Free Cities of the Dead by Linda Barnes

Spraggue said under his breath.
    â€œI tol’ you, ’cause of that phone call.”
    â€œWho was it from?”
    â€œDunno.”
    â€œYou listen in?”
    â€œSure,” Flowers said.
    â€œShe must have called the other person something. Think. When she answered the phone, she said hello, and then …”
    â€œHoney!” Flowers said triumphantly. “She called him ‘honey’!”
    â€œAh,” Spraggue said. “Maybe we’d better wait here for a while.”
    â€œIt’s a lover, right?” Flowers asked. “You think it’s her lover, this ‘honey’? You think maybe she offed her old man ’cause she had somethin’ else goin’ on the side?”
    â€œI think it’s the daughter. She didn’t want me to talk to her daughter. And if dear daughter called to say she was on her way over and Momma didn’t want our paths to cross—”
    â€œYou think the daughter killed her daddy?”
    â€œMomma doesn’t want us to talk to her. Any time anybody doesn’t want me to talk to somebody, that somebody zips to the top of my interview list.”
    Flowers grinned.
    Spraggue stared at his watch. “Trouble is, I’ve got a lunch date.”
    A dark green Volkswagen Rabbit eased into the alley beside the restaurant.
    The driver moved quickly, with a young woman’s step. She ran up the front stoop and knocked, then disappeared inside. Spraggue scribbled the license number of the green Rabbit in his phony reporter’s notebook, then turned to Flowers. “If I leave you here to keep tabs on Fontenot’s daughter, can you call another cab to get me back to the Quarter?”
    â€œI could. Waste of time though. Just mosey yourself ’round the block to Le Ruth’s. ’Round lunchtime, every tourist in the Quarter cabs out there. Any of them drivers be delighted to have a return fare.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œAnd I’ll eyeball this lady for you. What you want to know about her?”
    â€œWhere she lives. Where she works. Where I can find her if I want her.”
    The cabbie chortled. “Follow that dame, right?”
    â€œYou got it,” Spraggue said. “Then catch me at the hotel in time for that hoodoo ceremony tonight.”

SEVEN
    â€œPaul Armand will join us for dessert,” Aunt Mary said contentedly, dabbing at one corner of her mouth with a linen napkin.
    â€œDessert?” Spraggue spread a hand protectively over his stomach. “Look, if you made any dinner plans for me, cancel them. I may want to act again, and Falstaff is the only good fat-man part I know.”
    â€œI’ve never seen you grill a suspect,” Mary said brightly. “I’m looking forward to it.”
    The Café Creole was hardly the setting for the third degree. The restaurant made Fontenot’s place look like a corner cafeteria. Satiny rose-colored wallpaper spread upward from dark-panelled wainscoting. Chandeliers glowed overhead. The main dining room was a fantasy ballroom heisted from a wealthy planter’s antebellum manse, complete with an overflow of ladies and gentlemen waiting for tables. The line wandered clear out to Bourbon Street and down the block, where the elegantly garbed queue could gawk into two strip joints, one featuring an “all-male kick line,” the other a “live college girl revue,” and an open-air saloon where a Cajun fiddler stomped and wailed on a make-shift stage.
    Spraggue hadn’t liked leapfrogging the line, but Mary had assured him that all the regular patrons did it, and they’d been ushered immediately and ceremoniously to a table where a bottle of champagne waited, compliments of Monsieur Armand. The starch-stiff waiter with the waxed mustache had not failed to notice this courtesy and the service had been, like the oysters Bienville and the soft-shell crabs, exemplary. Dining out with Mary was like that.