Murder in the Rue Ursulines (11 page)

My fingerprints were on the murder weapon, unless the killer wiped it clean.

“She was alive when I left the house.” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Her assistant can testify to that.”

“Do yourself a favor.” He reached into his wallet and handed me a business card. “Give this guy a call. I’ll phone him and let him know you’re calling.” He nodded and shut the door behind him.

I looked at the card.

STORM BRADLEY, ATTORNEY AT LAW.

I put it in my wallet. Feeling a little nauseous, I headed back to my car.

If you solve this case, you’ll be famous
, I thought as I walked back to my car. I felt a little numb—and nervous. My heart was racing, and I recognized what could be the signs of an onset of an anxiety attack. My palms were damp, and I could feel wetness under my arms. My breathing was fast, so I tried to focus on slowing it down. Esplanade Avenue was deserted, no signs of life anywhere. Not even a car passing through an intersection in the distance.

Glynis was dead; and according to Loren, I was all but arrested and charged for it.. But there had to be an up-side to this thing, right? 

I let my imagination go. This could be the opportunity of a lifetime—solving one of the highest-profile murder cases in history. Whoever tracked down the killer would make headlines, would wind up being interviewed by the likes of Anderson Cooper and Larry King—and why
shouldn’t
that be me? Visions of fame and money danced through my head as I walked through the thickening fog.

 I could get a book deal, and it would surely be made into a movie or a mini-series—at the very least an episode of
City Confidential
or
American Justice.
The trial would air live on Court TV.

Dream on, Chanse
.

There was a piece of it that was real, though. Sure, Loren was right--I was mixed up in the middle of the whole thing. But the best way to clear everything up really would be to prove that Freddy hadn’t killed his ex-wife—and neither had I.

I was disturbed by the weak identification I was going to have to make to the police. It bothered me that Loren had so easily shaken my identification of the guy coming out of the house. I’d been completely sure it was Freddy at the time—it was only later that doubt crept in. And that doubt had been planted by Loren..

It’s pretty much taken for granted that eyewitnesses make mistakes. Defense attorneys frequently hammer that point home to juries. We see what we expect to see. Our memories are filtered by our experiences and prejudices. I’d seen someone dressed similarly to the way Freddy had been at our meeting earlier that day, and with the same kind of build, coming down the front steps of his ex-wife’s house. It was entirely possible that all of those factors had added up in my mind to recognition.

Had it really been Freddy?

If Freddy was indicted and went to trial, his attorneys would dig into my past.

Can your life bear that kind of scrutiny?

I remembered how other witnesses in major murder trials had been treated by the press. I didn’t want to be another Kato Kaelin. They would dig up everything they possibly could on me, and make it public knowledge. They’d track down my parents in Cottonwood Wells, my brother Rory, my sister Daphne in Houston—and I could be relatively certain Daphne wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion. I could give a rat’s ass about my parents—I hadn’t talked to them in years.

I imagined the look on my father’s face when some reporter asked him about his gay son, and it made me smile. The thought of how humiliated he’d be when everyone in that miserable little town found out that his big football star son was a big old homo was a very amusing one indeed. But Daphne—and my brother Rory—how would they feel about having their own lives intruded on? I hadn’t talked to Rory in years, either. I’d cut him off when I’d cut off Mom and Dad

The thought of having all the stuff about Paul dredged up also worried me. Not because it made me look bad—it might, it might not. My therapist was always telling me that the situation wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be…but there was his family to think about. How would the Maxwells, who’d taken me in as part of their family, and maintained that tie after Paul died, feel about having their beloved son’s memory tarnished and trashed on the national news?

He’d been kidnapped by an obsessed stalker, someone who’d struck him a terrible blow to the skull in order to take him from his apartment. Maybe with prompt and immediate medical attention, he would have had a chance. Instead, he’d been handcuffed to a bed, not fed or given anything to drink, and he’d begun the slow and agonizing process of dying. By the time we found him, he’d lapsed into the coma from which he’d never wake. After a few days, his family made the agonizing decision to turn off the machines that breathed for him, and he’d died. For the next year, I’d thought of my life as being clearly divided by that terrible day at Touro Hospital—
before
and
after.
In my misery and grief, I’d tried to move forward with my life.

But I felt guilty about Paul’s death; guilty because while I was looking for him I’d allowed myself to get distracted away from my primary objective—finding him—because of other things that were going on, side trails I’d followed that eventually proved to have nothing to do with him. I kept thinking,
If only I were a better detective, I could have found him sooner, I could have found him when there was still a chance for him to make a recovery and he would still be with me.
Instead, he’d died, and that guilt haunted me.

But maybe none of that would come up.

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that.

Maybe, like my therapist said, I was just imagining the worst again.

 But I was in a bad spot, and the best way out was to solve the case.

But how? I wouldn’t be able to interview witnesses, get access to evidence, or even conduct any semblance of a normal investigation. The police wouldn’t want me interfering in their investigation.

As for the fame, truth be told, it was a nice fantasy. When I was young, I used to fantasize about being rich. I always, when I was a kid, thought the reason our lives were so miserable was because we were poor, because we lived in a trailer park, because we didn’t get to wear nice clothes and have nice things like so many of the other kids in Cotttonwood Wells. Daphne, Rory and I weren’t the only poor kids in town—but it seemed to me like we were. Other kids didn’t have mothers who wore faded old sweats and reeked of gin or vodka at the Kroger. Other kids didn’t have clothes that didn’t quite fit right, didn’t wear their clothes till they wore through in places, and didn’t have to eat bologna sandwiches for lunch every day.

