“Sorry I’m late. I’ve got a lot going on since those murders at CluckIt,” he said and picked up the menu the waiter had left, scanning it. Our server came over and took our drink order. Dante indicated he was ready to order. I said I wasn’t and needed a few more minutes.
“You didn’t bring Meaux?” Dante was already waving for the waiter to return to take our order as soon as I set the menu down.
“I dropped both dogs off at my home after we all went to the dog park. They were tired,” I said, but Dante had quit listening when the waiter walked up because he was looking at him and pointing to a meatball po’boy on the menu.
“I’ll have a turkey po’boy, dressed. No mayo, only mustard, please,” I told him.
The waiter looked at me puzzled and said, “I’m new here and this is my first day at this job. I don’t know what ‘dressed’ means.”
“It means I want lettuce and tomatoes on my sandwich. And you know, a po’boy is on French bread, right?”
He nodded and scribbled it all down before he left.
“I found a flier left on my front door welcoming us to the neighborhood along with an offer for a free drink at the Irish bar a few blocks away.” I watched Dante fire off a couple of texts on his cell phone.
“That’s a rough bar. Don’t go there by yourself,” he said without looking up.
“You’re right. It is a rough bar and I didn’t go there alone. I went to see if they had any good takeout food,” I said.
He finished a text, making no comment on the bar update but said, “I can only stay for a quick bite. I told you this was my dinner break.”
The waiter came and put down a Barq’s root beer for Dante and a glass of wine for me. We toasted, clinking our glasses. We always did that when our drinks arrived, toasting what I never really knew.
“So, what are we toasting?” I decided to ask. “Are we setting a date for our future to start, as in our wedding?”
Dante turned ashen. He looked at me as if he was trapped in the middle of a road and I was an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on him.
Before either of us spoke, his police radio interrupted the tension between us with that confounded static calling Dante’s badge number to respond. He stepped away from the table to the street, switched to his ear piece and, holding the radio close to his lips, spoke a few exchanges I didn’t hear.
He returned to the table and said a woman had been found drowned but chained to something along the riverfront near Jackson Square. He looked relieved having another homicide to solve instead of answering my question about our future.
He kissed me goodbye on the cheek, and while pulling out a few bills to leave the waiter he said, “I’ll try to call later, but this is a serial killer. I now have three homicides on my plate.”
Translation: I’ll see you when I see you. Dating a cop, a homicide cop, meant that I would always be the wife while the job was the other woman. Another super-hot woman who left him drained when he finally had time for me.
I sat alone to finish my glass of wine and deal with the waiter to cancel our meals. My thoughts drifted to Dante and his unchivalrous attitude toward my sister and his brother getting married. I wondered if he had always been like this, and I didn’t notice, or was the job causing him to have a jaded outlook toward everyone? I didn’t even fight the urge to compare how different two evenings turned out with the two different men in my life.
After I left Freret Street, I drove up Broadway to Carrollton Avenue leading me to Canal Street, which stretched from end-to-end of our city. It was the widest street in New Orleans and ran from the French Quarter that sits alongside the Mississippi River, to Lake Pontchartrain.
While there were many stop lights along Canal, there never seemed to be very much traffic or traffic jams. I could hear the clanging of the streetcar as it made its way along the neutral ground, alerting vehicles about to cross Canal to pay attention. Other places call the neutral ground a median.
In New Orleans, the neutral ground in the early 1800’s divided the French-speaking Creoles who lived in the French Quarter—downtown—from the English-speaking Anglos—uptown. Both groups were always at odds with each other and fighting, but agreed to get along when they met on the Canal Street neutral ground.
As my mind wandered to the CluckIt murders and the crime in the city now, I thought maybe we should bring back the original concept of the neutral ground. Canal Street would be perfect place to re-implement the idea since it was also the widest street in America—wide enough for different opinions.
Maybe Dante and I needed to find our neutral ground, or was I like Jimmie? She ignored how Charles really felt about her. She hung around waiting for him to throw her a bread crumb, and when he did, to her it probably felt like a whole loaf. Was I ignoring what Dante felt for me, waiting for him to toss me crumbs? Unlike Jimmie, I had Jiff, someone who wanted me to feel for him like he felt for me.
Chapter Fourteen
The pounding on my front door woke me at four-fifteen a.m. I was tying my robe around me while looking through the peephole to see if Suzanne had locked herself out. It was Dante’s face looming in the fish eye lens. When I opened the door, he walked in past me and began emptying his pockets on my dining room table.
“I need to get back to work in about two hours, so I thought I would crash here. Sorry I had to cut dinner short last night.” He pulled his jacket off one arm while loosening his tie with the other. With his free arm, he started to remove his cop paraphernalia, badge, gun, handcuffs and radio, putting it all on the table.
“Dinner, which never happened, was Saturday—two nights ago. It’s now Monday morning. Is there something you need to talk about? Something that can’t wait?” I asked.
“No, not really,” he said pulling stuff out of his pockets.
“Did you talk to Suzanne about coming here…now?” I stood holding the door open, finger combing my hair. “I’m a little groggy, but I don’t recall any discussion with you about tonight, or any night.”
