by Greg Herren
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. Consider yourself deputized.” She finished the drink and held it up for me. I got the bottle, filled her glass, and left it on the coffee table. “I hate loose ends, you know that. It just doesn’t seem right to me that we just forget about that woman. Someone killed her … and even if the killer evacuated and is thousands of miles away, she deserves better, you know? It’s not right. It’s just not right.” She took another swig of vodka.
“So, I gather you don’t think she was really killed because she walked in on a robbery.” I tasted my own drink. It wasn’t bad. Jude drank Kahlua, which was why I had some in the house. I generally preferred something stronger, but I didn’t feel like anesthetizing myself. At least not yet—maybe later.
“That’s what the killer wanted us to think.” Venus shrugged. “Messed the place up a bit, but he didn’t take her purse. She had all her credit cards and about four hundred bucks in cash in her wallet. Sure, maybe he freaked after he killed her and just got the fuck out of there, but it didn’t sit right with me. She was dead, no one was coming, no one knew she was there—and the alarm had been deactivated. Someone knew the alarm code, or she let her killer into the house. Now why would she let a burglar—or any stranger—into the house? And when she got home, if the alarm was off, wouldn’t that have sent her right back out of the house?”
“Maybe she forgot to activate it,” I suggested. “That morning, when she left.” As a security consultant, I knew that often happened. People would get in a rush, running late, and wouldn’t think to set the alarm as they ran out. And even if they did remember to set it—particularly in the morning, when most are still foggy with sleep and not quite awake—when they came home and found the alarm wasn’t set, they just assumed they forgot.
“Security company records show the alarm was turned off at seven-thirty that night, by someone who knew the alarm code.” Venus took another drink. “So either she did it, or someone else who knew it did.” She set the glass down and refilled it. “I think the killer went there specifically to kill her. It had nothing to do with a robbery or anything like that. Someone wanted Iris Verlaine dead. I can’t prove it, and I don’t have any evidence to back me up. Call it a gut instinct, a hunch, whatever. But that was not an interrupted robbery. It wasn’t a break-in.” She sighed, and polished off her new drink. “But who the fuck knows now?” She put the glass down and stood up. “All right. I’ll leave you to it. But you know how you get a gut feeling when you see a crime scene? This one just didn’t feel right.” She weaved a little bit, and the words were a little slurred.
“So you think her death might have something to do with her trying to find her father?”
“You like coincidences?” She threw her arms up in the air dramatically. “I sure as fuck don’t.”
“No. No, I don’t,” I replied. “Her brother is paying me to keep looking.”
Her eyebrow went up. “Better keep an eye on him or something bad might happen to him.” She barked out a laugh. “Listen to me. Like something bad didn’t happen to all of us.” She rubbed her eyes. “Christ, what a fucking mess, huh? You gonna stay?”
I shrugged. “New Orleans is home.”
She clenched a fist and punched it into the palm of her other hand. “That’s what I keep telling myself. This is home. I’ve lived here my whole life—grew up in the Lower Ninth. The house I grew up in is gone. The house where I raised my girls is gone. I don’t want to live in that carriage house the rest of my life, but where am I going to live? Sometimes I think I should just pick a place and move. I’m close to retiring. Maybe I should just pack it all in, take early retirement, move close to one of my daughters. I’m going to be a grandmother some day. Might be nice to watch those kids grow up. And this isn’t a city for the living anymore. It’s a city for the dead.”
The door closed behind her.
Chapter Five
I decided not to meet Paige and the rest at the Avenue Pub that night.
I just wanted to be alone. I needed some time to myself, to think and put my house in order. It was something that was way overdue.
