Nude in Red

by O'Neil De Noux

  The iPhone makes a weird noise. He pulls it away and sees Jessie’s name. The phone must recognize her number. Yeah. I’d punched it in. He tells Juanita he’s gotta go.

  “OK.”

  He pushes buttons to answer but no Jessie. Damn. He waits a few seconds, then tries to find her on his contacts list. Wait. Isn’t there a recent calls list? He finds it and taps her name, holds the phone up to his ear and hears ringing.

  “Hello, there,” Jessie says. “I called to see how your first day as chief inspector went.”

  Cool.

  Wednesday

  • Toulouse Street, 10:25 a.m.

  Hotel DeSaix is four stories with wrought iron balconies wrapping around the second, third and fourth floors. Painted pale yellow, a few small pieces of stucco have worn away to reveal its original Creole construction, bricks between cypress covered in stucco. Businesses flank the hotel, a used bookstore called Books-a-Plenty on one side, Roma Real Estate on the other.

  A prim man about fifty in navy a blue suit and a black woman about thirty in a navy blue skirt-suit stand behind the desk. Beau has put on a light-weight, waterproof TacDry 100% nylon tactical jacket to cover his weapon, opens the jacket to show his badge clipped to his belt.

  “Yes, inspector. I’m the one you spoke with.” The woman is the concierge. She tells him no problem, the room is unoccupied that day.

  Beau introduces his partner and the woman introduces herself as Jennifer Jones as she leads the way to the elevators. “My mother was always worried I’d be confused with the actress but that hasn’t been a problem.” She smiles at Beau, pushes the button for the elevator. “We changed the furniture, carpet, just about everything. But your specialists went over the room carefully before we did that.”

  “As I said. We just want to look at the layout.”

  She lets them into the room but doesn’t go in. “Don’t want to hover over y’all. I’ll be downstairs.”

  Juanita, in a dark green skirt-suit today, follows Beau from the sitting room into the bedroom, the bath to the left, French doors and balcony to the right.

  “What are we looking for again?”

  “As I said. Just getting the lay of the land,” he tells her. He’d seen the pictures but pictures did not show the depth of the room. It looks larger in person. Beau moves around the bed, stands close, looks at the clean covers and remembers the photos of the dead girl, pretzeled in death as she’d twisted and fought the man who strangled her. He was right here, the bastard, right where Beau stands.

  The French doors have a good lock and no pry marks. The crime scene reports already told him that. He opens the doors and steps out on the wide balcony, moves to the rail and looks down. Stairs are at each end of the building and another stairway halfway. She could have let someone in this way.

  The inspectors spend forty-five minutes in the rooms, opening drawers, looking in the empty closet and bathroom cupboard. The vanity in the bedroom looks unused. Beau sees its legs don’t quite match the imprint in the thick carpet.

  Jennifer Jones is behind the front desk downstairs.

  “Have you heard anything new about this?” Beau says. “Anything at all.”

  “We dismissed the night clerk.”

  That was in the report. Beau planned to talk to the night clerk who took tips from working girls and let the johns in, no questions asked.

  “It doesn’t take a genius,” Beau says, “to know Judy Allure wasn’t the only high-priced call girl who used Hotel DeSaix.”

  “We gave you a complete list of occupants for a month before up to the day the body was found.”

  Beau glances at his notes, says, “Donna Marie? Anyone on your staff recall her, beyond the fired night clerk?”

  The concierge shakes her head. Beau leaves his card with her, remembers he needs to get new ones with his new rank and office telephone number.

  “Two leads,” Juanita says as they step out to a sky that’s darkening to their left, over Lake Pontchartrain. “Night clerk and Donna Marie.”

  Beau has a feeling about this Donna Marie, who checked into a room a few hours after Judy Allure, same floor, other side of the hotel, could be a key to this. Same M.O., pretty girl checks in with an overnight bag, has male visitors. No way these gals did not know each other. High priced talent in a quiet, swanky hotel.

  Dark clouds head their way and the air is almost damp now.

