CHAPTER 31
THE CHOICE
POV: NOELLE
I paint my mother’s nails myself on Wednesday morning.
It isn’t Thursday. The nurse who does it every week looks surprised when I ask for the bottle, and then she looks at my face and at the four men outside the door and hands it to me without a word, and goes out, and closes the door behind her.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I take my mother’s hand. I shake the bottle the way she used to shake hers, fast, against her palm, the little metal ball rattling inside.
Shell pink. Her color.
I start with her thumb.
“He’s dead, Mama,” I tell her.
The brush goes on smoothly. The color’s too thick at the edge; I clean it with my thumbnail.
“Yesterday. At the cemetery. In the fog. Lucien shot him.” Her first finger. “I watched. He said your name first. I made sure.”
Her chest rises. Falls.
“They put him in the wall yesterday afternoon. Beside his wife. There’s a brass plate. It says he fell.” Her middle finger. My hand is steady. “Nobody will ever look behind it.”
The monitor ticks.
“I found your box,” I say. “In Grandmère’s niche. I found the card.”
I finish her ring finger. I sit a moment with her hand in mine, the wet nails spread so they won’t smudge.
“It’s safe now,” I tell her. “You can stop checking.”
I blow on her nails the way she used to blow on mine.
Lucien is waiting in the hall. He looks at my face, and then at the pink on my own fingertips where I smeared it, and doesn’t say anything.
“Poydras Street,” I say.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Noelle.”
“I’m going in alone,” I say. “I have an appointment at eleven with the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. I made it myself. On the phone at the nurses’ station. I told her secretary I was Grant Whitlock’s last visitor and I had his phone, and she found an opening.”
His eyes go black.
“You called the federal building.”
“Yes.”
“From my mother-in-law’s clinic.”
“From my mother’s clinic,” I say.
He looks at me. At the gold at my throat. At the mark on his own neck, which I can see above his collar and which he hasn’t tried once to hide.
“I drive you,” he says. “I wait at the curb. If you’re not out in an hour, I come in after you.”
“You’d walk into the federal building.”
“I’d walk through it,” he says.
I believe him.
“One hour,” I say.
***
The United States Attorney is a woman named Diane Ferrand, and she’s younger than I expected, and she doesn’t offer me coffee.
Her office is on the fourteenth floor. Gray carpet, a flag, a window over the Superdome. There’s a man from the FBI in the corner in a blue suit who doesn’t introduce himself, and a legal pad on her desk with nothing written on it yet.
I sit in the chair across from her desk.
I think about my mother three years ago, in a chair like this one, on another floor of this building, sitting for forty minutes with a flash drive in her purse, not saying anything.
I don’t wait forty minutes.
I take Grant Whitlock’s phone out of my bag and set it on her desk.
“He was on Cormac Brannigan’s payroll for two and a half years,” I say. “The messages are all there. The payments are in his bank. He paid off his mortgage in April with three hundred and ten thousand dollars from an aunt who died in 2011.”
Ferrand looks at the phone. She doesn’t touch it.
“Mr. Whitlock,” she says carefully, “was found Saturday morning in the crypt of St. Anselm Church. The medical examiner’s preliminary finding is accidental drowning.”
“He broke in,” I say. “During the flood. Looking for something that wasn’t his.”
“What was he looking for?”
I take a flash drive out of my coat pocket. One of the four. The one I watched Lucien read at the door-table in the camp by kerosene light, and nod, and hand back to me.
I set it beside the phone.
“Every deal Cormac Brannigan has made on the east docks for eleven years,” I say.
“Ships. Customs agents. A man at the Port Authority. Payments. Dates. My mother kept both sets of books for Gulf Crescent Maritime, Ms. Ferrand. She was very precise. When she saw the Brannigans in the Delacroix numbers, she followed them.”
Ferrand looks at the drive without moving.
“And the Delacroix numbers?” she says.
“Augustin Delacroix died yesterday,” I say. “He fell.”
The man in the corner shifts.
“And his son?”
“My husband,” I say, “is waiting at the curb.”
She almost smiles. Almost.
“Mrs. Delacroix,” she says. “You understand that if your mother kept both sets of books, then somewhere there’s a record of everything the Delacroix family has done on that river for eleven years. And you understand that I’m a federal prosecutor.”
“I understand that,” I say. “I also understand that one of your prosecutors was on a gangster’s payroll and drowned breaking into a church, and the Times-Picayune would love to hear about it.
And that Cormac Brannigan has the Garzas and half the Port Authority, and your office has been trying to put him in a cell for fifteen years and has never once come close. ”
I lean forward.
“I’m giving you Cormac,” I say. “All of him. Everything my mother found. You’ll have him in handcuffs by Christmas.
In return, Grant Whitlock drowned by accident.
The fire on the Magdalene was a gas line.
And my mother’s accident on Paris Road three years ago gets reopened as a homicide by persons associated with Augustin Delacroix, deceased.
With her name on it, as the witness who tried to come to you.
” My voice doesn’t shake. “She did try. She sat in a chair in this building for forty minutes. Somebody should write that down.”
Ferrand picks up her pen.
“And the rest of your mother’s books?” she says.
I sit back.
“Insurance,” I say.
She holds my eyes in silence.
“Are you safe, Mrs. Delacroix?” she says at last. Quietly. The way the deacon asked. The way Whitlock asked, in a chair beside my mother’s bed. “Do you need protection? Is there anyone you’re afraid of?”
I think about the loft. The lock. The wall. A man on his knees in the water on the step below me, calling me a queen.
“No,” I say. “I have a husband.”
Ferrand writes something on her legal pad.
It’s 11:41 when I stand.
The elevator is empty. The lobby is marble and security guards and a metal detector I walk out through, past the guards who watch me go. The revolving door turns me out into gray noon, onto the steps above Poydras Street, into the wind off the river.
The long black car is at the curb.
He’s standing beside it with his arms folded and his coat open and the rosary on his wrist, and he isn’t looking at the building, or the traffic, or the federal marshals at the door who know exactly who he is.
He’s looking at me.
He’s been looking at me for three years.
I walk down the steps alone.
He’s waiting at the curb.
Of course he is.