Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

  My purple LSU sweats were folded neatly on the nightstand where I’d put them yesterday morning after getting ready for the trip to Belle Riviere. I slid the pants on and slipped my bare feet into my faux-fur-lined house shoes. I pulled the hoodie on over my head, walked into the bathroom, and turned on the water spigot. While I waited for the water to get hot, I went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. Another strike against Oxycontin: I’d forgotten to get the coffee ready last night and set the timer. While the coffee brewed I went back into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and thoroughly washed my face with the hot water. The room was so cold tendrils of steam drifted up from the stream of water, misting up the mirror. By the time I got back into the kitchen there was enough coffee in the pot for a cup.

  After I stirred a Sweet’N Low packet and a healthy dollop of French vanilla creamer into my big mug, I realized Rory hadn’t come over to spend the night.

  Of course, that didn’t mean anything. It was possible he may have come by and found me dead to the world thanks to the Oxycontin (strike three). If he had, I couldn’t blame him for not staying.

  No, he didn’t come by, because if he had, he wouldn’t have left without checking to make sure the coffeemaker was set. It was the kind of thoughtful thing he always did. Before his promotion he used to have to work late nights doing HIV testing in the French Quarter’s gay bars. I’d try to wait up for him but would fall asleep on the couch. He’d always wake me up and make me get into bed, and before he joined me he’d always make sure the coffee was set so it would be ready for me in the morning.

  He was a great guy, thoughtful and considerate and ruthlessly efficient.

  It was, I had to admit, a weird relationship. We were comfortable with each other, which was probably a terrible way to describe a relationship. We made each other laugh, and I enjoyed talking to him. But was it a relationship, really? I went with him to NO / AIDS events or parties where he needed a date. We didn’t go out much together other than that. I had a key to his place in the Bywater and he had a key to mine. Every once in a while he’d decide he needed to be single and I wouldn’t see him for a few months—but then he’d call and we’d start up all over again. I was never upset or hurt when he’d have one of his “I need more than this” moods, and I always took him back.

  And now that he’d gotten the promotion he’d wanted, he was talking about settling down. I wasn’t sure what that meant and never asked. He never offered an explanation, either.

  He must be really pissed at me for bailing on him last night if he didn’t come by.

  My best friend Paige said it was past time for us to either “shit or get off the pot.” It was hard to believe that we’d been seeing each other off and on for almost five years. Five years. Much as I hated to admit it, she had a point. Were we ever going to commit, move in together and set up a joint household? I wondered myself sometimes. But whenever it had come up in the past, it seemed like there was always a good reason to table it, put it off, push it aside and pretend it had never come up. Things worked between us the way they were.

  Was the reason I never asked what he meant by settling down because I wasn’t ready? Or did I not want to settle down with Rory?

  I’ll figure out a way to make it up to him, I decided as I sat down on the sofa in my living room, putting my feet up on the table. I wasn’t good at romantic gestures, but unlike other guys in my checkered past, Rory never seemed to mind. That was another reason we clicked. I liked that he didn’t make me feel guilty for forgetting made-up anniversaries like “our first date” or “the day we met” or other ridiculous sentimental occasions. He didn’t want me sending him flowers or buying him little gifts. He didn’t get his feelings hurt when I wanted alone time or when I was feeling moody.

  I plugged my phone into the charger and set my mug down on the coffee table. I leaned back on the couch. My back was still not hurting, but the muscles felt tight.

  I picked up the remote for the DVD player, pressed the play button, and took a sip of my coffee as the yoga DVD started up.

  Yoga was part of my regimen for my back. I’d been resistant when my physical therapist recommended daily yoga as part of my regimen. He’d given me phone numbers for several yoga studios in the city, but I just couldn’t see myself going to a group class. Yoga was for women, not former college football players who stood six foot four and weighed in at more than 240 pounds. Sensing my reluctance, my therapist rolled his eyes and gave me a DVD. “Try this,” he said with a slight shake of his head, “there’re routines for beginners, intermediates, and advanced. You might actually like it.” He looked me up and down. “It wouldn’t hurt you to work on your flexibility anyway.”

  I put my yoga mat out on the floor and sat down. The DVD featured an incredibly ripped and hot man with dark olive skin and long bluish black hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing nothing more than black tights over his legs. His voice was calm and soothing. I’d felt pretty silly the first time I’d done it—if anyone had told me back in the days when I was playing football at LSU that one day I’d be doing yoga I would have laughed in their face—but now I actually looked forward to doing my yoga routine every morning. I’d never really been much of a stretcher before—I always just went through the motions of stretching before practice and games—but I found myself enjoying it. The stretching felt good, and the breathing method was calming.

  As I closed my eyes and listened to Yogi Rafael’s soothing voice, the music playing gently in the background, and focused on controlling my breathing the way he softly prodded me to, I found my mind wandering back to the meeting at Belle Riviere.

