by Greg Herren
That was all it took for me to make up my mind. If nothing else, it would make him feel better. Maybe he’d sober up and change his mind. He was entitled to that, and it wouldn’t be the first—or the last—time a client fired me.
I reached over and shook his hand. “Mr. Verlaine, you’ve got a deal.” I rose. “I’ll report back to you weekly, if that’s okay with you.”
He waved his hand. “That’s fine, whatever you think is best.” He reached into his wallet and handed me a business card. “Call me on my cell phone.” He grinned at me. “You probably think I’m going to sober up and change my mind, right?”
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
“Well, that’s not something you have to worry about.” He walked me to the front door of the house.
“You changing your mind?”
He laughed. “No, you don’t have to worry about me sobering up. That’s not going to happen any time soon. Not as long as there’s liquor in this house—and that’s one thing we always have in supply.”
The front door closed behind me.
Chapter Four
I decided to drive up Magazine Street a little farther after leaving the Verlaine mausoleum and see if my gym had opened back up.
Bodytech was located on the corner of Magazine and Louisiana. I’d been working out there ever since it opened four years earlier. I’d known the owner, Allen Johnson, for years before he’d opened up the place. He’d been a trainer at my old gym before he went out on his own. Bodytech was a great space. It was a lot bigger than the old gym in Canal Place where I’d used to work out, brighter and airier and not as cramped. I’d fallen in love with the place when Allen had his grand opening and had switched almost immediately. I also liked that it was the only gay-owned and -operated gym in the city. The clientele was an interesting mix of Uptown gay men and straight women, with some straight men showing up every now and then. The place was always packed in the mornings, at lunchtime, and after five. I prefer to work out in the off times because I hate to wait for a machine I want to use; plus it’s not quite as distracting when the place is emptied out. Allen always played the latest glitterball dance remixes over the gym’s state-of-the-art sound system, which got you pumped up and energized to hit the weights a little bit harder than listening to Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony” for the ten-thousandth time or some heavy metal thrash garbage like other gyms played. Besides, I’d always had a bit of a crush on Allen. Joining his gym gave me the chance to get to know him better. It seemed like he was always there when I came in for my mid-morning workouts, and we’d always shoot the shit for a little while before I hit the weights.
Allen lived with his longtime partner, Greg Buchmaier, in the old Buchmaier mansion on St. Charles Avenue further uptown, closer to the campuses of Tulane and Loyola Universities and Audubon Park. Allen was a good guy, if not the brightest, and he always knew all the local gay gossip. I could always count on Allen to give me the scoop on any gay man or gay couple in town—I guess running a gym makes you privy to all kinds of information. He still worked as a trainer, and he told me once over a protein shake that being a trainer was kind of like being a therapist. “You wouldn’t believe the shit people tell me,” he said, rolling his eyes and grinning at me, “and it’s not like we have any kind of client-trainer confidentiality thing. I’m always afraid I’m going to be subpoenaed to testify in a divorce case or something. Could you imagine?”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t expect to see Allen’s white Lexus in the parking lot and the neon OPEN sign in the big front window lit up. It was such an unexpected moment, a slight semblance of normality in a crazy world where normal no longer existed, that I just slammed on the brakes and swung the car into the parking lot. Fortunately, there was absolutely no traffic on Magazine Street. Before, such a sudden move would have caused a massive accident and backed traffic up in both directions for miles. I put the car in the spot next to the Lexus and walked through the front door.
Even though the air conditioning was on and it was cool inside, there was a faint musty smell to the place. Other than that, it was like stepping into a time machine and going back to the last time I’d worked out. All the machines sparkled and shone in the lights, the mirrors that lined the walls were spotless, and Allen himself was behind the front counter, resting his thick arms on it. A huge grin spread across his face when he saw me. He’s only about five-nine, with dark blond hair he’d recently started buzzing off to hide the fact it was thinning—which was a really hot look for him. I knew he was in his early forties, but he could easily pass for his late twenties. There were no bags under his eyes and no telltale lines emanating from his eyes or the corners of his mouth. His chipmunk-like cheeks were deeply dimpled, his gray eyes almond-shaped but wide open and cheery, and his body showed the years of hard work he’d put into it. Veins bulged in his forearms and his biceps. His tight black tank top with BODYTECH in red lettering across his chest fit like a glove. His thickly muscled legs were hidden beneath a pair of black sweatpants with a white stripe running up each side.
“Chanse!” He came out from behind the counter and gave me a big hug, squeezing long and hard. “When did you get back?” He stepped away from me, still smiling.
“Yesterday, actually,” I replied, finding myself grinning back at him.
“I got back last week—I wanted to get the place back open as soon as possible.” He scratched his head. “How’d you come out? The house okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I was lucky. I guess the floodwaters stopped a couple of blocks away from Camp Street, and the roof held on. Paige got back to town right after and emptied my refrigerator. How’d you do?”
