Murder in the Rue Ursulines (7 page)

I stood up and stretched. It was just past five, and I wanted to take a quick shower before heading down to meet Paige for dinner. My neck was sore from hunching over the computer screen. I tried calling the people on the list again, but once again didn’t get anyone. I made a mental note to check in with Rosemary again after dinner, to see if she had in fact called them all for me.

At five forty-five, I pulled into a parking spot just past St. Philip Street on Burgundy. It was about a six-block walk to Port of Call from there, but my standard rule of parking in the French Quarter is to always grab the first parking spot I saw—there may not be another one in the entire neighborhood. And there’s nothing I hate more than driving around trying to find one.  Besides, I always enjoy strolling through the Quarter—and Paige would be late as she always was. I decided to walk up Ursulines past Glynis’s house—it was on the way. I got out and walked down to the corner at Ursulines, and turned right. It was already dark, and the street lamps were casting their glow over the sidewalk. There wasn’t another soul to be seen anywhere. I looked over across the street. The gas lights on the front of Glynis’s house were flickering. There was no sign of light behind the closed shutters. I glanced at my watch—five fifty-two. I shrugged and started walking down the street.

  I was about halfway down the block when Glynis’s front door opened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man step out and slam it loudly. I stopped walking and looked over to watch.  He came down the front steps in a hurry, almost stumbling on the bottom step and having to grab the metal rail to keep from falling onto the sidewalk.  He was wearing a loose-fitting pair of jeans, and a hooded purple sweatshirt with LSU emblazoned on the front in bright gold. The jeans hung down low enough for me to see his lower abdomen and the waistband of his underwear. The hood was pulled up over his head, hiding his hair. It was also pulled down low in the front, covering the top of his face.  Something flashed in my brain—
I know that guy—
as I watched him, trying to remember who it was and where I knew him from. There was something about the build, the way he carried himself, that struck a familiar chord.

New Orleans is a small town, and that happens a lot. Everyone looks familiar, but when I see them out of a familiar context, at first I blank on who they are and where I know them from. I once had a long conversation with a guy in a bar, never once giving away that I had no idea who he was or where I knew him from. Two days later, when I went into Café Envie, one of my regular Quarter hangouts, there he was, working behind the counter—and thankfully, wearing a nametag.

 This guy across the street didn’t seem to notice me, and I was just starting to think I was mistaken when he reached the bottom of the steps and turned to walk towards the river. In that moment, he was directly under a street lamp, and I did a double take.

It was Freddy Bliss.

I opened my mouth to shout hello before crossing the street, but before I could form the word in my throat, he started walking up the street at a very fast pace, breaking into a run when he got to the corner at Dauphine. I stared after him until I lost him in the darkness.

I glanced back at the house. It was silent, no sign of life there other than the gas lights.
That’s odd,
I thought
, what the hell was Freddy doing there?
A cold chill went down my spine as I remembered my call to Loren. Surely Loren had passed the information along…had Freddy gone over to confront her?

You might be fooling the world with your do-gooder act, but I know what you really are.

I shuddered in the chill evening air.

I laughed to myself a little bit, trying to shake the feeling. I crossed the street and stared at the front of the house for a moment. I debated whether I should knock or not.

 The house was completely silent.

A dog barked, and I jumped.

Get a grip, Chanse. Besides, it’s really none of your business, is it now, what Freddy was doing there?

I shrugged, put it out of my head, and headed to Port of Call.

Port of Call is on the edge of the French Quarter on the corner of Dauphine and Esplanade streets.

I was on Dauphine about halfway down the block between Barracks and Esplanade when I was assaulted by one of my favorite smells in New Orleans: burgers, being cooked over an open flame. I stopped for a moment, standing there on the sidewalk, my eyes partly closed, savoring the smell. My knees got weak, my stomach growled, and my mouth filled with saliva. There’s nothing I love more than hamburgers—and if they’re cooked over an open flame or charcoal, so much the better.

Every publication and website having to do with New Orleans always ranks Port of Call as one of the best places in the city to get a burger. They also have great drinks.

