“Grace,” she said.
He began, “Bless us, O Lord, and these your gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” Paulina said, crossing herself as he did.
He reached for his fork but felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He grabbed it to silence it.
He groaned at the sight of the number. Katherine again.
“You can answer it,” Paulina said.
“It can wait.” Everything could wait when he was with her.
“A priest is dead, a priest I cared about. Table manners can take the day off.”
“I love you.”
She winked at him as he rose from the table. He went outside to the sidewalk, where he called Katherine back. He wasn’t about to talk to a woman he’d slept with while standing in his own fiancée’s house.
“Secretary swears up and down Father Murran never put in for a transfer anywhere,” Katherine said without preamble.
“And she would know,” he said.
“She handles all the paperwork. Did you hear different?”
“He came to our engagement party in June,” he told her. “When I asked him if he’d help perform our wedding Mass, he said he wouldn’t be around for the wedding because he was being transferred.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“He lied to you.”
“He did.”
“Maybe he was already planning on killing himself?”
“Maybe,” Cyrus said. “He also asked me to pray for him.”
“Did he say why?”
“No.”
“Did you pray for him?”
“Kind of forgot to,” he confessed.
“Take the case, Tremont,” Katherine said. “Please? You already have a lead.”
Cyrus remembered the river, the gut-churning feeling of seeing Ike with the rifle in his hand. He would have tried to stop it if he’d been there. He wasn’t there then, but he was here now.
“I’ll look into it. Just in case there’s more going on here.”
Katherine exhaled so hard the phone rattled in Cyrus’s ear. “Thank you,” she said with obvious relief. “I’ll sleep better tonight knowing somebody’s looking into this. The Church has way too much power in this town.”
Cyrus agreed, but he didn’t say that aloud. Not with his Catholic saint of a fiancée inside the house waiting on him to come finish breakfast.
“What about those digits on the red card?” Cyrus asked. He dug his reporter’s notebook out of his pocket.
“The previous address associated with the number is just a P.O. box, no longer Sutherlin’s. But our dominatrix friend has a file. A big one.”
“Criminal record?”
“Nothing in Nola. All in New York, mostly Manhattan. Plus a sealed juvenile record.”
“What’s in the file?” Cyrus asked, scribbling everything down she told him.
“Arrests. Lots of arrests. Now, the last arrest was years ago, but there was a period from about 2004 to 2008 she was arrested over ten times.”
“Prostitution?”
“Two arrests, yes. But mostly assault,” Katherine said. “But hey, that’s kind of what dominatrixes do, right? How’s a cop to know you’re slapping Joe Blow around by request?”
Cyrus could picture that scene playing out, a nosy neighbor calling the cops on suspicious noises from next door. He’d seen stranger things back in his days on the force.
“Jail time?”
“The woman is Teflon. I’ll email you the basics, but no convictions. Nothing went to court. Not even a plea. Everything dropped every single time.”
“What about blackmail? Any arrests?” Cyrus could easily imagine a sex worker blackmailing a priest-client. He knew quite a few priests with money tooling around town in big black Caddies, rushing to get morning Mass over with so they could make their ten o’clock tee-times at the golf course.
“No, but she does have a known associate who was investigated for blackmail. And he’s local, too. I couldn’t find an address for her, but I found one for him.”
“Name?”
“Kingsley Boissonneault.”
“Never heard of him.”
“AKA Kingsley Edge. Owns The Marquis Club. Jazz club, supposedly.”
Cyrus winced. “Him I’ve heard of.” A husband he was tailing last year had spent a lot of money at The Marquis Club, a lot of money that should have been going to his ex-wife and kid.
“What’s Edge’s address?”
Katherine gave him an address in the Garden District. “You think Sutherlin’s there?” he asked.
“They’ll know where she is if she isn’t. Better hurry. She might skip town when she finds out Murran’s dead. Plus, you know you want to meet this lady.”
“Believe it or not, I’m not looking forward to getting slapped around by a big lady with a whip today. That is not my type.”
Katherine laughed. “You’re forgetting I know you, Cyrus. Every woman is your type.”
He looked back at the house, the little brick cottage painted white. His heart was in that house.
“Not anymore.”
Chapter Three
Nora Sutherlin set her paintbrush down onto the tray and stepped back. She stood in the center of the nursery, which had been emptied of all furnishings. Everything was in storage, waiting for the mother-to-be to pick a paint color and for the aunt-to-be to do the painting.
“Okay, take your time. But not too much time. You’re about to pop,” Nora said. “The green one is Sounds of Nature. The pink one is Cotton Candy. The yellow one is Enchanted. Which one do you like best?”
Juliette Toussaint, thirty-five weeks pregnant with the child of the notorious Kingsley Edge, narrowed her eyes at the wall where Nora had painted three large sections in baby-friendly hues. With her right hand on her protruding pregnant belly and her left hand toying at a string of pearls around her long graceful neck, Juliette gave each swatch a long look before finally turning to Nora.
“No blues?” Juliette asked.
Nora dropped her chin to her chest and counted to three.
“You told me no blues,” Nora said.
“No, he told you no blues,” Juliette reminded her.
“He’s buying. Therefore, no blues.”
Juliette only sighed.
“If there is any white woman on the planet who shouldn’t have a Pinterest account, it’s me,” Nora said. “But I opened a Pinterest account in my quest to get you the perfect nursery wall color, because your baby deserves the best. These three are the best. These are the colors Martha Stewart dreams in. If the Virgin Mary had a ten-thousand-dollar nursery budget, baby Jesus would have had one of these colors painted on His walls. Any one of these colors in a nursery will give the most diehard childless free spirit—me, for example—aching ovaries because she wants to have a baby for the sole reason she can have a room one of these colors in her house.”
“I like blue,” Juliette said.
“What are ovaries?” Céleste asked.
Nora looked over her shoulder at Juliette and Kingsley’s three-year-old daughter Céleste, who was currently applying gold star stickers to the back of a large black German Shepherd.