Murder in the Rue Chartres (25 page)

“He died in the Upstairs Lounge fire.” His voice cracked for a moment, and he took a deep breath, removed his glasses, and wiped his eyes. “That was such a horrible day… Would you like me to start at the beginning?”

“Please.” It was hard not to smile. I was right.

“I met Michael a few years earlier, at a show for a mutual friend of mine.” He slapped his legs. “I wasn’t in this chair then, Chanse, and believe it or not, I was a rather decent-looking young man. I knew the Verlaine family—we didn’t really travel in the same social circles, but you know how New Orleans is…you can’t help meeting people and knowing more about them than you’d care to, if you know what I mean. I never much cared for Percy Verlaine, and I know my parents detested him. My father—did Barbara tell you anything about my family?”

“I know your father was a congressman.”

“He fought very hard for civil rights—which didn’t really make him terribly popular in the state, but my father, bless him, believed that every American was entitled to the same basic rights. Percy was a racist, among other things, and he often tried to finance my father out of office. My parents believed in the basic dignity of every human—not just the white men. So, I didn’t really come into contact with the Verlaines very often, but I knew them.” He sighed. “But I’m off topic, aren’t I? Don’t be afraid to point that out to me, Chanse.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, I don’t remember whose show it was, and I suppose that doesn’t really matter, but I was introduced to Michael and Margot—that I do remember. And as we talked, I began to get the feeling that Michael was flirting with me—in front of his wife!” He wiped his glasses again, replaced them on his nose, and grinned at me. “You have to remember, it was a different time back then, Chanse. We weren’t quite so public about our sexuality in those days as you boys can be today—but then, weren’t you the private eye who solved the Mike Hansen murder a few years back?” He shuddered. “That was a terrible thing—it brought back all those horrible memories of the fire…”

“Yes, that was me,” I replied. “Did you know Mike Hansen?”

“He modeled for Davis—I think I have a photograph of him hanging somewhere in the house. He was a beautiful young man…such a waste. Anyway, Michael asked me for my card at the end of that evening and called me a few days later. We became lovers, although it was more of a sex thing more than anything else. It was a dangerous time…that monster Jim Garrison had just destroyed Clay Shaw, you know…but then again, no one thought it odd if two men had dinner together at Galatoire’s or spent a great deal of time together—people didn’t automatically suspect anything in those days.” He smiled. “It just never entered people’s minds that someone might be gay, you know, especially if there was a wife and children—which is why so many of us had them, you know. I never did…it didn’t seem right to me.”

“But it was okay to sleep with a man with a wife and children?” I shook my own head with a smile at his logic.

“Does that shock you?” He raised an eyebrow and smiled at me. “I know today ‘married men’ are the forbidden fruit—if you pardon the dreadful pun—for gay men. But you have to remember, at that time most gay men and lesbians got married and hid who they were. Marriages were a wonderful smoke screen—and Margot knew all about Michael’s ‘little quirk,’ as she called it.” He coughed. “I know a lot of people didn’t like Margot, but she was a remarkable woman. She loved Michael—and figured his men weren’t a threat to her or her family. And they weren’t. Michael knew where his bread was buttered, if you’ll pardon the cliché. I seem to be speaking in puns and clichés today.”

“So Margot knew?”

“Of course she knew! She may have been a lot of things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. They had a very nice little arrangement, and it worked for everyone. I certainly didn’t want Michael for anything other than an afternoon in bed in my home.” He shrugged.

“You didn’t love him?”

