Chapter 4 Thiago
Chapter four
Thiago
Iwas still waiting for Luca’s access list. “Who has keys to the house?” I asked.
Dominic and Luca looked at each other across the kitchen table. Luca answered first.
“Dominic. Me. The cleaning crew carries a spare—three people—plus the groundskeeper. Celeste has had one for years.” He paused. “I hold the alarm code for the front door. So does Dominic. The service gets a rotating temporary code. It’s due for an update on Friday.”
“Rotate it today.”
Luca nodded without writing it down. I was confident he would remember.
“Who enters the house alone?”
“Cleaning crew, Wednesdays. I’m usually here, but not always. The piano tuner comes on the first Tuesday of each month. That was last week.”
“He has a key?”
“No. I let him in.”
“Every visit?”
“Every visit.”
“How long has he been coming?”
“Eleven years. He predates me.”
“Orchestra personnel. When are they in the house?”
“Rehearsal dinners with the principals. Score sessions when Dominic wants a read-through on a smaller scale.” Luca glanced at Dominic. “Last time was six weeks ago. There were eight musicians. Bridget was here. Two section leads, a brass player, and four more strings.”
“Access to the salon?”
“Yes, and the kitchen. I cooked.”
Dominic, who had sat with his hands folded since we started, looked at the growing list on my screen. “The Orpheum’s stage management team came three weeks ago. Preliminary production meeting. I preferred holding it here.”
“Names?”
He gave them to me.
I opened a new file. Twenty-two names. Every one of them had a legitimate reason to be in the house.
“The last seventy-two hours,” I said. “Who was physically inside?”
Luca didn’t pause. “Dominic. Me. Bridget came Saturday afternoon with rehearsal notes. Forty minutes.”
“In the salon?”
“Yes.”
“Near the baton case?”
“The case lives on that table. The salon isn’t large.” He looked at me. “Anyone in the salon is near it.”
Dominic unfolded his hands and set both palms flat on the table. “You’re building a map.”
“Yes.”
“Of the people I trust.”
“Of the people who had physical access.” I looked at him steadily. “Those aren’t necessarily the same.”
He picked up his coffee and nodded once.
I laid out my proposals: immediate alarm code rotation, restricted access, essential personnel only through the concert date, and nonessential visits suspended. There would be a secondary lock on the courtyard gate and daily confirmation of the baton case’s position.
Dominic listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment, and then, “No.”
He didn’t sound irritated or defensive. “The alarm rotation, yes. The gate lock, yes.” He sipped from his coffee mug. “The rest, no.”
“The access restrictions are the most effective single measure—“
“I will not live inside a bunker.” He leaned slightly forward, his blue eyes focusing on me. “Protection without captivity. That was my condition when Celeste made the call. I assumed you understood.”
“I will work within your parameters,” I said. “Not that your parameters are optimal.”
He turned the word over. “Optimal.” As though examining an instrument he hadn’t encountered before.
“I have been moving through this city for fifty years, Mr. Reyes. Through the AIDS years. Through Katrina, and through the suicide of a beloved board member. I managed none of it from inside a bunker, and I don’t intend to begin now. ”
We were all silent for a moment.
I had worked for clients who pushed back on security measures out of inconvenience or disbelief in threat levels.
Dominic was a different situation. He was telling me that who he was and how he had survived were not separable things; a protection strategy that required him to become someone else was not actually protection.
He was protecting his identity, not his ego.
“I will implement security that is invisible,” I said. “Layered. Nothing that announces itself.”
“That is the agreement.”
“I still require advance notice of every commitment and every deviation from routine. If I ask you to change something, I want you to listen to my reasons before you decline.”
He studied me. “Agreed.”
He stood, picked up his coffee, and walked toward the salon. At the doorway, he stopped without turning.
“The baton.”
“Being examined today.”
I heard him settle back into the room, with the creak of the chair and the soft rustling of score pages. The replacement baton lay on the counter between Luca and me.
Dominic was done looking at it.
“He’ll fire you if you try to cage him,” Luca said.
“I don’t intend to cage him. I intend to find out who put a bullet in his house.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Your employer is unusually resistant to being kept alive.”
I tapped my notebook. “I need to understand his professional circle. History, not only current access. Long relationships. Anyone with a grievance connected to the concert or that night in Jackson Square.”