  Where do I know Tom from? I asked myself as I moved from Mountain Pose to Warrior, and then into Child’s Pose, feeling the gentle pull of the tight muscles in my back. I know I’ve seen him before, shirtless. Maybe it was at Decadence, or the dance floor of one of the bars, or Mardi Gras? But I haven’t been to bars in years…

  The weird thing was the memory was pretty clear. He was shirtless, his pale skin covered with a light sheen of sweat, and he was wearing clinging white boxer briefs as he leaned against a black wall with his eyes closed. It was like he was right there in front of me, his light brown curls dusted with drops of sweat.

  Where? Where do I know him from?

  New Orleans is a very small town. Many times I would see someone who looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place the face. I saw so many people in my day-to-day existence—the cashiers at the grocery store or the Walgreens on St. Charles, the trainers and front desk clerks at my gym, the people who worked at the rehab facility at Touro—and when I saw them out of context I couldn’t place them. Maybe that’s all it was with Tom. Maybe he’d put himself through law school dancing for dollars in the gay bars. Maybe I’d seen him in the locker room at the gym sometime. I’d eventually remember. I always did.

  Finally, I pushed the thoughts out of my head and focused on the yoga.

  Before I knew it the workout was over, with Yogi Raphael placing his hands together and saying namaste. I got to my feet slowly, rolled up the mat, and stored it back under the sofa. I got another cup of coffee and took a shower.

  I wanted to catch Todd before he left for the gallery. I figured it would be easier to talk to him at home. The Todd Laborde Gallery was always filled with potential buyers, and I knew he had five or six salespeople working all day. I’d been to openings there, and the guest list was the highest echelons of New Orleans society. Blaine had been born into that world—his family went back to even before the Spanish took over New Orleans in 1763, and his mother was the grandest of New Orleans’s grande dames—but I always felt uncomfortable in those situations. I’d grown up in a trailer park in a Podunk town in East Texas, and going to openings at Todd’s gallery made me very aware of that past. As I got dressed, it hit me that Rory’s family was kind of the same as Blaine’s—maybe that was the reason I was so on the fence about everything with him?

  I pushed that thought to the back
of my mind. I didn’t have time to think about that now.

  I locked my front door and crossed Camp Street, cutting through Coliseum Square. Blaine and Todd lived on Coliseum Street on the other side of the park, between Polymnia and Race Streets. I turned up my leather jacket’s collar as the cold, damp wind blasted at me. Some dog owners were huddled together over by the fountain, clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands as their dogs went about their business. Blaine and Todd’s beautiful old house was almost directly kitty-corner from mine. It had taken them several years to renovate it. I’d just moved into my place when they bought it. The place looked like a derelict wreck at the time, like one good shove and the whole place would collapse into a pile of rotting wood and decayed plaster. Todd bought it for practically a song. They’d been living pretty far uptown, in Riverbend, and this was a lot closer not only to Todd’s gallery but the 8th District police station where Blaine was based.

  At that time, the whole neighborhood was in pretty bad shape. The park wasn’t lit up at night—all the streetlights had been shot out and never replaced. Peering through my blinds I could see the drug dealers and their clients out there, dim shapes in the dark, the occasional flare of a cigarette lighter and the glowing red end as someone inhaled. The houses around the park, with a few exceptions, all looked abandoned and blighted. But once Todd and Blaine got their house and got the renovation started, the other wrecked houses started getting bought up by other gay couples and the gentrification began. Within a year or two, Utne Reader declared the Lower Garden District to be “the coolest neighborhood to live in the United States.” The Coliseum Square Association was formed by the new homeowners around the park and the other streets in the neighborhood. They’d spent a lot of money renovating their homes and turning them into show places. Eager to protect their investments and increase their property values, they pressured the city into fixing the streetlights in the park, then pressured the police department into chasing the drug dealers and users out of the park. Now Coliseum Square was well lit all night long. The fountain had been repaired and was also lit at night. It was now safe for the young urban professionals who’d moved in to walk their dogs alone after dark.

  It was my first experience with gentrification, and I really couldn’t complain about it. I didn’t mind coming home at night and not having to worry about being harassed—or shot—by drug dealers and their clientele. The park was beautiful now.

  Gentrification, though, was now becoming a dirty word in New Orleans.

  The whole city had changed a great deal since Katrina. The first few years after had been difficult as we struggled to rebuild the city with a corrupt and ineffective mayor who didn’t give a damn. But things began to pick up once a new mayor was voted in. It had actually taken years, but now it seemed like the city had changed overnight.

  Rory’s neighborhood—the Bywater—had changed so dramatically it was almost unrecognizable. His own rent had been raised several times, and he was tired of it. He was looking for a new place to live, maybe even a condo to buy. Rory called the people who’d taken over his neighborhood “hipsters”—his face twisting into a sneer when he spat the word out. They drove him nuts, but even he had to admit that the revival of his neighborhood, which had been sketchy pre-flood, wasn’t a bad thing. It was kind of nice seeing people out walking their dogs or skateboarding or on their bikes after dark down there—before the flood it was a ghost town once the sun went down. Crime had been pretty rife, too. Rory rented one side of a shotgun, and his place had been robbed a couple of times back then, his car vandalized and broken into. But now the houses were being renovated and painted, lawns and gardens planted. Coffee shops and new restaurants and bars were being opened at a manic pace, drawing even more people to the neighborhood. Parking was now an issue—another issue that drove Rory nuts. “Nothing like coming home from the grocery store with a trunk full of bags and not being able to park closer than three blocks from your house,” he complained.