“Have I shocked you? Surely people today don’t only have sexual relations with people they love?” He threw back his head and laughed. “No, I didn’t like Michael very much as a person. Michael was certainly charming, and he was a very talented painter, and he was wonderful as a lover, but other than that? He was very unemotional, very cold. He was like biting into tinfoil. Have you ever done that?” When I nodded, he went on, “I don’t think Michael was capable of feeling or caring about anyone rather than himself. It was unfortunate, but there you have it. So, no, I didn’t fall in love with Michael. I wasn’t that stupid. No, I thought Michael had a great deal of talent, and I thought he was a beautiful man, and a wonderful lay, to be crude—but other than that, no. I didn’t want to see him waste his talent, so I pushed him to paint, to show his work—and he was remarkable—but no, I didn’t love him. In fact, by the time he died, our little arrangement had been over for quite some time. No, he called me that morning and wanted me to meet him at the Upstairs Lounge, to talk about a gallery owner in Palm Springs I was going to introduce him to—it wasn’t an assignation or anything. It was purely business, and Michael did like to go there every once in a while to relax and maybe pick up a boy. And I wasn’t averse to going there—it was quite fun on a Sunday afternoon.” He closed his eyes. “My mother called me just as I was leaving the house, and would not get off the phone—although as it turned out, she may have saved my life. I was furious with her, and I remember having to walk very quickly. I was a few blocks away when I saw the smoke and the flames.” He closed his eyes for a few moments, and then he opened them. “I lost several wonderful, irreplaceable friends that day,” he said softly. “And afterward, it wasn’t too hard to figure out, was it? Michael was supposed to meet me there, and he disappeared without a trace. Margot wouldn’t return my calls. I talked to the police, but they didn’t care. He was just another dead fag to them.” His eyes narrowed. “And that was when I realized things had to change. They were people, not garbage, and that was how everyone was acting. I thought about going to the papers with it, but my mother convinced me not too—my father was a congressman, and she was afraid it might harm his career.” He wiped at his eyes again. “So, no, I kept my mouth shut. I never told anyone else. And so. There you have it. I’m not proud I kept my mouth shut, that I didn’t raise a fuss.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Percy Verlaine—” I stopped myself. I was beginning to doubt the theory myself.

“Percy Verlaine.” He laughed bitterly. “A monster of a man. Inhuman. Do you know when the Metropolitan Community Church tried to get the plaque laid commemorating the tragedy a few years back, he tried to get it stopped? He’s been one of the biggest enemies of the gay community—behind the scenes, of course, always behind the scenes—this city has ever seen. He hates everyone except white men, you know. I’ve always thought it the greatest irony that the father of his grandchildren was a gay man.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Percy Verlaine was behind the fire?”

He inhaled with a hiss. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. After a few moments, he opened them and looked at me. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t surprise me.” He tapped his fingers on his knees. “You know, they never did find who set the fire—not that they looked too damned hard, if you ask me.”

“You’re sure Percy didn’t know Michael was gay?”

“If he knew, I—” His eyes got wide. “Oh, good lord,” he whispered. “I almost said that if Percy knew he would have killed Michael. You don’t think—”

“I don’t know.” It was my turn to shrug. “It’s an interesting theory I’m kicking around.”

He glanced at his watch. His face had gone pale, and his hands were shaking a little. “Um, Chanse, would you mind terribly if I terminated this interview?” he gave me a weak smile. “I truly am getting tired, and Devon is driving me to Hammond in a little while, and I’d like to get some rest.”

I rose. “Well, I thank you for your time, Eric.” I smiled at him. “I enjoyed talking to you. Maybe we could have lunch or something sometime?”

He smiled. “I’d like that—as long as you aren’t just trying to use me to get to Devon.”

I laughed as I walked over to the door, and was about to walk out when he called my name. I turned around. “Yes?”

He rolled his chair across the room to me. He pointed an index finger at me. “Find out if that old fuck did this. If he did this”—his voice shook with emotion—“he needs to fry for it.” He swallowed. “Like they did.”

Just outside my car, a kid with blond dreadlocks who smelled like he hadn’t bathed since New Year’s asked for spare change.

“Sorry,” I said as I unlocked the driver’s side door.

“Come on, man,” he whined. “I need something to eat.”

I stopped getting into my car and looked at him, trying to control my rising temper. “Why don’t you get a job? There are help wanted signs everywhere.”

