Murder in the Rue Chartres (2 page)

I’d always loved the Superdome. I played in two Sugar Bowls there when I was playing college football at LSU, to the roars of crowds wearing purple and gold, holding signs saying
Geaux Tigers
and other Louisiana-flavored slogans. After graduation, I’d cheered the Saints on through years of futility, shaking my head with everyone else as they blew another game, another season, and sank into the NFL cellar yet again, heading back to the beer vender in my black-and-gold jersey to drown my sorrows. I’d been to concerts there—U2, one of Cher’s numerous farewell tours, and countless others. The odd oval shape just before the taller buildings of the Central Business District always brought a sense of joy to me, as another sign I was getting closer to home all those other times I’d driven back into the city. But now it meant something different, more than just another landmark of my homecoming. It was now a symbol of almost unimaginable misery and suffering, witnessed by the entire world—just as New Orleans itself meant tragedy, disaster and death instead of let the good times roll, good food, lots of drink, and Mardi Gras. As I sped closer, I could see that half the roof had been torn off by the wind.

Now, it resembled a half-peeled hard-boiled egg.

I took my eyes off it, instinctively readying myself for the interchange of I-90 West, I-10, and I-90 East, which all converged just before the St. Charles Avenue exit, with cars coming on and others trying to exit in the engineering nightmare of three or four on-ramps too close together for rational, safe merging. But there were no cars, even here. I didn’t even have to touch my brakes once as I flew through and headed down the off-ramp. I stomped down a little too hard on the brakes once I realized the traffic light at the bottom was dark and a stop sign had been erected. It didn’t matter. There was no traffic other than a station wagon crossing the intersection a block ahead. I glanced to my left and saw filthy cars, coated in mud, abandoned in the Mass Transit parking area under the elevated highway. There were hundreds of them, it seemed. I swallowed and drove ahead to St. Charles.

*

St. Charles during daylight weekday hours was always a hive of activity. The streets were crowded, the streetcars would be running, people would be walking along the sidewalks. There would be people in front of the Popeye’s, cars in the drive-through at Wendy’s, a full parking lot at Office Depot. The St. Charles Tavern was always full of people, as was the Voodoo BBQ on the opposite corner. Instead, all I could see were massive tree branches along the neutral ground and sidewalks. Some of the trees were denuded of branches and stood naked in the bright sunlight. Dirt, debris, and garbage were everywhere. Storefronts were boarded up. There were messages spray-painted on the plywood.

LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT, DON’T EVEN TRY IT.

WE ARE ARMED AND WILL SHOOT ANYONE TRYING TO BREAK IN.

But then one on a carpet shop made me smile.

8/30 I AM HERE WITH A GUN, A MEAN DOG, AND AN UGLY WOMAN.

9/2 STILL HERE, WOMAN LEFT YESTERDAY, MAKING DOG GUMBO.

I turned down Euterpe, right past the darkened Burger King, and headed for Coliseum Square. There was no sign of life anywhere. The houses were empty, no cars in the driveways or parked in front. There were piles of roof tiles and garbage everywhere I looked. One of the huge oaks in the empty park was down, its massive gnarled roots stabbing at the sky. I turned onto Camp Street and pulled up in front of my house.

Paige had been right. There was debris all around the house, and some of it was roof tile. But the front windows appeared to be intact. The iron fence was leaning closer to the ground than it had been, and one of the huge branches that shaded the walk to the porch had been torn off, but there was no sign of it anywhere. It must have been carried off by the high winds. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette, and just stared at my house.

It had only been six weeks since I left. Six weeks that seemed like a lifetime.

