by Greg Herren
I don’t think any of the Grande Dames from the other franchises had ever had nudes surface—but I also couldn’t swear to it. Chloe’s nudes would have made a great storyline for the second season—had she not been killed.
What terrific television that would have made! The ratings would have been through the roof.
But it probably would have ruined any chance of Chloe ever being taken seriously as a writer again. How crazy had she been, to think doing a Grande Dames show would help her career? Sure, some of the Dames were best-selling authors—but they didn’t write fiction. Their specialties were cookbooks and memoirs and lifestyles guides—like how to please your husband or how to live elegantly or how to throw a party on a budget.
Again, I couldn’t help but wonder why someone with so much to hide would go on a reality television show. She had to know the pictures were going to surface at some point.
Did she think the boost in her book sales was worth this kind of—well, literal exposure?
I’ve never understood the puritanical attitudes toward nudity and the human body. What’s the big deal? I used to dance in a thong or underwear for dollars in gay bars. Even when I wasn’t go-go boying, I used to go out dancing all the time, and I always took my shirt off on the dance floor. Rarely did I wear underwear when I went out dancing.
Frank wrestles in front of cheering crowds wearing little more than a bikini.
These pictures getting out would have finished Chloe in her social circles. The conservative, prudish ladies of the Garden District would have frozen her out—if she’d survived doing the show with her position intact.
But that gave Chloe more of a motive to kill someone, not made her more likely to be a victim.
Remy would have killed to keep the pictures from coming out. He would have shared the humiliation and social ostracizing with her.
When I’d asked how they got the pictures, Amanda had explained that once Margery got the cease-and-desist letter from the Valences’ lawyer, the two of them took matters into their own hands. Like many wealthy women with a score to settle, they’d hired a private eye to dig up any and all dirt available on Chloe.
Their private eye had dug up these pictures of Chloe—and the equally sordid ones at the bottom of the stack, the ones of Remy in flagrante delicto with another man.
And then it hit me: Margery’s plan had been to bring the pictures to the taping of the reunion show, intending to expose the two of them on camera.
I shivered involuntarily.
Margery was clearly not someone whose bad side you wanted to be on.
Damn, that was some cold shit.
Part of the shows’ appeal was pretending it was reality—the fights, the feuds, the arguments, and the overall silliness of grown women behaving like tweens. We viewers liked to think camera crews just followed them around all day filming everything they did and it was later edited into a cohesive season of episodes, with storylines for each character and scenes plucked from filming that bolstered the stories without boring the viewer with all the mundane, everyday stuff.
But I wasn’t dumb enough to think that none of it was staged. Sure, they may not have actual scripts and lines to learn, but that didn’t mean producers and assistants didn’t tweak the ladies somewhat. “You know what Chloe said?”
There wasn’t any way the women could possibly know what was said in their talking head interviews unless they were told by someone involved with production. Some of the Dames tried to convince people that the drama was manufactured and manipulated out of them.
It wasn’t too hard to believe.
After all, no one watched to see the women getting along.
It was all about the drama, with each women trying to be good television to ensure they’d return the following season. Each woman blogged for the Diva TV website after each episode aired, and viewers could post comments. The viewers were encouraged to take sides in the fights and feuds.
And of course, every celebrity “news” magazine had pretty much abandoned film and television stars to focus on this new breed of celebrity—narcissists who liked to air their dirty laundry on national television. There was an entire industry based on all this manufactured drama. It was one reason my mother hated the shows so much—in her opinion, they made the women look bad, and by extension, made all women look bad.
“Catfights are typical patriarchy bullshit,” she would rant. “Because women don’t support and nurture each other. This is the image of women that men want to perpetuate…and the people who watch? The worst kinds of gossips, only they think it’s okay because they don’t actually know the people they’re gossiping about…which is really sad.”
She kind of had a point, but she still watched.
The other franchises of the show’s storylines pretty much followed the classic tropes refined on the old soap operas—misunderstandings, back-stabbing, talking behind each other’s backs.
But the New Orleans bitches weren’t playing around—they’d raised the ante in ways I would have never dreamed of—and I was sure even Eric Brewer hadn’t expected things to get so far out of hand—assuming his death had something to do with the show.
Threatening each other with lawyers and hiring private detectives to dig up dirt on the other cast members was raising the bar far higher than any of the other shows had ever dared to go.
Not to mention the struggle over the Barron restaurant empire.
What had Rebecca Barron said? Fidelis thought Steve was going to marry her, and he married me instead. She’s helping my stepsons try to take the company away from me.
It was possible Fidelis had no qualms about sleeping with a father and son—but most people outside of a daytime soap would. Serena, Margery, and Amanda all three agreed there was some animosity between Chloe and Fidelis that predated filming—and Billy Barron was the only link that had turned up so far.
Billy Barron.
It always came back to Billy Barron, didn’t it?
Billy had no reason to want Eric dead.
They’d argued the night of the premiere…but I also only had Rebecca’s word for that. Billy had denied it.
Who would want both Eric and Chloe dead, though? And why? Those murders had to be connected, but how?
