Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

  “I don’t know if you need a lawyer, but it might not be a bad idea,” I said honestly. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with your case or not. I don’t know enough about the Lovejoys to know. They could have had any number of enemies. But you and Bill had business dealings with them”—that seem a little bit odd to me—“and now Collier’s dead and the paintings y’all bought from them are missing. So, yeah, it might not be a bad idea to talk to a lawyer.”

  “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll make us a reservation at Coquette for eight. We can talk then.” He disconnected the call.

  I stared at my phone for a few moments before putting it back into my pocket. He wants to talk to me about the case in a public place—that doesn’t make any sense, I thought. But maybe that just shows he doesn’t feel like he has anything to hide.

  Was he flirting with me?

  Venus came walking back toward me, a concerned look on her face. She pulled up a chair and sat down next to me, her notepad in her hand. “All right, let me know how you came to be here, how you came to find the body, and so on.”

  “I actually didn’t find the body—that was Meredith.” I took a deep breath and told her about my morning, finishing up with me calling to report the body. “You know all about the robbery at Belle Riviere, right?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded, scratching her forehead with the back end of her pen. “It’s peculiar, to say the least. I don’t have a lot of respect for the Redemption Parish Sheriff’s Department, though, but that’s another story.” She looked at the window, which was still being pelted with huge drops of continuous rain, and sighed. “The case Ziebell is working on with that law firm? Suing the Redemption Parish sheriff? It’s pretty nasty.”

  “I don’t even know what it’s about,” I admitted. “Abby’s up there looking into it today. You really don’t think she’s in any danger, do you?”

  Venus barked out a mirthless laugh. “I’m more worried about the sheriff’s department, frankly.”

  “What about this?” I gestured to the morgue personnel who were removing the body on a stretcher out to the crime lab van.

  “Just between you and me, I’d say he was killed late last night, sometime between nine and midnight, most likely.” She raised an eyebrow slightly. “One shot, right through the heart. Killed instantly. We’ll pull the security camera footage, and we’ll be looking through that. Your girl”—she gestured with her head to Meredith—“had to disarm the alarm this morning, so whoever killed him knew how to set the alarm. That narrows the field of suspects down to a small number. The Lovejoys, Meredith, and there was another part-time employee, name of”—she checked her notepad for a moment—“Leslea Lowenstein. According to the schedule I checked, this Lowenstein woman wasn’t working this week.” She shrugged slightly. “But she knew the alarm code and had a set of keys to the gallery.”

  “There were only two employees? That seems odd in a gallery this size.”

  “Apparently, the gallery itself was only open to walk-ins from eleven to five every day except Sunday, when it’s closed. Most of the art was seen by appointment only.” Venus flipped her notepad closed and tucked it into a pocket. “Seems like an odd way to do business, but what do I know? I’m not an art dealer. That’s not how Todd does things but maybe it’s a New York thing, who knows? Appointment only makes it seem more exclusive, maybe that’s something rich people respond to.” She sighed. “The most important thing to do now is track down Myrna Lovejoy. She’s still not answering her cell phone, and no one’s answering the landline. I guess Blaine and I are going to have to head over there.”

  “Is someone going to be letting the son know?”

  She tapped her pen against the side of her forehead. “If we don’t raise Myrna soon, yeah, we’re going to have to send someone over to Newman and pull him out of class. Christ, what a mess.” She stood up. “You want us to drop you on our way uptown?”

  “Yeah, that would be great.” The throbbing in my back was getting worse. The Vicodin didn’t seem to be doing the trick—I needed to lie down for a while with the heating pad.

  Stupid fucking back.

  Chapter Six

  The combination of my cell phone ringing and someone pounding on my front door woke me up out of a Vicodin-induced sleep.

  I sat up groggily. I vaguely remembered Venus and Blaine dropping me off at my apartment—they’d given me a ride because it was still pouring. I’d swallowed another Vicodin during the drive back as the pain started getting worse again. My back aching and throbbing to the point I could barely fit my key into the dead bolt, I’d somehow managed to make it to the couch. The heating pad was now cold against my back. The pain had receded to the usual dull throb I was used to and could handle without having to take anything else to manage it.

