Chapter 30

 

I called Arthur and Megan Duplesses. They agreed to see Maurice, Celeste and me that night at nine. I left a message for Maurice that I would meet him at his hotel. He’d already left when I got there. Celeste arrived in a taxi as I walked out the front door.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He must have gone without us. Let’s take your cab. It’ll be faster.”

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Bourbon and St. Ann’s. And please hurry.”

Although the Duplesses’ house wasn’t far from the hotel, I had a strange feeling every minute saved in getting there might be useful. We found the front door open and we entered without knocking. We found Maurice Duples braced against the wall, the ensuing scene worse than I’d suspected.

Maurice was pointing his Luger at an old man in a rattan wheelchair. A purple Afghan draped the man’s legs, and he seemed oblivious to the pistol pointed at his chest. His crooked grin looked eerily similar and every bit as deranged as Maurice. He waved his gun at us in a menacing fashion. Remembering the scene at the cemetery, I pinned Celeste against the wall. The old man spoke, returning his attention to the center of the room.

“You wanna kill me? Go ahead. I’m ninety-six next month,” he said, giving one of his useless legs a hard slap with the flat of his hand. “I already done more living than any three men. Nothing you do can take that away.”

“I’ll kill you, all right. Soon as you tell me why you moved my mother’s body.”

Arthur Duplesses squinted and leaned forward in the wheelchair, assessing the likelihood that the person with the gun was someone he knew.

“You crazy? Who are you, anyway?”

“Maurice Duples. My mother’s name was Beatrice, but you already know that.”

Arthur Duplesses’ rheumy old eyes glimmered with sudden recognition in the light of the overhead bulb. He began to laugh. “You about a dumb one, you. You mama was a whore I met one night out on the town. I only took her in ’cause I felt sorry for her lazy ass.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Don’t call your daddy a liar.”

When Maurice opened his mouth, no words issued. Outside the open door, a horse-drawn carriage clomped by on the street. The distant howl of a dog baying at the moon over by the Iberville Project put an exclamation mark on the old man’s words.

“What the hell are you jabbering about, old man?” he said.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Duplesses said. “You think your name was Duples all these years? What kind of dumb name is that? You mama was my whore, and you’re my bastard boy.”

His grip on the Luger wavered, but for only a moment. After glancing at Celeste, he returned his gaze, and the barrel of the pistol, toward the old man.

“My mother was no whore. Now I want to know what you did with her body.”

Duplesses howled with laughter, and it quickly drew into a dry, hacking cough. “She’s right where we put her back in the thirties.”

“Then why isn’t her name on the crypt?”

“Whores don’t have their names carved on gravestones. Your mother was a whore, dumb ass.”

The old man’s words were more than Maurice could handle. Grabbing him by the collar, he prodded the barrel of the pistol into his temple.

“Take back what you said about my mother. Do it right now before I blow your brains out.”

Duplesses laughed again. “You gonna kill me? I told you, I’m almost ninety six-year old. You got more to lose than me, ’cept you too stupid to realize it.”

I got between Celeste and her father. “He’s right, Maurice. You know the truth now. Killing this old man will serve no purpose.”

“You’re wrong, Mr. Thomas. It’ll make me feel lots better.”

“Daddy, Wyatt’s right. Killing him will only get you thrown in jail. Please drop your gun and let him go, I beg you.”

Maurice dragged the old man out of the wheelchair and slapped him across the face. It just made him laugh harder.

“You about a dumb one, you know that? You must have got it from your mother’s side ’cause you damn sure ain’t got any Duplesses’ brains. Thank God, I never let that crazy wife of mine change your name. She wanted me to. I had to break her damn nose to shut her up.”

“The last nose you’ll ever break,” Maurice said, slamming the old man back into the rattan wheelchair.

Celeste had seen enough. Rushing past me, she grabbed her father’s arm and tried to pull him away from Arthur Duplesses.

“Please, Daddy, stop it,” she cried.

Duples shook her away from his arm and grabbed Duplesses’ collar again. This time he stuck the barrel of the pistol in the old man’s mouth. The old man showed no fear, continuing to taunt his agitated son.

“Bastard boy, bastard boy,” he mumbled, the barrel of the pistol obstructing his words.

“Stop it, Maurice,” I said. “He’s not worth it to you. Think of Celeste. Now you know what happened to your mother. Killing your father won’t bring her back.”

The old man chortled at my plea, and it quickly turned into another fit of coughing. When his seizure abated, he started to speak again but never got the words out of his mouth. Instead, someone behind us, an old woman, barked a command.

“Let him go, Maurice, and back away.”

He reacted quickly as if he somehow knew the woman’s voice. Letting go of Duplesses’ collar, he took two steps backward. Just in time as a mighty blast rocked the room, knocking the old man out of his wheelchair and blowing him against the wall. When Celeste and I regained our senses, we turned to Maurice. His eyes were wide and his mouth open. Both barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun had blasted Duplesses. A gray-haired old woman dressed in tattered silk dropped the smoking gun.

“He’s the bastard, not you. I should have killed him years ago. He kept your mama and others like her. Never gave a whit for my feelings or theirs.”

After letting the shotgun slide to the floor, Megan Duplesses crossed the room to where the stunned Maurice, again braced against the wall, waited. When she touched his cheek, he dropped the pistol to the floor.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Maurice. I want you to know, your real mama’s still in that tomb. The old man just had her bones pushed to the back of the vault. I loved you like a son and begged Arthur to let me keep you after Beatrice died. He answered by breaking my nose and kicking out my front teeth. He sent you to Mississippi, and I was too frightened to go and get you. Son, will you ever forgive me?” she asked, tears welling in her eyes.

Maurice put his arms around the old woman and began to weep. Celeste joined him. I hurried to the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

***

Distant sirens sounded minutes after I called for help. Megan Duplesses hugged both Maurice and Celeste then pulled away from their embraces, rushing to her dead husband.

“He did love you, at least in his own crazed way,” she said. “He sent money every month and paid your way through college. He thought I didn’t know. It’s the only decent thing he ever did in his life.”

She knelt and kissed her husband’s cold cheek a last time before clutching her heart, gasping once, and sinking to the floor beside him. Celeste, her father, and I rushed to help her until the E.M.T.s arrived to the blare of an ambulance’s siren.

***

Tony gave me a go-to-hell look when he and the N.O.P.D. made it to the scene. Between stilted explanations, deftly omitting why we were there in the first place, I spirited Maurice’s pistol off the floor and into my jacket. Arthur and Megan ranked high among the city’s elite. I knew Tony would find a way to overlook the fact that the old man had died from an intentional shotgun hole in his belly. His death, subsequently resulting in Megan’s untimely heart attack, would go down as accidental.

Other than some puritanical need to punish Maurice for his temporary insanity, I saw no reason to involve him further in Duplesses’ death. New Orleans is the home of few Puritans, and I certainly was not one of them. The ambulance rushed Megan Duplesses to University Hospital where they placed her in critical care. Celeste and Maurice would be there when she came out from under anesthesia. On the way to the hospital, Celeste informed me the real reason I covered up for her father.

“The X I made on Marie Laveau’s tomb. I wished that my father would find out about his family so his terrible memories would stop driving him crazy. And I wished for a happy ending.”

A crowd had gathered outside the townhouse on Bourbon and St. Ann. Gunshots, police cars, and ambulances have that effect on people. Someone that lived on nearby Rue Bourbon watched the commotion from the sidewalk across the street. Someone that had other plans for Celeste’s happy ending.