Murder in the Rue Ursulines (4 page)

“I wouldn’t ask you to do anything illegal. I could lose my license.”

“Yeah, sure,” he’d shrugged. “How good is the pay?”

I told him, and his eyes widened. “Are you serious?” When I nodded, he said, “I’ll get right on it.” Two days later, he e-mailed a detailed analysis of the weaknesses in the system—and it went right over my head. But one thing I did understand was
I was able to hack into the computer network in less than ten minutes. The only reason I can see that no one has so far is because it hasn’t occurred to anyone.

I took the report to my boss at Crown Oil, Barbara Castlemaine, and she immediately authorized me to hire him. He started work that very day.

A week later, we did a test run on his system.

Not a single computer programmer or expert at Crown Oil could break into it.

He’s been working for me ever since.

Over the years, I’d become fond of Jephtha. His jail experience had the effect it should have—he was firmly on the straight and narrow path now.  He had no desire to ever go back.

Jephtha lived with his current girlfriend in a single shotgun on Constantinople Street in the Irish Channel. His girlfriends were one of Jephtha’s freely admitted problems. The Bourbon Street strip clubs—and the huge-breasted bleached blondes who danced there, were his biggest weakness. He’d dated a string of them—falling madly in love each time, swearing she was ‘the one’—until she walked out on him or stole from him. Since he’d started working for me, I started doing background checks on every last one of them—not that it made a bit of difference to him. When Jephtha was in love, he didn’t want to hear anything bad about the object of his affection—because she was a goddess of perfection in his eyes.

His current girlfriend’s stage name at the Catbox Club was Tiffani. Her real name was Abby Grosjean, and she was worth all of her predecessors combined. Abby was from Plaquemines Parish, the oldest daughter of a shrimper. She’d left home when she was nineteen, when her father took a second wife she didn’t like, and headed for New Orleans. Her only work experience was waiting tables in a small diner. She did that for a while after she got into town, tired of it quickly, and made a decision to, as she put it, “put my body to work for me instead of the other way around. God gave me big boobs, he must have wanted me to use ‘em, right?”  She bleached her dark hair white-blonde and applied for work as a dancer at the Catbox Club. “I was on the drill team in high school,” she’d told me after she’d moved in with Jephtha. “I just use the same moves we learned at drill camp and voila, I became a stripper.” I liked her because she was honest and a hard worker, and unlike her predecessors, she actually cared about Jephtha. She did her best to make sure he ate decent and regular meals, and tried to keep the house as tidy as she could. She was taking a couple of classes at the University of New Orleans, majoring in pre-law, no less.

 The house on Constantinople had belonged to his grandmother. She’d died while he was in prison and left it to him. It was a typical New Orleans shotgun house—so-called because if you stood in the front door and fired a shotgun, the bullet would go all the way through the house and out the back door without hitting a wall. Typical of the style, the house was long and narrow. It was badly in need of paint. The yard was also a mess—Jephtha rarely remembered to mow the small patch of lawn, and the roses his grandmother had planted grew wild and out of control. The house also listed slightly to the right. Jephtha’s beat-up old Oldsmobile, with its cracked windshield, leprous-looking paint job, and a screwdriver holding the driver’s window shut sat out in front. Some of the shutters on the windows hung loose—Abby was always nagging at him to do something about them because of the way they banged against the house in the wind. “It’s like talking to a wall,” she’d once told me after haranguing him to no avail.

I parked behind his car, wondering again why no one ever had it towed as abandoned.  I opened the gate and winced as it screeched. Inside the house, the dogs started barking. The front door opened before I even made it up the groaning steps onto the porch.

“Hey,” Abby said. She was wearing what looked like a Catholic school uniform—at a school with very lax moral standards. There was no bra under her white shirt, which she’d tied to show her midriff, and I could see the nipples outlined through its tightness. Her feet were bare, showing dark pink polish on her toenails and the scorpion tattoo on her inner calf. She looked like she was about thirteen—except for the massive breasts—and her face was clear of make-up. She never wore make-up unless she was going to work, and she’d tied the bleached hair back in a ponytail that made her look even younger than she usually did. She was smoking an unfiltered Camel. She flicked ash and stood aside. “Go on in—he’s at the computer, where else would he be?” A hint of annoyance crept into her voice.

“Everything okay, Abby?”

She shrugged. “I just get tired of nagging him to mow the damned lawn. I might as well just give up and do it myself.” She took another drag, and winked at me. “Go on in, Chanse. I just made some sweet tea—it’s in the fridge. Help yourself.”

 I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks.”

“I just put a strawberry cobbler in the oven. It’ll be ready in about an hour. You want some?”

I winked and patted my stomach. “Not on my diet.”

She made a farting noise with her lips. “You and Jephtha both could use a little more meat on your bones, you ask me.”

 I laughed and walked inside. Despite Abby’s best efforts, the house on the inside always looked unkempt. It was probably the dog hair coating the 1950’s style furniture. I greeted Rhett and Greta, the huge matching black labs, with the head rubs and back scratching that sent them in paroxysms of dog ecstasy, and headed back to the ‘computer lab’, as Jeptha called it.

The computer lab always looked like a bomb had gone off recently. Sometimes I thought my need for order in my house bordered on the neurotic—my therapist claimed it was a ‘control issue’—“subconsciously, you have a need for control, and since you cannot control the future or what’s going to happen to you, you exercise that need for control by controlling your home environment.” He’d even said that was part of the reason I worked out regularly—to gain ‘control’ over my body. While going to the therapist was helping me, there were times I thought he was full of shit.

