Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries)

by Herren, Greg

  “I’m on it, boss.”

  Venus was already halfway through her next drink when I got back to the table. Paige gave me a worried look. Venus and Blaine were frowning.

  “What did I miss?” I asked no one in particular.

  Paige began, “Blaine was just about to tell you—”

  “I’ll do it,” Venus interrupted, turning to me. “We got pulled off your shooting case this afternoon. Feds swarmed in and took all our notes, everything.”

  “Did they say why?” Paige asked.

  “Like they’d bother to tell mere NOPD detectives anything,” Venus scoffed.

  “It’s because of Vinnie Castiglione,” I said, and filled them in on the U.S. Marshals’ visit to my apartment.

  “Maybe you should evacuate,” Blaine said seriously. “Tonight.”

  “I just need to be careful. The hurricane won’t reach New Orleans until Sunday night, if it comes at all, and I’m not going back to my apartment, anyway. Paige, if you don’t want me to stay with you—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Chanse. My apartment is pretty secure. My windows can’t be accessed by a sniper. The only way he could get in is through the front door, and before he can do that, he has to climb over the fence. This morning my landlady strung razor wire along the top, to keep out looters after the evacuation—as if the walls weren’t high enough to discourage them.”

  “I don’t know, Paige. If anything happened to you because of me…”

  “We both have guns, Chanse. We can barricade ourselves in with all the supplies you brought. Besides, it’s just down the street, and Venus and Blaine can cover us.”

  “We’ll come with you,” Venus said.

  “Maybe we should camp out there, too,” Blaine added. “Four guns are better than two.”

  “You’d have to sleep on the floor,” Paige pointed out. “And you aren’t retired yet. You’ll both be working around the clock the next few days. Chanse and I will be perfectly safe once we’re inside. Discussion closed.”

  We walked briskly down Polymnia, on the lookout for any lurking presence. The street was ominously silent. This area of New Orleans is usually pretty noisy, what with the traffic, the clicking and clacking of streetcars along St. Charles, snatches of conversation carried on the wind and constant music coming from all directions. It quiets down late at night, but it was still broad daylight now. Paige voiced what we were all thinking.

  “It’s like a scene from some end-of-the-world movie.”

  She pulled out her keys as we reached the intricate wrought iron fence that fronted the house. Sure enough, coils of razor wire ran all the way along the top. She unlocked the gate on the right, and we followed her past the elevated front porch and along the concrete path to her duplex at the back.

  “Let’s scope out the place, Chanse,” Blaine suggested as Paige climbed the wooden steps the five feet to her door and fit her key into the lock.

  “I’ll do the same inside,” Venus offered.

  Blaine and I circumnavigated the house, remaining wary.

  Formerly a single-family dwelling, the gigantic Victorian had been split into three generous units, each with two floors. Like all residential buildings in New Orleans, the living area was at least five feet above the ground, because of perennial flooding. Paige’s landlady and her husband lived on the left side, which was separated from the property next door by a seven-foot-high stone fence with coils of razor wire across the top. A nice gay couple occupied the huge apartment that took up two-thirds of the right side, separated from the property on that side by another seven-foot stone fence, the top of which also was lined with razor wire. An unbroken line of crepe myrtle trees beyond it shaded the house. If Vinnie somehow broke into the property next door, the thickness of the crepe myrtles would prevent him from getting a clear shot into any of Paige’s windows. Her living room window was covered with curtains. There was a direct line from the rear carriage house next door into the breakfast nook extending from her kitchen, but as we passed beneath the demi-hexagon, we saw Venus and Paige hanging sheets over the usually exposed bay window there. Although that carriage house had no gallery, the one in the back on Paige’s property did. A large patio opened off the upstairs hall between Paige’s bathroom and bedroom, but there was no way to get up there except through Paige’s apartment. The property on the other side also had a carriage house with a gallery, but the galleries as well were separated by razor wire.