The one litany that had gone through my mind the entire time I was away was
I want to go home
! I’d been to several places in my wanderings since August 28, but everywhere I went, the places seemed different to me somehow, unreal in a strange way that made no sense. Maybe it was me that was different, I don’t know. Those weeks had passed in a strange fog, days drifting into each other, one day after another in a monotonous surreal pastiche. I’d lost track of dates, even what day of the week it was. I was numb, and when I could feel something, it was sorrow and depression. I couldn’t watch television after a certain point. I tried to read, focus on my work, but my mind just couldn’t stay focused. I found myself searching message boards online, boiling with rage when reading ignorant posts by heartless bastards who claimed we got what we deserved for being so stupid as to live below sea level, or those who claimed it was God’s punishment on New Orleans for her sins. The ignorance and cruelty of my fellow human beings had rarely surprised me before the disaster, but coming face to face with it in this instance, when we were all hurting beyond anything we could have imagined, consumed me with anger. But the rage felt good, because I’d begun to wonder if I’d ever be able to feel anything besides sorrow again—sorrow and guilt. I felt tremendous guilt for abandoning New Orleans, my city and home, to die by herself. Of course, there was nothing I could have done, but that didn’t make the feeling any less real. I somehow felt like I’d betrayed the city I loved by not staying to die with her.

I’d taken enormous pride in the fact that I’d never evacuated before. I stayed for both Jorges and Ivan since I’d moved to New Orleans. In both cases, the storms had turned to the east at the last moment, unleashing their fury elsewhere on the Gulf Coast. I’d never lost power, phone, or cable for either one of them. It hadn’t even rained at my house during Jorges. I figured this one would do the same at first as the television started preaching death and destruction and the need to leave. While most people were stuck on the westbound lanes of I-10 on Saturday, I’d been calmly watching the doomsday forecasts on the Weather Channel. I went to the grocery store and stocked up on supplies—bottled water, canned goods, batteries, and candles, fighting my way through the panicked mobs in the store. But when I’d woken up that Sunday morning, turned on the television, and saw the size of the monster in the Gulf, in horror I realized that even if it turned east at the last minute, New Orleans was going to get hit, and hit hard. The size of the storm surge in the Gulf would surely overtop the levees along the river and the lake, and all those computer-generated models they’d been showing every year during hurricane season could possibly come true. Even as I sat staring at the Doppler images, Paige called and told me to get the fuck out of town as fast as I could. The terror in her voice was enough to erase any doubt that I had left.

“We’re going up to Baton Rouge,” she said, her voice shaking with fear, “but man, you’ve got to go this time. And pray for the city.” She hung up without giving me a chance to answer.

I packed in a daze, not knowing what to take or where I was going. Like the rest, I figured I’d go west and just get a room somewhere, maybe as far away as Houston. I don’t really remember much of that morning; it passed in a haze as I rushed around the apartment looking for things like my birth certificate, my passport, the title to my car, and other things that would be hard to replace. I was in shock, and every once in a while I would break down crying. This was it, the Big One they’d been warning about for years, and it was possible I might not ever be able to come home. But I put those thoughts out of my head; New Orleans somehow always survived…and there was still a chance it might turn and spare the city its fury.

I wound up going to Dallas. I was throwing clothes into a suitcase when my phone rang.

“Chanse, this is Jude. I think you should come here.”

I stopped, my hands full of black Calvin Klein underwear. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Jude swallowed. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. Really.” He paused for a minute, waiting for me to answer. When I didn’t respond, he said in a rush, “There’s no sense in wasting money on a hotel room. Just come here.”

“It makes sense,” I said, putting the underwear into the suitcase, relieved to finally have some kind of plan. “Thanks, I appreciate it. It’ll only be for a few days anyway.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” He sounded more relaxed, relieved. “You’d better get moving, okay? Call me from the road and let me know how you’re doing, okay?”

It had probably cost him a lot to put himself out there. We’d reached a strange place in our relationship. Then again, our relationship had never exactly been normal to begin with. He’d been a friend and former sex partner of my boyfriend, Paul. We’d really come together after Paul had died a year ago. A few weeks after the funeral, he’d come to New Orleans for Halloween weekend, and we’d had dinner together at the Napoleon House. I hadn’t wanted to go meet him, but finally figured it was better than just sitting around the house drinking vodka all night yet again. He was kind and sweet, and he could somehow, despite everything, make me laugh—and I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to laugh. We’d started talking on the telephone a couple of times a week. Paige warned me that it was a rebound thing, over and over again, like a broken record. “You’re not ready for this, and you’re going to wind up hurting him,” she warned.

