The plight of the shrimpers was a serious one, especially since shrimp represented the most important fishing catch in the Gulf region. Shrimp were dying by the truckloads in Louisiana, or their numbers dwindling off, and someone was to blame. Part of it was due to overfishing by commercial enterprises and sport fishermen, but mostly it was due to habitat destruction.
A person didn’t have to be a tree-hugger to care about what was happening, and Luc felt guilty knowing his loose tongue, or association with that dingbat Sylvie, might have mucked up their case. He had a lot of damage control to put together today.
While René’s calls had been expected, the other calls were a bit of a shock. Most hurtful were the anonymous calls from plain folks who said Luc’s meddling threatened their livelihoods.
Then there was Sylvie’s grandmother, Dixie Breaux, a lobbyist for a conglomerate of Southern oil companies, who asked him to stop by her office. Her voice was businesslike, the underlying tone was uptown pissed.
Joe VanZandt, a lawyer for Cypress Oil, threatened, “LeDeux, I’m gonna put your ass in a legal sling if you don’t stop screwing with matters that’re none of your business.” He knew Joe from way back. Joe was a prick, not worth worrying about.
The Department of Environmental Resources was another matter. The DER would naturally be perturbed by any insinuation that they weren’t doing their job. Frank Early, the regional director, demanded, “LeDeux, it’s nine A.M. Monday morning. Be in this office by noon with all the lab work and files you have on Cypress Oil.”
Luc looked at his watch. It was already one o’clock. Not that he’d kowtow to any pencil pusher anyhow.
The last call before the machine tape ran out was the clincher. His father.
Luc went stiff. His father never called him. Never. Even when they ran into each other in public, they barely exchanged more than a few civil words. The company must be really worried if they’d convinced his father to approach his estranged son.
“Lucien, this is Valcour LeDeux.” God, the man didn’t even have the sense to know how offensive it was to refer to himself that way. Not Dad. Or Papa. Even father.
With a snort of disgust, Luc threw a sofa pillow at the answering machine.
“For once in your life, take my advice, boy. Don’t get involved in this bullshit with René, and his loser pals. It’s an unwinnable battle. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.”
Boy? Luc could barely understand his father’s slurred voice. He must have been drunk when he called. As usual.
Which caused Luc to be assailed by a wave of self-loathing at his own drunken lapse. Like father, like son.
No! I am not like my father. I’m not!
But then he thought of his father’s youngest son, ten-year-old Tee-John, and had to admit that he very well might be.
Letting out a whoosh of exasperation, his father continued with boozy recklessness, “If this is about revenge, forget it. You can’t hurt me. No one can. Your mother was the only one, but the bitch went and died on me.”
With a howl of outrage, Luc picked up the machine and threw it against the wall. Still, the hated voice droned on with self-pity and recriminations. If he were in the same room with his father, and if he were twenty-five years younger, now would be the time when the belt would come off and the beatings begin. “You’re a bad boy, Lucien. Bad, bad, bad. Someone’s gotta beat the badness out of you. Bad seed, that’s what you are. Devil’s spawn. Bad, bad bad.”
Luc stormed out of his apartment, slamming the door after him.
I never ends. Never.
Things weren’t any better when Luc arrived at Terrebonne Pharmaceuticals. The first clue was the half-dozen police cars in the lot. Thanks to a Cajun police officer he knew from high school, Luc finally got through to the lab, which had been cordoned off. He discovered that there had been a break-in the night before. Drawers had been pulled out, file cabinets were overturned, bottles smashed, papers scattered everywhere. A detective he’d represented once in a messy divorce suit told him off the record that all of Sylvie’s files and some of her experimental rats had been taken, though Luc noticed that a few of the rodent couples were humping away in the corner, despite the turmoil surrounding them.
But there wasn’t a sign of Sylvie. Apparently she hadn’t been seen since yesterday.
“Where’s Sylvie?” he asked her boss, Charles Henderson, who was standing in the open doorway of his office, talking with a police officer.
