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Besides her.
Landry didn’t know if he broke the spell or she did. She drew a loud, sudden, shaking-herself-back-to-action breath at the same time he moved down the first step. Without speaking they walked to her car, backed out of the driveway and drove out of the neighborhood, leaving behind Serenity, Divinity and Trinity.
A few minutes later, she pulled to the curb on Bourbon Street, blocking his driveway, and gazed at him. She wanted to say something, or wanted him to. He didn’t know. He opened the door and swung one foot to the ground, then turned back to her. “Lunch tomorrow?”
Her faint smile was echoed in her eyes as she nodded.
“Noon? Here?”
Another nod.
He slid out, then bent down to look at her. “I’ll see you then.”
He watched until her car disappeared into the shadows down the street, the red taillights the only sign of it, then they were gone, too. He breathed deeply of garbage and beer and sweaty people partying on a miserably hot night. He listened to the competing music from nearby bars, the loud voices of tourists passing by, the sound of a siren down the street, the clank and wheeze of an air conditioner losing the fight to the heat, and he smiled ruefully.
Five minutes of Bourbon Street made him miss the evening of peace on Serenity. He never would have believed it.
* * *
Alia wasn’t a shoe whore. She had a few pairs of killer heels—in ways both good and bad—but she would never buy a pair of shoes that cost more than her monthly mortgage, and she didn’t need an excessive number of them. Other than three pairs of good running shoes, the rest of the shelves were filled with shoes ranging from reasonably priced pumps, boots and sandals to dollar-sale flip-flops.
Clothing, however, was a different matter.
She stood in the closet—formerly known as the guest bedroom—Sunday morning and surveyed her choices for lunch with Landry. There was a rack filled with dresses like last night’s, some reaching to her ankles, others barely covering her butt, all of them snug-fitting and flattering. There were pants, skirts, suits, sundresses; jeans, capris and shorts; shirts and tees and tanks, covering the gamut from casual to nice-restaurant-worthy.
And there were a lot. They filled the racks around the perimeter of the room and the drawers of the two dressers that stood back to back in the middle. Never let it be said Alia Kingsley had nothing to wear.
She pulled a pair of capris from their hanger. They were the exact shade of her favorite lime sherbet, loose-fitting and cool, and she’d had the luck to find a print scoop-neck top that matched. That and a pair of well-worn sandals, plus dangling earrings and a couple of thin bangles, and she was ready to—
Her cell phone interrupted the thought, a standard ring—not her mom’s or dad’s. She pulled on the shirt on her way to the bedroom and snatched the cell off the bed, noting Jimmy’s number on the screen before answering. “I’m off today.”
“Yeah, so am I. But not everyone has our good luck, sweet pea. What are you doing?”
She turned on the speaker, then dropped the phone so she could wiggle into the cropped pants. “I’m getting ready for lunch. What do you need?”
“Maybe I’ll join you. What are you having?”
“Vietnamese,” she said sweetly.
“Yeah, maybe some other time,” he responded, just as she’d expected. “Listen, I got a call from Jack Murphy. Remember him?”
“Sure. Best detective NOPD has.” Intense, damn good-looking, loved his wife, adored their kids and had an admirable solve rate.
“Yeah, well—hey. I thought I was the best.”
“You keep thinking that, Jimmy.”
“You’re hard on a man’s ego,” Jimmy said in a wounded tone. “Anyway, Murphy caught a case this morning. Woman came home from early services at church and found her husband dead in his office.”
Alia fastened her watch, then sprayed a cloud of perfume around her. “And that has to do with me how?”
“The guy was Bradley Wallace.”
She knew that name: it had appeared on the lengthy list of Jeremiah Jackson’s associates. According to Mary Ellen, Wallace had been one of her father’s nearest and dearest friends. They, along with three others, had grown up together, gone to college together, lived within blocks of each other their entire lives. Their wives had been friends, their kids playmates, and Brad Wallace had been devastated by Jeremiah’s death, according to the interview the police had done with him.
Taking the phone off speaker, Alia held it to her ear as she started downstairs. “How did he die?”
“Stabbed multiple times in the office in his Garden District home. Wife hadn’t seen him since she went to bed last night. He’d stayed up to work, never did go to church with her anyway, so she wasn’t expecting him. Today she went to roust him for brunch with some friends and found him.” Jimmy paused. “There were cuts and stab wounds pretty much everywhere, and when they moved him, his tongue fell out of his mouth.”
