Chapter 6 Thiago
Chapter six
Thiago
Dominic appeared at the top of the stairs in a formal jacket with a silk pocket square in place. “Celeste is hosting this evening,” he said. “Her usual Wednesday gathering. I’m expected.”
I looked at him.
“I’ll be there until eleven.” He came down the stairs without hurrying. “You are not invited.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is how this works when the alternative is attending a friend’s party with a bodyguard at my elbow.
” He retrieved his hat from the console table.
“Celeste’s house has a security system. There will be six other people present, all of them known to me for decades, and a driver who has been taking me to her door since 2009.
” He settled the hat. “I will not be caged, Mr. Reyes. We established this.”
“You’ll be alone between here and the car.”
“For approximately forty feet.” He walked to the door. “I suggest you use the evening productively. Figure out how a stranger can be in my home while we’re playing cards with none of us knowing.”
I was already on my phone. Eamon picked up on the second ring, and I reported the situation in under a minute, including Dominic’s route and the destination address.
He had a local contact, a former NOPD detective, who had done work for The Guardians before.
She’d be at Celeste’s within twenty minutes, plainclothes.
“Unnecessary,” Dominic said from the doorway, having heard all of it.
“Non-negotiable.”
A pause. Then he opened the door and left without further comment.
Luca watched me finish the call. “That went smoothly.”
“He’s at Celeste’s with coverage that won’t be disruptive. That’s the best available outcome.”
“And we’re expected to be productive in his absence. Figure out why he’s in danger.”
“That’s not the primary danger.”
Luca raised an eyebrow. “It’s not?”
“It’s a distraction. Show me where it happened—in 2006,” I said.
“Now?”
We left through the front gate, stepping into the August humidity pressing against our skin.
My shirt was damp before we reached the sidewalk.
The canopy formed by the live oaks gave nothing in the way of relief; the canopy trapped the day’s heat instead of blocking it.
The number 12 streetcar passed as we reached the curb, its windows fogged at the edges with the temperature differential.
I suggested walking, and Luca set the pace. He didn’t fight the heat. He moved with it.
“You went to Chicago,” I said. “After Tulane.”
“Graduate certificate in arts administration, Columbia College.” He stepped around a section of buckled sidewalk without looking down. “Two years.”
“And came back.”
“On purpose.”
We crossed into the CBD, where the tree canopy disappeared and the heat intensified.
The sidewalk radiated it upward through my shoes while glass towers deflected the evening light without mercy.
Luca’s shirt had darkened between his shoulder blades.
I understood why the city dressed in linen and air conditioning here was infrastructure, not indulgence.
The smell of fried dough and powdered sugar reached us from a food truck half a block down.
Canal Street opened ahead of us, and on the far side the city changed. The buildings crowded in. Iron balconies brought the sky down toward the earth.
A bar door swung open ahead, releasing a blast of air conditioning and the first four bars of something on a jukebox, then swung shut again. A man on an upper balcony watered his plants, and the runoff threaded down along a rail in a thin silver line.
Luca moved through the French Quarter at a steady pace, dark hair pasted to his temples by sweat. He was entirely at home in his heat-dampened skin.
“You do that everywhere,” he said.
“Do what.”
“The scan. Both balconies on that last block.”
“Occupational.”
“I know, but I do it differently. I look at who’s been standing in the same doorway since we turned off Canal.”
I looked back. A man in a Saints jersey stood outside a bar, phone in hand, with a sweating beer dripping condensation onto the sidewalk. “That one.”
“He’s waiting for someone. He keeps checking the door instead of the street.”
“Solid observational skills.”
“The first time I brought Dominic’s dry cleaning back on foot,” Luca said, “I went the wrong way on Chartres and ended up at the river. Stood there for ten minutes trying to figure out how I felt about it.”
“And.”
“I knew I’d made the right call moving back from Chicago. The city gave me the river for orientation. I know that’s not a rigorous analysis.”
“Did it need to be?”
He thought about it for a step or two. “No. It didn’t.”
The street compressed further as we approached Jackson Square. The evening light turned gold, catching the ironwork overhead and throwing patterned shadows down across the worn pavement. From a second-floor window came the smell of something cooking in butter—shallots and herbs.
