That Old Devil Sin

by W E DeVore

  What are you doing, Clementine?

  She quickly stood up and began walking back towards the CBD and Ben when she noticed an elaborately gated driveway and the address Marianne Multer had given her.

  Fuck it. I’m here now. What harm could it do?

  Before she could change her mind, she rang the doorbell next to the brightly painted red front door, and waited. A cab passed by just as the door opened and an elderly black woman opened the door.

  Figures.

  Q considered turning and running for it, but thirty-two years of Southern manners cemented her feet on the front step.

  “Q Toledano to see Mrs. Multer, please,” she said politely.

  The woman looked her up and looked her down and mumbled, “Hmm-mmm,” before leading her through the door and up the narrow staircase. Q followed her into a large, well-appointed room on the second floor, lit only by the sunlight filtering in through the closed shutters to the balcony. Marianne Multer was curled into the corner of the blue chintz sofa wearing a long, flowing gold caftan that set off her black hair. Q couldn’t help but think that Marianne looked like anything but a Senator’s wife right now.

  “Miss Toledano, so very nice to see you again. I’m enjoying some lovely Prosecco; can I pour you a glass?” She gestured to the open bottle and the extra glass in front of her, then patted the cushion next to her seat.

  “Umm, sure.” Q sat down next to her on the sofa, feeling markedly uncomfortable.

  Marianne poured her a glass of the Italian champagne and leaned closer, as she handed it to Q. “Let me just get this out of the way. I was so sorry to hear about your band member. How awful it must be to have someone close to you do something so…unspeakable. Were you and he close?”

  Q paused, unsure of whether or not to defend Pete. She decided that vulnerability was probably her best play. “We grew up together. The whole thing is so surreal. But, I’m sure you’ve heard, Pete has had a drug problem for years. I don’t think he could have been in his right mind.”

  “No, of course not. Well, let’s not dwell on unpleasant things. Tell me, to what do I owe the lovely surprise of your company this afternoon?”

  Uh-oh.

  She vetted a litany of possible lies, and finally settled on possibly the least probable among them.

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy. I just had a huge fight with my boyfriend and I was walking through the Quarter, wishing I had a girlfriend to talk to, when I remembered your kind offer. A little girl talk is just what I need right now.”

  Marianne’s hand inched across the back of the sofa, until it rested on Q’s shoulder. “Men are such trouble, aren’t they?”

  “Um, yeah, I guess.” Q resisted her compulsion to flee the room as fast as she could.

  Marianne gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “So what did he do?”

  “Excuse me?” Q asked quickly taking a sip of the sparkling wine to calm her nerves.

  “Well, it can’t possibly be your fault.” Marianne smiled and leaned back into the corner of the couch. “Any man would be out of his head to want to fight with you.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Q began to relax, formulating her lie. “It was kind of my fault. It’s just…he’s so gorgeous. I mean, you’ve seen him.”

  “Mr. Bordelon? Yes, dear, I suppose he is an attractive man.” She took a sip of her drink.

  “You just don’t know how hard it is. Women are constantly throwing themselves at him. It’s just exhausting to watch.” Q took a deep breath. Here goes nothing. “Even my friends do it. It’s like they can’t help themselves or something and, he says he doesn’t, but I know he enjoys it. I mean, what man wouldn’t want women fighting over him?”

  “Yes, who wouldn’t want that?” Marianne smiled to herself and sipped her wine.

  “My friend, Jessica, is the absolute worst. I mean, she dances at the Dollhouse, so she is a professional flirt, but you’d think she’d lay off around Ben instead of cranking it up to eleven.” Q threw up her hands in mock exasperation. She looked at Marianne. If there was any flicker of recognition, she didn’t show it.

  That’s a swing and a miss, for the super sleuth!

  “Women can be such bitches,” Marianne purred, tilting her head to regard Q. “So your friend is sleeping with your man, is that it?”

