by Greg Herren
“I don’t even know where you can get another deadbolt—the Ace Hardware on Magazine hasn’t reopened. Maybe you can find one on the West bank or in Metairie.”
Venus slipped on a pair of gloves and turned the knob, whistling as she surveyed the mess inside. “Well, your electronics are all still here.” She gave me a half-smile. “Can you tell if anything is missing?”
“The only thing of value in the whole place is the electronics, and all of that is still here.” I replied, pointing to my computer, the DVD player, and the television. “Damn, what a fucking mess.”
“Well…” Venus closed the door again, and motioned for us all to sit on the stoop. “No point in going in there until they dust for prints and things.” She whistled. “Now, I don’t know what to think.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well—” Blaine looked at Venus, and she nodded slowly. “We were thinking about a whole new direction on the Verlaine case, but if someone tossed your place…I don’t know.”
“New direction?” I looked at both of them. “What the hell—”
“Chanse, you know as well as I do when someone is murdered, unless it was a random thing, most times the killer is someone close to the victim—and most likely very close. A spouse, a parent, a sibling.” Venus reached into my shirt pocket and removed my cigarette pack, shook one out, and lit up. “One thing we didn’t think about—mainly because we didn’t have time—was who benefited from Iris’s death? What were her financials like, who inherited her money?” She inhaled, coughed, made a face, and flicked the cigarette out into the street. “And we leaped to the conclusion that since she’d hired you the morning she was killed, that it might have something to do with her trying to find her father—we just never thought about the financial angle…” She sighed. “And part of it is this post-Katrina malaise or whatever the fuck you want to call it. My mind just isn’t as sharp as it was before, you know? I’m kind of pissed at myself for not thinking about that. But now with Joshua Verlaine dead…who benefits if both Joshua and Iris die?”
“Darrin Verlaine,” I replied. “The old man is in poor health and won’t last much longer. With Iris and Joshua out of the way, Darrin stands to inherit everything. He’s all that’s left.”
“Bingo.” Venus gave me a wink. “There’s no one else. They are the last of the family—Margot’s children. And now two of them are gone…hundreds of millions of dollars, Chanse. Hundreds of millions of motives.”
“So you think Joshua was murdered?” Much as I hated to admit it, it made the most sense. But it also meant that everything else was coincidence—both Iris and Joshua hiring me, the hit-and-run, and the tossing of my office. But then again, they could all be related to the financial gain motive. Darrin Verlaine might not know why they’d hired me; Iris hadn’t told Joshua; why would she tell Darrin? In his mind, I was a complication that might need to be taken care of.
“And just what the hell was he doing up on the roof of the house in the middle of the night? I can’t believe he was just up there for the hell of it—so I doubt it was an accidental fall. And I don’t believe it was suicide, either.”
Venus shrugged. “Not the way he landed. People who jump off roofs don’t fall backward.” She rolled her eyes. “I hate dealing with rich people, you know? The old man was sedated—the doctor wouldn’t let me anywhere near him, and the only other people who live in the house are Darrin and that bodyguard—what’s his name?”
“Lenny Pousson,” Blaine replied. “Both he and Darrin claim they were in their rooms all night and heard nothing. But Darrin’s suite of rooms is right next to Joshua’s on the second floor—and he could easily have knocked his brother unconscious, carried him up to the roof, and just pitched him over. He’s in pretty good shape.”
“I don’t know—why would he do it himself?” I replied. “What about Lenny Pousson? He could have done it as well as Darrin.”
“You got a motive?” Venus raised an eyebrow. “He’s just a longtime employee—why would he suddenly start knocking off the Verlaine heirs? I seriously doubt he’s in the old man’s will.”
