Murder in the Rue St. Ann

by Greg Herren

  We tossed our back packs on a chair by the front door and headed back to the kitchen, where T. J. snagged a six-pack of Coors Lite out of the refrigerator and led me out back to the pool. He kicked off his shoes and socks, cracked a beer, and tossed me one. I pulled off my own shoes and sat down, my feet dangling into the warm pool water. He flicked a switch and the pool flooded with lights. He went back inside and turned on the stereo:“Appetite for Destruction” by Guns ‘n’ Roses. He came back and sat down next to me, his feet plopping into the pool. He grinned at me as he pulled a joint out of his pants pocket. He lit it and handed it to me. We sat there, our feet dangling in the water, smoking the joint and drinking the beer as the sun faded in the west.

  T. J. had introduced me to pot. I’d never smoked it before I started hanging out with him. I liked it—a lot. Being stoned made everything easier. I could even deal with my parents when I was stoned. We’d smoke a joint in the morning before school, which made the whole school thing easier to deal with. If it wasn’t football season, we worked out with weights every day after school and would get stoned after. During season, we only smoked on weekends.

  I opened my third beer as T. J. stood up and took off his shirt. “Let’s go swimming. I feel sticky.”

  “I didn’t bring anything to swim in.”

  He grinned at me. “I ain’t wearing nothing.”

  I stood up and took a swig out of my beer. It took my addled brain a few seconds to comprehend what was happening. T. J. is suggesting we skinny dip, I thought as my shirt came up over my head. The moment I’d prayed for was finally here. This would be it, the first step—getting naked together alone. I’d never been naked in front of just one other person in my life at that point. At least not since I’d started bathing myself. This was it.

  I glanced over at T. J. as I slid my jeans down. He was standing there, hands on hips, with just that bright tight white underwear on. Once I folded my jeans and set them down, he slid the underwear down and off.

  I was just starting to take mine down when I realized I had an erection.

  I stopped, stricken. I looked up at T. J. and he was grinning at me. “Damn, Chanse, you got a hard-on?” He laughed. “No big deal, I get ‘em all the time. You wanna go into the house and take care of it in the bathroom?”

  I slid my underwear down. It was now or never. My voice shook. “Do—do you wanna come with me?”

  His grin faded. His eyebrows went up then back down as his face relaxed. He half-closed his eyes and looked out over the pool. “No, I don’t think I do.”

  Mortified, I turned to retrieve my jeans and slipped, falling over the edge into the pool. I clipped my lower left back on the side on the way. It bled pretty bad. T. J. helped me clean it up and bandage it.

  It never came up again, and T. J. didn’t treat me any different. We both acted like I’d never said anything.

  But he never invited me over when his parents weren’t home again.

  “What time are you expecting your friend?”

  My waitress was still smiling, but she didn’t seem sincere this time. I looked at my watch. 7:39. Damn him, he was almost forty minutes late!

  He just refused to understand how rude it was to keep someone waiting, but even this was bad for Paul. He tried to be punctual when it was me he was meeting—he rarely was later than 15 minutes, maybe 20. I longed for a cigarette. Back when I smoked, I’d chain smoke while I waited for someone—even lighting a new cigarette off the butt of the one I’d just finished.

  He must really be pissed at me.

  I shrugged. “I guess he isn’t coming.” I told the waitress. I stood up and slipped a five on the table. “Sorry to tie up the table for so long.” I’d go home and order a pizza, I figured, and wait for him to call. I’d be damned if I’d call him when he’d just stood me up.

  She patted me on the arm, a sympathetic smile on her face. I got the sense she’d been stood up before. “Something must have come up.” She said, giving me a half-hearted smile.

  “Yeah, sure, thanks.” Nothing like having a total stranger feel sorry for you.

  I walked out the front door onto Magazine Street and stepped into the little grocery store on the corner at St. Andrew. I bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and lit up one up as I headed up Sophie Wright Place. If Paul showed up and I was gone, good enough for him. How fucking insensitive.

