by Greg Herren
“This is so nice, don’t you think?” he asked. “I love sleeping in and spending the morning in bed.”
“Yeah, it’s a great way to waste the morning.” I put my arms around him and put my head on his shoulder.
He set the mug on the nightstand and kissed my cheek. “Spending lazy time with someone you love is never a waste, Chanse. Love is never a waste of time.”
I smiled, even laughed a little bit.
Love is never a waste of time.
I sent a mental apology to Fee for breaking my word to her and talking to the picture.
I could never make things right with Paul, but Fee was right. The way I could honor his memory by becoming a better person, by letting go of the past and living a good life.
That was his legacy to me.
I poured myself another drink and raised my glass to the print of Paul. “If there’s a heaven, or somehow you’re watching me, or can hear me, thank you, Paul.”
I walked back into the kitchen to finish making my dinner.
Chapter Six
I woke up feeling invigorated and alive. It was almost as though the breakthrough I’d had last night had changed my perception of everything, as if heavy weights I’d been carrying around my neck had finally broken free.
I felt like I could conquer the world.
I went through my usual morning ritual of drinking an entire pot of coffee and checking my emails. I was hoping Jude might have sent me one rather than calling me back—after all, it’s much easier to tell someone to go to hell electronically than in person—but there was nothing in my inbox other than hot stock tips, penile implant ads, and requests for assistance from someone in Nigeria who apparently wanted my bank information so he could put a couple of hundred million dollars in there. I shook my head in amusement at the notion of how many people would probably leap at this opportunity, not realizing it was a scam until their identities were stolen and their bank accounts wiped out. I thought about sending Jude an e-mail, and finally decided against it. I’d just call him again later—he couldn’t duck my calls forever.
And if he did somehow manage to avoid me, I might just show up at his door one evening.
I turned off the computer and opened the envelope Venus had left for me. I started going through her notes. As I expected, Venus was very thorough and pretty much had checked out everything in the house. There had been no sign of forced entry, and as she’d mentioned, the alarm system had been deactivated with the code, which meant Iris had done it or the killer had known the code. The killer had to be someone she knew fairly well. The downstairs hadn’t looked as though it had been searched or gone through in any way; the DVD player, a computer, and other portable electronic equipment—the kind of stuff that is easy to unload and relatively untraceable—hadn’t been touched. Even the liquor arranged on the bar was untouched—and the inventory of bottles Venus had scribbled down was all good, expensive stuff. Iris obviously never stooped to cheap liquor.
I took out the photos and started paging through them. Crime scene photographs are always unpleasant to look at. I’d seen a lot of death when I was on the force, but it’s never something you really get used to, and the photographs show death in all its stark ugliness. Iris lay flat on her back in a puddle of blood, her lifeless eyes open and staring up. She was wearing the same outfit she’d worn to her meeting with me earlier the day she was killed, and my mind went into a “disconnect” mode. You have to erect a barrier in your mind and dismiss the victim as a person, think of the corpse as a “thing,” something not quite human. The bullet had torn a huge hole in the front of her gray silk blouse, which was drenched in blood. There was a look of surprise still on her face, frozen there until the mortician could do something about it. At some point, she’d taken her hair down before she was shot. Her hair was spread around her head, and some of it was saturated from sitting in the puddle of blood. Her purse sat on the nightstand, unopened. The carpet she was lying on was a beige shag style, and as I took in the other room details, I realized that the room was tastefully decorated. It looked like the bedroom of a woman with money to burn, and she’d apparently spared no expense in her determination to have a sophisticated yet comfortable bedroom.
The purse bothered me, as it had Venus. How had it ended up sitting on the nightstand? If she’d come home during a burglary, how had she managed to get into her bedroom and put her purse down on the nightstand before being surprised? Had the burglar somehow followed her in? There was no sign of forced entry. On the floor beside the nightstand I could see her briefcase, also untouched. Had the burglar been upstairs, she’d come up and been surprised in the bedroom? Then he’d shot her, and fled? And how had the burglar gotten into the house beforehand if the alarm was still set?
No, it looked to me as though someone had come expressly to her house to kill her.
It was the only thing that made any sense. But even with the flood damage, I’d have to go take a look. It would help me get a sense of things. I showered and dressed, putting on a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans. The “safety kit” I’d assembled before returning was still in the trunk of the car—plastic gloves, Purel, bottled water, and surgical masks—so I was ready to deal with anything in Iris’s wrecked house. I also made sure my gun was loaded—no telling what I might find out there. I doubted the killer would be around, but even with the National Guard in town, there wasn’t much point in risking running into looters. I got into my car and headed out to Lakeview.
There still weren’t many signs of life in the city, but at least the Central Business District looked to be fairly intact, other than all the windows blown out of the Hyatt Hotel by the Superdome. Out of habit, I took O’Keefe, which eventually joins up with Rampart about a block uptown from Canal Street. None of the traffic lights were working, and there were no other cars out and about. I crossed Canal and couldn’t help but smile as I drove up Rampart Street.
