Murder in the Rue Chartres (28 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“There was a horrible fight that night. That Saturday night before.”

“Before?”

“Before everything went to hell.”

“What was the fight about?”

“It was at the dinner table. Your father and I were going out to a party. Your mother was pregnant—that’s right, she must have been carrying you, you’re the one I never met, Irene—and Uncle Percy was angry about something, and made some horrible remark about me being a tramp or something, and your father got angry and they started shouting at each other, and then Uncle Percy said something like, ‘You think I don’t know what you are Michael but I do know… Everyone knows and everyone pities your wife and your children, who will have to grow up knowing their father was a pervert, how does that make you feel?’ and Margot got upset and ran out of the room, and Michael told Uncle Percy, ‘Better a pervert than a bigoted old monster incapable of love—and don’t act so high and mighty with me, old man—why don’t you ask your precious daughter who got her pregnant THIS time?’ and he grabbed me and pulled me out of the room, and we went to that party—I think it was at Barbara Palmer’s, I don’t remember whose party it was, and we got stinking drunk and then we went down to the Quarter, and we both picked up men and went to a nasty little motel on Esplanade Avenue… We drank some more and smoked some pot and your father took his boy to a room and I took mine to one and before dawn we snuck back into the house…and he invited me to meet him for a drink that Sunday afternoon at a bar on Chartres Street—we met there every Sunday to sing along with the piano player and drink beer with the other gay men and just get stinking drunk and then we would go to a little Greek diner just up the street and eat gyros to soak up the liquor before heading home. It was always a lot of fun. By the time I woke up that Sunday afternoon your father had already left the house. No one was around, not even your mother…so I had breakfast and drank mimosas and then got dressed and called a cab to go down to the Quarter… It was such a warm, beautiful day for late June…sunny and the sky was blue, but it wasn’t really humid like it usually is…I remember thinking what a beautiful day it was. I was wearing a white sundress and I thought I looked beautiful. I had the cab driver drop me on Canal Street and decided to walk the rest of the way in… On the next block from the bar where we would go to the diner for gyros were some bars that the sailors liked to go to and I always liked to walk by there when I looked pretty… I remember that day there was this gorgeous sailor from Italy, he was so beautiful but a little shy and he wanted to buy me a drink, so I thought why not and I went in and had my dirty martini and then told him I had to go, and then I walked out into the sunshine and started down the street, and that’s when I saw…”

Silence.

“Aunt Cathy?”

No response.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Please, Aunt Cathy.”

“No, no, every time I’ve talked about it I’ve gotten into trouble. You know what they did to me when they first brought me here? They strapped electrodes to my forehead and ran shocks through my brain to try to make me forget what I saw, and all the time they kept telling me that I was imagining it all, that none of it ever happened, that I was delusional…so I decided that I’d never talk about it again. I won’t. You can’t make me.”

“But you’ve already told me so much!”

“You have to forget everything I’ve said, and you must swear to me you will never repeat anything I’ve said.”

“I already promised you I wouldn’t. Please tell me, Aunt Cathy. My father would want me to know!”

“Maybe he would at that…”

“Please!”

“I walked down the street. It was so pretty out, and I was in a good mood and I was a little buzzed, and then I saw Lenny Pousson, standing outside the door to the stairs. I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is Lenny doing there?’ He was holding a bottle, and I couldn’t figure it out, why was he there and why did he have his own liquor, the Upstairs Lounge has a full bar, and surely Lenny isn’t queer, and then he shoved a cloth into the mouth of the bottle, lit a book of matches, and set it on fire …then he threw it inside, and shut the door…and then as I stood there staring, he rang the buzzer, the one the cabbies always used to let the bartender know there was a cab waiting, and I just stood there and it happened so fast I couldn’t think what to do, I could hear people screaming, and the flames were everywhere and I started screaming and I ran down there because I knew your father was inside waiting for me…and then I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital…and I kept trying to tell them, but they just said I was hysterical and kept drugging me, and I kept on and on and then they brought me here. And I’ve been here ever since.”

