Baton Rouge Bingo

by Greg Herren

  “Sorry.” He stepped back from me, a sheepish look on his face. “That really is some good pot. I feel pretty stoned.”

  “Have a seat and let me get you something to drink,” I said. “What would you like?”

  “Water’s fine.” He sat down on the couch. “This is a really nice place.”

  “Thanks,” I said, going into the kitchen as the back door opened and Frank came into the apartment.

  “Where’s Taylor?” he asked.

  “In the living room, he’s a little stoned,” I called as I got a glass down from the cabinet and added ice to it.

  “What?” Frank stormed into the living room, his face red and his jaw clenched.

  “I’ve smoked pot before,” Taylor replied, his hands going onto his hips, his jaw clenching just like Frank’s. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Frank’s face relaxed a little bit, and finally he laughed. “I suppose there’s no way around it,” he said, sitting down on the couch next to his nephew and putting his arm around him. “The Bradleys are all pot smokers, so it’s going to be around. When did you start smoking?”

  “In high school.”

  I filled up the glass with water out of the gallon jug in the refrigerator and carried it into the living room just as my cell phone started ringing. I excused myself and went out onto the balcony. It was Mom.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “What’s up? How are you feeling?”

  Her voice sounded shaky. “Have you talked to your father today, by any chance?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I think you and Frank need to come over here. Pronto.”

  Chapter Six

  Nine of Pentacles, Reversed

  Possible loss, danger from thieves

  Anyone who thinks New Orleans tourism hasn’t recovered from Katrina is someone who clearly has not set foot in the Quarter in a while.

  One of the weird aftereffects of the disaster that I’ve noticed involves my memory—everyone I know has the same problem. It probably has to do with PTSD—there was an article about it in the paper back when the Times-Picayune was still a daily newspaper. Some memories of my life before Katrina are sketchy and not very clear. I swear I have no memory of the Quarter being as crowded back then as it often is now, but I wouldn’t be able to swear to it. It’s entirely possible I’m wrong, of course. It’s very likely that I view life before through the rosy glasses of nostalgia—everything was better before. For example, I don’t remember there ever being lines at Café du Monde stretching almost all the way to Jax Brewery. I don’t remember Decatur Street’s sidewalks being so packed with slow-moving window-shopping tourists that I had to detour out and walk in the street.

  Despite my sketchy memory, I am certain the Quarter was always deserted during the heat of summer.

  Maybe as I’ve gotten older my tolerance for crowds has decreased.

  When I walked out through the front gate, Decatur Street was swarming with people. Café Envie at the corner had a line out the door, and all of its tables—both inside and out—were occupied. As far as the eye could see, the sidewalk was packed full of people, and the air had gotten hotter and thicker while I was inside. People heading into the Quarter swarmed past me, and I could hear music playing on the neutral ground on Esplanade Avenue. I took a deep breath and dove into the crowd, wondering if this was how a salmon felt on its way upstream to spawn. By the time I got to the corner I was already sick to death of ducking around people walking at a snail’s pace.

  So when I reached the corner, I turned and headed up Barracks to avoid it all. It was the right decision—Barracks was practically abandoned, and I walked up to Royal.

  Frank had stayed behind to help Taylor get settled. That surprised me a little at first, but then I realized he wanted some private time with Taylor to get to know him a little better. It made sense—Frank hadn’t seen him since he was a little boy, and they were practically strangers to each other. I couldn’t imagine that—as awful as some of my close relatives were, we were still family. Both of my grandfathers had refused to release my trusts to me when I turned twenty-five, but that was more about me dropping out of college than the gay thing.

  Taylor seemed like a sweet kid, and I was glad we were able to give him a home while his parents sorted things out. It was probably too much to hope they’d see the light by the end of the summer, buy PROUD OF MY GAY SON T-shirts, and march with PFLAG in Pride parades—but stranger things have happened. I hoped they’d at least come to realize that Taylor was still their son, no matter who he was attracted to, and they’d want to be a part of his life.

  I thanked the Goddess again that I have such amazing parents.

