Two

Celina heard the coldness in her own voice and bowed her head. One thing she’d always been proud of was her ability to appear calm under pressure. Mama wasn’t “steady,” Daddy had always warned. For her parents’ sake it was up to Celina to be real steady. Evidently she’d perfected her act very well. Too bad she felt as if she were disintegrating inside.

Jack Charbonnet gave her one of his unfathomable stares. “You didn’t even bother to get Antoine.”

When he was outside, Antoine was the Royal Street gardener. When he was inside, he filled whatever position was necessary. “He doesn’t live here. It’s early.”

“Not that early. He was working on the banana trees in the courtyard when I arrived. When did Errol collapse?”

“It was seven or so when I found him.”

“It’s after nine now. Antoine gets here before seven, doesn’t he?”

What was he trying to say, to ask? “I didn’t go for Antoine because I didn’t think about it. That’s all I can tell you.”

“That man has worked for Errol for years. He loves him. You knew that.”

“I didn’t think to get him,” she repeated. Jack Charbonnet wouldn’t batter her into losing control.

He turned on his heel and returned to crouch over Errol. Celina’s legs wobbled and she sank to sit on the floor. Errol ran Dreams as a tight ship. Every penny they took in from auctions and other fund-raisers went to terminally ill children and their families, to funding services to those children, and minimally for the support of Errol and his staff of two: Celina and Antoine. Rooms on the other side of the second-story apartment—antique stores occupied the ground floor on Royal Street—rent-free rooms were a good part of Celina’s compensation.

Jack Charbonnet didn’t approve of her living there. She knew because she’d overheard him telling Errol as much. Today she’d seen how he assessed what she wore, and she remembered his voice when he said, “Sure, your private lives are separate. And you didn’t hire her as the Dreams Girl to wring donations out of horny old men—rich, horny old men, because she’s beautiful and sexy? She’ll bring trouble, Errol. Get rid of her.”

“Errol,” she whispered, and touched a fingertip to the tumble of green sheets and green and gold spread spilling over the side of the bed. She’d chosen them for him to replace his threadbare linens. “Oh, Errol.” Her dear friend, her best friend, the one she could rely on to listen, to smile, and to help when she needed help. He’d told Jack he was wrong about her, and warned him not to raise the subject again.

Errol was dead.

Yesterday he’d told her she looked tired and given her this morning off. She had been in bed when calls began switching through from his lines to her phone, and she came to see if he was all right.

Celina shuddered. How long had she stood there, looking down at him?

She had panicked, almost fainted, then refused to believe he wouldn’t come to and smile at her.

What was the sickly smell in the room? The fans moved sluggishly through heavy air.

Errol’s blond hair, turning gray at the temples, was clearly visible to the left of Jack’s lowered knee. Celina didn’t think Jack was looking at Errol, but that he had covered his own face with his right hand.

She heard his long, slow exhalation, then he stood up and said, “Why did you put the towel over his face?” without turning to her.

“Ι don’t know.” She felt ill, but she was calmer now. “How do you know why you do things when you do them?”

“Most people have an idea.” He swept up the towel.

She drove her fingers into her hair. “Most people don’t find their best friend dead on the bathroom floor with”—she waved her hands—”like that—like he is. I couldn’t bear that he was so vulnerable. His eyes. He looked so shocked.”

“Your best friend?” Jack turned around and walked slowly into the bedroom. He still held the towel. “Curious thing to call your boss. I’m going to ask you again. What went on here?”

He stood so close, she had to crane her neck to see his face. “That’s where I found him—how I found him. I don’t know what happened.”

According to talk, Jack’s roots were Cajun on his father’s side, and they showed in his thick, black hair, which he wore short, and in a lean face that never appeared completely clean shaven. His eyes were that hazel color, perhaps more green than hazel, and could hold an unblinking intensity Celina found uncomfortable. A tall man, his broad-shouldered body was muscular but slender, and he moved with deceptively languid grace. They said he was dangerous, but the reasons were never clear. A man to fear, she’d been warned by her mother, but Bitsy Payne feared most people whom she didn’t consider her social equal.

“You didn’t expect me this mornin’, did you?” he asked in his deep, slow tones. His drawl wasn’t as strong as some, but it was enough to be another reminder that Jack Charbonnet’s family tree was very different from Celina’s. He made her too aware of being female, had done so from the first time they met. She didn’t recall another man having the same, or even a similar impact on her.

“No. Jack, Errol—”

“You didn’t call for help because you were tryin’ to decide what to do next.”

