Murder in the Rue Chartres (24 page)

“I had to listen to his mother go on and on for about an hour about how worried she’s been about him—but he’s back in New Orleans. He lives down in the Marigny, and I gave him a call. He said he’d be happy to talk to you about Michael Mercereau.” She inhaled sharply. “The problem is he’s planning to head back up to Hammond later this afternoon to stay with his mother a few days.”

“I’ll head right over there. What’s the address?” She gave it to me, and I wrote it down. “But what if the locksmith comes while I’m gone? I don’t really feel comfortable leaving the apartment open.”

“Oh, I’ll send Jasper over.” Jasper was her driver. “He’ll wait there for the locksmith—and if you aren’t back before the locksmith is finished, he can just leave the new keys for the front door for you on the kitchen counter.”

“You are way too good to me, Barbara.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I?” She laughed. “And don’t ever forget it.” She hung up.

I went outside to wait for Jasper.

Eric Valmont’s house was in the last block of Dauphine Street before Frenchmen, in what was called the Marigny triangle—a name that’s never really made a lot of sense to me.

The Marigny district, on the lake side of Elysian Fields, had not gotten water; I’d been told that the flood stopped at Elysian Fields. I was pleased to see that the little Frenchmen Deli’s OPEN sign was lit up, even though everything else on Frenchmen was dark. Frenchmen Street in the time before the storm had been going through a Renaissance—turning itself into a smaller version of Bourbon Street with bars, restaurants, and music venues. There was also a tattoo parlor and a bike shop. Even with the renewal, the area still seemed a little derelict in the daylight. There weren’t any real trees on Frenchmen Street, and it a lot of pavement and telephone wires seemed to hang low over the street. Some of the buildings remained vacant. Regardless, at any time of night or day, there were always people milling about on its dirty sidewalks, and finding a place to park was next to impossible. Now, there was no one around and there was parking everywhere. There were piles of debris almost everywhere I looked, along with the occasional refrigerator with a nasty message for the federal government written in magic marker on the front.

Paige was right. Refrigerator art was the new art form of the city.

I pulled up in front of Washington Square and gawked at what was going on at the park. There were at least twenty, maybe thirty people inside the black wrought-iron fence that circled the park. There were tents set up everywhere, and in one place a huge vat of something was cooking over an open fire. I got out of my car and locked it, taking a closer look at the crowd. It looked like a makeshift soup kitchen—or the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert. I wasn’t sure what to make of the crowd inside—they all appeared to be relatively young. The average age of the people apparently camping out there seemed to be about twenty-three—and they were the kind of kids we used to refer to before the storm as the gutter punks. They were all white kids, their arms, necks, and bare legs covered with tattoos and piercings. Most of them had their hair in dreadlocks, and they all looked like they hadn’t bathed in weeks. Some were playing Frisbee with equally ratty looking dogs. Maybe they’re here to help out, I thought for a moment, in that way that kids do—not wanting to deal with an organized group like the Red Cross, just rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

But they didn’t seem to be doing anything other than hanging out.

I stood there for a moment, watching them, before heading around the corner and finding Eric Valmont’s address.

There were trees on Dauphine Street, so it didn’t look as bare as Frenchmen. The houses were closer together, the way they are in the Quarter, with narrow passages guarded by gates between them. Dauphine was one of the first streets in the Marigny to get the “extreme makeover” treatment, and even though there was still a house here and there that looked like it might be blighted or a haven for crackheads, overall the street had come back nicely. It looked deserted now, and some of the houses had those horrible painted crosses on them, but I was also pleased to see that no bodies—human or animal—had been found on the street.

Eric’s house was a single shotgun on the uptown side of the street, about four houses down from the corner. Ironically, it was one of the houses I would have picked as blighted. It was badly in need of paint, having once been painted that orange-coral shade that was fairly prevalent in the Quarter, which helped give the city a Caribbean flavor. The front porch sagged a bit to the left where a wheelchair lift had been mounted. There was a wooden gate on the right of the house with razor wire looped over the top of it. There was a beat-up blue Toyota Corolla parked in front, behind the HANDICAPPED PARKING sign mounted beside a towering oak tree. I climbed the steps, which groaned under my weight, and rang the bell. I heard footsteps inside, and then the door opened.

