in front of Renée Pettitpas’s address, his head spinning with excitement. If Rose Bohème was Rosemary Delancey …
Dixon looked up at the house. Its chips and peels spoke of several decades of stucco and paint—white, pink, gray and most recently green. In this part of town, the effect of the crumbling layers with old brick peeking through was charming.
Dixon’s sister made quite a good living working to achieve the same effect artificially for clients who loved the look but preferred to pay outrageous sums for faux finishing for their Garden District mansions rather