by Greg Herren
I was itching to get out of there and get home, but I could understand her caution. If two people had been killed because of what was on that recorder… “You might want to think about getting out of town for a while, “I said casually. “Is there somewhere you could go?”
She smiled as the elevator doors started to close. “I’ll find somewhere.”
It took another couple of minutes before another elevator came, and I could feel my own nerves starting to get the better of me as I waited. In the elevator on the way down, I pulled out the recorder. It was the same make and model as mine, which was good—I already had the software I needed loaded in my computer, and I didn’t need an instruction manual.
The sky was overcast as I got into my car—roiling black clouds moving in fast from the river, and lightning flashed over the west bank of the river as I started it up. My cell phone rang. It was Allen. I debated for a moment taking it, but the recorder was too important. Allen could wait.
I put the car into drive and headed home.
Chapter Seventeen
I couldn’t get home fast enough. The digital recorder felt like it was burning a hole in my shirt pocket. Iris had been a good detective—hell, she’d been a better one than I’d been thus far, but on the other hand, she’d had access to financial records at Verlaine Shipping that I hadn’t—and she’d had some idea of what she was looking for. I could guess what was on this digital file. It was the evidence she needed to force her grandfather to make her president of the company—whatever that might be. It was also the reason she’d been killed.
I parked in the lot beside the house and went inside as fast as I could. I switched on lights as I went—the storm was rolling in and the entire house was dark. I turned on my computer and while it booted up, I dug out the connection cable for my digital recorder. I downloaded the file into my computer and turned up the volume. My finger trembling, I pressed the play key.
The first few seconds were silence, and then it began with Iris talking.
“Hello, Aunt Cathy. Thanks for agreeing to see me. How are you?”
“I don’t know you. They said you were my cousin, but I don’t have any women cousins other than Margot, and they told me she died. But you kind of look like her, only you’re prettier.”
“I’m Margot’s daughter, Iris.”
“Margot didn’t have a daughter. She had two boys, Joshua and Darrin. They were sweet boys, but they never come to see me. Family doesn’t mean what it used to, I guess.”
“Well, I’m here to see you now. You don’t know me because I was born after you came to stay here. Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“I don’t know you. Why have you come?”
“I’m Margot and Michael’s youngest child. Iris Verlaine. You remember my father, don’t you? You remember surely that my mother was pregnant before you went away? Well, I’m their daughter. My father went away before I was born, too. I want to talk to you about him.”
“I don’t want to talk about your father. I won’t talk about him.”
“But I want to talk about him. I never knew him, and you’re one of the few people left who knew him who is still alive. My mother would never talk about him—and neither will my grandfather.”
“Then why should I? I have nothing to say about Michael, not now, not ever.”
“Please, Aunt Cathy, won’t you tell me about my father? Please?”
“Talking about your father is what got me locked up in this place, and I am never ever going to talk about him again.”
There was silence, and then Iris tried again.
“Well, can you tell me if my parents loved each other? Can you tell me at least that much?”
“Margot loved Michael very much. Almost too much, if you ask me. It wasn’t a healthy kind of love. Margot never understood that love sometimes means letting go. She always wanted to hold on to everything she loved.” Cathy laughed. “Margot wasn’t nearly as pretty as you are. There weren’t many men interested in her—I used to think Margot would marry the first man who paid any attention to her at all. And then your father came around. He was handsome, he was charming…and Margot fell for him very hard. She loved him, all right. She loved him far too much for it to be healthy.” More laughter. “But what do I know about it? What do I know about what’s right and what’s good and what’s healthy? Look where I am!”
“So she didn’t want my father to leave her?”
“Does any woman want to be left? I’m sure it destroyed her, made her bitter and angry—more so than she already was.”
“Did you like my mother? It doesn’t sound like you did very much.”
“I liked her well enough; she tried to be as nice to me as she could, given that I was just a poor relation…she was always kind to me, but no one in that house could ever let me forget I was just there on their charity. It’s a terrible thing, you know, to always be made to feel like you should be grateful for the least little kindness…but Margot did her best to make me feel like I was really her sister, not some poor cousin they’d taken in because it was either that or foster care… It was her father that was cruel. But his cruelty wasn’t just for me, it was for everyone…he enjoyed being cruel for the sake of cruelty. He was cruel to Margot, he was cruel to your Uncle Matthew while he was alive—I always thought it was a merciful release when Matthew got himself killed in that accident—just as Margot thought having children would change the way he treated her. It didn’t. Everyone was beneath Percy …and he thought Margot married beneath her. He hated Michael, because Michael just laughed at him, wouldn’t listen…he couldn’t get under Michael’s skin, and he knew it…he couldn’t control Michael the way he could control us…”
“He hasn’t changed. He’s still trying to control all of us.”
“Leopards don’t change their spots, do they? I hate Uncle Percy. I always have.”
“There are times when I almost hate him myself. If he weren’t my grandfather…”
“You want to know about your father? That wouldn’t please Uncle Percy, you know. He would hate that.”
“Yes, yes, I want to know. Please, won’t you reconsider and tell me? I’ve come a long, long way to hear what you know—no one has to know. It’s just for me. I want to know about my father.”