“You’re telling me that Lenny Pousson set a fire that killed my father?”

“Not just your father, Irene. Not just your father… A lot of people died in there. And then I woke up in the hospital and I tried to tell them, but they told me I’d imagined the whole thing, and I tried to convince them that Lenny had started the fire, and then Percy himself came to see me, and he told me I needed to shut my mouth or I would be sorry.”

“He threatened you?”

“I wanted to talk to Margot, I wanted to talk to the police, I wanted to talk to anyone who would listen—but they kept drugging me. And then I woke up here, and they kept telling me I was crazy.”

“So, my grandfather knew.”

“Of course he knew! Lenny never had an original thought in his mind. He would have never thought to set a fire, he would have never thought to murder your father and a bunch of innocent people… Of course, it was your grandfather’s idea. Lenny always did his dirty work; he was happy to do anything for money…he was like a lapdog with your grandfather. Anything the great Percy Verlaine wanted, Lenny was only too happy to do for him.”

“Who was my father, Aunt Cathy?”

Laughter. “I don’t know. Michael suspected, but he never told me. And you promised me you wouldn’t tell anyone about the fire. You mustn’t, because then they would come after me. Lenny would come up here and take care of me—or they’ll shock me again. You know they threatened me with a lobotomy once… It’s where they stick an ice pick through your eye socket and scramble your brains so you can’t really think anymore. Every once in a while when I don’t do what they want me to, they threaten me with that again… Can you imagine how horrible it would be to have an ice pick stuck into your brain?”

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Cathy. Thank you for telling me. And I am going to try to get you out of here.”

“I will never leave here alive, Irene. They’ve told me that. I will never leave here alive…”

The recording ended.

I felt sick to my stomach, like I was going to throw up. I could hear my heart pounding.

Catherine Hollis had been an eyewitness to the setting of the Upstairs Lounge fire.

For thirty-two years, she’d been locked up in mental hospital to keep that secret.

Lenny Pousson had set the fire that had killed over twenty people, just to kill Michael Mercereau—because he had become dangerous to the Verlaine family.

Michael Mercereau wasn’t Iris’s father.

And the day after Catherine had finally told Iris her secrets, Iris had been shot and killed.

In my mind, I could hear Nurse Amanda saying again: You never know who might be listening.

I heard Valerie: I told Joshua that someone had cleaned out Iris’s files and wiped her hard drive, how am I supposed to do my job without that information? He said he’d see what he could find out…

And two days later, he was dead.

On my way back from Cortez, someone had tried to run me off the road—and while I was gone, my apartment had been broken into and searched.

If my life had been in danger before, now that I’d listened to this recording—it wasn’t worth two cents.

My hands shook as I slid a CD into my computer and burned a copy of the recording onto it. I ejected the CD and slid another in. While the second one burned, I wrote Venus on the first one and slipped it into a jewel case. The second one was for Blaine, and I made a third for Paige. Once the three CDs were ready and labeled, I put them in envelopes and addressed them. I leaned back in my chair.

I could feel something inside me, but I didn’t really know what it was. Fear? Horror? Something like that.

I pulled out my cell phone. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold it, let alone hit my first speed dial number. I held it up to my ear. Nothing. It just rang and rang…and then I got that horrible recording, We’re sorry, all circuits are busy, please hang up and try again. I tried three times more before I gave up—I was ready to throw the phone across the room.

I had to do something.

*

I walked out my front door, checked to see if anyone was around, sprinted across the park, and slid the envelopes marked Blaine and Venus into the mail slot at Blaine’s house. There were no cars around, so no one was home. The wind was blowing, the branches of the park’s oak trees waving lazily, leaves shivering. I then hurried over to Paige’s, and put one in her mail slot. I felt a little better. If anything happened to me…the truth would come out.

If anything happened to me.

My mind was spinning. I didn’t know what to do, or where to go.

Somehow I managed to find my way back to my apartment.

