Murder in the Rue Chartres (7 page)

“They’re in Houston, got the kids enrolled in school there, but they’re planning on coming back. She’s furious with Greg for even considering it.” He laughed. “She calls me every day to tell me how much she hates being in Houston.” He ran his hand over his buzzed hair and gave me a grin. “I don’t know, maybe it’s time to be single again.”

“How long have you guys been together?”

“Almost eighteen years.” He shrugged. “Our anniversary is in November.”

“Really?” I knew the story—everyone did, really. It started when Greg hired Allen to be his personal trainer, and they’d both been attracted to each other, but neither ever acted on it. Greg went from a once-a-week client to a three-times-a-week client before he finally, after a few months, got up the nerve to go ahead and ask Allen out on a date. They’d dated for a few months before Allen moved into the big house on St. Charles. They were practically an institution in New Orleans—the Nelson-Buchmaiers, Greg-and-Allen, Allen-and-Greg. They raised money for every gay charity in New Orleans, opening up the big house and having parties for the Human Rights Campaign, the NO/AIDS Task Force, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, and many Democratic Party candidates for public office. I’d been to many a fundraiser at their place, as well as other parties they’d thrown just for fun. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion of them breaking up. They were one of those couples I always envied, used as a reference point in my own mind to show that yes, gay couples can indeed make it work and stay together.

Allen shrugged. “I’m staying in the house until he sells it, although I probably should start looking for an apartment. If you hear of one, let me know, okay? But that’s not going to be easy. So many people are looking for a place to live—and I hear the rents are all being jacked up.” He looked down at his hands and sighed. “Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I should just pack it all in and move to Atlanta with him. I don’t know. But I’m not ready to give up, you know? I mean, leave New Orleans? Give up all my hard work? It just doesn’t seem right, Chanse. Sure, it’s going to be hard, but if everyone just gives up and doesn’t want to do the work—I mean, I can’t imagine a world without New Orleans, let alone not living here. I can understand people with kids staying away because they’ve got to go to school, but shit. You’re back to stay, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I guess. I don’t know. Probably.” I hadn’t really thought about it much. The whole time I was away, all I’d wanted to do was come home. It never occurred to me to think about moving away. Besides, where would I go?

Growing up in Cottonwood Wells in east Texas, about 50 miles from Houston, had been hellish for me. The town was small, about twenty-five thousand people, and heavily Baptist and Church of Christ. My dad had worked in the oil fields and we’d lived in a trailer on the wrong side of town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was grow up and get the fuck out of there as fast as I could. The football scholarship to LSU had been a lifesaver. I left and never looked back. I didn’t discover New Orleans until after my freshmen football season ended. I’d gotten in my car one night and driven down I-10 to the French Quarter. For a small-town kid like me from a Bible-thumping county, the French Quarter had been mysterious and magical, a small piece of decadent heaven on earth. I’d walked around, gawking like the big kid I was, and somehow managed to find my way to the gay bars down Bourbon Street by St. Ann. The first time I walked into the Bourbon Pub, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were gay men everywhere I looked, of all shapes and sizes. The place was packed, and I couldn’t help but grin. It was like being in a candy store. “I’ll take one of everything,” I thought as I worked my way up to the bar, where a sexy young bartender in a tight black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off winked at me and said, “What’ll you have, sexy?”—somehow managing to make himself heard over the remix of a Mariah Carey hit that was playing at ear-bleed levels. I got a bottle of Bud Light, delighted that the cute bartender didn’t card me, and stood in a corner just staring at everyone with a big stupid grin on my face. A muscular guy about thirty, wearing a tight black tank top and a pair of white jeans cut off just below the curve of his ass, introduced himself to me as Jay and bought me another beer. After about an hour I found myself walking back to his apartment on Royal Street. He was the first man I’d ever been with. He’d given me my first blow job, my first experience with gay sex, and for a nineteen-year-old, I’d thought I’d surely died and gone to heaven. And when I’d walked back to my car in the morning as the sun came up in the east, I made up my mind right then and there I was moving to New Orleans as soon as I graduated. New Orleans was home for me, and over the next four years I came down to the city whenever I could. I’d slept with Jay a few more times, met other guys, had a lot of sex, discovered the back room of Rawhide, where I could get my dick sucked if I’d struck out in the bars, and even found the bathhouse down on Toulouse Street, where for twenty bucks I could get a bed for the night and wander the halls with a towel wrapped around my waist and find someone to fuck if I wanted to—well, several people to fuck. And when I’d graduated, I got a job with the New Orleans Police Department, got a small little apartment in a slave quarter behind a huge mansion painted coral on Dumaine Street, and made New Orleans my home once and for all.