  So, I’d never told him about T. J. and how I got the scar. Big deal. That was an embarrassing story. I was ashamed of it. Yet his attitude toward posing bare-ass didn’t suggest he was ashamed—it seemed more like he was proud of it. So, if there wasn’t a reason to be ashamed of it, why not tell me?

  My cell phone rang as I crossed against the light on Felicity. I flipped it open. The caller ID read N O P D. I turned it on. “MacLeod.”

  “Chanse, it’s Blaine.” Blaine Tujague was an old friend of mine. We’d gone through police training together, and he’d just gotten promoted to detective. His voice was lowered. “Do you know any good lawyers?”

  “Well, yeah.” I’d done some work for a gay lawyer named Loren McKeithen. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Good, You better call one.” I could hear the hubbub of the police station behind him. “They’ve brought Paul in for questioning.”

  “What?” The Camp Street bus roared by, spewing toxic black fumes. “I could have sworn you said Paul was brought in for questioning.” I couldn’t have heard that right. That didn’t make any sense.

  “He has been, Chanse! That’s why I’m telling you to call a lawyer.” His voice remained hushed but became more urgent. “He’s going to need one.”

  “Why have they brought him in?”

  “Suspicion of murder.”

  I almost dropped my phone. “Blaine, this isn’t funny.” Blaine had a weird sense of humor and loved to play jokes on people—and sometimes he went a little too far.

  “No joke, Chanse.”

  “Just who is he supposed to have killed?” I felt the knot in my stomach tightening, as I waited for Blaine to start laughing and say “Gotcha!”

  “Some guy who lived over on St. Ann.” He replied instead. “Name of Mark Williams. You know him?” He sighed. “Anyway, get a lawyer down to the 8th District station. Pronto.”

  Chapter Five

  I don’t remember walking the rest of the way back to my apartment. My mind was in another place completely. I just felt nauseated, worried, sick. I think I almost stepped out in front of a Kenwood water delivery truck, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Somehow I managed to get my keys in the door and go in. I vaguely remember calling Loren McKeithen and interrupting his dinner. Loren switched immediately into lawyer mode and promised to get down to the station immediately. “I’ll call you later,” he said and hung up. I toyed with the idea of going down there, but there was no way in hell they were going to let me in to see Paul. Blaine might be able to swing it, but he just got promoted and I didn’t want to get him in trouble. The only person who could get in to see him was his lawyer—to get more than that Loren would have to threaten to go to a judge. I hung up the phone and just sat in the dark for a little while.

  Paul couldn’t kill anyone. That was just ridiculous.

  How well do you really know Paul? An insidious voice asked from the back of my brain. You didn’t know he was a nude model, did you? You don’t know anything about him— he could be a fucking serial killer for all you know. There could be all kinds of things in his past you know nothing about it, you fucking idiot.

  I turned on the computer and the desk lamp. “I can’t do this,” I said to myself. I couldn’t invade his privacy like this.

  Don’t you want to know? That insidious voice was back. Don’t you have a right to know? He’ll never know you checked him out. He probably thinks you did already. And why didn’t you do this before? What kind of detective are you?

  The kind who wants to trust his boyfriend…

  Hating myself a little bit, I logged onto the Internet.

>   I went to a search engine and typed in Paul’s name and social security number.

  I paused before I clicked ‘send.’

  The nature of my job is to be suspicious. People lie pretty easily, and the ones who claim never to lie are the worst. Every word out of their mouths is a lie. I never take anyone I meet during an investigation at their word. That’s just asking for trouble. Stories always have to be checked out and independently verified before I take it as gospel. And New Orleans is a city where people frequently take liberties with the truth. Some folks could be quite entertaining, even though their lies were so outlandish and over the top there was no way they could be true. New Orleans seemed to attract people who come here to escape from their pasts and begin fresh, Their histories become what they wish they’d been. After a while, they’ve told the lies so long they begin to believe them.

  I’d taken Paul at his word. I hadn’t checked him out. Why was he different? I wondered.

  Because you’re supposed to trust and believe in your boyfriend, that’s why.

  I took a deep breath and clicked the mouse.