In the days after the storm blew through and the water from the breeched levees filled the city, a lot of fundamentalist Christians had claimed that God had destroyed New Orleans for “her sins and her acceptance and tolerance of gays.” The fact that Southern Decadence, the big gay Labor Day weekend celebration, had been scheduled for the weekend after Katrina also played a part in the statements by those ministers who claimed to have a direct line to God. The Thursday before, I’d driven down to the Quarter to get a haircut, and city workers had been hanging rainbow banners from the streetlights on Rampart, as they do every year for Decadence.
The rainbow banners were still there. Katrina hadn’t blown them down!
“Take that, you sanctimonious fuckwads,” I said out loud, a broad grin spreading over my face. I turned onto Esplanade and drove past some guys picking up trash on the neutral ground. They waved as I drove past, and I waved back. The city was getting cleaned up; there was no debris anywhere along Esplanade Avenue, and the beautiful old houses looked intact. I glanced down the streets of the Quarter as I drove past, and other than garbage bags and the ubiquitous refrigerators, it looked intact and clean. My heart sang with joy, The French Quarter had always been the heart of the city, and its survival seemed a good sign to me. If we’d lost the Quarter…It would be hard to imagine the city without its beating heart. There was no traffic at all on Elysian Fields, and the light at St. Claude was out—those ubiquitous stop signs placed at every corner.
My good mood started to fade as I drove along Elysian Fields. It had never been a pretty drive: the blocks between St. Claude and the I-10 on-ramp had always been relatively poor and not kept up as well as the neighborhoods I was more familiar with. The silence was oppressive, and I turned the car stereo up louder. Brother Martin High School looked desolate. The closer I got to the lake, the more depressing it got. The houses all along Elysian Fields had those horrible spray-painted X’s on them, and the farther along I got, the more I started seeing the water lines stained onto the sides of the houses. The street itself was caked with dirt left behind when the
water receded. No traffic lights were working; no businesses open. It was a dead zone. I felt a sob welling up inside me and I fought it back down.
*
My own evacuation had taken me down Elysian Fields; that was the last time I’d been down the street. I’d headed that way to try to avoid backed-up traffic on I-10 that Sunday before Katrina had come ashore, getting on the highway at the Elysian Fields on-ramp. As I drove along, I remembered the anxiety I’d felt, and why I’d decided to take the eastern route out of the city, rather than heading west through Baton Rouge. I’d turned on the TV after packing up the car, and every single newscaster on every single news station had been advising late evacuees to head east and then north. “It’s taking eight hours to get to Baton Rouge”—what was usually an hour-and-a-half drive—“so head east, then turn north when you get outside the city. The highway is clear going east! Head east!” I’d gotten out my map, decided to head east on I-10, swing west on I-12 at Slidell on the other side of the lake, and catch 55 north through Jackson, Mississippi, then cut over toward Dallas.
It had been a huge mistake—which I didn’t realize until I was actually on the highway.
The traffic was bumper to bumper and crawling along. The westbound lanes were bare and empty. Every so often, I would see someone climb out of a car and get bottled water out of the trunk. Once in a while, I’d see a car on the shoulder, with people out walking dogs or wandering off into the bushes to relieve themselves. I kept glancing at my watch, anxiety growing within me with each passing minute. I couldn’t help but feel that at the rate the traffic was moving, we weren’t all going to get out in time. The radio kept broadcasting doom and gloom—and despite the fact we weren’t moving at all, the broadcasters kept insisting to everyone they head “east” to avoid the congestion heading west. Every so often, they’d talk to a member of their crew on a cell phone, stuck heading west between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As the hours passed, I began to get really annoyed. Why didn’t they have anyone out actually reporting what was going on eastbound out of the city? But I was also amazed at how well behaved everyone on the highway was, all united in a grim single purpose. I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally reached the twin spans across Lake Pontchartrain, but the traffic was still moving at a snail’s pace. And when I was out over the lake, it started raining just as one of the broadcasters stated, “The outer bands are starting to reach New Orleans,” and my heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t imagine anything more frightening than being trapped on the twin spans as a hurricane roared ashore.
It took eight hours to get to Slidell, but I was able to relax once I was off the bridge. (After the hurricane, when we were safely ensconced on Jude’s couch, CNN showed an aerial view of how the storm had blown the twin spans apart. I said to Jude, “That’s the bridge I took out of the city,” and he started crying.) Once there, I couldn’t go west on I-12; it was closed off by state troopers. So I headed north to Hattiesburg on 59, then cut over to Jackson. I’d left my apartment at ten in the morning, got to Jackson finally at ten that night, and kept heading west. The entire time I was absolutely terrified. The news reports on the radio were frightening. Katrina was such a huge storm with such intense power, it was undoubtedly going to be felt as far north as Jackson—and the weather people kept saying, “This storm’s intensity may not dissipate before it reaches Tennessee!” So, I kept going, afraid to stop for anything other than gas and coffee and to use the bathroom. I couldn’t eat. I sped through the night, and didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I crossed the Mississippi River back into Louisiana from Vicksburg and kept going. I’d gotten to Jude’s house in Dallas twenty-six hours after I left New Orleans, all the while listening to the reports of the destruction the storm was causing, not just to New Orleans but all over the Gulf Coast. The reports had been so hopeful and positive when I got to Jude’s—“New Orleans has dodged a bullet!” Wind damage was all; the storm had taken an eastern jog as it came ashore. I got out of my car, collapsed onto Jude’s living room floor, and slept, relieved and thinking I would be able to head back home in just a few days.
