Big Easy Bonanza

say for His Otherwise Worthlessness—to Mr. Young Making-It-In-The-Big-World, a deal was a deal. He’d simply stayed on the phone until he could deliver. What he delivered was this—an aging Deke named Hinky Hebert knew a call girl named LaBelle Doucette; he’d be at Tipitina’s that night.
    If there was a single person in New Orleans Skip thought more worthless than her brother, it was Hinky Hebert; and if she had to choose the single worst location in town to conduct an interview, it would have to be Tipitina’s.

5
    Shit! It was his sister. Christ, and André too. Henry was feeling about as avuncular as a lamppost. And about as fraternal. He was feeling pretty awful, pretty much wrung out just keeping it together. He didn’t feel like coping with family right now. Earlier, Bitty had nearly done him in.
    The stair clomping stopped, and he opened the door. “Hi, Sissy.” She kissed him on the cheek.
    “Hi. Can André go in the bedroom and watch TV? I need to talk to you.”
    She needed to talk to him. He was taken aback. He couldn’t remember ever having a heart-to-heart with Marcelle.
    “Sure. Come on, Sport.” He took André’s hand and led him to the television.
    When he got back, Marcelle was drinking a glass of wine. Having sworn off alcohol, Henry hated her for it. “Help yourself,” he said.
    “Thanks.” She didn’t even notice the sarcasm. “Henry, I’ve remembered something. Remember the summer we spent at Covington without Mother? When she only came on weekends?” She was in worse shape than he was; he saw it now. Her voice was coming in little whispered bursts, and she was gulping the wine.
    He nodded, signifying that he remembered. (He was not likely to forget.)
    ”Mother attacked me.”
    “Marcelle, have you lost your tiny mind?”
    “She did. She even asked me about it yesterday. And then I remembered it.”
    “What did you remember, pray tell?”
    “She came at me with a weapon of some sort.”
    “A weapon? Bitty?” He was going extra-heavy on the sarcasm. “Our little ninety-nine-pound bundle of utter helplessness?”
    “Something big.”
    “An M-l carbine, maybe?”
    She chewed her lip. “Not a gun. She was only going to hit me, I think.”
    “Only going to hit you. As opposed to what? Murder you?”
    “I don’t… know.” There was a lot of time between the last two words, as if Marcelle really had to think it out.
    “You don’t know? Do you hear yourself, Marcelle? Excuse me, but did you just accuse your own mother of trying to kill you?”
    “I did not! You’re the one who brought up murder!” To his horror, she started to cry. She turned away from him, ashamed, he supposed. “Anyway, she had a good reason.” She wheeled back abruptly, going in for the dramatic, he thought. She said in a low, level voice, “I killed the baby, didn’t I?”
    “You what? You killed the baby? What baby, for Christ’s sake?”
    “Oh, Henry, please. Do you know how absurd you sound?” Brattily, she imitated him: “What baby?” Then she paused and spoke in an understated way he’d never heard before—quietly but with echoing undertones. “Look, I’ll be okay. I swear to you I’ll be okay. Just please quit trying to protect me, like everyone has all my fucking life.” He hadn’t thought she had so much passion in her.
    “I’m not trying to protect you. I just don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s all. What baby did you personally dispatch at age three and a half?”
    “Our sister, goddammit! And stop condescending to me!”
    “Our sister? You remember killing her?”
    “See! I did, didn’t I?”
    “You might have wanted to—”
    “Oh, God, I did. I did. That part I can remember perfectly. And I probably dumped her out of her crib or conveniently dropped her when it was my turn to hold her. Didn’t I? Please don’t protect me, Henry. I need to know what happened. Please?”
    “Marcelle, she never came home from the hospital. The baby never fucking made it home, okay? There’s no way you could have killed her.”
    “She didn’t?”
    He shook his head slowly, hoping the deliberateness of it would have a sobering effect on her. “Furthermore,” he said, “Bitty never attacked you.”
    “I remember it.”
    “You remember wrong.”
    “The baby never came home from the hospital?”
    “Definitely not.”
    “Then what did she die of?”
    Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. Do adults tell little kids?”
    “When they’re big