  “Chanse! I know you’re in there!” Abby shouted, pounding on the door some more as my phone stopped ringing.

  “Coming! Calm the fuck down already!” I shouted groggily as I wiped at my eyes. Abby’s face grinned at me from the screen of my phone before it faded away and the “missed call” message popped up on the screen. I picked up my keys from where I’d tossed them on the coffee table and stood up, staggered to the front door, unlocked the dead bolt, and pulled the door open. “Jesus fucking Christ, Abby, I was asleep.” It was still pouring rain outside, and a cold wind blasted around her into my apartment.

  “’Bout fucking time,” Abby groused, brushing past me on her way in. She tossed her umbrella into the brass umbrella stand just inside the front door. I closed the door and turned the key in the dead bolt. I could smell hot grease. “I brought you some food—I figured you probably weren’t remembering to eat.” She plopped herself down on the couch and tossed a greasy brown paper sack onto the coffee table. She shivered. “Fuck, it is cold in here, dude.”

  I walked over to the thermostat and flipped the switch over to “heat.” I looked over at the cable box. 4:15 p.m. I’d slept for almost four hours.

  “You got any Cokes?” she asked, pulling bags and sandwiches wrapped in white butcher paper out of the bag. “I assumed you had some.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, smiling faintly to myself as I walked into the kitchen area. I must be in really bad shape if Abby’s buying me meals.

  Abby always did her best to make sure she never paid for food.

  “You owe me fifteen bucks,” she called as I retrieved two plastic bottles of Coke from the lower shelf of my refrigerator—which was ridiculously empty.

  I need to buy groceries sooner rather than later, I thought as I walked back into the living room, wincing a bit as I handed her one of the cold bottles and sat down on the far end of the couch. I picked up the heating pad controls, pressed the “high” button, and placed it inside my sweater against my lower back. I eased back onto the couch.

  “Back bothering you again?” she asked sympathetically as she handed me one of the greasy paper-wrapped sandwiches and an even greasier waxed paper bag of onion rings. Steam rose from both as I set them down on the end table. I tore the tape open and unrolled the sandwich, spilling deep-fried beer-battered shrimp out from either side of the French bread. “Sorry I woke you up, but you need to eat something.”

  My stomach growled. “I had to take another Vicodin earlier and it knocked me out.” I popped one of the hot shrimp in my mouth and chewed it thoroughly before swallowing. I was now so hungry I felt weak.

  “Dude, if the Vicodin isn’t working you need to take the Oxy,” she replied. “I’m sorry but there is just no reason in this day and age to suffer when there’s medication that can put you out of your misery.” She shook her head. “Call your doctor and get something stronger if you have to. You don’t have to prove how tough you are, Chanse.”

  “The last thing in the world I need right now is an addiction problem.” I tore the corner off one of the ketchup packets and squeezed some onto an enormous, hot onion ring. I blew on it for a moment to cool it down before folding it so it would fit into
my mouth. As soon as I started chewing it I realized I hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day, before heading out for Belle Riviere. Not good, Chanse, I thought, making another mental note to remind myself to eat regularly. That was another part of the problem with the pills—they took away my appetite, and I needed food to help heal the damned injury in the first place. I ate another onion ring.

  “Are you going to do the cortisone shot?” she asked casually, unwrapping her oyster po’boy and pointedly not looking at me. “You really need to consider it, Chanse. You can’t keep on like this.” She looked up at me finally. “I mean, do what you want—it’s your back, not mine, after all—but don’t you want the pain to stop?” She shuddered. “I try to not tell people what to do, but seriously. It’s not fun for me to see you suffer, boss.”

