Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

  It was enough of a fortune to acquire a hunky boy toy. You’re being a dick, I told myself. Tom has a law degree. He’s clearly not some dumb hunk—but he is pretty.

  And I knew I shouldn’t be judgmental about their age difference, and so quick to assume it had everything to do with Bill’s fortune. It was possible they were in love. Just because it would be hard for me to fall in love with someone that much older than me didn’t mean it couldn’t happen for other people. I’d been pretty judgmental when I was younger but had mellowed out about a lot of things as I got older. Really, who was I to judge? I was dating a guy almost ten years younger than me.

  Todd was about twenty years or so older than Blaine. I’d never understood how their relationship worked when I was younger. Blaine was free pretty much to sleep with whomever he wanted whenever he wanted—and Blaine did go through periods of time when he was doing a lot of trolling around for sex. Yet Todd never seemed to have any problems with Blaine’s extracurricular activity, some of which had been with me. I could never be comfortable having anyone I was seeing whore around the way Blaine occasionally did. I also couldn’t understand why Blaine would stay with someone who didn’t care if he was faithful or not. Blaine and I had slept together a few times when I was younger and a lot more foolish. As a result, I always felt like Todd disliked me intensely and only tolerated me to be polite. Paige always said I was projecting my own hang-ups onto him whenever I brought it up. It was possible, but I was also pretty sure Todd barely tried to hide his disdain for me beneath a veneer of New Orleans society social politeness.

  But I’d learned there was more than one way to love someone, and there was more than one kind of relationship—

  I almost screamed as a jolt of pain shot out from my lower back.

  Fuck it, I thought, gritting my teeth and blinking back involuntary tears. I flipped open the console between the front seats, felt for the pill bottle while keeping my eyes on the road, and shook a pill out into my hand. I swallowed it dry, making sure to cap the bottle before putting it back inside the console. The pain was already so intense I could barely focus on the road. Another ten minutes, I thought as I grimly tried to push the pain out of my head, hoping it wouldn’t make it impossible for me to keep driving. Maybe I should just pull over and call someone to come get me flashed through my mind. I dismissed that option. The only person I knew who wouldn’t be at work was out of town, so the only option would be a cab.

  I can make it home. I just need to focus.

  My car came down from the bridge to dry land and the traffic began to get thicker, the way it always did out by the airport. I still had hope it was early enough that traffic wouldn’t be backed up anywhere. If I got stuck in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic—no, don’t think that way, stay positive, I reminded myself as I checked my side mirrors. I gritted my teeth as I swerved around cars so I wouldn’t have to slow down, mumbling swear words out the side of my mouth. The dull ache was getting more pronounced with each turn of the wheels on the road, with each tick of the second hand—but at least the sharper, knifelike agony hadn’t come back. I flew past exits with the speedometer holding steady at eighty, thanking God for light traffic.

  Half an hour later and I would have been stuck between the Clearview Parkway and Causeway Boulevard exits for sure.

  The car handled beautifully as I flew around the curve after the 610 split, passed another couple of slow-moving cars as I went past the cemeteries and the Superdome came into sight as the highway turned back again toward the river.

  And as I finally passed the Superdome / Claiborne Avenue exits, the pain suddenly went away.

  I sat up straight, happy the pain pill had finally kicked in. I had another five or ten minutes of lucidity before the world started melting around the edges of my vision, and that had to be enough time for me to make it home.

  And it was.

  I pulled into my parking space, turning off the engine with a sigh of relief just as my mind started taking on that weird numb feeling I now associated with Oxycontin.

  My hand was trembling a bit as I slipped my key into the dead bolt of the back entrance to the house. I had to put my hand against the back door to my apartment as I tried to figure out which of my keys would unlock it.

  I could feel my head getting heavier as I tossed the keys onto the nightstand next to my bed.

  My cell phone started ringing as I collapsed facedown onto my bed, stretching out my body. I looked at the screen—it was my business partner, Abby Grosjean. “Hello?” I said into the phone, wincing a bit at how slurred my voice sounded.

  “Dude—you hurting?”

  “I was,” I replied, rolling over onto my back. I reached for the heating pad sitting on the nightstand, turned it on, and slipped it into the slight arch above my butt, which was where the pain always came from. “I took a pill, fine now. Just a little on the loopy side.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Sorry, man. I told you I’d take the meeting if you wanted me to.” Her disapproving tone clearly was saying You need to take it easy and stop pushing your luck—you wanna be crippled for life?

  “It’s not that I didn’t want you to—believe me, I would have been more than happy to let you go out there, but they were kind of insistent on talking to me.” I could feel the heating pad warming up and shifted a bit so I could pull my shirt down to protect my skin. “It’s a weird fucking case. I don’t know what to make of it. What do you think of this?” I filled her in as best I could. My voice sounded hollow to my ears, echoing inside my head like it was an empty chamber with air blowing through it.

  That was one of the many reasons I hated having to take Oxycontin. Percocet and Vicodin didn’t have the same effect, but they didn’t take the pain away completely when it got really bad. They also didn’t last as long. And when the pain got that bad, I didn’t care what I had to suffer through to make it go away. If it meant being empty-headed and being unable to focus, so be it.