After Venus left, I made myself another drink. So what if it was only four in the afternoon? That kind of thing didn’t matter anymore—not that it ever had in New Orleans. I added a healthy dose of Grey Goose to my second Kahlua and cream, took a drink—the vodka added the perfect bite to the drink—and got my bag of pot out of my suitcase. I sat back down on the couch and rolled a joint. I took the joint and the drink out to the front porch and sat down on the stoop. A city bus rolled by, completely empty other than the driver. There was a refrigerator out on the curb on the other side of the park, so someone else had come back—there were also lights on in the house and a car parked at the curb. There were piles of full garbage bags around the refrigerator, and written in black magic marker on the refrigerator’s door was Fix Everything My Ass, with the letters FEMA circled. The entire thing was taped shut with black duct tape. It made me smile a bit as I lit the joint and took a hit. That, I figured, was the spirit of New Orleans—a defiant fuck you to the federal government written on a ruined appliance. I looked out at the park and took a sip of my drink.
It never entered my mind until talking to Allen and Venus that New Orleans wouldn’t be rebuilt, that everyone wouldn’t come home, that everyone wouldn’t stay. I was so wrapped up in my own misery I hadn’t paid any attention to anything other than myself. I was a selfish bastard. Sure, things were bad—the only way things could be worse was if the entire city had been destroyed, but that hadn’t happened. Most of the city might be gone, but parts of it remained, including my neighborhood. Sure, driving Uptown had been unsettling, but there had been signs of life reemerging from the strange hibernation the city seemed to be in. The fresh produce in the Sav-a-Center and its full parking lot and the reopening of Bodytech were signs that the city would slowly come back to life. Several other businesses had been open, or had signs up proudly announcing that they were planning to reopen as soon as possible. It wasn’t completely hopeless. Let the federal government bitch and argue about whether to fund the rebuilding process—New Orleans would do it, with or without their help. This disaster had been mind-boggling, but the city had never bowed down and given up before—not in the face of yellow fever epidemics that killed half the population, not in the face of the horrible river flood of 1927, or Hurricane Betsy, or any of the other countless horrors since the French landed back in 1718.
As long as there were people who loved New Orleans, there would always be hope.
Hope. That was something I’d had a short supply of for a long time. Since Paul died, in fact. I’d kind of been sleepwalking through my life ever since the funeral. I’d been smoking too much pot, drinking too much. I’d fallen into the relationship with Jude for all the wrong reasons—to put the pain aside while I found release in his arms, and now I’d hurt him. “Who the hell are you kidding, Chanse?” I said out loud, taking another hit and holding the smoke in till it burst from my lungs in an explosive hacking cough. I took another swig of my drink to cool my burning throat. “You’ve been walking around under a dark cloud your entire fucking life.”
In a moment of clarity, probably enhanced by the pot and the liquor, I knew I was on to something. I took another drink. “You’re nothing but a big fucking downer. And you wonder why people leave you? Why everyone heads for the hills the first chance they get? What do you have to offer anyone other than misery?”
So many people were worse off than I was. So many people had lost everything, had been caught in unfathomable suffering in the city for days without food and water. People had been trapped on rooftops awaiting rescue for days, begging for help, praying. People had died—and no one was really sure how many. People were missing. And here I sat, on my front porch, with liquor and a joint. My apartment was intact. I hadn’t lost anything. Katrina had taken nothing from me. The storm and the flood had just driven me away from home for a while, but I had a home to
come to and I was back. My possessions were still there. My apartment was no different than the day I’d left. Hell, Paige had even saved my goddamned refrigerator by cleaning it out before the food rotted and ruined it.
I was fucking lucky. I hadn’t had to go to a shelter. I wasn’t waiting for a FEMA trailer.
Allen might lose his relationship after eighteen years, and his home as well, if Greg decided to sell it. Venus had lost everything, her entire life—possessions, mementoes, photographs—and the house she’d invested in was now worth nothing.
And here I was, with my life pretty intact and feeling sorry for myself, playing “poor, poor pitiful me.”
What a load of bullshit.
And it was about goddamned time I was grateful for what I had.
I’d been a shitty boyfriend to Paul—that was true. I hadn’t even allowed myself to realize how much I loved him, how much I needed him, until he was lying in a hospital bed in a coma being kept alive by machines. No, I kept him at arm’s length, throwing away happiness with both hands, and I’d been too goddamned stupid to realize I was doing it. And for what? Because my first love had walked out on me in college and I was afraid of getting hurt again? Well, that plan sure the fuck had worked out well for me, hadn’t it?
