Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  He suddenly stopped and reached into his anorak and pulled out the old snapshot that Pangloss had given him of Chaz. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back and his scar began to tighten. He told himself it was the lack of sleep making him see things.

  Even though it was a perfectly rational explanation, it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “Yeah, that’s ours, awright,” said the florist, studying the length of faded yellow ribbon Palmer handed him.

  “I was wondering if you might be able to help me find out who placed the order.”

  “Look, buddy, we sell a lot of flowers...”

  “What about black roses? You sell a lot of those?”

  The florist pulled his bifocals down a fraction of an inch and squinted at Palmer. “Black roses, you say?”

  Palmer nodded. He was on the trail, he knew it. He could feel the familiar, almost electrical thrill of connections being made, invisible machinery dropping into gear. “That’s right. A dozen of them, delivered to the Rolling Lawn Cemetery.”

  The florist moved over to the shop’s computer. “Deceased’s name?”

  “Chastain.”

  The florist tapped on the keyboard. “Yeah, I remember filling that order, now. Customers usually don’t order roses for grave decorations, outside of Mother’s Day. Black roses are even rare still—especially this time of year.”

  “I take it they’re expensive.”

  “You could say that,” the florist replied drily. He pointed at an entry on the computer screen. “Says here it was a phone order. Long distance. Paid for it with a credit card.”

  “Could I see that information?”

  The florist shook his head. “I don’t know about that. Sharing customer info ain’t good for my business.”

  “I understand. Say, how much for one of those thingies over there?” Palmer pointed to a large floral display shaped like a horseshoe, with GOOD LUCK spelled along its rim in white carnations.

  “That runs around two hundred bucks, depending on where you want it delivered.”

  “I’ll take one,” Palmer said, peeling twenties from the roll in his pocket.

  “In that case, sir, the order for the black roses was placed a week ago and was paid for by Indigo Imports of New Orleans.”

  Palmer could feel it coming together. For the first time in his professional life he was on a real case, like the ones Sam Spade and the Continental Op solved; the kind that cloaked his profession in glamorous clouds of cigarette smoke, whiskey fumes and gunpowder. The years spent staking out no-tell motels with a camera in his lap seemed to melt away, reviving the romantic at his core, the one he’d thought died long ago.

  As he headed for the shop door, the florist called after him. “Where and when would you like the good luck wreath delivered, sir?”

  “Send it to the same place the black roses went. There’s no hurry.”

  Chapter Three

  When Palmer informed Pangloss of his destination, the good doctor assured him Renfield would see to his airfare and accommodations. When Palmer pointed out that flights into New Orleans during Carnival were booked solid weeks in advance, not to mention the hotels, Pangloss merely laughed and said there was nothing to worry about. He kept an apartment in the French Quarter, away from the heavily trafficked tourist areas, but still close to the action. Pangloss said he would call the housekeeper and make sure it was aired out in anticipation of his arrival.

  Palmer arrived late Sunday evening to find the city swarming with drunken, raucous merrymakers. He was surprised when Renfield answered the door at the address Pangloss had given him.

  “You’re here,” was all the pale man said in way of greeting, stepping back into the hallway to allow Palmer entrance.

  “Doc didn’t say anything about sending you to keep tabs on me.”

  If the other man noticed the barb, he ignored it. Renfield pointed to the staircase, curled inside the house like a chambered nautilus. “Your room is on the second floor. Third door to the right.”

  “I thought Doc said he only kept an apartment here?”

  Renfield shrugged. “In a way; he owns the entire building.”

  Palmer’s quarters were quite spacious, consisting of a bed-sitter, a sizable bathroom complete with a cast-iron tub, and a kitchenette furnished with a stocked refrigerator and a microwave. There was also a flat screen TV, a home theater system and a wet bar. The bedroom offered a view of the patio and what had once been the slave quarters, and the faint reek of vegetable decay rose from the garden below.

