by G. T. Herren
“You owe me twenty bucks,” he said as I unlocked the gate and swung it open.
“Put it on my tab. You look terrible,” I said. I followed him down the narrow walk, childishly delighted to see him cringe as water dripped onto his back.
“No need to make myself pretty just for you, is there?” He gave me a sardonic wink as he went up my stairs and opened my front door. Skittle immediately started rubbing against his legs and purring. The little attention whore. He set the pizza box down on the coffee table and whipped out a joint from his shorts pocket. He plopped down on my ancient rust-colored couch, scarred by years of abuse from Skittle’s claws, and lit the joint while I went into the kitchen to get some plates and a beer for him. He handed it to me when I put a bottle of Abita Amber on the table in front of him. I took a couple of hits and gave it back, grabbing a steaming slice of pizza from the box and putting it on my plate to cool. I sat down in my reclining chair and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, feeling my mind start to unwind. Relaxation slowly began seeping through my entire body.
I hadn’t realized how tired I was. “We haven’t done this in a while,” I said. We used to smoke pot and eat while brainstorming cases I was covering or ones he was working on all the time.
He shrugged. “You haven’t been a reporter in a couple of years. And you’ve cut back on the pot smoking since you started seeing Ryan.” He pinched the joint out and put it on the table next to the pizza box. He grinned at me. “So, what have you been doing since we talked on the phone?”
“I’ve been wading through Marigny’s memoirs,” I reclined in the chair, and explained how I wound up with them. “Seriously, Chanse, it’s the worst written shit I’ve read since I was in that writer’s group in college.”
That had been an unqualified disaster; our senior year at LSU I started writing a novel, and thinking it would be helpful, joined a fiction writer’s group on campus. My book, a torrid romance set during the War of 1812 in New Orleans, didn’t exactly win me any admirers in the group, which consisted almost entirely of creative writing grad students. After listening to their condescension as they tore my writing to pieces in that smug, superior way only pretentious beret-wearing grad students who don’t bathe can, I would head over to Chanse’s apartment, where we would get stoned and read their incredibly constipated short stories aloud. I only lasted four meetings before I finally blew up at the group’s facilitator, a pompous ass the girls in the group adored, hanging on his every word as he chain-smoked stinky clove cigarettes and expounded about the evils of American society and culture.
He was the kind of ass who always winds up teaching at some junior college in the middle of nowhere, never publishes anything, and gets fired for fucking a student.
That was the last time I tried to join a writing group.
Chanse goggled at me. “I can’t believe anything could be worse than that shit. Remember the story that girl wrote from the point of view of a cockroach?” He took another slice of pizza out of the box. “That had to be the worst thing ever put on paper.”
“True— it was pretty awful. We called her Frances Kafka, remember?” The facilitator, of course, had thought it was a brilliantly symbolic indictment of American consumerism. “But it’s pretty damned close.”
He shuddered dramatically. “I think of that story every time I step on one,” he observed, “which makes killing them even more pleasurable for me. What do you think ever happened to her?”
“She’s probably making her third husband miserable,” I replied. “But this is so bad, Chanse, it should be taught as an example of how not to write a memoir.”
“Better you than me,” He took another enormous bite of his pizza, wiping grease from his chin. “But I think you’ll be pretty happy with the dirt I dug up.”
I shrugged. “What did you find?” I took a bite out of my pizza as he started talking.
He placed a manila envelope on the table. “It’s all there,” he said, picking up his own pizza. “There’s nothing on the first four husbands— I don’t think there’s anything there, really. The divorces were all pretty basic and civil, and the husbands moved on, married again and had kids. They all seem pretty settled.” He shrugged. “They made a mistake, realized it, and got out fast. But the fifth divorce?” He grinned at me. “That’s where we hit the jackpot. She married him two years before Katrina, and of course that delayed the divorce some.”
“She filed before the storm, I take it.” I closed my eyes. That must have been incredibly frustrating. City Hall had taken on water, and city and court records had been a mess that had taken a long time to straighten out. I couldn’t even remember how long it had taken to get the civil courts open again. “How long did she wait afterwards to move on it?”
“Her lawyer re-filed in Baton Rouge that November,” Chanse replied. “And that’s really when things got ugly.”
“He was a lot younger than she was,” I observed, remembering Audrey’s rather catty commentary on Marigny’s fifth marriage.
“When she originally filed, it was basically an ‘irreconcilable differences’ kind of thing, and she was even willing to make a settlement on him,” Chanse popped a piece of crust in his mouth. After swallowing, he shook his head. “But when she filed again, it was for adultery, and she didn’t want to give him anything.” He gave me a wicked grin. “She also named a co-respondent, one Miss Amber Kormann, aged twenty two.” He shook his head. “Good thing gays can’t marry here, right? We’d be undermining the sanctity of marriage left and right.”
I gave him a sour look. “Preaching to the choir, dear. You know I think everyone has the right to a bridal registry.”
“I know, but I like to take a moment to point out the hypocrisy whenever I can,” he said, picking up yet another piece of pizza. I’d only had two slices and felt full, even though I wanted more. I envied his ability to pretty much eat as much as he wanted whenever he wanted.