It was already too late in the evening to enter the garden, but the pedestrian walkways remained open.
The painters were packing along the fence line, sliding their canvases into black cases. Tarot readers folded their tables and gathered their cloths. On the cathedral steps, a trumpet player ran a slow descending phrase, the notes going soft at the edges before they crossed the square.
The cathedral’s three spires rose against the amber and violet sky. By habit, I looked for all of the doors and access to alleys.
Luca stopped and stood still. He turned slowly to sort out his physical orientation.
“Horns were here first.” He walked north several paces and stopped. He pointed. “The drum came from over there. Someone had it in a car on Decatur. You can hear the door in the video if you go back and listen for it.”
He moved again, drawing an arc with his arm toward the cathedral steps. “The second line formed along that side. It moved in from the street.” He faced the garden. “Dominic took his position in there.”
There was a single shallow step that would have elevated him above the main grade. He would have been visible from the upper floors of every surrounding building.
“Did anyone organize it?”
Luca looked at me. “I think I mentioned I don’t know, but my best guess is Henri Fontenot had something to do with it.”
He knew more than he’d shared. I’d cut him off by insisting on documented information first.
“Why do you believe that? Did Henri conduct too?”
“No.” Luca watched the trumpet player break down his case. “He was in the crowd. I went back through the video twice this week. In the last five seconds, near the end of the video, he’s watching Dominic conduct.”
“Did you ask Dominic for clarification?”
“Not yet.”
I signaled for Luca to remain in place while I walked the perimeter alone.
It was a reconstruction of the event in my head. I had turned a corner and was heading back toward Luca when a flash went off.
A photographer crouched at the fence line, twenty feet away. The white burst of light threw sharp shadows across the flagstone. Tourists flinched, and two checked their phones.
Luca was where I’d left him, arms crossed, watching the last tarot reader fold her cloth. He’d scrunched his nose slightly as if something unpleasant had passed by.
“Anything?” he asked.
“If he had something to do with starting the crowd, he would have watched Dominic take charge. That would have been… difficult.”
Luca didn’t respond immediately. He glanced over his shoulder before speaking.
“He was at the Orpheum fundraiser in April. It was a donor reception. He spoke to Dominic twice: once at the bar, and once near the door on his way out. He seemed lighter than I’d seen him in years. I remember thinking his health had improved.”
More information that wouldn’t come from files. It came from seven years of reading the room.
The square had mostly cleared. The gas lamps came on, with orange circles of light pooling across the flagstones.
An older musician settled onto the cathedral steps with a battered case open beside him and a small stack of dollar bills held down by a brick. Fragments of trumpet melody drifted across the square as he started and stopped.
“Saints.” Unmistakable even in pieces.
“Here it starts as a funeral march,” Luca said. “The version everyone knows from bars, parades, and Saints games comes after. It initially moves at the pace of a procession. You play while heading for the grave.”
The musician found a phrase he liked and repeated it.
“The joy is in the second half. After you’ve done the hard thing, taken the body to its rest, the tempo lifts. You’ve earned it.” He paused as the trumpet player delivered a full chorus. “Grief comes first. The celebration is what you get on the way back.”
I thought about the arrangement left on the piano bench. Same melody and same intervals, but the harmony bent inward, never making the turn.
“He’s not corrupting it,” I said.
“No.” Luca turned toward me. “He’s amputating the second half. Cutting off at the grave.” He faced the trumpet player. “‘Saints’ in minor is grief with nowhere else to go.”
I turned to face Luca. “If it’s him, whatever he’s planning at the Orpheum isn’t chaos. He wants the ending to mean something precise.”
The trumpet player finished and lowered his instrument into his lap. The square was quiet.
“I need everything about what Henri actually did that night,” I said. “Not the institutional record. See if I can piece together the hour before Dominic arrived. Who he called, where he stood, and what the months after the video spread looked like from his side.”
“I know someone who was in the square. He’s a saxophone player. He went back to Lafayette after Katrina but returned eight months later. Dominic once said Henri was his benefactor.”
“Can you arrange a meeting?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Across Decatur, the muddy river moved slowly downstream, quietly present.
“He’ll try to feed you,” Luca said.
“Who.”