Murder in the Rue Ursulines (24 page)

“That doesn’t matter, dear. I was just trying to help—“

“By having Jay beat up Chanse? By having your mother locked up in rehab?” His hands were shaking. “And you never said a word about any of this to me. You never asked me about it—and you knew. Did you think I’d raped her, Jillian?”

“Of course not,” she said in a soothing tone. “I just knew it was out there, and if it ever got out, it could do damage to you. So I tried to keep it a secret. I was just trying to help—“

“So, Freddy, when you first started getting the e-mails, it never occurred to you that they might be about Karen Zorn?” I interrupted Jillian. They could fight out their personal problems after I left.

He shook his head. “It crossed my mind, but I thought, you know, that it couldn’t be. If Karen wanted to dredge all this up again, why wait until now? Why wait? She could have ruined me years ago with all of this—and really? It wouldn’t have been a big deal. Celebrities get accused of this kind of thing all the time, and I didn’t do anything wrong.” He swallowed again. “I didn’t really know what it was all about—and frankly, I wasn’t that concerned. I get those kinds of e-mails all the time and they’re usually just cranks. But Jillian was really worried…she was the one who insisted we get a private eye to check them out.”

“You were sure the e-mails referred to Karen Zorn?” I turned my attention back to Jillian.

She sat down on the sofa next to Freddy—who moved several inches away from her.
Yes, there was definitely going to be a knock-down-drag-out once I left,
I thought, with no small degree of satisfaction. She fidgeted. “Yes. Because I got a call after they started coming. On my cell phone. From a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. All she said was,
Ask your precious husband about Karen Zorn.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” A muscle worked in Freddy’s cheek. He was drumming his fingers on his knees.

“I was trying to protect—“

“I DON’T NEED TO BE PROTECTED!” He screamed at her. His face was bright red. He stood up. “Chanse, go ahead and make this all public. I don’t care what it does to my career. I didn’t do anything wrong.” He shrugged. “If it kills my fucking career, I don’t care. I have more money now than I know what to do with. I don’t care. I don’t want any of this hanging over my head.” He walked over to me, and offered me his hand. “Thank you.”

I stood up and shook his hand. I glanced over at Jillian. She was trembling. All hell was going to break loose any minute.

“And just for the record,” Freddy added, “Jillian and I were together that afternoon. It wasn’t me you saw coming out of Glynis’s house.”

I nodded and headed for the door. I put my hand on the doorknob and looked at the wall beside it. It was a ‘wall of fame’—framed photographs and magazine covers. There was one picture that didn’t seem to belong—a headshot of a very young Freddy wearing a suit. He was smiling, but his mouth was closed. I stared at it.

I heard Mrs. Zorn saying,
When he got those braces off, he was going to be a real lady-killer.

I looked back at Freddy. I stared at his lips. “You used to wear braces.”

He nodded, a puzzled look on his face. “Until I was twenty-two.”

The line of his lips was different than it was in the picture.

I put my hand on the glass and covered the top half of his face.

I closed my eyes and remembered.

It wasn’t Freddy I saw.

The person I saw had braces on—his lips had that odd full look braces give people.

Another memory flashed.

The kid in Café Envie—the one Rosemary said was a neighborhood kid, who’d looked slightly familiar, who did errands for her every once in a while, who danced at the Brass Rail.

Joey.

He looked familiar because he was the man I saw coming out of Glynis’s house that night.

Since the levee failure, granted, I hadn’t gone out to the bars in the Quarter much—just on special occasions, like Halloween, Southern Decadence, Mardi Gras, New Year’s, and so on. But I always stuck to the Fruit Loop—the bars ringing the area of St. Ann and Bourbon. There are five bars there, the loop stretching from Rawhide to Good Friends to Bourbon Pub and Oz to Café Lafitte in Exile. We call it the Fruit Loop because they’re all so close together they’re easy to walk between. One bar bores you—you grab your drink and head to another one. Though there are about ten more gay bars spread throughout the French Quarter, I never really went to any of the others with a great degree of frequency back when I used to go out pretty regularly.

