Murder in the Rue Chartres Page 10

  “My apologies.” Percy Verlaine gave me a nasty smile. “I like to yank Lenny’s chain from time to time. Please be seated.”

  I sat down and took a good look at him. His head was completely devoid of hair, and his scalp gleamed in the sunlight. His skin was thin as paper, so I could see almost every vein in his face and neck. He was wearing a white linen suit, complete with navy blue button-down shirt and a rather loud red-and-yellow tie. He looked as though he would blow away in a slight wind, but his watery blue eyes were small, hooded, and alert—and alive with malice. He rang a bell, and the black woman who’d opened the door for me the last time I’d been to the house placed a plate of salad in front of him and one in front of me. It was merely a heart of romaine sliced lengthwise, drenched in a raspberry vinaigrette, and covered in feta cheese and crushed walnuts. She poured me a glass of red wine and refilled his ice water from a metal pitcher and then disappeared without a word.

  “Eat,” the old man wheezed. “We’ll talk after.”

  We ate in silence, him ringing the bell to signal the next course whenever we finished one plate. The salad was good, the bisque delicious, and it was easily the best shrimp Creole I’d ever tasted—not too much tomato and plenty of spices. The bread pudding was also heavenly, and then everything was all cleared away. He grabbed the mask, closed his eyes, and took in several deep breaths. He let the mask drop to his side, then opened the eyes slowly. I was reminded of a cobra.

  “I don’t know what my fool grandson was thinking, but I don’t want you looking for my former son-in-law,” he said quietly. “Nothing good will come of it.”

  “Your granddaughter wanted to find him before she got married.” I shrugged. “I think he’s just honoring her wishes, now that she’s gone.”

  “Iris was a fool too,” he hissed. “I told my daughter not to marry that trash, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I knew he was only capable of begetting fools—and I was right. And he betrayed her, broke her heart.” He waved his hand. “The best thing that ever happened to this family was the day Michael Mercereau walked out that front door and never came back.”

  “You’ll need to take that up with your grandson.” I shrugged. “He hired me, and until he tells me not to, I’m going to keep doing the job he hired me for.”

  “I’ll double what he’s paying you. Just tell him you can’t find him.” He gave me a vile smile. “That way you can make a nice tidy profit off the Verlaine family.”

  “Why don’t you just talk to him yourself?”

  He waved his hand again. “He won’t listen, the more fool he. My grandchildren were all fools. Iris getting herself killed! Thank God, Margot is safely in her grave. I told Iris not to move into that damn fool house, but she wanted to be independent, and Margot let her go…the Verlaines have always lived in this house, safe and sound. I warned her.”

  “Was Margot your only child?”

  “My wife and I had a son who was killed when he was sixteen. A car accident. Margot was all we had left.” He closed his eyes. “Matthew was also a fool.”

  “Was Aunt Cathy, Michael’s sister?”

  “Who told you about Cathy?” He looked down, and when he looked back up, there was a sly look to his eyes that I didn’t like or trust.

  “What happened to her?” I pressed on.

  “Cathy Hollis is my wife’s niece. Her parents died when she was very young, so we took her in, raised her as our own daughter.” He shrugged. “Not that she was ever grateful for anything we gave her. She was wild… She liked men, she liked to drink, and I suspect she took drugs. She liked to be looked at, have drinks bought for her—and she never cared if the man was married—or if the man was white.” He shook his head. “She was out of control—she had a wild streak. She lost her mind a long time ago—the drink and drugs, no doubt had a part in it. But her own mother’s family had a streak of madness in their bloodline… There’s no denying your blood, Mr. MacLeod.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “She’s in a mental hospital somewhere in Mississippi. She’s been there for a long time. I haven’t seen her in years. Her mind is gone. She thinks she’s a child again, and has for years.” He shook his head, but his eyes gleamed. “We pay for her care, of course. All she ever did was drain our money off us like a siphon. Nothing was ever good enough for her, of course. She was nothing like Margot. Margot was a perfect daughter—completely obedient, did as she was told.”

  “Except for marrying Michael Mercereau.”