  *

  Mom and Dad’s place is on the corner of Royal and Dumaine, on the second floor of a corner building. Mom had inherited the place from her maternal grandmother, who was apparently quite a pistol. On the first floor was their tobacco shop, the Devil’s Weed. The store specialized in cigars, pipe tobacco, and all the assorted paraphernalia that goes with it, and also does a bang-up mail order business through their website. (Of course they also sell bongs—which they legally have to call “water pipes.”) Before Katrina, they’d also sold specialty coffee, bagels, and muffins—but there was so much competition now they’d discontinued it.

  Like I said, the Quarter is booming.

  They’d opened their shop when they were first married, converting the upper floor to a spacious apartment where they raised Storm, Rain, and me. I’d lived there until I was about twenty-two, when I moved into my current apartment. There’s a staircase from the storage room that leads upstairs, but the main way up is hidden behind a wooden door right behind the building. Behind the door and the razor wire above it is a wrought iron staircase leading up to the second floor. At the top is a door that opens into the kitchen. There’s also a balcony that runs around the two street sides of the building, but the only access to it is French doors in the living room.

  I put my key in the lock and took the stairs two at a time. I hadn’t liked the way Mom sounded on the phone. She hadn’t sounded like herself, and that probably had something to do with my lack of patience for the gawking tourists I’d had to dodge on my way over. I was also drenched in sweat, and my socks were soaked through. When I reached the top of the stairs, I inhaled sharply. The back door was open, and I could feel cold air escaping. This was unusual—Mom and Dad rarely, if ever, left the back door unlocked, let alone open.

  “Mom?” I called, stepping inside and pulling the door closed behind me. The kitchen was dark—all the lights were off and the shutters were closed. I switched on the overhead lights and walked through the kitchen. “Mom? You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m in the living room,” was her response.

  I crossed the kitchen and walked through the doorway into the darkened living room. The shutters in here were also closed. The only light was from a table lamp Mom had turned on. I could see in the light she was wearing a ratty old pair of black Saints sweatpants and a Drew Brees jersey. She was sitting at the end of the couch, holding a joint in one hand while she examined a piece of paper she was holding in the other hand.

  She took another hit and offered it to me. When I waved it off, she pinched it out and carefully placed it in a Mason jar about half-filled with roaches. She resealed the jar and placed it back on the coffee table. She waved me over and exhaled, filling the room with pungent smoke. She coughed and took a drink of water, passing me the piece of paper. I sat down in an easy chair and stared at it.

  We have your husband. Notify the police and we’ll kill him. Further instructions to follow.

  I stared at Mom. “What the hell is this, some kind of sick joke?” I could feel all of my nerve endings coming alert, and I swallowed as panic rose up inside me. Stay calm, stay calm, I reminded myself. Panicking won’t make anything better or solve anything.

  “That’s what I came home to.” She rubbed her eyes and took another drink of water. “It was thumbtacked to the back doo
r, Scotty.” She shook her head. “Of course I looked everywhere, and there’s no sign of him. Emily hasn’t seen him since last night.”

  Emily Hunter was a lesbian in her late twenties who managed the Devil’s Weed for Mom and Dad. She’d come down for Mardi Gras after grad school and just stayed. She shaved her head and had an amazing singing voice—the main reason she hadn’t become an international superstar was because she just didn’t care about things like that. She’d become a member of the family during the eight years or so she’d been working for Mom and Dad.

  “I don’t get it.” I stared at the ransom note in my hands. “Why would someone kidnap Dad? Is there something going on around here I don’t know about?”

  She bit her lower lip. “No.” Her eyes were watery and bloodshot, and her voice shook a little. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t understand.” I took a deep breath to calm myself and control the panic trying to take over my mind. You can’t panic, you have to stay calm, panicking is the worst thing you can do. “Is anything else missing?”

  She shook her head. “Believe me, I’ve gone through the whole place. Everything’s exactly the way it was when I left for Baton Rouge.”

  “But how did they get in here?” I got up and walked over to one of the windows. I turned the bolt and pushed it up. I unlatched the shutters and swung them open, flooding the room with light. “Dad had to have let them in, right?”

