by G. T. Herren
Jackson wouldn’t welcome a call or visit from me today.
Maybe— maybe I could stop by the House of Mercereau? Maybe someone was there who could find the photo I needed.
It was an excuse, of course. I really just wanted to snoop around the house.
The cops might buy it— but I’d only need to use it if I got caught.
I checked through the rest of my email, but there wasn’t anything from Chanse, not even an acknowledgment of my request for information about Isabelle. I tried his cell, but it went right to voicemail.
Maybe he’s hot on the trail of Amber and Tony, I thought, heading up the stairs to take a shower and get dressed.
I still hadn’t heard back from him half an hour later as I got into my car and headed uptown. Rachel hadn’t responded to my email yet, either. As I drove, I continued convincing myself that it made perfect sense for me to go by the House of Mercereau without getting permission from Jackson, or seeing if he had any pictures of his mother the magazine could use. Besides, I wasn’t going to break in. I was just going to see if any of the staff was around and get some more material for my article in addition to a photo of Marigny. If no one was there, I could just take some shots of the place with my digital camera.
It might piss off Venus and Blaine for me to mess around at their crime scene, but they’d get over it. They also didn’t have to know.
You could call them, an annoying little voice whispered in my head. Of course I ignored it, the way I always did.
They’d be happy if by some remote chance I solved their case for them, right? A win-win for everyone.
Ah, the lies we tell ourselves.
I found a place to park on Nashville and walked up to Magazine Street. I tried calling Chanse again but got his voicemail. I frowned, and turned the corner just in time to see someone slip inside the front gates of the House of Mercereau.
Interesting, I thought, dumping my phone back into my purse. I hadn’t gotten a good look, so I hurried along the sidewalk, fumbling in my bag for my digital camera. The gates were slightly open, and I got to them just in time to see a woman going inside the front door. I couldn’t be certain, but it sure looked a lot like Isabelle DePew. I pressed the silver button on my digital camera and tried to get a picture of her entry, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now what in the hell was she doing here? Destroying evidence, maybe?
I should have called Venus. But I didn’t.
I wanted to see what Isabelle was up to before getting the police involved. After all, her being here could be entirely innocent, right? Maybe she just wanted to get some personal items out of her office or desk. I didn’t see crime scene tape anywhere, so maybe it was perfectly legit for her to go inside.
I carefully opened the gates and walked inside. I didn’t close them completely, just enough so they looked closed. I made sure the latch didn’t catch. The last thing in the world I needed was to be trapped inside. I bit my lower lip. What would I do if she left before me and locked the gates? I’d have to climb the fence or figure out some other way to let myself out. I looked at the fence and swallowed. It looked climbable.
I hurried up the walkway to the steps, hesitating a moment before climbing up to the gallery. A chill went up my spine. The last time I’d been here the place had been alive, full of people and light and noise. Now the only sound was the occasional car driving past on Magazine Street. The entire place was silent as a tomb. I took a deep breath and climbed the steps. When I reached the top, I could see the crime scene tape had been bunched up into a ball and tossed into a corner.
Whoever was inside was contaminating a crime scene.
The smart thing to do was go back to the gates and call Venus.
But I’m not known for doing the smart thing.
The front door was ajar, and it was just too big a temptation for me. I stepped inside carefully, trying desperately not to make any sound, afraid that I was even breathing too loud.
I could hear voices murmuring upstairs. I strained to hear but couldn’t make out any words, couldn’t tell who was doing the talking. All I knew for sure was there was more than one person trespassing inside the House of Mercereau.
I had to find out who was upstairs.
I reached in my purse and put my hand on my phone. I flicked the switch on the side, setting it to vibrate. I touched the screen and pressed the voice memo app button. I turned it on, placing it in the side pocket of my purse.
I didn’t know what its range was, but it was best to be prepared for anything.
I turned off my camera and put it back in my purse. The shutters were closed, and it was so dark and shadowy inside, any picture would need a flash. Since it’s hard to sneak pictures of anyone when a flash goes off, it was going to be useless to me.
The big main room was still set up for the fashion show from Friday night. The uncomfortable white plastic chairs were still in rows, but some were askew, others lying on their sides. Plastic cups with the remnants of drinks were almost everywhere— clearly Marigny had planned on having the place cleaned up the next morning. I tiptoed to the foot of the stairs, carefully stepping around chairs and cups, trying not to make any noise. I was listening, but still couldn’t make out what the voices were saying. I could only hope I wouldn’t step on a creaky board. That little voice in my head started urging me to get the hell out and call Venus, but again I ignored it. I could hear my heart beating in my ears, and I was getting the old adrenaline rush I used to get when I was on a story for the paper.
I’d missed that feeling.
The voices were still too muffled for me to hear anything clearly, but now I could make out that one of them was male, one female— probably the woman I’d seen. I paused, my foot on the bottom step. All my instincts were telling me to run, get the hell out of there, and call the police.
But what if they didn’t get here in time?
I was the only person who could find out who was here and why they’d broken in.