  The sitting room had a wrought iron balcony that overlooked the street, empty now except for the occasional passing mule buggy and cruising taxi. As he stood savoring his cigarette in the pleasant evening breeze, Palmer could hear Bourbon Street—its constant hubbub blurred and muted, but still distinct in the otherwise quiet neighborhood. Every now and again a drunken celebrant would shriek with laughter, the echoes losing themselves among the ancient buildings.

  Palmer experienced a slight twinge of unreality, as if he were dreaming and aware of dreaming at the same time. When he had left for New Orleans that morning, there was still frost on the ground and in certain alleys where the shadows rarely part, there were still hard crusts of snow and ice to be found. Now he was standing in his shirtsleeves, taking in the fragrant subtropical night air while listening to the sounds of Carnival.

  He contemplated going out and joining the party, but jet lag claimed him. He fell asleep splayed across the massive four-poster, wisps of mosquito netting fluttering in the breeze from the open windows.

  He dreamed that he woke up. In that dream, he lay in bed for a few seconds, trying to place where he was and what he was doing there. When he remembered, he sat up, rubbing his eyes. It was still dark outside; a pale sliver of moonlight fell through the French windows. There was a table and chair near the foot of the bed. Palmer’s dream-self was aware that someone—or something—was seated in the chair, watching him. He could see enough to tell his visitor was female and he instinctively put his hand to the scar over his heart, fearing it was Lola. Palmer wanted to stand up and walk toward the mysterious figure, but he couldn’t move.

  Who are you?

  The dream-woman did not answer but instead got to her feet. She stood in deep shadow, fingering the length of netting draped across the footboard. She moved again, and a spear of moonlight struck her face, but all Palmer could see was his own perplexed frown, reflected in miniature. The shadow-woman smiled, revealing teeth too white and sharp to belong in a human mouth.

  That’s funny; I was going to ask you the same thing.

  It was her. The one he’d traveled so far to find. Palmer had never seen her photo, much less heard her voice, but he was certain that the woman standing at the foot of his bed was Sonja Blue. Before he could say anything, her attention was drawn to the balcony.

  Here? No, not here. But close. On its way.

  She sprinted for the French windows. Palmer opened his mouth to shout a warning that they were two stories up, but nothing came out. He felt embarrassed for trying to warn a dream about breaking its legs. When the woman reached the open windows, she seemed to expand and elongate at the same time, stretching like a spaceship achieving light speed, then shot headfirst into the early morning sky.

  Palmer was suddenly aware that he was cold and sweating and shaking like a malaria victim. His scar began to burn like a hot wire pressed against his chest. That’s when Lola popped up from behind the footboard like a malignant jack-in-the-box, the .38 leveled at his heart.

  “Surrr-prizzze!”

  He was unable to control himself this time and woke screaming, his fingers clawing at the scar.

  There was no listing for Indigo Imports in either the New Orleans Yellow or White Pages. Still, if you wanted a credit card, you had to have a phone. It was a fact of life. It was probably an unlisted number, but there was always the chance she relied on a message service to relay her calls. And those were listed.


  Two hours and twelve answering services later, he called Telephones Answered, Inc. and asked to speak to the head of Indigo Imports.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but this is their answering service. Would you like to leave a message?”

  He had her. He fought to keep his voice from betraying his excitement. “Yes. Tell her William Palmer called. It’s very important that she contact me,” he said, and gave the operator his cell number.

  “Very good, sir. I’ll make sure she gets the message.”

  The call came at six that evening. He’d fallen into a light drowse, helped by a couple of shots of expensive bourbon he’d found in the wet bar, and nearly fell off the couch attempting to answer the phone before it rolled over to voicemail.

  “Hello?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice. “What do you want of me, Mr. Palmer?”

  “I’m a private investigator, Ms. Blue. I was hired by your grandfather to find you.”

  “You work for Pangloss?” There was both suspicion and curiosity in her voice.

  “Let’s say I owe him a favor. All I know is that I’m supposed to deliver a letter to you. Please, I’d like to arrange a meeting with you, if it’s at all possible.”

