A Diamond Before You Die Page 2

  A tough, streetwise cop isn’t supposed to fall in love with a call girl. Maybe if she’d told me that’s what she was I wouldn’t have. But, then, a call girl isn’t supposed to fall in love with a cop either. Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell me.

  When she finally did, when she couldn’t stand any more of the pressure I was putting on her for more time, she cried. I told her it was okay, that she didn’t have to do it anymore, live that kind of life. She said she’d thought about it, hard, but she liked the money and the glamour too much to give it up. She went out with some rich, high-powered men. One of them was Salvadore Angelesi, the district attorney of New Orleans, a corrupt power monger, the kind of flashy, egomaniacal politician that makes the whole state of Louisiana stink with rotten politics.

  Angry and hurt, I tried to stay away from Myra. It didn’t last two weeks; I convinced myself she would change because she loved me.

  Two years later Myra was murdered. The only thing left I had to care about was getting Angelesi for killing her. Trying to prove it ruined my career, but the rest of my life was ruined, so what did I care.

  Actually, I didn’t get thrown off the police force. I left before they told me I had to, and let Maurice talk me into becoming an investigator. He gave me my first case.

  Maurice lives in the Garden District, where I’d just come from and where Richard Cotton lives. Maurice’s house is in the next block up toward St. Charles Avenue, so I passed Cotton’s to see if he’d gotten home, but his car still wasn’t in the driveway. The brown Olds wasn’t parked out in front of his house either. There was something about this that didn’t sit quite right. You see, Touro Infirmary is at most a five-minute drive from Cotton’s house. A good hour and a half must have elapsed between the time patrolmen Clift and Gaudet would have dropped Lee Diamond off at the hospital, and the time I finished boarding up the window and watching the fire die. If she hadn’t gone into the emergency room for treatment, then . . . I could feel those eyes on me all over again.

  It was getting late, but I wasn’t worried about waking Maurice. He’s a real genius type, never sleeping, forgetting to eat, always working, and he doesn’t give a thought to time unless he has to be in court or has an appointment, in which case he is scrupulously punctual.

  Maurice answered the door, dressed, as usual, in a black three-piece Western-cut suit and black cowboy boots. Maurice is in no way your average lawyer. In this town, any other lawyer who dressed like that would be dismissed as weird. But Maurice is so smart he’s just eccentric.

  I told him what had been going on as we walked through the house to what used to be a den but now looks like a law office, the only setting other than a courtroom in which Maurice is comfortable. The rest of the house is like a museum; nothing has been changed since his parents died.

  Maurice sat behind his desk in the law office away from the law office, and looked at me through the thick lenses of his glasses, which never sit perfectly straight on his face. Even though they’re heavy black horn-rims, they made him wide-eyed and boyish—a whiz kid. But when he talked he sounded anything but boyish. His voice belongs in a courtroom—he has trouble keeping it down.

  “So she knocked him in the fireplace and left him there?” he asked. I might have been on the witness stand.

  “She said he tried to kill her with the poker. She took a severe blow on the neck.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “Her name is Lee Diamond.” The eyes really did get wide. “You know her?”

  “I went to law school with her.”

  “I thought she was an investigator.”

  He nodded. “She dropped out after her second year. She does mostly paralegal-type work, research, questioning of witnesses, photography; she’s very good at it. I’ve hired her a couple of times, but the last time I called her, she turned me down, so I assume she keeps busy. She could sue Richard Cotton, you know. So could the man who burned in the fireplace.”

  “Well, it would be good if I could find Richard to tell him what happened in his house tonight.”

  “He’s probably across the lake.”

  “What’s across the lake?” I asked.

  “The Colonel’s estate,” Maurice said.