And how could someone have gotten up to the top floor of the Royal Aquitaine, killed Eric, and then gotten to the Garden District to kill Chloe so quickly?
Without being seen by anyone?
It was all making my head hurt.
New Orleans society is so insular—there are feuds between people and families that have been going on for so long even those directly involved don’t remember what started them in the first place. So it had to have come up during the casting process that the four of them were connected from high school. They’d cast Margery instead of Amanda, and Billy turned out to also be sleeping with Chloe.
And his stepmother had been cast, too.
It was almost like…like the show had been cast this way on purpose.
Billy was the link between all of them—except Serena. She was the only one with no connection to him.
At least, no connection I knew about.
He was the key. I was sure he wasn’t the killer, but all of this circled back to him somehow.
Eric couldn’t have known all these connections beforehand.
Damn it, Brandon, call me back al-fucking-ready, okay?
The Uber pulled up in front of my house, and I thanked the driver as I got out, digging my keys out of my pocket. I had just put the key into the lock when a voice in a thick accent whispered from behind me, “You make such an easy target, Scotty.”
My blood ran cold for a moment before I recognized the voice. I spun around in delight, a big grin on my face.
It was my two favorite lesbian Mossad agents in the world, Lindy and Rhoda, aka the Ninja Lesbians. They were old friends of Colin’s from his own Mossad days; he had trained them both. We’d met when they came crashing through my living room windows whe
n—well, it’s a long story. Rhoda and Lindy had since become good friends of ours, coming to visit us in New Orleans or meeting us some fun place for a couple of weeks of R&R. They were lots of fun—both had great senses of humor, and both could put away booze like it was going out of style. Like Colin, they seemed to be able to do almost anything. They were also a couple. Rhoda was a little older than Lindy, but both were beautiful, strong women.
I’m always grateful they’re on our side.
“It’s so good to see you both!” I held out my arms and they came in for a hug.
“Any word on Taylor?” Lindy asked, after crushing me in a bear hug and planting a kiss on my cheek. Slight and pretty and petite, Lindy is deceptively strong.
“Did Frank call you?” I asked, turning the key and opening the gate. I stood aside to let them in first and shut the door behind me. “How did you get here so fast?”
“We were on our way here already,” Rhoda said. “Who knew it got so cold in New Orleans? I thought this was supposed to be the tropics.” Rhoda had a thick Eastern European accent, but her English was always perfect.
“Why?”
They exchanged a glance when they got to the courtyard.
“Oh, come on,” I said, waving them to follow me up the stairs. “If you were already on your way here—”
“All right,” Lindy replied. “We’ll tell you, but let’s wait till we are all together. That way we won’t have to explain it all over again to Frank, too.”
“Frank did text us about Taylor,” Rhoda said as we went up the steps. “Still no word?”
“No,” I replied. I felt so much better now that they were here to help.
If anyone could find him, it would be the Ninja Lesbians.
The warmth of the apartment felt so damned good I didn’t ever want to go back outside. Frank was in the living room. There was a brief flurry of hugs and kisses. Frank gave me a big hug and kissed my cheek. He smelled fresh and clean, like he’d just showered. “I’m sorry, it was shitty of me to not let you know where I was,” he whispered in my ear. “I just needed to let off some steam and didn’t think.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered back. “I’ll punish you later.”
He winked. “Counting on it.” He walked over to the desk and picked up his MacBook Air. “Everyone, have a seat. I actually know what happened to Taylor,” he said grimly. He turned the television on to the Apple TV setting and then plugged a flash drive into the USB port. The television screen went blue for just a moment, and then a time-stamped image of our sidewalk popped up on the screen. Pedestrians walking, cars driving past on Decatur Street.
“What is this?” I asked, sitting down next to Lindy and Rhoda on the couch.
“I remembered that the bar on the corner has a surveillance camera,” Frank replied grimly. “The manager was willing to let me make a copy of their recording.” He made a face. “For a hundred bucks, the asshole. But it was worth it.”
“You need your own cameras,” Rhoda replied. “That way you see who is at gate and can keep an eye on courtyard.”
I made a mental note, kicking myself for not thinking of it myself.
We watched as Taylor got out of an Uber and let himself into the building. Another couple of minutes passed, and then a dark panel van drove up and parked in front of our building. Someone wearing a hoodie got out of the van and walked up to our intercom. He pressed the button, talked into the intercom for a few moments, and stepped back away from it. He was also wearing a peacoat and had what I sometimes call a redneck body—you know, where the guy has really thin, pencil-like legs and an oversized upper body? He was built like that. After a few more seconds passed, the gate opened. Taylor stepped out again, holding the gate open and gesturing for them to come inside. Instead, the man grabbed him and pulled him away from the gate. Taylor fought back, but two more men got out of the van. They also grabbed him, dragged him to the vehicle, and tossed him inside. During the struggle the first guy’s hoodie was pulled away from his head.
He looked sort of familiar, like I’d seen him before, but I didn’t know who he was.
