Murder in the Rue Chartres (11 page)

“Buying his way into heaven.” Venus looked tired, even more tired than she had the day before. She swung her head to look at me, and I noticed her eyes were rimmed with red. “What did you do today, besides get a call from the great and terrible Oz?”

“I went out to Lakeview.” They all recoiled and looked away from me. “Yeah, I know, but I wanted to see Iris’s place and take a look around.”

“You should go down to the Lower Ninth Ward.” Paige took another bite from her burger. “Lakeview is bad, but it’s nothing compared to what you’ll see down there.” She put her burger down. “Everyone in this country needs to go down there and see what it looks like for themselves. Not on television, but in person.” She shuddered. “I swear, you can still sometimes hear the people screaming for help.” She reached for her second glass of Jack Daniels and downed half of it. She raised her glass. “Here’s to you, Mr. President and your asshole cronies, may you all fucking burn in hell for eternity.”

“Hear, hear.” Venus raised her own glass. “Here’s to FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers. May the ghosts of your victims haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.”

I decided to change the subject before the conversation turned into what apparently was becoming the conversation in town—how much we all hated the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers. “So, Paige, why don’t you like Percy Verlaine? How do you know him?”

She finished her glass and signaled for another. Her eyes were starting to get a little glassy. “Percy? I dated one of the grandsons for a little while. Not long, maybe once or twice.” She shrugged. “Darrin. Man, was he a lousy lay. But the second date was a dinner at the big house in the Garden District. Oh my God. What a fucking nightmare. The old man wheezing with his oxygen mask…and he looks old as Methuse—Methus—whatever the hell that guy’s name was. The old one. Anyway, his eyes—mean as a snake. It was just me, Percy’s daughter—Margot, that was her name—and some friend of hers, me and Darrin. None of the others were there. I don’t know why Darrin took me to that, thought that it was a good idea. Maybe he figured having me meet the family was a way to chase me away—although I could have told him the bad sex was much more likely to get me to dump his bony ass. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, the old man. Man, what a bastard. All he did was just sit there and belittle Darrin, his mother—but she was a cold bitch, that one was—and it was like that all through the whole lousy fucking meal. Just horrible, I kept drinking, gulping glass after glass of wine and praying for the last fucking course to come—and then finally, the old man looks at me and says, ‘I hope you’re enjoying that wine, Ms. Tourneur, it costs $75 a bottle, and you’ve drunk about $200 worth already.’ I just looked at him and said, ‘You got ripped off then, because it tastes like it should have cost about twelve bucks.’”

“You said that to Percy Verlaine?” Blaine’s eyes about popped out of his head. “What did he do?”

“He laughed and said to help myself, he liked my style.” Paige accepted a fresh glass of Jack Daniels from the bartender and laughed. “Needless to say, I never went out with Darrin Verlaine again. That whole fucking family is a major creep show.” She shuddered.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d dated Darrin Verlaine?” I asked.

She shrugged. “What single straight man in this town haven’t I dated? Although it’s my studied opinion that Darrin Verlaine isn’t straight by a long shot. Not 100 percent straight, anyway.”

“I’m heading home.” Venus stood up. She put a twenty down on the table. “I’m tired and—”

“Venus hates it when we speculate on people’s sex lives,” Paige hiccupped. “Probly cuz everyone thinks she’s a lesbian.”

“You’re drunk, Paige,” Venus said, more tired than angry. “And I’m tired—it’s been a long day. Good night.”

Blaine pulled a twenty out of his wallet, laid it on the table, and they walked outside. I could see them through the window. Venus had her face in her hands and her shoulders were shaking. Blaine put his arms around her and gave her a long hug. Paige turned and followed my eyes. She looked back at me, her face flushed. “I’m drunk and I’m a bitch.” She started crying.

I slid around the table and put my arm around her. She sobbed for a few moments into my shoulder, blubbering apology after apology, and then things started pouring out of her. “I’m such a horrible person, such a horrible person.”