  “I don’t know. They deny it. But Jessica… she’s so beautiful, and I see the way he looks at her when she’s coming on to him.” Q swung for the fences, carefully watching her companion. “She’s such a liar, I don’t know why I’m friends with her anyway. She even says she’s been to your house in Baton Rouge. Can you imagine? Jessica Valentine, wannabe model and full-time stripper, at Senator Gus Multer’s house.”

  Marianne just smiled. Q’s stomach began to churn in the awkward silence that followed.

  Strike two for Encyclopedia Brown.

  “Anyway, that was what the fight was about. Stupid.” Q sipped her drink and finally decided to change the subject. “How was your after-party?”

  “Disappointing. Especially when the charming Miss Toledano couldn’t join us.”

  “So, I’ve got to know. What in the hell is a ‘girl talk’ party anyway?” Q turned slightly, trying to seem casual.

  “I’m surprised your friend, Miss Valentine, didn’t tell you.” Marianne sipped her sparkling wine and leaned closer, her fingers were now stroking the hair above Q’s right ear. “Would you like me to show you what our favorite party game is?”

  Q’s discomfort grew exponentially.

  “Uh, Mrs. Multer…” she began.

  Marianna Multer cooed, leaning closer, “Marianne, darling, Marianne.”

  “Ms. Marianne, I think you have the wrong idea,” Q said as politely as she could.

  Marianne gazed luridly at Q, letting her eyes linger on the general vicinity of her braless chest, before looking at her face. “I thought you needed a girlfriend to talk to.”

  “I think you and me might have a different idea of what that means,” Q replied nervously.

  Marianne gasped in mock surprise. “Don’t tell be you’ve never been with a woman. Especially being friends with Miss Valentine. I don’t think you have anything to worry about on that count, by the way. I bet she’s just trying to keep you all to herself.”

  “I apologize for the misunderstanding, but I’m not a lesbian. That isn’t why I came here.”

  “Such a shame, because that’s exactly why I invited you.” Marianne’s mouth was now inches from Q’s ear. She could smell the alcohol on her breath and heard the same subtle slurring in her voice, that Pete had when he was snorting pills.

  Q nervously sipped her wine. “Yeah, look, I’ve been through this experiment before and couldn’t get past first base, so…”

  “Just first base? But third is so much more fun…” she whispered into Q’s ear and slid her hand way too high up on her leg. She gently bit Q’s earlobe before purring, “I want to be the first woman to make you come.”

  Q’s eyes widened and she stood up, disengaging herself from Marianne Multer as quickly as she could.

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Multer. I really do thank you for the champagne, and letting me ramble on like that about Ben and all, but we have definitely had a huge misunderstanding here.” Q said, backing towards the door.

  Marianne didn’t seem to care either way. She leaned back against the sofa and drained her glass. “No matter. Call me when you change your mind, dear. My door is always open. Talk to Jessica. I’m sure she’ll tell you just how open it is.” She winked. “I would appreciate your discretion, however. You know how the press can be about this kind of thing.”

  Q nodded and slipped her satchel back over her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not a gossip, Mrs. Multer. Your personal business is none of mine,” she said and quickly left the room without waiting for a reply.

  Once she was back on Burgundy, she headed towards Esplanade and home. She dug her phone out of her satchel and glanced at the t
ime, horrified to see that it had been almost two hours since she had left Ben. She quickly called him as she raced down the street. It rang several times and went to voicemail. Q hung up and redialed. This time it went directly to voicemail.

  Third time’s the charm.

  She hung up and redialed. Voicemail.

  “Ben, baby, it’s me. I fucked up and I am so sorry. Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have left. I shouldn’t have accused you of, fuck, I can’t even say it now - it’s so ridiculous. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. Look, I’m on my way home. I still want to go with you to your parents’ house tonight. I’m going to go get ready now, just come by on your way. Please. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I love you. Please give me a chance to make this right.”

  She slipped her phone back into her pocket and walked as quickly as she could towards home.

  Marianne Multer is gay.

  Q shivered despite the warm afternoon sun.

  Correction. Marianne Multer is Super Gay.

  This afternoon hadn’t been the first time a woman had tried to get her into bed but it was definitely the strangest. The predatory way Marianne Multer had attempted the seduction was something Q thought was reserved for sleazy men, and definitely not something she’d expect from a zealously conservative politician’s wife.