  Colonel Cotton, Richard’s deceased father, was not a military man, but he went around in military-type suits—epaulets, lots of gold buttons, an American flag stickpin always in his lapel. He was the founder of the Cotton National Bank, an institution where the way you are treated has a lot more to do with who you know and what your name is rather than how much money you have, although if you know the right people, you usually have plenty enough money. A bank like this can thrive in a class-conscious city like New Orleans. Like the Cottons themselves, it has snob appeal.

  “It’s an old plantation home on the Bogue Falaya,” Maurice said, “right in the heart of Covington, but once you’re on the grounds, it feels like it’s miles away from anything. Richard used to spend a lot of time over there.”

  “Hm. Seems like he would have given me a number if he’d planned to be across the lake for any length of time.”

  “With the rumors flying the way they are,” Maurice said with that in-the-know nonchalance of his, “he probably went over there to escape a lot of questions.”

  “What rumors?” I demanded. It’s true that Maurice is a veritable font of information, but when he seems to have more information at his command about my client than I do, it makes me irritable.

  “Where have you been, Neal?”

  “Where have I been? I’ve been tailing his wife from stores to restaurants to beauty parlors and back to stores. What rumors are you talking about?”

  “Word’s been out for the past few days that Cotton’s going to give Callahan a run for his money in this year’s election.”

  Clarence “Chance” Callahan was the district attorney of New Orleans. In the three years since he’d been elected he’d been at the center of a lot of controversy, most of which had to do with blacks and the police. There had been several incidents of alleged police brutality and violation of civil rights, standard fare for New Orleans, but when Callahan had not immediately prosecuted several police officers for murder after four blacks were gunned down by the officers in a housing project, the black community had been outraged. The police had gone into the project to question suspects about a cop murder that had happened a few days before, and they claimed that they’d shot the suspects in self-defense. There were plenty of questionable circumstances, however, like the fact that two raids occurred simultaneously on different sides of the project, and in both raids a single suspect had decided to draw a gun against four or five cops; and in an earlier, separate case of a black man who had been shot, a knife.

  Of course, the cops had on their side the fact that none of these suspects were models of upstanding citizenship, a career criminal and drug dealer among them. There was some appeasement while a grand jury investigated the shootings, but when it came back saying there was not enough evidence to bring the policemen to trial, the entire city was paralyzed with fear of race riots. A lot of the blame for this menace was put on Callahan by the whites, who were demanding more and better police protection, as well as by the blacks, since it’s pretty well known that if a powerful district attorney wants to prosecute, he can usually get a grand jury to go along with him.

  There had been no riots, but for a long time blacks had picketed outside City Hall and Callahan’s office with signs reading, WE HAVE NO CHANCE WITH CALLAHAN. The city was calmer now, but the matter was far from settled and didn’t look as if it would be before the election.

  “Can you believe this?” I asked Maurice. “I’ve talked to the man almost every day for the past two weeks and he’s failed to tell me he wants to run for district attorney.”

  “Look at it this way—you wouldn’t be in business if people are discreet when they’re supposed to be or talk when they have something to say.”

  “You lawyers have great powers of rationaliz
ation,” I said. “I guess Richard figures I don’t need to know his political ambitions in order to tail his wife. I guess he’s right.”

  “He’s going to be very unhappy about what happened at his house tonight. An accident like that shouldn’t happen to a man with political ambitions.”

  “He’s also going to be very unhappy to find out his wife’s got a tail on him.” I rubbed a hand down over my face. “I could use a drink, Maurice.”

  Maurice went out to the kitchen, but I could hear the perfect courtroom voice without any trouble. “What’s he doing hiring a shadow for his old lady at a time like this? He needs to clean up his act.”

  I wish Maurice wouldn’t try to use slang or talk like a regular person—it doesn’t sound right on him. His voice resounds too much; his elocution is too good for slang. He almost sounds like a foreigner when he says things like “clean up his act” or calls someone’s wife his “old lady.”

  “I hate to say it, Neal, but he needs to get rid of you, reinstate family unity, and work on presenting an image as the strong arm of the law instead of rich Southern white boy.” Ah, that was more like it. “No Scotch.”