The Brass Rail was one of those bars further up in the Quarter, on Burgundy Street near Canal. I’d been there a few times, but not since the levee failure. It was a small place on a corner, dimly lit on the inside, and its main attraction was the boys dancing on the bar. And when I say
boys,
I mean young men who look as though they’re barely legal. Every time I’d been in there, I’d wanted to ask the dancers for ID. 

It was frequented by older men, who would perch on bar stools and give the dancers dollars in exchange for groping. I also suspected, that if the price was right, the boys would make their bodies available in private. They also sold lap dances, leading the patron to a darkened room with booths in the back of the bar. I always felt sorry for the young men, who often looked as if they were from small towns and working class backgrounds. It was different there from the other bars, where the dancers had thickly muscled bodies and seemed to be dancing out of choice. The boys at the Rail struck me as doing it because they didn’t have many other options. It might be all in my head, but I sensed  a sadness to them, and I found myself wondering what they would be like in five years—where they would be, what they would be doing when they got too old for the Rail patrons.

It also made me sad to know that these boys could make more money working there than they could anywhere else.

The dancers usually started their show around nine on Friday nights, and the highlight of the evening was a dance contest judged by three people in the audience who were selected by the drag queen hostess of the evening. The winner got $100.

Even that seemed sad to me—given what they had to do to win. The more skin they showed, the higher the likelihood of getting that hundred dollar bill. So they would pull their underwear down and reveal their butts. They always danced in underwear, which made me feel like I’d stumbled into a high school slumber party.

At eight-thirty, I found a parking place, and walked up Burgundy Street. The Quarter was fairly empty. The Mardi Gras tourists were long gone and the vast majority of New Orleanians were honoring Lent. It was a two-week season of rest for the city until the NBA All-Star game would bring more hordes of tourists and their money into town like the plague. I hadn’t heard from Paige. I’d spent the rest of the day after getting home from the gym doing more on-line research on Karen Zorn, to no avail. There just wasn’t much about her to find out. She’d vanished off the face of the earth. Her mother still hadn’t e-mailed or faxed the photograph, either.

It probably didn’t matter, anyway. Most likely, she was dead and her body would never be found.

I had also thought about calling Venus and telling her about Joey, but what could I really tell her? That I was now convinced he was the guy I’d seen coming out of Glynis’s house? I’d also been pretty convinced it was Freddy Bliss, and without proof, my word meant nothing. I needed something a little more concrete than that to take to Venus and Blaine. And it did occur to me he might be more willing to tell what he knew to another gay man than to a police officer.

The cops probably weren’t very welcome at the Brass Rail.

I paid my five-dollar cover to the big tattooed guy working the door, and walked into the bar. It consisted of two rooms—the big main room with the rectangular bar, and the seedy, dark, smaller back room where the dancers took their patrons. There were only about ten customers, all looking to be over fifty, seated on stools around the bar. Two young men with that scrawny underfed look the Rail patrons liked were walking around in boots and white underwear. As I watched, one of them stopped by one of the customers, who put a hand on his ass. The older man put his hand down the front of the dancer’s underwear, and the dancer looked over to me with a bored expression on his face. Finally, the patron tired of groping him, handed him a five, and turned back to his drink. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a bottle of Bud Lite from the bartender. “What time does the show start?” I asked as I passed him a ten.

“Supposed to start around ten.” He replied, sliding my change across the bar. He was in his early thirties, I judged, and a Cajun, with bluish black hair, blue eyes, and tattoos running up and down his bare arms. “But Floretta’s not even here yet.” He rolled his eyes. “Probably can’t find her coke dealer. And you know no drag queen can go on without her nose full of candy.”

