Murder in the Arts District

by Greg Herren

  It was Paige, sitting by herself and scowling at her laptop.

  She didn’t notice me. I liberally sprinkled vanilla powder into my drink, stirred it vigorously, and replaced the lid. I walked over to the table where she was sitting, still scowling at her computer screen. “What are you doing here?” I asked, sliding into the chair on the opposite side from her. “What a pleasant surprise.” I winced as a dull throb of pain shot up my spine and hoped she didn’t notice. I didn’t need another lecture about the cortisone shot.

  She looked up from her computer screen with a deep sigh. “I have to write this feature story and I just can’t wrap my mind around it.”

  “Really? What’s it about?” It wasn’t like Paige to have trouble writing anything. She’d once told me that she thought writer’s block really was writer’s lazy.

  She rolled her big eyes dramatically. She was wearing colored contact lenses that turned her eyes a deep, rich blue. I hated when she did that. To me, one of her most arresting features was her mismatched eyes—one was green, the other blue. She ran a hand through her curly, blond-streaked red hair and let out a moan. “Trust me, you don’t want to know. The real problem is I can’t think of any way to make this fucking story interesting in the least.” She picked up her coffee cup, took a sip, and made a face as she spat it back into the cup. “And I’ve let my coffee get cold.”

  “I’ll get you another one,” I replied, standing up and taking her cup.

  “Thank you.” She glared at her laptop as I walked away. She moaned in relief when I returned and placed her fresh cup on the table. “Thanks.” She glowered at her computer screen before shutting the laptop. “I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble writing this. I can usually do this in my sleep. I can make anything interesting, but I…” She sipped at the steaming-hot coffee. “I couldn’t focus in the office, so I decided to try to work at home. When that didn’t work, I came here.” She rolled her eyes. “Not that this is working any better. What are you doing here? You hate coffee shops.”

  “I left my car on Washington last night. I had dinner with a client at Coquette last night, and drank wine on top of a Vicodin.”

  “Not smart.” She shook her head and ran a hand through her hair again. The enormous diamond on her ring finger caught the overhead light and flashed fire.

  “That engagement ring skirts the very fine line between tasteful and vulgar, you know,” I said with a crooked smile.

  She raised an eyebrow and held the hand up so the big stone caught the light again. Her fingernails were bitten down—something she only did when she was stressed out. Definitely not a good sign. “I’ll have you know this was Ryan’s grandmother’s ring—his grandfather had the diamond specially cut, you know.” She examined it again for a moment. “I never thought I’d like a diamond ring, but I have to admit I love this one, old-fashioned as it is. Does that mean I’ve sold my soul?” She peered at me across the table. “It weighs a fucking ton.”

  “An heirloom? Why didn’t the first wife have it?” For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of Ryan’s first wife. She and Paige got along quite famously.

  “She has a name, you know.” Paige gave me a sardonic look, pointedly not saying the name so I would have to remember it. “And she did have it. The eldest son gives it to his fiancée.” She rolled her eyes. “Family traditions. Lord, what am I getting myself into? Anyway, she gave it back to him so he could give it to me.” She blew on it and rubbed it on her purple LSU sweatshirt. “You need to watch the liquor with the painkillers, Judy Garland. That’s a surefire way to the emergency room, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky—” She narrowed her eyes and drew an index finger across her throat. “No more, Chanse. You really need to have the cortisone shot.” As I started to splutter, she held up a hand to shut me up. “I get it, I do. But everything is a risk, Chanse, and it’s certainly no more risky than mixing painkillers with liquor, is it? I don’t understand this need you have to suffer when you don’t have to. You need to get down from the cross, we need the wood.”

  “I’m not being a martyr,” I replied, feeling my cheeks flush. I knew she was right, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

  “Was the client you were having dinner with Bill Marren?” Paige blew on her coffee before taking another drink. “We missed you the other night at dinner. Rory was really disappointed you canceled.” Her tone was disapproving. Unspoken were the words if you’d just have the damned cortisone shot, you wouldn’t have these problems.