  “Bourbon, then.”

  “I’m surprised Lee Diamond took on divorce work, if that’s what she’s doing.”

  “You’re just saying that because she turned you down. Paula Cotton probably pays her better than you do.”

  There was silence in the kitchen. “Just kidding, Maurice.” Sometimes he doesn’t pick up on my more subtle jokes.

  “Urn, no bourbon, Neal.”

  “What do you have?”

  I could hear bottles rattling. “Grenadine, vermouth and rum.”

  “Rum and soda.”

  I heard cabinet doors banging. He was probably looking for a jigger. Or maybe a clean glass.

  He walked into the room and said, “She should have been a lawyer.”

  I clutched at my chest. “Okay, okay,” I said. “You got me where it hurts.”

  “I meant nothing against your profession, Neal.” Maurice knows what a sensitive guy I am. “She has something better than great powers of rationalization.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Great powers of intimidation, and"—he jiggled his brows behind his slightly lopsided glasses—"an innate sense of when to leave your scruples at home.” He hummed a small sigh. “She would have made a great trial lawyer.” He handed me a suspicious-looking drink.

  “What’s this?”

  “Rum and grapefruit juice. I seem to be out of everything.”

  Well, you can’t expect a genius to remember to go to the store if he can’t remember to eat.

  I backtracked to Richard Cotton’s house one more time before heading down St. Charles Avenue to the Euclid Apartments where I live. Cotton still wasn’t home and I didn’t want to be.

  The Euclid was a nice place when I moved in four years ago, but I wouldn’t call it that anymore. I’ll give you some examples: I parked in the parking garage, as usual, and when I got out of my car, the first thing I saw was that someone had thrown up in the slot next to mine. Inside, the lobby was dim because several bulbs had burned out and no one had bothered to replace them. It was bright enough, though, that I could see that the same leftover drinks in plastic cups were still sitting where they’d been discarded the weekend before, on the furniture, one in a plant, another on the floor by the elevators. One of the elevators was broken and had been for almost two weeks. I stood and watched the other one go back and forth between the fourth and fifth floors, and finally hiked up to my apartment on the sixth.

  My apartment was freezing. The heating unit in it had been working off and on, mostly off, for the entire month of December and into January, the coldest, wettest and dreariest month of the winter in New Orleans. It’s the kind of cold that goes right through you, gets in your bones and makes them feel like pieces of ice trying to bend. Mine felt that way now. Some of the residents had told me they’d heard the Euclid was going condo. They were upset about it. Not me. I wished it would. Then I would have the motivation to move.

  I took a hot shower, fixed a hot toddy, and crawled under the covers with the phone books. I looked up detectives in the Yellow Pages. My small ad was there, but she didn’t have any listing at all. She was in the white pages—Lee Diamond, 910 Dumaine. The French Quarter. It wasn’t even in boldface. Yes, indeed, she must keep busy, and she must be very particular about the work she took. Probably about her clients, too.

  I went to sleep thinking about her, the soft brown hair I’d pushed aside to put the ice pack on her neck, those yellow eyes in the firelight, her voice when she thanked me, her slightly crooked teeth, but it was the burned man I dreamed about.

  3

  * * *

  Colonel Cotton’s Estate

  At eight o’clock the next morning, I still hadn’t heard from my client. There was no answer when I called his house. At nine o’clock his office told me that he wasn’t expected all day. When I asked where he was, the woman said she didn’t know, which I took to mean she wouldn’t tell me. I left my name and office number and said I needed to talk to him. I hesitated to say it was urgent, not after the way he’d told me he didn’t want his law partners to know he’d hired a private investigator for work outside the firm. I tried Covington directory assistance, but the number was unpublished. I called Maurice. He told me that anyone in Covington could direct me to Colonel Cotton’s estate. By nine-fifteen, I was on my way across Lake Pontchartrain.

