by Herren, Greg
It didn’t feel lived in anymore.
A staircase led up to the camelback, which had been converted into one massive bedroom suite. Nothing seemed to be missing from the walk-in closet, or from the chests, but Jonny couldn’t swear to it. Her luggage set, though, was still resting on the closet floor. The bed was made, and everything in the big bathroom seemed to be in place. A large pink towel was draped over the shower rod. I felt it—it was stiff. The bathroom smelled slightly of bleach.
I went back down the stairs into the kitchen, Jonny at my heels. I walked out the back door into the backyard in time to see a black-and-white cat vanish over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. The backyard was just like the front—neat and tidy. A massive live oak in the back corner cast shade over most of it. There was a brick barbecue pit close to the house and a wooden picnic table in the shade. A wooden slat fence about six feet high closed it in on three sides. I walked down the back steps and could imagine Mona’s family gathered, grandchildren laughing and playing while white smoke rose from the barbecue pit, hamburgers and hot dogs sizzling over the coals.
“Hey, Jonny!”
The voice was female and came from the house on the right. I looked up and saw a rather pretty young woman in a white bikini and sunglasses, her skin glistening with suntan lotion, waving from the sagging back balcony of the huge house. An enormous floppy hat shaded her face.
“Oh, hey, Lois, how are you?” Jonny shaded his eyes.
“You mind if I come over? I want to ask you about something.”
“Sure.”
“Give me a second.” She pulled on a robe and slipped her feet into some flip-flops before disappearing inside her house through a pair of French doors. A few minutes later, I heard a door open and slam on the other side of the fence.
“Lois Armstrong,” Jonny said to me in a low voice before crossing the yard and unlocking the back gate. “She’s been living next door to Ma for about three years now. She’s really nice.”
I sat down at the picnic table as Lois Armstrong came through the back gate. She pulled the big floppy hat off and shook her thick curly hair loose. The blue terry-cloth robe she had on wouldn’t stay closed, and she kept trying to retie it as she made her way over to the picnic table. Jonny shut the gate behind her and joined us at the table.
“Lois Armstrong,” she said to me, sticking out her small hand. Her nails were neat and trimmed, with just clear polish. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she didn’t need any. She had long eyelashes fluttering over enormous green eyes. Her lips were full and red, her skin olive, and her teeth were even and white. She was older than I’d originally thought, maybe in her mid-thirties rather than mid-twenties.
“Chanse MacLeod.” I took her warm hand and shook it. Hers was so small it seemed to be swallowed up in mine.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.” She fussed with the robe some more before sitting down. “Jonny, I’m worried about your mom. I haven’t seen her for a few days, and that’s just not normal. Have you talked to her? Is she mad at me about something?”
“I haven’t talked to Ma since Thursday.” Jonny gave me a significant look. See? “That’s why Mr. MacLeod’s here, Lois. I’ve hired him to look for Ma, find out where she is.”
“Oh.” She flashed a smile at me before turning back to Jonny. She swallowed. “So, it’s serious.” She folded her hands together on the picnic table. “I thought I might have done something—you know, made her mad and she was avoiding me or something.”
“So it’s not normal for you to not see Mrs. O’Neill for a few days, Ms. Armstrong?” I asked. “Is there another reason you might be concerned about her?”
She looked at me, tilting her head to one side and narrowing her eyes a little. “Like I said, I haven’t seen her in three days, and she never goes away without telling me.” Her eyebrows went up and she turned to me. “We feed this stray black-and-white cat that hangs around in our yards. If she’s not going to be around, she makes sure I know, so I know to feed him. And every afternoon when I get home from work I always come by for a glass of wine—around four thirty. Mona is wonderful to talk to, you know—it’s a way I can unwind after dealing with the kids all day—it’s nice to have an adult that’s not another teacher to talk to, you know? And every Saturday morning when she gets home from her vigil at the church, she comes over and we have coffee.” She gave a little shrug. “If she’s not going to be home, she calls me and lets me know. Friday she wasn’t here—and neither was her car, and she didn’t call me. She didn’t come by yesterday morning for coffee, and I haven’t seen her car at all.” She turned back to Jonny. “I was going to call you today, but I knew you had a fight last night…” Her voice trailed off as she focused her big eyes on me again. “So, you think something’s happened to her?” Her hand went to her throat gracefully, like she’d practiced the gesture.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, ma’am,” I replied. “Do you know if Mrs. O’Neill was seeing anyone?”