I’d done the same thing with Jude.
Paul would hate what I’d become. Paul would hate how I treated Jude.
*
“You need to move on,” Paul’s mother, Fee, had told me the last time I’d gone to Albuquerque to visit Paul’s grave. She had a thick Irish accent, being from County Cork. She was a short woman, with ivory-colored skin and black hair shot through with gray. But despite her petite size, she ruled her brood of much larger sons with an iron fist. Her husband, Ian, was also a large man, but there was no question which one of them ran the Maxwell family or the family business, an Irish pub always filled with music and laughter. I hadn’t met her until Paul was in the hospital, and she and the entire Maxwell family had flown in. Each and every one of them had treated me like a member of the family, something I’d neither expected nor deserved. After he died I had spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas in Albuquerque with them, and even with Paul gone, his parents and his siblings still called, still emailed, still treated me like I was a Maxwell.
It was an amazing feeling, to be part of a family for the first time in my life.
We’d stood, Fee and I, in the cemetery, our arms around each other, looking down at the beautiful marble headstone with Paul’s name, the dates of his birth and his death, and “Heaven called another angel, only too soon” carved into its smooth face. “I am worried about you, son.” She looked up at me, her green eyes that Paul had inherited concerned and lined with worry. “You need to move on.”
I loved that she called me son. “I can’t, Fee, I can’t.”
“Do you think any son of mine would want you to be miserable and lonely for the rest of your life?” Fee pulled away from me, the twinkle in her eyes belying the severity of her words. “That wasn’t my son, that isn’t any of my children. I didn’t raise them that way. Paul would want you to be happy. And Paul would not want you to blame yourself for what happened to him, Chanse. He wasn’t that way, and you know it. Things happen for a reason, and it’s not always for us to know why. For whatever reason, this is how God wanted it to be. It was his time to go, Chanse, and there’s nothing you could have done to change that. God will have His own way.”
I knew she was right, but somehow I couldn’t make that empty feeling go away. The guilt was too much for me to just walk away from.
“Do you honestly think Paul would blame you?” She shook her head. “If he’d lived, do you think he would have walked away from you and blamed you for everything that had happened, for his almost dying? It wasn’t your fault, Chanse. You have to realize that. It was not your fault. And Paul would have never blamed you. Of course not! He loved you, Chanse, and your happiness was the most important thing to him. And I’ll tell you something else, mister. You are not honoring his memory by treating Jude the way you are.” She pointed her index finger at me. “He loved Jude too. Jude was important to him, just as you were, and he would be happy that the two of you have found each other. Has it ever occurred to you, in all your self-pity and misery, that maybe Jude was the one you were meant to be with all along? That Paul came into your life simply as a means to bring the two of you together?”
“That’s impossible.” I shook my head. “That can’t be true.”
“You don’t know the mind of God.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and walked back to where we’d parked her car.
I’d flown back home the next day, and that following weekend was when Jude came, when I’d screwed everything up. And then came the bitch Katrina.
I walked back inside and looked up at the print on my fireplace. It was a black-and-white full-sized print of Paul, naked, from the back. It was a gorgeous photograph, with impressive lines, and the use of shadow to create the illusion of life was stunning. He was standing against a brick wall, his back to the camera, both of his arms stretched out over his head, every muscle in his back rippling and flowing. It showed all his strength, yet at the same time the way his head was turned somehow gave the sense of vulnerability, of gentleness, of a kind heart. The photographer had somehow managed to capture, on film, exactly who he was, his beautiful soul. It was a masterpiece, and had hung in Paul’s apartment. Fee had given it to me when we’d cleaned out his apartment, before we’d gone to Albuquerque for the funeral.
“Are you doing okay, son?” Fee asked as I stared at the framed image. She had her hair tied up in a scarf, and a smudge of dust marred her cheek. She was taping shut a box of clothes we were having taken over to the Bridge House store.