“Yeah, we did okay, besides the refrigerator.” He made a face. “I got a new one on the way down from Baton Rouge. But we did lose one of the oak trees in the yard. Went down right through the gazebo. Lucky—if it went the other way, it would have gone right through the living room.” He shuddered. “That would have been a disaster—I don’t even like to think about that.” He went back around the counter and opened the glass-fronted cool case. “You want a protein drink? On the house, as my first post-Katrina customer.” He smiled at me again. “Damn, it’s good to see you.”
I took it from him with a grin. Strawberry, my favorite. Allen knew his customers well. “Thanks. Greg back too?” I opened it and took a swig.
He shook his head. “He’s in Atlanta, running the company from the store there.” Buchmaier Jewels was one of the oldest jewelry stores in New Orleans, with a flagship store on Canal Street and branches scattered all over the city. Greg had expanded the company and opened stores in Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. The new stores had required Greg to travel a lot more than Allen would have liked.
“When’s he coming back?” I finished the drink and tossed it into the trash.
A dark look crossed Allen’s face. “Good question.” His eyes narrowed. “He thinks we should move to Atlanta.” His face reddened and his jaw clenched. His hands balled into fists. “Yeah, easy for him. Everything I own is tied up in this place, you know? And he says, ‘Let’s just move to Atlanta.’ He wants to sell the house, close the stores here, just move on. I know everyone thinks he gave me the money to open this place, but I didn’t take a goddamned dime from him, thank you very much, and I’m not about to start being the rich Mrs. Buchmaier because a fucking hurricane came through New Orleans.” He spread his hands. “He’s never kept me, and he’s never going to. If I have to live in this fucking gym, I will.”
“Wow,” I said. Not exactly the most profound thing, but I couldn’t think of what else to say. The Buchmaiers had been in New Orleans since the early 1800s, when they’d left what was then Bavaria and opened their first store. The family had been one of the backbones of the New Orleans Jewish community ever since. “What about Ruth?” Ruth was Greg’s sister. She worked for the Vieux Carre Commission. “Is she going to leave too?”
“They’re in Houston, got the kids enrolle
d in school there, but they’re planning on coming back. She’s furious with Greg for even considering it.” He laughed. “She calls me every day to tell me how much she hates being in Houston.” He ran his hand over his buzzed hair and gave me a grin. “I don’t know, maybe it’s time to be single again.”
“How long have you guys been together?”
“Almost eighteen years.” He shrugged. “Our anniversary is in November.”
“Really?” I knew the story—everyone did, really. It started when Greg hired Allen to be his personal trainer, and they’d both been attracted to each other, but neither ever acted on it. Greg went from a once-a-week client to a three-times-a-week client before he finally, after a few months, got up the nerve to go ahead and ask Allen out on a date. They’d dated for a few months before Allen moved into the big house on St. Charles. They were practically an institution in New Orleans—the Nelson-Buchmaiers, Greg-and-Allen, Allen-and-Greg. They raised money for every gay charity in New Orleans, opening up the big house and having parties for the Human Rights Campaign, the NO/AIDS Task Force, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, and many Democratic Party candidates for public office. I’d been to many a fundraiser at their place, as well as other parties they’d thrown just for fun. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion of them breaking up. They were one of those couples I always envied, used as a reference point in my own mind to show that yes, gay couples can indeed make it work and stay together.
Allen shrugged. “I’m staying in the house until he sells it, although I probably should start looking for an apartment. If you hear of one, let me know, okay? But that’s not going to be easy. So many people are looking for a place to live—and I hear the rents are all being jacked up.” He looked down at his hands and sighed. “Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I should just pack it all in and move to Atlanta with him. I don’t know. But I’m not ready to give up, you know? I mean, leave New Orleans? Give up all my hard work? It just doesn’t seem right, Chanse. Sure, it’s going to be hard, but if everyone just gives up and doesn’t want to do the work—I mean, I can’t imagine a world without New Orleans, let alone not living here. I can understand people with kids staying away because they’ve got to go to school, but shit. You’re back to stay, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess. I don’t know. Probably.” I hadn’t really thought about it much. The whole time I was away, all I’d wanted to do was come home. It never occurred to me to think about moving away. Besides, where would I go?