  Wealth, power, and a lifetime in the closet are apparently a lethal combination for a person’s soul.

  If Marianne was sleeping with Jessica, she was probably sleeping with Ronnie, too. Q wondered if Pete knew and that was the bad thing he thought Ronnie was mixed up in. Having an affair with the wife of Gus ‘Homosexuality is an abomination before the eyes of our Lord’ Multer was certainly playing with fire. Knowing Pete, he wouldn’t have cared if Ronnie slept with women as long as she came home to him, so a lesbian tryst wasn’t out of the question. Q guessed Ronnie may have tried to blackmail Marianne, but the baseless allegation of a junky stripper didn’t quite seem worth twenty thousand dollars of Gus and Marianne Multer’s inherited fortune.

  As soon as she was home, Q shoved all thoughts of Pete, Ronnie, and Marianne Multer aside and sprinted upstairs to get ready to meet Ben’s family. She took a quick shower and slipped into a pair of linen slacks, a light yellow cardigan, and some sandals. She carefully applied her make-up, and brushed her teeth three times, before finally putting on some lipstick, and the pair of pearl earrings she only ever wore to her grandmother’s Passover Seder.

  She sat down on her window seat and watched the late afternoon traffic for Ben’s car. It wasn’t until the sun had set and her apartment was completely in shadows, that she finally admitted to herself that Ben wasn’t coming.

  She stared at the evening traffic for a few more moments, wiping away a tear that slipped down her cheek before she could stop it. Ben wasn’t coming and she couldn’t blame him. She took a jagged inhale and straightened her posture, refusing to give into the self-loathing that roiled inside her. Once she’d composed herself, she stood up to flip on a lamp, deciding to console herself with a large jigger of dark rum and her only constant companion. Q sat down at her piano and opened the keyboard. Just as she’d successfully made it through the chord progression of the song that Charlie had played with her night before, she heard a soft knock at her door.

  Q rushed to open it. Niko stood on her doorstep. “You stood me up for brunch, kiddo.”

  She dissolved into tears. He held her awkwardly for several seconds, before setting her down in her chair, and fixing himself a drink.

  “What is all this about?” he asked, sitting down at the window seat.

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and apologized. “I’m sorry, Niko. I thought you were Ben. We had a horrible fight and he asked me to leave. Now he won’t take my calls.”

  He took a long sip before saying, “Start at the beginning. What did you fight about?”

  Q went over her lunch with Ernst, his suspicions about Ben, Ben’s reaction to it all, and him standing her up earlier in the evening.

  Niko let out a low whistle. “I don’t want to want to pour salt in an open wound, kiddo, but maybe you got lucky. I mean, do you really think your uncle would have told you about that murder if he didn’t think Ben had something to do with it.”

  “It wasn’t Ben. He was with his family. He showed me time-stamped pictures, for fuck’s sake.” Q stood up and stalked to the piano to retrieve her drink. “What do you have against Ben Bordelon, anyway?”

  “I don’t want to rehash this, Q. I already told you what I thought about your angel man and you kicked me out, remember?” Niko calmly sipped his drink. “Besides, part of you must think I’m right, otherwise you would have turned right around and went back to him, instead of moping around all afternoon.”

  “I wasn’t moping around. I bumped into Urian and then went to see Marianne Multer. I called Ben as soon as I was finished.” She drained her glass and refilled it.

  Niko held up his hand. “Wait a minute. Back that part up again.”

  Q sat down and recounted her conversation with Urian, and her discovery that Ronnie actually started with twenty thousand dollars on her that night, along with some information about some powerful people.

  “So you thought you’d just go ask a Senator’s wife if she was being blackmailed?” Niko asked incredulously.

  “No, I went to find out what kind of party she was throwing that required the services of two strippers.” Q told him about the Dollhouse and Jessica, leaving out the part about Charlie very nearly getting a concussion from a full body collision with the business end of a stripper’s thong.