Stupid biology, anyway.
He took a big swallow from his beer and burped. “And that Tony Castiglione is a piece of work, for sure. His lawyer was counter-filing and counter-suing and trying every sleazy trick in the book to try to get a cash settlement for Tony out of Marigny— he obviously was working on a percentage of the take basis. I looked him up, that’s his usual practice. His website says it makes him work harder for his clients.” He rolled his eyes. “So, yeah, there was a lot of stuff I had Abby look over and decipher for me.” His business partner, Abby, had majored in Pre-Law at the University of New Orleans and had been accepted into the Loyola University Law School, but hadn’t enrolled. “But here’s the really weird part— the settlement hearing was sealed by the court, so it must have been pretty nasty. And it was done at Marigny’s request. And he didn’t get a cent— the judge’s decision wasn’t sealed. This Tony Castiglione’s a pretty nasty character. He’s been arrested for assault a couple of times but never convicted. The charges were always dropped. Always women, I might add— he’s a predator. There’s a clear pattern there.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. Nothing makes me angrier than men who abuse women either physically or emotionally or both. For just a moment a memory flashed through my mind and my entire body went rigid.
Don’t go back there, I reminded myself, pushing the memory back into a corner of my mind, where I slammed the door closed and locked it.
Chanse was still talking. “And he married again, a couple of months after the divorce— to the very same Amber Kormann. She’s what? Fifteen years younger than he is?” He shook his head. “Must be clearly a control thing with him— like I said, someone should just take him out somewhere and horsewhip his sorry ass. Last record of him in the system is a few months back— she had him arrested and charged with domestic abuse and spousal rape. But the charges were dropped yet again.” He frowned. “I’m trying to track them both down. His last known address was down in the Holy Cross district, but that property is also on the city’s blighted list,
so who knows? And I can’t find anything on the wife. She has that same property listed… and her occupation on her last rental application was ‘entertainer’.” He winked at me.
I didn’t want to know how he’d accessed those records— I’m a big fan of plausible deniability. As long as he didn’t tell me, I was fine— even though I knew that he kept Abby’s boyfriend, a computer genius, on retainer to hack into places he shouldn’t. “So she was either a prostitute or a stripper or both.”
“I’ve got Abby talking to some of her friends down at the strip clubs, trying to see what she can find out about her.” One of the things I absolutely adored about Abby was she had put herself through UNO as a dancer at the Catbox Club, a Bourbon Street strip joint. She still danced every once in a while “to keep her hand in,” as she liked to say. “I’m really worried about the most recent Mrs. Castiglione, to be honest. Abusive men who don’t get help or don’t go to jail just get worse until someone ends up dead.” His face was grim. “And I can’t find any trace of her in the months since the charges were dropped— I don’t know if that means anything or not. Maybe she just changed her name and skipped town. But I don’t have a good feeling about it. The address being blighted really worries me.”
I bit my tongue. There were a lot of reasons for a woman to give a phony address— even more reasons for a woman to completely disappear.
Best not to go there.
Instead, I said, “I think it’s great you’re so concerned about this woman, Chanse, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with Marigny, does it?”
He shook his head, his face still grim and angry. He’d once told me when we were both really high and drinking wine that his father sometimes hit his mother— so physically abusive men were always a trigger for him, just as they were for me. “No, it doesn’t. But I’m worried about this woman, and I’m not working on anything else. What can it hurt to look for her, make sure she’s okay?”
I knew better than to try to dissuade him when he got like this— anything I said would only make him more determined. It was one of the reasons I loved him like a brother. “This is all very interesting, but as far as Marigny was concerned, it’s all old news. She never charged him with abuse, did she?”
“No.”
“So why would he kill Marigny now? Wouldn’t he have killed her before the divorce if he wanted money from her? Killing her now doesn’t make sense. He isn’t going to get anything.”
He shrugged. “He doesn’t seem too bright, Paige, seriously. Any man who physically abuses women has more than a few screws loose. Who knows? Maybe he’s been brooding all this time about how she treated him. Maybe he found out she was writing a book that made him look bad— what does she say about him?”
“I haven’t gotten that far into it.” Reading her memoir was incredibly slow going, because the writing was so bad. My mind would get numb from trying to decipher what she was talking about and I’d have to get up from the computer. There were times I wanted to scream at the screen. “So far I’ve gotten to her college years. Outside of her friend Audrey, apparently everyone she went to school with at McGehee was a bitch from hell, and she named names.” The only one that I recognized was Athalie’s.
There was only one Athalie in New Orleans, after all.
He whistled. “That’s pretty ballsy, don’t you think? Wasn’t she afraid of getting sued?”
“Well, they’d have to prove what she said wasn’t true, and that she wrote it with malicious intent— and intent is always really hard to prove,” I replied. “And think of the publicity! Once it got into the paper— or on the web— everyone in the city would want to read the book to see what she had to say about people. She was probably hoping she’d get sued— it would be great marketing for her.”
“Are you getting a sense of her from the book?”
