Who Dat Whodunnit Read online

  Synopsis

  The Saints’ victory in the Super Bowl just prior to the start of Carnival season has everyone in New Orleans floating on Cloud Nine. But for Scotty Bradley, Carnival looks like it’s going to be grim yet again when his estranged cousin Jared—who plays for the Saints—becomes the number one suspect in the murder of his girlfriend, dethroned former Miss Louisiana Tara Bourgeouis. Scotty’s not entirely convinced his cousin isn’t the killer, but when he starts digging around into the homophobic beauty queen’s sordid life, he finds that any number of people wanted her dead. With the help of his friends and family, he plunges deeper and deeper into Tara’s tawdry world of sex tapes, fundamentalist fascists, and mind-boggling secrets—secrets some are willing to kill to keep!

  Who Dat Whodunnit

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  Who Dat Whodunnit

  © 2011 By Greg Herren. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-225-2

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: May 2011

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  By The Author

  The Scott Bradley Adventures

  Bourbon Street Blues

  Jackson Square Jazz

  Mardi Gras Mambo

  Vieux Carré Voodoo

  Who Dat Whodunnit

  The Chanse MacLeod Mysteries

  Murder in the Rue Dauphine

  Murder in the Rue St. Ann

  Murder in the Rue Chartres

  Murder in the Rue Ursulines

  Murder in the Garden District

  Sleeping Angel

  Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections on New Orleans (edited with Paul J. Willis)

  Dedication

  This is for the SUPER BOWL XLIV CHAMPION

  NEW ORLEANS SAINTS

  Bless you, boys, and thank you.

  “Ignorance—of mortality—is a comfort. A man don’t have the comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is.”

  —Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  “What kind of Fascist state would deny a gay man a bridal registry?”

  —Margaret Cho

  “This stadium used to have holes in it, and it used to be wet. Well, it isn’t wet anymore. This is for the city of New Orleans.”

  —Saints Coach Sean Payton,

  accepting the NFC Championship Trophy

  Prologue

  It was the best of times.

  It was the craziest of times.

  Well, what it really had to be was the end times, which was the only logical explanation for what was going on in the city of New Orleans.

  Pigs grew wings and nested in the branches of the beautiful live oaks everywhere in the city. Some thought the pilot light in hell had gone out, so that icicles hung from the noses of shivering demons in the realm of the dark lord. Others starting watching the horizon for the arrival of the Four Horsemen, for surely the Apocalypse must be coming. Surely the earth was tilting in its axis. Maybe aliens would land in Audubon Park, or the Mississippi River would start flowing backward.

  Anything and everything was possible, because the Saints were winning.

  GEAUX SAINTS!

  People who don’t live in the South don’t really understand how important football is down here. Football is more than a religion in the Deep South. I’m not sure why it is—my mom claims it’s because the South lost the Civil War—but it’s true. On Saturdays, when the colleges play their games, the entire region comes to a complete halt. People live and die by their teams—whether it’s LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia or Tennessee—and how they fare on Saturday. I myself grew up cheering for the LSU Tigers—even though attending Vanderbilt was a family tradition on my mother’s side. Whenever Papa Fontenot gives me crap for dropping (well, flunking is probably a more accurate word) out after my sophomore year, I give him a withering look and reply, “Maybe I’d have done better at LSU.”

  That always shuts him up.

  But as much as we love football, here in New Orleans we’ve known nothing but shame for decades. Tulane, the only major university within the city limits, might as well not even have fielded a team, they were so hopeless. And the Saints, our NFL team, were probably the most hopeless case in the entire league. For forty-two years, the Saints (sometimes called the Aints) failed spectacularly. It took them over twenty years to post their first winning season. Yet somehow, we loved them. No matter how bad they were—and they were pretty bad most of the time—we kept on loving them and cheering for them. They were ours, and well, if they were losers, they were still OUR losers. The Saints were like that crazy uncle every family seems to have, you know what I mean? You don’t stop loving him because he’s a screw-up and a failure. You just keep loving him and hoping for the best, thinking maybe someday he’ll get it together.

