Catherine Sutton's sentencing is at the Orleans Parish Civil District Court on Tulane Avenue. Eight months after the livestream.
I attend as a victim's family member and as a witness. The prosecution has asked me to make a statement.
I am in a black dress. The keening sash is folded inside my purse. Cordelia is in the gallery, in a new chair on her own power. Charlotte is too sick to attend; she has sent her statement by deposition.
Catherine has put her hair up. She is in a charcoal suit. She looks across the room at me and lifts the corner of her mouth.
"You thought sending me to a parish jail was going to feel like winning, sweetheart?"
I smile back at her.
"Ma'am, I'm not here to win."
The judge reads the verdict in the formal language of the criminal court. Unlawful imprisonment of a vulnerable adult. Aggravated battery. Falsification of medical records. Conspiracy to defraud the state on a relinquishment of parental rights. Bribery of a parish official — the parish coroner who signed the 1998 stillbirth certificate retired to a beach house in Costa Rica three years ago and is being extradited. Conspiracy to commit homicide, in the matter of one Reginald Henry Sutton, deceased, Grand Isle, 2007. The conspiracy-to-commit-homicide charge will go to a separate trial. The instant offenses alone carry a thirty-year sentence.
Catherine is led to the back of the courtroom and out a service door, into a holding area, where she will be transferred to the Department of Corrections van waiting in the secure dock.
The van will exit through the front of the courthouse. The press will be there.
I step out onto the courthouse steps.
The press scrum is loud. The afternoon sun is full on the limestone.
I reach into my purse. I take out the keening sash. It's not the white cloth my grandma's mother used to wear. It's the black diagonal sash for next-of-kin chief mourner, the kind my grandma sewed me for my first solo job at fifteen. Black silk, plain, no embellishment. I tie it across my chest, right shoulder to left hip, slowly. Two-handed. Like a priest.
Photographers see me. Lenses pivot.
The DOC transport van rolls into the loading bay. Catherine is at the back window, her hand on the glass.
I step to the top of the courthouse steps. I drop, on both knees, to the stone.
I open my throat.
"Catherine Beauchamp Sutton — "
The press scrum goes quiet.
"You wore Carolina Herrera. You drank Sancerre. You bought a doctor in every parish from here to Mobile. How in all that wealth did you forget that a daughter is not a blood bag in a refrigerator?"
Catherine inside the van has lost the corner-smile.
"You let a child suffer in the room across from your morning coffee for ten years! You let your husband drown off Grand Isle so the books would balance! You let a young woman fall off the second-floor verandah and called it gravity!"
The van's window comes down. Her voice from inside, ragged: "Lecroix, you guttersnipe — "
"You stand corrected, ma'am! I'm a guttersnipe who knows how to love her grandma. You're the high-bred lady who couldn't tell a daughter from a donor list!"
The press scrum is on me. The DOC driver has been told not to engage. The van pulls forward. Catherine's face shrinks in the rear window.
I sit back on my heels. I wipe my eyes once. I let the sash slide down off my shoulder, into my lap.
I open the Cash App QR clipped to my purse.
Cordelia rolls up. Her thumb works the screen. The notification pings.
I look at the figure. It's twice the standard live-subject rate.
"It's high, ma'am."
Cordelia, eyes wet:
"Family gratuity. Sister-gift on top."
I take it.
The money was never the wrong thing. The wrong thing was the people who thought a life could be bought with it.
After the sentencing, Beau Sutton-Marchand falls off the social pages.
The story comes in pieces. The Sutton-Marchand Holdings board, it turns out, had been doing parallel business with Catherine for over a decade — shipping lanes that doubled as discreet transport for the offshore IVF run, accounts that paid the parish coroner's annual "consultation" fee. When the case broke, Beau handed the federal prosecutors a Mardi Gras parade of binders.
He resigned from the board on a Tuesday in March. His mother stopped speaking to him on a Wednesday. By Friday the Times-Pic had run two op-eds about whether his cooperation was principled or strategic.
Some people said he had lost his mind over Charlotte Sutton.
Some people said he had finally grown a spine.
I saw the news scrolling on my phone while I was livestreaming a Q&A about hidden costs in the funeral trade. How do you tell a parlor is overcharging on a casket lid? Look for the upcharge they buried in catering — that's where they hide it.
A comment popped up in the chat.
Lecroix is Beau Sutton-Marchand chasing you
I almost spit my tea on the camera.
I leaned into the lens.