  “We gotta check out the surveillance film of the hotel lobby. See what this Donna Marie looks like.” In the case file are four DVDs. “Meantime, let’s eat.”

  “Costa Rican?”

  “Tomorrow maybe.” Beau leads the way back to their SUV. “This close I gotta eat at the Clover Grill.”

  A meter maid of indeterminate age and race, somewhere between twenty and forty with dyed red hair, nearly runs them off the banquette. She pulls out her ticket writer and starts in on cars parked along Toulouse Street.

  Around the corner, Beau spots an NOPD marked unit in the street. A tall cop has his ticket book in hand and is writing a ticket for the meter maid’s Parking Department Kawasaki mule, a jeep-looking motorized contraption. The Kawasaki is parked next to a fire hydrant.

  The cop spots Beau and points to the meter maid’s vehicle. “I fuckin’ hate meter maids!”

  His name is Johnny Miller, worked with Beau in the Second District a few years back.

  “Just a ticket?”

  “Fuck no. I got a tow truck coming.”

  As they step up to their legally parked SUV, fifteen minutes still on the parking meter, Beau tells Juanita, “Ya’ gotta love this city.”

  They have to wait for traffic along the narrow one-way French Quarter street designed for horse and buggies.

  “This grill. Typical New Orleans food?”

  “You’ve never eaten at the Clover? Well you’re about to have the one of best grilled burgers in the city.”

  “What if I don’t want a burger?”

  Beau slips the SUV into traffic, takes the next right to head away from the river.

  “You go to Acme Oyster House, you eat oysters. You go to Mama Rosa’s Spaghetti House, you order spaghetti. You don’t order fried chicken at Papa Gyro’s. You order a gyro. The Clover Grill, you order hamburger – a quarter pound of black Angus beef grilled beneath hub caps.”

  “What?”

  “They buy them new. Weigh down the thick burgers while they’re grilled. You’ll see.”

  She doesn’t look convinced.

  • Police Headquarters, 4:39 p.m.

  Beau leans back and stretches, rubs his eyes. He turns off the iMovie program on the MacBook and drags the DVD icon to the trash and a disk pops out. He puts it into its case. Juanita is just finishing hers across the desks.

  Over sixty-five hours of surveillance video of the lobby of Hotel DeSaix shows Judy Allure enter with her overnight case on wheels, check in and go into the elevator. She checks in using the name Judy Summers. She is Judy Allure on her Louisiana driver’s license. Detective Val Paradis checked out the address on the license. A large apartment complex in Metairie where Judy never lived.

  How do you get a driver’s license without a birth certificate?

  Easy. Beau answers his own question. There’s no picture on a birth certificate. Phonies can be bought. Probably online.

  On the video, two hours after Judy enters, Donna Marie comes in with her own overnight case. A blond with long curled hair, she looks about five-six, maybe even as tall as five-eight. She appears to be top-heavy with long legs.

  Fifty-one men entered the hotel between the time Judy checks into until her body is found. Twenty registered at the desk, eighteen with female companions, looking like standard-issue married couples. The remaining thirty-one go straight to the elevator.

  The hall surveillance camera, closer to Donna Marie’s room than Judy’s, shows a better view of the top of the heads of Donna Marie’s sixteen clients. Beau counts fifteen men go into Judy’s room. No telling how many come up the b
ack steps. Only seven of the men who go into Judy’s room via the hall door, come back out that way. Both women have room service delivered on rolling tables, always left outside their door. On one occasion Judy steps out naked to get her delivery.

  Juanita pops out her DVD.

  When they finish, speed forwarding the empty hall times, they check their notes. Judy’s body was found by the cleaning woman at noon. She rushes out of the room and Donna Marie does not come out through the hall. She left her key on the dresser and went out the back way.

  “How’d you like that Clover burger?”

  “Delicious. I was a little surprised to see we were the only straights in the place. Cooks, customers, even our waitress. Every one was gay. Not that it bothers me in the least. You didn’t seem to notice.”

  “I gave it the notice it deserved. Nothing. Saw how peaceful it was in there?”

  “Peaceful?”