“You have to promise you won’t tell. I’ll get in trouble.”
“I won’t tell anyone. I swear to you.”
“I tried, you know. I tried to tell everyone, and all it got me was locked up in here. So I decided I wouldn’t talk about it anymore. Nobody wants to know the truth when it’s inconvenient, you know. It’s only when the truth is what they want to hear. You may not like it when you hear it. Do you promise not to tell anyone? You must promise!”
“It’ll be just between us, Aunt Cathy.”
“Your father was a wonderful man. He could make me laugh like no one else, and he was always up for a good time. And your mother, she didn’t mind. She had the boys to take care of, so she didn’t mind if he and I went out clubbing or to parties. She was very kind to me in that regard. Other people talked—thought I was sleeping with your father, of course. I had a terrible reputation; although if they really knew what I was doing it would have been much worse. Your father covered for me. He made it possible for me to do what I wanted by being my escort. Back then a woman’s reputation meant a lot, and I liked men.”
“Why didn’t you sleep with Dad?”
“I wasn’t his type.” Hysterical laughter. “But then neither was your mother.”
“What was his type?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Please tell me.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I’d rather know. Now I don’t know anything, please tell me.”
“Your father liked other men.”
Silence. “I suspected as much.”
“Your mother didn’t care as long as he was discreet. Discretion was everything in those days, Irene.”
“Iris.”
“So, I covered for him and he covered for me. We would go to clubs together, where I would meet men, where he would meet men, and we lived as we pleased, and it worked. I had an escort, so it was okay for me to go out, which I couldn’t do alone… Back then the only women who went anywhere alone were whores, and I was a Verlaine—a poor relation, but still a member of the family, and so I couldn’t risk a lot of talk… It would have gotten back to your grandfather, and then there would have been hell to pay. He was such a monster…but it was a good arrangement, and it would have gone on forever until I married—which I never wanted to do. I was not the marrying kind. Tie myself down to a man and lose all of my freedom, become one of those dreadfully dull Uptown women with no life other than her husband and her children? No, thank you, that wasn’t for me. I didn’t want anything to do with that, you can be sure of that. Your grandfather was desperate for me to marry; he wanted me to find a rich husband so he wouldn’t have to go on supporting me, but he couldn’t very well throw me out into the streets. He even tried to get me to marry that horrible Lenny Pousson…if you can believe that. How desperate would I have had to be to marry that son of a bitch?”
“You knew Lenny Pousson?”
“Oh, yes, I knew Lenny. Lenny was always around. You know, Lenny was in love with your mother, but he would have settled for me.” More laughter. “Poor Lenny. Since your father was a nobody from the Lower Ninth Ward, he thought he was good enough for your mother, too. He didn’t understand that your father was smart, handsome, and charming. So what if he was white trash? No one would ever talk to him and know it…Lenny was a yat, and would always be a yat. He thought he could marry into the Verlaine family and become a gentleman, as if that would be all it would take! But Percy was willing enough to let him marry me…as if I ever would. And then I found out exactly what kind of a monster Lenny was…and even then, Uncle Percy wanted me to marry him! He was perfectly willing to let me marry a monster, may he rot in hell for eternity.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was a horrible fight that night. That Saturday night before.”
“Before?”
“Before everything went to hell.”
“What was the fight about?”
“It was at the dinner table. Your father and I were going out to a party. Your mother was pregnant—that’s right, she must have been carrying you, you’re the one I never met, Irene—and Uncle Percy was angry about something, and made some horrible remark about me being a tramp or something, and your father got angry and they started shouting at each other, and then Uncle Percy said something like, ‘You think I don’t know what you are Michael but I do know… Everyone knows and everyone pities your wife and your children, who will have to grow up knowing their father was a pervert, how does that make you feel?’ and Margot got upset and ran out of the room, and Michael told Uncle Percy, ‘Better a pervert than a bigoted old monster incapable of love—and don’t act so high and mighty with me, old man—why don’t you ask your precious daughter who got her pregnant THIS time?’ and he grabbed me and pulled me out of the room, and we went to that party—I think it was at Barbara Palmer’s, I don’t remember whose party it was, and we got stinking drunk and then we went down to the Quarter, and we both picked up men and went to a nasty little motel on Esplanade Avenue… We drank some more and smoked some pot and your father took his boy to a room and I took mine to one and before dawn we snuck back into the house…and he invited me to meet him for a drink that Sunday afternoon at a bar on Chartres Street—we met there every Sunday to sing along with the piano player and drink beer with the other gay men and just get stinking drunk and then we would go to a little Greek diner just up the street and eat gyros to soak up the liquor before heading home. It was always a lot of fun. By the time I woke up that Sunday afternoon your father had already left the house. No one was around, not even your mother…so I had breakfast and drank mimosas and then got dressed and called a cab to go down to the Quarter… It was such a warm, beautiful day for late June…sunny and the sky was blue, but it wasn’t really humid like it usually is…I remember thinking what a beautiful day it was. I was wearing a white sundress and I thought I looked beautiful. I had the cab driver drop me on Canal Street and decided to walk the rest of the way in… On the next block from the bar where we would go to the diner for gyros were some bars that the sailors liked to go to and I always liked to walk by there when I looked pretty… I remember that day there was this gorgeous sailor from Italy, he was so beautiful but a little shy and he wanted to buy me a drink, so I thought why not and I went in and had my dirty martini and then told him I had to go, and then I walked out into the sunshine and started down the street, and that’s when I saw…”
Silence.
