G.T. Herren - Paige Tourneur 01 - Fashion Victim (7 page)

To give him credit, he never brings that up.

“I’m fine,” I insisted, as the rain started to come down harder. It was getting really dark outside the car. “We were doing a cover story on her, and we have to put the magazine to bed on Wednesday. It’s not like we can come up with something good for the cover at the last minute, so we’re just going to do an ‘in memoriam’ thing. But I need your help. And you never answered my question.”
“If you must know, I spent the night at Rory’s.” Rory was Rory Delesdernier, the guy he’d been dating for just over a year. He happened to be my boss Rachel’s younger brother.

New Orleans is nothing if not incestuous.

Even stranger, he met Rory on his own, not through my connection to Rachel.

“Are you home now?” I asked.

“It sounds like you’re outside in the rain somewhere— where are you?”

“I’m sitting in my car in the Quarter and it’s pouring.” It was; cars were driving past me at a crawl with their headlights on. I was planning on waiting the storm out before heading home— New Orleans drivers are terrible under the best conditions.

“It’s just starting to sprinkle here,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to do some digging on Marigny,” I replied, wincing as an enormous truck drove past and splashed water heavily against my car window. “I know she was married five times, but I only have the name of her most recent husband— and I want you to definitely find out everything you can about
him
.” Quickly, I sketched out what Audrey had told me.

Chanse whistled when I was finished. “Sounds like he has a motive. Why didn’t you get her to tell you about the other husbands, if she was so willing to talk?”

“I asked something that pissed her off and she ordered me out of the house.” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “I asked her about Marigny working at Chanel— and that I’d heard she hadn’t. Worked there, I mean, and as soon as I did, she threw me out.”

“Sounds like you hit a nerve,” he commented. “Okay, dig up dirt on her marriages and her time at Chanel. Got it.” He exhaled. “This is going to cost you dinner.”

“Pizza from Café Roma?” Chanse, despite his slavish addiction to working out, was a sucker for unhealthy food. I’ve paid him for his assistance with greasy food for years. Usually, a shrimp po’boy would do the trick, but I was kind of in the mood for pizza.

“Yeah. I’ll call you when I’m on my way over.”

“You can bring Rory, too.”

“No, we’re spending the evening apart. He’s got a work thing.” Rory worked for the NO/AIDS Task Force, and part of his job was running a social group for young gay men between the ages of 18 and 35. Whenever the group had one of their events, Chanse bowed out despite being technically still young enough to attend.

“Okay. Talk to you later, and thanks.”

“You be careful.” He hung up the phone.

The rain was coming down harder now, and it was so dark I could barely see anything. My windshield was starting to fog up, so I started the car and checked my email— which I hadn’t done all day.

I was deleting a ridiculous amount of spam when I saw an email, time-stamped 1:15 a.m., from Marigny. There was a rather large file attached to it.

I clicked it open.

Paige:

I thought it might be helpful if I sent you a copy of my memoir. I’m really looking forward to our interview tomorrow
.

Marigny

I sighed.
Like I would have had time to read this whole thing before the interview. Really?

I touched the download button— I generally don’t like to read anything on my phone other than email, but the rain wasn’t letting up soon, and I was bored. After a few moments the document opened on my screen, and I used two fingers to make the text bigger.

I scanned the first page quickly. She opened with a prologue, an explanation of why she was writing her memoirs and what the reader could hope to gain from reading them.

Certainly not how to write compelling, grammatically correct sentences
, I thought.

After reading a particularly poorly constructed one twice, I still wasn’t completely sure I’d gotten it. Reading this was going to be torture— but what better way, really, to get to know Marigny than reading her own words and perceptions about her own life?

Assuming, of course, that the story she told was the truth.

My years as a reporter had taught me that truth wasn’t an absolute— everyone has their own truth. Two people will see the exact same conversation completely differently, based on their own emotions, experiences, and perceptions. The first time I interviewed witnesses to a crime, I was stunned by how different their accounts were— if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought they’d witnessed different events.

