Red Beans and Vice (20 page)

Heaven pushed and pried bags apart so she could read their origins. She found some labeled
ORGANIC BOLIVIA
and others saying
COLUMBIA ESTATE
. That seemed like a good place to start. Now she had to find one of those tools, the trier. She knew that the time clock was in the room with the fancy coffeepot and the tables and chairs for employees to eat their lunch. She went there and sure enough, a whole row of triers hung on hooks on the wall by leather loops, along with the long lab coats she had seen some workers wearing. She grabbed one of the triers and went back to the bags.

She was looking forward to this part. It had looked like fun stabbing into the coffee bags. Heaven slipped off her heels and climbed up on a small stack of the Bolivian beans. She was awkward with the tool at first, tearing a hole in the first burlap sack by not having a smooth in-and-out motion. Someone would curse when they moved this bag and it leaked beans all over the place. The person doing the cursing would most likely be the surly man who hadn’t revealed his name the day before. Oh, well. After a few attempts, Heaven got the trier down pat. She could stab down into the bag deep enough to be sure there wasn’t a bag of emeralds hiding in there. She methodically stabbed each bag in three different places, then moved on. Soon she was out of Bolivia and almost done with Columbia. She briefly considered diamonds from Africa and almost started over to the African coffee, then gave up. This wasn’t getting her anywhere. She sat down on the edge of the pallets and looked at the mess she’d made. Because she wasn’t armed with the baggies that were needed to store the
beans that came out of the burlap bags in the trier tube, she had just tossed them on the floor. All around the pallets of bags she’d been poking in, there were coffee beans. They stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise neat environment. Heaven considered finding a broom and cleaning up after herself. She decided against it. If she hadn’t found anything in the sacks of coffee beans, maybe she’d learn something from the reaction to a break-in at the warehouse. It might scare someone into making a mistake and she might notice that mistake.

With that decision, she walked back to the lunchroom and hung up the trier. Then she walked down the hall and opened every door. Most of them were for offices, full of invoices and computers and fax machines. But down at the end of the hall, several doors past Truely’s office, she found a room that puzzled her. It looked as though a brand-new sewing machine had just been moved into the room; the box for it was still lying on the floor. A chair had been pulled up to a table and the sewing machine was plugged in and set up. On the floor beside the chair was a stack of coffee bags, their seams carefully opened so they were flat. Heaven looked through the pile. Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico, Ethiopia. Not a Bolivia or Columbia in sight. What Heaven couldn’t understand was why the sewing machine? Was Mary going into the coffee bag fashion business? Since she wasn’t supposed to be here, it wasn’t a question Heaven could just ask when she got home, but she definitely would have to find out.

Heaven tackled Truely’s office last. After ten minutes of determined digging, she was almost ready to give up on it. She couldn’t take the time to go through the file cabinets and the desk didn’t seem to have one personal item in it, not one. It was a massive oak number with a
wide middle drawer, a lot like the desk her Mom had used in the barn for her antique business. Heaven remembered things getting caught in that middle drawer, so she pulled it out again and wiggled the drawer up and down, putting her hand back as far as she could. There was something wedged in between the drawer and the side of the desk at the back of the drawer. Heaven gently pried at it until it fell out the other direction on the floor. It was a photograph. She reached down and picked it up.

“Oh, shit,” she said out loud. It was a photo of Amelia Hart wearing a revealing piece of lingerie, a teddy. Heaven supposed you could call that little bit of lace a teddy. Amelia was blowing a big kiss at whoever was holding the camera. Heaven slipped the photo in her purse and tried to put the desk back in the same disarray it had been in when she started her search, wondering if someone else had been there before her, removing the private stuff but missing that photo. Maybe Mary looked through it when they’d been there the day before, trying to find all of Truely’s papers. Or maybe it had been tossed today, while all were gone. She took off for the warehouse.

When she got back to the door she’d entered, she put on the raincoat, went out and purposely left the door slightly ajar. It wasn’t enough to attract the attention of a vagrant looking for a home for the night, but it would tell the warehouse crew that someone had been there. That and all the coffee beans she’d left on the floor should shake someone up.

Heaven went out under the fence, this time taking her shoes off and shoving them to the other side of the fence first along with her purse. She was getting better at this breaking-and-entering stuff.

T
he house was quiet when Heaven got back. They must have run out of scotch. Quickly, she went up to her room and now changed her clothes into tights and a big white linen men’s shirt. She went back downstairs looking for Mary, quickly trying to figure out what she was going to say about her whereabouts. Blending back in with the crowd wasn’t an option.

She found Mary sitting by herself on the enclosed porch, obviously one of her favorite places. “Heaven, where have you been?”

She lied. “I didn’t know hardly anyone and after the first hour I had run out of niceties. I don’t know how you Southerners do it. I went over to Audubon Park. Ended up at the zoo. It was great. But what I want to know is how did you get rid of the hordes of people that were here?”

“When the food was gone, they left. Also, I think Will told them it was time to go.”

“Where’s Will?”

“I told him it was also time for him to go home and get some rest. I know he’s crushed about Truely and he just hasn’t had a chance to let go.”

“What about you? It seems like we haven’t had any time to talk about this stuff. Have you bawled your eyes out yet?”

“That first night I did. But the medication is making everything hazy now. I’m still numb.”

“Just remember, give yourself a time limit on taking the pills. They can creep up on you.”

“Right now I don’t care if I ever come out of this fog.”

Heaven started to say something trite about time changing the way we felt about tragedy, but she decided
to keep her homilies to herself. “So what are you going to do tomorrow?”