  “She learned from her mistakes. Cathy never did, and look where it got her!”

  “I’d like to talk to Cathy. What hospital is she in?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  It was obvious he was lying—and he wasn’t offering to have someone find out for me. If he was indeed paying her bills, there was a record somewhere. But if he wouldn’t tell me, it would be easy enough to find out. I rose. “Thank you for lunch, Mr. Verlaine, but I need to be going now.”

  “Whatever Joshua is paying you, I will double it.” He leaned forward. “Don’t be a fool, Mr. MacLeod. Let the past stay buried. That’s generally what’s best to do. Why dredge up all that pain again? Michael Mercereau walked out of this house thirty-odd years ago and broke my daughter’s heart—his children’s hearts too. He never once tried to reach them, or talk to them. Do you think my daughter didn’t try to find him? She hired detectives. They searched for him for years, and never found a trace of him.” He shook his head again. “It’s a waste of time and my grandson’s money to keep looking for him now. If they couldn’t find him back then, what makes you think you can find him now?”

  “What’s interesting to me,” I said slowly, “is why you don’t want me to look for him.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He waved his hand. “Go.”

  *

  I walked back out into the hallway and was heading for the front door when Joshua Verlaine stuck his head out of the drawing room door. He glanced around, and nodded toward the front door. Out on the porch, with the door shut, he whispered, “Heard you asking the old man about Aunt Cathy.” He hiccupped, and I realized he was drunk again.

  I nodded. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  He winked at me. “Only way to find out what’s going on around here, you know, is to listen.” He shrugged. “Aunt Cathy was cool. She went away that same summer, you know. Lost her mind. She was always cool to us kids though.”

  “So?” I prodded him. “Where is she?”

  “A place called St. Isabelle’s. It’s in Cortez, Mississippi, up near the Tennessee state line, on the way to Memphis. I’ll call up there and give permission for you to see her.” He gave me a brittle smile.

  “Okay, I can find that place. You’ll call this afternoon?” When he nodded, I stuck my hand out and shook his. It was sweaty. “Thanks, Joshua.”

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his eyes were glistening. “I loved Aunt Cathy. Besides Dad, she was the only adult around here who had any time for us kids. Mother couldn’t be bothered, that was for sure. Cathy would play with me and Darrin. After Dad left, and she went away…” His voice trailed off for a moment, and then he went on. “Grandpa was always hateful to Aunt Cathy. I don’t know how she stood it around here, to be honest.” He snorted, and mimicked Percy’s raspy voice. “It was probably the drink and the drugs. Like being a part of this family wasn’t enough to drive anyone to drink!” He hiccupped again. “I mean, look at me.”

  “I need to talk to your brother, too,” I replied.

  “I’ll have him call you.” He winked at me and started back toward the front door.

  “And give Aunt Cathy my love.”

  The door shut behind him.

  Chapter Nine

  I went to the gym after leaving the Verlaine house to work the creepy feelings out of my system. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like to grow up in that house under the thumb of that wretched old man. It was a wonder all the Verlaines
hadn’t wound up with Aunt Cathy in a mental hospital. Growing up in that trailer park in east Texas, sometimes I’d fantasized what it would be like to be the child of wealth and privilege, live in a mansion, and have more money than I knew what to do with. The creep show the Verlaine family was turning out to be made the lousy trailer park, a violent father, and an alcoholic mother look pretty damned good about now.

  I worked out hard for a good hour. The gym was still pretty deserted, just Allen behind the counter and a couple of women on the stationary bicycles. I beat the hell out of my arms and shoulders, did about two hundred incline crunches, and did a good twenty minutes on a stair climber. There’s something almost Zen-like about a good workout. You can just focus completely on what you’re doing and put everything else out of your mind. Before long, the rhythm of the repetitions puts you into an almost-trance state and nothing else seems to matter. I was still in that semi-trance when I headed for my car. I was almost out the door when I realized Allen had said something to me.

  I came back in. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Allen came around the corner of the counter and stood in front of me. His tongue flicked out and licked his upper lip. “Um, I, uh, I um asked you what you were doing for dinner tonight?” His face flushed bright crimson.