When I started playing football and became someone more than the big kid from the trailer park, when I started getting invited to the parties the rich kids threw, I never felt like I belonged there, no matter how badly I wanted to. I wanted to be rich and famous and come back to Cottonwood Wells and make all those rich kids who made me feel like trailer trash grovel before my wealth and power. But as I got older, I was more concerned with getting out of Cottonwood Wells then avenging myself on the rich kids

. At LSU, I had a taste of fame as a three year letterman on a damned good football team. Other students recognized me when I walked to class, and in restaurants and bars, so did the more rabid football fans. But I knew damned well that if I wasn’t on the football team, Beta Kappa would have never given me a bid to join their fraternity.  I was never comfortable with the status I had as a football player..

So forget the fantasy. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t even care about being rich any more. All I cared about was being comfortable, not having to worry about paying my bills—and I’d already achieved that.

But if Glynis Parrish’s killer was never brought to justice, my credibility would be gone forever. I would be known as ‘that guy who blew the case because he couldn’t make a positive identification of Freddy Bliss—who paid him money.’ I’d be even more notorious than Mark Fuhrman.

Could Barbara Castlemaine, my boss at Crown Oil, afford the bad publicity of keeping me on under those circumstances?

I could lose everything.

That reality was the final trigger. As I slid behind the wheel of my car, the anxiety attack started for real.

You’re going to lose everything you’ve worked for your entire life. Your life is fucked now. You don’t have a choice. You’re going to have to hope that either the police solve the case or you solve it for them. If the killer is never found, it isn’t just Frillian’s heads it will hang over—it will hang over yours. You will always be known as the guy who fucked up the Glynis Parrish murder. No one will hire you. People will whisper about you when you walk by. You’ll lose your job with Barbara, and then what the fuck are you going to do?

The thoughts swam through my mind as my heart raced and my breath came in gasps.

Think happy thoughts, Chanse. Go to that beach in your head. Green waves lapping against the white sand. The sun is shining and a soft breeze is blowing. You’re lying on a towel, soaking up the sun’s rays, everything is peaceful, everything is fine.

My heart rate slowed.

The dark spots in front of my eyes disappeared.

I’d beaten it again.

I sat there, behind the wheel, focusing on breathing in and out slowly and carefully. I started the car , turning the defroster on high, and watched as the fog on the windshield started to clear from the bottom up. I glanced at my watch. It was barely nine o’clock. They were about to send out their press release.

Even if they didn’t say a word about me, it was only a matter of time before my name would be uncovered as a witness.

My life was going to change completely—it would never be the same again.

You should have gotten out of this when you had the chance.

In less than twenty-four hours, my life was going to be completely different. I pounded on the steering wheel in frustration.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me. No matter how many times it happens, though, you never get used to it. You go through life always expecting things to be the same, or the changes to be small and gradual. You never think about all the horrible things that could happen to take the wind out of your sails and knock you off your feet. The first time my life had changed due to circumstances beyond my control was when Paul died. The second time was Hurricane Katrina, obviously. The evacuation, the destruction, the long time away, the return to a city that at the time seemed—and sometimes still seemed—broken beyond repair; the way of life that all of us who lived in New Orleans had known and loved and somehow taken for granted was gone forever. Again, I began dividing my life into
before
and
after.

But this wasn’t the same. My therapist was helping me deal with my feelings of guilt over Paul’s death, and I was coping with it a lot better. The two ordeals, barely a year apart, had forced me to reevaluate my life and myself—who I was, the kind of person I was and the kind of person I wanted to be for the rest of my life. My therapist helped a lot—I was doing a lot better than I had been, and I’d was a better boyfriend to Allen than I had been to Paul. I no longer felt as though I needed to be punished, and the truth was, I had started to realize that I had always felt that I needed to be punished, and this went back to my childhood. A sense that I didn’t deserve good things to happen to me, and anything good that came into my life was just a tease, a tantalizing glimpse of what happiness could be—something to be yanked away from me just as I was beginning to enjoy myself and my life again.

 I’d really had no choice in either of those situations—Paul wasn’t kidnapped and murdered to punish me; it had happened because he had made soft-core porn wrestling videos and had attracted the notice of someone who belonged in a mental hospital. And the hurricane? Well, I have no control or say over the forces of nature, and it would have been the height of self-absorption to think that an entire city had been destroyed to punish me for any sins I may have committed in my life.

This was different. This time I had a choice, some control over what was going to happen. I realized  this as I sat there in my car waiting for the windshield to clear. I could be proactive and take charge of the situation. Frillian was going to do what was best for them. They didn’t care what impact all of this might have on me, my career and my life. Why should they? They were trying to protect their own careers, the life they’d built together, the work they were doing to rebuild New Orleans.

I needed to do the same thing. I had a good life. I’d rebuilt it after the hurricane. I’d taken control. I’d gone to a therapist to work through all of my own issues. I was doing better emotionally. My career was going well. My personal life might not be the greatest, but I was working on it.

It was a very bad situation for me. But I could take this bad situation and turn it into an opportunity. It would come at a price, of course.

Everything does. It’s a question of being willing to pay that price.

I could feel the anxiety rising again, and I cleared my mind again.

Can your life bear that kind of scrutiny?