G.T. Herren - Paige Tourneur 01 - Fashion Victim (12 page)

Tony
.

It had to be Tony Castiglione— and if it was… then maybe Amber and Isabelle…

The little slut always wore one of my masks in the pictures, so I never did see her face
.

I swallowed. Marigny had never known what her husband’s mistress looked like.

Was this why we couldn’t find any trace of Tony and Amber?

I hoped my phone was picking up all of this. I leaned forward and peeped around the corner. Straight ahead of me was a long hallway, and the voices were coming from my right. I could see them through an open door. They had their backs to me in a room that must have been Marigny’s office. The safe door was wide open, and Isabelle was leaning against the wall on the right. A very muscular man was rifling through the contents.

I glanced at my watch. Another couple of minutes….

“Amber, why you wanna be so goddamned stupid?” Tony said, his voice sounding almost dangerously seductive. “You know the old bitch got a shitload of money for what’s on that drive. A couple grand ain’t gonna be enough to keep us in style once we get the hell out of this town. We need a nest egg to set us up.”

Isabelle was Amber
.

Amber had come to work for Marigny under another name, gotten close to her. Jackson hadn’t been stealing from his mother— Isabelle/Amber had been framing him all along. What had their plan been? Just to have her get access to the house and the safe, so she could steal money?

It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the plan had been to kill Marigny all along.

Tony had married Marigny for her money— but she’d found out about his affair and kicked him to the curb.

Marigny’d tried to shake down Athalie about her affair with the Judge, wanting money to leave it out of her memoir. Athalie had said she’d laughed at her and thrown her out— but there hadn’t been anything in the manuscript about the affair.

Much as I hated the thought, I couldn’t help but wonder if Athalie
had
actually paid her off.

I realized there’d been no names in the manuscript from Marigny’s wild, misspent youth in the Quarter.

The flash drive, apparently, had all that damning information on it; maybe it even contained a copy of the original manuscript Marigny’d written.

Tony said what was on it was a gold mine for them.

Marigny had been blackmailing people, asking for money in exchange for being left out of her memoir— that was why there’d been no dirt in the manuscript she’d sent me.

I needed to get the hell out of here and let Venus know what was going on. Let the police find the damned flash drive.

I turned to start sneaking back down the steps, but the stair groaned beneath me.

I froze.

“What was that?” Tony said. My blood turned to ice.

“I didn’t hear nothing,” Amber/Isabelle replied.

My hands shaking, I pulled my phone out and pulled up the contacts. I touched Venus’s name, and started typing a text message as fast as I could:
At Marigny’s the killers are here get here as fast as you can before they find me
and hit send, whispering a prayer to every Higher Being I could think of that Venus and Blaine would get here as fast as they possibly could.

“You’re imagining things,” Amber went on, her voice dripping scorn. “It’s an old house. It makes noises all the time. Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me Marigny’s ghost is here trying to get us.” She laughed nastily. “Seriously, Tony, what’s your problem? Feeling guilty?”

There was the unmistakable sound of a slap.

Much as I needed to get out of there, I froze again, long suppressed memories forcing their way to the surface.

My ears roared. I couldn’t hear anything else going on; the edges of my vision went gray— and I knew I was about to have a panic attack.

I couldn’t catch my breath. But somehow I forced myself to turn around. I grabbed the railing as everything started to swim in front of me, my vision blurring. Colors became vibrant and sharp, almost painfully so, in the small cone of vision directly in front of me as I stumbled down the stairs, no longer caring how loud I was being, no longer caring if they heard me. I just had to get out. I heard more noise, loud sounds coming from around me. I tried desperately to stay conscious, to stay focused, my mind whirling and twirling, my heart racing. Nothing made sense but escape. I stumbled, somehow managing to make it to the front door and out into the fresh air and the sunshine, across the porch and down the front steps, and I was somehow aware that there were flashing red lights in front of the gates so far ahead of me. I managed to get to the lawn, collapsed on the grass, and started throwing up.

“Paige?” I heard a voice as I struggled to breathe. “Honey, are you okay?”