I shrugged. “Look, Iris hired me to find her father—the same day, she’s shot. Then Joshua hires me to find their father, and now he’s dead. If it was just one victim, I’d be more inclined to believe it’s just a coincidence—but both of them? No, I can’t prove anything—but listen to this.” I laid out everything I’d learned and what I’d been thinking since leaving Cortez. I also told them about the hit-and-run, and showed them the back of the car. “Now, don’t you both think that’s odd? I’m telling you, all of this has something to do with Michael Mercereau.”
“You seriously think the old man killed his son-in-law?” Blaine shook his head.
“The old man is a serious homophobe.” I shrugged. “And so is Lenny Pousson. Think about it, Blaine. His only son is killed in a car accident. All he has left is his daughter, and he focuses all his energies on her. She marries, not some Garden District prince, but some poor kid from the Lower Ninth Ward who wants to be a painter. I am sure he approved of that. And then he finds out the son-in-law, who he’s never approved of, is gay.”
“I don’t know, Chanse.” Venus shook her head. “It seems a bit of a stretch.”
“Have you ever actually met the old man, talked to him?” I lit a cigarette. “Trust me, he’s capable of it, all right. So he has the son-in-law killed—no body is ever found; they spread the story that he just abandoned the family. Whether Margot ever knew the truth, I’m not sure. And then Iris decides she wants to find her dad, and hires me.”
“And so he has her killed?” Now Blaine shook his head. “And then his other grandson? He’s just mowing down his family to cover up a thirty-year-old crime? It doesn’t wash for me, Chanse. No one has found the body for over thirty years. Thirty years. After all this time—there’s no way there’s any evidence to be found. You don’t even know for a fact that Michael is dead.”
He had a point. “The key to all this is Cathy Hollis. I’m telling you. She knows the truth and they’ve had her locked up for years to keep this secret.”
“I need more than that.” Venus replied.
“She knows more than she was willing to tell me,” I insisted. “I mean, she told me the date he disappeared…that’s a place to start. And that date means something…” I drove my fist down onto my knee. “I just can’t figure out why.”
“What was the date?” Venus asked.
“June 23rd, 1973,” I replied.
“Oh my God.” Blaine paled. Venus just shrugged again. “You two don’t know that date?”
“Should we?” Venus asked.
Blaine shook his head. “That was the date of the Upstairs Lounge fire.”
Chapter Fourteen
I have an absolutely terrible memory—I always have.
As a result, I was not a good student. I never made the honor roll, and often I was lucky to squeak by with a passing grade. I could study my ass off, trying to commit things to memory, and then on test day my mind would be a complete blank. I graduated from LSU with one-tenth of a grade point over what was required to get my diploma. I barely kept my head above water in grade school and junior high, but once I got to high school and became a standout on the football field, my grades inexplicably became better—I’m sure my success as an athlete had nothing to do with that.
My strength is the security end of my business. It’s very easy for me to look at a system and determine where it is vulnerable, which is why Crown Oil pays me such a huge sum of money. I’m also good at proving insurance fraud and adultery. I’m terrible at murders, though. I just can’t wrap my mind around them; I can’t seem to get inside the heads of people who would actually kill another human being. Granted, there were times when I personally wanted to kill someone else, but my own morality always kicked in—it’s usually just a fleeting thought in a moment of anger, like when some idiot cuts me off in traffic. I don’t understand people who don’t have the m
ental block to actually taking another life. To me, there’s never enough justification to take another life. Trying to understand someone who is cold enough to commit murder just doesn’t work for me. So I generally don’t like to get involved in homicide investigations more complicated than someone snapping in a moment of rage. That I can understand; I can’t understand people who can plan a murder in cold blood.
I’d killed a man once—and his death haunted me for quite some time. I wasn’t even completely sure I was over it yet. And it wasn’t cold-blooded; it was self-defense and had I not killed him, he certainly would have killed me.
Life is just too sacred to me—and Paul’s death had brought that belief home to me even more forcefully.
