Under the Cajun Moon (2 page)

Rounding the corner of what I assumed was a bathroom, I realized that this wasn’t just a single hotel room but, in fact, a suite. The front room was as dark as the bedroom had been, and I stumbled through it to get to the door. Once there, I swung it open, revealing two policemen standing in a sunny courtyard. Just the sight of their crisp uniforms and no-nonsense expressions flooded my soul with relief. Maybe they could help me figure out where I was and what was going on.

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. Is everything all right?”

I blinked, wondering where to start.

“Ma’am? Have you been a victim of domestic violence? ’Cause we can take you out of here right now and bring you somewhere safe.”

“Domestic violence?” I asked, reaching a hand to my cheek, wondering if they saw something I hadn’t noticed in the mirror, a cut or a bruise.

“We had a complaint of noise. They said it sounded like two people having a big fight.”

I took my hand from my face, swallowed hard, and tried to think of how to reply. Before I could say another word, one of the cops stepped forward into the room, causing me to take a step back.

“You’re obviously confused, ma’am. Let’s take this one thing at a time.”
He was speaking in the measured tones usually reserved for small children and senile adults. “Are you physically injured in any way?”

Again looking down at my wrinkled suit, nothing seemed amiss. I ran my hands over my arms and down my sides, but I didn’t feel anything painful or unusual.

“No. Physically, I think I’m fine.”

“All right. How about him? Is he okay?”

As I looked to where the policeman pointed across the room, I gasped. There, in the light that spilled from the open doorway, I could see someone sprawled out on the couch. It was a man, dressed in a dark brown suit, eyes closed and mouth open.

The second cop came inside and went over to him, shaking his shoulder and saying, “Sir? Sir?”

Watching them, I realized that the sleeping man looked familiar. Then it came to me. He was the lawyer I had met with last night at the restaurant, at the request of my mother.

“Are you under the influence of something?” the cop asked me now. “Are you on drugs?”

Drugs. That must have been it. I must have been drugged.

“It’s hard to explain. I—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the cop interrupted, not waiting for my answer but instead responding to a grunt from his partner, the one who was now kneeling beside the couch.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait for this guy to wake up and tell us what was going on. But then the cops both stood and turned to look at me even more strangely than before. That’s when I realized that the man on the couch wasn’t going to wake up at all.

The man on the couch was dead.

Life should have an “undo” function. If one simple click could move time backward by a step—just one single step—then maybe that would make all the difference between success and failure. Between right and wrong.

Between life and death.

If I could, I thought now as I stood in the hotel doorway and looked across the room at the body of a man I could hardly recall, I would go back and undo that precise moment, yesterday, when everything had first begun to go wrong.

I had been in downtown Chicago, filming my second guest appearance on a local public television show,
Business Time Live
. During a commercial break, my assistant, Jenny, had come over and whispered that my mother was repeatedly texting and calling, and that she urgently wanted to talk to me. As the show only had seven minutes left, I told Jenny that my mother would have to wait and that I could call her back as soon as we were off the air. I didn’t bother to add that surely the woman who had barely given me the time of day my entire life could survive another seven minutes. Looking unsure, Jenny had ducked away just as the break came to an end.

“Welcome back to
Business Time Live,
” the host said as the cameras began rolling again. “I’m your host, Tony Gray, and today’s guest is
Chicago resident and international business etiquette expert Chloe Ledet.” Turning to me with a polished smile, he continued. “Chloe, you’ve given us some fascinating information here today, but let’s get specific. Say I’m a business executive used to the American way of doing things. What’s going to get me in trouble when I’m out of my element?”

Putting thoughts of my mother out of my mind, I had jumped back into the interview with my full attention, explaining the various faux pas that Americans frequently committed in international business situations—from accidentally making offensive gestures with their hands to wearing the wrong clothes to saying the wrong things.

“In fact, Tony, if we were in parts of Africa right now, just the way you’re sitting would be incredibly insulting to me.”

“How so?” he asked, animatedly looking down at his own posture.

“With your leg crossed over the other one like that, you are exposing to me the sole of your foot, something that’s unacceptable in certain cultures.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, placing both feet on the floor. “It’s like a minefield out there!”

“Absolutely, Tony, and those mines pop up around clothing, gifts, business cards, introductions, protocol, and so on. That’s why I always advise my clients, no matter which country or culture they’re going to be dealing with, to take time to learn about it first. Respecting other cultures is good business. Proper etiquette is the grease that oils civilized society.”

“Well, Chloe, thank you so much for all of your excellent advice today. Before we close, I wanted to take a minute to ask a more personal question, one that my viewers are eager to hear the answer to.”

Like a deer caught in headlights, I was afraid I knew exactly where he was going, but I had been helpless to stop him. Looking back now, I found it ironic that even as Tony was bringing up the topic of my famous father, neither one of us had known that man’s very life had been hanging in the balance.

“Tell all of us what it was like growing up as the daughter of the great Chef Julian Ledet. The man’s a legend. As beloved as Paul Prudhomme. As accomplished as Mario Batali. As recognizeable as Emeril Lagasse.
Did your fascination with good manners originate in Ledet’s restaurant, maybe even as a small child?”