  She’d been the number one advocate of me having the cortisone shots ever since I made the mistake of mentioning it to her. My doctor at the pain management clinic had presented it as an option almost from the beginning, but the idea of having a needle stuck into my spine wasn’t appealing. I’ve never been much of a fan of needles and shots to begin with. And no matter how unlikely the possibility, no matter how much reassurance I was given that the procedure was safe—any risk of further spinal damage was too much.

  This wasn’t a winnable argument, though. I was well aware that my position didn’t make sense, so I changed the subject. “How was your trip out to Redemption Parish? Find out anything good?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know, I grew up in Placquemines, but I never go back there so I forget how backward things can be out in the parishes. There were a couple of times when I was worried I’d have some severe flashbacks, but I toughed it out. Good thing I did, too, because the trip was very informative.”

  Abby had grown up very blue collar in Placquemines Parish. She came from a long line of shrimpers (“I was related to practically everyone in the damned parish. The Grosjeans were known for their fertility and their Catholicism—a dangerous combination if there ever was one”) and from childhood had been working whenever she wasn’t in school. After she graduated from high school she helped out on her dad’s boat and waited tables at a local diner. She left home at nineteen when her father took a second wife she didn’t like. She moved to New Orleans and got a job waiting tables at a diner in the lower Quarter. She got tired very quickly of being groped and abused by drunk tourists who would then stiff her on the tip. That was when she made the decision to, as she put it, “put my body to work for me.”

  Abby had been on the drill team all through high school. Even now, in her late twenties, she still had the compact, strong and sexy body of a cheerleader. She was maybe five-three or five-four, about 105 pounds, and carried little excess weight. Her waist was tiny, but she was very well developed in the chest. She scored a gig dancing at the Catbox Club, a strip joint on the sleazy end of Bourbon Street where she made more money in one night than she did waiting tables in a week. She’d been dancing there a couple of years, socking away her money to help pay for college, when she met the love of her life, Jephtha Carriere. Jephtha had always had a thing for strippers, who tended to use the tall, gangly computer genius for as much as they could get out of him before tossing him aside like a used tissue. They fell hard for each other, and Jephtha encouraged her to go to college. She moved in with him and enrolled at the University of New Orleans. She kept dancing while majoring in theater and pre-law. She was good at her job (“just because you’re a stripper doesn’t mean you can’t take pride in your work”), and her theater background combined with her cheerleading bumps-and-grinds made her one of the club’s hottest and most popular dancers. She knew how to work the audience as well as how to use makeup, wigs, and costumes to change up her look.

  Jephtha had been working for me before he met Abby. At first I was a little skeptical of her, but she won me over. I’d asked her once to use her disguise skills to help me out on a case, and she took to private eye work like it was the work she was meant to do. She was accepted into Loyola University’s law school but got certified as a private eye, and I hired her. She went to law school part-time for a while, but put her ambitions of being a lawyer on hold for a while. She still danced as a fill-in at the Catbox Club every once in a while (“to keep my hand in,” was what she said about it, but it was really to keep close to the other dancers because “they’re excellent sources”). I started farming out more and more of my work to her as she proved to be a valuable asset over and over again. She was so skilled at disguise there were times I didn’t recognize her myself. After she’d worked for me for about a year I’d made her a full partner in the business. She was currently taking a couple of classes at Loyola, but she was in no rush to get her degree. “I know I can make more money as a lawyer,” she once told me, after a couple of glasses of wine and a joint, “but I’ve noticed almost every lawyer we ever deal with is a sleazeball, so—” She shrugged. “I never feel sleazy when I’m dancing at the Catbox Club, but being a lawyer? I don’t know.”

  The law’s loss was my gain.

  “Go on, don’t stop there, what did you find out?” I encouraged her. I took the top piece of French bread off my po’boy and liberally applied ketchup to the steaming-hot shrimp. The smell was intoxicating, and I almost felt faint with hunger. I closed the sandwich and took a big bite. I didn’t even try to hold in the moan of pleasure as the tastes exploded in my mouth.