  The engine I was using showed previous addresses. It wasn’t always accurate—it only showed mailing addresses. I sat, stared at the screen as the site looked up Paul’s information. The program dinged when the search was finished and the page was loaded. Sure enough, it showed Paul’s current address as his apartment up on Valence Street, with two former addresses in Dallas and the one prior to that in Tempe—the student apartment where he lived during his brief stint at ASU, and before that Albuquerque.

  I printed out the page of his former addresses, then went to a basic web search engine and typed in his name. I cursed myself for being stupid. What did I expect to find about him on Google, anyway? After a few seconds, the results came up.

  The first page of results obviously were in reference to several other Paul Maxwells. I knew Paul couldn’t be a professor of psychology at Washington State, nor was he a dancer on Broadway. I scrolled to the bottom of the page. The last one read simply:…Paul Maxwell, one of Top Rope’s biggest stars as Cody Dallas, recently…..

  Cody Dallas? I grinned. That had to be a porn star name.

  For the hell of it, thinking it might be funny to tell him about it later, I clicked on the link. It took me to a website called “Ilovetoprope.com.” The front page loaded, and then the window flashed off as it loaded a sub-page.A headline appeared, in caps and all red: CODY DALLAS RETIRES! EXCLUSIVE!!

  The notice kind of like a checkout-stand tabloid newspaper. I started to close the window— obviously, this couldn’t be my Paul Maxwell— but I decided to wait and see what this guy looked like. He couldn’t be as good-looking as my Paul.

  Some text appeared, and next to it a picture began to load. I started to read the text. Cody Dallas was apparently a video star of some repute for a company named Top Rope Productions. But now he was giving up the business, and the website revealed, for the first time, his real name: Paul Maxwell.

  Paul’s going to get a kick out of this, I thought, deciding to print the whole thing out once it finished loading. We’d laugh about this when—

  When he gets out of jail?

  Of course he was going to get out of jail. It was all a misunderstanding—it had to be. Paul couldn’t kill anyone. He might not have told me a few things about his past, but I’d know if he was a killer. He couldn’t even kill the damned cockroaches that got in from outside and ran across the floor—I always had to do it.

  The picture finished loading and my mouth went dry.

  It was Paul, wearing a low cut red bikini that left little to the imagination. His hands were behind his head, his arms flexed, his abs standing out in bas-relief. You could clearly see the outline of his genitals in the bikini, and his dick was hard.

  He was smiling.

  I knew that smile quite well. My heart sank and my stomach twisted.

  I looked over at the text again.

  “Cody Dallas, long one of the biggest stars under contract to Top Rope Productions, recently announced his retirement from the scene.

  “’It’s kind of hard to top the video I just shot with Mark Miller,” he says with a shy smile. “I’d like to go while I’m still on top.’

  Pun fully intended, of course. More>>>

  I clicked to the next page. I stared at the screen.

  Action pictures loaded. Paul in a black bikini. Wrestling Mark Miller, who wore white. One picture showed Mark Miller pulling Paul to his feet by his hair. The bikini had crept into the crack of his ass, revealing both round hard cheeks. I kept shaking my head, trying to make sure I was looking at the right thing, trying to get my brain to accept what I was looking at. It just wouldn’t compute, on any level. Then, taking a closer look at Paul’s opponent, my blood ran cold.

  Mark Miller was Mark Williams.

  I pushed my chair away from the desk, staggered into the bathroom and threw up.

  It was Paul, my Paul all right, and he and Mark Williams obviously knew each other much better than he’d led me to believe.

  How many other lies had he told me?

  This was more than just not telling me about his past—he lied about knowing Mark Williams. What had he said? Oh, yeah: “the guy who owns the magazine wants me to pose for the cover.” Not “I knew him from before, I fucking made a goddamned fucking porn tape with him.”

  I washed my face and brushed my teeth, staring at myself in the mirror.

  That was something else I knew about Paul—he liked wrestling. If there was a wrestling show on television, he wanted to watch it. It wasn’t anything I’d ever really gotten into. When I was in college, some of the guys in my fraternity were into it, ordering pay-per-views, but I’d never bothered with it much. Yeah, the bodies of some of the guys were great, and it was nice seeing huge, muscular men running around in tights— kind of hot in a way—but it was always so obviously fake I couldn’t deal with it.