  “Yeah, well, Rory and I aren’t together anymore anyway,” I muttered. Paige had not been happy when Rory and I ended our relationship. I’d gotten a lengthy lecture from her about how I was throwing away happiness with both hands, and I needed to get over myself and recognize that I had just as much right to be happy as anyone else. It was a can of worms I didn’t want reopened, so I quickly added, “No, I was having dinner with his partner, Tom Ziebell. You interviewed them, didn’t you? For the piece on Belle Riviere?”

  “Tom Ziebell?” She nodded, pursing her lips. “Yes. The place is gorgeous, of course.”

  “What did you think of them?”

  “Bill Marren was—how should I say it?” She mused, staring off into space for a moment. “He was very public face with me.” She smiled. Public face was her term for people who act differently in front of the press rather than being themselves. When Paige interviewed people, she liked to, as she put it, “get behind the public face down to the private rage.” Her ability to do that was one of the reasons she was so good at her job, and very rarely did her interview subjects hold a grudge against her. She had a likability factor, an ability to put people at their ease that other journalists would kill to have. It was a skill that came to her naturally, and it was, she often said, something that couldn’t be taught. You either had it or you didn’t. “Very smooth. It wasn’t his first time with a reporter, I could tell. And nothing I did or said cracked that veneer one bit. Smooth operator.” She made a bit of a face. “And you know I don’t trust smooth operators.”

  “Interesting. What did you think of Tom?”

  “Tom? Very good-looking. Almost too good-looking for his own good. I mean, it was pretty obvious he’s used to getting by on his looks.” She sucked on her lower lip. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, more power to him, but you know that shit doesn’t work on me.” She grinned at me. “I even told him, ‘The twinkling eyes bit won’t work on me, pretty boy.’ Give him props, though—he had the decency to be self-aware enough to laugh.” She sighed. “Another one who is too smooth for his own good.” She shrugged. “Granted, I didn’t try too hard to crack their façades. It was just a puff piece about the renovation, after all.” She raised an eyebrow. “Why all the interest in Tom Ziebell?” A corner of her mouth twitched. “Thinking about crossing the personal / professional line?”

  I ignored that. “What do you know about the sheriff in Redemption Parish?”

  “Brad Parlange?” She snorted. “A blowhard. He has some pull in Redemption Parish, sure, but he’s a nobody outside the parish line. He likes to think he’s a player, but he’s not. I had thought about doing a story on the beating thing—have you seen the pictures of that poor woman? But Rachel nixed it.” Rachel was the publisher of Crescent City magazine, she was also Rory’s older sister. “Much as I hate to admit it, it’s not in our scope. We cover New Orleans, and I can push that to the metro area, but Redemption Parish? None of our readers gives two shits about what goes on there.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Well, pleasant as this is, I have to run. I’m going to talk to your buddy Serena. Thanks, by the way, for mentioning my case to her the other night.”

  “You’re welcome,” Paige replied, blowing me a kiss as she reopened her laptop. “Don’t be a stranger, Chanse. And get the goddamned cortisone shot? For all of our sakes? And can we have dinner sometime soon? Rory’s not the only one who misses you.”

  Chapter Eleven

>   Serena Castlemaine’s house was a beautiful old Victorian on Coliseum Street between Second and Third Streets.