  “Up on the reservation where my Mama’s folks live, where she lives now, there are no places peaceful like that. The Sioux are too fierce to be peaceful, I suppose, or, more likely – have refused to accept we lost the great plains to the damn white man. Gays just wanna be treated like everyone else and that’s the way I treat them.”

  “My brother’s gay.” Juanita leans back, puts her hands behind her head. “He used to get beat up a lot until he grew up too big to be beat up.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me the world’s fucked up. I know that already.”

  “No. I’m just saying I’ve never been in a gay place with a straight guy who didn’t seem to be a little uneasy. Or always looking around.”

  Beau smiles. “I was looking around. That gay waitress was a cute, sexy. With men, I just watch their hands.”

  “Hands?”

  “A gun can only kill you when it’s in someone hand.”

  “You were worried about getting shot?”

  Beau narrows one eye at his partner. “You’re a cop, Juanita. You should be ready to kill every stranger you meet.”

  She gives him a curious look.

  “That’s why I go to the grand jury and they go to a cemetery.”

  • New Orleans Marina, 7:02 p.m.

  Katrina didn’t kill Lorie’s Shrimp House when it ripped apart its lakefront building. Lorie’s just moved into Metairie where Beau picks up a shrimp po-boy on the way home. He can’t wait to bite into a steak fry on the way home and regrets it immediately. The fry is still simmering inside. Way too hot.

  The fries are still hot after he makes it home and digs a root beer from the fridge and lays out the po-boy, a dollop of ketchup on the po-boy’s waxed paper wrapping. Beau forces himself to eat slowly. A hold over from his time as a patrol officer, wolfing down lunches before he had to answer another call.

  That evening Stella decides to hide when Beau comes home and is still hiding as he takes a first bite of po-boy.

  “Stella? Where are you, Baby?”

  A bite later he calls out again. Able to finally eat a fry, he does and feels Stella’s whiskers brush his elbow. He points to her food dish, tells her there’s wet food in it. She chatters, sniffing at the po-boy. He takes out a shrimp, peels off the fried crust, lets her sniff it and tosses it into her food dish.

  He’s just finished eating when his cell rings.

  “So,” Jessie says. “How was your second day as a chief investigator?”

  “Are you going to be the kinda girl that calls all the time?” His voice is teasing.

  “As long as I’m still interested. Yes.”

  “Good. Because I was about to call you.”

  “To ask me what?”

  “To ask what you’re wearing, little girl.”

  “Actually I’m in bra and panties. Cooling down from a day of surveillance in the sun before I take a shower.”

  Beau digs an Abita beer from the fridge, twists off the cap and takes it and the cell to the sofa. He’s down to his boxers but doesn’t mention it. Yet. Thankfully, the AC aboard Sad Lisa doesn’t have a lot to cool off and its getting chilly inside already.

  “So what have you been up to?” She says.

  “Can’t really talk about it, yet. I’d rather talk about you.”

  “I can’t talk about my cases either.” She gives Beau the raspberry over the phone.

  He takes a hit of bracingly cold beer. “Maybe we should get down to the real nitty gritty.”

  “What?”

  “Where were you raised what school you went to. You know, deep background.”

  “You wanna know all that before we even kiss.”

  “Why not?”

  “What if we don’t, you know. Gel?”

  “I know how to delete you from my hard drive.”

  She laughs. “Touché. I’ll start, but it’ll be more interesting about where you came from.”

  Yeah. Right.

  Thursday

  • Gentilly Boulevard, 10:25 a.m.

  They wake up former night clerk Donald Taylor, who lives in an upstairs apartment of a brown brick, double house on Gentilly Boulevard, one of the houses raised a few feet after Katrina. He’s in black shorts and a white wife-beater undershirt tightly stretched over his beer belly.

  “Y’all might as well come in. I’m up ain’t I?”

  He leads them to a kitchen that’s cleaner than Beau’s and starts up a pot of coffee. He offers some, but the inspectors decline as they all sit at a green Formica table, bright sunlight streaming through the high windows. The strong scent of coffee overpowers the faint scent of whatever the man cooked the night before. Something with onions.