Someone grabbed one of my hands, and started talking to me. “Relax, catch your breath, you’re going to be all right.”

Slowly, everything came back into focus and I started to breathe again.

I looked up into Blaine’s concerned face, so much like Ryan’s I wanted to start crying.

“Are you okay?” he asked again, sitting down next to me. He slipped an arm around me.

“Panic… attack.” I managed to say.

He nodded. Over his shoulder I could see a muscular man and Isabelle/Amber being led out of the house in handcuffs by uniformed officers, Venus walking alongside, reading them their rights.

I closed my eyes and rested my head against Blaine’s chest.

Chapter Thirteen

The Avenue Pub, up on the corner at St. Charles from my apartment, had become a kind of haven for my friends and me in the months after Hurricane Katrina. Venus, Blaine, Chanse and I used to meet there every evening in the weeks when we weren’t sure if New Orleans was going to come back. We drank too much and commiserated, compared notes on our days, and railed against everything and everyone— the federal government, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, crooked contractors, pretty much anything we could think of and put a name to. Those were the dread days of panic attacks and medication, wondering when we were ever going to get garbage pick-up again, the days when the streets were empty, and nothing was open.

As life slowly returned to something that passed as normal, our daily meetings became less frequent, and finally we just stopped meeting there at all. Venus and Blaine’s hours made it impossible for them to be consistent, and as my job at the paper transitioned into my job at the magazine, the close bond we all felt back then loosened somewhat; the sense that we were all survivors of something horrible faded in the day-to-day minutiae of groceries and laundry and all the little tasks became less of an effort as the city rebuilt.

The Avenue Pub changed, too. Before Katrina, it was a neighborhood blue-collar bar, where colorful characters gathered to watch and bemoan the latest Saints tragedy and have strong drinks and old-fashioned New Orleans bar food. After Katrina, it was where the survivors gathered, nodding and smiling as recent returnees told their tales of evacuations and shared their shock at how the grocery stores weren’t open 24/7 and all the other inconveniences of a changed city, while those of us who’d been back for awhile shared knowing glances and faint smiles.

But that had changed yet again. Now it was a hip place for the young professionals who’d flooded into the city to take jobs left vacant by those who couldn’t return because they’d taken jobs in other cities, put their kids in school there, and knew what it meant to miss New Orleans. I didn’t mind the new crowd at the Avenue Pub, and I appreciated them for coming here and helping the city take shape again.

But as they sipped their frou-frou drinks and ate their upscale appetizers, I missed the older guys in their greasy clothes with their five o’clock shadows, bitching about the union or the bosses down on the docks or dem Saints who just never could get their act together.

I finished peeling the label off my bottle of Bud Lite and met Chanse’s eyes across the table. He gave me a faint smile, like he knew what I was thinking. He picked up his own bottle and we clinked ours together.

“Amber and Tony turned on each other pretty fast,” Venus was saying. “It’s just a matter of which one the DA’s going to want to make a deal with, although I’m betting Tony. It was Amber’s gun, and her fingerprints were all over it.”

“So Marigny used her memoir to extort money out of some people who didn’t want their old time affairs with her exposed?” I asked.

Venus and Blaine looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

“It’s a lot worse than that,” Chanse finally said. He winked at me. “This is all off the record, until the deals are signed and all the t’s are crossed, okay?” He took a deep breath as I nodded. “The time she was in France? Working for Chanel, supposedly? That wasn’t true.”

“Obviously.”

“She got pregnant,” Chanse said. “I finally got it out of Audrey this afternoon. Audrey helped her. She got pregnant by a very important man in Louisiana— Audrey wouldn’t tell me who— and Marigny got paid off to leave town and never come back. Marigny gave the child up for adoption and stayed away until her father died. She came back here and started her business, and never said a word. She made up the lie about Chanel, of course, to give her business some cachet.” He winked at me. “That child was Amber’s father.”

“Oh. My. God.” I looked at Venus and Blaine— neither of whom would look at me. “So, she tracked Marigny down and came here to just get even? Why didn’t she just tell Marigny who she was?”

Chanse shrugged. “That wasn’t a part of her plan.”

