Royal Street Reveillon Page 2

  The legend also holds they were going to name me either Ridge or River. Either would have been better than being named after a board game company. Other kids made my life miserable at school until Storm started calling me Scotty.

  Having Milton Bradley as your legal name causes no small amount of hilarity when dealing with things like the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the passport office, or whenever you need to show legal ID, like at airports.

  Trust me, I’ve heard every possible joke that can be made about my name, thank you very much.

  Don’t get me wrong, my parents are the best. No young kid grappling with his sexuality could have had better parents. Mom and Dad were thrilled when I came out in high school—they’ve marched in every gay pride parade in New Orleans since, hang rainbow flags on the house every Pride, Decadence, and Mardi Gras, and have worn out numerous I’m proud of my gay son T-shirts. They own and operate a tobacco shop on the corner of Royal and Dumaine in the Quarter, and I grew up in the spacious apartment directly above. I went to Jesuit High School, and like a good little Bradley went off to Vanderbilt after graduation. But I hated the school, missed New Orleans, and finally flunked out at twenty, returning to New Orleans an abject failure. Dismayed at the dark stain on the family honor my flunking out had created, both grandfathers tied up my trust funds until I proved myself worthy of access to all that money and accruing interest.

  Or turned thirty, whichever came first.

  It probably goes without saying that the trust funds were released on my thirtieth birthday, doesn’t it?

  Then there’s the psychic thing. I have what is known as a “gift,” which means that I can sometimes see the past or the future, and sometimes I can commune with the Goddess in one of her incarnations. That usually happens when something big is going to go down, but she also speaks in maddening riddles that I often can’t figure out until it’s too late. Sometimes I can focus the gift using tarot cards, and sometimes the cards will answer my questions. It doesn’t always work, and for some years after the Flood Caused By the Failure of the Federally Built and Maintained Levee System, it went away completely.

  I don’t really understand how it works, to be honest.

  If I did, I suppose I could have made money doing it. But without a degree or work experience other than working in my parents’ shop, I was kind of at loose ends.

  So, I became a stripper. I was also a personal trainer, but no one ever mentions that. It’s always “Back when you were a stripper…”

  I was a personal trainer by day and a sometime go-go boy at night in gay bars. I originally worked with Southern Knights, a booking agency that sent me all over the country to dance. Sometimes I made great money, sometimes I didn’t. But it required me to stay in shape. I was already in pretty good shape from being a wrestler in high school—Storm got me to go out for wrestling when I was in junior high, when kids were picking on me—and I was pretty good at it. I rented an apartment from a lesbian couple, old family friends that I call my aunts, on the last block of Decatur Street, across from the old Mint. Millie and Velma were awesome, and never minded if I was late sometimes with the rent.

  The summer I turned twenty-nine, a porn star who was supposed to dance at the Pub for Southern Decadence weekend overdosed and went into rehab, and the manager asked me to fill in. I needed some quick and easy money, so I said yes. I wound up helping the FBI stop a crazed right-wing politician from destroying the French Quarter (it’s a long story) and wound up with not one but two boyfriends. Frank Sobieski was the FBI agent I worked with, and Colin Cioni…well, he told me that weekend he was a cat burglar (it’s a long story) but it turned out he’s actually an international espionage agent, working for the Blackledge Agency.

  His boss, Angela Blackledge, is who governments call when they need something handled but also need plausible deniability. Colin is gone for long stretches of time, on jobs we can’t know anything about. Frank retired and moved to New Orleans, and eventually chased his dream of being a professional wrestler, signing with Gulf Coast Championship Wrestling and becoming one of their biggest stars and draws. He keeps saying he’s going to retire but hasn’t yet.

  I joke that his farewell tour has lasted longer than Cher’s.

  I think both of them being gone so much helps keep our three-way relationship fresh and alive—we’re never around each other long enough to get annoyed or bored.

  The sex is also fantastic. Have I mentioned that?

  Once the top floor of our building became vacant we rented it, too—so we have the third and fourth floors of our building.

  But Millie retired from her law practice—Velma had retired years ago. Tired of living in the city, they wanted to live at their beach house in Florida. I bought the building from them—but haven’t figured out what I want to do with it yet. There are four floors: The ground floor has always been leased to a business of some sort, but it’s been vacant since the coffee shop closed a few years ago. Millie and Velma’s apartment on the second floor has been vacant since they moved. Colin has always had his own bedroom up on the fourth floor, while Frank and I both have our own on the third—but we mostly all sleep together in my room. Frank’s nephew, Taylor, also lives with us now. His parents disowned him and threw him out when he came out, and he’s now attending Tulane University. He also has a bedroom on the fourth floor, and since Colin is often away, he pretty much has his own place.

  Both Frank and Colin think I spoil Taylor.

  Maybe I do. I have a soft spot for gay kids who grew up with homophobic parents, sue me. I was lucky, as I said, with my own parents, so I feel a bit of a karmic debt that needs repaying.