  “And....?” Niko prodded.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it was some kind of closeted lesbian sex club. Marianne Multer all but said so this afternoon, right after she gave me the full court press trying to get me into bed with her,” she said, not caring that she was breaking her promise.

  Niko took a large drink of whiskey. “Q, would you just get over yourself? Marianne Multer is not gay.”

  “She told me she wanted to be the first woman to make me come.”

  He choked on his drink and coughed. “I stand corrected.”

  “Let’s just say, Niko, that Ronnie was blackmailing the Multers. Maybe she slept with Senator when she was a prostitute; maybe she slept with Marianne at one of these parties and threatened to out her.”

  “Q, nobody would take the word of a junky stripper over a United States Senator. It’d be tabloid freak show for a month and then they’d pay her to go away.” Niko yawned and looked out of the window.

  “That’s what I thought, too. But what if she had some evidence? Something to scare them into getting her the money Pete needed to pay off Urian, and keep her and Pete in pills for a while. Something that would make them want to pay her off and keep it out of the press.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Q. Besides, Pete was in the clear with Urian, you made sure of that.” He sounded skeptical.

  “What if she didn’t trust that Urian would keep his word? Hell, I didn’t trust that Urian would keep his word.”

  She tried to put herself in Ronnie’s position and thoughts of Ben pulled at her chest.

  “Maybe she thought if she was the one that bailed Pete out, he wouldn’t leave her,” she said quietly.

  “Pete must be working with something serious to warrant that kind of loyalty.” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Not everything is about sex, Niko.”

  “Says the shameless hussy who has repeatedly fucked Ben Bordelon in various public locations around our fair city.” Niko raised his glass in approval.

  Q’s phone rang from the kitchen counter and he raced to get it before her. He held it out and taunted, “Speak of the devil.”

  “Niko, give me the fucking phone.” Q held out her hand and he held the phone away from her. She frantically wrestled it away from him just as her ringtone stopped.

  She started to call Ben back, when Niko said, gently, “Let him sweat it out
for a night, Q. He stood you up, not the other way around. He’s the one that told you to get out, isn’t he? Did he even leave a message just now?”

  Q looked at her phone and found that he hadn’t. Her pride got the better of her and she nodded in agreement. “Right. Fuck it. He knows where I am.”

  “That’s my girl. What’s say we order a pizza and watch a movie?”

  She nodded. “Let me go get some comfortable clothes on. You order the pizza.”

  “Anchovies and olives?” he asked.

  “Make it a lonely heart's special and add onions,” she said as she left the room.

  Suck it, Ben Bordelon. I’ll deal with you later.

  The Road Paved with Good Intentions

  Q awoke after a fitful night into a bleak, grey Monday morning. Indigestion and heartache had merged to form a decidedly uncomfortable and very angry creature that was currently viciously gnawing away at her insides. She glanced at her phone, hoping that some cell service disruption had made her miss another call from Ben. No such luck.

  Why did I listen to Niko?

  She gripped her stomach in a futile attempt to wrestle the creature away from her small intestine and picked up the phone. She dialed Ben’s number, letting his recorded voice slip through her, closing her eyes and basking in its syrupy warmth.

  At the tone, she said, “Ben, I’m sorry. Please call me. I know I’m an asshole but call me anyway. I don’t know what to do to make this right. Just tell me what to do. I love you. Please, just tell me what to do. I don’t want to lose you.”

  She hung up and flipped through her spam-filled email inbox, when she realized it was the last week of the month.

  Better go start to clean out Pete’s apartment.

  She reluctantly pulled on yesterday’s jeans and an In Flames t-shirt, and walked out into the fresh spring air. She decided to make the journey to Pete’s apartment on foot to clear her head, inwardly hoping that Ben would call or pull up alongside of her, knowing it was a long shot.

  That she had finally figured out exactly what kind of parties Marianne Multer was throwing, didn’t help the situation. It just made her sad. All those women trapped, hiding behind their husband’s power and privilege. Choosing a life of lies, unable to express who they really were, stuck in marriages of convenience, all the while publically shaming people just like them.