I held her. “No, shhh, no you’re not. You’re just drunk, that’s all.”

“Oh yes, Chanse, I am a horrible person. You have no idea just how horrible I am.” She buried her face in her hands. “Sometimes I wonder if this is all my fault.”

“What?”

She threw an arm out. “This, all of this, Chanse. What happened here.”

“Paige—” I sat there for a moment, trying to think of the right thing to say. “It was the goddamned weather. No one has any control over the weather, Paige, and hurricanes don’t happen to punish people. That’s just crazy talk.”

“When all those preachers were talking about how God was punishing New Orleans for her sins…” Her voice trailed off.

“Paige.” I cupped her chin in my hand and turned her so she was looking me in the eye. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And if that’s how their God behaves, the kind of thing their God is capable of, well, then fuck their God. He isn’t my God, and he isn’t your God, either. Those guys are cracked, insane, and you know that as well as I do.” I tried to make a joke. “Surely if they had a direct line to God, He’d tell them to do something about their hair.”

She laughed, then hiccupped, and then turned away from me. “I’ve never told you anything about me, you know.”

“So we’re even. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, you know.” She looked into her glass. “What they used to call the Holy Cross District, on Caffin Avenue. My mother was a drunk, you know. She drank in the morning before she’d go to work. She was a functioning alkie. No one she worked with even knew she drank, but at night she’d be so drunk she’d fall out of her chair and just pass out on the floor. I used to have to put her to bed, clean up her puke.”

“My mother drank too.”

“It sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” My mother’s weakness was gin. She always smelled of sour gin. As soon as my father left for work in the morning, she’d get the gin bottle out from under the kitchen sink and fill a coffee cup with gin. By the time my brother, my sister, and I were ready to leave for school, she was weaving and hardly able to stand up. Our trailer was always dirty, because she was too drunk to clean, which would then send my father into a rage and they would scream at each other for hours, throwing things and calling each other nasty names. As soon as we were old enough, my sister and I started cleaning the house when we got home to try to keep the peace. Mom would sit in her reclining chair watching The Edge of Night and Donahue while we dusted and vacuumed and washed the dishes.

“Mom would go out to bars every night,” Paige went on. “My dad left when she was pregnant with me—hell, for all I know they were never married; it wouldn’t surprise me—and so she would go out looking for men to buy her drinks and tell her she was pretty. It was so pathetic; even when I was a little girl I thought it was pathetic. I would hear her come in at night with whoever Mr. Goodbar for the night was, and lay there in bed, listening to them, swearing that when I grew up I was going to be different from her. I wasn’t going to be like her.” She picked up the glass and toasted me with it. “And look at me! I’m just like her.”

“No, you aren’t,” I replied. “You’ve been through a hard time, is all, and there’s nothing wrong with having some drinks to dull the pain, Paige. It’s not a crime.”

“But you don’t know the worst.” She stopped and threw the rest of the liquor down her throat. She belched and gave me a look. “When I was thirteen one of her men raped me.”

It was as though time suddenly stood still. I no longer heard the television set, or the music someone was playing on the jukebox. It was like the entire bar had frozen in time. I couldn’t have heard that right; I couldn’t have.

The fading sunlight coming through the window lit up her face. Her lower lip was trembling, but her jaw was set, her eyes clear and dry.

“She passed out,” Paige went on. “I think she was barely conscious when she came home, but I remember hearing her fall to the floor in the living room. I got out of my bed—I was in my nightgown —and I walked out to see if she was okay, to see what was going on. He was standing there in the living room, looking down at her. I could see she was fine—I was used to her passing out by then, you see—and then he looked up and saw me. And he got this big smile on his face. ‘What do we have here?’ he said. I’ll never forget his face as long as I live. He was a big guy, about your size actually, and he had a fleur-de-lis tattooed on his right bicep, and a bleeding sacred heart tattoo on his left forearm. He was wearing a white wife-beater shirt, and there were food stains on it. He was wearing jeans and boots…and he started walking toward me. He grabbed me and tore my nightgown off of me, and he just raped me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just held her tighter.

