In fact, I’d pretty much forgotten about her until her body landed a few feet away from me.
I finished giving information to the 911 operator just as I saw Jerry Channing running across the courtyard toward me.
Chapter Two
“Well, that was a rather unpleasant start for the weekend,” I commented as I unfolded my napkin and draped it across my lap.
“Yes, welcome home,” Jerry Channing replied with a theatrical roll of his eyes. “So glad you could make it down.”
We were seated at Muriel’s on the Square, a rather lovely restaurant on the corner of St. Ann and Chartres, just across from Jackson Square. The hostess had seated us at a table in the window on the Chartres Street side of the building. The restaurant was almost empty and fairly quiet, which was nice. It was just after nine. They closed at ten, so I didn’t feel so bad about getting there so late. I’d waited tables when I was a college student, so I knew far too well how much it sucked to have customers come in right before closing. I tried not to ever do it, except in the case of a dire food emergency. This definitely qualified as one. I was so hungry I would have eaten pretty much anything put in front of me. I’d had a bagel with my coffee at the airport in Albany, and I’d barely had time to get checked into my hotel and unpack before heading over to the Maison Maintenon to meet Jerry for dinner.
The little foil-wrapped chocolates Housekeeping had left on my pillow hadn’t done the trick.
And then, of course, there was the little matter of having to deal with the police after Antinous Renault’s untimely death.
One thing I didn’t miss in the ten years since I’d moved across the lake to Rouen was dealing with the New Orleans Police Department. At first, as the EMTs dealt with the obviously dead body, I’d been questioned by an extremely polite and friendly young woman of color who went out of her way to make me comfortable. I’d even made a mental note to write her sergeant a commendation letter for her professionalism. Had it ended there, all would have been well.
Unfortunately, the detective in charge of the investigation was an all-too-typical misogynist asshole by the name of Al Randisi, and he insisted on interviewing me himself. He was balding, with a really ridiculous-looking light-brown comb-over that was the height of self-delusion. He was tall, most likely one of those idiots who’d been a big-deal jock in high school—the Big Man on Campus type that had no idea how much everyone really hated him, the type that never got over the unearned sense of entitlement and believed that every woman he met wanted him on sight.
He was a stereotype straight out of Central Casting. “Get me a misogynist asshole cop type!”
To be fair, it was entirely possible that Al Randisi might have been a good-looking man in high school and maybe even well into his twenties…but years of not taking care of himself had taken their toll. He looked like he’d been on a steady diet of Pabst Blue Ribbon and fried everything for about twenty years.
He had wide shoulders and a beer gut that hung almost painfully over his too-tight belt. He had one of those unfortunate bodies with a low, narrow waist and slender legs so he rather looked like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. His yellow-and-blue paisley tie had several stains so old they probably predated Katrina, and it wasn’t knotted correctly. I could see his white undershirt through his pale blue shirt, but he’d still managed to sweat through both layers at the armpits. He wore a pair of blue polyester pants and cheap black shoes and stank of cigarette smoke and sweat and a cheap men’s cologne bought at a drugstore.
He was also a patronizing asshole who kept calling me “little lady,” which made me want to grab the gun out of his shoulder holster and put a bullet in the center of his forehead.
I had told him my story I don’t know how many times before he finally decided he’d heard it enough and dismissed me with a condescending wave of his hand.
The fact that I somehow managed to remain calm and not give him the tongue-lashing he deserved should qualify me for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I was exhausted, hungry, and desperately in need of a long, relaxing soak in a tub.
“I knew there was a reason I shouldn’t come this weekend. You really, really owe me one now,” I said darkly as I opened my menu. “Although I’d imagine this is going to be a nightmare for you.” I didn’t even try to fake sympathy. I was too tired and hungry.
“No, not really, it doesn’t have anything to do with the conference,” Jerry replied, taking a sip from his sweating glass of ice water. “Didn’t you think it was weird, though, the way the police were all over it? I mean, obviously it was an accident, right? She fell over the railing. Probably just lost her balance and went over and splat.” He shrugged. “Sure, it’s a tragedy, but hardly worthy of a full police investigation.”
“It wasn’t an accidental fall. For one thing, she didn’t fall far enough to really kill herself. Broken some bones, certainly, but it was what? Maybe ten feet? She would have had to land on her head for it to have killed her.” I closed my eyes and tried to remember yet another time how it happened. “Jerry, she landed pretty much flat on her back. If you fall over a railing, it’s not likely you’d land flat on your back like that.” I shook my head. “She didn’t scream or cry out, either—how likely is that? You don’t fall like that without screaming.” My mind was whirring along merrily. “In fact, if someone shoved her over, she would have screamed.”
So she had to already be dead when she went over the railing.
“So, your professional opinion is murder?” He arched an eyebrow at me. “Are you going to play Jessica Fletcher this weekend?”
“I’m not a professional investigator, so it’s not my professional opinion.”
His eyes glinted and he gave me his trademark wicked smile. “But you are a professional crime writer, and you research crimes and police procedures, don’t you? And really, you had a body practically land in your lap! How can you pass this up?”