He stopped dead in his tracks, his suit jacket hanging off one arm.
“I just thought…”
“You think, and then you decide what you want to do.” I walked to the dining room table, picked up what he had already set down and handed it back to him. “It’s four o’clock in the morning, and you just barge in here with no consideration for me, or Suzanne, who might be sleeping. Your coming here without discussing it with me first is unacceptable.” I had no idea what made me say all this now, and from the look on his face, neither did Dante. “If you only have two hours to get some sleep I suggest you hurry home to get it.”
“Can’t I…can’t we just….”
I ushered him back to the door he just came through. He stood on the porch trying to hold all his stuff with his jacket still hanging off one arm.
“No. You showing up whenever you feel like it or doing whatever you want without consulting me isn’t working. I’m not angry; I just don’t want to discuss it now, at four o’clock in the morning. Goodnight.” I closed and locked the door. When I started back to my room, Suzanne startled me standing like a statue in the kitchen holding a glass of water.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said.
“I know.”
“You know, he might still be standing there in the morning when you open that door,” she said.
“I don’t know where that came from.”
“Maybe you’re now realizing it’s Dante’s world, and you’re just in it.” She walked back to her bedroom and left me standing in the double parlor wide awake.
When I went back to bed, I lay awake for another hour before I decided to get up. I clicked on the morning news as I dressed for work, and a reporter was announcing another murder. A woman’s body had been found in the French Quarter floating in the Mississippi River.
The newsman looked over his shoulder at the raging muddy waters behind him and said, “She was found tied to the shore. The police would not release her name since
the family had not been notified, but described the woman dressed as a gypsy who had been known to work around Jackson Square.”
Now I began to worry that the body found in the French Quarter might be Sandra since I hadn’t seen her—correction—pulled her out of the hedge, since Saturday morning. The next thing the reporter said grabbed my attention back to the newscast.
“This morning’s homicide is similar to the body that was found almost a week ago near the seafood restaurants floating in Lake Pontchartrain. That body was tied to a boat slip in the marina. Both victims were found tied to the shore. There’s been no identification made on today’s victim.”
When I looked out the front window and saw the cat bowls were all over the place, it was hard to tell when Sandra fed them last. I wrote Suzanne two notes. I left one on the Mr. Coffee asking her to call or text me when she woke up, and to let me know if she saw or rode home with Sandra last night. The other note I taped to the front door when I left for work asking her to call me when she got in.
As I drove to my office, I thought about the body found in the Mississippi River along the French Quarter and the mention of the body found floating in Lake Pontchartrain. Top on my worry list was Sandra’s whereabouts. I went over and over in my head what she had told me about the rival palm reader and the fact that she used to stop at that CluckIt on her way home before her car became storage for cat food.
It was a few minutes before nine o’clock a.m. when I got off the elevator and headed to my office. My cell phone rang. Since No Caller ID flashed across the screen, I knew it was Dante calling from his work phone.
“Who was the murdered victim in the French Quarter you got the call on late Saturday?” I asked without saying hello.
“I don’t have an ID yet. Look, I think we need—”
“Did she have any tattoos?”
“Yeah, she did. I want to talk to you about…”
“What are the tats and where were they?”
“Why?”
“Just tell me, were they on her hands?
“As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “she had ink on both hands.”
“Where on her hands? What were the tattoos of? Skulls, hearts, what?” My knees were weak, and I reached for my desk chair and sat, still holding my purse and briefcase.
“Tats on the backs of her hands. One had a half moon, and the other one had a sun, I think. What’s this about?”
“Are you sure? Are you sure they weren’t eyeballs?”
“Eyeballs? Oh, right, your crackpot neighbor has eyeballs tattooed on her hands. No, it wasn’t her,” he said. “Look, that’s not what I called.”
“Gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, relieved the dead palm reader wasn’t Sandra. I called and left a message on Suzanne’s cell hoping she would get it before she heard the news, and thought it might be Sandra.
Now I felt an urgent need to get a visual on Sandra. Under the pretense of having a customer appointment, which I did have later in the day, I left my office to do a quick drive-by to check if Sandra made it home. I hoped I’d find Sandra sleeping off a binge from last night inside her apartment, and not hanging in the hedges like a Christmas tree ornament.
I pounded until she finally answered the door. Before I could ask her anything, Sandra held up a finger to her lips for me to be quiet and I noticed she was wearing a headset and was holding a cell phone in her hand. That was all she had on, a black headset—she was naked. She waved me in, pointed for me to sit at the dining room table and she sat in the other chair. I just stood there listening to her.
“Oh, yeah, Daddy, I can do that. And you, big man, you could do that to me all night long. What else do you want me to do to you?”
She hit a mute button on the handset she was holding. She was still listening to the caller.
“I can come back later,” I said, mostly mouthing the words and making a circular motion with my finger in the air.
“No, no. Have a seat. It’s on mute. I can hear them. They can’t hear us. Coffee?” she asked, and then held up her index finger, took the call off mute, and replied in a sultry voice with a non-interested look on her face, “Oh, yeah Daddy, you know that would hurt oh so good.”