  “You will be alone.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Of course. You set the time and place. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  “Tuesday night at eleven. The Devil’s Playground, on the corner of Decatur and Governor Nicholls.”

  The severed connection droned in his ear like an angry hornet. Palmer’s hands were shaking, his shirt glued to his back. It was the same woman. The one from his dream. He’d recognized the voice. He blinked and massaged his brow with the flat of his palm. Christ, what was going on? Was it the acid he used to do back in his club days? If so, it had picked one hell of a time to treat him to a flashback.

  So many things had changed since he’d awakened from the coma. Sometimes it felt as if he’d spent the past thirty-eight years stumbling around in a sleepwalker’s daze and was only now fully awake. Other times it seemed he was on the verge of complete and utter mental collapse.

  Before his “accident” he had never experienced much in the way of nightmares. Not since he was a kid, anyway. He’d had some doozies back then. His parents had disapproved of his discussing the dreams. His father insisted that talking about ‘things that ain’t real and never will be’ was pointless and only lead to confusion and, in some strange logic that only he seemed to grasp, insanity. Whenever Palmer tried to talk about his dreams, his father would threaten him with what happened to his uncle, the one he was named after.

  “You keep fretting about stuff that ain’t real, you‘re gonna end up just like Uncle Willy! He was always worrying about the things he saw in his dreams. Where’d it get him, besides the State Hospital? You two are gonna end up sharing a padded room if you don’t lay off this shit!”

  He could still remember the day the men in the white suits took Uncle Willy away, screaming at the top of his lungs about the worms crawling out of his skin. Palmer’s father had been quite upset. People on TV didn’t have members of their family carted away. At least not on Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. It happened on the soaps his mom liked to watch all the time, though. He smiled wryly as he reached for the bourbon. Uncle Willy better shove over, then, because he was going to have company.

  Palmer let the crowd push him along Bourbon Street. It was slow going and intensely claustrophobic, but in spite of the overcrowding, the noise, and the reek of piss and spilled beer, he was enjoying himself.

  It was Mardi Gras, and he’d spent the day wandering the narrow streets of the French Quarter, marveling at the costumes and sampling the various local alcoholic beverages. Carnival revelers on the balconies overhead tossed beads and other trinkets at the crowd below. Occasionally a drunken tourist would bare a tit or a backside, causing a shower of hurled plastic beads and a firestorm of camera flashes. The whole thing was silly, trivial, bawdy and dumb.

  Palmer thought it was great.

  He broke free of the press of bodies at the next intersection and headed toward Jackson Square to watch the costumers promenade past the Saint Louis Basilica. He was amused by a band of masqueraders dressed as frogs heckling the extremist fundamentalists, who were protesting the merrymaking by handing out their own bogus religious tracts.

  “Are you Saved, sir?”

  Palmer looked down at the florid-faced woman in the Christ Is the Answer Crusade T-shirt. Her eyes were so magnified by her coke-bottle glasses they seemed to hover in front of her face.

  “If not you shall burn in hell on Judgment Day!” she continued. “Jesus loves you, even if you are a sinner! If you confess your sin now, and kneel with me and pray for deliverance of your soul, it may not be too late for you. . “

  Palmer shook his head, too overwhelmed by the woman’s zealotry to say anything. It wasn’t until he’d disentangled himself that he realized she’d slipped a tract into his pocket. The title dripped red ink like slime and read: Are You Ready for the End Times?

  Judging from the crude illustration beneath the question, no one was: terrified “sinners” in tattered rags ran from flying insects the size of dachshunds, while haggard derelicts tried to slake their thirst at drinking fountain gushing blood, and a busty MTV-style Whore of Babylon lolled atop a seven-headed Beast. Meanwhile, in the background, a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus beamed beatifically at the hundreds of souls zipping skyward from a tangle of wrecked and abandoned cars on the interchange. Palmer tossed the tract to the ground and hurried away in search of beer.

  He passed the next few hours drinking concoctions with so much grenadine in them the back of his throat puckered. Darkness came, and, as if upon clandestine agreement, the families with children vanished from the area, leaving only the hardcore to bid farewell to the flesh as, which seemed compelled to cram as much as possible into the few hours remaining to them before returning to their normal lives.