  It would always be known in New Orleans as the Metoyer house, no matter how long Serena lived there. The Metoyer family had built the place originally, and then of course there was the murder twenty years or so ago in the carriage house on the property. The house wasn’t traditional, if the Garden District could be said to have a traditional style. It was three stories high, but the third story was gabled. Three gables faced Chestnut Street, each one set back a little farther than the one to its immediate right. A gallery with a three-foot-high railing ran around the entire second floor. The first gable also had a balcony tucked underneath its roof, with slender French doors leading out to it. The rooms beneath that first gable jutted out of the line of the house, three sided, like an alcove or breakfast nook. The front porch ended at the sides of the front of the house, but side porches were visible on both sides. All the black shutters were open, in stark contrast to the gray painted walls of the house. A five-foot-high black wrought iron fence ran across the front of the lot, so that people walking past on the Chestnut Street sidewalk could get a lovely view of the front of the house and the enormous yard. Several magnificent live oaks were scattered about on the property, but the one closest to the house was clearly dead, its bare branches and gray trunk looming like a tragic ghost alongside the house. The rest of the property line was delineated by a seven-foot brick fence that tilted dangerously here and there.

  Paige was right. Just looking at the beautiful old house, you’d never guess one of New Orleans’s most notorious crimes had occurred on the grounds. I vaguely remembered the case—most Americans in their late twenties or older couldn’t help having some knowledge of it. The story had been all over the news and the tabloids for at least a year. Every so often it would bubble back up, whenever someone involved would die or get married or wind up in the news again for whatever reason. Sometimes it was just the anniversary. One of the major cable news networks had done an exhaustive documentary on the case on the twentieth anniversary a few years ago that had splashed the story back into the public consciousness again.

  It was impossible not to feel sorry for the members of the immediate family. All of them had been suspects, with legal “experts” theorizing how each one of them might have done it. I’d always felt sorry for the son—he was eight or nine years older than his sister, and it had to suck to be a teenager suspected of murdering your younger sister.

  Part of the reason the story had gained such notoriety was because the mother was a former Miss Louisiana, basically some nobody from one of the more rural parishes who’d then managed to marry into New Orleans high society. If she’d left well enough alone, she might have been accepted, grudgingly, into the city’s upper crust. But having a daughter put stars back in Mrs. Metoyer’s eyes, and she became a stage mother. Young Delilah Metoyer was put through dance lessons, acting lessons, singing lessons, and the kiddie beauty pageant circuit. She was murdered just before Christmas when she was eight years old. The murder was still unsolved, and the Metoyer family had shattered under the pressure of all the public scrutiny. The parents eventually divorced, the father had fled New Orleans with his son in tow, and the former pageant queen had finally given up on trying to live down the scandal and have a life in New Orleans. She put the house on the market and left town. The house had stayed unsold for years before Serena fell in love with it and bought it, determined to make it her own.

  I parked in front of the house and got out of the car. The mist was clearing and the temperature was dropping, which meant it was going to start raining soon. The gate was open, so I walked through and up the short walk to the porch. Up close, the house was much more enormous than it looked from the street. I rang the bell and stepped back to wait, resisting the urge to look through the window next to the door.

  It was very odd that we’d never met in person, despite being one degree of separation from Serena through almost everyone I knew. Of course, I’d heard enough “Serena stories” to write her bio. There was no middle ground with Serena Castlemaine. People either loved her or they hated her. She’d come to town looking to make a splash—and she’d definitely done that. She’d joined the Krewe of Muses, the bawdy and fun ladies’ Mardi Gras parade krewe that was all about the shoes and featured walking groups like the Camel-toe High-steppers. She’d given an enormous amount of money to the Audubon Zoo, the Aquarium of the Americas, and the New Orleans Museum of Art—but then had appeared on a local franchise of an enormously successful but trashy reality show that wound up not airing after several members of the cast had been murdered.

  Old-line New Orleans society, which all too frequently these days has the position but not the cash, kept Serena at arm’s length, despite her almost overly generous philanthropy. Serena didn’t give a shit what people thought of her—which is easy to do when you’re sitting on top of an oil fortune. I’d heard a story that a doyenne of one of the city’s oldest families had been rude to her at a party and Serena had laughed in her face. Paige quoted her as saying, “I blew any chance at being accepted into high society three divorces ago, and what’s more, I don’t really have any great desire to put a stick up my ass.” As a result, while she’d been invited to join Muses, she hadn’t been asked to join the older, more aristocratic ladies’ krewe of Iris. She hadn’t been rewarded with a regular table at Antoine’s or Galatoire’s, or been invited to attend the Rex or Comus balls. Blaine’s aristocratic mother, Athalie Tujague, liked her, but believed she was still a little “too Texan” for New Orleans society’s delicate sensibilities.