This also made me respect police officers who are good at their jobs more than ever. How they manage to sift out the truth is beyond me at times.

In reading the prologue to Marigny’s memoirs, it soon became obvious that what Marigny really wanted to do was tell
her
side of her own story— under the guise of “getting the truth out there”— and get even with anyone who had ever done her wrong. Her claim of wanting to “inspire other women to be successful in life and love” was just a thinly veiled justification for trashing people she didn’t like. It promised to be the kind of juicy read everyone in New Orleans would denounce publicly— while reading every word privately and whispering about at the best cocktail parties.

Unfortunately, her writing style was pedestrian. The paragraphs rambled, jumping around incoherently from topic to topic and then back to the original topic again. This was actually rather similar to the way talking to Marigny had been— her mind jumped around in a confusing way. But what you can get away with in a conversation doesn’t always translate to the written word.

I sighed and looked up from my phone.

The sun was starting to peek out from behind the dark clouds, and it looked like the rain was starting to lessen.

It’s not like you haven’t read worse things than this
, I reasoned with myself.
You never know— the key to who killed her might be in here, and as far as you know, the cops don’t have this in their hot little hands yet
.

Moral dilemma
: The manuscript could be evidence
.

Solution:
I wouldn’t know that until I read it, would I?

With a smile, I put the car in gear and headed home.

Chapter Eight

When my buzzer rang, I glanced at the clock in the upper right hand corner of my computer screen. Seven-thirty?

I yawned and stretched, my back popping, and rolled my chair back from my desk. I pushed the intercom buzzer. “Yes?”

Chanse’s unmistakable voice drawled through the speaker. “Come let me in, I brought dinner.”

I grabbed my keys off the hook just inside the front door and walked alongside the house to the front gate. My apartment was in the back of a huge old Greek revival style just off St. Charles Avenue. The gay couple that lived in the front apartment on my side fancied themselves to be amateur gardeners. Every weekend they were out there, shirtless and sweating and trimming and planting and mulching and fertilizing. It paid off; the flower beds along the stone fence separating our property from the one next door was filled with towering ferns and flowers and all kinds of fresh-smelling greenery. These, coupled with the towering crape myrtles on the other side of the stone fence made it seem like the slender cement sidewalk was a path through a jungle. I usually didn’t mind— I liked that all the towering flora shielded my windows from the house next door— but after a strong rain the plants and ferns and crape myrtles dripped steadily for hours.

I swore as water dripped onto the back of my neck and went down my spine.

Chanse was standing at the gate, a white pizza box in one hand and a manila envelope tucked between his arm and his chest. He was wearing a white tank top that stretched across his broad shoulders and showed off his muscular arms and his narrow waist. His khaki shorts hung loosely at his hips. He had lately started wearing baseball caps all the time, which I suspected had something to do with his hair starting to thin a bit in the front. Today’s cap was yellow with the LSU logo over a tiger head. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two, from the looks of the stubble on his face. His grayish-blue eyes were bloodshot, and his thick lips looked bruised. He was a handsome man, with thick eyebrows over his deep-set eyes and a strong nose jutting out from his heavy brow. He had long eyelashes any woman, including myself, would gladly sell her soul to have. He was actually in better shape now than when he’d played football for LSU— although sometimes I wondered if his slavish devotion to working out was an outward symptom of some kind of insecurity or pathology.

“You owe me twenty bucks,” he said as I unlocked the gate and swung it open.

“Put it on my tab. You look terrible,” I said. I followed him down the narrow walk, childishly delighted to see him cringe as water dripped onto his back.

“No need to make myself pretty just for you, is there?” He gave me a sardonic wink as he went up my stairs and opened my front door. Skittle immediately started rubbing against his legs and purring. The little attention whore. He set the pizza box down on the coffee table and whipped out a joint from his shorts pocket. He plopped down on my ancient rust-colored couch, scarred by years of abuse from Skittle’s claws, and lit the joint while I went into the kitchen to get some plates and a beer for him. He handed it to me when I put a bottle of Abita Amber on the table in front of him. I took a couple of hits and gave it back, grabbing a steaming slice of pizza from the box and putting it on my plate to cool. I sat down in my reclining chair and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, feeling my mind start to unwind. Relaxation slowly began seeping through my entire body.