“That’s a different list,” he said.
Luca leaned back, coffee cup in both hands. “The 2006 moment changed how the city saw Dominic. He became more myth than man. Myths turn people into symbols. Some people never adjusted to the new version of him.”
“Someone specific?”
“Not yet.”
“When you have a name,” I said, “I need it immediately. The moment it comes to you.”
It was quiet enough to hear the light bubbling of the beans on the stove.
I began typing on my tablet.
Luca rose and continued his chores in the kitchen. He washed the morning dishes, checked the beans, and sent a series of emails from his phone.
Michael emailed a thorough analysis of Dominic’s background. Michael was former Seattle PD. Now he was one of the best analysts The Guardians employed.
I started with the names appearing most often across both Dominic’s professional history and the concert record.
Henri Fontenot surfaced immediately.
The public file was deep. He was a conductor and composer with five decades of experience in the New Orleans classical music scene.
His involvement in the Katrina recovery was well-documented.
Citations to his work appeared multiple times in grant applications over the past two decades. He had no criminal record.
His name appeared in two profiles about Dominic published in the past decade.
Both were generous, carefully worded statements of support and admiration for his work.
Nothing about the man. Thirty years of documented professional overlap, and Henri Fontenot had apparently never once spoken about Dominic personally in public.
I flagged the file and moved to Bridget Marchand.
Her record was clean: thirty years in professional music. The reviews I pulled used words like authoritative and structural to describe her performances. Fifteen years with Dominic. Concertmaster for four.
She had made herself indispensable.
Luca stepped up behind me, reading over my shoulder. I let him. He had context I didn’t have . He was close enough to smell the citrus from his soap. I kept my eyes on my screen.
“Dominic put her in the concertmaster’s chair,” he said.
“Directly?”
“He went to the board to make her case. He had something to say about her, and he said it.”
“Their relationship now?”
He straightened. “Functional warmth. She’s one of maybe six people in the city who could tell you precisely where Dominic stands during a performance.”
I typed that observation word for word. No background check would have given me that.
“Anything unresolved between them? Anything that didn’t land cleanly?”
“Not in my seven years. I don’t know about what might have come before.”
I returned to Henri.
He had a few documented grievances, but they led to clean resolutions. What would have concerned me more were disagreements that festered inside and never rose to direct confrontation.
I sent Michael a note asking for everything he could find on Henri Fontenot directly connected to August 2006.
Luca returned to the stove. “What’s the direction here?”
“I want to know everything about the 2006 event. Did it truly arise spontaneously? Was anyone behind the first gathering of musicians? How was that treated after Dominic stepped into the frame?”
Luca turned toward me. “Henri was there in Jackson Square.”
“What did he do?”
“That’s the part I don’t know. Dominic might.”
“I won’t ask him yet. I want the documented record first.”
Luca ladled beans into two bowls and set one in front of me without asking.
I hadn’t eaten since before dawn. We both ate without comment.
The beans were richer than the black beans I grew up with, thicker, almost velvety. Spicy andouille in the broth. Garlic. Bay leaf. A slow heat that built gradually.
At home my food was sharper. Rice bright with vinegar. Pork cut with lime.
Across the table, Luca worked through something on his laptop between bites, one hand on the keyboard and the other steady on the bowl. The kitchen windows were open to the courtyard, and I listened to the fountain gurgling steadily over stone.
After a few minutes, I set the spoon down.
“These are good.”
Luca glanced up. “They’re red beans. Hard to mess up.”
I took another bite.
“You didn’t rush them.”
He watched me for a moment, spoon paused halfway to his mouth, as if deciding whether that counted as praise.
***
We left the house at two, stepping into the thick August air. The pavement on St. Charles radiated heat in visible waves. By the time we reached the Orpheum, my shirt was stuck to my skin.
The theater rose before us with a Beaux-Arts terracotta facade and a cornice decorated with theatrical masks. The marquee announced Dominic’s production in white letters against red: SAINTS: A COMMEMORATION.
The Orpheum had opened in 1918. Severely damaged by Katrina, it sat dark for ten years.
Luca had his credentials clipped to his shirt before we reached the stage door. The door staff recognized him and let us through without checking my name against any lists. I would fix that oversight before the concert.