Murder in the Rue St. Ann Read online

  What else hadn’t he told me?

  The gate hadn’t shut, so I walked through it and up the stairs. I knocked on the door. I heard footsteps, then a slender young man opened the door. He had large green eyes, short black hair parted in the middle and gelled stiff, and a rather large nose the rest of his face dropped back from. He was slender— maybe 140 pounds, and wore baggy jeans and an orange T-shirt with an iron-on patch of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman on it. In a very soft voice he said, “May I help you?” Behind him I heard a male voice say something I couldn’t make out, followed by a high-pitched girlish peal of laugher.

  “I’m looking for Mark Williams. My name is Chanse MacLeod—“ I reached into my back pocket for my badge. “—and I’m working for Dominique DuPre.”

  He nodded, without giving the badge the courtesy of a glance. “She called to let us know you’d be coming.” He held the door open, and I walked into a large room. A chandelier hung from a 16-foot ceiling. The desks were slapdash things made out of particle board. Several of them were scattered about the room, with computers on top of them.. Equally cheap-looking chairs, garbage cans, and lamps accompanied them. A man and a woman were seated in chairs on the opposite sides of two desks that had been pushed together. Loose papers and file folders covered their shared work space.

  The man was in his early 40’s, with bangs brushed forward over a receding hairline. He had brown plastic glasses that dangled halfway down a wide, almost squashed-looking nose. The lenses were large and thick. The glasses had been glued together several times at the bridge. The man was laughing, his eyes were narrow slits, his mouth gaped open and his head shook. He was wearing a gray T-shirt with attitude written across the chest.

  The woman facing him had blonde hair in dreadlocks. She wore a baggy, faded blue men’s shirt over cut-off men’s brown polyester pants. Her feet were in sandals. She turned her head and faced me. Her face was round, her cheeks full with deep dimples, and her eyes were round and black behind severe black plastic framed glasses. She was also smiling. “Hey, come on in!” she said.

  My eyes wandered to the walls. They were covered with framed posters, which were actually blown-up attitude magazine covers. I recognized a hot muscle boy who’d been on The Real World; a muscular young Hispanic soap star; and an adorable young guy I’d seen dancing on the bar at the Pub a few times. He had almost tempted me to break my long standing rule about not tipping dancers. There were several others I didn’t recognize, but they were all young and beautiful and shirtless.

  “Our past covers.” Said the guy who’d let me in. “My name is Zane Rathburn. I’m the artistic director. That’s Ghentry Rutledge, who’s the editor of the magazine, “ –the man in glasses nodded— “and Julian Eastwick, our sales director.”

  “Eastwick as in Witches of,” she said in a girlish voice. She couldn’t be much older than 23. Her nose, lip and tongue were all pierced, and I spotted a tattoo of Wile E. Coyote on her unshaved calf.

  I nodded to her. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I’ll tell Mark you’re here,” Zane said, He then walked across the room and knocked on a door, and walked into another room.

  I sat down. “So what’s it like working here?” I asked Ghentry and Julian, just to make conversation. It was better than just sitting there staring at each other.

  Julian tossed her dreads with a grin. Silver braces shone on her teeth. “ I like working in a queer environment. I like having a job where my boss doesn’t expect me to take out my jewelry, wear my hair in a certain style, or keep my tattoos covered.” Her blue eyes were serious. “I have a college degree, man, in English. And the only job I can get is being a salesperson. Wasn’t what I was expecting when I was paying my tuition.” She shrugged. “I could have gotten this job without a degree—but it’s fun working here.”

  “Yeah.” Ghentry leaned back in his chair and his hands behind his head. Nicely shaped muscles moved in his arms. “I’ve had a lot of shitty jobs I hated that paid better than this, but we have a good time—I don’t mind coming to work, if you know what I mean.”

  “Cool.” I said. I’ve always thought enjoying your work was a lot more important than money. I’m not cracked out to be an employee, which was why I was self-employed.

  The door opened again. Zane came back with another man. I stood back up.