  The weather was foul. When I got to the causeway that goes across the lake, the fog was just beginning to lift enough that the bridge police were letting a few cars at a time start the twenty-four-mile trek. It was drizzling, one of those constant drizzles that never gets any heavier but doesn’t let up all day either. By the time it was my turn to cross, visibility was still low, so it was a slow crawl across the long bridge with nothing to look at but the choppy brown water of the lake. It looked like Mississippi River water.

  I drove into the thriving little town of Covington, crossing the Bogue Falaya River to get to the downtown area. When I was a kid my family used to vacation at some cabins on the Bogue Falaya that were right down a hill from the main drag through town. In my kid’s mind, we were completely surrounded by woods for miles, although I do remember going to a movie theater to see a Three Stooges movie a couple of times. Since I’d seen the movie twice, I thought it was the only movie shown at that theater, and the next few times we came back to Covington, I was disappointed and angry that I couldn’t see Larry, Curly and Moe. I remember the old man really getting a kick out of it, and that made me even madder.

  The sign for the cabins was all that was left. It stood to the side of the bridge across the river, but rivulets of rust and peeling paint made it hard to read the name anymore. I got past the sign and my childhood memories; the town of Covington has a new face on it, the face of prosperity. The two major causes of this change are crime and the high price of real estate in New Orleans. People have been moving across the lake in droves for the past few years so they can get a bigger piece of land with a bigger house on it for less money and not be in a marginal neighborhood or have one a block away. They say they’re moving to the country, to Life Beyond the Burglar Alarm, but with subdivisions, shopping centers and fast food places popping up like mad, it’s not the country anymore.

  The first person I asked told me exactly how to get to the Cotton estate. When Maurice said it was in the heart of town, he hadn’t exaggerated. It was through some back streets only a few blocks from the gas station downtown where I’d stopped for directions, but when I turned in to the shelled driveway I was in another world. Through the rain and mist I could see a tennis court equipped with night lights and a small viewing stand. Beyond that was a swimming pool flanked by a West Indies—type structure that was too big to be just a changing area. Thick foliage surrounded the grounds and made it private. A high wall of bamboo blocked any view of the tennis court from the front, and ran d
own one side of the drive. Behind the pool, fencing in that side of the property, were the tallest, thickest camellia bushes I’ve ever seen. They were in bloom and I could see dots of red for a long way in the thinning fog.

  I went around a curve and there was the plantation, big and white and unexpected, so suddenly was it in front of me. To my left the ground sloped down to a small lagoon. To the right was another structure, a guest house maybe, or the servants’ quarters. Another shelled road curved up around it. I pulled the car to the top of the horseshoe driveway in front of the mansion.

  At ground level, an open brick veranda ran around the house. Above, on the second story, was another railed veranda. Fog was clinging to the house in pearly-white patches that were moving gradually toward the roofline, disembodied idle drifters that made the house seem dead. I went up the wide wood steps to the leaded glass doors at the top and rang the bell.

  I didn’t really expect an answer, since my car was the only one around, but through the glass I could see a figure coming toward me.

  He was a young black man, in his mid to late twenties, and while I told him my name and that I was looking for Mr. Cotton, he smiled pleasantly, perhaps a bit spacily, at me. He was tall and slim and very well turned out in a white silk shirt and sharply creased jeans. His skin was smooth, a rich and unblemished café au lait color. His bright smile, his jaunty way of holding himself seemed to me to have something of the Caribbean in it, but maybe I just thought that because the pool house reminded me of the West Indies. He told me Cotton wasn’t there.

  “Mind if I come in and use the phone?” I asked.

  “Sure, boss,” he said, “you come in. You come in out of this bad weather.” He didn’t look, act or sound like any servant I’d ever seen before, in spite of what he said. He enunciated clearly, with just a hint of a black dialect, his speech soft, rounded, rhythmic. He stepped back, a graceful, dancerlike movement.