Murder in the Rue Ursulines (3 page)

“Let’s start with your ex-husband.” I said, mentally adding the words
at least, your most recent ex-husband.
 I thought for a moment. “You were married to Dale Monteith, right?” Dale Monteith was a character actor who somehow had managed, through hard work and talent, to become a star of sorts. “I’m assuming the break-up wasn’t a happy one?”

“Well, forget everything you’ve seen in the tabloids.” Freddy replied. “The public story is that when we were making
The Odyssey
, we fell madly in love and left our spouses to be with each other.”

“Dale and I had not been husband and wife for two years before Freddy and I met,” Jillian continued. “I was going through a very rocky period when Dale and I met, is the only defense I can offer—we were fine for a year, and then I realized—“ she rubbed her eyes. “I realized that Dale just wasn’t serious enough for me. He wasn’t interested in anything other than all that Hollywood bullshit, you know? I moved out of his house a year after we were married. Yes, we never bothered to file for divorce until I met Freddy, but we also had barely spoken in those two years. When I moved out, he knew it was for good. So, no, Dale has no reason to be resentful of Freddy—no matter what the tabloids say.” She gave me a horrible smile. “And the publicity was good for Dale’s career. He wasn’t getting work until he got to play cuckolded husband for the entertainment of the masses.”

“Likewise,” Freddy said,  “my ex-wife, Glynis and I were having problems for a while before I met Jillian.” Glynis Parrish had been a television star when she’d married the sexiest man alive. After the break up, she’d been everywhere: every talk show, every magazine cover, weeping quietly over her great heartbreak and humiliation. “Glynis played the jilted wife to perfection, as you must be aware. Hey, the marriage was over, and she was milking the publicity to make herself sympathetic to the audience, you know? So, I let her play it out—she got some movie roles out of it—and what did we care if people hated us?” He smiled at Jillian. “It all blows over after a little while—and people still came to see
our
movies.”

“But these e-mails started coming two weeks ago.” Jillian went on. “And just two weeks ago, Glynis blew into town to make a movie.”

I hadn’t heard about that. “She’s making a movie here?”

Freddy laughed. “She plays a woman who comes to New Orleans to rebuild her life after her husband leaves her for another woman..” He rolled his eyes. “Original concept, huh?”

“Okay.” I shook my head. “Kind of interesting that she came into town around the same time the e-mails started.”

“My mother is here too.” Jillian spat the words out, placing particular loathing on the word
mother.
 “And I wouldn’t put anything past that
bitch.”

Interesting. “Have some problems with your mother?” Jillian’s mother, Shirley Harris, had been a musical comedy star for years, moving between Broadway and film effortlessly. Until a bout of ill health had recently sidelined her, she’d been a huge draw in Las Vegas.

“How much time do you have?” Jillian laughed bitterly. “Look, my mother and I don’t have a relationship. I tried for years to have one with her. She doesn’t understand boundaries, she doesn’t understand anything other than what she needs. I don’t want anything to do with her. She knows this, but keeps pushing.” She sighed. “Wherever I go, there she is. Maybe if someone would give her a job, she’d forget all about me.” A pained look crossed her face. “My mother was always desperate for the limelight…and now that her star has faded, the only way she can get any attention is by talking about me.” Her lips narrowed. “It’s really pathetic, if you think about it.”

 “Where is your mother staying?” Somehow, I doubted that Shirley Harris would stoop to this level of harassment, but one of her employees might.

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but she’s here. I can sense her evil.”

Okay, probably best not to push that one. “And your staff?”

“Doreen Benson is our assistant.” Freddy said, passing me another folder. “Inside this folder are cell phone numbers for Dale and Glynis, as well as the resumes for Doreen, our nanny Cindy, and Jay Robinette, who’s the head of our security detail—along with our cell phone numbers. Our
private
numbers.” He glanced at his watch. “Those numbers, needless to say, aren’t for public knowledge. Cindy, Doreen and Jay have been instructed to cooperate with you fully—anything you might need. If you need to meet with us at the house, just call us, and we’ll let Jay know to let you in. You know where the house is?” When I nodded, he laughed. “Everyone knows where our house is, right? But as for the rest—“ he shrugged. “If any of them are doing this, I doubt they’d want to talk to you.”

“All right.” I picked up both folders to put into my shoulder bag. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything concrete, or if I need something.”

“Thank you,” Jillian said. “Please—get to the bottom of this quickly.” She reached over and touched my hand. “And please—be discreet.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

I watched them exit the conference room, and sat there for a moment. I opened the folder with the e-mails, and leafed through them. They were all insulting, some making derogatory remarks about Freddy’s genitalia—which naturally made me think of Glynis Parrish…until I remembered that a photographer had snapped pictures of Freddy sunbathing nude in the south of France a year or two earlier. Everyone in the world had seen him naked. Even I had—I hadn’t been able to resist clicking through the gallery of images when they’d been posted on a gossip website. There was no question that Freddy was a beautiful man—my best friend Paige had said when they’d moved here, “You know, I’ll see every movie he makes, because he always shows his ass. And he has such a nice one…” We had both laughed.

With a sigh, I shoved the e-mails back in the folder.

Loren came back into the conference room. He shook my hand. “Thanks for doing this, Chanse.”

“No problem,” I replied, and walked back out to the elevators. Frillian were long gone, and as I waited for the elevator, I wondered again if I’d made a huge mistake.

They were movie stars. They were paid lots of money to play roles, to become different people, to be convincing. It was their
job
. So, I would have to take everything they told me with a grain of salt, and be careful not to simply trust them. The feud between Jillian and her mother was well-documented in the tabloids—but then again, she’d also told me not to believe everything I read about them. So, what was true and what wasn’t true? They both claimed their former spouses held no grudges against them, that everything between them was fine. They’d been very careful, though, to point out that someone starting sending the e-mails right around the time Dale and Glynis came to New Orleans to make their movie.