“I’ve asked for a month off from the law firm so I can attend to Truely’s business, decide if I want to keep it or sell it. In the morning two lawyers who are taking my cases for the month are coming over so we can go through them. Luckily, I don’t have anything ready to go to court right now.”

“Good, then I’ll work on my project in the morning while you’re busy.”

“What project?”

Heaven smiled innocently. “You know, who has it in for the nuns.” And what Truely was doing with a naughty photo of Amelia Hart in his desk, she thought to herself with a sinking feeling.

H
eaven stood outside the restaurant Bayona and let her eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. She’d stopped there to check with Susan Spicer on where the labor for the benefit dinner had come from. Heaven hadn’t given it much thought at the time. She’d supposed that employees of the many restaurants and cafes in the French Quarter had somehow been summoned. But in the cold light of day she realized nothing happens without someone making the phone calls and having access to temporary labor. Susan’s manager had confirmed this. They had used a temporary staffing agency in the food service field. The service sent waiters and dishwashers to hotels when they had a big convention and their own staff couldn’t handle it, or an offsite party for a restaurant. They also worked with the local caterers to supply workers for them.

The office of the employment agency was on Burgundy
so Heaven walked over there. The young man behind the desk was very polite; tall, with a shaved head and a nose ring. No, he didn’t mind showing her the list of workers from the night of the chefs dinner. After all, the police had that list already.

“Thank you so much,” Heaven said sweetly. “As I said, I’m one of the chefs that cooked that night, and there were two or three people that I thought I might want to hire again, although I’m not sure what their names were. Do you think I could take a copy of the list with me so I could call folks from my own phone?”

The man behind the desk guessed it would be okay. These people wanted temporary work. But what would happen to the fee that the agency was supposed to collect, if Heaven were to hire these people independently, he asked slyly.

Heaven dug around in her purse and came up with her business card and fifty dollars. She scribbled her cell phone number on the card and handed it and the cash to the man. “This is my old card, from when I lived in Kansas City, but that’s my cell phone number on the back. And here is a little good-faith money, so you know I’m not trying to cheat your firm. If I hire any of them I’ll call you and have them report to you as well.”

The young man considered this for a second and swept the cash off the desk into his pocket with a nod. The deal was done.

“Would you help me with just one more thing? Could you go down the list with me and comment on the people you know? You can tell the servers from the dish people better than I.” Heaven had spotted a lone straight-back chair pushed against the wall. The place was a pretty bare-bones operation. She quickly grabbed it and carried it over to the young man’s post, knowing
that unless he was totally unlike most people in the food business, he wouldn’t refuse to give his opinions on the crew.

In twenty minutes or so, Heaven was standing outside the employment offices having learned more than she wanted to about the temporary servers of New Orleans; which ones were addicted to cocaine, which were reliable, which showed up late but at least showed up. There were only five names the deskman wasn’t familiar with. Three of the names were Hispanic with no addresses and Heaven figured they would be the hardest to track down. One was a woman and Heaven didn’t know what to think about that. Sure, a woman could shove a knife in Truely with enough force to kill him. But could she then position his body in a tub of running water, complete with the cross? It was possible, but it was much more likely the killer was a man. The fifth unfamiliar name was generic, James Smith, and that rang Heaven’s bell. If you were a hired hit man, you’d want to be anonymous, Heaven supposed. James Smith didn’t have a phone number on the list, just the words Verti Mart. That’s where Heaven was headed now.

Verti Mart was a French Quarter institution. Heaven supposed it had once been a corner grocery store. And it still had soft drinks and liquor and milk in the front. But mainly it was a deli with a huge prepared food business. Mass quantities of food were prepared there every day for the workers and residents of the Quarter to consume. The variety was astounding. Meat loaf, baked chicken, meatballs and spaghetti, scalloped potatoes, all the po’boy sandwich combinations, every salad known to a deli, vegetables dressed and cheesed up were behind the counter. The place was open twenty-four
hours a day and had teams of delivery bicycles running all over the Quarter with their wares.

Heaven had been in the Verti Mart last week, walking back to her hotel from prepping at Peristyle restaurant. She had gone in for some bottled water and stayed for twenty minutes talking about all the food they offered. Today the same team of workers was behind the counter, a young man with purple hair and one with tattoos all over his arms and what Heaven could see of his torso. Although these guys did not wear chef’s jackets—cut off jeans, tee shirts and dirty white aprons seemed to be the standard uniform—they did have their armpits covered, and they had hip head scarfs holding their hair away from the food. Just one shock of purple curls stuck out in the front of the head rag of the one boy.

Heaven talked to their backs as they worked. “Hey, I know you don’t remember me. I was in here last week.”

The two moved as one, turning toward Heaven and then turning back to the Styrofoam containers they were filling. “Yeah, I remember your hair,” the purple-haired boy said. “Can I get you something?”

“I was looking for someone, and I’d love some macaroni and cheese,” Heaven said, knowing she had to order something to keep their interest. “Do you have an employee named James Smith?”

“We did. Hasn’t showed,” the tattoo man said as he pulled the macaroni and cheese container out of the cooler and piled what must have been five pounds of the stuff in a container for Heaven. He put it in the microwave and turned the switch.

“Did he work here long? Any idea where I can find him?” Heaven asked.

They both shook their heads in unison. “Only about
two weeks. He hasn’t been here this week. Slacker,” purple hair declared solemnly.

“By the way, what did he look like? Was there anything unusual about him?” Heaven asked.