“I already told you she wasn’t,” Jonny said, his tone low and angry. His hands clenched into fists, and veins bulged in his forearms. “Heather was talking out her ass, I told you.”
Lois placed a hand on his wrist. “Jonny, your mother is seeing someone. She just didn’t told you—well, because you don’t always take it well.” She gave him a faint smile. “She’s worried you wouldn’t like it.”
Your ma ain’t so pure, I heard Heather’s nasal voice echo in my head. “Who was he, Ms. Armstrong?”
“Call me Lois, please.” She ran her hands through her thick curls. Her ringlets sprang back as soon as her hands passed through. She shook her head. “I only met him once, but she talks about him all the time.” Jonny made a noise, and she put her hand back on his arm. “Jonny, your mother has been a widow for a long time. Don’t you think she has a right to be happy?” When he didn’t answer, she turned back to me with a gentle smile, as though saying boys don’t like to think their mothers have needs, do they? “His name is Barney Hogan…”
“Mr. Hogan?” The words burst out of Jonny in an explosion, and his face darkened.
“You know him?” I asked.
Jonny scowled. “Yeah, he’s been around as long as I remember. He was a friend of my dad’s.” He rubbed his eyes. “He’s been married a few times, but his last wife died a few years back, and he owns a bar down on Tchoupitoulas Street. He goes to St. Anselm’s, too, and I know he was involved in the Save Our Churches thing.”
“They often keep vigil together. I thought it was, you know, sweet.” She sighed. “They mostly just hold hands and talk, is what Mona told me. I think they’re both more lonely than anything else, you know?”
“So, you don’t think she could be staying with him?”
“No, that’s not like Mona, not at all. Mona would never just go off and stay over somewhere and not let any of us know. She isn’t like that at all. Besides, I stopped by the bar last night, just to see if Barney’d heard from her—he said he hadn’t.”
“And you think he was telling the truth? She’s not staying with him?”
“I can’t imagine why he’d lie. Besides, like I said, Mona’d never do that without telling someone—if not me, than she certainly would have told Jonny. She isn’t impulsive—she’s very responsible.” She shook her head, the ringlets flying. “I’ve called her cell a few times and it goes straight to voicemail. And she’d definitely not want Jonny to worry—especially with Heather so close to her time, you know.” Her lips tightened into a narrow line. “She’s really excited about the baby.”
“Can you tell me the name of Barney’s bar?”
Her eyes rolled up as she thought about it for a moment. “The Wharf, I think. I don’t know—it’s something like that. It’s down there on Tchoupitoulas, near the Rouse’s and Tipitina’s at Napoleon. You can’t really miss it, you know.” She raised her shoulders again in a little shrug. “I’m not really a bar person, that’s the only time I’ve been down there…bars
aren’t really my scene. But they aren’t Mona’s, either. She only goes in there to see Barney.”
I made a note of the bar’s name and location. “I’ll check it out.”
Lois gave me a sad smile. “There was something bothering her last week—she seemed really worried about something, but I don’t know what it was…I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.” She sighed. “I suppose I should have pushed her to confide in me, but I figured it wasn’t really my place…I didn’t know, you know—” She shook her head. “You just never know when something’s going to turn out to be important later, you know? You just never know…”
Chapter Three
“I wish,” Police Detective Venus Casanova said, sitting down across the table from me, “that I could arrest people for being assholes.”