 I was hoping there wouldn’t be a wait—the majority of tourists who’d come in for Mardi Gras were probably already on their way home, nursing their hangovers and swearing off liquor permanently. I crossed my fingers as I reached the corner,
please, no line, please no line.
 I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I got a whiff of the grill, and now I was starving. As I walked around the corner, I breathed a sigh of relief—not only was there not a line; but, miracle of miracles, Paige was sitting on the steps leading to the door, puffing on a cigarette.

Paige is an unrepentant smoker; I’d finally managed to quit, although the desire for a butt never really went away.  Louisiana had finally passed a law about smoking in restaurants, something to do with how much of the place’s income derived from food vs. liquor…after which Paige swore she would never eat anywhere that wasn’t legally considered a bar rather than a restaurant.

Her protest didn’t last long. It was harder to swear off Port of Call than it was to quit smoking.

She stood up when she saw me come around the corner, and flicked her cigarette into the street with a practiced snap of her fingers. She was wearing a rather nice knee length black skirt, a red silk blouse, and black high-heeled shoes. If given her preference, she would dress more like a gypsy, but her new editor at the
Times-Picayune,
whom she referred to as “that bitch Coralie” had imposed a dress code on the reporters…which was also driving her crazy.

“More professional, my fat white ass,” she’d snarled when she told me about it. “Does that stupid bitch really think it makes me a goddamned better writer if I dress the way she wants me to? God, I hate her.” Paige’s shoulder-length red hair with blonde streaks looked tangled, and her lipstick had rubbed off on her cigarette butt. The most striking thing about Paige was her eyes—they were mismatched: one green, one blue. “Christ, what’s wrong?” She asked as she presented her cheek for me to kiss. “I got here before you? I am surely slipping in my old age.”

I showed her my watch. “You’re even early.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Oh, dear lord. It surely must be the end times.” She laughed and shrugged. “Well, these days I can’t get out of the office fast enough. That bitch Coralie was definitely in rare form today.” Paige’s longtime editor, Joe LeSeuer, had retired after the hurricane and left New Orleans. “Maybe the book will sell for a million dollars and I can tell her where she can shove her fucking dress code.” Ever since we graduated from college, Paige had been puttering around with a romance novel called
The Belle of New Orleans
, set during the War of 1812
s.
A few months after the flood, she’d taken all of her accrued vacation, grabbed her laptop, and rented a cabin in the Tennessee mountains for eight weeks, determined to finally finish the thing.

Oddly enough, though, once she got up there she started writing a new book called
Head Above Water,
an autobiographical novel about her experiences during the hurricane and the weeks thereafter. “Once I started it, I couldn’t stop writing it,” she’d confided to me when she returned to the city, “It was like it took on a life of its own.”
I’d tried reading it, but it was too painful for me. Everything the city had been through—and was still going through—was still too fresh, raw and painful for me to relive it all through Paige’s writing. She was damned good—too good.  She’d rewritten and revised it several times, and now it was in the hands of several high-powered literary agents in New York, all of whom were interested in it. It had become a kind of mantra for her:
When the book sells for a million dollars, I am telling Coralie where she can put her dress code and I am walking out the door.

She rolled her eyes. “Get this—she wants me to try to be more ‘warm and fuzzy’ in my pieces. Warm and fucking fuzzy!”

“What did you say?” Much as I hated to admit it, I found the endless power struggle between the two women highly amusing.

“I told her I worked for a newspaper the last time I checked, not fucking Hallmark.” She sighed. “Get this—she put out a jar. Every time someone uses bad language”—she made air quotes around the words—“you have to put a quarter in the jar, and she’s going to use the money to go toward the office Christmas party.” She gave me an evil smile. “I got up, put a twenty in there, and gave her the finger.”

“She’s going to fire you one of these days.”

“I can only hope.”

