Murder in the Rue St. Ann

by Greg Herren

  I gave her a warm smile and showed her my badge. “I’m trying to track down some faxes that were sent from this office.”

  “Oh..” She walked to the back and returned with a black three ring binder. She set it down on the counter in front of me. “We track our faxes— the number they are being sent to and who sent them.”

  I looked at the binder. “May I?” I asked.

  “Knock yourself out.” She said as she walked around from behind the counter. “I’m gonna step out and have a quick smoke.”

  The door shut behind her. I opened the notebook and scanned the first page of a simple ledger recording the time, the fax number, and the name of the sender. I flipped to the back and started to work my way forward, looking for familiar names. And on July 27th, there it was: Mark Williams, and Ruth’s number. I turned the page. Two more the next day, and so on and so on. I walked over to the copy machine and started copying the pages. The clerk was still out on the sidewalk. I didn’t think it was necessary to copy every page, but a few would suffice to prove my point.

  When she opened the door and came back in, the notebook was back on the counter and I was picking through the postcard rack. “Find what you needed?” she asked as she went around behind the counter again.

  “Yeah. How much are copies?”

  “Five cents each.”

  I pulled out a quarter and placed it on the counter. “I made five.”

  “Cool.” She rang it up and put the quarter in the drawer. “You want the receipt?”

  I shook my head no, walked out, and looked down the street for a cab. It didn’t take long— maybe five minutes— and I was on my way home. My cab driver wasn’t one of the talkative ones, fortunately. I just stared out the window and tried to figure out what Williams’s game was. He was losing money on the shows at Domino’s. How much was she paying him? It seemed like all of this was an incredibly complicated way to go about drumming up business—and an expensive one. I paid the cabbie when we arrived at my place, went into my apartment and turned on my computer.

  The Internet had changed the private eye business significantly. I used to have to manually do research—filling out forms and paying fees to get information. Now, all I had to do was go to some websites designed specifically for private eyes to get that information within seconds. The easiest way to start was with the Social Security number, but I didn’t have Williams’s. So I logged into a business license website and plugged in ‘attitude pr.’ Just as Ruth had said, it was listed with the state as a sole proprietorship under Zane Rathburn. I then checked their payroll tax logs. Interesting. They only had two employees listed: Zane Rathburn and Mark Williams. Bingo! There was the Social Security number for both. I copied down Williams’s, and went to another site, that listed criminal records. Just on a hunch, I typed in Williams’s Social Security number. A few moments passed while the computer searched through the site’s records, and then it came up.

  I whistled. Ten years ago, Williams had been convicted of credit card fraud in Savannah. He’d served five years before being paroled, and his parole had been completed three years later. He was 24 when he was convicted, which made him 34 now. I printed out the report, and signed off the Internet.

  I got a Dr. Pepper out of the refrigerator. I made copies of the report and then some copies of the faxes Ruth had received, matching them up to the report.

  Not bad, I thought to myself as I sat back down at the computer. I called Dominique’s office. After a few rings her voice mail picked up. “Dominique, I’ve found out who’s behind the harassment. I haven’t figured out why yet—give me a call when you get this message and let me know how you want me to proceed. I’ll go ahead and fax my report to you.” I hung up and did just that.

  As the pages passed through the fax machine, I patted myself on the back. Hired this afternoon, case solved by late afternoon.

  Damn, I’m good at my job.

  Chapter Four

  It was almost six when I finished faxing my report to Dominique. I put my copies of everything into a binder labeled DUPRE, DOMINIQUE and tossed it into my Out tray. I stood up and stretched. My back cracked from being hunched over the keyboard. If I was meeting Paul at seven, I was going to have to hurry.

  It took me roughly about half an hour to shower, shave, and get dressed. The whole time I kept thinking about this situation with Paul. By the time I walked out my front door, I had worked myself into a knot of tension. Juan’s Flying Burrito was on Magazine—about four blocks from my apartment. There was no point in risking taking the car, and besides, it was a nice autumn night. I started walking up Camp Street. Coliseum Square was filled with people and their dogs.