  Abby rolled her expressive hazel eyes and finished chewing, wiping crumbs from the slightly stale French bread off her chin. “Well, for one thing, that parish seat, Avignon?” She pronounced it the Louisiana way, Avenon, rather than the French Ah-vee-NYOH. “What a shithole. I mean, seriously. That place makes Plaquemines look like the Garden District.” She dragged an onion ring through the puddle of ketchup she’d made on the butcher paper her sandwich had been wrapped in. “Well, okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. It’s a cute little town, picturesque downtown with a little square park right in front of the courthouse, mostly antique stores”—she made air quotes as she said antique stores—“a little diner, your typical little Mayberry in Louisiana type little town, you have to cross a covered bridge over a bayou to even get into the city limits, blah blah blah. You know, the kind of place that looks really nice and charming on the surface but underneath it’s all rotting and disgusting? Like one of those towns where soaps are set?”

  “I get what you mean.” Cottonwood Wells, the small town in East Texas where I’d grown up, was like that—everyone went to church on Sunday but the ones who were the most church-proud were the biggest sinners of them all.

  “Well, Plaquemines Parish was like that, too,” she conceded with a slight shrug. “But yeah, the courthouse in Avignon reeks to high heaven of corruption. That is one place I wouldn’t want to cross the sheriff.”

  “Oh?”

  “They have a newspaper, if you want to call it that. It’s a daily, but there isn’t really much to it. They have a storefront on the square, just on the other side from the courthouse.” She made a face. “I stuck my head in, see if I could find any dirt over there.” She gave me a crooked smile. “When in doubt, always track down the social columnist. They always know where the bodies are buried in small towns.”

  I shifted in my seat. The pain was starting to pick up again. I winced and hoped she didn’t notice. “And?” I prompted.

  “I pretended I was there working on a story for Crescent City.” She smirked. Crescent City was the magazine where my oldest and best friend, Paige Tourneur, worked as editor-in-chief. Abby and Paige had worked it out that Abby could pretend to be working for the magazine if she ever needed a cover story, and if anyone ever called to check up on her, Paige and / or her assistant would lie for her. It was genius—I would have never thought of it myself. Another great example of how Abby constantly proved her worth to me. “The society columnist is this enormous woman who could stand to miss a few meals, if you know what I mean,” she said with all the cruelty of youth. “She
was nice, but a horrible snob. You can imagine how excited Mrs. Celeste Topham of the Redemption Parish Tophams, who go back in the parish to before the Civil War, was to talk to someone from an important magazine from New Orleans.” She said this in a thick drawl, mimicking the unfortunate Mrs. Topham’s way of speaking. “She was more than happy to have a cup of coffee with me and tell me anything and everything I needed to know about”—she lowered her voice and rolled her eyes—“those ‘confirmed bachelors’ at Belle Riviere.”

  I tried to keep the pain I was starting to feel off my face. “She didn’t say ‘confirmed bachelors,’ did she?”

  “She most certainly did.” Her eyes danced with amusement. “Bless her heart, Mrs. Topham had the most impressive manners, but she’s a terrible gossip. She thinks it’s a terrible waste that young Mr. Tom Ziebell is going the way of old Mr. Marren, because there are any number of beautiful and eligible young women in Redemption Parish would make him a good wife.” She rolled her eyes. “The women’s movement certainly never made it to Avignon. She did show me a picture of young Mr. Ziebell, and I have to agree that it’s a shame he’s been taken out of the gene pool.” She clucked her tongue. “But seriously, you can’t imagine how hard it was keeping a straight face while I listened to her go on and on! I can’t believe anyone—especially a woman—could talk and think like that still in this day and age. Although to be fair, the poor dear was probably in her sixties and that’s just how she was raised. Mrs. Topham, you see, and her circle, believed that when Belle Riviere was renovated, they would start having parties again like in the old days. Belle Riviere is the showplace of Redemption Parish…but not only has Mr. Marren not thrown any parties, he doesn’t seem terribly interested in letting anyone in to see the place or being part of the Garden Tour in the spring—which Mrs. Topham herself organizes. Mr. Marren doesn’t bother to return her calls.”