The hardest part of this case would be to curb my natural curiosity. I didn’t need to know
why
the e-mails were being sent. I was being paid to find out who was sending them—and that’s what I was going to do. I’d file a report, destroy all copies of the files to maintain confidentiality, and then I could just walk away from all of this.

 I climbed into the elevator, and hit the lobby button.

No, I wasn’t going to be able to take them at face value. And though I was trying not to let my curiosity run wild, I couldn’t help myself from thinking about it on the way down to the lobby.

There was something more going on here than either of them wanted to admit.

I was going to have to be very, very careful.

A nine-year-old probably knows more about computers than I do.

Don’t get me wrong, I can use mine. I know how to turn it on, I know how to open a program—I can even load software. I know how to hook my digital camera into it to download pictures. I can download music for my iPod. I can log onto the Internet to do research I used to have to do on the telephone, by mail or in person—which is an incredible time-saver. But beyond that, it’s like trying to read Vietnamese. I don’t understand why it crashes, nor do I know what to do to make it stop crashing. I don’t know how to wipe a hard drive (although discovering by accident is one of my biggest fears) or how to retrieve a file that’s been erased. I don’t know how to hack into someone else’s computer, or into a website—and have no desire to know. I barely know how to work with the spam filter on my e-mail account.

Tracing an e-mail back to the computer it came from is completely beyond my limited computer skills. From time to time, I think I should learn how to be more effective with the computer—and it’s not like I don’t have the time when I’m not working. Yet somehow I can never bring myself to take a course, or even spend the extra time to go through the tutorials that come with the software.

Fortunately, I have a great computer nerd to turn to.

It was my best friend, Paige Tourneur, who found him for me. I had just spent a small fortune getting some repair work done on my computer, and it still didn’t work right—even though they’d kept it for three weeks. Every time it froze up on me, I had to resist the urge to put my fist through the screen, or pack it up and shove it up the ass of the guy at the computer hospital. That night, Paige had come by in a fine foul mood with a bottle of wine. After relaxing over a couple of joints and when the bottle was half empty, she was finally ready to let me know what had gotten her goat that day.  It was one of her favorites: the incompetence and total failure of the Louisiana public school system. After listening to her rage about how we as a society were failing our youth for quite a while, giving my obligatory nods and agreeing noises (which is all she requires while on a tirade), I asked what triggered this latest and well deserved disgust with the school system.

 “I talked to this kid today, and he was the sweetest guy, Chanse, and we failed him.” She took another hit off the joint. “Take this kid,” she said flourishing the joint, “a poor kid from the Irish Channel. His mother was a manager at a McDonalds and trying to raise a family of three kids on those wages, if you can imagine that. Not a goddamned pot to piss in.  His father was a total deadbeat, a drug-addled loser who killed someone in an argument over drugs and was sent up to Angola before any of the kids were even in school. Like those kids are going to have any kind of chance, right? And we wonder why they turn to crime. And one of the kids is this incredibly bright kid, with an aptitude for computers, but no one notices or sees or cares at his school because they’re too busy trying to keep all the rest of the  kids from killing each other—rather than teaching them anything. So, he teaches himself all about computers, how to use them, how to build them, how the software and hardware works, all of that, you know? It’s almost like he’s a genius with computers, right?  So, he starts using his self-taught skills to hack into computers, change grades for money…and no one catches him, and then he moves on to other things…stealing credit card numbers, people’s personal information…and when he’s seventeen, he gets caught. His mother can’t afford a lawyer, so he gets a public defender—and you know what those are worth in Orleans Parish. He cops a plea, goes away for three years, gets out after eighteen months, and who’s going to hire him? He got his GED while in jail, and learned even more about computers there. Bright, sharp, and the sweetest guy you can imagine, and he’s barely eking out an existence because no one cared, or noticed, his abilities and nurtured him from an early age.” She sighed. “It’s just awful…the way we waste the youth in this town.”

“He’s really good with computers?” I asked, glaring at mine from across the room.

“Brilliant—he’s absolutely brilliant.” She shook her head. “Such a fucking waste—because you know he’s eventually going to have to go back to criminal shit if he wants to eat.”

“Do you have his name and number?”  I hooked a thumb at my computer. “That stupid fucking thing is still all fucked up. And I’d rather pay this kid to fix it than those know-nothing assholes at the repair shop.”

Fixing my computer was the first job I’d given Jephtha Carriere. He came over, and did a few things on it. Fifteen minutes later it was working better than it had when I’d first bought it. He tried explaining what the problem had been, but it made no sense to me. I wrote him a check, and then asked, “Could you design a hack-proof system for a computer network?”

“There’s no such thing as hack-proof,” he’d scoffed, shaking his head. “As long as someone wants to get in, they will. Anything I design might work for now, but someone would crack my system soon enough.” He gave me a sunny smile. “You know, for most hackers, it’s not so much about the information they can access or crashing a system—that’s what people don’t understand. It’s the challenge…to see if you can outsmart the original programmer. The harder it is, the harder they’ll try. And when you pull it off, it’s a rush better than any drug.”

“Are you willing to give it a try?” I asked. Paige had been right. He was incredibly bright and likeable. I also liked that he hadn’t assured me he could do something he didn’t think possible. “The pay would be really good, and it could be a regular gig—updating the system, making it even more secure. I’ll tell you what—why don’t you see if you can hack into the system, and give me an analysis of what needs to be done. Like I said, the pay would be really good. And I might need you to do some things for me from time to time—like fix my computer, or things I don’t have the skills to do.”

“I don’t want to do anything illega,.” He replied. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”