“I’ll gladly leave the investigating to the cops,” I replied with a theatrical eye roll and shuddered. “I have no interest in real-life crime, except from a very safe distance, thank you very much.”
“Okay, so let’s pretend this was one of your books,” he went on smoothly. “And Laura Lassiter is on the case.” He winked. “And she always gets her man, doesn’t she?”
I couldn’t help it, I had to laugh. Reviewers and readers always complained about Laura’s lack of a successful love life. I did have a tendency to kill off pretty much every man romantically involved with her—Jerry wickedly once called her “the fuck of death,” and it made me laugh. Always getting her man was a variation of the same theme, especially because in two of the books her lovers turned out to be the killers and she wound up shooting them in self-defense in the end after figuring it out.
“If Laura was on the case,” I said, wiping the tears out of my eyes and feeling kind of bad for laughing about someone’s death, “of course it would be murder, and everyone at the conference would have a motive for killing her.”
“Well, if you think someone shoved her over that railing, there had to be at least two of them,” he replied with a bitchy smirk. “It’s not like she was a delicate flower.”
“Still the mean one,” I replied with a faint smile and a slight shake of my head. It was another running gag between us—that I’m the nice one and he’s the mean one.
“You just say that because I’ll say out loud what you’re thinking.”
In response, I laughed and shook my head. He really was incorrigible. I’ve known him for over twenty years, and he has always been able to make me laugh. Jerry has an absolutely wicked sense of humor—bitchy and snarky, but he really has a big heart and would give anyone the shirt off his back.
Then again, he’ll jump at any excuse to take his shirt off.
We’d first met when we were both students at the University of New Orleans. We both took the same creative writing class taught by a ridiculously pompous fool who knew next to nothing about writing. We didn�
�t know that at the time we took the class, of course—well, the pompous part was apparent on Day One. The rest we figured out over the course of the semester—laughing about him later in Jerry’s apartment on Burgundy Street in the Quarter while drinking horrible cheap wine and smoking really good pot.
When I walked into the classroom on the first day of the fall semester of my sophomore year, I felt ready to collapse from the heat. August is unpleasant everywhere in Louisiana, but the University of New Orleans campus is right on the lakefront, and the high protective levee at the very edge of campus shielded it not only from rising water but from any refreshing breezes that might be blowing in from the water. Stepping out of the air-conditioned buildings was like climbing into an oven and slamming the door behind you. I was worried I was going to be late—moving through the horribly hot thick air was miserable and my Joan Jett T-shirt was soaked through by the time I was able to get inside again. But when I reached the classroom I could see there was no teacher in the front of the room. I stood in the doorway and looked around. There were about twenty students in the room, with an empty desk next to what appeared to be the only gay guy in the room.
He might not be gay, I’d chastised myself as I slid into the desk and smiled at him, but he is definitely setting off my gaydar.
When I was a student, no straight guy would even consider shaving his legs or waxing his armpits or watching his diet so he could have a six-pack. Anytime you saw a guy who was well-groomed with smooth legs and armpits in those days, you could be 99.99% certain he was gay. And this guy had no body hair on any of the skin he had exposed—which was quite a bit. So he was either gay or hadn’t hit puberty yet—which was hardly likely.
He was slouched so far down in his chair his ass was barely on the edge of the seat, and his arms were crossed. He was wearing a black muscle T-shirt that was probably a size too small, given the way it stretched across his muscular torso and strained at the seams. He was wearing tight white cut-off Daisy Dukes (another sign—straight boys were already wearing shorts down to their knees by then), and his long, tanned hairless legs were stretched out under his desk and crossed at the ankles. Wisps of curly, bluish-black hair hung out from underneath the Saints baseball cap perched backward on top of his head, and black Ray-Ban sunglasses hid his eyes. He turned his head slightly and gave me a bit of a nod before turning back to stare at the front of the room as a balding white-haired man in corduroy slacks and a maroon-and-yellow-striped button-down shirt strolled in and placed a briefcase on the table in the front of the room. The few students who were talking to each other fell silent, and he gave us what was supposed to be a “serious professor” look that actually made him look constipated. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote Dr. Dixon in big, sloping letters across the green board before turning around and smiling at us.
I liked the original constipated look better. The smile was kind of creepy, like there were teenage boys buried in quick-lime in his backyard.
He cleared his throat. “Henry James is the greatest author to ever string a sentence together.” He spent the rest of the hour explaining to us, in great detail, precisely why Henry James was the greatest author of all time, and that he hoped that we would all learn in his class to not only appreciate the genius of Henry James, but to emulate him in our writing styles. He also urged us to read everything of James’s we could, and actually assigned us to read a short story called “The Beast in the Jungle.”
I’d read it in high school and absolutely hated it.