  “Oh.” Of all the things I might have thought he’d said, I wasn’t expecting to hear that. It was from way out in left field. Was he asking me on a date? “Um, nothing, really. I mean, I meet some friends every evening for burgers and drinks at the Avenue Pub—kind of a standing date, but if I don’t show, it won’t be a big deal. Why?”

  “I close up the gym at seven.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “And I’m sick of eating alone.”

  “You want me to have dinner with you?” Sometimes I amaze myself with how slow I can be on the uptake. That’s me—master of urbane wit and putting someone else at their ease. Jesus, I can be a dork sometimes.

  “You mind?”

  “No. Of course not. I’d love to—it’ll be nice.” I glanced at my watch. It was almost three. “You want me to just meet you here at seven? Or meet you somewhere?”

  “I can pick you up.” He looked down at his shoes, his weight still going from one foot to the other. “If you’d rather...”

  “I can just meet you here,” I replied. “I have some work to do, and I can just swing by here. Is that cool?”

  He nodded, and then he flashed his grin, the one that always made me think of a happy chipmunk, at me. “I’ll see you then.”

  As I started my car, I wondered for a brief moment what I was getting myself into. I’d known Allen for years, ever since I’d joined Bodytech. I’d been to parties at the big house on St. Charles Avenue, but Allen and I had never done anything together before. Oh, sure, on the rare occasion when we ran into each other at a bar during Mardi Gras or Southern Decadence or something, we’d hang out for a while, talk and joke and laugh, but nothing serious. I didn’t really know him that well. He was a nice guy, attractive, had a great body, but I couldn’t help but wonder. Was this a date of some sort?

  Oh, good God, Chanse, get real and get over yourself, I admonished myself as I stopped at the intersection at Jackson. He’s lonely and bored. Can’t anyone show any interest in you for something besides sex? And with everything he told you the other day that was going on with him and Greg, he probably just wants someone to talk to about things, a friendly ear. Will it kill you to be that for him?

  “But he and Greg are having problems, and do I really want to get in the middle of that?” I said out loud as I swung the car to the left at the St. Andrew junction, where Magazine turned into Camp Street. As I pulled into the driveway, I decided not to worry about it. It was just dinner, for God’s sake.

  *

  I showered and got cleaned up before heading to my computer. I did a search for St. Isabelle’s and found their website. It quickly disabused me of any perception that it was a mental hospital. St. Isabelle’s was a “rest home,” with supervision and a fully trained medical staff. As I browsed through the site, looking at pictures of the “living suites” and the grounds, the workout center, the dining hall, the swimming pool, I began to wonder a little bit about what exactly was wrong with Cathy Hollis. Percy Verlaine had been pretty clear that she was not in her right mind, but I didn’t trust him. I glanced at my watch, and gave Paige a call, asking her to see what she could dig up in the paper’s archives about Catherine and Michael Mercereau. I tried to dig up some stuff online about Catherine—now that I knew her actual last name but wasn’t too surprised to come up with nothing.

  “Okay,” I said, leaning back in my chair and lighting a cigarette, “this isn’t going anywhere.” Solving a thirty-year-old disappearance wasn’t going to be easy; I’d never thought it would be. The lack of information on Michael Mercereau anywhere online pretty much ruled out any possibility he was still alive; he’d vanished off the face of the earth. So, it seemed likely he’d been murdered. But why? Why would someone want to kill him? Obviously, Percy hated him, but why wait until 1973 to have it done? I wasn’t getting far with the Verlaine family. The only ones who apparently knew anything were Percy—who wasn’t about to say anything—and Cathy Hollis, who may or may not be insane.

  I needed to come at it from a different direction. What about his family? I pulled out my old standby, the New Orleans phone book, and turned to New Orleans residential numbers. Sure enough, there were Mercereaus listed, but every single one of them had an address in the Lower Ninth Ward, and there was no one living down there now, not after the flood. There was no way of finding out where any of them had evacuated to, but I felt reasonably confident that not one of them was going to answer the phone. I found the printout I’d made of Michael Mercereau’s address history. Sure enough, one of the listings had been for a Lucien Mercereau, at the same address where Michael had lived until he moved Uptown.