I smothered a grin as she scowled at a young woman in her early twenties who was still messing around at the condiment bar. Completely oblivious to the dirty looks she was getting from one of New Orleans’ finest, she kept yakking loudly on her cell phone while adding more things to her coffee. She’d already added both vanilla and cinnamon flavoring powder. Still talking loudly and gesticulating with one hand, she added cream and a packet of sweetener and started stirring it all with a spoon, completely disregarding the sign requesting patrons use the wooden stir sticks provided rather than the silverware. Finally finished turning her coffee into some bizarre hybrid of clashing flavors, she carried the cup past us to a table at the opposite side of the coffee shop, the phone still apparently surgically attached to the side of her face.
“If we could do that, we’d never have time to investigate serious crime,” said her partner, Blaine Tujague, with a slight laugh. He winked at me. “There’re just too many assholes around these days.”
I’d asked them to meet me at Mojo’s, my favorite coffee shop. It sat on the corner of Magazine and Race streets, a mere couple of blocks from my apartment. The place was empty, other than the young woman who’d annoyed Venus, and a group of gutter-punk-looking kids in their early twenties. Wearing filthy clothes, their faces covered with tattoos and piercings, they were clustered around a table a few yards away from us. Every so often they would burst into raucous laughter. The young woman with multicolored hair working behind the counter was now reading Gambit Weekly, the city’s local alternative newspaper.
Blaine and I had been rookie cops together on the NOPD before I got tired of the politics and the rest of the bullshit that went along with being a cop and quit to start my own investigation agency. Venus and I had butted heads a few times over the years—she didn’t appreciate a private eye sticking his nose into her investigations. She’d even threatened to arrest me once. Once Blaine became her partner, we started getting along better, moving from dislike to grudging respect and finally, after the levee failure, to friends.
Venus was a tall woman, an inch or so over six feet without shoes—and she always wore heels to add a few more inches to her impressive height. She was lean and muscular, with long legs—she’d put herself through college on a basketball scholarship and had kept herself in shape with regular workouts at the gym in the years since she’d gotten her degree. Her skin was smooth and she kept her hair cropped close to her scalp. I had no idea how old she was—I knew she had two married daughters in their twenties, so she had to be at the very least in her mid-forties, but she was one of those women who simply seemed ageless. She’d been divorced for years—her husband was long gone by the time I joined the force. A lot of the men on the force thought she was a lesbian—I’d wondered myself—but that was just typical straight male misogynist bullshit.
She was also one of the best cops on the force. In the weeks after the flood, Venus had thought about taking an early retirement and moving up to Memphis near her daughters. Her home in New Orleans East was completely destroyed, and the entire New Orleans Police Department had taken a beating in the national press. She’d eventually decided to stay and work, to help rebuild not only the city but the department as well—which was a good thing. New Orleans couldn’t afford to lose someone like Venus. She’d lived in the carriage house behind Blaine and his partner’s house for a couple of years before finally buying her own home in Uptown New Orleans, on General Pershing Street. She kept saying she was going to have everyone in our little group of friends over for dinner, but it hadn’t happened yet. She kept saying she was waiting until she had the house fixed up just the way she wanted it.
I knew better than to press the subject.
Blaine was my age, give or take a year or so, and the youngest son of a prominent old New Orleans society family. He was about five-nine, and obviously spent a lot of time in the gym. He liked to wear his shirts tight with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. When he was off duty, he favored tight sleeveless T-shirts (when he bothered to wear one) and loose-fitting pleated madras shorts. He had beautiful dark blue eyes, olive skin that tanned easily, and curly black hair with a bluish sheen to it. He shaved every morning, but by midafternoon he always had a blue-black shadow on his cheeks and chin and under his nose. He used to like to go out dancing in the Quarter gay bars every weekend, but over the last few years had tapered that off quite a bit. He had a wicked sense of humor, was a merciless tease, and never seemed to let anything bother him for long. He lived on the opposite side of Coliseum Square from me with his partner, Todd Laborde, in a gorgeous mansion they’d renovated. Todd was about fifteen years older than Blaine and owned a number of successful businesses around the city. They’d been together since Blaine was in his early twenties, and they had an open relationship. Blaine and I had been fuck buddies for a short period of time. That was ancient history, though—now we were just close friends.