But I didn’t care. Whenever I talked to Jude, I forgot. I was able to leave the misery and the loneliness and the pain behind and go to a different place. Not completely happy— there was always a sense of melancholy—but it was better than where I was. And it was infinitely better than the other ways I’d found, ways that involved way too much liquor and strangers with hard-muscled bodies with names I didn’t want to learn or remember.

It had been almost a year now, and the last time Jude had come to New Orleans, he’d made it quite clear we needed to talk about things. We’d been coasting along quite well, but I knew at some point the ride was going to end unless we made a commitment of some sort. I tried to avoid the subject at all costs. I didn’t want to talk about things. I knew I was being selfish and unfair to him, but I just didn’t want things to develop any further just yet. I liked the distance between our two cities, and the lack of real seriousness the geography created. And while Jude was helping me to forget and move on, I didn’t know that it was right that I should. The only way we could move forward would be for me to put Paul aside once and for all. And somehow, that didn’t seem right to me.

And besides, I’d been a really shitty boyfriend to Paul.

Jude finally gave up, resigning himself to defeat, but there was a brittle quality to the weekend after that. And after I’d dropped him off at the airport—where we gave each other a listless, perfunctory kiss, I cursed myself for a fool. As he got out of the car, I fought down the urge to get out and go after him. Instead, I watched him walk into the airport and then drove off myself.

*

It seemed like a million years ago now. I put my cigarette out, took a deep breath, and walked through the gate into the front yard.

The house was a graceful old Victorian, painted fuchsia. It had been split into apartments; two side by side in the front, a large one that took up the back of the first floor, and two large ones upstairs. Mine was the one to the left. It ran alongside the driveway into the small parking lot in the back. I unlocked my door and stepped into the house.

It was cool inside. I always kept my apartment at about the temperature of a meat locker, and Paige had apparently turned it down to the level she knew I liked. The light in the kitchen was on. I looked up at the eighteen-foot high ceilings. No sign of mold up there or on the walls—she’d said there hadn’t been, but I wanted to be sure for myself. I walked into the center room, which had been split into a hallway, bathroom, and small kitchen. There were dishes in the sink I’d left; there was mold on them. There were spores of mold in the coffee pot, which I’d left half-full. But the walls and ceiling seemed okay in there as well, so I looked into the bathroom. The towel I’d hung to dry the morning I’d left for Texas was stiff but okay. I flushed the toilet to make sure it worked, and turned on the spigot in the sink. Everything was okay. I walked back to my bedroom.

It was strange. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but the apartment was exactly the way I’d left it. It was almost like I’d just left to go to the grocery store or run errands, not been gone for six weeks. The bed was unmade and my laundry basket was overflowing. That’s right, I was going to go do the laundry on Monday, I remembered, smiling at the memory.

That was before. Everything had changed in such a short period of time. Friday morning had been such a lovely day— hot and sunny and humid—typical of late August. I’d gotten up that morning, still a little distressed about not having heard from Jude since he’d gotten home. And a new client had called and fired me that morning.

Oh, yeah, that’s right, I thought, and walked back into the living room to my desk. Sure enough, in the top left-hand drawer were a deposit slip and her retainer check for $2,500. She’d hired me on Wednesday, and I hadn’t had the chance to get to the bank before she let me go.

I picked up the file I’d started for her, labeled VERLAINE, IRIS. I opened the file and took a look at the notes I’d written. Her business card was neatly paper-clipped to the inside. It was a thick, creamy-colored card, with her name in raised neat script on heavy vellum, and underneath in bold letters, Vice President of Public Relations. In the upper-right•hand corner was a multicolored logo featuring the prow of a freighter cutting through a breaking wave. In understated, slightly smaller letters underneath her title were the words VERLAINE SHIPPING COMPANY. On the bottom right, in the same understated font, were her office address, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address: [email protected].