Murder in the Rue Chartres (3 page)

I’d given her my card that day too.

I walked through the house, opening the windows as far up as they would go. It was a warm, sunny day. October was always beautiful in New Orleans, no humidity and sweet cool breezes that made the curtains dance. There was a thick layer of dust on everything in the apartment. I walked back out to the car, and marveled again at the almost absolute silence. I opened the trunk and got out the ice chest I’d bought at a Dallas Wal-Mart—almost everything in the car had come from Wal-Mart. It never entered my mind when I left that I wouldn’t be back in a few days, so I’d packed haphazardly and only took enough clothes for four days. When the levees broke and it became horribly apparent to me I was going to be gone for a long while, I’d had to go buy clothes.

But even then, it never entered my mind I wouldn’t ever be coming back. Relocating and not returning was never an option. New Orleans was my home; I’d lived there for almost eight years. With no offense to Dallas, I couldn’t imagine relocating there and starting my business over again. Granted, it wouldn’t have been that much of a struggle; my main source of income comes from working as a corporate security consultant for my landlady’s company, Crown Oil. Crown Oil’s corporate headquarters were in Tulsa, but they also had a skyscraper in Dallas. I could easily get office space there, but it wasn’t what I wanted, where I could imagine staying for the rest of my life. No, no matter how bad it was, at some point I was returning to New Orleans. And with that in mind, I’d headed for Wal-Mart rather than Macy’s or Dillard’s or the Gap.

My closet was full of clothes, and so were my dresser and my armoire. I just needed some temporary stuff until I got back home, so why spend a lot of money? So, I drove over to the Wal-Mart and stocked up on cheap socks and underwear and T-shirts. I missed my clothes, my comfortable underwear, and was tired of wearing the cheap shorts and T-shirts. And when I was finally able to begin planning my return to New Orleans, another storm came in.

“It’s okay.” Jude said, as we watched the progress of Rita as she approached the Gulf Coast, and the mayor of New Orleans ordered everyone who had returned to leave again. “It won’t affect New Orleans much, and you just need to stay here a few more days is all.”

Jude refused to let me pay for anything, which made me feel like shit. He refused rent money, grocery money, any offer to take him out to dinner. He was always polite about it, but firm. “I won’t hear of it,” he would say as he unpacked groceries, leaving me standing there with a hundred-dollar bill crumpled in my hand. “I’d like to think if the situation were reversed, you’d help me the same way.” Then he would bark out a bitter little laugh. “It’s what friends do, right?”

And I would squirm in my smallness, wondering if I would indeed open my house and wallet to him, and hating myself for even harboring the doubt.

And even though Jude’s bed was big and warm, and the feel of a warm body next to mine every night was a comfort, all I wanted was to be in my own bed, under my own roof, with my own clothes. The first night, I wasn’t sure what to expect—although I was grateful Jude didn’t put me in the spare room. We lay there, next to each other, the lights off, both of us awake.

Then Jude reached over and squeezed my hand. “It’s going to be all right, you know,” he said. “You’ll get through this. New Orleans will get through this.”

And I started to cry, and then he put his arms around me and held me tightly, kissing the top of my head while I sobbed, finally giving into the self-pity and misery I’d been holding off since Paul died. And then he was whispering to me, over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay, shhh, baby, it’s okay.”

No. I didn’t deserve Jude.

And when I decided to come back, he had helped me load up my car. I put my arms around him and held him.

“This is goodbye, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You deserve better than I can give you,” I replied.

He bit his lower lip and nodded. “Good luck,” he said, his voice shaking. “If you ever need me—”

I kissed his cheek, got in my car, and drove away.

*

There was a knock on my front door, startling me at first, but then I realized it had to be Paige.

She threw herself into my arms as soon as I opened the door, and I held onto her until her body stopped shaking and she was able to pull herself together. I wiped at my own eyes as she picked up a plastic bag. She shrugged. “I figured we could both use a drink.” She pulled out a champagne bottle and popped the cork, aiming away from the house so the cork shot out into the middle of Camp Street. She poured herself a foamy plastic cup full, and then poured me one. “Salud,” she said, tossing it all back in one gulp and erupting with a most unladylike burp. She sat down on the top step and waved at me to join her. I tossed back the champagne and sat as she refilled both cups.