We entered the dimly lit restaurant and took a table in a quiet corner. It wasn’t crowded, and our waitress looked somewhat tired as she took our drink orders. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days, and most likely, had been working double shifts throughout Carnival. We went ahead and ordered our burgers as well. After the waitress moved away from us, Paige gave me a wicked glance. “Thanks for having dinner with me.” She sighed. “After the day I’ve had, I needed to be around someone with a brain.”

I couldn’t resist. “Good thing Ryan’s with the kids, then—since he obviously doesn’t have one.”

“Because someone with a brain obviously wouldn’t date me. Right. I get it.” She rolled her eyes. “When do you leave for Texas? That’s coming up, isn’t it?” The waitress placed our iced teas in front of us and scooted away.

“Not for a few more weeks.” I hesitated and bit my lip. I always talked about my cases with Paige—and she often used her resources at the paper to get information to help me out.

“That bitch Coralie started harping on me getting an interview with Frillian again,” Paige didn’t seem to notice my hesitation, wrapped up as she was in her own anger. She took a sip of her tea, grimaced and added a pack of artificial sweetener to it. “Like it’s that goddamned easy, like I haven’t tried everything I can think of! She’s so stupid, I guess she probably thinks I can just drop by their place sometime and they’d be thrilled to see me.” She sighed. “I swear to God, she must have gotten her journalism degree online or from a mail order catalogue. If I’d only known she was going to turn into such a power hungry bitch, I’d have taken the damned job myself when they offered it to me.”

Paige had often theorized that part of the reason Coralie seemed to pick her out for ‘special’ treatment was because management had offered her the job first. Paige had turned it down. She smacked her forehead. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. But then no one had the slightest idea she’d turn into such a fucking Nazi.”

This was just great. I cursed the goddamned confidentiality agreement—even though I knew I could trust her. She’d be furious when she found out I was working for them and didn’t tell her. I made a mental note to ask them the next time I saw them to give her the interview. The worst thing they could do was say no, right? And I owed Paige many favors. “I don’t see what the big deal is.” I said. I had wondered how I could get her to talk to me about Frillian without telling her I was working for them. What a stroke of luck that bitch Coralie had opened the lines of communication for me. “I mean, yeah, I get it, they’re movie stars, but so what. Nobody even talks about them any more,, you know? They’re just part of the city now.”

“Try telling that to that bitch Coralie,” Paige groused, squeezing her lemon into the tall glass of tea. “And besides, you know damned well that celebrities are about the only thing people want to hear about on the news anymore. Every time Britney Spears farts, it makes
CNN Headline News.
If you ask me, it’s all a big government-controlled conspiracy. Who cares if we’re in a stupid war or the economy is going into the toilet, as long as we know that Paris Hilton flashed her cooch getting out of her Ferrari? Or that some other useless waste of oxygen they’ve decided we should care about went into rehab again, or is having a baby, or getting a divorce? So once again, she’s got a wild hair about an exclusive interview, and of course I’m the one stuck trying to get the damned story. If I ever see Joe again, I’m going to kill him for retiring and sticking me with that bitch.”

“It was rather inconsiderate of him.” 

“To say the least.” She sighed again. “I called Sandy Carter today, again, and she promised to see what she could do.”

“Sandy Carter?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Chanse. Do you ever listen
to
anything
I say to you?” She gave me a look. “Sandy Carter is the one working with Freddy Bliss on Operation Rebuild—you know, the one who does all the work while he runs around raising money and getting publicity. You’ve
met
her, you big idiot.”

“Oh, yes.” I’d met Sandy Carter the first time before the storm, when she’d been running for an at-large seat on the city council. Her campaign had been all about cleaning up the corruption at city hall—which meant her campaign was doomed to failure from the beginning. A lot of snide remarks had circulated in the media back in the fall of 2005 about corruption in Louisiana, about how the federal government shouldn’t give us money because our politicians would just steal it all. Of course, in the years since, the vast majority of the politicians who’d spread that story had all been caught in some kind of ethics or corruption scandal—because of course, there was NO corruption in any other state or the federal government. The only difference between New Orleans politics and that of the rest of the country is that we
expect
our politicians to be corrupt. We may be jaded, but I think it’s better than being naïve.