“Yes?”

I stood there and gaped for a few moments. The man who’d opened the door was one of the most gorgeous young men I’d ever laid eyes on. He was about five-ten, maybe one hundred and fifty pounds of lean muscle. He had short black hair with blond highlights, green eyes, and perfectly white even teeth showing in a wide smile in his tanned face. He was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt reading I stayed for Katrina and all I got was this lousy T-shirt…and a plasma TV…and a Cadillac… and a new computer… There was a tattoo of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows on his right bicep. Veins bulged out on his tan arms. He was wearing a loose-fitting pair of jeans that hung low enough on his hips to reveal not only the trail of curly black hairs disappearing down into the red waistband of his Calvin Klein underwear but the flat defined muscle of his lower abs. He looked like he was barely out of high school. His face was open and friendly.

I laughed. “That’s a great shirt. Where did you get it?”

His smile widened. “I know, huh? I got it at this little shop on Magazine Street near Aiden Gill. It might be in bad taste, but I thought it was funny.”

“It is.”

“You must be Chanse MacLeod.” He stuck out his right hand for me to shake. “I’m Devon; I work for Eric. We’ve been expecting you. Do come in. Can I get something for you to drink?” His voice was deep with a friendly lilt to it, with just a smidgen of the outer parish accent.

“Um, I’m fine.” I finally managed to get the words out somehow. “Thanks.” I stepped past him into the dim interior. He flicked a light switch and the room filled with light from a dusty chandelier hung in the center of the room, suspended from a fourteen-foot ceiling, which bore more than a few water stains. It was a large room, with a comfortable-looking worn sofa and some reclining chairs arranged around a coffee table piled high with magazines and art books. None of the furniture matched, which seemed a little odd to me. The bare floor was covered with a worn and dusty Oriental rug. A cat yawned and stretched from atop a pile of books on a dusty end table. A plasma TV hung on the wall over the mantelpiece. I couldn’t tell what color the room was painted because every inch of the walls was covered with framed artwork. Paintings, black-and-white photography, and lithographs hung everywhere the eye could see. The pocket doors opposite were pulled open. The next room was much the same—spare furnishings, but the walls were covered with art.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Devon shut the front door behind him. “I’ll see what’s keeping Eric.” He gave me that wide smile again, and I watched him walk through the next room to the back of the house. He walked lightly on the balls of his feet and on his way through the room he picked up the cat and carried it out with him.

I glanced over the books on the huge coffee table: Bruce Webber, Greg Gorman, Tom Bianchi, and a bunch of other names I didn’t recognize. The magazines ran the full range from Louisiana Cultural Vistas to New Orleans to Modern Photography, the New Yorker, and various other publications I’d never heard of. A half-empty water bottle sat on a mosaic-tiled coaster and on the other side of the table a huge mug of coffee looked like it had been sitting there for a day or two. I was more than a little surprised. It wasn’t like any home of an elder gay man with money I’d ever been in—those usually are decorated in what I call gay museum style and looked like no one ever lived in them. This place, on the other hand, looked comfortable and lived-in. I smiled to myself. Obviously, Eric Valmont was not a neat freak.

I liked him already.

I sat back and crossed my legs, and then I heard a rolling sound. I looked up and saw an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair rolling through the other room. He was completely bald, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a wide smile, and pince-nez-style glasses perched on his nose. His eyes flashed with intelligence and warmth. A knitted comforter covered his legs, but his broad shoulders and thick arms were evident beneath the red-and-black flannel shirt he was wearing. He maneuvered himself into the living room and held out his hand. “Don’t get up—I’m sitting so it would be rude for me to expect you to get up.” He laughed. “And besides, you look like a rather tall one. I don’t want to get neck strain looking up at you.”