The officer left and Henderson gave him a disdainful once-over, apparently because he hadn’t shaved in two days. Some hidden part of him wondered if his clothes were dirty or wrinkled, as they had been when he was a little boy, but, no, he’d donned clean jeans and a cotton shirt, fresh from the laundry packets. Maybe Henderson looked down on him just because he was who he was. Yep, that was probably it.
“I have no idea where Sylvie is,” Henderson replied. “I thought maybe you would know, LeDeux.”
Me? Why does everyone think I have some relationship with Sylvie? “She was supposed to meet me here this afternoon.”
“Why?”
“None of your freakin’ business, that’s why.” He inhaled deeply to control his temper. “Where’s Sylvie?”
“I don’t know. I told her when I saw her yesterday not to come in today, but—”
“You fired her?”
“No, I didn’t fire her.”
“Suspended?”
“Look, I don’t have to explain myself to you. But if you must know, I advised her to stay away for a few days till the board met.”
“What does the board have to do with her coming to work or not?”
“Are you her lawyer or something?”
“Something.”
“The board needs to discuss all the ramifications of Sylvie’s…I mean, our…uh, product.”
Luc’s eyes went wide with sudden understanding. “You intend to market her love potion? Now? Before the human testing?”
“Well, that hasn’t been decided yet.”
“And Sylvie agreed to this?”
“Well, not exactly. But it’s not up to her. Any work done on Terrebonne Pharmaceuticals property belongs to the company,” Henderson proclaimed. His eyes shifted craftily with those last words.
“Is that, so?” Luc swung on his heel, about to leave and hunt Sylvie down elsewhere. Apparently, Sylvie needed a good lawyer. Not that he was about to volunteer.
“If you find Sylvie, tell her she’d better deliver those formula files to me right away. We need to put them under lock and key. And she’d better bring those two lab rats back, too.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Luc said, peering back over his shoulder. “Neither you, nor the perps, got your hands on the precious formula?”
Stains of red bloomed on Henderson’s cheeks, but he clamped his thin lips together.
Luc smiled. Maybe Sylvie wasn’t as dumb as he’d thought.
On second thought, Luc concluded a half hour later, Sylvie Fontaine was the dumbest broad this side of the Mississippi.
Her home was a god-awful mess. Drawers pulled out and emptied, their contents tossed here and there. Paintings ripped off the walls. Oriental carpets flipped up. Chair and sofa cushions lifted off and slitted, their stuffing pulled out.
Dumb, dumb, dumb! How could she have left her front door unlocked? Well, maybe it had been unlocked by the vandals once they’d entered. But that didn’t excuse her other dumb mistakes. How could a single woman live in a town house with first-floor French doors? All that glass was an open invitation to a burglar, as evidenced by the broken panes he’d seen first thing on entering her home. Hadn’t she ever heard of an alarm system? Or a guard dog?
Good thing she wasn’t home, or the person who’d broken into her home might have done more than ransack the place. Obviously the burglars were out for something other than loot, or they would have taken the television, or VCR. Hell, there were enough silver doodads and fine antiques scattered about the place
to fill a small museum. That upended porcelain umbrella stand in the hallway, for instance. It looked like one of those Chinese thingamajigs, So-sue-me or some such name, that they sold in the French Quarter antique shops for a gazillion dollars.
What could the perps have been searching for?
Sylvie’s love potion? he speculated to himself with a groan of incredulity.
It seemed too ludicrous to be true, but hadn’t Henderson hinted that even his conservative business enterprise was entertaining the possibility of marketing the love potion? Well, not so ludicrous when you considered the huge profits Pfizer had made with Viagra.
But who would be anxious enough to break into a lab and a woman’s apartment for the formula? Industrial espionage agents? Reporters out for a scoop? Family members seeking to prevent a scandal? The FDA?
Something caught his attention then. A slight motion near the still-open front door. When he got there, though, all he saw rushing down the street was the back of a woman, clothed all in black, from turbanned head to ankle-length gown. Looking down, he saw something usually witnessed these days only in the deepest bayous…a gris-gris, of all things. The small gris-gris or conjo bag was attached to a voodoo curse doll, which wore a white lab coat and looked like a dark-haired Martha Stewart.