Frank froze the frame. He walked over to the television and tapped the man’s face with his index finger. His face was red, and that muscle in his jaw that always twitches when he is angry was working overtime. “That,” he said quietly, “is my fucking brother-in-law.”
“Taylor’s father?” Rhoda sounded incredulous.
“The one and only.”
My heart sank. “Oh my God,” I whispered. That was why the guy looked familiar. Looking at the freeze frame, I could see Taylor’s eyes, the crown of his forehead.
“We’ve got to move,” Frank went on. “If this is what I think it was—I’ve tried calling my sister, but she’s either not near her phone or not picking up because she knows what’s going to happen when I get ahold of her.”
“What do you think this is?” Rhoda asked.
“They’re taking him to a gay conversion camp, aren’t they?” My words sounded hollow and far away to me. They’d threatened Taylor with this when he came out to them, after his year studying in Paris, when he’d come back to Alabama and told them the truth. When he refused to go to the conversion therapy camp, they’d disowned him and thrown him out. That was when he called his uncle for help and stayed with friends from school in Tuscaloosa before Frank could get him a plane ticket to come to New Orleans and live with us.
It was hard to believe gay conversion therapy was still a thing, that people still believed you could cure homosexuality.
But ignorance sometimes just won’t die.
The thought of what those people could do to Taylor in that camp was terrifying.
“Is simple,” Rhoda said with a chilling smile. “We find out where camp is and we get him out by whatever means necessary.”
Frank advanced the recording frame by frame, until the van pulled away from the curb. He froze the picture again and enlarged the license plate.
You can’t live in New Orleans and not be able to recognize an Alabama license plate.
“Lindy, search the databases for that license plate,” Rhoda instructed. Lindy nodded and pulled out her own MacBook Air from her shoulder bag, walking over to the dining room table and turning it on.
“Can’t we take this to the police?” I asked. “Taylor’s not a minor, and he obviously went along against his will. Doesn’t this count as kidnapping? And the Alabama plates—they’re going to go across state lines. This brings in the FBI, doesn’t it?”
“The line can be a little blurry because it’s his fucking dad, but yes, it’s kidnapping,” Frank said. “I’ve already called the local office. I’m waiting for them to call back.”
“Email the video to Venus—”
“Already did,” Frank replied. “I’m waiting to hear back from them. And what were you doing at Margery Lautenschlaeger’s?”
I looked at the manila envelope in my lap. I made a face. “Well, I guess Margery and her daughter Amanda wanted to weigh in on the murders.” I tapped the envelope. “Apparently Margery hired a private eye once Chloe served her with the cease-and-desist, and her private eye dug up some serious dirt on the Valences.” I placed it on the coffee table. “The images are pretty…eye-opening.”
Frank didn’t move to pick them up. “Terrific.”
“My guess is she was planning on springing them on Chloe at the reunion,” I went on. “It would have been good television.”
“Do you think Eric knew about the pictures?”
“Who is this Eric and Margery?” Rhoda asked.
We quickly explained everything that had been going on since Friday—had it only been a couple of days, really? We left out the part about Colin killing the Russian in the apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning—that was need-to-know information, and no one needed to know it. I knew we could trust them—but Frank gave me a look and so we said nothing.
Rhoda shook her head. “You boys. Never a dull moment in your lives, is
there?”
“Got it,” Lindy called from the dining table. “The van is registered to Pine Bluff, which is some kind of retreat run by the Church of Christ the Lord in Corinth County, Alabama.”
“Which is where my sister and brother-in-law live, and that’s the church they go to.”
“So they’re probably heading back up there—”
The buzzing of our intercom startled us all into silence. Frank walked over to the wall and pressed the intercom button. “Yes?”
A woman’s voice came through. “Is this where Frank Sobieski lives?”
“I’ll be right down.” He turned and took a deep breath. “Perfect.” The muscle in his jaw jumped again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
His eyes met mine. “It’s my sister.”
Chapter Nineteen
Queen of Wands, Reversed
A woman who is strict to a fault and domineering
Whatever I was expecting, the reality of Taylor’s mom came as a bit of a surprise.
I’d spent so much time judging her over the last two years that I’d come to think of her as not being human. It was impossible for me to imagine any mother so awful that she could toss her child away like garbage for the crime of being gay.
But she was human. She didn’t have fangs, nor snakes for hair, nor claws for hands, nor scales instead of skin. She wasn’t a Gorgon.
When I was young, Mom once told me the most horrifying aspect of human monsters was that they didn’t look like monsters. “On the outside they look like nice, friendly, kind people,” she said with a sad shake of her head, “but inside they are monsters. Their minds are closed, they embrace darkness instead of light and love…and their minds will do backflips to justify their dark feelings and beliefs. If we learned anything from Nazi Germany, it’s that anyone can be a monster. Anyone.”
But the truth of Taylor’s mother was that she was just a small-town Southern woman like so many others who didn’t know how to deal with a reality she wasn’t prepared for nor considered possible.
It didn’t make her likable, but it did make her understandable…and maybe a little pitiable.