  I keep thinking I should renovate the building and turn it into a four-story home for my little family, but I tend to procrastinate—and Frank and Colin aren’t much help. My accountant, Bonnie, tells me I should actively look for a business tenant for the first floor, and I could make a fortune renting out Millie and Velma’s apartment, too…but I don’t know. Millie and Velma were family, and after the Duchesnays closed their little grocery store after Katrina, having other businesses in that space seemed weird to me. I never got used to the coffee shop being there—and it didn’t last long anyway.

  I’m also a private eye, licensed by the state of Louisiana. After that first experience with a criminal conspiracy and catching a killer, Frank convinced me to become a private eye. He retired from the FBI and we opened an agency together…but I don’t use the license much, honestly; we might get an actual paying client once in a while. Most of the time, my detective work is limited to doing research for my brother Storm’s law firm. But sometimes, a body will drop out of the sky, bullets start flying, and I’m right in the middle of the whole mess.

  The New Orleans Police Department—particularly detectives Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague—used to find me annoying. Over the years, they’ve come to a kind of grudging respect for my skills, such as they are.

  At least I like to think they do, anyway.

  I also have a deep dark secret: I love reality television.

  Not all of it, of course. But when it first got started, I was obsessed with The Real World, and later, with Project Runway. I liked the competition shows, where people were required to have some sort of talent in order to participate, but I didn’t care for the singing ones. I don’t watch the ones about finding your true love or about families with more money than they need who are just terrible people or any of those. I stopped watching Real World when they stopped casting actual real people and instead starting casting wannabe models and actors with rage and/or drinking problems.

  And then one of the cable networks launched a show called Grande Dames of Marin County. I didn’t watch, but one Sunday when I was the only one home I turned on the television while cleaning, and it was on. I didn’t change the channel right away because I’d turned it on just for background noise, and having seen preview commercials I immediately knew what it was…and so I paused, with my finger on the channel b
utton, ready to flip to something else if it was as awful as I figured it would be.

  But I couldn’t stop staring at the television. Two women, their faces frozen rigid and expressionless with Botox and fillers, were screaming at each other about something. Curious, I kept watching as they screamed at each other, finally agreeing to disagree but now that They Had Had a Conversation and Made Their Feelings Known, they were happy they could Move Forward and start fresh with their friendship.

  Everything about these shows annoyed me. They began, basically, as a rip-off of a hugely successful prime time soap starring actresses too old to play love interests for men two or three times their age and too young to play grandmothers yet. I hated that they catered to the lowest common denominator. I hated that all the women on the show were certifiably insane, encouraged to behave badly and make all women look bad, like a bunch of shrewish self-absorbed monsters—the absolute worst stereotypes of women: shallow, vain, petty, and unsupportive of other women, only concerned about their looks and money and things.

  I suppose it goes without saying that I couldn’t stop watching, nor could I stop hating myself for watching. Frank and Colin roundly mocked me for being so addicted, but I watched them all: The Grande Dames of Marin County, Manhattan, Malibu, Palm Beach, Baltimore, Boston, and Houston. The franchises spread across the country like bubonic plague in fourteenth-century Europe. The formula was the same, no matter which city served as the setting: women with money who had never progressed emotionally and intellectually beyond junior high school with too much time on their hands and way too much access to a plastic surgeon.

  Narcissism and borderline personality disorders were also apparently a plus in getting cast.

  It was only a matter of time, of course, before New Orleans got a franchise.

  A previous attempt to launch a franchise in New Orleans had failed spectacularly when the producers couldn’t find enough women interested in being on the show. The network had been getting complaints about racism and the lily-whiteness of its casts; even the Houston show was all white women, with nary a Latina in sight. The producers’ plan had been to make the New Orleans show the “black” one, but they couldn’t find enough women of color with the requisite narcissism and mental problems to air their dirty laundry for the cameras. The New Orleans show plans were scrapped, and they’d moved on to Baltimore, where they’d had great success finding women of color to film—and the Baltimore show was wildly popular.

  But one summer the news broke that the producers were, once again, trying to launch a New Orleans franchise. Naturally, it was a lot of fun trying to figure out who would say yes to being on such a show—casting it became a very popular parlor game around town. I couldn’t imagine anyone who was actually old-line New Orleans society—Comus and Rex and the Boston Club—agreeing to go on television and look bad to the entire country.

  When the cast was finalized and made public with a blazing fanfare and burst of publicity, no one was surprised they hadn’t landed anyone from the upper echelons of New Orleans society—the kind of woman they wanted here would never do a television show. The women in the New Orleans cast were all successful in varying degrees, but no one who’d ever been any sort of Mardi Gras royalty. Chloe Valence was probably the closest out of them, but she wasn’t from New Orleans and had married into an old Garden District family. Rebecca Barron was the widow of a nouveau riche restaurateur. Fidelis Vandiver had been a weather forecaster for one of the local news stations but had gotten her own local workout show, which led her to owning a string of health clubs scattered around the metropolitan area. Megan Dreher was married to a man who’d been a slumlord before Katrina and was now making a fortune in the building boom of the last decade—and becoming one of the most loathed men in the city. Margery Lautenschlaeger was the oldest member of the cast, with a family fortune from liquor. Her family name and money went back to the nineteenth century…but they were also Jewish, which meant no Boston Club or membership in Rex or Comus.

