by Greg Herren
“Should you drink when you’re—?”
“I don’t fucking care,” she snapped. “You don’t know, okay? The pills help but sometimes theyʼre not enough, alright? The whiskey helps. Sometimes itʼs the only thing that does, okay?” She sighed. “Let’s change the subject, okay? The last thing I want to do your first day back is give you chapter and verse of the tragedy that is Paige’s life right now, okay? I really hate talking about this, it just makes me angry and then I have to take another pill or drink more or both. I’m really glad to see you.” She forced a smile that looked terrible in its falseness. “What are you going to do to keep busy now that you’re back?”
“I don’t know.” I’d never really thought about it much. “I was just so focused on coming home, I never thought that far ahead.”
“You need to find something to do—you can’t just sit around your apartment all day.” She finished her glass. “That’s a one-way trip to the insane asylum, my friend.” She laughed. “I mean, look at me, for God’s sake. I have a job to go to everyday and I still needs booze and pills to stay out of a fucking straitjacket.”
“Well, there’s a lot of cleanup to be done around the house outside.” I shrugged. “That’ll keep me busy for a while.”
“There you go—that’s a good start.” She stood up. “You ready for another beer?”
I checked my bottle. It was half-full, so I chugged it down and put the bottle down, belching as I did. “Yup.”
She grinned. “That’s the spirit.” She walked over to the bar.
The door opened. I turned automatically, and felt a big grin creep over my face as Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague walked in. Venus and Blaine were detectives with the NOPD; I’d met them when I put in my two years on the force out of college before going out on my own. Venus was a tall, muscular black woman with close-cropped hair. Her face was beautiful and ageless—she could be any age from thirty to sixty and no one could guess. She worked out regularly and was in great shape. A lot of guys on the force resented her—black and female, after all, is not a popular combination in any police department, no matter how much things had changed over the years—and called her a lesbian behind her back. I didn’t think she was—I knew she’d been married and had two daughters, not that that meant anything. But whether she liked to sleep with men or women, Venus was a good cop.
Blaine was a handsome man about my age with blue eyes and curly black hair and a muscular body. He came from a wealthy, socially prominent family in Uptown, who’d been aghast when he joined the police force. He told me once he’d always wanted to be a cop, and when he was old enough, be became one. He lived with his partner, who was about twenty years older, in one of the big houses on the other side of Coliseum Square. We’d slept together a few times, and although Blaine insisted to me that he and his partner had an open relationship, I always got the feeling his partner hated me and was only nice to me because of Blaine. Blaine had a great sense of humor and was a lot of fun to be around. He always joked and teased, and his blue eyes always sparkled with humor. I waved at them, and they walked over to my table, pulling up chairs.
I stood and hugged them both. “When did you get back?” Blaine asked, after almost breaking a couple of my ribs.
“A few hours ago.” I was grinning like an idiot, but couldn’t help it. “Man, is it good to see you two.” I meant it. I’d been unable to reach them any way other than e-mail since the storm.
The NOPD had taken a beating in the media in the wake of the storm. Some cops had turned criminal, others had abandoned the city, and in the chaos of the flood there had been no real command. But Blaine and Venus were both dedicated to their jobs, and I knew they’d neither looted nor stolen cars nor left the city. Both looked tired and haggard, though. The humorous sparkle I was used to seeing in Blaine’s eyes wasn’t there anymore. They’d both lost weight, and their eyes looked hollow with fatigue.
“Welcome home,” Venus said as Paige put a glass of red wine in front of her and handed Blaine and me bottles of beer before sliding into her own chair. She lifted her glass. “Such as it is.”
Her voice was bitter, and in that instant I remembered she had lived in New Orleans East, which wasn’t there any more. “Venus, I’m sorry about—”
“Yeah, well, what can you do?” She shrugged. “Once the insurance settles up with me, I’ll be fine. I was insured to the teeth.” She took a sip of the wine. “If the fuckers ever do settle up.”
“Are you going to rebuild?” I hated to ask. She’d probably been asked a million times.
“I don’t know; there doesn’t seem much point.” She took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and lit one. “Can’t even decide until the government decides if they’re going to let us…maybe it’s time for a change and I should move.” She sighed. “I don’t need that big old house any more anyway. The girls are grown and on their own, and it was kind of lonely. I thought about selling before all of this happened, you know…should have moved beyond the thinking stage, I guess.”
“She’s staying in our slave quarter,” Blaine said. “For as long as she likes.”
“Now, white boy, how many times do I have to tell you not to call it that?” She flashed a ghost of the smile I remembered. “As long as you got a black woman living there, we’re calling it a carriage house, remember?”
Blaine rolled his eyes at me. “See what I got to put up with? So, Chanse, what about you? Now that you’re back, what are you going to do? You staying? Or are you going back to Dallas?”
“I’m staying.” I wasn’t in the mood to tell them about the breakup with Jude yet. And it felt good to say it out loud. New Orleans was home. “And I can keep busy, I’m sure. Was there a lot of damage to the shipyards and the port?”