  “I worry about the patio,” Blaine told Venus when we joined her and Paige again inside. “Otherwise the property is a fortress. What’s the story with the neighbors, Paige?”

  “John and Michael left this morning.”

  She uncorked a bottle of wine. “You guys want any?”

  “We should be getting home,” Venus said.

  I walked her and Blaine to the gate. The crepe myrtles whispered as they swayed in the slight breeze.

  “Be careful, Chanse,” Venus said.

  “You, too,” I responded.

  Venus hesitated, then pulled me into a rib-cracking hug.

  “Don’t know when I’ll see you again,” she said, her voice husky with emotion, and stepped back.

  I was oddly moved. In all the years I’d known her, Venus had never been an expressive person.

  Blaine hugged me.

  “We’ll be on evacuation detail tomorrow,” he said. “If you need us, call my cell. Now get into the house.”

  They watched me scuttle back to Paige’s apartment.

  *

  Paige sat calmly on the couch, her hands shaking slightly as she rolled a joint. She toked deeply and offered me a hit. I shook my head. I didn’t think getting stoned right now was a good idea, but I didn’t say so. The television was tuned to the Weather Channel. In the French Quarter, merchants boarded up their windows while customers drank inside the bars.

  “Can you believe this?” Paige said. “I feel this horrible sense of déjà vu, like I’m watching a movie I’ve already seen and didn’t like very much the first time.”

  “I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea that we may take another direct hit.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Houston, I guess. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  She inhaled again, then carefully put the joint out in the ashtray.

  “How is your mother doing, Chanse,” she said, looking concerned. “Really.”

  I opened my mouth to give my automatic response, but it wouldn’t come.

  “She’s dying, Paige. They found the cancer too late. She ignored the signs, didn’t see a doctor. She’s got a couple of months left, tops.”

  I reached for her pack of cigarettes and lit one.

  “I’m sorry, Chanse. Are you glad you went last week?”

  “Yeah, I’m glad I went.” I changed the subject. “Where will you go?”

  “I got a reservation for Sunday at a Hilton near the Houston airport. I figure if I leave tomorrow, I won’t get there until then anyway. But if you’re heading that way, we should just leave together and convoy.”

  “What about Ryan?”

  “They left a few hours ago for Atlanta. His ex has family there.”

  “Then why don’t you go to Atlanta, and be with him?”

  “He asked me to marry him, Chanse.”

  “Paige, that’s great!”

  The look on her face dampened my enthusiasm.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I know it’s selfish, but when I marry someone, I want to be his priority, at least occasionally. I’ll never be that with Ryan. His kids come before everything—and his ex takes advantage of that at every opportunity. I like the kids a lot, but…”

  “Maybe you should go to Atlanta, Paige.”

  I was hardly the person to give her advice, having pretty much blown every relationship I’d ever had.

  “I think maybe this evacuation might be a good thing, Chanse. I can use the time to try and figure a
ll of this out.”

  She lit the joint again and grinned at me.

  “Enough of this wallowing—for both of us. I got the sense at the Avenue that the case isn’t going well.”

  I crushed my cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Alais Sheehan is missing, and the family doesn’t want the police involved.”

  “Christ. You don’t think Alais killed Wendell, do you?”

  “It would explain why Janna and Cordelia are lying about what happened that night. But why would she kill her father? Kenneth Musgrave—her uncle—said that when she was eight years old Alais saw Wendell murder her mother. That’s a motive. Then why wait ten years to do it? Monica Davis warned me not to believe anything Musgrave told me.”

  “If Monica said that, it’s true,” Paige said.

  “She had dinner with Wendell the night he was murdered. He wanted to talk to her about Alais. He was concerned about her depression and wanted Monica’s advice on how to snap her out of it.”

  “Why was she depressed?”

  “Her boyfriend was murdered in June, up at Ole Miss. A young black man named Jerrell Perrilloux.”