  I was very worried about addiction. I’d flirted with addiction to Xanax after Katrina, and that breakup had been bitter and difficult. I’d also managed to quit smoking, and when I’d gotten that monkey off my back I’d vowed to never let anything like that happen again. But much as I hated the thought of being addicted to something else, sometimes the pain was too much for me to handle with non-prescription medication. I tried to deal with the pain the best I could. Learning to live with the dull, constant, steady ache hadn’t been easy but I could manage it. It was when the pain got worse that I couldn’t deal. In the early days of the injury I tried to see how long I could go without taking something stronger than Aleve—and had learned my lesson the hard way.

  I’d also learned to recognize the signs of when the pain was going to become soul destroying, and to pop a pill before it got so bad.

  The physical therapy was helping. I didn’t want to have surgery—that was going to be the last resort—and there was a possibility that I could strengthen the back without having to go under the knife.

  The thought of having an operation of any kind on my spine wasn’t exactly appealing.

  She whistled when I finished. “You’re right, Chanse, it does sound funky to me. You say the cops in Redemption Parish think the whole thing is fraud?”

  “Yeah. Tom, the younger one, claimed it had to do with him clerking at some law firm suing the sheriff’s department on an unrelated matter, trying to make the firm look bad, as well as homophobia”—I winced as I shifted on the bed to get more comfortable—“but not everything is homophobia, you know what I mean?”

  “You want me to head out there tomorrow, nose around the sheriff’s office?”

  It was uncanny how she always seemed to know what I wanted her to do before I could tell her. It was one of the many reasons I’d made her a full partner. “Yeah, see what you can find out. And look into this lawsuit. I’m going to go check out the dealer who made the sale and also appraised the paintings for the insurance company tomorrow.” I’d wante
d to stop by her gallery on my way home, get a feel for her and her business—but that was before my back pain started spiraling out of control. “You don’t know anything about Myrna Lovejoy, do you? Have Jephtha do a web search on her, find out what he can, and email a report to me later.” Jephtha was her boyfriend, a computer whiz who was able to do things online that I preferred to know nothing about. He’d been busted for credit card fraud in high school and done some time in a juvenile detention center in Jefferson Parish. That conviction kept him from getting work in his area of expertise—well, that and his lack of a college degree. He’d gotten his GED and taken some classes at Delgado Junior College, but he found it boring and quit. “I know more about computers than my teachers,” he said with a shrug, “and they don’t like it when I tell them they’re wrong about something.” He did some freelance web design work, but his real passion was designing computer games. He’d done a few already that hadn’t been licensed—the market for them was too narrow—but there was no doubt in my mind Jephtha was going to strike it rich someday. It was just a matter of time and finding the right game idea. I kept him on retainer to do work for me. He was a whiz at computers and the Internet, and his help had upped my game in the security market.

  I preferred not to know how or where he found his information. I suspected Jephtha wasn’t above hacking, so I liked to keep a firewall up between us.

  “Myrna Lovejoy?” Abby snorted. “That pretentious bitch from New York? She was the one who set this ball rolling?”

  “You know who she is?” It shouldn’t have surprised me. Abby seemed to know everyone in New Orleans.

  “I know her and her husband.” Her tone made it very clear her opinion of the Lovejoys was not a high one. “They’re both pieces of work. Idiots. Jephtha did her website for her. What a pain in the ass.”

  “What does the husband do?”

  “Lives off his wife, apparently.” She laughed snidely. “He’s here trying to get work in film and television but hasn’t found anything yet. He’s a big talker—you know the type. Refers to stars by their first names, like they’re close, personal friends. He somehow manages to drop in a ‘George’ or ‘Julia’ or ‘Matt’ or ‘Jennifer’ in every conversation.” She snorted again. “Like any major star would have anything to do with him. He used to be an agent in New York, worked for the Johnson Harris Agency. Mostly represented soap stars and Broadway wannabes, best as I can tell.”

  “So why isn’t he working as an agent anymore? I can’t imagine moving to New Orleans from New York is a strategic career move.”

  She laughed again. “Trust me, I found out everything I could about him and his wife once I’d met them. There was a scandal.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he had to resign from Johnson Harris and no one would hire him. Apparently, Myrna was having an affair with one of the agency’s senior partners and was using pillow talk to try to advance her hubby’s career. The senior partner got quietly bought out, and dear Collier was also let go. That’s the real reason they moved down here, you know. They figured no one here would know—or care—about their scandalous past.” I could see her rolling her eyes as she said the last.

  “Well, New Orleans does tend to draw people needing to reinvent themselves,” I observed. It was true. People came to New Orleans all the time to start over and leave their pasts in the dust. For an extremely insular city, New Orleans was very welcoming and no one ever bothered to check out new people’s pasts. This did result in temporary success for the occasional con artist, who eventually ended up sneaking out of town under the cover of darkness before his or her scam blew up completely in his or her face. “So what exactly did they do to get your hackles up?”