The class couldn’t end soon enough. I gathered my things and escaped to the student union, where I grabbed a can of Diet Coke and sat down in a corner. I’d always wanted to be a writer—my earliest memories were of me curled up somewhere reading a book. I’d read the entire Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden series by the time I was ten, when I moved on to Agatha Christie. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write books. I wrote my first story, a Nancy Drew rip-off called Tiffany Lane and the Secret of Hartwood Manor, when I was eight—I actually still had it in my files at home. My favorite stores had always been bookstores, and while other girls my age were buying dolls and teen magazines, I was buying books. The only place I loved more than a bookstore was a library, and I especially loved the Latter Library on St. Charles Avenue. Every Saturday morning for years I caught the streetcar at Felicity Street and rode it uptown, getting off at Soniat Street and lugging the books I was returning in a backpack through the front doors of the beautiful old mansion converted into a library. My parents loved that I was a reader—my older brother was a painter and had never had much interest in reading.
My teachers at the Academy of the Sacred Heart encouraged me in my dreams. I wrote for the school newspaper, and in my spare time when I wasn’t studying I was busy writing stories in my spiral notebooks in pencil—but by then I was well aware that I was more interested in other girls than in boys, so I wrote love stories where two girls fell in love. Usually my heroine was a bookish girl who got straight As, and the girl who fell in love with her was the incredibly beautiful and immensely popular captain of the field hockey / basketball / softball / volleyball teams. I never showed those stories to anyone, of course—the stories I turned in for my creative writing classes were heteronormative. Everyone at Sacred Heart knew I was a lesbian—I’d proudly come out at fourteen, with my parents’ full support—but as long as I didn’t talk about it, no one seemed to care. I just kept to myself, did my homework, read books, and wrote my stories.
So, that day in the Student Union, I pulled a spiral notebook out of my backpack and opened it to the current story I was writing—about a private eye named Laura. Over the summer, after high school graduation, I’d discovered Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, and I wanted to be just like them, writing about strong, independent women who didn’t take any shit from men and solved crimes. I looked at where I’d left off, thought for a moment, and started scribbling hurriedly in pencil again.
A deep voice said from behind me, “Henry James is without question the most constipated writer in the history of the English language.”
Startled, I dropped my pencil as the guy in the black muscle shirt and white Daisy Dukes sat down on the other side of the table from me. He took off his sunglasses, revealing two large, expressive brown eyes that were twinkling at me. He was grinning, and two deep dimples pierced his cheeks. “Jerry Channing,” he said, popping the top of his own Coke can. “And you are?”
“Tracy Norris.” I smiled back at him. “And I fucking hate Henry James.”
“You a lesbian?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “You gay?”
His grin got wider. “Yup.”
It turned out Jerry was from upstate Mississippi, some “little buttfuck town in the middle of no place where everyone’s been marrying their cousins since Indian days” (his words, not mine) and his parents had thrown him out when he was seventeen after catching him with the preacher’s son (“Yes,” he intoned seriously, “I was deflowered by the son of a preacher man”), and he’d hitchhiked his way to New Orleans. He was vague about the next couple of years and I didn’t press him on it—I suspected he’d been hustling—but now he was working as a personal trainer and moonlighted sometimes as a stripper. He’d gotten his GED and saved his money till he was finally able to swing the tuition at UNO. “And,” he winked at me, “I’m going to be the most famous fucking faggot in this country so I can rub my parents’ faces in it.”
I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. When I was able to get control of myself again, I asked, “How are you going to get famous?”
“Writing.”
I smiled back at him. “Me, too!”
And thus a beautiful friendship was born.
In fact, our friendship was the longest relationship either of us had ever had.
I’m not sure I like what that says about me.
“Anyway, it’s nice to have you back in the city,” he said with a smile, reaching over and
touching my hand lightly, pulling me back to the present. “I hate not seeing you all the time. Why don’t you move back?”
I shook my head. “I like living on the north shore, Jerry. Rouen suits me fine. And I really enjoy our email exchanges.” Jerry was more of a night person—I always had an eight a.m. class to teach and had gotten into the habit of getting up around six every morning. Before getting ready to go to work, I spent an hour with my coffee, yogurt, and fresh fruit answering the fifty or so emails he’d sent me around one in the morning. We agreed on almost everything, from politics to television to books.
The only thing we didn’t agree about was my move to Rouen ten years earlier. He was constantly trying to talk me into moving back to the south shore.
I took another drink of my water and decided to have the double-cut pork chop and pain perdu for dessert, rationalizing to myself that since I was in New Orleans it would be wrong to eat healthy.
“I suppose tomorrow night at the opening reception we’re going to have to do a moment of silence or something in the bitch’s honor,” Jerry went on as he glanced at his menu with a sigh. His phone vibrated, and he looked at the screen with a scowl. “I wish I had a dollar for every text I’ve gotten asking if I’m canceling the weekend. Why, yes, let’s write the whole weekend off because that stupid British bitch fell off a balcony—excuse me, was pushed off a balcony.” He shook his head. “I’m just sorry you had to see it happen.” He reached across the table and patted my hand. “Are you sure you’re doing okay?”
I gave him a withering look. “I’m not a shrinking violet, Jerry. I’ve seen worse than that when I was in the Peace Corps.” I repressed a shudder at the memory of Ethiopia during the worst of the famine years. “Anyway, it was just an odd coincidence that I met her at the airport in Atlanta, I suppose.”
He arched an eyebrow up. “You met her?”
Slash and Burn Page 3