  “I remember that murder,” Paige said. “Rachel was interested in it, but she didn’t say why. She had me start to look into the story, thought it might be racially motivated. But before I got going, she pulled me off it.”

  “Jerrell’s murder happened after Janna found out about the affair. Carey Sheehan seemed to think there was a connection. What if Wendell killed him?” It didn’t sound too far-fetched, once I said it out loud. “Maybe he didn’t like the idea of his daughter dating a black man.”

  “The Sheehans aren’t racists, Chanse. Bobby Sheehan did more for civil rights in Louisiana than—”

  “Maybe not publicly,” I interjected, recalling my conversation with Janna. “Why else would Cordelia do something as stupid as picking up the gun and firing it, unless she were covering for Alais? Janna and Cordelia cooked up their stories, sent Alais upstairs, told her to tell the police she hadn’t left her room or heard anything.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Chanse. A good defense lawyer could come up with a reasonable defense for Alais. I can think of three off the top of my head—it was an accident, she wasn’t in her right mind, she’d been depressed all summer—and I’m not Loren McKeithen. Plus there’s the Sheehan pull. Why would Cordelia take such a huge risk?”

  “I doubt Cordelia and Janna cared about Alais dating a black kid, one way or the other. But they didn’t want it coming out. If Wendell killed the boy, they’d do anything to protect him—and there’s Alais’s motive. Janna and Cordelia didn’t have time to think it through.”

  “You’re suggesting that Janna and Cordelia are not only covering for Alais, but they also knew Wendell killed Jerrell and were covering that up as well. Isn’t that a little convoluted?”

  I couldn’t tell Paige that Cordelia had already covered up Roger Palmer’s murder without betraying Barbara’s confidence.

  “If Wendell did kill his first wife—”

  “But Monica told you not to believe Musgrave’s story.”

  “Musgrave could be a liar and be telling the truth about that. He had something on Wendell, enough to force Wendell not only to break the trust Grace set up for Musgrave but also to pay him five grand a month after Grace died. From what I’ve heard about Wendell, he wouldn’t have done that to be nice.”

  “I admit, it’s a great story, Chanse, but you don’t have any proof.”

  My cell phone interrupted us. Jephtha had just e-mailed what he’d recovered from Alais’s blog, and told me to look at them right away. I pulled my laptop from my bag.

  “What’s going on?” Paige asked.

  “Alais kept a blog on her Myspace page. The morning after the murder all the entries were deleted. Jeph has been reconstructing it. Nothing ever completely disappears from the Internet.”

  Paige joined me on the couch as the download completed and I clicked the document open.

  11 August

  I don’t know how much longer I can stay in this house. Nobody seems to understand how I feel, and I have nobody to talk to. With every day that passes, my suspicions make more sense to me, I am being smothered in this place. They don’t allow me to see anyone, they don’t allow me to talk to anyone.

  I don’t want to believe it. If it’s true I might really lose my mind once and for all. I’m sure Mother thinks I’m overreacting, that I’m just a drama queen and want attention. She wouldn’t believe me if I told her, and I know Gram wouldn’t.

  I’m so sorry, Jerry. I loved you, I always did. If I’d known it would turn out this way I would never have let you near me. I will always love you, my sweet Jerry.

  I can’t go on this way. I’ve been avoiding the confrontation ever since I came home. But I have to be strong. Once and for all I have to know the truth. I owe that to Jerry.

  12 August

  Mother is acting strange. She had an appointment this morning, and when she came back she went straight to her room. I know she hasn’t been feeling well, but when I asked her this afternoon if everything was okay, she brushed me off and went back to her room and shut the door.

  Gram is acting weird, too. Everyone in this house is acting weird. Or maybe it’s just me.

  Last night I had the nightmare again. I woke up crying and had to take one of the damned pills. Mother and Gram are so determined that I take them. They don’t know I stopped a week ago and am starting to feel like myself again, that I’m starting to feel. Maybe I needed them when I came home from school, maybe I would have lost my mind without them, but I don’t need them anymore.