Growing up in Cottonwood Wells in east Texas, about 50 miles from Houston, had been hellish for me. The town was small, about twenty-five thousand people, and heavily Baptist and Church of Christ. My dad had worked in the oil fields and we’d lived in a trailer on the wrong side of town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was grow up and get the fuck out of there as fast as I could. The football scholarship to LSU had been a lifesaver. I left and never looked back. I didn’t discover New Orleans until after my freshmen football season ended. I’d gotten in my car one night and driven down I-10 to the French Quarter. For a small-town kid like me from a Bible-thumping county, the French Quarter had been mysterious and magical, a small piece of decadent heaven on earth. I’d walked around, gawking like the big kid I was, and somehow managed to find my way to the gay bars down Bourbon Street by St. Ann. The first time I walked into the Bourbon Pub, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were gay men everywhere I looked, of all shapes and sizes. The place was packed, and I couldn’t help but grin. It was like being in a candy store. “I’ll take one of everything,” I thought as I worked my way up to the bar, where a sexy young bartender in a tight black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off winked at me and said, “What’ll you have, sexy?”—somehow managing to make himself heard over the remix of a Mariah Carey hit that was playing at ear-bleed levels. I got a bottle of Bud Light, delighted that the cute bartender didn’t card me, and stood in a corner just staring at everyone with a big stupid grin on my face. A muscular guy about thirty, wearing a tight black tank top and a pair of white jeans cut off just below the curve of his ass, introduced himself to me as Jay and bought me another beer. After about an hour I found myself walking back to his apartment on Royal Street. He was the first man I’d ever been with. He’d given me my first blow job, my first experience with gay sex, and for a nineteen-year-old, I’d thought I’d surely died and gone to heaven. And when I’d walked back to my car in the morning as the sun came up in the east, I made up my mind right then and there I was moving to New Orleans as soon as I graduated. New Orleans was home for me, and over the next four years I came down to the city whenever I could. I’d slept with Jay a few more times, met other guys, had a lot of sex, discovered the back room of Rawhide, where I could get my dick sucked if I’d struck out in the bars, and even found the bathhouse down on Toulouse Street, where for twenty bucks I could get a bed for the night and wander the halls with a towel wrapped around my waist and find someone to fuck if I wanted to—well, several people to fuck. And when I’d graduated, I got a job with the New Orleans Police Department, got a small little apartment in a slave quarter behind a huge mansion painted coral on Dumaine Street, and made New Orleans my home once and for all.
“No,” I told Allen, “I’m staying. There’s nowhere else I want to be.”
Allen smiled back at me. “Good.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”
Somehow, having said it out loud made me feel better. “All right, man, I need to get to the Sav-a-Center before it closes. I’ll come back in soon and work out. What hours you going to be open?”
Allen shrugged. “I’m opening from ten to eight. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“All right.” I gave him a hug, and he held on to me tightly. “It’s good to see you, man.”
“Don’t be a stranger.” Allen winked at me. I winked back and headed outside.
The Sav-a-Center was at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon, and the parking lot was packed. I pushed my cart around for a while, trying to figure out what to buy, and was surprised to notice little things. They were out of charcoal, ice trays, and strange little things like that—the cleaning products aisle was pretty much picked clean, for example— but there were plenty of food choices. I spent about two hundred dollars and headed home.
*
I was in the middle of stir-frying some vegetables for beef lo mein about an hour later, a Fleetwood Mac CD blaring on my stereo, when someone knocked on my front door. I checked through the blinds and opened the door. “Hey, Venus. Where’s Blaine?”
“He’s off today.” She looked tired, just as she had the previous night. She came in, plopped down on the couch, and lit a cigarette. “I’m going off duty myself, but I’m not ready to head back to the carriage house just yet. Mind if I have a drink?”
I checked my liquor cabinet and found an unopened bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “I don’t have any mixer,” I called back to her, turning the burner off and moving the wok off the eye.
“Vodka’s fine. Just ice, if you have any.”
I plopped a couple of cubes in the glass, made myself a Kahlua and cream, and carried the two drinks back into the living room. She took a healthy swig from hers. “Thanks, bud. That’s good.”
“So what brings you by? I mean, not that you can’t just stop by whenever you want—you’re always welcome, you know that—but…”
She gave me a look. “Ah, you know me too well, MacLeod.” She reached into her bag and handed me a manila envelope. “Thought you might want to take a look at this.”
“What is it?” I put it down on the coffee table. It was thick and sealed with tape.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re planning to do with yourself these days, but I figure you gotta do something, right? Or go nuts, like the rest of us, and what with all the post-traumatic stress shit and everyone popping pills like M&M’s…I talked to my boss and he agreed that it would be okay to let you have this.” She took another drink. “Look, my crime scene for the Verlaine
murder is all fucked to shit. I drove out there this morning, just to be sure, and yeah, Iris’s house took at least ten feet of water. And it’s not like I’ve got the time—or Blaine has the time—to do anything about it. You’re kind of involved in a way, since she hired you…I don’t know if that has anything to do with her being killed or not, but you never know.”
I looked at the envelope. “So this is...”
“Copies of our notes, files, crime scene photos, everything we’ve got.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it. It was on NOPD letterhead and was signed by the police superintendent himself. I scanned it. Basically, it was a letter authorizing me, as an official consultant to the New Orleans Police Department, to enter Iris’ property as well as conduct my own investigation into the murder. “That,” she nodded at the paper in my hand, “will get you into the neighborhood without any trouble, and will keep you from being arrested if you get caught on the property. You’re not on payroll, but you’re officially investigating the crime at the request of the New Orleans Police Department. You just need to keep me informed of what’s going on. You can’t break any laws or procedures to get evidence—anything you might dig up has to hold up in court, but you know all about that from your days on the force—and if you need me to open any doors for you, just call me and I’ll take care of it all.”
“Wow. This is kind of unusual.” Usually Venus was all over my ass for getting mixed up in criminal investigations and warning me off.