It wasn’t until I woke up that evening that I found out the levees were breached and the city was filling with water. I wouldn’t be going home any time soon.
*
I fought back tears as I turned onto Robert E. Lee. The University of New Orleans campus was a wasteland, and the horror only got worse the farther into Lakeview I got. I finally found the street that Iris Verlaine’s home was on, and turned onto it.
There was nothing alive out there. The grass was dead and brown. Trees were down, and the ones that were standing were covered in dried mud over my head on their trunks. There were no leaves. Everything just looked dead, and the entire neighborhood stank. In some houses there were piles of garbage in the yard, and everywhere there were dead dirty cars, with dried mud at least an inch thick on them.
I’d never spent a lot of time in Lakeview. I’d pretty much kept to my neighborhood, except when I had to for a case— and I wasn’t really familiar with the rest of the city and its multitude of neighborhoods. For me, the city boundaries had been Elysian Fields in the Marigny, St. Charles Avenue through Uptown, the river, and then Audubon Park on the other side. I’d always known there was a vast city of diverse neighborhoods out there, but I never really ventured beyond my area of town. I’d been to Lakeview a few times in my seven years in the city: it was a beautiful neighborhood of gorgeous and expensive homes, lovely emerald-green well-kept lawns, thriving businesses, and main streets crowded with cars.
Now it was just—well, dead.
Iris Verlaine’s house was on what used to be a quiet side street, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of it, I shook my head. Her house, pre-storm, had probably been worth a minimum of half a million dollars; now it wasn’t worth a dime. It was a big house, probably three or four bedrooms from the size of it, with a driveway leading to a garage behind. There was a dirty fountain in the front yard, with a statue of what looked to be Aquarius in the center of it. It was filled with disgusting brown water with a film on the top of it. I got out the safety kit and made my way to the front walk.
The front door was off its hinges and lying down in the dirty foyer. I wasn’t sure if the house had been looted or not, but the spray-paint symbol showed no pets found, nor corpses. I called out a greeting before stepping over the front door and entering the house. There was no answer, and immediately I was greeted by the smell, a smorgasbord of scent that made my stomach clench. Every drop of coffee I’d consumed that morning came right up in a spray into a dead flowerbed.
I went back out into the yard and took deep breaths, hoping for the nausea to clear. I rinsed my mouth out with a bottle of water and smeared Vicks VapoRub over my nostrils—it made my eyes water, but I couldn’t smell anything else. I then placed one of the surgical masks over my nose and mouth and slipped rubber gloves onto my hands. I went back to the front of the house, but paused. Instead, I decided to go look in the garage windows—and sure enough, there was her car, covered in grime.
Hell, no, it hadn’t been a burglary. Surely, someone inside the house would have heard her pull into the driveway.
I headed back to the front door, and stepped into the wreckage of Iris Verlaine’s home. As I walked across the mucky foyer tiles, my shoes stuck to them and some of them even pulled free from the floor. I looked down at the muck on my shoes and realized I was going to have to throw them away—I didn’t even want to get back into the car with them on. The carpet was black and squished under my feet. The floodwaters had tossed her furniture around like toys. The sofa was on its side, coated in grime. A recliner rested on top of it somehow. Tables and other chairs and bric-a-brac were thrown about as if there had been an earthquake. The walls themselves were coated with grime. I could see the mold and mildew streaking on the ceiling and through some of the grime on the walls. Beyond the living room, in the kitchen, I could see the refrigerator lying on its side, the door open, flies and coffin
fleas buzzing around. Paintings and photographs were scattered all over the floor, their glass coverings cracked; the images beneath the broken glass no longer recognizable through the mildew and the filth. The sideboard, which she must have used as her bar, was tilted on its side, its doors hanging open, and I could see the grimy liquor bottles the killer hadn’t touched. Some of them were broken; undoubtedly that was a part of the overpowering smell.
I found the curved staircase and squished my way up. About halfway to the second floor, the carpet was dry; the water hadn’t gotten that high, and although the wall along the staircase was covered with black mold all the way to the ceiling, I could see that the hallway walls of the second floor were completely clear. As I kept walking up, the contrast was startling. By the time I reached the second floor, it was as though I had entered a completely different world. On the second floor, everything was fine, the way it had been before August 29th. The walls were painted in soothing pastels; the carpet was the expensive-looking beige shag style that I’d noted in the crime scene photos, and black-and-white photographs lined the hallways. There was a room with a washer and dryer just across from the staircase, and when I looked in, everything was in its place: cleaning materials lined up neatly on their shelf, a box of Tide powder next to a bottle of Downy and one of bleach, next to them an open box of dryer sheets. I opened the dryer door, and there was a pair of women’s jeans and a couple of T-shirts sitting in there, a crumpled dryer sheet on top of them. She’d probably thrown them in the dryer that morning before she left for work, and they’d been sitting there ever since.