  If I could just get into the safe, I know I’d find the proof I need. All the dirty secrets are locked up in the safe.

  “The poor girl,” Paige said.

  “The safe was open the night of the murder,” I told her.

  14 August

  It’s going to be tonight.

  Vernita came to tell me Jerry’s mother was on the phone. She called to see how I was doing. We talked for a while, we cried together, and she told me I needed to get on with my life, that he would have wanted me to. She’s right, I know that, and maybe I’d be better now if I’d stopped taking the pills sooner. After I talked to her, Vernita came back to my room to check on me. Mother and Gram were out. They’d fire Vernita if they knew she let me talk to Mrs. Perrilloux.

  Vernita is the only ally I have in this house. She loved Jerry as much as I did, maybe more. She is the only one who really understands.

  I am going to talk to Dad tonight. I’m going to find out the truth.

  And the truth shall set me free.

  “That was the day Wendell was shot,” Paige said. “Alais was going to confront her father about Jerrell.”

  My heart ached for Alais, but something niggled at the back of my mind.

  My cell phone rang.

  “Yes, Abby?”

  “Chanse, I found her. You’ll never believe what she told me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I arrived at Jeph and Abby’s a little after eight on Saturday morning. The trip to the Irish Channel was uneventful, and I was wondering if maybe the Feds were right about Vinnie flying the coop. But I remained wary. I’d wanted to jump in my car the moment Abby called me, but Abby had begged off. She’d traced Alais to the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter and was taking her back to the shotgun house on Constantinople Street she shared with Jeph. Abby had not only found Alais, she’d managed to earn her trust. (I was definitely going to have to give her a raise.) Since then the mayor had ordered mandatory evacuation. Ginevra had strengthened to Category 5, and was predicted to make landfall late Sunday evening. There was still time for me to talk to Alais.

  Abby introduced me to Alais and went to get coffee in the kitchen. Jephtha was undoubtedly asleep in their bedroom at the back of the house, not being an early riser.

  Alais glared at me. ”I’m over eighteen and I have my own money,” she said def
iantly. “You can’t make me go back.”

  She was definitely Cordelia Sheehan’s grandchild.

  Alais was much prettier in person than she’d seemed in her Myspace photo. Her thick, dark red ponytail with golden highlights reached halfway down her back. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black. Like her grandmother, her face was heart-shaped, with prominent cheekbones, a pert nose and the full red lips most women get from a dermatologist’s needle. Her skin was pale with a hint of gold, with a few freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. A red Ole Miss T-shirt with blue script and low-rise jeans shorts complemented her short, petite frame, as did the pale pink toenail polish visible on her shoeless feet.

  We were sitting in Abby and Jeph’s living room, Alais on the dilapidated sofa and I in an uncomfortable reclining chair with broken springs that should have gone to the garbage men years ago. Jeph’s aged golden retrievers, Greta and Rhett, had curled up on either side of Alais. Greta was sleeping, but Rhett kept shoving his head under Alais’s hand whenever she stopped stroking him. His thumping tail drummed a steady tattoo on the sofa cushions.

  The room itself was dim and somber. The dingy beige walls were bare. Abby and Jeph had nailed the shutters closed against the coming storm. Some morning light broke through the slats, but it was a losing battle against the dark. Several of the light bulbs on the ceiling fan/chandelier had burned out, and the slowly rotating fan blades seemed just to stir up more dust. Magazines and newspapers were scattered on the coffee table and the bare hardwood floor. The DVD player underneath the television was blinking 12:00. Abby tried her best to keep the house neat, but dog hair and the relentless New Orleans dust were winning the fight.

  “Actually, I was hoping you could clear up some things for me,” I told Alais, trying not to sound patronizing. “Are you willing to do that?”

  Abby returned with three steaming mugs, each of which had a Disney villainess on it. I got Ursula the Sea Witch. The coffee was exactly the way I liked it—with a packet of sweetener and cream.