I took a deep breath, said a short prayer, and started creeping up the stairs.
The voices became more and more clear as I got closer to the second floor. I was starting to be able to make out individual words.
One of the speakers was definitely Isabelle— I recognized her high-pitched voice. But I couldn’t tell who the man was— I’d never heard his voice before.
“I’m telling you it has to be here,” the man was saying. “She must have moved it somewhere. She wouldn’t have gotten rid of anything that made her money. You know that as well as I do.”
“You need to hurry up,” Isabelle’s voice was angry. “If we get caught in here we’re going to jail, and I am not going to go to jail for you. Just take the goddamned money and jewelry from the safe. They already think Jackson was embezzling from the old bitch, they’ll just think he stole this stuff, too.”
Her voice was harder, more mature sounding than when I’d talked to her before. I knew this was the real Isabelle— whoever the hell she was.
“Honey, you know as well as I do the real money is on that fucking flash drive,” the man replied, his voice cajoling. “How are we going to turn these jewels into cash anyway? And there’s only a couple grand in her fucking safe. The flash drive is a gold mine.”
“I told you, I don’t know what she did with it. She might have destroyed it. She got the money, didn’t she?” Isabelle‘s voice became whiny. “Come on, Tony, let’s get out of here. Isn’t it enough that she’s dead and her son’s going to fry for it?”
Tony.
It had to be Tony Castiglione— and if it was… then maybe Amber and Isabelle…
The little slut always wore one of my masks in the pictures, so I never did see her face.
I swallowed. Marigny had never known what her husband’s mistress looked like.
Was this why we couldn’t find any trace of Tony and Amber?
I hoped my phone was picking up all of this. I leaned forward and peeped around the corner. Straight ahead of me was a long h
allway, and the voices were coming from my right. I could see them through an open door. They had their backs to me in a room that must have been Marigny’s office. The safe door was wide open, and Isabelle was leaning against the wall on the right. A very muscular man was rifling through the contents.
I glanced at my watch. Another couple of minutes….
“Amber, why you wanna be so goddamned stupid?” Tony said, his voice sounding almost dangerously seductive. “You know the old bitch got a shitload of money for what’s on that drive. A couple grand ain’t gonna be enough to keep us in style once we get the hell out of this town. We need a nest egg to set us up.”
Isabelle was Amber.
Amber had come to work for Marigny under another name, gotten close to her. Jackson hadn’t been stealing from his mother— Isabelle/Amber had been framing him all along. What had their plan been? Just to have her get access to the house and the safe, so she could steal money?
It hardly seemed worth the trouble.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the plan had been to kill Marigny all along.
Tony had married Marigny for her money— but she’d found out about his affair and kicked him to the curb.
Marigny’d tried to shake down Athalie about her affair with the Judge, wanting money to leave it out of her memoir. Athalie had said she’d laughed at her and thrown her out— but there hadn’t been anything in the manuscript about the affair.
Much as I hated the thought, I couldn’t help but wonder if Athalie had actually paid her off.
I realized there’d been no names in the manuscript from Marigny’s wild, misspent youth in the Quarter.
The flash drive, apparently, had all that damning information on it; maybe it even contained a copy of the original manuscript Marigny’d written.
Tony said what was on it was a gold mine for them.
Marigny had been blackmailing people, asking for money in exchange for being left out of her memoir— that was why there’d been no dirt in the manuscript she’d sent me.
I needed to get the hell out of here and let Venus know what was going on. Let the police find the damned flash drive.
I turned to start sneaking back down the steps, but the stair groaned beneath me.
I froze.
“What was that?” Tony said. My blood turned to ice.
“I didn’t hear nothing,” Amber/Isabelle replied.
My hands shaking, I pulled my phone out and pulled up the contacts. I touched Venus’s name, and started typing a text message as fast as I could: At Marigny’s the killers are here get here as fast as you can before they find me and hit send, whispering a prayer to every Higher Being I could think of that Venus and Blaine would get here as fast as they possibly could.
“You’re imagining things,” Amber went on, her voice dripping scorn. “It’s an old house. It makes noises all the time. Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me Marigny’s ghost is here trying to get us.” She laughed nastily. “Seriously, Tony, what’s your problem? Feeling guilty?”
There was the unmistakable sound of a slap.
Much as I needed to get out of there, I froze again, long suppressed memories forcing their way to the surface.
My ears roared. I couldn’t hear anything else going on; the edges of my vision went gray— and I knew I was about to have a panic attack.
I couldn’t catch my breath. But somehow I forced myself to turn around. I grabbed the railing as everything started to swim in front of me, my vision blurring. Colors became vibrant and sharp, almost painfully so, in the small cone of vision directly in front of me as I stumbled down the stairs, no longer caring how loud I was being, no longer caring if they heard me. I just had to get out. I heard more noise, loud sounds coming from around me. I tried desperately to stay conscious, to stay focused, my mind whirling and twirling, my heart racing. Nothing made sense but escape. I stumbled, somehow managing to make it to the front door and out into the fresh air and the sunshine, across the porch and down the front steps, and I was somehow aware that there were flashing red lights in front of the gates so far ahead of me. I managed to get to the lawn, collapsed on the grass, and started throwing up.