“He was gone when she finally came to, me lying there on the floor in my ripped nightgown, and she didn’t believe me.” She laughed bitterly. “She didn’t fucking believe me—and what was worse, she couldn’t even remember his name. She accused me of seducing him, if you can believe that. My own fucking bitch drunk of a mother.”

“Paige, I’m so sorry.” I’d known her for almost ten years, and I’d never had any idea what had happened to her. She didn’t like to talk about her past; she didn’t like to talk about her mother. I knew her mother called her from time to time, and whenever she talked to her, it upset her and required a lot of pot to forget about it. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this before?”

“It’s my cross to bear.” Her eyes swam with tears. “It’s probably why I can’t ever seem to make anything work with any guy I ever date, you know.”

“That wasn’t your fault, Paige.” I kissed the top of her head.

“Oh, I know that, Chanse. That wasn’t my sin. My sin—” She bit her lip.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She raised her chin. “My sin was the abortion.” And then she broke down and wept, her entire body shaking with sobs. “That motherfucker got me pregnant…”

I kept holding her, my mind reeling, murmuring over and over again that it wasn’t her fault, that there was nothing she could do, and Katrina had not been sent by God to punish her for that. After a few minutes, she pushed me away and wiped her face with a napkin, smearing her makeup all over it.

I watched her as she somehow managed to pull herself together. “Well, I must look a wreck.” She rose. “Will you walk me home?”

At her gate, she gave me a big hug. “Thanks, Chanse, you know—talking about that, finally telling someone—it helped a little bit.” She gave me her crooked grin. “Sorry to dump that on you.”

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. “Do you want me to stay over?”

She stroked my cheek. “No, I’m fine. I’ll just go in and take a Xanax and sleep like a baby.” She hiccupped again. “I think I need to switch back to wine.” She opened her purse and handed me a little vial of pills. “There’s five Xanaxes in there.” She winked at me. “You never know when you might need them.”

“I don’t want to take your—”

“Trust me, I have plenty.” She shrugged. “And trust me, the longer you’re back, the more you’ll need them.”

She shut the gate behind her, and I watched her walk back to the carriage house. Once she opened the door, she gave me a little wave, and then she was inside.

Maybe, I thought as I took a deep breath and started walking home, getting my own Xanax prescription wasn’t a bad idea.

Everyone was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, it seemed.

The meltdown I’d had in the car on the way back from Lakeview had been pretty scary.

Just focus on what you’re doing, and keep working, I told myself as I crossed Coliseum Square, digging out my keys. If you keep your mind occupied, you won’t have the time or energy to have these kinds of meltdowns.

Once inside my apartment, I sat down on the couch with a notebook. I always make lists when I’m working on a case—I don’t trust my memory enough not to do so. I wrote down everything I knew so far, and everything I needed to find out. I made a list of people to interview, notes to make some computer searches on Michael Mercereau’s family—Iris had to have some relatives on her father’s side.

I got up and stretched.

Yes, move forward, don’t take the time to stop and think.

That was the only way to get through all of this.

I went to bed and fell asleep within seconds.

I woke up around three in the morning from one of the worst nightmares I’d ever had. My hair was soaked and plastered to my scalp. My skin—and the sheets too—were drenched in sweat. I sat there for a moment in the dark, waiting for my heart to stop pounding and my entire body to stop trembling and relax. The images were so vivid, so real…I turned on the nightstand lamp and sat there for a moment before reaching a trembling hand out for a cigarette. I breathed in the soothing nicotine, closing my eyes and letting calm wash over me. I stubbed it out when it was burned about halfway down to the butt, and got out of bed. I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stood under the hot spray for a few minutes, letting the water soak into my tense muscles, and then toweled off, got a soda, and went into the living room. The pipe was sitting where I’d left it after getting home from Paige’s, and I took a long, slow hit, hoping it would help.