Big Easy Bonanza

at Chauncey.
    “Mother, is that really what happened? You wouldn’t lie to me?”
    “Of course not, Marcelle.”
    “I remember it—I remember your saying ‘I hate you!’ I remember it so clearly. I thought you meant me.”
    “You poor child. Of course I didn’t mean you.”
    “You really didn’t?”
    “Of course not. And I didn’t really hate your father either. “
Not till later
. “I was just upset.”
    “Did this happen before or after the baby died?”
    Marcelle had brought up Hélène as if it was nothing. Bitty took it like a blow in the stomach. Looking down, she said, “After.”
    “After? Really?”
    “Marcelle, that’s what was wrong with me. Don’t you understand? That’s why I was so excitable
.” So violent.
    “I didn’t kill her.”
    Bitty wondered if she’d heard right. She didn’t understand what Marcelle meant, but she felt suddenly too ill to try to fathom it.
    “Mother, what is it?”
    “I think I’d better lie down.” Marcelle helped her to the sofa.
    When Marcelle had said, “the baby,” just the two words, that was all, the image had come—the ugly mark on Hélène’s backside, like a fading bruise mark.
    “Someone hit her,” Chauncey had said. “They spanked her to make her breathe. They hurt her—nurse, look at this.”
    “Oh, that’s not a bruise. It’s a Mongolian spot, a kind of birthmark.” She looked at Chauncey quizzically. “Are you French Algerian? Mediterranean?”
    Chauncey didn’t answer, only looked confused.
    “You’re not, are you, Mrs. St. Amant? It must be Mr. St. Amant.”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “I never saw a Caucasian baby with a Mongolian spot.”
    And then the accusations had started. He had examined Hélène every day, her skin and her hair, as if she were a doll, and after a month or so, both hair and skin had begun to change. Her father noticed too, and Chauncey told him what Bitty had done—what he
said
Bitty had done. She had cried and denied it and told them both what Ma-Mère had said, but they didn’t hear and they wouldn’t have cared if they had.

Recovery
    I BELIEVE I truly hate the little bastard. What kind of attitude is that?
    Unprofessional
.
    Skip felt a little rueful about pushing Henry around, but the hell of it was, she longed to do it again. She had to get a grip on herself or she was going to end up the kind of cop she told herself shed never be.
    Okay, count to ten. Burn some incense. Try to sit still. She tried sometimes to meditate, but was usually so wildly unsuccessful at it that she settled not even for sitting still, simply for trying to. It helped with the adrenaline rushes that were epidemic in her job, helped a little anyway, even though she usually felt as if somebody’d just dropped a sack of ants on her the second she assumed the lotus position. It was so hard for her, so alien, that she took that as her clue: if she could ever master this, then she could probably master her fate. But that was for later. She wasn’t yet spiritually advanced enough for ten minutes of meditation. Five minutes of sitting reasonably still would have to do for the moment.
    At the end of the five minutes—actually more like four and a half—she felt she could cope. She had already dumped her suit, panty hose and shoes, and was down to panties and bra. She got a Diet Coke and sat on her sofa, massaging feet that were bitterly protesting the walk back and forth across the Quarter in the damn heels.
    Nothing was any better. The “meditation,” if you could call it that, hadn’t changed a thing. She still didn’t believe a word that came out of Henry’s mouth.
    Hélène is dead. Marcelle…
    Marcelle what?
    He had spoken with passion and seemingly a lot of pain, but Henry was an actor. However, say she didn’t know that—would that make his story any easier to believe? It might if she didn’t know Tolliver—and Henry himself.
    A passionate man given to histrionics might well have killed Chauncey for interfering in his romance, but Tolliver had always seemed so phlegmatic. (Which argued against his killing Chauncey for love of either mother or son.) Yet people did do things that were out of character.
    There were other problems. If Tolliver was gay at all (which she doubted because Jimmy Dee didn’t think he was), he was certainly secretive about it. Why, at age fifty-odd, should he suddenly decide to have a particular young man come live with him?
    Of course he could have been in love with Henry all