That was one of the reasons I left the New Orleans police department. I knew I didn’t have what it took to make detective grade, and the thought of spending the rest of my life punching a time card and riding in patrol cars terrified me. I also knew that at some point I was going to have to use my gun, and the thought of even shooting another human being, as my two years passed, became even more unappealing to me. I also had to take into consideration the toll on my body from years of bad coffee and junk food, one I could see every time I looked at a twenty-year veteran of car patrol. I couldn’t ride a horse, so the mounted duty in the Quarter was also out. The only other option for me would be a desk job—and I couldn’t see myself sitting at a desk pushing paper forty hours a week either.
I also have never been a huge fan of taking orders without question.
I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten the date of the fire at the Upstairs Lounge.
What made it worse was that I’d actually attended the ceremony where a memorial plaque commemorating the victims was placed in the sidewalk at the corner where the bar used to be. Paige had been assigned to cover it for the Times-Picayune, and had asked me to come along. When she mentioned it to me, I didn’t even know what she was talking about. I’d never heard of the Upstairs Lounge fire, which resulted in my receiving a lecture as well as copies of all the articles from the newspaper morgue about it.
Reading them made me sick to my stomach.
The Upstairs Lounge was a gay bar located in the French Quarter at the corner of Iberville and Chartres Streets. Fairly popular back in the days when almost every gay man or lesbian in New Orleans was deeply closeted, before there was a gay pride celebration or a gay paper, it was one of the few havens in the city where gays could gather and be themselves. It still boggled my mind that as recently as thirty years ago it was dangerous to be openly gay in New Orleans. It was a completely different time, a different mentality. Homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder—one that could get a queer locked up in a mental hospital and given electric shock treatments. Not only were queers deep in the closet, many of them got married and had children—satisfying their true sexual needs on the side, always afraid of the ruin that would follow upon being found out. The Upstairs Lounge was one of the few havens they had—and while everyone in the Quarter knew it was a queer bar, most people simply looked the other way. The existence of queers wasn’t a secret, but as long as it was kept quiet and no one had to really be confronted with it, an uneasy coexistence was possible.
On that fateful Sunday afternoon in June, over twenty people were gathered in the bar, relaxing and enjoying themselves. They had a beer bust every Sunday afternoon: one dollar and all the beer you could drink. There was a piano, and often the people in the bar would gather around it and sing along with whoever was there and could play. The bar was on the second floor, accessed by a staircase. There was a buzzer installed at the bottom of the stairs for identity protection—if you called a cab, they would buzz to let you know to come down. That way no one ever had to hang around on the corner waiting…and thus run the risk of being exposed as a queer.
That afternoon, someone opened the door at the foot of the stairs and threw a Molotov cocktail. As soon as the stairs were engulfed in flame, the arsonist rang the buzzer. The bartender asked if anyone had called a cab—and since no one had, he went over to the big steel door to shout down to the cabbie it was a mistake. The backdraft created by opening the door sucked the flames into the bar, where they fed on the air and the flammable decorations. Within seconds, the bar became an inferno. Most of the windows had burglar bars on them, and there was only one way out. Only a few of the patrons managed to escape. Almost everyone who was inside the bar either died there or in the hospital. It was one of the most fatal fires in the history of a city known for fires. Many of the victims’ families turned their backs on them and refused to claim the bodies. One, a teacher, was fired while lying on his deathbed. Some bodies were never identified.
The heat was so intense some of the bodies fused together.
And the arsonist was never caught.
It was without question one of the most horrible moments in the history of the city of New Orleans. Churches refused to have memorial services for the victims. The governor, who would eventually would go to jail for accepting bribes, never made an announcement about one of the most fatal fires in Louisiana history.