  “Mr. MacLeod?” A blue-eyed man stepped forward with his hand extended for a shake. He had thick dark blonde hair clipped about an inch above the top of his head. His eyebrows were brown, and had been shaved apart over the bridge of his straight nose. There were some tell-tale lines starting to show around his eyes and mouth, but they were hardly noticeable. His cheeks were dimpled, his lips full and thick, and his teeth straight and white. He was a little over six feet tall, and probably about 190. He wore a tight black T-shirt with attitude printed on it. His tight faded jeans had a rip at the left knee.

  I shook his hand. His grip was fraternity-trained strong. “Call me Chanse.” I said.

  “And you call me Mark.” He clapped me on the back. “Come on into my office so we can talk.”

  He shut the door behind me. His office was completely different from the outer one. It was decorated in mahogany, brass, and glass. The walls were painted a dark green. There were no posters on the walls. The large desk was immaculate—everything was neatly stacked and carefully ordered. He sat down in his chair, leaned forward, and cupped his chin in his hands. “What they’re doing to Dominique is terrible, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head slightly.

  I sat down, pulled a notebook from my briefcase and flipped it open. “Just who is doing what to Dominique?”

  “I know she told you about the trouble with the liquor licenses.” He shook his head. “You’d think the other clubs would welcome another one into the fold. More clubs means more people. I managed to get the club open for Southern Decadence, and you couldn’t tell a difference—all the bars were full.”

  “So you all managed to get it open for Decadence? How?” Paul and I had gone out during Decadence, but had never gone beyond the St. Ann line on Bourbon. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. That dividing line, invisible as it may be, was fixed in my head.

  He nodded. “We got them a special event license. She couldn’t stay open for 24 hours, but she could open at nine as an event and stay open till six in the morning. She did a bang up business too.”

  “And the other bars see this as threatening?”

  He held up his hands. “I don’t understand it, Chanse. It doesn’t make much sense. I have friends who bartend at Oz and they say it was the busiest Decadence there ever. My friends at the Pub say the same thing. Business was up everywhere. But both bars are trying to keep her from opening.”

  I scribbled that down. “And you’ve told Dominique this?”

  “She doesn’t believe me.” Mark shrugged. “They’re nice to her when she sees them, and act friendly, so she can’t believe they’d do her dirty like that.” His eyes hardened. “She doesn’t realize how things work here in the Quarter. How much do you know about the bars?”

  “Not much.” I’d been to all of them, but didn’t know much about them. Some of the bartenders and barbacks I recognized, but for the most part I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know who owned or managed either the Pub or Oz. I knew the same company owned Rawhide, Lafitte’s, Good Friend’s, and the Clover Grill, but I didn’t know the company’s name. The bars were just a place to go, drink, and meet guys. Since I’d met Paul, I’d gone mainly to drink and dance, back when we went out. Paul and I had taken to staying home more and more.

  Who owned or ran the bars hadn’t been of much interest to me.

  “It’s a savage, cutthroat business.” Mark said, shaking his head. “I’m telling you, Chanse, look no further than the bars.”

  “Do you have any proof? Have any threats been made?”

  “They’re way too smart for that.”

  This wasn’t much help, so I stood up. “All right, thanks Mark
. If I have more questions—“

  “Please give me a shout. I want to help in any way I can.”

  I walked over to the door.

  He stood up. “Sometimes—“ He hesitated.

  I stopped. “Yes?”

  “I wonder if it’s because she’s black.”

  I froze with my hand on the doorknob. I wondered if this was going to come up. Since I’d first laid eyes on a publicity still of Dominique on a website, I’d hoped it wouldn’t.

  Race is a complicated issue. Most white people like to think it isn’t anymore. The Civil Rights movement had been a success, and all the problems of black people were finished, over, done with. They could vote, they could go to college, and they could get any job they wanted.