“Some.” Venus shook her head. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious, is all.” I laughed. “I was hired by Iris Verlaine to find her father a couple of days before the storm, and then she fired me on Friday morning—and was kind of rude about it. I figured it might be some karmic payback if their shipyard was destroyed.”
“Iris Verlaine?” Venus asked, her voice strange.
I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”
Blaine gave a weird laugh, and ran a hand through his curls. “Small fucking world, huh? The last case to drop into our lap was Iris Verlaine. She was shot and killed in her house the Friday night before the storm. We didn’t really get much of a chance to look into it, what with the storm and everything on Saturday. And now I imagine the crime scene is destroyed. She lived in Lakeview.”
“She’s dead?” I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That was the last thing I was expecting to hear.
“Looked like a robbery—she came home and surprised them in the act, and they shot her,” Venus replied. “Funny that should happen the same week she hired and fired a private eye, though. You say she wanted you to find her father?”
“Uh huh.” I cast my mind back to that afternoon. She’d arrived punctually at twelve-thirty. At that time, Katrina was forming out in the Atlantic Ocean and looked like it would be heading across the southern tip of Florida on its way to the Gulf. We were all just starting to pay attention to the path, but it was still too early to panic about it. We’d already been hit by two small hurricanes—Cindy and Dennis—in July. Every time a storm forms in the Atlantic, we pay attention—a little. I had the Weather Channel playing on my big-screen TV, just to be on the safe side.
I’d opened the door. “Mr. MacLeod?” she’d asked, an eyebrow raised in a questioning manner, as though I wasn’t what she was expecting.
She was a tall woman, probably around five-nine in her stocking feet, but she was wearing gray stiletto heels that added a few inches to her height. She was thin—almost too thin in that way some women get, that looks unhealthy. She had a flat chest and almost non-existent hips. She was wearing all gray—skirt, jacket, and silk blouse, with a double strand of pearl
s knotted at her neck. The hand she extended for me to shake was bony and pale, with long, manicured nails. Her green eyes were almost too large for her narrow, angular face. Her lips were small, and her fine blond hair was swept back into a tight chignon on top of her head. She appeared to be nervous, but then, most of my clients are when they show up for the first meeting.
I’d invited her in, asked her if she wanted coffee (which she declined), and offered her a seat. She’d sat down and crossed her legs, her eyes occasionally darting around my apartment, taking in my artwork, and judging it—the expression on her face clearly showing that she found my taste in art considerably lacking. “Would you mind shutting off the television?” she asked. Her voice was shaky and high-toned, almost like a little girl’s. She’d gone to McGehee, I decided, and had probably been a Tri Delta at either Newcomb or Ole Miss. “Hurricanes bore me.” She tilted her head to one side. “It’s all anyone has been talking about all morning. No one seems able to get any work done.” She folded her hands together in her lap. “Like talking about it will make it go somewhere else, the idiots.”
I bit my lip to keep from grinning and obliged, picking up the remote and pressing the power button. “What can I do for you, Ms. Verlaine?” I gave her what I call my reassuring, I-can-solve-all-your-problems face.
She favored me with a little smile, which warmed her face up a bit. She was, I decided, pretty when she relaxed her face. “All business? I like that, Mr. MacLeod. What I want you to do for me is relatively simple, actually. I could probably have my assistant do it for me, but then Valerie is an incorrigible gossip—it would be all over the office by lunchtime—and I would prefer this to be my little secret for now, so can I count on your discretion?”
“Yes, Ms. Verlaine. Your secrets are safe with me.”
“Good.” She started twisting a diamond on her ring finger. “I’m getting married in the spring, and I would like for my father to give me away.”
“Okay.”
“The trick, Mr. MacLeod, is that I don’t know my father, and I don’t know where he is. I’ve never met him. He left my mother when she was pregnant with me, and no one has ever heard from him since.” She said it in a rush, as if she’d been practicing at home in front of a mirror, to get it to sound just right. But then, she struck me as the kind of person who always prepared herself, so maybe she had.
“And how long has that been?”
The faint smile flashed again. “One should never ask a woman her age, Mr. MacLeod, as you well know, but as this is pertinent to the investigation, he disappeared in 1973.”
I whistled. “Thirty-two years? You haven’t heard anything from him in all that time?”
She nodded. “I realize that makes it harder.”
“Why did you wait so long?”
She raised an eyebrow. “My mother died a few months ago. She was a rather, um, formidable woman. The mere mention of my father drove her into an insane rage, and when she was angry—” She shuddered at the memory. “Let’s just say it wasn’t possible while she was alive. But she’s dead now, and I am getting married, and I’ve always been curious about my father. My two older brothers barely remember him—I’ve asked them—and my grandfather just flatly refuses to discuss him.” She made a little hopeless gesture with her hands. “So I have no recourse but to hire a private eye.”
“He’s never once tried to get in touch with you or your brothers?”