It was one thing for Lucien LeDeux to be after Sylvie Fontaine’s butt. The press, her family, business spies, and every government agency in the Washington Beltway might pose a threat. But voodoo hoodoos were a whole other territory.
Yep, Sylvie Fontaine was in big, big trouble.
The first thing Sylvie noticed when she arrived home Monday afternoon was the open doorway to her town house.
The second thing she noticed was the mess. Someone had broken into her home and savaged it. She leaned down and picked up a closed umbrella on the hall floor.
Stepping quietly into the living room, she set her Happy Meal container on the floor, then noticed a third thing…Lucien LeDeux.
She’d been gone since yesterday evening after giving up on responding to the numerous phone calls that kept coming in on her answering machine. Blanche had offered her the use of her parents’ summer home near Avery Island. After four straight hours of sightseeing at the famous bird sanctuary, hearing every birdsong imaginable, Sylvie had decided it was time to hightail it home and face her own music.
Little did she know she’d be confronted by her own personal vulture first thing. Luc stood on the other side of the room with his back to her, casually listening to the messages on her answering machine. The nerve of the dolt!
“Ms. Fontaine, this is Fred Daltry at the Food and Drug Administration. Please give me a call immediately. We need to talk about this…ahem, uh, love potion you’ve invented. Are you aware of FDA regulations regarding substances which are sold as medicinal products? Now, if this is just a vitamin supplement, or herb…well, really, I can’t explain over the phone. We need to talk. My number is…”
“Aaarrgh!” Sylvie shrieked, and went after Luc with the upraised umbrella. “How dare you break into my home? How dare you listen to my private messages? How dare you smirk?”
Luc ducked just in time, and the umbrella came down with a whack on her great-grandmother’s Queen Anne side table, knocking the phone and answering machine to the floor.
Aunt Madeline was spouting off now. “Don’t forget now, dear. You mustn’t make any deals for your love potion. The formula could be very valuable. In fact, Margo and I might be able to help you out…for a fee, of course. We might even be able to market it through our herbal tea company. First things first, though. You need a good lawyer, sweetheart. May I suggest…”
Talk about vultures!
“Hey, babe. This is your lucky day. I just happen to be a lawyer,” Luc pointed out in response to her aunt’s suggestion. He was still smirking.
“Aaarrgh!” she said again, this time more softly. Tears filled her eyes as she surveyed the damage to her home. “How could you do this, Luc? I told you there was no antidote to the love potion.”
“You think I did this? For a lousy antidote?” Luc stiffened, no longer smirking. “God, you must consider me lower than pond scum.”
She counted to ten to stop herself from saying something really vulgar. “Who else, then?”
“Well, how about your boyfriend and his cohorts at Terrebonne Pharmaceuticals? How about some overzealous competitor who wants to get in on the love potion market? How about your scandal-shy, nutcake family? How about the FDA, EPA, the FBI, the CIA? And by the way, where are my lab results?”
“The FBI? The CIA? Give me a break!”
He ignored her interruption. “Not to mention”—he held up the gris-gris doll—“some voodoo fanatic.”
Her eyes bugged out at the voodoo doll.
People who lived in the South might not believe in voodoo, but they would never be so foolish as to disbelieve. Uh-uh! Superstitions ran deep below the Mason-Dixon line, and Sylvie felt a shiver of trepidation run through her.
“This is your fault, Luc. If you hadn’t opened your big mouth at my mother’s party, none of this would have happened.”
“My fault? My fault? If you hadn’t been poking around with human nature, inventing a jelly-bean aphrodisiac, none of this would’ve happened. And if your friend Blanche hadn’t blabbed to a newspaper reporter, we wouldn’t be in this fix,” he declared icily, moving to the French doors, where he examined the broken glass on the floor, being careful not to handle anything that might have fingerprints. “And, by the way, it works just fine, in case you were wondering.”