  But the vast majority of black folks in New Orleans were still unemployed, or working at minimum wage jobs. Black women still worked as maids and paid companions in the Garden District and Uptown—some of them worked for the families their mothers had worked for before them. The majority of the bellmen and porters at the hotels of the Quarter were black men. Burger flipper, grocery bagger, drug stores, waiter and waitress, convenience store clerk—these were jobs the Civil Rights movement had opened the doors to.

  If most white people liked to think that the problems were over, they did so only by ignoring the evidence of the poverty and desperation all around them.

  Which most of them did.

  But the blacks knew better. They were living it. Maybe they’d come a long way, but they still knew. They saw the way some white people looked at them. They noticed how when three or four of them walked together on the sidewalk white people would cross to the other side. They knew store security followed them every time they walked into Saks Fifth Avenue at the foot of Canal Street. It wasn’t out of the question for Dominique’s troubles to stem from the color of her skin.

  I looked back at Mark. He wore a smug half-smile, like he was playing me. When he saw me look back, his face acquired a serious expression.

  I felt myself getting mad and gripped the doorknob. This guy’s an asshole, I thought, when I finally turned the knob and walked out. The three people in the outer office were focused on their computer screens and didn’t look up as I passed through and walked out the front door.

  I crossed over to the Pub and ordered a Coke from a blond bartender who was chatting with a couple of guys at the other end of the bar. A video for a Pink remix flickered on the video screens above the bar. There were only a few other guys in the place, grouped around a table here and there. A guy played a video poker machine, and was not doing well apparently. He pushed another twenty dollar bill into the money slot.

  I noticed the stack of free papers and magazines piled on a ledge on the other side of the room. I set down my Coke and walked over there. Sure enough, there was a stack of attitude magazines next to the Ambushmag papers and some Guides. I picked one up and walked back to the table.

  It was digest sized and full color. The name was spelled out in lower case letters in rainbow colors across the top. A shirtless young hunk smiled at me from the cover. He was generically beautiful in the way so many young guys are, with muscles rippling under deeply tanned skin. His loose jeans hung low on his hips with just a few strands of curly pubic hair teasing their way out. I opened it and started paging through it. I’d picked it up before, but hadn’t paid much attention to it. There wasn’t much to pay attention to, actually. There wasn’t ever anything to read in it. You could tell not much thought went into the articles. It just served as filler to make an excuse for ads and full page color photographs of beautiful, nearly-naked young men. What was the point? You might as well go buy a porn magazine—at least then you got to see bare ass and hard-ons.

  About halfway through I realized I’d already seen an ad for Domino’s when I found myself looking at another one. I carefully started paging backward. Yeah, there it was. An ad for Domino’s, with a photograph of a mass of sweaty, shirtless dancing muscle boys taken from a balcony above and the two-one domino in the upper right hand corner. At the bottom it simply said Dancing at Domino’s—Hot music and hot guys. I turned back to the other one. A beautiful shirtless young man with dark hair and brown eyes, leaned against a balcony pole with the Domino’s sign hanging over his head. Again, it said Hot music and hot guys at the bottom.

  Why on earth would you buy two ads in the same magazine? I wondered as I kept paging through. Almost at the back of the issue, right before the classifieds with the hustler ads, (with photos and ages listed that never changed), there was another ad for Domino’s. It featured another generic looking pretty boy wearing a tiny squarecut swimsuit and dancing on a bar, with the same tag line.

  Three full-page ads in a 32 page magazine. I’d never seen anything like that before. And that look on Mark Williams’ face when he didn’t think I’d see him. Was he just playing the race card, or was there some truth to it?

  And just how the hell did he know Paul, where did he run into him, and did he just walk up and ask a stranger to pose for a magazine cover? It didn’t seem like Paul not to tell me something like that happened. I mean, I was pretty thrilled when Dominique asked me to pose for her. I would have told him. Maybe he knew Mark from before he met me.