He managed to make every sentence sound like an accusation. “I was trying to make sense out of this,” she told him.

“Shouldn’t have been tough. Unless you didn’t know Errol’s father died of a heart attack at fifty. His uncle was fifty-two. Errol ignored it, but he’d already been told he was high risk.” He glanced at the pile of women’s underwear he’d seen on the floor earlier. “I thought he had himself under better—Never mind. If I had to go on a hunch, I’d say he died because somethin’ was too much for him.” His eyes narrowed and he looked her over slowly enough to make her even more edgy.

She averted her face. “I knew about his heart. But I can’t believe he’s dead. I just can’t believe it.”

“Regardless of what you can believe, we’d better get back to the plan you were working on before I got here.”

Celina held quite still for a moment before looking up at his face again. “Plan?”

“The one you said I’m goin’ to help you with. That’s the one you started on when you decided not to call for help when he died.”

“I wasn’t with him when he died.”

“So you say.”

Her head hurt. “So it was. I wish I had been there when he collapsed. Perhaps I could have helped him.”

He strolled to pick up the underwear. Very deliberately he held each piece aloft.

Celina blushed. Α pair of black panties that were nothing more than a small triangle and some strings, and a transparent black bra with lace stitched around holes cut out where a woman’s nipples would be. The stockings had lace at the tops but were torn. The garter belt was another abbreviated collection of elastic covered with gathered silk. Jack threw the black scraps on the bed.

She got to her feet. “I’m going to have to leave this room. I can’t bear it here any longer.”

He went around her and closed the door. “I understand your feelin’ that way, chère. I feel the same way, but you and I aren’t goin’ anywhere without some really careful thought, remember? There’s too much tied up in Dreams to allow it all to slip away now.”

Goose bumps ran along her skin. “So you are worried about the foundation losing money.”

“Money doesn’t have a thing to do with this. Everything he was working for depends on people being willin’ to hitch their wagons to Dreams with absolute assurance that the last thing they’ll be faced with is scandal.”

She crossed her arms. “I know all about what makes the foundation click. I know it from every angle. You invested in Dreams. Errol told me you did. A lot of money.”

“Sure I did. At the time…No, you don’t have to know any more about my part in everythin’. You’re an employee, an employee I didn’t want hired, let alone set up in an adjoining room to Errol’s.”

“I’m not in an—”

“Figuratively speaking,” he said, blinking slowly. “All you have to do to get here is walk through a few rooms. 1 figure we’re in this together, chère, so I’m going to say things I wouldn’t say otherwise. Errol was a recoverin’ addict.”

Did he think she’d worked side by side with Errol for almost two years and known him for years before that without being aware of the demons he’d fought?

“He came through a long, dark tunnel. That was his description, not mine. But he made it through—almost.” His unflinching gaze moved beyond her again. “Dammit, he tried to get past it. He surely did try.”

Celina had always assumed Jack knew Errol’s secrets, but evidently Jack had no notion she might know them, too. “He must have been in the bath and felt ill. There’s water all over. He made it out and collapsed.”

“It could have happened that way,” Jack said. “It probably did. He was a charismatic man. Women always fell for him That’s what made it so hard on him.”

“Don’t.” She couldn’t stand to hear it all aired, all of the past Errol had managed to bury. “He was a good man, the best.”

“He was a recoverin’ alcoholic.”

“Member of a large club, according to what Ι hear,” Celina said, thinking of her own stepfather.

“The stuff was more poisonous to him than to most of the other members. He was told he had what amounted to an allergy. It scared him. But he fell off the wagon this time.”

She’d smelled liquor of some kind. “You don’t know he was the one—”

“The one doing the drinking? Rather than the lady who owns those?” He pointed to the clothing on the bed. “Okay. Let’s say you weren’t the one he had fun and games with before he died. He didn’t need you flauntin’ yourself in front of him seven days a week. Turnin’ him on so he might be more vulnerable.”

“Flaunting?” Even the word stunned her. She spread her arms. “Have you ever seen me flaunt myself?”

He looked her over from head to foot and gave a short laugh. His all-seeing stare brought a rush of heat. Her own intense response shook her. He said, “Do you get to be Miss Louisiana without flauntin’ yourself?”

She winced. “You weren’t talking about a beauty pageant six years ago. You were suggesting I’ve been trying to attract Errol in a sexual way right here and now.”

“Haven’t you?” He bent forward from the waist and studied his feet as if seeing his shoes for the first time. “You think you’re hard on the eye dressed in a thin robe like that? Or dressed in any old thing at all?”