I closed my eyes. The pot was making my mind a little fuzzy, and I was getting tired— I wasn’t going to have any trouble going to sleep after he left. “I feel sorry for her,” I said, not opening my eyes. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as she makes it out to have been— who remembers high school pleasantly? I sure don’t. But it’s our perception of what it was like— someone else would probably remember it differently.” To be fair to Marigny, though, Audrey had pretty much painted the same picture of Marigny’s school days. “You know how teenagers always think everything is the end of the world? That whole ‘my boyfriend’s broken up with me and no one has ever been hurt this badly ever before in the history of the world’ type thing?”
Chanse laughed. “Like how people I went to high school keep friending me on Facebook and are always so surprised to hear how much I hated high school because they thought I was popular and everyone liked me?”
“Exactly like that,” I replied. “I really do feel sorry for Marigny— all of the stuff she talks about in her introduction, the Russian royalty thing, all of that, all the husbands and even all the boyfriends. She talks about losing her virginity at fifteen in almost excruciatingly exhaustive detail. I don’t really need to know how badly it hurt or how long she bled after, thank you— it was all about her feeling like she didn’t belong and wanting to, so badly. They were mean to her at McGehee because she wasn’t New Orleans society. Her grandfather had made money importing bananas, but her father spent it all… and so not only was she nobody, but they were broke and everyone knew it. So she started making up this story about her grandfather being an illegitimate son of the Czar… which of course is bullshit. The last Romanov had one mistress before he married, and he was ridiculously faithful to his wife. But she told that lie so often she started believing it, and after Katrina she went over there to try to prove it.” I ran my hand through my hair. “None of the marriages worked out, her relationship with her sons wasn’t as close as she felt they could have been… yes, I feel sorry for Marigny. She was a very sad and lonely lady.”
“Is that going to be the theme of your piece on her?”
“It should be.” I leaned forward and flicked the pizza box closed on the two slices that were left. “I don’t know if Rachel would allow that. The great irony is she claimed she wrote the memoir to inspire other women to follow their dreams no matter what, but it’s not inspirational at all. Her story, I mean. It’s really sad.”
“But you haven’t gotten to where she starts running her own business yet.”
I stifled a yawn. “Yeah.” I stood up and stretched.
Taking the hint, Chanse stood up. “I’ll leave you the roach.”
“Thanks.” I followed him out to the gate so I could let him out. “Call me if you find out anything about Amber Castiglione, all right?”
He leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “I’ve got her financials, too— I just hadn’t a chance to look them over. You want me to email them to you?”
“Yeah. No sense wasting any more of your time on this. Thanks.”
I watched him walk down the street towards his own apartment before shutting the gate and walking back into my own. I put the pizza in the fridge and sat back down at my desk, the joint in my hand. I lit it and took another hit before diving back into Marigny’s memoir.
Chapter Nine
I woke up to the smell of bacon.
At first I thought I must have died in my sleep and gone to some wonderful heaven where angels make bacon, but then I realized it had to be Ryan.
One of the great things about my man was he loved to cook, and he loved to cook for me. Sunday morning I always woke up to wonderful smells coming from my under-utilized kitchen. I threw the covers back, glanced at the alarm and was shocked to realize it was just past ten. I usually didn’t sleep that late, but I had stayed up until almost one reading the damned memoirs. I walked into the bathroom, washed my face and brushed my teeth. I slipped on my house shoes and went downstairs, peeking around the corner into the kitchen.
Ryan was standing at the stove, scrambling eggs. There was a small plate with buttered toast, and two more pieces popped up
in the toaster. He was wearing a pair of loose-fitting gray cargo shorts and a black Saints #9 jersey with BREES written on the back. I slipped up behind and slid my arms around his stomach, giving him a hug. “You’re back early,” I said, resting my face against his warm back.
“The kids had an early church pageant,” he replied, “so I dropped them off early and headed back over here.” He pulled one of my hands up to his mouth and kissed it. “Now, step away from the stove. I don’t want you getting burned by bacon grease or something.”
I obeyed, pouring myself a cup of coffee and sitting down at my desk. I touched the mouse and my screen woke back up. The last thing I’d done before going to bed— the same thing I do every night— is check my email, so the web browser was open to my gmail account. I started opening mail; nothing that needed immediate response. I deleted the spam, and was making good progress getting through them all when I saw one whose return address was all numbers; like a phone number, actually. I clicked the box preparatory to deleting it when something about the subject line had me move the cursor off the delete button.
I know who you really are.
I swallowed, and glanced back over at Ryan, who was now pouring pancake batter onto the griddle. I clicked it open and my heart sank into my feet.
The message was simply two sentences: I also know where you’re from. You’ll be hearing from me soon.
“Not possible,” I whispered, and quickly deleted it.
I took a few deep breaths, chanting in my head a bit to calm my nerves and slow down my heart rate. It’s nothing, I told myself, until my stomach stopped roiling and the thudding of my heartbeat in my ears faded away. It’s just the Internet equivalent of a crank call, some stupid kid playing around online and trying to be funny. He probably sent that to at least a hundred total strangers, just some stupid kid, It has to be nothing, right? There’s no way anyone could have found you, not after all this time.