Red Beans and Vice Read Online Free Page A

Amelia Hart, in honor of my great-great-great-grandmother of the same name. Does that ring a bell to any of you who are so interested in preserving history?” She made a briefsweep of the table with her eyes. “Amelia Hart was the daughter of the sister of Henriette Delille, the founder of the Sisters of the Holy Family, the free woman of color who dedicated her life to the education of the children of slaves and other people of color. She is who you should be honoring, not a group who were brought to this country to continue the exploitation of others.”
    Heaven couldn’t believe it. Nowhere in Kansas City could you get a bunch of folks to argue about the past like it was just yesterday. This woman was talking about stuff that happened in the eighteenth century with a passion most midwesterners couldn’t muster for a crisis that happened last week. But enough was enough. Amelia Hart could create a serious problem for the event they were trying to plan. Heaven tried the old outsider ploy. She stood up and the room became all atwitter.
    “Amelia, I’m Heaven Lee, a chef from Kansas City. I know very little about those you speak of, yet as an outsider it sounds to me that both groups have done good for the children of New Orleans and especially for their education, yes?”
    Amelia narrowed her eyes at Heaven, trying to figure out where she was going with this. But around the table there were enough yeses for Heaven to continue without waiting for Amelia to counterattack.
    “As a member of the Women’s Chefs and Restaurateurs, and also of Chef’s Collaborative 2000, I’m dedicated to the education of children and women. That’s why I’m here. And I’d be glad to come back next year and do the same thing we’re doing now for your aunt’s order. We could make it an annual event, one year for one group, the next year for the other.”
    Well, if the feminine racket before the meeting had been loud, now it was deafening. Everyone had an opinionand they wanted it heard by everyone else. Heaven had blown Amelia totally out of the saddle and Amelia knew it. Even the Uptown ladies, who never would have come up with such a compromise on their own, were having trouble finding fault with it. From the look on Amelia’s face, so was she.
    “Nice work, girlfriend,” Mary hissed through her teeth with a little pat on Heaven’s hand and a laugh.
    The meeting would have been hard to call back to order after Amelia and Heaven’s exchange, but then something happened to ruin that possibility forever. The janitor burst into the room with a wild look on his face. “Sister, you better come,” he gasped, indicating the nun at the table. “You better all come. Streetside courtyard. I’m calling the police,” he said, and turned around and hurried out.
    Not only did the former convent have a spacious inner courtyard, where the dinner was to be held, but it had a second courtyard between the high brick fence on Ursu-lines Street and the building proper. Boxwood shrubs formed elegant patterns. As the group poured out into this space, elegance wasn’t what they saw. The walls of the courtyard were splashed with red paint, ugly words scrawled all around: Parasites, Bloodsuckers, Witches. But as upsetting as that seemed to Heaven, most of the women were aghast at something else, or the lack of it.
    “Oh my God,” Mary Whitten said. “They’ve stolen the cross that the sisters brought from France on that first trip in 1727. It’s the sisters’ most prized possession.”
    T he Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone had a real merry-go-round in the middle of the room. A round, garish confection that rotated slowly, the bar suppliesand bartender were located in the middle of this affair. The room was filling up fast with a combination of local businessmen and tourists too shy to start out their drinking at Pat O’Brien’s over on Bourbon Street. Mary and Heaven rushed in. They were meeting Mary’s husband and they were late.
    The