“Why don’t you say what’s really on your mind? Yes, Errol was a recovering alcoholic. He was also a recovering sex addict.”

Jack’s head snapped up. “How the hell did you know that?”

“He told me. Back at the beginning when he hired me he told me and said if I had any concerns about that he’d understand.” The amazement in Jack Charbonnet’s fine eyes gave Celina satisfaction. “His father was a friend of my parents. I knew Errol from when I was a little kid. When he got married I was the flower girl. Natalie was a bitch. He never should have married her.”

Jack’s sudden, sharp laugh wasn’t what she’d expected, and she smiled involuntarily.

“He never told me all that—about bein’ acquainted with you before. I was at the wedding too. I don’t remember the flower girl. I didn’t know you had that kind of shared history.”

“You never bothered to find out.”

Jack ran a hand around his neck. He said, “We’ve got to make decisions and act. Errol’s death is tragedy enough. What good would it do if his name got tainted by whatever went on here?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not important,” he told her. “As you said, what a man chooses to do in the privacy of his own home is his own business—as long as he does it with consenting adults, and by the look of what I’ve seen so far, the lady he was with was very adult.”

Tears filmed her eyes. She nodded.

“We’re going to clean up anything that didn’t belong to Errol, then raise the alarm. Errol asked me to come over, but he was out when I got here. Or that’s what 1 thought. You came along—ready to go to work—and we shot the breeze for a while. We waited. Then we got suspicious and came looking. And voilà. Does that work fur you?”

“You must have made up a lot of stories. You’re good at it.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve got at least one fan who thinks I am. But this is a simple story. It’s even got elements of truth in it.”

She began to tremble again. “Then what?”

“They come and deal with…They come and take care of things.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant afterward. Dreams.”

“It’ll go on,” Jack said as if speaking through his teeth. “After he lost his boy, he behaved like he was givin’ up. Then he came up with the idea for Dreams and it kept him going. It became his life and it does so much good.”

She wanted to turn on him, to tell him that she knew he wasn’t the kind of man who stayed awake nights worrying about sick children, that she knew Errol had been paying back the big loan he’d got from Jack back at the beginning. And the payback had been with big interest attached. Jack wanted to he sure his investment continued to pay off.

“I’ll be in the bathroom,” Jack said. “The bedroom’s all yours. Nothing gets left behind unless it belongs to Errol. Got that?”

Oh, yes, sir. She gathered the handful of black silk and held it at arm’s length. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Grow up,” Jack said, but his voice was even. “Use your head and start looking around.”

He went into the bathroom again. Celina didn’t want to look, but couldn’t stop herself. He made a ball of the towel and dropped it, then made a visual search of the space.

“How—” Celina swallowed. “How long ago do you think he died?”

“I’m not a pathologist.” He bent over Errol’s body.

Celina saw what he was doing and looked away. How could the act of touching a dead man’s penis be at once so personal yet so impersonal?

She picked up a long, black scarf from the floor and untied another from the head of the bed. The fur glove was almost hidden by a pillow. Celina took a tissue from the pocket of her robe and used it as a barrier between her fingers and the thing that disgusted her. She dropped the glove among the heap of silk.

Α bottle of bourbon had rolled under the bed. Fortunately it had been capped. The room was stuffy and foul smelling. “Should I open a window?” she called.

“No,” Jack said, so close behind her she jumped and spun around. “We’re going to admit they’ll find our fingerprints all over this place, but you don’t open windows in someone else’s bedroom, not if you’re only supposed to be trying to find them.”

“Where should I put all this stuff?” Celina asked, not wanting to as much as touch it.

“In your apartment.”

She gazed at him. “I don’t want it there.”

“What you do with it later is your business. That’s where it will have to go for now.” He picked up the phone beside Errol’s bed and dialed the emergency number. Then he said, “Medical emergency. Heart attack. I’m not sure, but I think so. I understand. I’ll stay on the line. Someone will be waiting for you down below.” He held an open hand toward Celina, and in the palm rested the awful green rubber ring she’d seen.

When she backed away, he frowned and motioned her to come to him. She did so and he pushed the ring among the other things she held while he gave the Royal Street address to whoever was on the phone.

He hung up and said, “Go. Now. Get dressed fast and come right back. They’ll be here.”

“You’ve forgotten something,” she said. “Whoever these things belong to. What if she comes forward and says what really happened here?”

“Go,” Jack said. “She’s not going to say anything.” “How can you be so sure?”

He looked her directly in the eye. “I’m sure.”