Who Dat Whodunnit (2 page)

When we won the coin toss for the overtime, I felt the electrical current that flowed through the entire city. Every hair on my arms was standing up.

Frank was hugging me so tightly I could barely breathe.

I was almost afraid to keep watching. My hands were clammy, my heart was pounding, and my chest was tight. My entire body was trembling.

I couldn’t even think clearly enough to pray.

And when the field goal went through the uprights, the city literally exploded.

And I cried. I just sat there on the couch and cried as everyone in the room screamed and hugged. Outside, all hell broke loose as people ran out screaming into the streets of the French Quarter. Horns were blaring, and I swear I could hear the cannons down on the riverfront being fired.

“Oh my God.” Frank grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. He put his arms around me and lifted me in a bear hug, kissing my cheek as tears flowed down both of our faces. Even though it was cold, we ran out onto the balcony with everyone else and screamed at the top of our lungs. We didn’t form words—we couldn’t just yet. We just screamed and hollered and laughed and cried and kissed and hugged.

People were dancing in the streets.

Fireworks were going off over Jackson Square.

The night was a blur from that point on. My memory is, frankly, spotty. I drank champagne and did shots with total strangers. I hugged and kissed people. I remember joining impromptu second line parades. I sang “When the Saints Go Marching In” or screamed the “Who Dat?” cheer until my throat was sore and my voice was barely more than a croak.

And I cried from the sheer joy of it all. I was so happy, so proud, so glad to be a New Orleanian, so glad to experience this incredible moment with everyone else in the city.

No city knows how to party and celebrate like New Orleans.

We live here because we love New Orleans and don’t want to be anywhere else. We stayed after the flood because we could live nowhere else; and even a battered, almost completely destroyed New Orleans was still better than any other place. For a New Orleanian, there is nowhere else.

There is only New Orleans.

It would have been easy for the Saints to leave us in those dark days after the flood, and there was talk of it. It was heartbreaking. The Saints, even in the days when fans wore paper bags over their heads to the games and we referred to them as the Aints, were as much a part of this city’s fabric as the Superdome, St, Louis Cathedral, and Mardi Gras. We loved our sad-sack Saints, even when we shook our heads and clicked our tongues over their bad luck. Some claimed it was because the Superdome had been built on top of an old slave cemetery—the team was cursed.

And when Katrina damaged the Superdome, the Saints played in San Antonio and in Baton Rouge at Tiger Stadium.

Was there ever a more opportune time, it seemed, for the Saints to leave New Orleans in their rearview mirrors, change their name, and start over again somewhere else?

But they stayed. They could have left but they stayed. And a grateful city, in its darkest days, in its bleakest hours, opened its heart and poured out an extraordinary and seemingly endless flow of love and gratitude.

And the team loved us right back. They gave us something to be proud of, to look forward to, and they united the city when we had so little, when we were just hanging on by our fingernails and trying to get through the day with our dignity intact and our heads held high.

That day I was so keyed up and nervous about the game I couldn’t do anything. I kept reminding myself
it’s only a game, it’s only a game
but it didn’t work. All of my life, as big a sports fan as I am, I have never been so worked up over a football game, so tense, so nervous. When the Saints took the field, I had to wipe tears out of my eyes. They were tears of pride and joy—not just in my team, but in my city and we who live here—because we never, ever gave up on New Orleans. Because it would have been so easy to just give up. But we didn’t—we didn’t just walk away from one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country. We stayed, and we fought and rebuilt in the face of so much negativity. Because our actions, so much more so than our words, gave the middle finger to all those who seemed to exult in the annihilation of our city—because New Orleans will be here long after they’ve all gone to hell and their corpses crumble to dust in their graves.

And now, after years of listening to naysayers pronouncing our city dead, or beyond redemption, being told it was hopeless, the Saints pulled off a miracle.

And they did it for us.

Frank and I stumbled home around seven in the morning, exhausted, drained both emotionally and physically. We undressed and got under the covers, our arms around each other. “The Saints are going to the Super Bowl,” I whispered for maybe the thousandth time that night, still not quite able to believe it.

“I know,” Frank replied, kissing the top of my head.

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said, “because I’m afraid I’ll wake up and the whole night will have been a dream. It still doesn’t seem real.”

“It’s real, baby.” He kissed the top of my head again. “They did it. I just wish Colin was here to enjoy this with us.”

“I know,” I replied, rolling onto my side and closing my eyes.

My last thought before I went to sleep was
Wherever you are, Colin, please be safe.

Queen of Swords, Reversed

A sly, deceitful, cruel woman

Contact made.

I stared at the computer screen while emotions swept over my body. Relief and joy were followed closely by irritation. The urge to reach through the computer screen and strangle Angela Blackledge until her face went blue and her protruding tongue turned black was much more powerful than it should have been. I closed my eyes, took some deep breaths, and centered myself.

Once the toxic feelings were gone, I opened my eyes and read the two words again.

Seriously, Angela, would it have killed you to say more—like everything is okay, or maybe when he’s going to be coming home? You know, stuff we’d like to know?

I shook my head and sighed.

It would have to be enough, like every other time Colin was out there in some incredibly dangerous trouble zone, putting his life on the line to make the world a safer place for us normal, everyday people. When one of your boyfriends is a master secret agent, just knowing he was still alive has to be enough.

“He’s alive,” I called out to Frank as I typed
Thanks
and hit Send, wishing there was a way to connote sarcasm electronically.

Frank walked into the living room with just a towel wrapped around his waist. Shaving cream was lathered all over his face, beads of water glittering on his defined muscles. “Angela e-mailed, then?”