  She hesitated for a moment. “I told you—Jephtha did her website, and then the bitch tried to get out of paying him, so I dug up some dirt on Myrna to get her to pay, is all. She paid, all right. She doesn’t want anyone in New Orleans to know she and her precious Collier basically got run out of New York.”

  I whistled. “Damn.”

  “She’s still got some connections up there,” Abby went on, “which is how that piece in the Times got published. You’re going to have to go talk to her yourself, though. You can bet she won’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to stop by her gallery.” The heating pad was getting a bit too hot, so I turned it down a bit.

  “I’ll see what I can find out in Redemption Parish,” she replied. “You rest and make sure you take care of yourself, hear? And I’ll have Jephtha send you some reports on these people, okay?” She hung up.

  I glanced over at the clock. It was getting close to three. I was supposed to have dinner with Rory and another couple we knew at seven thirty.

  I took a deep breath and typed a text out to him. Baby I don’t know about tonight my back’s flared up again and I took a pill.

  I hesitated before hitting send.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d backed out of something recently because of my back.

  It was starting to get on Rory’s nerves.

  We’d been dating off and on now for going on five years, hard as that was to believe. I’d actually met Rory while working on a case, and our attraction to each other had been immediate. We started seeing each other after I closed that case. He was sexy and smart, and we liked the same kinds of movies and television shows. He also was able to make me laugh harder than anyone I’d ever known before. When we met, he’d been finishing his master’s in public health at Tulane and was working at the NO / AIDS Task Force, running their young men’s social group and doing testing work. Rory wasn’t looking for anything committed—he didn’t like the idea of whoring around and playing the field, but he wasn’t, he told me, looking for anything lifetime commitment-like. Even though he came from an old New Orleans political family—his father had been mayor—and money, he was determined to work on his career and getting his life together before making any kind of commitment.

  That was more than fine with me—I’ve always been a bit of a commitment phobe. The one time I ever had a serious relationship with another guy, I’d ruined it with my selfish and jealous nature—and before I could fix things he’d been killed.

  So, yeah, I wasn’t ready for anything serious. I’d pretty much decided to live the rest of my life alone.

  But now Rory and I were falling into a kind of rhythm, a comfort zone where we didn’t talk about the future and all we cared about was the present. The sex was amazing, Rory was incredibly creative and adventurous, and it was hard to believe that so much time had passed.

  Rory had recently gotten a major promotion into management with NO / AIDS…and at the same time he’d come into an inheritance from a relative—I think an aunt.

  Now he was ready for a lifetime commitment.

  And I wasn’t so sure I was.

  He was a great guy, but I didn’t love him the way I’d loved—

  A few moments later my phone vibrated.

  ok was all he sent back.

  That wasn’t good.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  I’ll worry about this later.

  Chapter Three

  The sound of a garbage truck woke me from a deep, restful sleep.

  I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling. My room was filled with the grayish light of the pre-dawn. The glowing digital numbers on my alarm read 6:04. I was warm beneath my blankets, but my face was exposed and cold. I resisted the urge to pull the blankets over my head and go back to sleep. I knew from bitter experience just how cold it would be out of my warm cocoon. I sighed and rolled over to my side. The good news was that my back wasn’t hurting, just the low dull throb I’d gotten so used to and rarely noticed anymore. It was just something to be endured every day. It had only been a few months but I couldn’t remember what my life had been like without back pain. But I usually took waking up with just the throb as a sign it would be a good day. At least I’d slept thro
ugh the night. I hated those nights when the pain woke me up writhing in agony. I’d learned to keep the pill bottles on the nightstand the first time that happened and I could barely make it to the bathroom, each step a fresh hell of suffering.

  I closed my eyes again in a vain attempt to see if my mind would shut down and let me go back to sleep. But it was no use, I was wide-awake. No matter how long I stayed burrowed under the covers with my eyes closed, I wasn’t going to fall back asleep.

  I had no memory of going to bed, nor did I remember getting undressed. That was another strike against taking Oxycontin: memory loss. The last thing I could remember about the previous day was talking to Abby on the phone.

  There was undoubtedly a report waiting for me in my email inbox. Both Abby and Jephtha were nothing if not efficient, which was why she was my partner and I kept him on a healthy retainer.

  I grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand and pressed the button to bring it back to life. Nothing—the battery was dead. In my drugged-out stupor I’d forgotten to charge the damned thing. Stupid fucking Oxycontin. I sat up, keeping the blankets covering as much of my body as I could. I inhaled sharply. I had no choice now but to get out of bed.

  I pushed the covers off and immediately began shivering. The cold washed over my body, goose bumps rising on my skin, and my teeth started chattering. I hate being cold more than almost anything. My house was raised at least four feet off the ground—and the floor wasn’t insulated. Before electricity, the fireplaces worked—which was also why the city burned to the ground any number of times. My first winter living in my apartment I’d done my best to make the place livable. I ran the heater nonstop and bought some space heaters, and my reward was an apartment filled with stuffy dry air, cold floors, and an astronomical Entergy bill. After that, I learned to just dress in layers, run the heat for brief spurts to take the edge off, and pray for winter to end.