“Christ,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Can you believe what a ghost town this is?” She shook her head. “Man.”

“Yeah,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say.

A camouflage-painted Hummer went by with a machine gun mounted on the front hood. A group of National Guardsmen, the oldest of whom couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, rolled by.   Solemnly, each one raised a stiff hand in acknowledgement, and Paige did the same back, all of them nodding.

“Nobody but nobody had better ever criticize the National Guard in my presence again, or the Coast Guard. Not if they want to live to see the morning,” Paige said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Anyway, welcome home.”

“Thanks for cleaning out the refrigerator,” I replied, lighting my own cigarette.

“Yeah, well, I needed something to keep me busy besides work and dwelling on everything,” she said, gesturing at her battered Toyota. “I went to Sav-a-Center and got you some things—soda, beer, you know, the essentials.” She flashed a grin at me. “They’re open, but only from ten to six, so remember that—and our bank is open down there, and I went by Bodytech today and there was a sign up saying they’re reopening tomorrow, so you can work out and everything. And the Avenue Pub is open. We can go get a burger there later, if you want. They have really good burgers.” She laughed. “I don’t believe they ever closed, you know? They used charcoal and sold burgers. God, I love this city.”

“How is it really? Here?”

“It’s still New Orleans, but it’s different.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking. “Nothing much is open, and what is, is on limited hours. There are help-wanted signs everywhere.” She stared off at the park. “It’s—it’s—oh, hell, I don’t know how to describe it, Chanse.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s still New Orleans, though, that I can say. And I am so fucking glad to be here.” She stabbed her cigarette out on the step. “So fucking glad to be here.” Her lip trembled and her eyes filled again, but she snapped back out of it, standing up. “Well, let’s get the cars unloaded, shall we?”

There used to be two kinds of bars in New Orleans: the ones that have the big daiquiri machines and cater to the tourists; and the ones locals frequent, where they serve strong drinks, don’t charge an arm and a leg for them, and have atmosphere that isn’t manufactured. The Avenue Pub, on the corner of St. Charles and Polymnia, about a half block from Paige’s apartment, is one of the latter. I wasn’t a regular there, but stopped in every once in a while for a burger and fried cheese sticks. Most of the people who hung out there were working class, stopping in after work for a couple of drinks and staying longer than they probably should. Being gay, I always felt a little uncomfortable there. It wasn’t like I had GAY tattooed on my forehead, but I never really felt able to completely relax in a straight bar environment. It was stupid—I never felt like I was in danger of being gay-bashed or anything there, but I always preferred to err on the side of caution. After Paige had moved down the street a few months before the storm, she’d fallen in love with the place and made it one of her preferred hangouts.

New Orleans wasn’t the only thing different. Paige herself was different, in ways someone who didn’t know her as well as I did might not notice. The changes were a little subtle, small, but they were definitely there. For example, she was chain-smoking, lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. She’d smoked from the time we’d first met, but I’d never seen her smoke this much—even when she was upset, even when she was drinking. Her mismatched eyes (one green, one blue) were bloodshot, and there were heavy, dark circles beneath them. Her reddish hair, usually streaked with blond, looked unkempt, and about an inch of brown was showing at the roots. Her voice seemed a little higher in tone as well, as though she were on the verge of hysteria. Maybe I was just being hypersensitive, my own emotions on edge and raw. Maybe I also seemed different to her, changed in some ways that I wasn’t aware of and only someone else could see. All I could feel, all I was aware of, was that dead sense of numbness to everything.

She parked me at a scarred table near the jukebox, which was silent. A silver-haired man in a dirty sports coat that had seen better days, a weathered-looking man of indeterminate age in paint-spattered coveralls, and a whipcord-thin black man in jeans and a flannel shirt sat at the bar. All the tables were empty other than the one I was sitting at. A pretty girl wearing glasses and with her thick long black hair pulled back into a braid was grilling hamburgers, while another girl, maybe in her mid-twenties with reddish-blond hair, was pouring drinks with a heavy hand behind the bar. Paige came back with a glass of amber liquid and a sweating bottle of Bud Light, which she put down in front of me.