A smile spread over my face as my gaze traveled up and down his truly exquisite body. Frank, in his late forties, had the kind of body a man half his age would kill for. He was even hotter now than when we’d first met all those years ago, when I was still in my twenties and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

He stands about six feet two in his bare feet, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. There isn’t an ounce of fat on his thickly muscled frame. Every muscle on him looks carved out of stone. The ridges between his abs are so deep my fingers will fit there up to the first knuckle. Blue veins run over every muscle like a road map. His round, hard ass has to be seen to be believed—underwear models wished they had a butt so beauteous and awe-inspiring. He is balding and shaves his head down to little more than stubble. His jaw is strong and square. An angry-looking scar runs down his right cheek from almost the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. It gives him a mean, almost sinister look—especially when he scowls.

But when he smiles, his blue-gray eyes light up, dimples deepen in his cheeks, and the scar isn’t even noticeable.

Fortunately, he smiles a lot.

“As usual, she didn’t say much.” I shrugged. “Her typical cryptic shit.” I signed out of the computer and got out of my chair. “But I suppose if she told us anything more—”

“She’d have to kill us.” Frank finished the running joke between us with a laugh. No matter how many times we said it, it never seemed to get old. He winked at me. “You look hot,” he went on, giving me a wolf whistle.

“You think?” I looked down at what I was wearing—a pair of worn low-rise jeans and a black T-shirt that fit a little more snugly in the waist than I would have preferred. For that matter, I’d had some trouble closing the jeans.

I was going to have to start being a little more careful with my diet.

“I thought this was supposed to be a dressy thing—why are you wearing jeans?”

“Do you think Mom and Dad are going to be dressed up?” I rolled my eyes. “Besides, our branch of the family is always expected to be a freak show.”

“Why are we going, anyway?” he asked as I followed him back into the bathroom. I leaned against the door frame as he started shaving. “Mom hates these command performances, doesn’t she?”

“She’s not the only one,” I replied.

Dinner parties at the home of my paternal grandparents were always tedious affairs, where the only saving grace was the good liquor. Get-togethers at my maternal grandparents’ graceful Garden District mansion were always a good time—you never knew what was going to happen, and that was part of the fun. But the Bradleys were the antithesis of the Diderots—boring, stuffy, and extremely concerned about appearances. Papa Bradley disliked my mother intensely—and the feeling was more than mutual. He blamed her for turning my dad into a “French Quarter bohemian”; she thought he was an uptight racist classist bourgeois bastard. On more than one occasion he’d said something offensive and Mom had blown up.

At the Diderot house, a lively family argument would ensue. Papa Bradley just curled his lip disdainfully and drank more Scotch, his disapproval of his second son’s family written all over his face.

Frankly, I much prefer the Diderots. I try to avoid the Bradley side as much as possible. It’s not fun to be part of the black sheep branch of the family tree.

Even my brother Storm’s law degree and marriage to a Garden District blueblood didn’t make up for the “sins” of our parents. My sister Rain, who’d married a doctor and was very active in all the correct Uptown charities, hadn’t set foot inside the State Street house in years.

And I suspect Papa Bradley didn’t like to admit to many people he had a gay grandson with two long-term partners and his own private eye business.

I can only imagine what he’d think if he knew I was also a bit psychic.

“But it’s an obligation.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go any more than you do.”

Frank frowned at me in the mirror. He rinsed off his razor before going back to work on his neck. “I don’t mind your Bradley relatives as much as you do.”

“That’s because they aren’t
your
relatives,” I retorted. As soon as I said it, I was sorry.

I’d never met any of Frank’s relatives. I knew he had parents up in one of the Chicago suburbs, and a sister with a family in Birmingham. Other than that, he didn’t talk about them. I quickly added before the vein in his forehead started throbbing, “Besides, much as I loathe my cousin Jared, he
does
play for the Saints”—
mostly on the bench
,
I thought—“and they
are
going to the Super Bowl, so if Papa Bradley wants the whole family there to toast this momentous occasion, we have to go. It’s just one evening.” I sighed. “I guess this kind of thing means a lot to him.”

“Do you think MiMi will get drunk?” Frank winked at me as he rinsed his face.

I glanced at my watch and raised an eyebrow. “It’s six thirty—she’s already been drunk for hours.”

No one in the family really blamed MiMi for getting drunk. “It can’t be easy being married to that horrible old bastard, If drinking keeps her from putting a bullet in his head, who are we to judge?” was what Mom always said whenever one of us suggested getting her help or possibly staging an intervention. She had a point. Hell, if I’d spent fifty years married to the old bastard, I’d probably have my first drink at lunch, too. Mom also liked to point out that she rarely made a spectacle of herself in public—although there was that one time at Galatoire’s we weren’t allowed to talk about. No one on our side of the family had been there to witness it. According to my sister Rain, whose friend Catsy Thorndike
had
witnessed it,
MiMi apparently took off her blouse, climbed up on her table, and did a pole dance to the cheers of the other diners.

I’m quite sure it wasn’t quite
that
bad. Catsy Thorndike is prone to exaggeration—and had most likely been pretty hammered herself.

“Colin’s lucky he’s wherever he is,” I said sourly. “I know I’d rather be shot at than spend the evening on State Street.”

“It’s not that bad.” Frank rolled his eyes at me as he went into the bedroom. A nice pair of navy blue slacks, a yellow button-down shirt, a pair of socks that matched the shirt, and a leather belt were laid out across our neatly made bed.

“You’re wearing that?” I moaned. “Come on, Frank, wear jeans.”