Murder in the Rue St. Ann (6 page)

Which most of them did.

But the blacks knew better. They were living it. Maybe they’d come a long way, but they still knew. They saw the way some white people looked at them. They noticed how when three or four of them walked together on the sidewalk white people would cross to the other side. They knew store security followed them every time they walked into Saks Fifth Avenue at the foot of Canal Street. It wasn’t out of the question for Dominique’s troubles to stem from the color of her skin.

I looked back at Mark. He wore a smug half-smile, like he was playing me. When he saw me look back, his face acquired a serious expression.

I felt myself getting mad and gripped the doorknob.
This guy’s an asshole
, I thought, when I finally turned the knob and walked out. The three people in the outer office were focused on their computer screens and didn’t look up as I passed through and walked out the front door.

I crossed over to the Pub and ordered a Coke from a blond bartender who was chatting with a couple of guys at the other end of the bar.  A video for a Pink remix flickered on the video screens above the bar. There were only a few other guys in the place, grouped around a table here and there. A guy played a video poker machine, and was not doing well apparently.  He pushed another twenty dollar bill into the money slot.

I noticed the stack of free papers and magazines piled on a ledge on the other side of the room. I set down my Coke and walked over there. Sure enough, there was a stack of
attitude
magazines next to the
Ambushmag
papers and some
Guide
s. I picked one up and walked back to the table.

It was digest sized and full color. The name was spelled out in lower case letters in rainbow colors across the top. A shirtless young hunk smiled at me from the cover. He was generically beautiful in the way so many young guys are, with muscles rippling under deeply tanned skin. His loose jeans hung low on his hips with just a few strands of curly pubic hair teasing their way out. I opened it and started paging through it. I’d picked it up before, but hadn’t paid much attention to it.  There wasn’t much to pay attention to, actually. There wasn’t ever anything to read in it. You could tell not much thought went into the articles. It just served as filler to make an excuse for ads and full page color photographs of beautiful, nearly-naked young men. What was the point? You might as well go buy a porn magazine—at least then you got to see bare ass and hard-ons.

About halfway through I realized I’d already seen an ad for Domino’s when I found myself looking at another one. I carefully started paging backward.
Yeah, there it was
. An ad for Domino’s, with a photograph of a mass of sweaty, shirtless dancing muscle boys taken from a balcony above and the two-one domino in the upper right hand corner. At the bottom it simply said
Dancing at Domino’s—Hot music and hot guys.
I turned back to the other one. A beautiful shirtless young man with dark hair and brown eyes, leaned against a balcony pole with the Domino’s sign hanging over his head. Again, it said
Hot music and hot guys
at the bottom.

Why on earth would you buy two ads in the same magazine?
I wondered as I kept paging through. Almost at the back of the issue, right before the classifieds with the hustler ads, (with photos and ages listed that never changed), there was another ad for Domino’s.  It featured another generic looking pretty boy wearing a tiny squarecut swimsuit and dancing on a bar, with the same tag line.

Three full-page ads in a 32 page magazine. I’d never seen anything like that before. And that look on Mark Williams’ face when he didn’t think I’d see him. Was he just playing the race card, or was there some truth to it?

And just how the hell did he know Paul, where did he run into him, and did he just walk up and ask a stranger to pose for a magazine cover? It didn’t seem like Paul not to tell me something like that happened. I mean, I was pretty thrilled when Dominique asked me to pose for her. I would have told him. Maybe he knew Mark from before he met me.

I knew Paul was from Albuquerque, from an Irish Catholic family. His mother was actually from Ireland. I liked to hear her accent when she called for Paul at my place. She was always friendly and nice to me. I’d never spoken to his dad, but Paul always spoke fondly of him. He also had three older brothers and an older sister. They were all married and had kids. It seemed like every other week or so Paul was flying off to one of his niece’s or nephew’s birthday celebrations. His flight benefits as a gate agent for Transco Airlines at Armstrong International made that possible. He’d been a flight attendant when we’d first met, but had gotten assigned a ground job when we started getting more serious about each other. I knew he’d come out of a five year relationship with a doctor in Dallas when we met. I knew he liked to go the gym and work out. I knew he’d been a jock in high school and his red and black high school letter jacket was still hanging in his bedroom closet. I knew his family was perfectly fine with his homosexuality.