I looked at her glass. I had never seen her drink anything alcoholic besides red wine since we’d met in college. “What are you drinking?”

“I’ve developed a taste for whiskey. Sue me.” She took a long drink before closing her eyes and pressing the glass to her forehead. “Damn, I’m getting another headache.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We’re all a little crazy now.” She shrugged. “That’s something you’re going to have to get used to, bud. The whole city has post-traumatic stress disorder. There’s a big piece in tomorrow’s paper about it.”

“How late is this place open?” I started peeling the label off my bottle.

“Curfew’s midnight.” Paige lit another cigarette. “The soldiers take the curfew very seriously, too.” She flicked ash into a plastic Budweiser ashtray. “If you’re caught out after curfew, you spend the night in jail. You’ve been warned. Inside by midnight. Don’t be calling me to bail your ass out if you break curfew.”

“How are you doing, Paige?” On the rare occasions I’d been able to get her on her cell phone, we hadn’t talked long. Her emails were even briefer. Just reports on my apartment, that she was okay, and not much else. “Are you really okay?”

“No, I’m most definitely not okay.” She took another drink of her whiskey. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again. It’s horrible, Chanse. The things I’ve seen…the stories I’ve been told…what a fucking nightmare. And it doesn’t seem to ever end…and what makes me the angriest is none of it had to happen. It didn’t have to happen the way it did. I hope everyone in Washington, from the White House to the lowest paper pusher at Homeland Security and FEMA, suffer long painful deaths in agony, just the way they left New Orleans to die. I swear to God I would just as soon shoot Michael Chertoff’s balls off as look at that son of a bitch. How that motherfucker can sleep at night is beyond me. It makes me want to believe there’s a heaven and hell, you know? And the Ninth Ward, Lakeview…” she shuddered. “It’s just awful out there, so dead…and sometimes I think I can still hear people screaming. And the city just reeks of death and rot.” She shrugged. “The Xanax helps a lot, though. It evens me out when I need it—but I seem to need it every fucking day. And I take pills to sleep. That helps with the dreams.”

“Should you drink when you’re—?”

“I don’t fucking care,” she snapped. “You don’t know, okay? The pills help but sometimes theyʼre not enough, alright? The whiskey helps. Sometimes itʼs the only thing that does, okay?” She sighed. “Let’s change the subject, okay? The last thing I want to do your first day back is give you chapter and verse of the tragedy that is Paige’s life right now, okay? I really hate talking about this, it just makes me angry and then I have to take another pill or drink more or both. I’m really glad to see you.” She forced a smile that looked terrible in its falseness. “What are you going to do to keep busy now that you’re back?”

“I don’t know.” I’d never really thought about it much. “I was just so focused on coming home, I never thought that far ahead.”

“You need to find something to do—you can’t just sit around your apartment all day.” She finished her glass. “That’s a one-way trip to the insane asylum, my friend.” She laughed. “I mean, look at me, for God’s sake. I have a job to go to everyday and I still needs booze and pills to stay out of a fucking straitjacket.”

“Well, there’s a lot of cleanup to be done around the house outside.” I shrugged. “That’ll keep me busy for a while.”

“There you go—that’s a good start.” She stood up. “You ready for another beer?”

I checked my bottle. It was half-full, so I chugged it down and put the bottle down, belching as I did. “Yup.”

She grinned. “That’s the spirit.” She walked over to the bar.

The door opened. I turned automatically, and felt a big grin creep over my face as Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague walked in. Venus and Blaine were detectives with the NOPD; I’d met them when I put in my two years on the force out of college before going out on my own. Venus was a tall, muscular black woman with close-cropped hair. Her face was beautiful and ageless—she could be any age from thirty to sixty and no one could guess. She worked out regularly and was in great shape. A lot of guys on the force resented her—black and female, after all, is not a popular combination in any police department, no matter how much things had changed over the years—and called her a lesbian behind her back. I didn’t think she was—I knew she’d been married and had two daughters, not that that meant anything. But whether she liked to sleep with men or women, Venus was a good cop.