But out of the horror, the queer community of New Orleans was born. The reaction of city and state officials—or their lack of reaction—made people angry. People started coming out. Activism began in an indolent city where most people couldn’t be bothered to get involved. Within a few years, New Orleans became a haven of tolerance for gays and lesbians throughout the South. And although homophobia was never completely eradicated, the city no longer tolerated it in an official capacity. New Orleans was one of the first cities in the country to recognize gay couples and offer partner benefits. And despite the heavily conservative beliefs of the rest of the state, New Orleans refused to give in. New Orleans welcomed gay tourism, encouraged gay businesses, and was proud of its open-minded reputation. Sure, every once in a while there might be a gay bashing, but it wasn’t locals committing hate crimes—there’s a live and let live mentality in the city. Those kinds of crimes were committed by homophobic thugs coming in from one of the outer parishes around the city. You know, the dopes who sit around drinking beer and then go hunting gays for sport, as if we were deer or ducks, not human beings.
“Oh my God,” I said in response to Blaine, lighting another cigarette. “Michael Mercereau could easily have been one of the unidentified bodies.” Despite the slight fog of the Xanax, my mind raced ahead. “Obviously, the Verlaines would have never claimed the body—let alone even admitted there was a possibility he could be there. And so Michael just vanished…”
“That’s a possibility,” Blaine said with a shudder, and ran a hand through his curls.
“I wonder…” Possibilities were whirling around in my head. “Maybe Percy hired someone to get rid of Michael, and…”
“But don’t you think that’s a bit of overkill? Are you thinking that Percy Verlaine hired an arsonist and killed all those people to get at his son-in-law? I mean, Percy’s a mean old bastard, but—”
“And what guarantee did he have that Michael would even be there that afternoon?” Venus finished for him. “No, Chanse, I don’t believe it. I can believe Michael Mercereau was one of the unidentified victims, but I don’t believe Percy Verlaine was behind the fire.” She shook her head. “It’s possible, of course, but it’s really a bit of a reach. You think the killer just walked around for weeks waiting for a chance, carrying a Molotov cocktail with him, in case Mercereau went into that bar? That doesn’t work for me…it seems like a really sloppy way for a hired killer to work. It would be much more likely he’d have shot Mercereau and dumped the body somewhere. And besides, there’s no physical evidence, for one thing—and it would be pretty damned hard to find any after all this time. And I seriously doubt that Percy would have his own grandchildren knocked off on the off chance that you’d find out their father died in that fire. You might have been able to prove Mercereau was one of the unidentified victims, but no offense, babe, but you’d never be able to connect
Percy Verlaine to the arson.”
Put that way, my theory went down in flames. But I grasped at a straw. “Then why did they lock Catherine Hollis away all these years?”
“Chanse.” Venus patted my leg. “Maybe she is mentally unbalanced.”
There was nothing to say to that. All I had was my gut feeling, and I didn’t have a medical degree. Just because she seemed rational and in control to me didn’t mean she was.
*
The lab techs pulled up a few moments later, ending the conversation. It took them about an hour to photograph everything, dust for prints, and do all the things they had to do—which meant making a big mess even bigger. When they finally finished, both Venus and Blaine offered to help me clean up. I turned down the offer—I hate having other people go through my stuff—as well as an offer for a place to spend the night. I got them to help me push my loveseat over to block the door, and then sent them home. I put the rest of the furniture back where it belonged, picked up all the paper and made stacks on my desk, and wiped down every surface before giving in to exhaustion and going to bed.
I didn’t sleep well, not that I expected to. I kept waking up throughout the night, and never really went into a deep sleep. I tossed and turned, thinking maybe that if I found a really comfortable position I’d finally lose myself in sleep. It never happened. It seemed like I was looking at the clock every five minutes, and every so often I’d hear a noise in the front of the house that would make me sit bolt upright in bed, my ears cocked, listening. It was a mistake not to stay over at Blaine’s. My house had already been violated once, and without the ability to lock the front door, I didn’t feel safe. And considering how much death was hovering over this investigation, even having my gun on the nightstand didn’t make me feel safer.
Finally, at seven in the morning I gave up on sleep and got out of bed. I took a shower, drank some coffee, and went into the living room and started reorganizing all my files.