I didn’t know he’d posed nude, though. I didn’t know who else he might know in New Orleans. He’d never introduced me to any of his co-workers or friends.

Come to think of it, that was kind of odd.

I crumpled up the magazine and threw it in the trash.

The Vieux Carre Commission is the second oldest preservation society in the country. The state constitution of 1921 was amended in 1936 to create the Commission, and specifically charged it with the preservation of the quaint traditional architecture of the Quarter. It’s hard to imagine, but back then the Quarter had degenerated into little more than a slum. There had even been talk of bulldozing it as an eyesore. It’s hard to imagine today anyone taking such a suggestion seriously—the French Quarter
is
New Orleans.

 The Commission took to its job with a vengeance.  The way the French Quarter looks today is thanks primarily to them.  People who run afoul of them, of course, refer to them as the “Quarter Gestapo” and abuse them to anyone who will listen. Most people don’t. Any changes or renovations to the exterior of any building requires their approval. They can fine property owners, and can even place liens. The Quarter is responsible for lots of tourist dollars—and Louisiana needs every penny it can get. Without the estimated billions in revenues generated by the Quarter the entire state would be a third world country.

Working at the VCC had to be a thankless job. No matter what you did, you were bound to piss someone off.

The VCC offices are located in the Eighth District Police Department, on the corner of Royal and Conti. The Eighth District is probably one of the most beautiful police buildings in the country. Painted peach, with massive white columns built into the façade,  it looks like an old pre-Civil War plantation manor house.  A little café next door served coffee, beignets, and sandwiches and has tables and chairs set out inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the building. On nice days those tables are full of tourists wiping powdered sugar off their faces. How many other police stations in the country have an al fresco café on their grounds? Only in New Orleans, I’m sure.

Police motor scooters were lined up like soldiers inside the black wrought iron fence, to the left of the big gate. I noticed, with a little amusement, that some of the license plates had expired, and I grinned at the thought of a scooter cop being ticketed by a fellow officer for expired registration. That would be one way to meet your monthly quota of tickets.

I hadn’t been stationed at the Eighth District when I was a cop—I’d worked the Garden District. That might sound like a cushy assignment, but the jurisdiction also included the St. Thomas Housing Projects. It was strange to cruise around the elegant streets shaded by massive swamp oaks only to respond to a crack shooting a half-mile away. Just a few blocks from the storied mansions were some of the most miserable living conditions in the country. But that was New Orleans for you—every neighborhood, no matter how posh and expensive, abutted an area that was seedy and scary. One block could have houses recently renovated, with beautifully landscaped gardens and smelling of money, while one block away were ramshackle houses a good wind could blow over, with garbage piled up in front of them and old women in faded housedresses sitting in rusty chairs on the sagging porches trying to catch a cool breeze as they fanned themselves with newspaper. 

When I was a cop, I lived in the Quarter in a carriage house behind a huge old mansion on Dumaine Street between Chartres and Royal. I loved my apartment, and its close proximity to the bars. Every restaurant in the Quarter seemed to deliver, so I never had to use my ancient gas stove. I always wished I was stationed at the Eighth District, in that graceful building with chandeliers and polished hardwood floors.  I never regretted leaving the force, but I did feel a bit of a pang as I climbed the hanging stair to the second floor.
It would be so cool to report for work every day here
, I thought.