His grip was strong, and I smiled back at him. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Valmont. Thanks for agreeing to see me—especially on such short notice.”

“The pleasure is all mine.” He smiled back at me. “I don’t get many visitors, you know. Most people seem to have forgotten my existence—though, to tell you the truth, in most cases I’m relieved.” He rolled his eyes. “Most people are such insufferable bores that it’s all I can do to stay awake, let alone engage in conversation.” He shook his head, then winked at me. “Being a crip comes in handy, you know. All I have to do to get rid of someone is just say, ‘I’m tired’ and then they are out of here like lightning.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Well, that’s a good thing. Although now if you tell me you’re tired, I won’t know if you really are or just want me to leave.”

He let out a shout of laughter. “Oh, no worries on that score. I like you already.”

“Do you need anything, Eric?” Devon asked from the other room. He was holding a dishtowel.

“I’ll call you if we do, thanks, Devon.” He turned a bit in his chair and watched Devon walk to the back of the house. “Isn’t he a find?” he turned back to me. “That one should be a model, don’t you think?” He winked. “That face and body belong on the covers of magazines, don’t you think?”

“Um, yeah, he’s gorgeous.” Which was putting it mildly.

“Don’t get any ideas, now.” He wagged a finger at me. “Alas, Devon is a straight boy and has a girlfriend.” He shook his head. “Devon is a good soul with a good heart, an absolute sweetheart of a boy, but he has the most unimaginably bad taste in women. He likes those slutty types with the ratted bleached blond hair and the long red fingernails and the silicone tits.” He rolled his eyes. “It makes me so glad to be gay when I meet those horrible women. And he has absolutely no idea how beautiful he is—which, of course, to me makes him even more beautiful. Nothing is quite so ugly as a beautiful boy who knows he’s beautiful, and uses that to manipulate people. No, Devon isn’t one of those, bless his heart.”

I smiled, not sure what to say.

“I met him through a photographer friend of mine—do you know Davis Rochelle?”

I thought for a minute but drew a blank. “The name’s familiar—”

“He teaches photography at UNO. Devon was one of his models—a student who answered an ad in the school paper because he needed money.” He gestured behind him with his head. “I bought two of Davis’s shots of Devon—if you have to avail yourself of the facilities, they’re hanging in there. They’re definitely worth the look”—he winked at me again—“but alas, Devon had to drop out of college—money problems again—he comes from an unimaginably poor family out in Chalmette, and they lost everything in the flood on top of that. It’s so awful, his family is out in Lake Charles with relatives now… Anyway, I hired him to work with me. As you can see, I have some difficulties getting around, and Devon has been a dream. He’s been wonderful since the storm, you know. He made sure I got to the north shore safely, and then he stayed with my mother and me, and was just absolutely wonderful. When UNO reopens, my mother is going to pay his tuition for him—she’s fallen as madly in love with him as most people do when they meet him. Bright and beautiful; it would be a shame for all that potential to go to waste. If only I could wean him off those horrible women… They’ll wind up being his downfall eventually.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you didn’t come here to find out about Devon. Barbara said you were looking for people who knew Michael Mercereau.” He shrugged. “There aren’t many of us left who knew him, you know. But she didn’t give me any particulars. Why do you want to know about him?”

“I was hired by Iris Verlaine to find him, before the storm,” I said. “She was getting married and wanted to find him.”

“Ah, the Verlaine snake pit.” He folded his arms. “She wanted you to find him?” He stroked his chin for a while. “Well, I wish I had better news for you—but since she’s now dead, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. He’s buried out in a pauper’s grave somewhere—wherever they put them here. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that; I have no idea where they buried him. No, I’m afraid looking for Michael was nothing more than a wild goose chase for you, son.” He sighed. “Poor Iris. It must have been awful for her to grow up without knowing her father. Even a dreadful father is better than none at all.”

“How did he die?” I asked, even though I was certain I knew the answer.