“What works just fine?” She was having trouble following his rambling train of thought. Was he talking about the doors, or who was at fault, or…oh, my God!
“I’ve been drinking nonstop since Friday night, and I don’t even like to drink all that much anymore. Despite being snockered, I still kept…keep thinking about you.” Sheepishly, and with way too much candor, he explained, “I’ve had a hard-on for you the past forty-eight hours straight.”
She looked down, without thinking, at the flat denim area near his crotch.
“Believe me, it’ll be salutin’ any minute now. And its national anthem ain’t no ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ It’s ‘Star-Spangled Red-Hot, White-Heat, Blue-Flame’ Sylvie. Put that on your Bunsen burner, babe, and think about it.”
“You are the crudest man I have ever met.”
“Yeah. Maybe that’s what you need in your life, chère. Maybe you’ve had too many la-dee-dah, polite namby-pambies in your life. Men who say, ‘Can I?’ and ‘May I?’ when what they should’ve said was, ‘Park your ass on my lap, sweet buns, and let the good times roll.’”
“I hate you.”
“Likewise.”
They were practically nose to nose now, gritting out their insults to each other, when a loud cracking noise erupted just above their heads. Another pane of glass shattered, followed by a whizzing noise, then a thud against the far wall.
Startled, they turned as one to see a bullet hole the size of a quarter in the cream-colored plaster wall.
“Duck!” Luc shouted, and shoved her to the floor, just before another bullet winged its way through the French doors.
Sylvie was too stunned to scream or cry, even though one of her palms was grinding against a sliver of glass…even though Luc was lying on top of her with his full weight.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said in a panic. “Samson and Delilah. I left them by the front door.” Sylvie shoved him off her and proceeded to turn and make a snakelike path back through the living room.
He grabbed her by the back collar of her blouse, halting her progress. “Are you nuts? You can’t go back there…not yet. And who in blazes are Samson and Delilah?”
“Rats.”
“Rats?” he repeated incredulously.
“Yes, I brought Samson and Delilah, my two main lab rats, with me yesterday when I left the company.”
“Holy shit!” he muttered. The woman was risking her life for rats. br />
She stared at him, wide-eyed with unspoken supplication.
Oh, hell! He was the one doing a snake dance then, making his way on his belly to the foyer, then back again carrying a Happy Meal carton that made tiny squealing noises. He handed it to Sylvie, who checked to see if the occupants were okay. The two little rodents squeaked with delight, but he wasn’t sure if it was because they were happy to see Sylvie, or happy to be able to hump in peace once again.
Sylvie was making cooing noises at the animals as they shook the wax paper in their usual erotic frenzy. They were real sex machines, these two were…a regular X-rated Mickey and Minnie.
“You are really weird, Sylv. No kidding.”
The most important thing, though, was that there were no more shots. He pushed the Happy Meal carton to the wall and motioned for her to follow him, crawling on his belly to the far side of the room. Finally, they made it to the dining room, still lying low on their bellies, and gazed at each other in amazement.
It was the craziest situation Luc had ever been in…and there had been a few humdingers. He propped his elbows on the floor and braced his chin in his hands, staring at the witch who’d conjured up this unbelievable plot.
“Why is someone shooting at us?” Sylvie, also propped on her hands, was wearing black pleated trousers and a white silk blouse. The top few buttons of the wispy shirt must have come undone when he’d thrown her to the floor at the first gunshot, or when he’d pulled on her collar. Not that he noticed her exposed skin. Or cared. Or even looked.
Hah!
“Not us, necessarily. It could be me. Maybe someone followed me here,” he suggested.
She tilted her head in puzzlement, causing the blouse to gape wider.
I’m not looking. I’m not looking. “They would have no reason to shoot at you, Sylv. They’d never get the formula, then. Me, on the other hand,” he said, with a shrug. “They’re banking on the fact that the fishermen might give up without an advocate. They’d probably never find another lawyer dumb enough to represent them.”