“Paige?” I heard a voice as I struggled to breathe. “Honey, are you okay?”
Someone grabbed one of my hands, and started talking to me. “Relax, catch your breath, you’re going to be all right.”
Slowly, everything came back into focus and I started to breathe again.
I looked up into Blaine’s concerned face, so much like Ryan’s I wanted to start crying.
“Are you okay?” he asked again, sitting down next to me. He slipped an arm around me.
“Panic… attack.” I managed to say.
He nodded. Over his shoulder I could see a muscular man and Isabelle/Amber being led out of the house in handcuffs by uniformed officers, Venus walking alongside, reading them their rights.
I closed my eyes and rested my head against Blaine’s chest.
Chapter Thirteen
The Avenue Pub, up on the corner at St. Charles from my apartment, had become a kind of haven for my friends and me in the months after Hurricane Katrina. Venus, Blaine, Chanse and I used to meet there every evening in the weeks when we weren’t sure if New Orleans was going to come back. We drank too much and commiserated, compared notes on our days, and railed against everything and everyone— the federal government, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, crooked contractors, pretty much anything we could think of and put a name to. Those were the dread days of panic attacks and medication, wondering when we were ever going to get garbage pick-up again, the days when the streets were empty, and nothing was open.
As life slowly returned to something that passed as normal, our daily meetings became less frequent, and finally we just stopped meeting there at all. Venus and Blaine’s hours made it impossible for them to be consistent, and as my job at the paper transitioned into my job at the magazine, the close bond we all felt back then loosened somewhat; the sense that we were all survivors of something horrible faded in the day-to-day minutiae of groceries and laundry and all the little tasks became less of an effort as the city rebuilt.
The Avenue Pub changed, too. Before Katrina, it was a neighborhood blue-collar bar, where colorful characters gathered to watch and bemoan the latest Saints tragedy and have strong drinks and old-fashioned New Orleans bar food. After Katrina, it was where the survivors gathered, nodding and smiling as recent returnees told their tales of evacuations and shared their shock at how the grocery stores weren’t open 24/7 and all the other inconveniences of a changed city, while those of us who’d been back for awhile shared knowing glances and faint smiles.
But that had changed yet again. Now it was a hip place for the young professionals who’d flooded into the city to take jobs left vacant by those who couldn’t return because they’d taken jobs in other cities, put their kids in school there, and knew what it meant to miss New Orleans. I didn’t mind the new crowd at the Avenue Pub, and I appreciated them for coming here and helping the city take shape again.
But as they sipped their frou-frou drinks and ate their upscale appetizers, I missed the older guys in their greasy clothes with their five o’clock shadows, bitching about the union or the bosses down on the docks or dem Saints who just never could get their act together.
I finished peeling the label off my bottle of Bud Lite and met Chanse’s eyes across the table. He gave me a faint smile, like he knew what I was thinking. He picked up his own bottle and we clinked ours together.
“Amber and Tony turned on each other pretty fast,” Venus was saying. “It’s just a matter of which one the DA’s going to want to make a deal with, although I’m betting Tony. It was Amber’s gun, and her fingerprints were all over it.”
“So Marigny used her memoir to extort money out of some people who didn’t want their old time affairs with her exposed?” I asked.
Venus and Blaine looked at each other but didn’t say anything.
&nbs
p; “It’s a lot worse than that,” Chanse finally said. He winked at me. “This is all off the record, until the deals are signed and all the t’s are crossed, okay?” He took a deep breath as I nodded. “The time she was in France? Working for Chanel, supposedly? That wasn’t true.”
“Obviously.”
“She got pregnant,” Chanse said. “I finally got it out of Audrey this afternoon. Audrey helped her. She got pregnant by a very important man in Louisiana— Audrey wouldn’t tell me who— and Marigny got paid off to leave town and never come back. Marigny gave the child up for adoption and stayed away until her father died. She came back here and started her business, and never said a word. She made up the lie about Chanel, of course, to give her business some cachet.” He winked at me. “That child was Amber’s father.”
“Oh. My. God.” I looked at Venus and Blaine— neither of whom would look at me. “So, she tracked Marigny down and came here to just get even? Why didn’t she just tell Marigny who she was?”
Chanse shrugged. “That wasn’t a part of her plan.”
“Did Audrey know who she was?” I remembered seeing Isabelle— Amber— leaving her house the day after the murder.
“She says she didn’t— but we’re pretty sure she’s lying. She’s trying really hard to distance herself from all of this.” Blaine said, earning a scowl from Venus. “She wasn’t as good a friend to Marigny as she pretended.”
“So Isabelle seduced her grandmother’s husband—” I started, but Venus interrupted me.
“This is off the record, all right?” She lowered her voice.
I nodded. “Of course.”
“When we searched their love nest, we found her father’s birth certificate.” She said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Marigny was listed as the mother, and the father was Alan Vidrine.”