  Mom and Dad had always been big on security—hence the razor wire over the door to the back steps. The door at the foot of the indoor staircase, which opened into the storage room of the Devil’s Weed, was always locked and dead-bolted. Only once had someone broken into Mom and Dad’s—and they had been thoroughly trained agents who’d gone over the roofs.

  But how could they have gotten Dad out without anyone on the street noticing?

  “Scotty, it doesn’t make any sense.” She shook her head, the long braid swinging. “Believe me, I’ve tried to figure this out. I can’t think of anything.”

  “You and Dad haven’t gotten into anything weird with the drugs, have you?”

  My parents had always been stoners. Some of my earliest memories were of Mom and Dad smoking joints in the living room with their friends. They always had an enormous supply they kept locked in a private closet, which they were more than happy to share with everyone they knew. They’ve always believed that marijuana should be legal and the laws prohibiting it were ridiculous. Mom and Dad never restricted any of their kids from using it, but were always very clear about the laws and penalties so we could make an informed choice. Storm and Rain don’t smoke that much anymore, but I generally smoke a little every day. It took a while for Frank—those years with the FBI—to get comfortable enough to indulge, but eventually he came around. Mom and Dad usually buy it by the pound and always get the really good stuff. I get mine from them—but I don’t go through it as quickly as they do. They hope it will someday be approved for medicinal purposes in Louisiana, and the Devil’s Weed can become a dispensary.

  Of course, the odds of deeply conservative Louisiana legalizing medicinal marijuana any time soon were around the same as hitting the Powerball.

  “Of course not.” She waved her hand. “We use the same source we always have, and you know we don’t deal—that’s just asking for trouble. You know the house rules—anyone who wants some can have it.”

  “You think they want a ransom?”

  “What else could they want?” She bit her lower lip again, and I could see she was close to tears. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She put her head down on mine.

  It was possible, I reflected. Dad and Mom were sitting on a pile of cash—they had inherited trusts, like all of their kids and my cousins and everyone in the family on both sides—but why kidnap Dad for ransom? And while the Diderots and the Bradleys both had money, there were far richer people in New Orleans. “We must have something they want, Mom.”

  “But what?” Mom shook her head again. “What could we possibly have anyone would want?”

  “Maybe…” I hesitated. “Maybe this has something to do with Veronica’s murder.”

  “Veronica?” She goggled at me. “But…” She paused. She opened the coffee table drawer and pulled out a baggie of weed. She rolled another joint. “It’s possible, I suppose.” She put the joint into her mouth and lit the end, taking a deep inhale.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” My mind was leaping from thought to thought. I shouldn’t have smoked the joint with Millie; I wasn’t sure if what I was thinking made any kind of logical sense or if it was what Frank always called stoner thinking—that sense of wonder that’s a by-product of smoking pot. “Well, you’re a lifelong friend of hers, and yesterday we stumbled on her body. And now Dad’s been kidnapped with some kind of weird ransom note left behind. You think that’s a coincidence?”

  `”I don’t know what to think, to be honest,” she replied, taking another drag on the joint. “None of this makes any sense to me. None at all. I thought Veronica’s murder had something to do with stealing the tiger.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought.” My mind kept racing. “But there has to be some kind of connection, Mom.” The reality of it hit me. “You don’t think they’ll hurt Dad, do you?” I felt a sob rise in my throat that I quickly choked back down.

  “I refuse to even entertain that idea.” Mom said, her voice trembling a little bit. “If they harm him in any way—”

  The phone started ringing.

  We stared at each other for a moment before Mom grabbed it. “Hello? Yes, this is she…I’m listening…no, I want to hear his voice, do you understand me? Hello? Hello?” She put the phone back down. She stared at me for a moment before saying, “I don’t know what to do.” Her hand went to her throat as her face drained of color. “It didn’t seem—it didn’t seem real before.” She swallowed. “Like it was some kind of joke, you know, like he was playing a trick on me and was going to laugh about it, you know?” A tear slipped out of her left eye. “But someone’s really taken your father!” She started sobbing.