  The CBD (Central Business District) was also going through the same kind of renaissance. Like the Bywater, driving through there at night pre-flood had always been weird, like driving through some deserted postapocalyptic world. Every time I looked in my rearview mirror I expected to see Mad Max coming up behind me. But now there was a grocery store in what used to be the Sewell Cadillac dealership, abandoned warehouses were being turned into luxury condos, hotels and new condo buildings were being built, the streets were being torn up and repaired, and there were all kinds of new restaurants and clubs. There was actually a nightlife in the CBD now, and I couldn’t see that as a completely bad thing.

  There were, of course, people like Myrna Lovejoy, who came to New Orleans for what they called “the authentic experience,” but then wanted to complain and change things. Those were the people the locals wished would pack up their carpetbags and leave again—and eventually they would. Another city would become the hip new happening place for the authentic Bohemian lifestyle they sought, and they would flock there with their granola and porkpie hats and bicycles and tattoos and piercings.

  Unless, of course, their trust funds ran out first, and then who knew what they would do?

  That wasn’t fair—a lot of the new young people who were moving to the city were coming to work, and they loved the city just as much as the locals did.

  I rang the buzzer on the enormous front gate to what Paige jokingly referred to sometimes as Chateau Laborde. The house was gorgeous, a Greek revival–style two-story mansion with Doric columns and a balcony no one used on the second level. The fence was black wrought iron, and the gate was six feet high. The house was painted coral, giving it a Caribbean feel. In the summer the flower beds in front of the porch were festooned with color. There was an enormous side yard, a two-car garage at the end of the lengthy driveway, and a huge carriage house in the back. The yard between the driveway and the house was littered with statuary of nude Greek gods, and there was also the obligatory fountain.

  The front gate buzzed, and I went inside. The downstairs shutters were closed. I didn’t see Blaine’s SUV parked either on the street or in the driveway, so he had already left for the day. His partner Venus Casanova had been renting the carriage house since her home in New Orleans East had been completely destroyed by the flood, but I didn’t see her SUV either. Todd’s silver Mercedes was clearly visible in the driveway, though—so he was home. I rang the doorbell and shivered. The wind was picking up and getting colder. The sun was hidden by gray clouds that filled the sky. The damp in the air hinted at rain. I could see a shadowy movement through the tinted glass, and the door opened.

  “Chanse,” Todd Laborde said coldly, without smiling. He stepped aside so I could enter. “I figured you’d be stopping by this morning. Come in.”

  Todd was a good-looking man in his late fifties, maybe his early sixties. I suspected his blond hair was colored to cover the gray, and he wore it in what used to be called a Caesar—combing the bangs forward to hide his receding hairline. He was shorter than me, maybe about five-ten, since he was a little taller than Blaine. His forehead was unlined and immovable, and I suspected he’d had some fillers added to his remarkably unlined face as well. His blue eyes were sharp. He was in very good physical condition—Blaine told me Todd went to the gym five days a week without fail. His shoulders, chest, and biceps strained his electric blue silk shirt, which seemed maybe a size smaller than it should have been. He was wearing tight charcoal gray slacks and a matching tie. He moved to the doorway to the front room and glanced at his watch. “Come on in and have a seat. Would you like some coffee? I have some time before I have to be at the gallery.”

  “I don’t want to keep you,” I replied, sitting down on the overstuffed white sofa. “I’ll try to make this quick.”

  “Let me get the coffee,” he said with a slight shake of his head. He paused at the door. “Bill called me yesterday, after you’d left Belle Riviere. I knew I’d be hearing from you. And really, we can take as much
time as we need.” He smiled faintly. “I would hope my staff can handle opening the gallery without me there, otherwise I am overpaying them.” He turned and I heard his footsteps receding down the hallway.

  I shook my jacket off, folding it and laying it down on the sofa beside me. The house was absurdly warm, and I’d already started sweating. It had to be at least eighty degrees in there. It felt like I was in a hothouse. I’d never felt comfortable in Chateau Laborde. Todd was one of those gay men whose idea of the perfect home was one that looked like a museum, rather than a place to be comfortable and relax, where you could forget about all the stress and worries outside. Everything here had a place, and everything was in its place. Over the fireplace mantel was an abstract painting in citrus hues in a simple black metal frame. Placed perfectly on the mantel shelf were several small sculptures, each an equal distance from the others. There was no dust evident anywhere. The hardwood floors shone like the surface of a mirror. To give credit where it was due, at least the furniture was all modern. Todd hadn’t followed the stereotypical New Orleans design trend to use antiques in order to make the house look like you’d stepped back in time to pre–Civil War days. Blaine had told me Todd had hired an interior designer from New York to come down and do the house, but Todd had insisted on approving everything in the house and its placement.

  I’ve often wondered, standing in the homes of wealthy gay men in New Orleans and looking around at the Audubon prints and wingback chairs, where the myth that all gay men had exquisite taste had come from.

  But Todd’s taste was impeccable. The décor was beautiful, if a little too museum-like and pristine for me.