I sat there for a moment, and then felt the anger starting to rise inside of me.

Twenty-four people had died in that fire. Been murdered in the most horrible way imaginable—incinerated to death for no reason other than being gay and in the wrong bar at the wrong time. They’d been exterminated like vermin, burned to death.

The heat was so intense in some cases the bodies fused together.

For thirty-two years, Percy Verlaine and Lenny Pousson had gotten away with it.

Percy had had his own grandchildren murdered to cover it up.

He doesn’t deserve to live.

I got my gun out of the safe under my bed, and loaded it. I kept it clean and well oiled. I don’t like to carry it, and I certainly don’t like to use it, but I go out for target practice once a month, just to be on the safe side.

Destiny is a funny thing. I’d never really believed in it. I was raised in the Church of Christ, and the most important tenet of that incredibly intolerant sect was free will. We choose our paths, we make decisions, and we must suffer the consequences of our actions. The notion of destiny denies free will. And even though I’d shaken off the outer trappings of my religious upbringing, at the root of my being my early training was still there, controlling what I thought and what I believed and what I did. I thought Paul’s death was a punishment for killing a man—the consequences of my taking a life.

Now, as I sat there holding my gun, I believed differently.

It was my destiny to punish Percy Verlaine and Lenny Pousson for their crimes.

It was destiny that had brought Iris Verlaine to me. It was destiny that had sent me to see Catherine Hollis, to get the recorder from Valerie Stratton. It was destiny that had led me into law enforcement, so I would learn how to shoot a gun. It was destiny that had made me go into private investigation. All those years of training, all those hours spent at the shooting range perfecting my ability to handle a gun—it was all preparation for what I was about to do, what I had to do.

The anger that had been building inside me cooled. I felt calm, and at peace. Now that the decision had been made, there was no turning back. They had to pay for their crimes. Percy Verlaine would never have been brought to justice in our courts—he had too much money and too much power. He would get away with it—and he would protect Lenny Pousson as well. He had covered for Lenny for thirty-two years—at the cost of losing two of his only grandchildren.

He was old and he was sick, but he didn’t deserve to draw another breath.

I had always held life to be a sacred thing, and had never understood how one person could knowingly and willingly take another life.

Now, I completely understood.

I put on my leather jacket, put the gun in my pocket, and walked out the back door.

It started to rain almost at the exact same moment I started the car. I turned the wipers on as I backed out of my spot and switched on the lights. The sun was just setting, but the sky was covered with dark clouds. Lightning forked nearby and the thunder that followed almost immediately was loud enough to shake my car. I drove down the drive and pulled out onto Camp Street. The streetlights weren’t working, and all of the houses were dark. The darkness was almost absolute; it was like being in the country. I circled the park—still no cars over at Blaine’s, which wasn’t a good thing—and swung back down to Magazine Street and headed for the Garden District.

Confronting a killer is generally not a smart thing to do. I had done it once before in the past, armed with nothing more than a pocket tape recorder. It had never occurred to me that day as I went over there that he was a hardened killer, that he’d be willing to kill me as well. Live and learn. Once I confronted him with what I knew, he’d first tried to talk me into not going to the police, to let him get away. I couldn’t do it, and so he’d tried to kill me. He came after me with a knife, and we’d fought—and it was the first time in my life I ever feared I was going to die, faced my own mortality. In the ensuing struggle I’d wound up punching him and knocking him backward. He had crashed through a glass door, hit a railing, and gone over—breaking his neck when he landed on the cement courtyard below. I hadn’t meant for him to die—I was just trying to save myself—but he died anyway. I hadn’t been charged—the knife was still in his hands and there was a matching cut on my arm from when he’d come at me with it—and I’d had the tape recording of our conversation. It was open-and-shut, but nevertheless his death had haunted me in the ensuing months. I’d relived it in my dreams over and over again, waking up covered in sweat and sometimes screaming. Paul had always been there to hold me and comfort me, to make me feel safe and better.