  Stay strong, Scotty, I told myself. “What did they say?” All of my life Mom had been a rock of strength for everyone who knew her. Sure, she had a bit of a temper and always spoke her mind no matter the consequences, and she was passionate about her beliefs. But one thing anyone who knew her could always be sure of was that Mom would always have your back, and she was a tough cookie. I’d never seen her like this before, and it was kind of scary.

  “They have him,” she repeated. “But I don’t understand what they want, Scotty. They don’t want money.” Her voice sounded empty and hollow, and her body was trembling a little. “We’re not supposed to call the police, obviously, but for some reason they seem to think I know something about the weirdest thing.” She shook her head. “They said, we know you know where the deduct box is. That’s what we want. If you don’t give it to us within seventy-two hours, you’ll never see your husband again.”

  “Deduct box?” I stared at her, confused. “What the hell is a deduct box?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, Scotty.” She pushed herself up to her feet, swaying a little. “I—I think maybe I need to go lie down for a bit.” She paused when she reached the hallway, and looked back at me. “Scotty, do you think—do you think you could read the cards for me?”

  It was the first time Mom had ever asked me. “Yes, of course, Mom, when I get home I’ll do a reading.”

  She gave me a weak smile. “Thanks, baby.” She turned and walked down the hallway. I watched her go into her bedroom. The door shut behind her.

  Deduct box? Where have I heard of that before?

  Then it came to me—I’d heard about it in my Louisiana History class at Jesuit High School. It had something to do with Huey Long.

  I went back into the kitchen. In the corner opposite the back door was the little desk where Mom kept her laptop computer and paid the bills. She never lo
gged out of the computer—Storm lectured her fairly regularly about that. I sat down and touched the mouse pad. The screen sprang to life. I opened an Internet search engine on her web browser and typed “deduct box” into the blank space.

  A series of links came up, and I stared at the list in surprise. Most of them were newspaper or magazine archives, and all of them were links to articles on Huey Long.

  That triggered a bit of memory, but it eluded me as I clicked on the top one, which was from a recent issue of Crescent City magazine.

  The article popped up, with a picture I recognized as Huey Long. It was written by someone named Paige Tourneur, whose name was vaguely familiar. I scanned the opening paragraphs, which seemed to contradict what I’d learned about Huey Long.

  Huey P. Long has a long-enduring reputation for being a corrupt demagogue, for running Louisiana as a dictator and treating the state as his own personal fiefdom. Yet this is very simplistic, and as with anything to do with political history, skips over a lot of nuance. The truth about Huey Long is a lot more complex than the histories written and/or influenced by his enemies. As Barney Fleming, professor of history at Tulane University and an expert on Huey Long’s career, said, “Think of it this way: imagine that the only histories and biographies of George Washington available to us in modern times were ones that had been written by British historians. Our modern perception of Washington would be considerably different, wouldn’t it? Almost everything we know about Huey Long today has come from the newspapers of the time—and they were conservative papers, and they were violently opposed to what they called Longism. The conservatives called him every name in the book, and after he was assassinated, they continued to blacken his name.”

  One cannot simply look at the negatives when it comes to the most colorful and famous politician to ever come out of Louisiana. Governor Long accomplished a lot during his short political career; one has to wonder had he never existed how backward Louisiana would be! He took LSU from a sleepy, backward and underfunded little military college into a major university of national repute. He was absolutely dedicated to educating the population; few American politicians have done so much for education. He provided all schoolchildren in Louisiana with free textbooks, made sure all children, black or white, had bus transportation to school, improved curricula, and raised standards for teachers. He worked tirelessly to abolish the poll tax, which was keeping the poor and blacks disenfranchised. He paved most of the roads, built bridges, brought natural gas to New Orleans, created the Homestead Exemption, expanded the Charity Hospital system, created the LSU School of Medicine, and a lot more—far more than any other three governors combined. Yet these accomplishments are frequently ignored or overlooked; all that is remembered of this remarkable leader are the labels of demagogue and dictator…but clearly, “demagogue” is inaccurate.