  But Paul loved it. Every once in a when we were in bed, he’d ask me to restrain him physically, but I’d never given it much of a thought. I liked holding him down while he struggled against me—it always seemed to make him really horny and the sex even hotter. Watching wrestling shows with him was interesting. I never paid much attention, just daydreaming while he watched and kept a running commentary. He often critiqued the wrestlers and complained about the obvious cartoonish elements. I didn’t mind watching it with him. It never stirred my interest, but every so often there was a hot guy I’d watch, which was kind of fun, but their hitting each other with chairs and ladders and so on was just dumb.

  I walked into the kitchen and got a beer. I pulled the cigarettes out of my pocket and lit another one. At this point, what did my smoking matter? Yeah, just try to lecture me now, I thought as I walked back into the living room and sat down at the computer.

  At the bottom of the page was a link that said ORDER THIS TAPE NOW!

  I clicked on it without a second thought.

  A window popped open. WOULD YOU LIKE TO ORDER MORE CODY DALLAS TAPES? I clicked yes, and a list popped up. I clicked on three more, adding them to the shopping cart.

  What the hell? Why not? Didn’t I have the right to see what my boyfriend got up to on videotapes? Just another interested customer, like God knows how many others there were. I ordered the tape. I typed in my American Express number as quickly as my shaking fingers could move. I clicked on ‘overnight rush delivery,’ authorizing an additional $20 charge on the card. After I clicked ‘send,’ the confirmation email arrived.

  I book-marked all the pages and logged off the Internet.

  Then I turned on the overhead light and ceiling fan in the living room.

  Not only was he a nude model, he also has a lucrative video wrestling career. And what else? A murderer?

  My phone rang. I got to it on the third ring. “MacLeod.”

  “Hey Chanse, it’s Loren.” He let out a breath of air. “They’ve booked him, and they’re keeping him overnight as a guest
of the parish. He’ll been arraigned in the morning. I’m pretty sure I can get him out on bail, though.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I won’t lie to you, Chanse, it looks pretty bad. You got any cranberry juice?” Loren was a vodka and cranberry drinker.

  “No.”

  “You do have vodka in the house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, I’ll stop on my way over and get some cranberry. You need anything?”

  “No—“ then something occurred to me. “Yeah, get me a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. In a box.”

  “See ya in a few.”

  I walked into my bedroom and reached up onto the closet shelf. I felt around for a while before I found the old Cuban cigar box with my pot stash in it. I hadn’t smoked pot in almost three months. Paul thought I threw it all away, but I hadn’t. I’d kept it. Keeping some in the house where I could get to it whenever I wanted to was how I was getting through life. It was a challenge to myself, every day, to see if I could handle everything without having to get stoned at night in order to deal. Once Loren was gone, I’d roll myself a big fattie.

  I’d probably smoke the entire pack of cigarettes as well.

  Paul wouldn’t like it, but he could just get over himself. Like he was anyone to criticize my bad habits. I didn’t pose naked. I didn’t make wrestling porn tapes. I wasn’t all over the fucking Internet in a tiny little bikini with my dick hard. I wasn’t so big a star that my ‘retirement’ required a press release and an interview on a website.

  Who the fuck was my boyfriend? Was he a murderer?

  As I sat there on the bed, my head and heart were pounding.

  The doorbell rang. I grabbed the bottle of vodka from under the sink on my way to answer the door.

  “You expect me to drink that cheap-ass vodka?” Loren said, giving the bottle in my hand a withering look. “For shit’s sake, MacLeod, get out the good stuff.”

  “This is the good stuff.”

  He handed me the bag with the cranberry juice in it and sighed. “I don’t think that bodes well for my fee.” He walked past me and sat on the couch. Loren is short; maybe five-five— but stocky. He wears silver wire-framed glasses, has toffy colored skin, and short cut gray hair. He wore a light, pistachio-colored suit with a white shirt underneath the jacket. He lit a cigarette and looked for an ashtray.