Stunned, I nodded yes to the coffee question. Sandra went to the kitchen to start a fresh pot while she oohed and ahed and said “yeah, baby” to whoever was on the other end of the call.
Sandra returned to where I was sitting still wearing the headset and said, “It’s back on mute.”
“There was a body found this morning in the French Quarter. I wanted to ask you when was the last time you saw that other palm reader you told me about? You know, the one you directed your negative energy at?”
“I don’t think she really needs the money because she doesn’t work a lot. I haven’t seen her lately. The last time I saw her? Hmmm…”
Sandra pondered this a few moments before she said, “The last time might be a week ago, or maybe even longer than that. I only saw her working on weekends when most of the tourists were in the French Quarter. Why?” She held up one hand and tapped the headset again indicating she was going live to the caller.
I wanted to know more about the phone sex work she did, out of curiosity, and since she was walking around nude talking to me and “Big Daddy,” I got distracted about what I came over to ask her in the first place. In between Sandra muting her phone so the caller didn’t hear us, I mentioned Suzanne said they shared a cab and rode home together, hoping Sandra would tell me what they discussed. When she didn’t, I pressed on.
“Suzanne said she found it interesting you work as a dating consultant by phone.” I was going to burn in hell for even thinking about phone sex.
“She called me a dating consultant? No, this is dial-in phone sex. That’s what I’m doing now,” she said and pointed to the headset. “It’s on mute. Some guy’s going off on what he wants me to do to him.”
“What kind of training do you get for that?” I realized the straightforward approach would get more info out of Sandra. She was a tumble-in-the-bush, not a beat-around-the-bush sort of girl.
“Training? No training. They expect you to tap into your pool of real life experiences, which only works if you have a cesspool of real life experiences. It seems I do since I bounced around a lot growing up.” In between unmuting the headset and giving the caller on the other end a groan or a couple of heavy breaths with an ‘oh baby’ thrown in, she described how she logged in and got calls. It was pretty much the same information Suzanne had already told me.
“Do you always work in the nude?” I asked.
“This caller is in the mood for nude so it helps me relate to him,” she said tapping the headset. She held up a finger to let me know she was going live on her call. She used a low throating voice, like warm butter was melting on a biscuit in her hand and said, “Daddy, it’s only you I let talk to me in the nude. No one else gets to do that. Let me tell you what I took off just to talk to you, or do you want to guess?”
She snapped the mute off and turned her attention back to me adding, “No. I wear something to put me in the right frame of mind to talk a better story to callers. I wear garter belts with stockings, crotch-less underwear, spiked collars, leather bras with no cups, whatever they ask me for. I have a whip around here somewhere.”
She got up, looking for it under the pillows on the sofa and behind it. “I’ll have to find it. I crack it once in a while when I get one into S and M. He gets off thinking I’m using it on myself.”
“That’s OK. I really don’t need to see it…” I said.
Sandra held up a finger again, hit the mute off and rubbed the speaker in her ear while she told the caller in a breathless voice, like she had run a marathon, “You can call and say you want to do that to me anytime. Bye Daddy.” She yanked the headset off and slung it on her coffee table. “I learned all you have to say is ‘do that to me’ or ‘I can do that to you,’ and anything else you throw in is lagniappe, or like a verbal
strip tease and they’ll tip you for more.”
“Its good you can work from home,” I said not knowing what to do with that info. It wasn’t like I could use it in my work, unless a big phone company added a call center with sex lines and wanted me to investigate their workers giving away, or not charging for dirty talk.
“Yeah, the pay is good but that’s about it,” she added.
“Do you date anyone?” I asked, not sure how, or if I wanted to keep the phone sex info rolling my way.
“I never agree to meet anyone I talk to from this, and I never tell any men I meet or get interested in anything about this job. They would want a dirty talk freebie. I have a, uh…friend, I meet sometimes after I leave my palm reading gig. He gives me free drinks and sends me home in a cab if I have too much. If he gets off work and I’m at the bar, sometimes we hang out. I don’t want to date anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Well, before I started working as a sex operator I used to think about sex and wanted it all the time. Now, since I listen to how strange men are, I’m never in the mood anymore. This job completely turned me off to sex,” she said, pouring us each a cup of coffee when the timer buzzed.
Just hearing Sandra’s side of the conversation could turn me off sex too. I pressed her for more information. “How do you decide what to say to callers after you get the electronic announcement saying what they are interested in?” I asked. “You must need to be a quick thinker.”
“I think of someone I know and what they look like as soon as I get the mechanical announcement. If they ask for a stripper or exotic dancer, or transgender, then I think of someone I know, or have seen working in the French Quarter or on Bourbon Street. If they want a bored housewife, hot waitress or high school cheerleader, then I try to remember someone, and describe myself as that person. I never tell anyone what I look like. I always describe myself as someone else.”
Sandra explained she figured out how to get the callers to talk dirty to her, so she didn’t have to work, I mean talk, so much. All she had to do was listen and say, “Oh yeah, Daddy, I’d like to do that, or I’d like you to do that to me.” Sandra added “These men are very particular about what they want to have done to them or what they wish to do to me, and they don’t mind telling me every sick detail.”
Drive Thru Murder Page 12