There was a lot of activity when I walked in—cops coming in and out, talking into their radios. Much as we liked to pretend otherwise, the tourists in the Quarter were easy prey for pickpockets and muggers. They’d drink too much, wander down a dark street, and find themselves at the end of a gun. There was an occasional shooting, and the residents weren’t safe from break-ins, either. That was why the fences around houses down there had broken glass imbedded across the top or razor wire to keep out unwelcomed guests. Every once in a while, a horrific crime would unite the usually contentious Quarter residents into  an angry mob marching on City Hall. A few years back, the employees of a restaurant on the edges of the Quarter were massacred before it opened for the day. The killers managed to get a couple thousand dollars out of the safe. Afterwards, residents hung signs from their balconies warning the tourists: THE QUARTER IS A HIGH CRIME ZONE BEWARE.  Things had gotten better since then—the crime rate had fallen, and people felt a little safer walking the streets at night.

But you still had to be careful.

I climbed the steps and walked into the VCC office. I knew someone who worked at the VCC, and I figured if anyone knew what was going on with Domino’s, it would be her.  I asked the receptionist—a pretty young redhead in her early 20s who gave me a big smile when I walked in— if Ruth was in. The redhead asked me to take a seat, picked up her phone, and called back to Ruth’s office. I paged through a copy of
New Orleans
magazine while I waited. The phone rang, and the young woman said, “Mr. MacLeod, go ahead. It’s the last door on the left.”

Ruth Buchmaier Solomon was the younger sister of Greg Buchmaier, the scion of the Buchmaier Jewelry empire. The Buchmaiers were a New Orleans institution since before the Civil War. Their original store was still on Canal Street, even though they now had several scattered throughout the city and the suburbs. Greg’s life partner, Alan Gardner, owned Bodytech , my gym in Uptown. I liked Greg and Alan a lot, even though Alan had a tendency to gossip. Greg was more quiet and reserved, always thinking. Even when he was looking at you and his mouth was moving, making conversation, his mind seemed a million miles away. I’d met his sister Ruth at several parties at Greg and Alan’s big mansion in Uptown. 

Ruth was a graduate of Tulane Law, and had passed the bar, but had never practiced law except on behalf of the VCC. She’d worked there as an intern while in law school, and they’d offered her a job when she graduated and passed the bar. “It’s better to work for a cause you believe in,” she’d told me once while she was waiting for the bartender at one of her brother’s parties to refill her vodka martini, “than to just practice law for the hell of it.”

She didn’t really have to work at all. She came from money, and then had married more. She loved the Quarter, and fought for its historic heritage with the tenacity of a tigress. She was very petite and pretty, with short thick brown hair and a lovely olive skin that didn’t require a lot of makeup. She had a birthmark just above the left side of her mouth and lustrous round brown eyes framed with long lashes. She was what we in New Orleans called a “party friend”— someone you never saw unless it was at a party or a function with a cocktail in her hand. I ‘d always liked seeing her. When I attended a party and saw her there, I always made a beeline for her side. She had a raunchy sense of humor that never failed to take me by surprise because she looked every inch the Uptown aristocrat.  She was the perfect person to stand next to in a room full of people you don’t know. She knew everyone and everything about them, and was more than happy to share her wealth of knowledge. What she doesn’t know, she’d make up. Once I accused her of fabricating something. She grinned at me, threw her arms out in a dramatic gesture, and said, “But darling, this is New Orleans! Anything can happen here!” You never could be sure if the gossip she shared was true or not, but that was part of the fun.

“CHANSE!” She squealed as she came around the desk to present her cheek for me to kiss and then her body to hug. She was maybe five three, so I had to bend down for her to wrap her arms around me. She wore a white silk blouse over a gray skirt that matched the jacket flung over the back of her chair.  “I couldn’t believe it when Christy buzzed me to say you were here asking for me.” She sat back down and crossed her legs. “I’m so sick of all this crap—what a pleasant break from all of this.” She gestured to the pile of paperwork on her desk with a dismal frown.  “I swear, sometimes I just want to get in a cab, head to the airport and buy a ticket for
anywhere
.”