“No,” I told Allen, “I’m staying. There’s nowhere else I want to be.”

Allen smiled back at me. “Good.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”

Somehow, having said it out loud made me feel better. “All right, man, I need to get to the Sav-a-Center before it closes. I’ll come back in soon and work out. What hours you going to be open?”

Allen shrugged. “I’m opening from ten to eight. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

“All right.” I gave him a hug, and he held on to me tightly. “It’s good to see you, man.”

“Don’t be a stranger.” Allen winked at me. I winked back and headed outside.

The Sav-a-Center was at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon, and the parking lot was packed. I pushed my cart around for a while, trying to figure out what to buy, and was surprised to notice little things. They were out of charcoal, ice trays, and strange little things like that—the cleaning products aisle was pretty much picked clean, for example— but there were plenty of food choices. I spent about two hundred dollars and headed home.

*

I was in the middle of stir-frying some vegetables for beef lo mein about an hour later, a Fleetwood Mac CD blaring on my stereo, when someone knocked on my front door. I checked through the blinds and opened the door. “Hey, Venus. Where’s Blaine?”

“He’s off today.” She looked tired, just as she had the previous night. She came in, plopped down on the couch, and lit a cigarette. “I’m going off duty myself, but I’m not ready to head back to the carriage house just yet. Mind if I have a drink?”

I checked my liquor cabinet and found an unopened bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “I don’t have any mixer,” I called back to her, turning the burner off and moving the wok off the eye.

“Vodka’s fine. Just ice, if you have any.”

I plopped a couple of cubes in the glass, made myself a Kahlua and cream, and carried the two drinks back into the living room. She took a healthy swig from hers. “Thanks, bud. That’s good.”

“So what brings you by? I mean, not that you can’t just stop by whenever you want—you’re always welcome, you know that—but…”

She gave me a look. “Ah, you know me too well, MacLeod.” She reached into her bag and handed me a manila envelope. “Thought you might want to take a look at this.”

“What is it?” I put it down on the coffee table. It was thick and sealed with tape.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re planning to do with yourself these days, but I figure you gotta do something, right? Or go nuts, like the rest of us, and what with all the post-traumatic stress shit and everyone popping pills like M&M’s…I talked to my boss and he agreed that it would be okay to let you have this.” She took another drink. “Look, my crime scene for the Verlaine murder is all fucked to shit. I drove out there this morning, just to be sure, and yeah, Iris’s house took at least ten feet of water. And it’s not like I’ve got the time—or Blaine has the time—to do anything about it. You’re kind of involved in a way, since she hired you…I don’t know if that has anything to do with her being killed or not, but you never know.”

I looked at the envelope. “So this is...”

“Copies of our notes, files, crime scene photos, everything we’ve got.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it. It was on NOPD letterhead and was signed by the police superintendent himself. I scanned it. Basically, it was a letter authorizing me, as an official consultant to the New Orleans Police Department, to enter Iris’ property as well as conduct my own investigation into the murder. “That,” she nodded at the paper in my hand, “will get you into the neighborhood without any trouble, and will keep you from being arrested if you get caught on the property. You’re not on payroll, but you’re officially investigating the crime at the request of the New Orleans Police Department. You just need to keep me informed of what’s going on. You can’t break any laws or procedures to get evidence—anything you might dig up has to hold up in court, but you know all about that from your days on the force—and if you need me to open any doors for you, just call me and I’ll take care of it all.”