  I knew Paul was from Albuquerque, from an Irish Catholic family. His mother was actually from Ireland. I liked to hear her accent when she called for Paul at my place. She was always friendly and nice to me. I’d never spoken to his dad, but Paul always spoke fondly of him. He also had three older brothers and an older sister. They were all married and had kids. It seemed like every other week or so Paul was flying off to one of his niece’s or nephew’s birthday celebrations. His flight benefits as a gate agent for Transco Airlines at Armstrong International made that possible. He’d been a flight attendant when we’d first met, but had gotten assigned a ground job when we started getting more serious about each other. I knew he’d come out of a five year relationship with a doctor in Dallas when we met. I knew he liked to go the gym and work out. I knew he’d been a jock in high school and his red and black high school letter jacket was still hanging in his bedroom closet. I knew his family was perfectly fine with his homosexuality.

  I didn’t know he’d posed nude, though. I didn’t know who else he might know in New Orleans. He’d never introduced me to any of his co-workers or friends.

  Come to think of it, that was kind of odd.

  I crumpled up the magazine and threw it in the trash.

  Chapter Three

  The Vieux Carre Commission is the second oldest preservation society in the country. The state constitution of 1921 was amended in 1936 to create the Commission, and specifically charged it with the preservation of the quaint traditional architecture of the Quarter. It’s hard to imagine, but back then the Quarter had degenerated into little more than a slum. There had even been talk of bulldozing it as an eyesore. It’s hard to imagine today anyone taking such a suggestion seriously—the French Quarter is New Orleans.

  The Commission took to its job with a vengeance. The way the French Quarter looks today is thanks primarily to them. People who run afoul of them, of course, refer to them as the “Quarter Gestapo” and abuse them to anyone who will listen. Most people don’t. Any changes or renovations to the exterior of any building requires their approval. They can fine property owners, and can even place liens. The Quarter is responsible for lots of tourist dollars—and Louisiana needs every penny it can get. Without the estimated billions in revenues generated by the Quarter the entire state would be a third world country.

  Working at the VCC had to be a thankless job. No matter what you did, you were bound to piss someone off.

  The VCC offices are located in the Eighth District Police Department, on the corner of Royal and Conti. The Eighth District is probably one of the most beautiful police buildings in the country. Painted peach, with massive white columns built into the façade, it looks like an old pre-Civil War plantation manor house. A little café next door ser
ved coffee, beignets, and sandwiches and has tables and chairs set out inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the building. On nice days those tables are full of tourists wiping powdered sugar off their faces. How many other police stations in the country have an al fresco café on their grounds? Only in New Orleans, I’m sure.

  Police motor scooters were lined up like soldiers inside the black wrought iron fence, to the left of the big gate. I noticed, with a little amusement, that some of the license plates had expired, and I grinned at the thought of a scooter cop being ticketed by a fellow officer for expired registration. That would be one way to meet your monthly quota of tickets.

  I hadn’t been stationed at the Eighth District when I was a cop—I’d worked the Garden District. That might sound like a cushy assignment, but the jurisdiction also included the St. Thomas Housing Projects. It was strange to cruise around the elegant streets shaded by massive swamp oaks only to respond to a crack shooting a half-mile away. Just a few blocks from the storied mansions were some of the most miserable living conditions in the country. But that was New Orleans for you—every neighborhood, no matter how posh and expensive, abutted an area that was seedy and scary. One block could have houses recently renovated, with beautifully landscaped gardens and smelling of money, while one block away were ramshackle houses a good wind could blow over, with garbage piled up in front of them and old women in faded housedresses sitting in rusty chairs on the sagging porches trying to catch a cool breeze as they fanned themselves with newspaper.

  When I was a cop, I lived in the Quarter in a carriage house behind a huge old mansion on Dumaine Street between Chartres and Royal. I loved my apartment, and its close proximity to the bars. Every restaurant in the Quarter seemed to deliver, so I never had to use my ancient gas stove. I always wished I was stationed at the Eighth District, in that graceful building with chandeliers and polished hardwood floors. I never regretted leaving the force, but I did feel a bit of a pang as I climbed the hanging stair to the second floor. It would be so cool to report for work every day here, I thought.