  Even though he never seems to succeed—and sometimes, many times, he shoots himself in the foot.

  But this year, things were different.

  The fever spread through the city faster than bubonic plague. Each week, the excitement built as our sad-sack always-an-also-ran NFL team mowed down every team they faced. Every Sunday, at game time, the streets were as deserted and empty as they’d been those months after the floodwaters from the levee failures receded. For those few hours, New Orleans turned into a ghost town, eerily silent until a roar would erupt from the nearest bar—a roar that meant the Saints had scored.

  By the time the team was 4–0, people were saying this could be the year we went to the Super Bowl. No one talked about winning the Super Bowl; just making it there was more than enough for us long-suffering Saints fans. As hopeful as we were, there was always that thought in the back of our minds—Is this a fluke? Will the clock strike midnight and turn the Saints back into field mice from champions?

  But somehow, week after week, they kept winning.

  People were talking about destiny.

  And the city turned black and gold.

  Even those people who didn’t care for football were hanging Saints flags on their houses, writing FINISH STRONG on their car windows in grease pencil, and wearing jerseys on game days. Everywhere you turned on Sundays, all you could see were locals in Saints jerseys. Anything with a fleur-de-lis, the words “Who Dat,” or the Saints logo on it just flew off the shelves. Even the gay bars turned off their traditional music videos on Sundays and played the games for crowds of jersey-wearing gay men, offering drink specials every time the Saints scored. One bar started calling vodka-and-cranberry a “Drew Brees.”

  Priests took to performing Sunday mass in Saints jerseys, and closing with a prayer for a Saints victory.

  The fever was everywhere. It was bigger than Mardi Gras.

  It was almost as though it was ordained somehow.

  Some of the wins were not only improbable, they were impossible. Down
by seven points against the Redskins, less than three minutes left in the game with the Redskins getting ready to kick a field goal to clinch the game—they somehow found a way to win. Down twenty-one points to the Miami Dolphins, they wound up winning.

  Week after week, somehow the Saints just kept winning.

  And eventually, the Minnesota Vikings came to the Superdome with the NFC Championship on the line, and a trip to the Super Bowl—the Promised Land Saints fans never once believed we’d ever see after wandering forty-two long years in the desert.

  My name is Milton Scott Bradley, but you can just call me Scotty. I am a born and bred New Orleanian, and I bleed black and gold. I live in the French Quarter with my two boyfriends, Frank Sobieski and Colin Cioni. Yes, I have two boyfriends—but Colin’s work takes him away most of the time. Frank and I have a private detective business—Bradley & Sobieski.

  And that Sunday night, my parents decided to invite people over to watch the Saints play (for only the second time in their history) for a chance to go to the Super Bowl.

  And it came down to a field goal—in overtime.

  An entire city—no, an entire state—held its breath as a twenty-three-year-old kid who’d missed a game-winning kick a few weeks earlier trotted out onto the field with a chance to go down in New Orleans history as either a great hero or as the goat.

  The ball was snapped.

  All I could do was whisper “oh my God” as I watched him swing his leg. My eyes filled with tears of shock and joy as I watched the ball go up in the air, travel forty yards spinning end over end, and cleanly split the uprights.

  And the entire city of New Orleans spontaneously erupted with joy.

  By that time, I was emotionally exhausted and drained. With about five minutes left in the game, I just went completely numb. I’ve never experienced anything even remotely like that during a football game; it was weird, like I’d blown a circuit in my brain. I had alternated between joy and disappointment throughout the entire game, but as the game wound down I was numb from head to toe and felt nothing but an unearthly calm that frankly had me worried I’d had a mini-stroke or something. When the Saints intercepted legendary Vikings quarterback Brett Favre with nineteen seconds left in the game, I could hear the cheers roaring and echoing from every direction outside. In my parents’ living room, people were screaming and cheering, jumping up and down—but I just sat there on the couch, unable to believe what I was seeing, to process what had just happened.

  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.

  Chapter One

  Queen of Swords, Reversed

  A sly, deceitful, cruel woman

  Contact made.

  I stared at the computer sc
reen 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.