  What I knew about her I found fascinating. There were the numerous ex-husbands—four in total, everything from another oil heir to a rodeo star to a Saudi prince to a television actor—and numerous affairs, most rumored, some confirmed. There was a story that she’d left Texas because of an affair with a high-powered politician in the state. Depending who you heard the story from and how they felt about Serena, it was anything from “she was run out of the state in disgrace” to “she left Texas so he and his wife could patch up their marriage and save his career.”

  I didn’t know if any of it was true, but I wanted it to be.

  A thickset older black woman in a black uniform with a white apron opened the front door. Her face wasn’t lined, but there was gray in the hair she’d pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. “Mr. MacLeod?” she asked in a low, husky, lightly accented voice. When I nodded, she bowed her head slightly and said, “Ms. Serena is expecting you. Please come in.” Once I was inside the door, she closed it and said, “May I take your jacket?”

  I took my phone out of the pocket, took it off, and handed it to her. “Thank you.” It was very warm inside the house, and I felt my sinuses reacting to the hot, dry air.

  She draped my jacket over her left arm. “If you’ll follow me?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and started to walk down the hallway.

  I followed her, taking it all in. The hallway ran the length of the house. A long red, gold, and black Oriental-style runner went from the front door to the back door. There was a hanging staircase near the back door. To my right, closed pocket doors shut off the rest of the house from this front part. Her housekeeper silently indicated, with an inclination of her head, that I was to go into a lovely sitting room all done in modern style; everything was black metal and glass and gold chrome. The room was painted a dark, vibrant green with gold fleur-de-lis stenciled in patterns on them. The furniture looked jarringly incongruous at first, given the hardwood floors and old-style chandelier and paint. I sat down on the uncomfortable-looking couch, which faced the front windows. The green and gold brocade curtains were closed over them. The couch was much more comfortable than it looked. On the glass and chrome coffee table magazines were fanned out across the center: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Street Talk, Crescent City. There was a crystal candy dish filled with hard-looking pastel mints to the lef
t of the fanned magazines. To the right was a matching crystal ashtray. The room was overly warm. The ceiling fan wasn’t turning, but there was a fire going in the fireplace. Serena clearly didn’t like to be cold.

  The longer I sat there, the more I began to appreciate the design aesthetic; the contrast of modern simplicity versus the old-fashioned ornateness of the room itself. It was a refreshing change from the wingback chairs and the Audubon prints and the antiques most New Orleans homes were infested with.

  The housekeeper entered the room and gave me another slight bow. “Miss Serena said she would be with you shortly. May I offer you some coffee or something to drink? Perhaps some cookies, or would you prefer a piece of cake? It would be no trouble, sir.”

  “I’m good for now, thank you.” I smiled at her. To be honest, servants always make me uncomfortable. I’m not around them very often, but the deference always bothers me.

  You can take the man out of the trailer park, apparently, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the man.

  “Chanse darling!” Serena swept into the room with her face wreathed in smiles. She was much taller than I expected, close to six feet tall in her perfectly white, new-looking Nike training shoes. Her thick blond hair hung in loose, almost studied disarray around her heart-shaped face. She was tanned—a real, golden-brown tan from the sun, not one of those awful brownish-orange tans that came from a bottle or a spray machine and that stained furniture. Her almond-shaped brown eyes had flecks of gold in them and tilted upward at the outside corners. There were hints of dimples in her cheeks, and her chin appeared to be sharp enough to cut glass. Her lips were maybe just a touch too thick for her face, which made me suspect there was some collagen injections involved. Her forehead was also suspiciously smooth and immobile.