“I don’t know why people can’t just drink regular coffee anymore.” Venus shook her head, apparently not finished with her tirade. Her big gold hoop earrings started swinging. “I mean, seriously. Why does everyone have to have some kind of goddamned thing no one ever heard of ten years ago? What the fuck is a goddamned triple mocha skinny latte with a shot of this or that or whatever? Who even thought about putting that shit in their coffee in the first place? When you’re done putting all that crap into it, it doesn’t even taste like coffee anymore.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Coffee is fucking coffee, for God’s sake.”
I glanced down at my iced mocha and tried not to let her see me smile. “Next you’ll be yelling at kids to get off your lawn.”
“Yeah, well, if you had your own lawn you wouldn’t want kids running all over it and tearing it up, either.” Venus threw her head back and barked out a loud laugh. “And you’re not getting any younger yourself, there, buddy.” Venus trained her big round brown eyes on me, a smile playing at the corner of her lips. “And it’s generally not a good idea to be rude and insulting to someone you need help from.” She nudged Blaine with her elbow. “Right, partner?”
It wasn’t strictly kosher, but sometimes Venus and Blaine would slip me some information I shouldn’t have access to, or would do some checking for me—as long as it was never traced back to them. Cops have a lot more access to information than private eyes—and private eyes have access to a lot more information than your average Joe Citizen. In return, I’ve been known to help them out with some of their cases from time to time—whenever they needed something done that might not necessarily hold up in a court of law.
It’s a nice little arrangement that some of their higher-ups might not look kindly upon, but it worked for us.
“Yeah, well, be that as it may, you know as well as I do if Chanse doesn’t find this woman, she’ll never be found. You know who caught the case, Chanse?” Blaine took a sip from his coffee and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Delvecchio.”
My heart sank. “Fuck.”
There really wasn’t much else to say. If Venus was one of the better cops on the NOPD, Albert Delvecchio was the epitome of why the department had such a bad reputation. Lazy, racist, homophobic, and sexist, he’d been assi
gned to Missing Persons primarily because it was a place where he could do the least amount of damage. The general consensus around the department was Delvecchio had something on someone—it was the only explanation anyone could come up with for why he hadn’t been fired with extreme prejudice years ago. His virulent homophobia meant Blaine would get nowhere with him—the racism and sexism ruled Venus out as a confidant. Delvecchio hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since high school—if he had then. He was balding but tried masking it by combing his graying hair over the baldness. He had an ever-expanding beer belly and the disposition of a warthog—an angry warthog, at that. He was a lousy cop—the kind who talked smack about the higher-ups when they weren’t around but would shove his head as far up their asses as possible when they were. He was insulting and crude to his fellow officers, and I’d come close to slugging him any number of times during my brief tenure in uniform. I still regretted not loosening a few of his teeth for him. He was also a lazy son of a bitch who always tried to pass his work off to anyone available, and wasn’t especially smart either.
If it were left solely up to him, Mona O’Neill would never be found.
“Well, in that case I’m not going to owe either one of you a favor,” I observed, taking a drink of my iced mocha. “Because if it’s Delvecchio’s case, he maybe did a half-assed interview with Jonny and didn’t bother with anyone else—so undoubtedly I know a hell of a lot more than he does.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t argue that point with you. But he did put out the APB, at least—I checked on that.” Venus blew on her coffee before taking a drink. “But you’re right, that’s about all he did. He’s probably forgotten all about her already.”