I laughed and watched the young man who’d been groped jump up on the bar and start dancing. He was short, maybe about five-six on a good day, and had one of those silly looking hair-styles called a ‘faux hawk’, where the hair is gelled to stand up in the middle of his head like a Mohawk. It was a look I hated, which also made me feel like I was a hundred years old—one step away from saying
Kids these days!
 He had some acne scattered over his face, and despite the big smile plastered on his face he moved his hands up and down his torso. He couldn’t quite hide the sadness on his face. He was cute in a boyish kind of way, with thick red lips, a prominent nose and big brown eyes.

He saw me looking at him and licked his lips, tilting his head down in what was probably supposed to be a seductive pose, pinched both of his dime-sized nipples and then made his way over to where I was seated. He squatted down in front of me, his crotch about six inches from my face. I wondered if he had stuffed his crotch, but then realized if patrons put their hands down there, he couldn’t.  He leaned his head down to me, and said, “Hi. I’m Adonis.” He touched his forehead to mine.

That was another thing I hated about the Rail. I don’t like being touched unless I invite it. At the other bars, the strippers didn’t touch you until you lured them in with a dollar bill in your hand—which was how I liked it. At the Rail, the dancers felt free to touch you at any time. But I needed information, so I was going to have to put up with it. And I was going to have to tip big. There might be some kind of dancer’s code barring them from talking about each other. If that was the case, I’d have to find one with a grudge against Joey.

“Chanse,” I replied as he brushed his lips against my cheek. Somehow, I doubted his parents had named him Adonis. He had a thick Mississippi accent, crooked teeth, and reeked of cigaretttes and vodka. He actually pronounced it Uh-DAWN-ees. But he was cute—if not the kind of looker a goddess from Mount Olympus would fall in love with. I doubted he even knew who the original Adonis was.

“Nice to meet you,” he replied in what I assume was meant to be a coy voice. “You out looking for a good time, tonight? You want me to show you one?” He tilted his head down to one side. He was definitely trying for coy and shy. The effect was spoiled by his tired, sad eyes.

I shifted on my stool, pulling out my wallet and slipping out a twenty. “No, not really, although I’m sure you could definitely show me one.”

His eyes lit up at the sight of the bill. “You want a lap dance, sexy?” He moved his hips a little bit.

“No, what I want is some information.”

His eyes narrowed a bit. “You undercover vice?”

“No.” I took the twenty and rubbed the edge of it over his right nipple. “No, I’m just looking for some information. I can get it from you—“ I gestured to the other end of the bar, where a young Hispanic guy was dancing in red Unico briefs, “or I’ll get it from him or one of the other guys. It’s up to you. What do you say?” I felt a little nauseous about what I was doing. How much money did these kids make if a twenty got one of them so damned excited? And a lap dance for twenty dollars?

Maybe I was crazy, but that didn’t seem like very much for what you got.

“What kind of information?” He licked his lips. “I know all kinds of things.”

“I want to know about one of the other dancers. A guy named Joey.” I brushed the twenty against his nipple again. “You know him?”

“Oh,
her.
” He hissed the words. “What do you want to know about that bitch?” He scooted closer to me. Now his crotch was so close to my face I could smell his sweat. “I’m a lot more fun than she is.”

“Whatever you can tell me.” I tried not to recoil from him. I hated when gay men referred to other gay men with feminine pronouns. But I’d hoped to find one with a grudge, and I’d hit pay dirt.

“She’s a bitch.” He shrugged. “Says she’s from a Garden District family that threw her out when she came out. Bullshit is what that is. I might be just a small-town boy from Mississippi, but I know a yat accent when I hear one. She’s from da parish. Acts likes she’s better than all of us. Thinks her shit don’t stink.” He smiled at me. “We call her Hollywood, because she always says she looks like a movie star, and she’s going to go out there and be a big star.” He spat the words out. “She ain’t going to be no movie star. She ain’t that pretty.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I’m just as pretty as she is.” He gave me another lewd smile.