I’d managed to pick out a few things of Paul’s that I wanted to keep—a watch he loved, a necklace he always wore, a couple of his favorite shirts, a blue wool blanket he had bought in Mexico that was the most comfortable blanket I’d ever slept beneath in my life, and a few photographs—and had already placed them in the car.
“I’d like to keep this, if you don’t mind, or want it,” I said, looking at the small mole just above the left butt cheek. I’d always loved that mole, the one blemish on an almost completely perfect body, the flaw that made him even more beautiful.
“Lord, Chanse, like I’m going to be hanging a naked picture of one of me boys in my house?” She roared with laughter. “Yes, I think he’d want you to have that, of course he would.” She came over and put her arm around my waist. “But are you doing okay, Chanse?”
“I’ll be fine.” That was my mantra, the thing I said whenever anyone—a Maxwell, Paige, Blaine, Venus, any of the people who knew what I’d lost—asked me how I was. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to deal with it, to get through my pain, by myself. I always had, and I wasn’t used to the notion of sharing emotions and feelings with other people. Wasn’t that the fatal flaw in my relationship with Paul? My inability to let go, to break down the reserve I’d built in my childhood to keep other people out?
“I don’t think you’re fine.” Fee shrugged. “But if you aren’t ready to talk to me, to get it out, that’s fine too. Just be careful, son.”
“Careful?”
“Sometimes when you try to handle enormous pain by yourself, all you do is keep the wound fresh rather than letting it scab over and heal.” She gestured to the print. “If your purpose in keeping that is to look at it and keep picking the scab off, then I’ll keep it, thank you very much. That isn’t healthy, it isn’t right, and it isn’t what my Paul would have wanted. You’re family, now, whether you like it or not, and we Maxwells always say what we think.”
“That isn’t what I’ll do with it. I promise.”
“All right, then.” She climbed up on a stool and took it down, handing it to me, her green eyes dancing. She pointed a finger at me. “But if I ever find out you’re talking to it, or pretending you can communicate with him thro
ugh it, I’ll come back here and take me scissors to it, until all that’s left is confetti, and I will burn it, do you understand me?” She put her arm around me. “You’re one of us, now, and you will always be. The fact we’ve lost him will never change that, you hear? You are one of us now…and there will always be a place at our table, there will always be a room for you in our house. And the good Lord help you if you ever forget that.”
I looked at the picture, and for the first time, I broke my promise to Fee.
I sat down on the couch. “Paul, I’m so sorry about everything. I miss you so much, wish I could do everything all over again.” I rubbed my eyes.
“I love you, Chanse,” Paul had said to me that last Sunday morning we were together. We’d slept late, having stayed up really late watching a tearjerker movie starring Susan Sarandon, and then making love before drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms. I’d gotten up and made coffee, bringing him a cup to wake him up. He flashed his blue eyes at me, his sensual thick lips spreading in a delighted, sleepy smile.
“Oh, you’re just saying that because I brought you coffee,” I teased as I slid underneath the covers and pressed up against his warm body.
“Don’t be so dismissive.” He snuggled up against me. “I love the fact that you woke me up with a cup of coffee because you knew that would make me happy.” He took another big drink from the massive mug I’d gotten for him. His coffee addiction was intense. He said it came from having to get up so many mornings at four for flights when he’d been a flight attendant, and he could drink an entire pot of coffee by himself every morning. He got me to start buying a higher grade of beans and grinding the coffee myself rather than buying it in a jar. He got me to start filtering the water for the coffee so it would be free of impurities and taste better. He taught me to clean the coffee maker once a month with white vinegar so the coffee would taste pure. He would drink a normal-sized cup of coffee in two gulps, so when I saw the huge mug at a coffee shop in Uptown, I bought it as a joke. But in typical Paul fashion, he loved it and always brought it with him when he spent the night, telling me he couldn’t drink coffee out of anything else now that I’d given him the perfect coffee mug. It was beige with a black fleur-de-lis on each side, and written under the symbol on both sides were the words, “New Orleans—we take coffee seriously.”