  Juanita wears a pink polo shirt with a khaki colored skirt. Beau’s in a charcoal gray short-sleeved button shirt and dark green RipStop tactical pants. One their way to Gentilly she’d told Beau she can’t wait for her tactical skirts to get a skirt with loops wide enough for a canvas gunbelt.

  “So.” Taylor covers his mouth as he yawns. “Y’all haven’t given up on the case.”

  “Nope,” Juanita answers.

  “I gave y’all everything I knew.”

  Juanita nods. “We read your statements. Lot of information about the victim, how you never saw her before.”

  It takes Taylor a moment to realize it’s Juanita’s interview.

  He tells her, “There are always different girls. No idea where they come from. They just show up. No reservation, just a 72-hour stay.”

  Juanita takes out his ball point and notepad. “How often?”

  “About every three months a gal would check in. Sometimes two gals. But never together.” Taylor gets up, pours himself a mug of coffee.

  Beau, whose taking his own notes, thinks – different girls every three months has to be a sophisticated operation.

  Taylor comes back with coffee and a pair of glasses, sits, puts on the glasses. Huge frames. Elton John glasses. Taylor smiles. “Used to be my wife’s. She died five years ago.” He taps the glasses. “Work better than my glasses.”

  “Look nice,” Beau says with such a stoic look on his face, Taylor and Juanita can’t tell if he’s kidding. He doesn’t want to go over questions asked three times previously, so he’s glad Juanita gets to the point.

  “We’re interested in the other girl,” Juanita tells the old man. “Donna Marie. Checked into a room a few hours after Judy Allure, same floor, other side of the hotel.”

  Taylor nods as he sips his coffee. “Long blond hair. Well developed figure. Very pretty face. Looks a little like a movie star, I can’t remember the name. Hell, they all looked like movie stars.” Taylor leans back in his chair. “These are high class sporting gals.” He looks at Juanita. “Used to call them that back in the old days.”

  “You working anywhere now?”

  “I’m known as a top night man. Got a new job but y’all tell them why I left the DeSaix and I’m have to go on welfare.”

  Juanita raises a hand. “You’re at the Monteleone. We checked around. We don’t tell people anything.”

  The questions co
me quickly from Juanita –

  “Have you seen Donna Marie since the murder?”

  “No.”

  “Any of these girls go to the Monteleone?”

  “No. The DeSaix is small enough for no one to notice. The Monteleone – too many managers.”

  “You got a good look at Donna Marie. I’m sure you can identify her if I bring some pictures around for you to view.”

  “Here. Not the Monteleone.”

  Juanita has a few more questions, making sure they didn’t forget to ask about the clients. None of them said a word to Taylor. They just walked in off the street straight for the rooms, walked in as the two women did, right off Toulouse Street.

  Juanita closed her notebook, glances at Beau who has one question. “The DeSaix’s out of the mix now. Where do you think they’re operating now?”

  Taylor shakes his head. “It would have to be a small hotel, a clean place in the Quarter or uptown maybe. A bed-and-breakfast?” He stands, leads them out.

  Beau gives him a card, which reminds him he needs those new cards.

  Juanita has a parting word. “As I said, we won’t tell anyone at the Monteleone, but you ever see Donna Marie again, you better call me.”

  They step back to their SUV and Juanita says, “What now?”

  “This is the 21st Century. After checking the usual sources, electricity, gas, phone, property records, credit reports, we go online. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other web sites. New Orleans Whores.com.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  They climb in and ease into the street. Juanita says, “Then what do we do?”

  Beau likes this about her. She keeps thinking.

  “Organized Crime. This operation is sophisticated. Our local franchise of the Mafia is either involved or knows about this.”

  “Franchise?” She laughs.

  “They call it a family, a dysfunctional, degenerate, murderous scum-sucking family. The Godfather was fiction.”

  “We have any sources that knows them? Intelligence Division? Vice Squad?”

  Beau taps down his Ray Bans and gleeks her. “Not really. But there is a man who may be able to help us with this.”