  I felt a little tightness in my stomach. In the six months Paul and I had been seeing each other, we’d never had a disagreement until this thing today. We got along so well it was almost eerie. Yeah, maybe it was because I just went along with whatever he wanted, but it wasn’t like anything had ever been unpleasant. I didn’t mind changing my eating habits or working out harder at the gym. Quitting smoking wasn’t a bad thing, and I already felt a difference in my lungs. I felt healthier and looked better than I had since I was a teenager.

  So why did it bother me so much to have Paul pose for a magazine cover? It’s not like it was Genre or another magazine distributed nationally. For Christ’s sake, it was just a little local glossy bar rag, really. It was kind of stupid to react so intensely. Paul was a great looking guy. Yeah, it kind of bothered me that so many guys stared at him, wanted him, flirted with him, tried to make eye contact and all the other annoying things guys will do to try to get into someone’s pants. And to be completely honest, most of the time I liked the fact Paul was such a turn-on for other guys. It felt great to have someone that everyone else wanted. You might like him, you might want him, but he’s going home with me. But every once in a while it made me wonder “why is he with me?” And he did hurt my feelings every once in a while with his casual, off the cuff remarks about the way I looked.

  But being on a magazine cover was different. Guys didn’t see Paul in bars and then run home and jack off remembering what he looked like. In the pages of a magazine, he was there to be objectified. The whole point of the photos would be to arouse the viewer, to get him hard, and beat off to the pictures. That bothered me. Maybe I was being irrational, but regardless, if it bothered me, Paul would just have to just accept my discomfort and not pose. It just seemed, well, intrusive to me.

  Juan’s wasn’t crowded yet. It was a small place—long and narrow. Heavy metal music I didn’t recognize blared through their sound system. Juan’s was a hip place, popular with college students and that age group. I could do without the loud music, but I liked their food. I grabbed a booth in the front and sat facing the front door. I instantly wished I had a cigarette. I was about ten minutes early, and Paul was always at least ten minutes late. I picked up a Gambit Weekly and started paging through it. I was in the midst of another article about the juvenile detention facility at Tallulah when I looked up with a start.

  When and where had he posed nude, and why?

  That question had gone right past me in all the fuss about the Attitude cover.

  And just why exactly was I only finding out about that now?

  I should know things like that about my boyfriend.

  We’d met about six months ago at Oz. I’d seen him earlier that day at my gym. At Oz, he was dancing on stage, shirtless, the black hairs on his hard torso slick were with sweat. I went out on the dance floor and we wound up dancing together. He was flying high on Ecstasy, and we ended up going back to my place. He told me he was a flight attendant for Transco Airlines, based out of their hub in Dallas. He’d just taken an apartment in Uptown and was commuting. He paid partial rent on a three bedroom house in one of the Dallas suburbs with five other flight attendants, but he wanted a place of his own to be by himself when he had time off. He’d been seeing a doctor in Dallas, but that was coming to an end.

  We click
ed. The sex was phenomenal, and we started seeing each other whenever he was in town. We took a trip to South Beach. We’d decided to stop seeing other people in July, about a month after we’d met, when he transferred to ground crew at Armstrong International. He’d gotten the job with Transco when he was 20, seven years ago—when he’d dropped out of Arizona State. Apart from that, we never really talked a lot about his past, and it was weird I’d never met any of his friends.

  Maybe he’s ashamed of me.

  I sat up straight with a jolt. No, that couldn’t be it.

  Be fair, I said to myself as three young guys in their 20s walked in. They were wearing baseball caps backwards and sleeveless T-shirts. Baggy shorts hung to their knees. You never talk about your past, so why should he talk about his? Only Paige knew about the Ryan disaster in college, and we never talk about it. Paige didn’t even know any details of my pre-LSU life other then I was from a little town in east Texas.

