City of Night

Chapter 15

Aubrey Picou had retired from a life of crime to have more time to tend his garden.

He lived on an oak shaded street in Mid-City. His historic house boasted some of the most ornate decorative ironwork — fence, balcony railings — in a city dripping with such weighty filigree.

The front porch, draped with trumpet vines and hung with basket ferns, offered two white bench swings and wicker rocking chairs, but the shadows seemed no cooler than the sun-scorched front walk.

The maid, Lulana St. John, answered the doorbell. She was a fiftyish black woman whose girth and personality were equally formidable.

Leveling a disapproving look at Carson, trying to suppress a smile when she glanced at Michael, Lulana said, “I see before me two well-known public servants who do the Lord’s work but sometimes make the mistake of using the devil’s tactics.”

“We’re two sinners,” Carson admitted.

“ ‘Amazing grace,’” Michael said, “ ‘how sweet thou art, to save a wretch like me.’”

“Child,” said Lulana, “I suspect you flatter yourself to think you’re saved. If you have come here to be troublesome to the mister, I ask you to look within yourselves and find the part of you that wants to be a peace officer.”

“That’s the biggest part of me,” Michael said, “but Detective O’Connor here mostly just wants to kick ass.”

To Carson, Lulana said, “I’m sorry to say, missy, that is your reputation.”

“Not today,” Carson assured her. “We’re here to ask a favor of Aubrey, if you would please announce us. We have no grievance against him.”

Lulana studied her solemnly. “The Lord has given me an excellent crap detector, and it isn’t ringing at the moment. It’s in your favor that you have not shaken your badge at me, and you did say please.”

“At my insistence,” Michael said, “Detective O’Connor has been taking an evening class in etiquette.”

“He’s a fool,” Lulana told Carson. “Yes, I know.”

“After a lifetime of eating with her hands,” Michael said, “she has mastered the use of the fork in a remarkably short time.”

“Child, you are a fool,” Lulana told him, “but for reasons that only the Lord knows, in spite of myself, I always take a liking to you.” She stepped back from the threshold. “Wipe your feet, and come in.”

The foyer was painted peach with white wainscoting and ornate white crown molding. The white marble floor with diamond-shaped black inlays had been polished to such a shine that it looked wet.

“Has Aubrey found Jesus yet?” Carson wondered.

Closing the front door, Lulana said, “The mister hasn’t embraced his Lord, no, but I’m pleased to say he has come as far as making eye contact with Him.”

Although paid only to be a maid, Lulana did double duty as a spiritual guide to her employer, whose past she knew and whose soul concerned her.

“The mister is gardening,” she said. “You could wait for him in the parlor or join him in the roses.”

“By all means, the roses,” Michael said.

At the back of the house, in the immense kitchen, Lulana’s older sister, Evangeline Antoine, softly sang “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness” as she pressed dough into a pie pan.

Evangeline served as Aubrey’s cook and also as an amen choir to Lulana’s indefatigable soul-saving efforts. She was taller than her sister, thin, yet her lively eyes and her smile made their kinship obvious.

“Detective Maddison,” Evangeline said, “I’m so glad you’re not dead yet.”

“Me too,” he said. “What kind of pie are you making?”

“Praline-cinnamon cream topped with fried pecans.”

“Now that’s worth a quadruple heart-bypass.”

“Cholesterol,” Lulana informed them, “won’t stick if you have the right attitude.”

She led them through the rear door onto the back veranda, where Moses Bienvenu, Aubrey’s driver and handyman, was painting the beautifully turned white balusters under the black handrail.

Beaming, he said, “Detective O’Connor, I’m amazed to see you haven’t shot Mr. Michael yet.”

“My aim’s good,” she assured him, “but he can move fast.”

Well-padded but not fat, a robust and towering man with hands as big as dinner plates, Moses served as a deacon at the church and sang in the same gospel choir as his sisters, Lulana and Evangeline.

“They’re here to see the mister but not to trouble him,” Lulana told her brother. “If it looks like they’re troubling him, after all, lift them by the scruffs of their necks and put them in the street.”

As Lulana went inside, Moses said, “You heard Lulana. You may be police officers, but she’s the law around here. The Law and the Way. I would be in your debt if you didn’t make it necessary for me to scruff-carry you out of here.”

“If we find ourselves getting out of hand,” Michael said, “we’ll scruff-carry each other.”

Pointing with his paintbrush, Moses said, “Mr. Aubrey is over there past the pagan fountain, among the roses. And please don’t make fun of his hat.”

“His hat?” Michael asked.

“Lulana insists he wear a sun hat if he’s going to spend half the day in the garden. He’s mostly bald, so she worries he’ll get head-top skin cancer. Mr. Aubrey hated the hat at first. He only recently got used to it.”

Carson said, “Never thought I’d see the day when anyone would be the boss of Aubrey Picou.”

“Lulana doesn’t so much boss,” said Moses. “She sort of just tough-loves everyone into obedience.”

A brick walkway led from the back veranda steps, across the lawn, encircled the pagan fountain, and continued to the rose garden.

The sculptured-marble fountain featured three life-size figures. Pan, a male form with goat legs and horns, played a flute and chased two nude women — or they chased him — around a column twined with grapevines.

“My eye for antiques isn’t infallible,” Michael said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s eighteenth-century Las Vegas.”

The rosebushes grew in rows, with aisles of decomposed granite between. In the third of four aisles stood a bag of fertilizer, a tank sprayer, and trays of neatly arranged gardening tools.

Here, too, was Aubrey Picou, under a straw hat with such a broad brim that squirrels could have raced around it for exercise.

Before he noticed them and looked up, he was humming a tune. It sounded like “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness.”

Aubrey was eighty years old and had a baby face: an eighty-year-old baby face, but nevertheless pink and plump and pinchable. Even in the deep shade of his anticancer headgear, his blue eyes twinkled with merriment.

“Of all the cops I know,” said Aubrey, “here are the two I like the best.”

“Do you like any others at all?” Carson asked.

“Not one of the bastards, no,” Aubrey said. “But then none of the rest ever saved my life.”

“What’s with the stupid hat?” Michael asked.

Aubrey’s smile became a grimace. “What’s it matter if I die of skin cancer? I’m eighty years old. I gotta die of something.”

“Lulana doesn’t want you to die before you find Jesus.”

Aubrey sighed. “With those three running the show, I trip over Jesus every time I turn around.”

“If anyone can redeem you,” Carson said, “it’ll be Lulana.”

Aubrey looked as if he would say something acerbic. Instead he sighed again. “I never used to have a conscience. Now I do. It’s more annoying than this absurd hat.”

“Why wear the hat if you hate it?” Michael asked.

Aubrey glanced toward the house. “If I take it off, she’ll see. Then I won’t get any of Evangeline’s pie.”

“The praline-cinnamon cream pie.”

“With fried-pecan topping,” Aubrey said. “I love that pie.” He sighed.

“You sigh a lot these days,” Michael said.

“I’ve become pathetic, haven’t I?”

“You used to be pathetic,” Carson said. “What you’ve become is a little bit human.”

“It’s disconcerting,” Michael said.

“Don’t I know,” Aubrey agreed. “So what brings you guys here?”

Carson said, “We need some big, loud, door-busting guns.”