I hadn’t realized how tired I was. “We haven’t done this in a while,” I said. We used to smoke pot and eat while brainstorming cases I was covering or ones he was working on all the time.

He shrugged. “You haven’t been a reporter in a couple of years. And you’ve cut back on the pot smoking since you started seeing Ryan.” He pinched the joint out and put it on the table next to the pizza box. He grinned at me. “So, what have you been doing since we talked on the phone?”

“I’ve been wading through Marigny’s memoirs,” I reclined in the chair, and explained how I wound up with them. “Seriously, Chanse, it’s the worst written shit I’ve read since I was in that writer’s group in college.”

That had been an unqualified disaster; our senior year at LSU I started writing a novel, and thinking it would be helpful, joined a fiction writer’s group on campus. My book, a torrid romance set during the War of 1812 in New Orleans, didn’t exactly win me any admirers in the group, which consisted almost entirely of creative writing grad students. After listening to their condescension as they tore my writing to pieces in that smug, superior way only pretentious beret-wearing grad students who don’t bathe can, I would head over to Chanse’s apartment, where we would get stoned and read their incredibly constipated short stories aloud. I only lasted four meetings before I finally blew up at the group’s facilitator, a pompous ass the girls in the group adored, hanging on his every word as he chain-smoked stinky clove cigarettes and expounded about the evils of American society and culture.

He was the kind of ass who
always
winds up teaching at some junior college in the middle of nowhere, never publishes anything, and gets fired for fucking a student.

That was the last time I tried to join a writing group.

Chanse goggled at me. “I can’t believe anything could be worse than that shit. Remember the story that girl wrote from the point of view of a cockroach?” He took another slice of pizza out of the box. “That had to be the worst thing ever put on paper.”

“True— it was pretty awful. We called her Frances Kafka, remember?” The facilitator, of course, had thought it was a brilliantly symbolic indictment of American consumerism. “But it’s pretty damned close.”

He shuddered dramatically. “I think of that story every time I step on one,” he observed, “which makes killing them even more pleasurable for me. What do you think ever happened to her?”

“She’s probably making her third husband miserable,” I replied. “But this is so bad, Chanse, it should be
taught
as an example of how not to write a memoir.”

“Better you than me,” He took another enormous bite of his pizza, wiping grease from his chin. “But I think you’ll be pretty happy with the dirt I dug up.”

I shrugged. “What did you find?” I took a bite out of my pizza as he started talking.

He placed a manila envelope on the table. “It’s all there,” he said, picking up his own pizza. “There’s nothing on the first four husbands— I don’t think there’s anything there, really. The divorces were all pretty basic and civil, and the husbands moved on, married again and had kids. They all seem pretty settled.” He shrugged. “They made a mistake, realized it, and got out fast. But the fifth divorce?” He grinned at me. “That’s where we hit the jackpot. She married him two years before Katrina, and of course that delayed the divorce some.”

“She filed before the storm, I take it.” I closed my eyes. That must have been incredibly frustrating. City Hall had taken on water, and city and court records had been a mess that had taken a long time to straighten out. I couldn’t even remember how long it had taken to get the civil courts open again. “How long did she wait afterwards to move on it?”

“Her lawyer re-filed in Baton Rouge that November,” Chanse replied. “And that’s really when things got ugly.”

“He was a lot younger than she was,” I observed, remembering Audrey’s rather catty commentary on Marigny’s fifth marriage.

“When she originally filed, it was basically an ‘irreconcilable differences’ kind of thing, and she was even willing to make a settlement on him,” Chanse popped a piece of crust in his mouth. After swallowing, he shook his head. “But when she filed again, it was for adultery, and she didn’t want to give him anything.” He gave me a wicked grin. “She also named a co-respondent, one Miss Amber Kormann, aged twenty two.” He shook his head. “Good thing gays can’t marry here, right? We’d be undermining the sanctity of marriage left and right.”