Tony continued to smile as he waited for my response, but I was furious. He had known the question would upset me, but he had gone there anyway.

“Well, Tony,” I replied evenly, “the great Chef Julian Ledet may have been famous, but to me he was always, simply, ‘Daddy.’”

Tony knew that wasn’t exactly true, but it was the only answer I was giving him on live TV. I couldn’t believe he had blindsided me with the very topic I had told him was off limits, one that had hounded me my entire adult life.

“When you were growing up, did he cook fancy meals at home or just at the restaurant?” Tony persisted.

“Mostly at the restaurant.”

I knew what Tony was getting at, and I wasn’t going to go there. He wanted me to share my poor-little-rich-girl story of lonely meals in boarding school dining halls or at home in front of the television, eating reheated leftovers by myself. I had told that to him in confidence when he took me out to dinner just last week. Now he was trying to get me to repeat myself on national television—even though I had made it clear that I was sharing those things in confidence.

“How about you? Do you cook too, Chloe?”

“Only if microwaving counts,” I joked, glancing at the clock to see how much longer he was going to drag this out. Ninety seconds left, which meant he had no choice but to move on.

“Well, to bring this back around to the topic of business, just one more question,” he said, leaning toward me in his chair. “What’s the secret behind Chef Julian’s Secret Salt? Its unique color and flavor have made it a best seller in gourmet shops and professional food outlets for many years, despite the fact that quantities are often limited. Where does it really come from?”

“Come on, Tony. You know better than that. That’s like asking Colonel Sander’s daughter to reveal her father’s eleven herbs and spices.”

Laughing, Tony agreed. He shook my hand and thanked me for
coming, and then he turned directly back to the camera and gave a plug for the next week’s show.

As soon as we were off the air and the tech had removed the microphone pack from my suit, I thanked Tony for the interview and asked that he please never call me again—not for another appearance on his show or a second date.

Marching from the room, I could hear him calling after me.

“Come on, babe, what’s the big deal? That’s just good TV!”

I wasn’t going to dignify his comment with a reply. As I passed through the studio door and into the hall, I could hear Jenny’s tiny footsteps tapping along behind me.

“I’m so sorry, I can’t believe he pulled a stunt like that,” she said as she fell into step beside me, her brown curls bouncing as we walked.

“Don’t apologize, Jenny. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine, for going out with that sleaze in the first place.”

“Hey, you! Ice Queen!” the sleaze called from behind us. “You left your complimentary fruit basket in the green room.”

Jenny told me that she would handle things and then meet me at the car.

“You know, you really crossed the line in there, mister,” Jenny said, turning on her heel as I reached the heavy door and pushed it open. As I stepped out into the Chicago sunshine, I couldn’t help but smile at the tiny tornado who served as my right arm and chief defender. Tony Gray might be six foot three inches of glorified muscle, but against Jenny he didn’t stand a chance.

Tony couldn’t have known this, but calling me “Ice Queen” had been a particularly cruel blow. That was the nickname I had earned as a teenager, when my ugly-duckling adolescence had given way to a more swanlike appearance, leaving me tall and striking but also confused and frightened. After years of being ignored, suddenly I found myself getting attention from every direction. The problem was that what people saw on the outside didn’t match up at all with who I still was on the inside. Over time, my best defense had become a sort of cool, reserved demeanor. That my eyes were an icy blue didn’t help, and eventually I earned the nickname
“Ice Queen.” What no one had ever understood was that underneath all of that ice was a teenager’s aching heart, pumping with a desperate need to belong and to be loved.

I slipped into the car and dialed my mother’s number. As I waited for it to start ringing, I noticed movement in my side mirror and turned to see what looked like a fruit basket walking toward the car on two tiny legs. Jumping out to help, I cradled the phone against my shoulder as Jenny and I wrestled to get the huge mountain of fresh fruit onto the backseat of my new sports car.

“I knew I should’ve gone with the convertible,” I quipped.

“The pineapple’s stuck,” Jenny grunted, pressing down the top until the whole thing finally popped through. At that moment, my mother finally answered.

“Chloe? It’s about time!”

“Hello, Mother,” I said, glancing toward Jenny. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You have to come to Louisiana. Now.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“We need you, Chloe. It’s your father. He’s been shot.”

He’s been shot.

And that was it, the “undo” moment that I wanted to take back. Now that I was standing in a room with two policemen and one very dead body, here was another. I had a feeling that my life was about to be filled with all sorts of undo moments.

Somehow, the cops had come there in response to a report of possible domestic violence, and they seemed intent on sticking with that first impression. I tried to explain, but they both seemed so sure, in fact, that it took a while for them to actually listen to what I was saying. I told them I had almost no memories of last night, absolutely no idea how I had gotten there in that hotel room, and that I had obviously been drugged and brought there without my knowledge or consent. Finally, they grew so frustrated with my adamant insistence about the bizarre nature of the situation that they told me to wait and save my complicated story for the detective.