Murder in the Rue Chartres (31 page)

It wouldn’t be easy, but life in New Orleans had never been easy.

Our little get-together broke up, and we walked Paige back home. We said our goodbyes, shed a few tears, and then Blaine and Venus drove me back home.

*

I walked into my apartment and turned on the lights. I sat down on the sofa and picked up my pipe. As I took a hit, I looked up at the print of Paul on the wall.

We hadn’t had a lot of time together, but we were really happy during that time. I’d been happier than I’d ever thought I would be, happier than I’d ever imagined in my wildest dreams. Maybe I didn’t realize or appreciate it at the time, but it was true. And I appreciated it now. I’d been too hung up on my own issues while he was alive to truly recognize what I’d had, and that had been a waste.

There are no guarantees in life. You don’t get a warranty when you are born. Things happen. Hurricanes come in, levees fail, people die. You never know when your own number is going to come up. There might be an afterlife; reincarnation might be true—no one really knows. But the one thing certain is you get one shot at your life, and it is what you make it. You can spend the rest of your life bitter over not having the kind of parents or background you think you should have had. You can bitch about growing up in a trailer with a drunken mother and an abusive father. You can close yourself off from other people because your partner was murdered. You can allow that to twist your perspective, make you think you don’t deserve good things from life. You can stop trying to be happy because it seems like life is always right there, ready to kick you in the teeth and knock you down.

We like to think we have control. We build our lives and we pretend we have security. But security is a myth. It doesn’t really exist. It’s an illusion we create to protect ourselves from the realization that so many things are random, out of our control. So we soldier on, pretending that it can’t all be taken away from us at any moment, but the major drawback of that mental insulation is it makes us less appreciative of what we have. We don’t live in the moment; we don’t take time every day to enjoy life and savor the great gift of being alive.

I stood up and walked over to the wall. I reached up and took the print down.

It was time to let go and start living again.

It didn’t mean I loved him less. It didn’t mean I’d stopped missing him and wishing he was still here with me. But it was time to stop hurting. It was time to appreciate what we’d had and move on.

Fee was right. Paul wouldn’t have wanted me to mourn him for the rest of my life. That wasn’t who he was. He would want me to be happy.

Maybe things with Jude would have worked out—but I didn’t see how they could have. I would never move to Dallas; I couldn’t expect him to give up his job and move to New Orleans. My only regret was that I’d hurt him, but I was hopeful we were getting past that now and could be friends.

Maybe something would develop with Allen. Maybe not, but if I didn’t give it a try I’d never know. Yet if I spent the rest of my life inside my own walls, afraid to live and take risks, I’d only be a shell of a person.

That wasn’t living.

New Orleans would endure. She had survived plague, pestilence, war, fire, flood, death, and destruction in her almost three hundred years of existence. She always came back defiantly, ready for more. She never became bitter; she didn’t live in the past. She lived in the moment and tried to make us all understand how important that was.

So many of us failed to listen and to learn from her example.

Laissez le bon temps rouler.

At a party in the spring of 2006, my friend Anthony Bidulka (an enormously gifted writer in his own right) asked me if I thought living through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath had made me a better writer.

The question caught me off guard. We were standing on the front gallery of a gorgeous mansion on St. Charles Avenue outside the party. I’d stepped out to have a cigarette (a nasty habit I am very pleased to say I have since broken), and he’d joined me. Our conversation hadn’t been particularly heavy up to that point—just the usual kind of small talk people exchange at a party. It was a valid question, but no one had asked me that before. I had to stop and think for a moment before I gave my answer, and after a few moments of reflection I said
yes.
 

At that time, I had only written a short story and my rather lengthy essay “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” for
Love Bourbon Street: Reflections on New Orleans,
since returning to New Orleans.

But I do believe it was the correct answer, both then and now.