  Then again, I’d never posed butt naked for a camera before. He should have told me about that.

  I’d never told Paul much about my past, mainly because he seemed rather uninterested in it. One time, when we were lying covered in sweat, our bodies entwined on top of the covers, still slightly out of breath from the sex, I sat up to take a drink of water. Paul reached out and touched a scar at the bottom of my left lower back. “What’s this from?” He traced it with his fingers.

  I’d winced, pulling away from his touch as though it hurt. “I’d rather not talk about it.” He just shrugged and never brought it up again. He never asked me anything about my past. It just never came up—not that there was a hell of a lot for me to tell.

  The loud music changed. It was an old Def Leppard song: “Armageddon It.” I smiled. I’d been how old when that song was a hit? I’d been 15, in high school, already starting on the football team. My success at football had changed everything in my away- from-home life. I’d always been big for my class, so kids never picked on me, but most of the kids stayed away from me. I don’t know if they sensed somehow I lived in a trailer park, or if they picked it up from my Sears catalogue clothes that never fit right. The clothes always look okay at the start of the school year, but after a few washings they started looking ragged. My mother wasn’t big on laundry, and as she hated to iron, she never did it. She didn’t like to clean either. My fifth grade teacher once sniffed and said to me, “I can smell the oil fields on you.” My dad worked in the fields and came home every night to drink himself senseless. He usually ignored us kids, unless we got in his way or he was in one of his moods.

  That changed when I went out for football. I didn’t have much interest in it, frankly, but practice was from three-thirty to six after school, which meant I wouldn’t get home until almost seven. I would have practiced longer. I knew enough about it from watching it on television every weekend I can remember. I’d always done well in gym class, but I took to football like I was born to play. I was fast, I could hit hard, I could catch, and I was hard to tackle. I started as a wide receiver when I was a freshman, and in our first game caught two touchdown passes. Even my dad— who made it pretty clear I was nothing but an expense to him— was excited. After the game, when I was heading with the team for the locker room, he came down and clapped me on the back, a big grin on his face. “Way to go, son!” he said, and I could smell the liquor on his breath. I just smiled and went in to shower.

  Monday morning was like going to school in an parallel universe.

  Everyone was nicer to me, even the teachers. People saved seats for me in class. At lunch, I was invited to sit with the starters and the cheerleaders. I sat down next to T. J. Ziebell, a sophomore who started as a running back but was also back-up quarterback. T. J. ‘s dad owned the local newspaper and a couple of the oil fields around town. They lived on a huge ranch on the side of town farthest from the trailer park I called home. It might have been the other side of town, but it might as well have been a different planet.

  T. J. was one of the best-looking boys at Cottonwood Wells High. He was always going steady with some pretty girl, but seemed to trade them in every month or so. He had curly reddish brown hair, golden skin with freckles across his nose and cheeks, gray eyes, and a grin so wide you couldn’t help but grin back at him. He also had a beautiful body. I’d been sneaking peaks at him in the locker room since football practice started with two-a-days back in August. His torso was tanned but hairless, the skin smooth as silk. A trail of curly hair led down from his navel to the waistband of his underwear. He had hair on his legs below the knee, but above it was just as smooth as his stomach. He wore tight, bright, white underwear with a gold stripe on the waistband just above a navy blue stripe. He had the roundest, hardest, most perfectly curved ass I had ever seen. I could stare at it for hours. At that point I knew I was attracted to boys, but still wasn’t sure what boys could do together other than beat off or get blow jobs. But I knew I was turned on by T.J.’s ass and wanted to touch it, squeeze it, hold it.

  At night, in my narrow bed, listening to the blaring television in the living room and my father’s alcohol-induced snores, my hand would slip into my own underwear as I fantasized about T.J. I wished one day we’d become best friends, love and care about each other, walk around naked in front of each other, go skinny dipping, wrestle, and then one day…

  Sitting next to T. J. at the lunch table was almost too much for me.