"Folks, don't start that. Mr. Sutton-Marchand and I are vendor and client. Clean books, paid invoices, that's the entire relationship."
The doorbell rang.
I muted the stream.
I opened the door.
Beau Sutton-Marchand was on my landing in a charcoal coat with a wicker basket of fresh fruit and a wax-paper-wrapped king cake from Manny Randazzo's.
The chat exploded behind me.
I shut the laptop without ending stream and turned the camera around.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. Visits are by appointment."
"I am here for Grandma Mae."
From inside the apartment my grandma's voice — strong now, getting stronger every month — sang out.
"Beauregard, baby, come on in. There's chicory on the stove."
I turned around in the doorway.
"Grandma. Since when are you and this man on a first-name basis?"
Beau cleared his throat.
Grandma Mae beamed from her wicker rocker. "He donated the new hospital beds at Slidell. He plays cribbage with me on Sundays. He brings King Cake."
I looked at him.
"You're bribing my grandma?"
"I'm making amends."
Grandma pushed past me and grabbed his elbow.
"Sit down, baby. Don't mind her, she's never been any good at having visitors."
I stepped out of the doorway. My own grandmother had elbowed me out of my own apartment.
Beau paused at the threshold. He didn't look at me directly.
"Miss Lecroix. I am not chasing you."
I nodded.
He went on. "I am learning how to do one person right at a time."
I didn't answer him.
Feelings are dangerous things to take on, when the person offering is the kind of person who confuses a debt for an affection. I am not anybody's redemption. I am not anybody's penance trophy.
Beau Sutton-Marchand seemed to understand.
He didn't push. He drove Grandma Mae to her cardiology follow-ups. He helped Cordelia administer the Sutton settlement trust she had set up for the live-in housekeepers her mother had churned through. He drove Charlotte to her chemo appointments on the weeks I was on the road for jobs.
I kept on working.
Funeral keenings. Living-subject jobs. Public verdicts on cheating husbands paid for by ex-wives who wanted the neighborhood to hear it. Public verdicts on payroll-skimming bosses paid for by line cooks. The trade scaled.
In April a woman in a black Bentley pulled up outside my Mid-City apartment. The driver got out and rang my bell. The woman came up the stairs herself, slow, in a coat she had probably worn to her daughter's debutante ball thirty years ago.
She sat down at my kitchen table. She set a snakeskin clutch in front of her. She opened it.
She put eight hundred thousand dollars in printed money orders on my table.
"Miss Lecroix. I would like to engage you to wail for someone."
"Living, ma'am? Or deceased?"
She took her sunglasses off. Her eyes were red and swollen and the whites had gone yellow.
"My daughter. Living. She's at a private psychiatric facility on Grand Cayman. Her husband had her committed. He has told everyone — including me, for two years — that she died of an overdose."
I slid the agreement across the table.
"Living subject, hostile principal. Double rate."
Her hand shook so badly the pen slipped twice before she signed.
I picked up my keening sash. I packed a go-bag. I walked downstairs.
The black GMC Yukon was at the curb. Beau Sutton-Marchand was in the driver's seat.
I leaned in at the window.
"Where you headed?"
I looked at him.
"Out of town."
"Need a driver?"
I started to say no.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Cordelia: Remy. Don't go alone. Take Mr. Sutton-Marchand. He's free, you take a free driver when you can get one.
Charlotte, right behind it: Let him drive. He owes you.
Grandma Mae, by voice memo: Remedy, baby, take the man. The world's full of bad people. Take one along that knows how to fight.
I stood out on the sidewalk in the wind and laughed once.
Beau got out and opened the passenger door.
He didn't ask me where we were going. He didn't try to put my bag in the trunk for me.
I got in. I dropped the agreement on the dash.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. Terms."
He looked over.
I held up my fingers.
"Gas. Tolls. Lodging. All on you. I keen who I'm paid to keen. You don't touch the script. You don't second-guess the wail. You don't apologize to my client on my behalf."
"Yes, ma'am."
He turned the key.
The Yukon pulled away from the curb. The streetlights of Tulane Avenue slid by. We were southbound, toward the airport.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from an unknown number.
Miss Lecroix. Don't take the Cayman job. That psychiatric facility was Catherine Sutton's backup laboratory.
The Yukon kept rolling.
I looked at the screen. I looked at Beau Sutton-Marchand's profile in the orange streetlight.
I thought: there are more of them.
I thought: the trade scales.
I tucked the phone back into the keening sash. I closed my eyes for a second. I opened them again.
"Drive," I said.