  I leaned the phone book against the wall and started going through websites, keying in the names listed. Unfortunately, the only addresses and phone numbers the computer could find for them were the same as the ones in the phonebook. I went to the Red Cross website’s post-Katrina page and searched for them. If the Mercereaus had indeed gotten out of the city before the storm hit, they’d never bothered to register with the Red Cross. I doubted that all of them had been killed, so most likely, they had a place to go when they fled. I picked up the file Iris had given me and pulled out the birth certificate. Lucien Mercereau was listed as the father. I did a records search, and discovered there were two Mercereau children in addition to Michael: Jolene and Jules. I went to the address history website and typed in Jules Mercereau—he wasn’t listed in the New Orleans phone book. His last known address, unfortunately, was in Chalmette—and Chalmette, like the Lower Ninth Ward it bordered, was gone.

  With a sigh, I searched for Jolene Mercereau—and hit the motherlode. Jolene had married a man named Earl Mc-Connell in the early 1970s. Despite having moved around a bit, she was listed as living in Jackson, Mississippi, for the last seven years. I did a quick search and found a phone number for her. I got out my road map, and grinned to myself. Just as I thought—Jackson was on Highway 55 on the way to Memphis, and there was Cortez, just below the Tennessee state line, also on Highway 55.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and grinned again. I could easily stop and see Jolene McConnell on my way up to see Catherine Hollis.

  I lit another cigarette. Why had Iris never bothered to look up the rest of her father’s family, and why had the family never bothered with their Verlaine relatives? It seemed more than a little odd. Of course, the old man had made it pretty plain he thought his daughter had married beneath her, and it was possible after the marriage failed he and Margot had purposely kept the kids from their Lower Ninth Ward roots. The Mercereaus might have wanted to keep the family ties alive, but a working-class family wouldn’t have had a hell of a lot of recourse against a wealthy and powerful Garden District family—one of the wealthies
t families in the city, for that matter.

  Obviously, there was a lot more going on here than I could figure out by pure speculation.

  I did a search on Iris Verlaine. The vast majority of the entries were links to www.nola.com, the Times-Picayuneʼs website. The first one was an engagement announcement from the social pages. I clicked on the link and found myself staring at a professional portrait of Iris and her fiancé, Phillip Shea. He was handsome, and looked a little younger than she. I scrutinized his face. He had thick lips, longish hair that curled at the ends, and clear eyes and skin. He was smiling at the camera, and his long lashes gave him a dewy-eyed look. He was so handsome he could almost be called pretty—a designation most straight men detested. His left arm circled Iris’s waist, and she too, smiled at the camera. But her smile, unlike his, seemed a little frozen and forced. It didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes looked uncomfortable, as though there were a million other things she’d rather be doing than posing with her fiancé for a picture in the paper. I printed it out and tacked it up on my corkboard. I tacked the picture of Michael and Catherine Hollis next to it, and then put the wedding picture of Michael and Margot up beside them. I leaned back and took a good hard look at all of them. Iris had no resemblance to her father at all. I could see a resemblance between him and Joshua Verlaine—in fact, Joshua could almost be a facial clone of his father—but Iris looked liked neither one of her parents. Of course, that didn’t have to mean anything—I didn’t look like either of my parents, thank God, although my sister looked like our mother and my brother looked like our dad—but it made me curious. Maybe Michael had left Margot because he’d found out Iris wasn’t his child?

  Stick to the facts as you know them and stop speculating.

  I looked closer at Margot. At first glance, in her wedding photo, with the long lace veil framing her face, she looked like any other happy bride, aglow with excitement on her big day. But closer inspection showed that her teeth were clenched; there was tension in her jaw, and again, her eyes looked cold, as though posing for the picture with her new husband was an ordeal for her. His face was alight with excitement—and looking closer didn’t change that. But Margot…Margot was a different story.