“He may have,” she said grimly. “My mother was a very determined woman, Mr. MacLeod, to say the least. I don’t even know what happened; why he left, but it was obvious from my mother’s behavior that the separation wasn’t her idea. Once he left, she erased him completely from our lives.It wasn’t until she died that I even knew what he looked like. All I knew was his name, which was on my birth certificate.” She clicked open her briefcase and handed me a file folder. “Everything I know about my father is in that folder. There’s a wedding picture that I found in with my mother’s things, as well as his Social Security number. Their divorce decree is in there as well—she divorced him for desertion. She also had sole custody of us—her children. After the divorce, she petitioned the court to change our names—hers, my brothers’, and mine—back to Verlaine.”
“That’s pretty extreme,” I replied.
She raised an eyebrow. “As I said, my mother was a formidable woman. Are you interested in taking this case?”
I considered. Might as well be honest with her—that way it couldn’t come back to bite me in the ass later. “After all this time, I can’t promise that I’ll find him—and you also have to take into consideration that—”
“He might be dead?” She seemed amused. “Yes, I have considered that. But in any case, Mr. MacLeod, I’d like to know one way or the other. “She pulled out her checkbook and started writing me a check. “It’s so horrible to just wonder.”
“Ms. Verlaine—” I hesitated as I noticed the amount she was writing in. Usually, I give my clients a disclaimer. People who disappear don’t want to be found. Chances are if you think your spouse is cheating, he or she probably is. But she also didn’t strike me as being driven by sentiment. I didn’t believe for one moment she wanted to have her father give her away at her wedding—not a father she’d never known. She wasn’t looking for him to fill a void she’d felt most of her life. I sensed there was a further reason she was interested in finding him—something she wasn’t telling me, nor was she likely to. But clients don’t always tell me their true motivations, nor is having that information necessary for me to do my job. As long as their check clears, I don’t care one way or the other.
She paused before signing the check. “Yes?”
“Nothing.” I walked over to my computer and printed out my standard boilerplate contract, which I gave to her to sign. “How often would you like a report on my progress?”
“Weekly, if that would be okay with you.” She paper-clipped a business card to her check. “You can reach me at any of these numbers—although I would prefer it if you would always try my cell phone first. Valerie answers my office line, and as I said, she is a gossip. And when the retainer runs out, I will decide then if I want you to continue.” She stood, smoothing her skirt and extending her hand to me. “I look forward to hearing from you.”
“Iʼll get started on Monday, if thatʼs all right with you?”
“That would be just fine, Mr. MacLeod.”
She walked out of my apartment and got into a gray Mercedes convertible. I watched her drive off down Camp Street.
And she’d been killed later that same day.
“I guess I should just tear up the check,” I said as the girl with the braid set down plastic takeout containers in front of us. I smiled at her before opening mine and squirting mustard and ketchup on my cheeseburger. I took a bite. It was amazing. There’s no burger like a New Orleans bar burger.
“The Verlaine Shipping Offices are open,” Paige said, dipping a steak fry into a puddle of ketchup. “Jack Devlin did a story on them the other day for the business section. The family never evacuated; they rode out the storm in the Garden District—I can get the address for you, if you’d like to stop by the house. Their offices are in the Entergy building on Poydras, if you’d rather do that. Let me know.”
“Thanks,” I said, focusing on my burger.
We ate the rest of the meal in relative silence. When we were finished eating we all walked out together. At Blaine’s car, I hugged him again, and then turned to Venus.
“We get together for dinner and drinks pretty much every night here,” Venus said as she hugged me back. “Hope you’ll start joining us. It’s good to see you again, MacLeod.”
“I will whenever I can.” I walked Paige home, and then headed home myself.
I opened one of the beers in the refrigerator, sat down on the couch, and turned on the television. It was only nine o’clock, but there was nothing I wanted to watch. I turned it off, got a book, and got into bed. I read until I fell asleep.
I didn’t dream, which was a blessing.
Chapter Three
I used to hate driving down Magazine Street in that time I was beginning to think of as simply before.
Magazine Street was an artery of the city that twisted from Canal Street all the way to Riverbend, following the course of the river, less than half a mile away from the protective levee at any point in its meanderings. It was one of those bizarre streets calculated to push a driver with out-of-state license plates over the edge rather quickly. It began as a one-way at Canal on the Uptown side, corresponding roughly to Decatur in the Quarter. Its path was pretty straight until it reached St. Andrew in the lower Garden District, where it suddenly and without warning changed into a two-way street for the rest of its narrow path. Magazine Street was lined almost its entire distance with shops of every shape, size, and nature, like A&P, Walgreen, coffee shops, thrift stores, antique shops, neighborhood bars, and upscale restaurants. It was potted and scarred, lined with parked cars, and always jammed with traffic. It always hummed with life and activity, which could be incredibly frustrating when you were in a hurry—and God forbid you got stuck behind a city bus. When I had to go uptown, I preferred to take Prytania, a few blocks away. It was more of a residential street, with fewer lights and a lot less traffic.
But after drinking a pot of coffee and getting dressed, I decided to take Magazine Street, just to see what it was like.