  And we did become friends. I still don’t know if I was a pet project or something for him, but he took me under his wing. I went to dinner at his house. He drove me around in his car, a convertible Mustang. We hung out together, and for once, T.J. didn’t have a steady girlfriend.

  Every once in a while we’d double date. T.J. always arranged these, telling me about it later. I wasn’t about to complain. I didn’t have to ask anyone out and it was a perfect shield for me. T. J. never asked if I liked my date, and we didn’t pay much attention to them anyway. Observing other couples on dates, it began to seem to me as though T. J. was using the girls to cover up us being together all the time.

  Hope springs eternal in a young heart.

  “Are you ready to order, sir?”

  I looked up at my waitress. She was maybe 21, about five-nine with a long, sturdy body. She was wearing hip-hugging brown polyester pants under a black clingy cropped top that revealed the compass tattooed around her pierced navel. She wore little round black plastic glasses and no make-up. “No, someone is meeting me. I’m early.” When I looked at my watch, I was startled to see it was already quarter after seven.

  Paul was always late. That was something else I knew about him. It drove me crazy. I fucking HATE being late.

  “Something to drink, then?”

  I started to order a Coke, then stopped myself. Sugar. “Iced tea, with lemon.”

  She nodded and walked away.

  I fought my irritation. It was just Paul. You’d think someone who had worked for an airline for seven years would always be on time. Paul even joked about it. “I single handedly keep Transco from being the most on-time airline,” he would laugh. “If they want to improve their ranking, they should fire me.” It never seemed to matter what time he started getting ready—he always managed to be late. He could start getting ready three hours before we had to be somewhere and we’d still wind up arriving half an hour late.

  I was always on time—even when I was a kid. Having to be someplace meant getting out of the trailer and away from my parents, so I always left early. When I started getting invitations to parties in high school, I was without fail the first guest to arrive, sampling the food and making awkward conversation with whoever was throwing the party as they put last minute touches on things. T. J. always teased me about it. “You always do as your told, Chanse? Someone tells you ‘be there at seven’ and you obey?” He’d flash me that grin.

  Any command you want to give me, T. J., flashed through my mind every time he’d say it.

  I was on time the night I went over to T.
J.’s to study History my junior year. He picked me up in the convertible outside the entrance to the trailer park, where I always had him meet me. He’d met my parents at football games, and was always extremely polite while I burned with embarrassment. His parents never reeked of liquor. His mom always smelled of some nice perfume, and was always made up perfectly and dressed nice. Even when she was just wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, she seemed to radiate class. His father wasn’t as friendly as his mom, but he was always nice. He would ask me about the team and school— things like that—even though I could tell he wasn’t interested.

  On the way over to T.J.’s house the stereo was blaring Def Leppard and he was singing along over the roar of the wind. In the passenger seat I obliged by playing air guitar to go with his vocal, chiming in on the chorus. We both had big stupid grins on our faces. I always liked spending the night at his house. We’d both sleep in his big king-sixe bed. I got to get long looks at him in his underwear. While he slept I would lie there, unable to sleep, listening to the even rhythm of his breathing and wishing I had the nerve to do something—anything— but was always too afraid.

  He wore a white mesh Texas Longhorns tank-top and tapped his hand on the car door in time with the drum. Ray-Bans hid his eyes. His curls danced as he bopped his head as he sang.

  The house was dark as we pulled up the long driveway. “Where’s your folks?” I asked as we got out of the car. He had an older sister, Karen, who was at school in Austin.

  “Dad had a thing in Dallas, and Mom went with him.” He flashed that grin at me again. “We got the whole place to ourselves.” He laughed. “Party time, ole buddy.”

  The Ziebell place didn’t intimidate me any more by then. The house was huge, something out of a movie— two stories with a wide verandah and big round stone columns. A fountain bubbled in the front yard, and the verandah was lined with Mrs. Ziebell’s huge rose bushes. The living room was as big as our entire trailer.