  As darkness arrived, a shrill, almost hysterical, sense of abandon began to tinge the masqueraders’ celebrations, as drunken horseplay quickly turned into brawls. Palmer couldn’t tell the difference between screams and laughter in the crowd, and the eyes of the revelers gleamed from behind their borrowed faces. The need Palmer glimpsed in their bleary, unfocused stares was both repellent and fascinating. It was as if he were surrounded by thousands of empty people desperately trying to fill themselves. Suddenly he found himself overwhelmed by an image of being attacked by the screaming, laughing, empty people, who devoured his soul as easily as a lion cleans the marrow from a broken bone.

  Gasping, he pushed past a group of masqueraders dressed as cockroaches and stumbled inside one of the all-hours tourist traps that lined the street, selling novelty items and T-shirts. He leaned against a postcard rack and shivered like a drunk with the DTs. There was still an hour to go before he could consider his job done. He decided to lay off the booze so he would be in the right mind to talk with the elusive Ms. Blue. Or if he meant to steer clear of the nuthouse, for that matter.

  “You awright, mister?”

  Palmer jerked his head up and stared at the man behind the cash register. The shopkeeper was the overall shape and size of a small foothill, dressed in khaki pants and I Survived Katrina T-shirt. He chewed on an unlit cigar, eyeing Palmer warily.

  “You ain’t gonna be sick, are ya? If yer gonna puke, do it outside, fer th’ love ‘a Gawd! I awready cleaned up after three people t’night! Jesus!”

  “I’m okay, thanks. It was a just a little... crowded out there.”

  “Yeah, ain’t that the truth! I’ll be glad when ever’body goes home so’s I can get some sleep. Hey, is that a friend of yours?” He pointed at the busy street on the other side of the glass.

  Palmer turned around, the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly erect, but all he saw was a well-fed tourist couple.

  “You mean them?”

  “No, it was some g
uy in a suit. You know, dressed like them queers down at the art galleries. He was smokin’ a cigarette and wavin’ at ya, like he was tryin’ t’getcher attention.”

  “It must have been a case of mistaken identity. I don’t know anybody in this town.”

  The shopkeeper grunted and returned to thumbing through his racing forum. “Whatever ya say, Cap.”

  Palmer stared out into the street. He hadn’t lied. He didn’t know anybody in New Orleans. So why did he feel as if someone had just walked over his grave?

  The Devil’s Playground was a block off the historic French Market, and the odor of discarded produce was strong on the night wind, mixing with the ever-present reek of beer and urine that seemed to hang over the Quarter during Carnival. Painted flames covered the bar’s windows and a fiberglass statue of a grinning Mephistopheles, resplendent in his skintight red jumpsuit and neat goatee, stood next to the door. The Prince of Lies held aloft a pitchfork in his right hand, his left fist firmly planted on one hip, his jaunty demeanor far more reminiscent of Robin Hood than Goethe’s demon.

  Palmer pushed his way inside, ignoring the looks from a pair of men sheathed in black leather and chrome chains lounging near the door. The place was packed, the buzz of a hundred voices lost under the crash and thunder of amplified dance music. He scanned the cramped quarters for a sign of his quarry. He made a try for the bar, brushing against a tall, heavyset woman.

  The woman turned, smiling good-naturedly if somewhat drunkenly. Her face was heavily made up, chunky costume jewelry dripping from her fingers and ears.

  “Hey there, handsome.” Her voice was husky, her breath redolent of whiskey. She reached up with one beringed hand and patted her hair. “You look lonesome. No one should be by themselves on Mardi Gras. My name’s Velveeta.”

  “Uh, okay. My name’s Palmer. And I’m here to meet someone, actually.”

  Velveeta’s smile grew wider. “Aren’t we all, sugar?” She leaned closer and Palmer glimpsed a hint of five o’clock shadow under the makeup. “Maybe I can keep you company until he shows up.”