Chapter 3
Chapter three
Luca
Igathered up the bruised lemons from the courtyard floor.
It was mid-morning, and I was pleased to see the pots holding small trees made it through the storm without cracks.
As requested by Dominic, the bullet remained in the plaster above his podium mark.
I had looked at it twice this morning before deciding it was not a productive use of my time. I had red beans to cook.
One distraction I had a harder time breaking was watching Thiago work.
He had been moving through the house without interruption since he arrived. Nothing he did suggested haste. He operated at an even, almost meditative pace, but he never stopped.
I heard him on the stairs and then walking the floor above my head. He systematically opened and tested the doors. When he came back down, he tested the courtyard gate twice and examined its hinges with both hands.
He didn’t acknowledge me, and I didn’t interrupt him.
I tried to understand how I felt watching Thiago. It wasn’t territorial. It was more like when you hand someone a book you love and then watch their face, looking for clues about what they think.
When he finished checking the gate, I said, “You always do that.”
He looked at me.
“Stand where you can see all the exits.”
“Occupational habit.”
“Army?”
“Rangers.”
I nodded once.
“Does it ever turn off?”
A brief pause.
“No,” he said. “It just gets quieter.”
Leaving him to the courtyard and the lemon trees, I returned to the kitchen with coffee in hand. Dominic joined me there.
He poured himself a mug of coffee and headed for the salon. I followed a few steps behind, watching him take stock. He spent three seconds on the taped pane and then longer on the bullet hole. After touching the edges of the hole again with his fingertips, he began arranging music on his podium.
I retrieved a half-baguette with butter at ten. He ate without looking up, tapping his fingers on his thigh, working through a musical phrase only he could hear.
An hour later, he set the score he was working on aside and rolled his shoulders. He reached for his baton case on a small table near the podium. I’d watched him do that a thousand times.
When he opened the lid, the baton lay on a velvet-lined surface. It had a white shaft and a dark handle. He reached in and picked it up.
Dominic paused, and then he rotated the baton between his fingers. He stopped and then rotated it again.
“This isn’t mine.”
My first impulse was skepticism. The baton looked correct, the same length and coloring, with a worn grip. I saw no difference between the current object and what he’d held almost every day for the past seven years.
“It looks—“ I started.
He tapped it on the podium. Then he extended his arm and balanced the baton across two fingers. The shaft leaned slightly toward the handle end.
“My baton balances here.” He indicated a point roughly two-thirds from the tip. “This one balances here.” An inch lower. “Someone copied the appearance but never tested the balance.”
He delivered his conclusion with the precision of a man reading an instrument gauge. He set the baton back in its velvet channel and looked at it for a moment without expression.
“Someone replaced it.”
A momentary chill raced up my spine.
I picked up the case and examined it. The clasp was undamaged; no sign of forced entry. The hinges moved as they always had. Whoever had opened it had opened it in the ordinary way.
Someone had lifted the original out with care. They placed the new one in the channel and returned the case to its position on the table.
I thought about the gunshot. That violation had come through glass, from outside and from a position in the dark.
This latest interruption happened in the room. At the table.
I set the case on the piano lid and thought through the sequence of events.
Someone had placed the sheet music on the bench before the shot.
I’d established that much in the dark of the previous night.
Someone had been inside before the glass broke.
The placement required timing, knowing when Dominic would step away from the piano and the podium.
It occurred in a single, precisely calibrated window.
The baton signaled a return. Was it only two visits? If they could return without notice, exactly how many times had they been in the house. When did they begin planning the events? Last week? Last month? A year ago?
We had assumed the gunshot was an opening move, a statement. Now it felt more like an announcement that the violations had already occurred and would soon surface.
Someone was piecing together a performance for us to follow. They had been planning it for some time and now pegged it all to the anniversary concert.
I remembered Dominic’s words from the night before: Whoever this is, they’ve been living with it for a long time.
Eleven days to go.
Thiago came in from the courtyard. He looked around the room, then at Dominic, and finally at me. “What happened?”
Dominic picked up the replacement baton and handed it to Thiago. “It’s not mine.”
Thiago rotated it slowly and held it at different angles. He couldn’t feel what was wrong, but he accepted Dominic’s judgment. He set it down on the piano lid.
“When was it last used?”
“Thursday rehearsal,” Dominic said. “Four days ago, but I pick it up every day, working through pieces in my mind.”
“Has the case been on that table since?”
“It lives there.”
Thiago walked to all the room’s access points in succession. “Who knew where it was kept?”
“Anyone who has spent time in this room,” Dominic said.
“Which is.”
Dominic looked at me.
“Everyone,” I said. “Colleagues. Board members. Some musicians. Celeste. I paused. “And Bridget Marchand. She handles rehearsal logistics, and she is the concertmaster for the celebration concert. She’s been in this room more than anyone outside of Dominic and me.”
Thiago absorbed the information without a change in his expression. “The case was unlocked?”
“It doesn’t lock,” I said. “It latches.”
“No damage to the clasp.”
“No.”
“So whoever did this either had plenty of time, or they’d done it before and already knew how long it would take.”
“Yes,” I said.
Thiago picked up the replacement baton again, studying it carefully.
“Whoever did this wanted Dominic to feel it.”
“Then they were successful,” Dominic said.
Thiago set the baton down. “Would you feel the difference during a performance?”
“Within the first phrase,” Dominic confirmed. “Possibly the first measure.”
A sharp knock sounded at the front door. Not tentative. Three quick strikes.
Dominic sighed. “Celeste.”
I went to answer it.
Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove swept past me before I had fully stepped aside, trailing the stifling August air and expensive perfume into the parlor. Her animated movements suggested a woman at least ten years younger than her seventy-one years.
She wore a cream linen suit and held a large leather portfolio under one arm. She’d pushed a pair of sunglasses up in her hair like a crown.
“Dominic,” she announced as she walked into the salon, “if I had known your house would be the subject of target practice this week, I would have given you a helmet.”
Dominic didn’t look up from the baton case. “Good morning to you too, Celeste.”
She immediately focused on Thiago. I watched her chin move as she appraised him from head to foot.
“Ah, you must be the man Seattle sent.”
“Thiago Reyes.”
She took his hand in both of hers, shaking it with decisive enthusiasm.
“Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove. Patron, fundraiser, occasional tyrant, and as of today, your benefactor. You are to make sure Dominic gets to the stage alive in eleven days.”
Thiago inclined his head. “Understood.”
“You look competent,” she said. “That’s encouraging. I had a dreadful image of someone arriving with an earpiece and a clipboard.”
“I left the clipboard in the car.”
I couldn’t suppress a small smile.
“Good answer,” Celeste said briskly.
She turned back to Dominic.
“The board is in a panic. Half of them think you should postpone the concert. The other half are terrified that postponing it will look like weakness.”
Dominic picked up the replacement baton and turned it slowly between his fingers.
“It would be a sign of weakness.”
“Yes, of course it would,” Celeste said. “But panic rarely produces rational thinking.” She looked at the baton. “What is that?”
“Not mine,” Dominic said.
She glanced at me and then at Thiago.
“Someone explain.”
Thiago spoke calmly.
“Someone replaced the baton in the case.”
Celeste blinked once. Then she let out a low whistle. “Oh, that is clever.”
She walked to the piano and held out her hand for the baton. Dominic handed it over. She examined it as though it were an ancient artifact.
“So the gunshot gets everyone’s attention, and then this appears.”
Dominic muttered, “They’re staging something.”
Celeste straightened. “Well,” she clapped her hands once. “That is deeply unpleasant.” She addressed Thiago. “Mr. Reyes, I assume you’re now investigating everyone who has ever walked through Dominic’s front door.”
“I am.”
“Good. It’s a long list.”
She gestured toward me. “Luca knows it better than anyone.”
I nodded in agreement. “I’m compiling it now.”
Celeste lowered her voice slightly as she stepped closer to Dominic. She was still loud enough for all of us to hear.
“The man sees the room before he speaks.”
Dominic glanced toward Thiago.
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s the sort we need.”
Celeste straightened again and turned back toward the door as abruptly as she had entered.
“I’ll send Bridget over at eleven,” she said. “And Dominic—“
She paused in the doorway.
“Try not to get shot today.”
The front door closed behind her.
Thiago began moving around the salon, systematically inspecting everything. He touched the piano lid lightly, examined the side table surface, and crouched near the baseboard beside the doorway.
I watched his hands glide over surfaces, with the muscles in his forearms flexing.
Dominic retreated to the kitchen and poured a second coffee. He stood near the doorway and looked through the French doors to the courtyard. Thiago had positioned himself near the far gate, speaking quietly into his phone with his back to the house.
“We’re both staring,” Dominic said.
He didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the courtyard.
“I’m evaluating,” I said.
“Of course you are,” he said.
I turned to check the red beans.
Dominic stirred a cube of sugar into his coffee. “Fortune favors the bold.”
I didn’t have a reply.
Dominic’s dry observations never came without a deeper meaning. I remembered that I’d used the same line when I described to him my visits to the east end of Bourbon Street as a younger man.
I was nineteen. It was the summer after my first year at Tulane. I spent too many nights in a specific bar.
A regular occupied the same stool night after night.
I pegged his age at forty-five to fifty.
He watched the room with one hand wrapped around his glass.
He was handsome, with broad shoulders and a sculpted jaw, and he always wore a suit.
Every night he sat alone, often with a gentle expression of amusement on his face.
Finally, as the summer was winding down in the sweltering heat of August, I crossed the room and climbed into his lap to find out what would happen.
He laughed, and then he bought me a drink. We talked for over two hours about architecture, of all things. I went home at three in the morning, having learned a lesson about being bold.
I decided the outcome frequently justified making myself vulnerable, risking embarrassment.
I had worked from that understanding, more or less, ever since.
Thiago had finished his call. He stood near the courtyard wall, crouched beside one of the potted lemon trees, studying the bricks where the mortar had worn shallow with age.
I joined him.
He ran his fingers along the rim of the pot and then pointed toward the paving stones beneath it. “Look at this.”
At first, I saw nothing. He reached out and took my hand.
It was direct and unceremonious. He closed his fingers around mine as he guided my palm downward.
“Here.”
Thiago pressed my hand against the edge of the stone. The surface felt rough, but along one corner the texture changed. There it was smooth.
I frowned. “That wasn’t there last week.”
“No.”
He released my hand and traced the edge of the stone with one finger. “Someone stepped here repeatedly,” he said. “Same spot. Same angle.”
I followed the line of his gesture upward, from the stone to the rim of the lemon pot. Then from the pot to the courtyard wall.
“It’s a climbing point,” I said.
“Likely.”
I looked back down at the stone, feeling the faint smoothness where my hand had touched it. “That tree’s been here for years. It’s the heaviest, and I don’t move it, even during storms.”
“Which means whoever did this knew it would hold weight.”
I glanced toward the balcony above us. The wall no longer looked decorative. It looked utilitarian.
Thiago stood and brushed his hands together. “I’ll still need that full access list.”
“By noon,” I said.
I went back inside and thought about climbing into someone’s lap.