“Wow. This is kind of unusual.” Usually Venus was all over my ass for getting mixed up in criminal investigations and warning me off.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures. Consider yourself deputized.” She finished the drink and held it up for me. I got the bottle, filled her glass, and left it on the coffee table. “I hate loose ends, you know that. It just doesn’t seem right to me that we just forget about that woman. Someone killed her … and even if the killer evacuated and is thousands of miles away, she deserves better, you know? It’s not right. It’s just not right.” She took another swig of vodka.

“So, I gather you don’t think she was really killed because she walked in on a robbery.” I tasted my own drink. It wasn’t bad. Jude drank Kahlua, which was why I had some in the house. I generally preferred something stronger, but I didn’t feel like anesthetizing myself. At least not yet—maybe later.

“That’s what the killer wanted us to think.” Venus shrugged. “Messed the place up a bit, but he didn’t take her purse. She had all her credit cards and about four hundred bucks in cash in her wallet. Sure, maybe he freaked after he killed her and just got the fuck out of there, but it didn’t sit right with me. She was dead, no one was coming, no one knew she was there—and the alarm had been deactivated. Someone knew the alarm code, or she let her killer into the house. Now why would she let a burglar—or any stranger—into the house? And when she got home, if the alarm was off, wouldn’t that have sent her right back out of the house?”

“Maybe she forgot to activate it,” I suggested. “That morning, when she left.” As a security consultant, I knew that often happened. People would get in a rush, running late, and wouldn’t think to set the alarm as they ran out. And even if they did remember to set it—particularly in the morning, when most are still foggy with sleep and not quite awake—when they came home and found the alarm wasn’t set, they just assumed they forgot.

“Security company records show the alarm was turned off at seven-thirty that night, by someone who knew the alarm code.” Venus took another drink. “So either she did it, or someone else who knew it did.” She set the glass down and refilled it. “I think the killer went there specifically to kill her. It had nothing to do with a robbery or anything like that. Someone wanted Iris Verlaine dead. I can’t prove it, and I don’t have any evidence to back me up. Call it a gut instinct, a hunch, whatever. But that was not an interrupted robbery. It wasn’t a break-in.” She sighed, and polished off her new drink. “But who the fuck knows now?” She put the glass down and stood up. “All right. I’ll leave you to it. But you know how you get a gut feeling when you see a crime scene? This one just didn’t feel right.” She weaved a little bit, and the words were a little slurred.

“So you think her death might have something to do with her trying to find her father?”

“You like coincidences?” She threw her arms up in the air dramatically. “I sure as fuck don’t.”

“No. No, I don’t,” I replied. “Her brother is paying me to keep looking.”

Her eyebrow went up. “Better keep an eye on him or something bad might happen to him.” She barked out a laugh. “Listen to me. Like something bad didn’t happen to all of us.” She rubbed her eyes. “Christ, what a fucking mess, huh? You gonna stay?”

I shrugged. “New Orleans is home.”

She clenched a fist and punched it into the palm of her other hand. “That’s what I keep telling myself. This is home. I’ve lived here my whole life—grew up in the Lower Ninth. The house I grew up in is gone. The house where I raised my girls is gone. I don’t want to live in that carriage house the rest of my life, but where am I going to live? Sometimes I think I should just pick a place and move. I’m close to retiring. Maybe I should just pack it all in, take early retirement, move close to one of my daughters. I’m going to be a grandmother some day. Might be nice to watch those kids grow up. And this isn’t a city for the living anymore. It’s a city for the dead.”

The door closed behind her.

I decided not to meet Paige and the rest at the Avenue Pub that night.