  The final member of the cast was the one I knew the best, Serena Castlemaine, an oil heiress from Dallas who’d relocated to New Orleans several years earlier. I loved Serena, with her platinum blond hair and enormous breasts and her earthy sense of humor. Serena was a Grande Dames natural. But she has a great sense of humor, and her reason for doing the show was neither fame nor fortune, but simply because she thought it would be fun.

  “And, darling,” she said, rolling her enormous eyes at me with a wicked grin, “when it stops being fun, I’m done.”

  New Orleans being the small town it was, I had met all the women cast on the show in passing or knew who they were. New Orleans being New Orleans, I’d also heard plenty of gossip about all of them. And once filming began, their presence became hard to miss: restaurants and bars put up the filming tonight coming inside indicates permission to be filmed signs on their doors.

  “I was going to go to that fundraiser/party/event, but those dreadful reality show people were going to be filming there” became a common refrain throughout that late summer and fall, always mentioned with sighs and eye rolls. I suspected that most people couldn’t wait for the show to air but would never admit it—and would certainly never admit watching.

  I managed to avoid filming, even though Serena kept asking me to film with her. I always declined—when one of your partners is an undercover operative working around the globe, the less attention you bring to yourself, the better. Besides, I didn’t want to know how the cookies got made. I preferred to just continue being a fan, pretending that it was all unscripted and none of the women were putting on a show for the cameras, trying to be liked, trying to claw their way up the ladder and become a brand.

  But…you hear things. New Orleans has always been about a block long and everyone is on a party line, as they used to say when people still remembered what a party line was.

  And the weekend the show premiered, I got sucked into the drama against my will.

  Like I said, I have a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  So, this is the story of how I sort of became a Grande Dame of New Orleans.

  They didn’t even have the decency to give me a fleur-de-lis to hold in the opening credits.

  Bitches.

  Chapter One

  Page of Cups

  A young man who is courageous when it is called for

  I fished the last olive out of my almost empty glass and popped it into my mouth. I glanced at my watch as I chewed it, and moaned after swallowing. “There’s nothing like a good martini,” I said, glancing around the bar and getting our server’s attention.

  “Do we have time for another?” My nephew Taylor finished the rest of his sazerac and looked at me hopefully.

  “I take it you liked it,” I replied, not even trying to hide my smile. “But no time for another unless we want to be late.”

  This was Taylor’s first time at the Sazerac Bar. He’d turned twenty-one just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater, I thought I’d treat him to a sazerac in the bar where they were invented. I personally don’t care for the drink—give me gin or vodka any day of the week—but everyone in New Orleans is required to try a sazerac at least once.

  And now I could rest easy, having done not only my civic duty but treated Taylor to a New Orleans rite of passage.

  I’d also wanted him to see the Roosevelt Hotel’s Christmas decorations. The Roosevelt is one of the grand old hotels of the city, and their lobby decorations are truly spectacular. Since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater—a mere block or so from the hotel—I thought, why not kill two birds with one stone? This was Taylor’s second Christmas with us, and I wanted to do it right. We’d already done Celebration in the Oaks at City Park, and I’d loved seeing the beautifully decorated ancient live oak trees through a newbie’s eyes.

  I know it’s corny, but I love Christmas.

  I love everything about it. I love decorating my apartme
nt. I love picking out a present that is 100 percent perfect for the person and carefully wrapping it up in beautiful paper, topping it with a bow, and twining ribbons around the box. I love picking out a tree, and the wonderful smell of pine that permeates everything inside once it’s delivered. I love getting the boxes of ornaments down from the storage closet and adorning the branches with them. I love tinsel and opening a new box of icicles for the branches. I love Christmas cookies and cakes and pies and turkey and celebrating and spending time with people I love.

  I even love carols—although I do think that September is a bit early to start playing them unless the intent is to drive people to homicide by December.

  I love how New Orleans puts on her Christmas best every year, the houses and buildings festooned with lights and decorations and wreaths, massive trees sparkling and shining and blinking in picture windows. It’s fun walking through the French Quarter after dark to see the decorations at Jackson Square and on the houses along the way. I love driving down St. Charles Avenue and through the Garden District. I love going out to City Park for Celebration in the Oaks. New Orleans takes decorating just as seriously as costuming. I even watch the movies and specials—I get a little bit misty with A Charlie Brown Christmas every year, and yes, I may cry every time Clarence gets his wings and George Bailey decides his life is wonderful after all.

  Sue me.

  My favorite thing about Christmas, though, is a New Orleans tradition known as reveillon dinners, a traditional dinner that originally followed midnight mass on Christmas. Local restaurants started offering these meals (not just after Christmas midnight mass, of course) in the weeks leading up to Christmas. New Orleans food is amazing, and a bad restaurant doesn’t last long in this city. Reveillon is just really an excuse to get dressed up and go out for dinner at a nice place and feel festive for the holidays. Christmas was less than two weeks away, and we’d already been to several restaurants to enjoy a reveillon meal.