“A job?” He looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. “Why would I want to do that?”

“You know, panhandlers who aren’t willing to work aren’t what we need in this fucking city right now,” I snapped, getting into my car and starting the ignition. My hands were shaking as I felt the rage continue to build. No, I said to myself, I am not going to lose it, I can get this under control, I don’t need to take a Xanax.

The last thing in the world I needed was to become chemically dependent.

Fortunately, there was no traffic on the roads as I headed Uptown, which helped me to calm down.

All the possibilities were swirling around in my head. I started to make the turn at Race to head home, and then swerved back onto Magazine as another possibility hit me in the forehead like a brick. I’d been going about this entire case all wrong. Sure, Michael Mercereau’s death had something to do with it—I was sure of that—but I needed to take a look at things more current. Iris was murdered—and it didn’t make sense that she’d been killed simply because she’d hired me to find her father. The likelihood that I’d be able to dig up anything about the fire was pretty low. I didn’t think it was a coincidence she’d been killed the very day she’d hired me—but it was also likely there was another reason, a more pressing one, that the killer had wanted her out of the way.

What did Iris know that made her a threat?

Phillip had said she’d found out something—something that would put her in the driver’s seat at Verlaine Shipping.

The major flaw in the case I was building against Percy Verlaine was the consideration that no grandparent would have his grandchildren killed. It was unnatural, against every conceivable law of nature. The truth is that parents and grandparents behave unnaturally all the time. I saw that when I was a cop. Most people can’t wrap their heads around it—so juries are loathe to convict on that kind of crime unless the evidence is so damning and concrete they have no other choice. Family members kill each other all the time, but we are so socialized to hold familial bonds as sacred that when it does happen, it comes as a complete shock to our systems and we don’t want to believe it. Part of that comes from the fear that perhaps we might wind up being capable of doing such a thing—or that a relative could be. I could recognize the weakness of my logic. Percy Verlaine was a monster—every single person I’d talked to agreed on that point—but they still couldn’t believe that he would have his grandchildren killed. Even I had some trouble with it, myself. The Upstairs Lounge fire was a horrible tragedy, but would he have Iris and Joshua killed to cover it up after all this time? Just hiring me to find Michael wasn’t even motivation enough, to be perfectly honest. What were the odds I’d find out Michael had died in the fire, had been a gay man who’d married Margot as a blind? There had to be more; it had to go deeper than that.

And I also couldn’t rule out the possibility that Darrin Verlaine was behind the deaths of his siblings. He was, as Venus had pointed out, now the sole heir to the company and the family fortune. It was possible there was no connection to the fire, no connection to Michael’s disappearance. Much as I hate them, coincidences do happen.

It was time to have a sit down with Iris’s assistant.

*

I drove over to where the company headquarters were located on Poydras Street and parked. It wasn’t hard to find Iris’s office. I knocked on the door and walked in. There was no one seated at the outer desk, and the inner office door was open. Various generic-looking paintings of popular New Orleans tourist spots were placed at even intervals on the walls—Jackson Square, the Huey P. Long bridge, Bourbon Street at night, and the city skyline as seen from the West Bank.

A woman I assumed to be Valerie Stratton was seated behind Iris’ desk. Her blond-highlighted dark hair was pulled back into a bun. She was in her early thirties and just missed being pretty by the hard set to her jaw and eyes. She was wearing dark red lipstick that matched the polish on her long nails, and I could catch a hint of her perfume—something that vaguely smelled of roses and lavender. On her left hand was a silver ring, and her watch looked expensive. She was wearing a powder blue business suit over a salmon silk shirt. “May I help you?” she asked with a smile.

“Ms. Stratton?” I asked as I sat down in one of the chairs facing the desk. When she nodded, I went on, “I’m Chanse MacLeod. We spoke on the phone the other day. You weren’t completely honest with me, were you?”

She started tapping a pencil on her blotter. Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. MacLeod.” She gave me a frosty smile. “As I recall our conversation, I answered your questions.”