It has been, at this writing, almost seven years since that horrible weekend in late August when my partner and I packed up what we could before fleeing north as the one-eyed bitch inexorably headed towards New Orleans. There are gaps now in my memory of that time—I do recall it seemed like I was gone for months, but in reality I was only gone a very short period of time before I returned to Louisiana. I remember checking my blog a few years ago to get the time frame right of the evacuation, and was stunned to realize I’d actually returned to Louisiana less than a month after leaving. I returned to New Orleans itself for good on October 11
^th
, 2005, and bore witness to the slow, still-not-quite-completed recovery.

Those days seem a lifetime ago, the days when there was a 10 pm curfew; the grocery stores were only open from 11-6, the power would go out in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, and I wondered if New Orleans and my life would ever return to any semblance of normality.

Writing this book was enormously painful for me, yet at the same time it was very cathartic. Channeling all of my anger and frustration into a book, while emotionally draining, was also incredibly helpful. It didn’t make me whole again—that would take another year or so after the book was published—but I was a lot better when it was done. Many of the things Chanse experiences and feels are from my own personal experience. The depression, the panic attacks, the mood swings—all of that was all too real. I felt it was important to write the book—even though I’d initially resisted it—as honestly and as realistically as I possibly could. I wanted to make what we were going through here in New Orleans as real and vivid for the people who read the book, so that they could
understand
a little better.

I didn’t know how the book would be received when I was writing it—I didn’t know if it would be denounced as ‘self-pitying’ and/or ‘self-indulgent.’  There was a lot of that going around in those days; it seemed like the entire world had switched from sympathy to heartless when it came to the New Orleans recovery.

But in my wildest dreams, I never dreamed it would be embraced the way it was. The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
called it ‘the most honest piece of writing about post-Katrina New Orleans published so far.’ It also won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery that year.

The Upstairs Fire actually happened, and the arsonist responsible for the deadliest fire in the history of New Orleans was never arrested or brought to trial. The victims of that terrible tragedy never received justice. I had always wanted to write about the fire, and when I was putting this book together I decided to link the two tragedies. The Verlaine family and their retinue are, of course, creations of my imagination. The mystery of the Upstairs Fire will probably never be solved.

Part of the reason I wanted to write about the fire was the fact that three bodies were never identified. I’ve often wondered who those three men were; and from that curiosity sprang the plot of this book.

May we never forget the victims of the fire:

Partners, Joe William Bailey & Clarence Joseph McCloskey, Jr

Partners Duane George “Mitch” Mitchell and Louis Horace Broussard.

Mrs. Willie Inez Warren died with her sons, Eddie Hosea Warren and James Curtis Warren
.

Rev. William R. Larson

Dr. Perry Lane Waters, Jr.

Douglas Maxwell Williams

Leon Richard Maples
.

George Steven Matyi

Larry Stratton

Reginald Adams, Jr.

James Walls Hambrick

Horace “Skip” Getchell

Joseph Henry Adams

Herbert Dean Cooley

David Stuart Gary

Guy D. Anderson

Luther Boggs

Donald Walter Dunbar

John Thomas Golding, Sr

 
Adam Roland Fontenot

Gerald Hoyt Gordon

Kenneth Paul Harrington

Glenn Richard “Dick” Green

Robert “Bob” Lumpkin

Ferris Leblanc

Three bodies remain unidentified to this day.

Greg Herren is the award-winning author of two mystery series set in New Orleans featuring gay detectives Chanse MacLeod and Scotty Bradley. He has also published two young adult novels,
Sorceress
and
Sleeping Angel,
and co-edited the critically acclaimed anthologies
Men of the Mean Streets
and
Women of the Mean Streets
with the award-winning author of the Mickey Knight mystery series, J. M. Redmann.  He has also published several novels and short stories under various pseudonyms, as well as over fifty short stories in markets as varied as
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and the acclaimed anthology
New Orleans Noir.
He works as an editor for Liberty Editions of Bold Strokes Books and lives in the lower Garden District of New Orleans.

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