“Aunt Cathy?”
No response.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Please, Aunt Cathy.”
“No, no, every time I’ve talked about it I’ve gotten into trouble. You know what they did to me when they first brought me here? They strapped electrodes to my forehead and ran shocks through my brain to try to make me forget what I saw, and all the time they kept telling me that I was imagining it all, that none of it ever happened, that I was delusional…so I decided that I’d never talk about it again. I won’t. You can’t make me.”
“But you’ve already told me so much!”
“You have to forget everything I’ve said, and you must swear to me you will never repeat anything I’ve said.”
“I already promised you I wouldn’t. Please tell me, Aunt Cathy. My father would want me to know!”
“Maybe he would at that…”
“Please!”
“I walked down the street. It was so pretty out, and I was in a good mood and I was a little buzzed, and then I saw Lenny Pousson, standing outside the door to the stairs. I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is Lenny doing there?’ He was holding a bottle, and I couldn’t figure it out, why was he there and why did he have his own liquor, the Upstairs Lounge has a full bar, and surely Lenny isn’t queer, and then he shoved a cloth into the mouth of the bottle, lit a book of matches, and set it on fire …then he threw it inside, and shut the door…and then as I stood there staring, he rang the buzzer, the one the cabbies always used to let the bartender know there was a cab waiting, and I just stood there and it happened so fast I couldn’t think what to do, I could hear people screaming, and the flames were everywhere and I started screaming and I ran down there because I knew your father was inside waiting for me…and then I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital…and I kept trying to tell them, but they just said I was hysterical and kept drugging me, and I kept on and on and then they brought me here. And I’ve been here ever since.”
“You’re telling me that Lenny Pousson set a fire that killed my father?”
“Not just your father, Irene. Not just your father… A lot of people died in there. And then I woke up in the hospital and I tried to tell them, but they told me I’d imagined the whole thing, and I tried to convince them that Lenny had started the fire, and then Percy himself came to see me, and he told me I needed to shut my mouth or I would be sorry.”
“He threatened you?”
“I wanted to talk to Margot, I wanted to talk to the police, I wanted to talk to anyone who would listen—but they kept drugging me. And then I woke up here, and they kept telling me I was crazy.”
“So, my grandfather knew.”
“Of course he knew! Lenny never had an original thought in his mind. He would have never thought to set a fire, he would have never thought to murder your father and a bunch of innocent people… Of course, it was your grandfather’s idea. Lenny always did his dirty work; he was happy to do anything for money…he was like a lapdog with your grandfather. Anything the great Percy Verlaine wanted, Lenny was only too happy to do for him.”
“Who was my father, Aunt Cathy?”
Laughter. “I don’t know. Michael suspected, but he never told me. And you promised me you wouldn’t tell anyone about the fire. You mustn’t, because then they would come after me. Lenny would come up here and take care of me—or they’ll shock me again. You know they threatened me with a lobotomy once… It’s where they stick an ice pick through your eye socket and scramble your brains so you can’t really think anymore. Every once in a while when I don’t do what they want me to, they threaten me with that again… Can you imagine how horrible it would be to have an ice pick stuck into your brain?”
“I’m so sorry, Aunt Cathy. Thank you for telling me. And I am going to try to get you out of here.”
“I will never leave here alive, Irene. They’ve told me that. I will never leave here alive…”
The recording ended.
I felt sick to my stomach, like I was going to throw up. I could hear my heart pounding.
Catherine Hollis had been an eyewitness to the setting of the Upstairs Lounge fire.
For thirty-two years, she’d been locked up in mental hospital to keep that secret.
Lenny Pousson had set the fire that had killed over twenty people, just to kill Michael Mercereau—because he had become dangerous to the Verlaine family.
Michael Mercereau wasn’t Iris’s father.
And the day after Catherine had finally told Iris her secrets, Iris had been shot and killed.
In my mind, I could hear Nurse Amanda saying again: You never know who might be listening.
I heard Valerie: I told Joshua that someone had cleaned out Iris’s files and wiped her hard drive, how am I supposed to do my job without that information? He said he’d see what he could find out…
And two days later, he was dead.
On my way back from Cortez, someone had tried to run me off the road—and while I was gone, my apartment had been broken into and searched.
If my life had been in danger before, now that I’d listened to this recording—it wasn’t worth two cents.
My hands shook as I slid a CD into my computer and burned a copy of the recording onto it. I ejected the CD and slid another in. While the second one burned, I wrote Venus on the first one and slipped it into a jewel case. The second one was for Blaine, and I made a third for Paige. Once the three CDs were ready and labeled, I put them in envelopes and addressed them. I leaned back in my chair.