“Did Audrey know who she was?” I remembered seeing Isabelle—
Amber—
leaving her house the day after the murder.

“She says she didn’t— but we’re pretty sure she’s lying. She’s trying really hard to distance herself from all of this.” Blaine said, earning a scowl from Venus. “She wasn’t as good a friend to Marigny as she pretended.”

“So Isabelle seduced her grandmother’s husband—” I started, but Venus interrupted me.

“This is off the record, all right?” She lowered her voice.

I nodded. “Of course.”

“When we searched their love nest, we found her father’s birth certificate.” She said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Marigny was listed as the mother, and the father was Alan Vidrine.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Vidrine?”

“Audrey’s father,” Chanse winked at me. He laughed. “Audrey was helping her niece, is what we believe. Jackson says Marigny hired Isabelle based on Audrey’s recommendation— why wouldn’t she hire someone recommended by her oldest friend in the world?”

The pieces started coming together in my head. Isabelle/Amber comes to town, looking for family. “But I thought you said Amber was a stripper.”

“No, I was wrong about that,” Chanse scowled. “That rental application I found, where she claimed to be an ‘entertainer,’ wasn’t actually hers.” He didn’t like making mistakes, and I could tell he was angry at himself. “The last name on that was
Corwin.”

“An easy mistake to make.” I patted his hand. “So she went to work for her own grandmother and seduced her step-grandfather.” I shuddered. “I know there’s no relation, but ick.”

“Ick, indeed,” Venus replied. “That’s why she was so careful to make sure her face was never shown in any of those pictures. Tony ran up his credit cards buying things for her, of course. I think her plan at first was just to make her grandmother suffer. She would have exposed those pictures to Marigny if Marigny hadn’t found them on her own. She probably convinced Tony to take the pictures in the first place… but once the divorce got going and Tony turned on Marigny so completely, they became partners in crime.”

“Did you find the jump drive?” I asked.

Blaine answered. “Not yet, but there’s a safe deposit box that needs to be checked out.”

“It was the manuscript that really pushed Amber over the edge,” Chanse shrugged. “She read the whole thing.” He sighed. “All of it was there— all of Marigny’s indiscretions— except for the one with Audrey’s father. Not a word about that, or the child she gave away. That was when Amber decided to confront her.” He sighed. “We’ll probably never know what went down that night.”

“She says she just wanted to get her to admit the truth,” Blaine said. “That was all she wanted, not to kill Marigny.”

“It really doesn’t seem like a good reason to kill someone.” I replied.

“Well, sane people don’t kill people, like I always say.” Venus shrugged a bit. “And sane people don’t confront people with guns, either. I think she went there to rob the place.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. She could have robbed the place after she shot Marigny… I’m not saying she isn’t crazy, mind you, I certainly got that vibe from her— but I don’t think she went there to kill Marigny that night. She panicked and ran— that doesn’t sound premeditated to me.”

Venus and Blaine exchanged a look. “Well, it’s up to the lawyers now,” Blaine said.

“All’s well that ends well,” Chanse gave me a lopsided grin.

I finished my drink and glanced at my watch. “Well, this has been fun, guys— but I’ve got to get to work.” I held up my hand as Venus and Blaine both started to say something. “All I’m going to say is that her assistant and her ex-husband have been charged. In the follow up in the next issue, I’m going to demand an exclusive from you two, okay?”

They nodded, and I walked out of the bar.

Down the street I could see Ryan standing at my gate, his keys in his hand. I called his name, and he turned. His face lit up in a smile as I hurried down the street. He gave me a big hug, lifting me up in his strong arms and kissing the top of my head.

“Put me down.” I smiled at him.

“Have a good day?” he asked, unlocking the gate.

“I wouldn’t say that— just glad it’s over,” I replied, leading the way back to my apartment and remembering the panic attack that hearing Tony slap Amber/Isabelle had triggered. I swallowed.

I was going to have to tell him about it, someday.

Well, that and the fact I still had a husband out there somewhere. A horrible, violent monster of a man I’d escaped years ago, before he could kill me.