But even my therapist would understand why walking into Jephtha’s computer lab made me cringe inwardly. There was a thick layer of dust on everything—he refused to let Abby clean in there. Piles of newspapers and paper covered every available surface. Empty plastic soda bottles were scattered all over the floor. Jephtha was partial to every conceivable kind of snack that came in a bag—potato chips, pretzels, and corn chips. If Abby didn’t cook, he would probably live on chips. He always kept the curtains closed, and the only light he ever turned on was the one on the desk by whatever computer he was working on.

Predictably, I sneezed.  He looked up from the computer screen and grinned at me. There was an open bottle of Coke next to his keyboard, and in one hand he held a bag of Funions. As I watched, he tilted the bag over his mouth and shook the crumbs out in a shower—some of them missing his mouth and dusting his cheeks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him when he wasn’t eating or snacking on something, but somehow he never gained a pound. He was taller than me—about six-feet-six with maybe 150 pounds on his long-limbed frame. He wore his light brown hair long and was always pushing it out of his pale face. His face was long and thin, and he was wearing his glasses. “Hey, Chanse, buddy,” he said, spitting out Funion crumbs as he wiped his hands on his Che Guevara T-shirt. “You got something for me, man?”

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the folder of e-mails.  “I need you to trace the computer these came from.” I handed it to him.

He didn’t even look at them, just slid the folder on top of the stack closest to his computer. He waved a hand. “Piece of cake—so easy it’s hardly even worth my time. I keep telling you—let me teach you how to do it yourself, save you a trip over here and some money, too.”

I shook my head. “Nah, I’d rather pay you to do it.”

“Well, you know my rule. I have to charge for at least an hour’s worth of work.” He said it apologetically. He always seemed to regret charging me for the work he did for me, no matter how much I insisted it was more than worth it to me.

“That’s fine.” Jephtha’s hourly rate was ridiculously low. “I don’t want you to have to go back to a life of crime.”

“No worries on that score, trust me.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Like I said, it won’t take more than ten minutes, tops.” He grinned at me. “But you got to check this out, man.” He enjoyed writing programs, but his real love was designing computer games. He confided in me once that should one of his games ever catch on and become a success, he wanted to start a foundation to help kids like him.

“I don’t want some other kid to wind up in jail the way I did,” he said simply, “just because there wasn’t anyone around to help out.” That was the kind of person Jephtha was. There was no doubt in my mind that one day he’d finally design the game that would make him millions. I suspected the only reason he hadn’t so far was his macabre sense of humor. His games were usually inspired by something that irritated him. He used the computer games to vent his spleen.  Some of them were so brilliantly funny—if slightly disturbing—that they just might catch on in the increasingly violent world of computer gaming.

I looked at the computer screen and recognized
Tourist Season,
his latest game. In it, the player walked through the streets of the French Quarter with an automatic weapon. You got points for killing tourists doing things they shouldn’t. But if the tourist was just walking along doing nothing wrong, you lost points for shooting them. You also lost points for killing locals. It certainly cracked me up. The more horrible the tourist, the more points you got. For example, if you shot a tourist taking a piss on the street, it was worth two thousand points. Shooting the couple having sex in public was worth five thousand points. Blowing away the jerk throwing trash in the street was only a thousand points.

The game was paused. An obvious tourist, in one of those ridiculous Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts, was pissing in front of the Cabildo.
 
“I’ve been working on this some more. Pull up a chair, man.” He started the game again, blowing the man to bits, and then reset the game. “You want to play while I trace this? It won’t take ten minutes, I’m telling you.” He grinned at me. “You know you want to kill some tourists.”

It was a hard offer to resist. I moved a pile of newspapers, magazines and crumpled empty bags of chips on top of a pile already on the floor.  I pulled the chair over next to his. He rolled his chair over to another computer, and started typing away at the keyboard.
 
 I looked at the computer screen in front of me and clicked on the mouse to start the game. I took aim and shot at a woman running across Burgundy Street pushing a baby in a stroller in front of her as a car slammed on its brakes. As the woman’s head exploded, I said, “Um, this game is kind of sick, Jephtha.”

“Yeah, well,” he replied grimly, looking over at the screen in front of me, “that very thing happened to me yesterday when I was taking Abby to work. Some stupid pregnant woman with a baby ran right out in front of my car. Why would anyone do something so stupid? I mean, what if my brakes were bad? And there wasn’t a car behind me. She couldn’t wait twenty seconds for me to go by?” He glowered. “Just because you can breed doesn’t mean you should.” He pursed his lips at me. “At least in the game she’s not pregnant. And besides, you don’t kill the baby. If you do, you lose points.” He shook his head. “I’m not
that
sick.” He gave me an innocent grin.

“Well, no video game company would allow that. People would get pissed.”

“And it would make the national news. The family values assholes would get up in arms—even though women who risk their kids’ lives like that—that’s who they should be pissed at—and every teenaged boy in the country would want to play it, and I’d make a bazillion dollars.” He reached for the folder he’d set down on the desk beside the computer screen. He opened it and removed one of the e-mail printouts, then handed the folder back to me. “All I need is the information on one of these.” He peered at the paper, and laughed. “Chanse, this is not even a challenge, you know? When you going to give me something hard to do?” He sighed. “It’s like taking candy from a baby. You want lunch or something?  Abby’s making a strawberry cobbler…her cobblers are fucking awesome, man. It’s like going to heaven.” He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips.

My stomach growled, but Jephtha had treated me to lunch once before. He’d made me an ‘Elvis special,’ a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.  It had sat in my stomach for the rest of the day like a lead weight.  “No, I’m meeting someone for lunch in about an hour,” I lied, glancing at my watch.  “You’ll be done by then?”

“I told you, I’ll have this IP address in like two seconds…there it is.” His eyes gleamed. “Okay, give me another few minutes and I’ll know whose computer this is...well shit fire.” He sneered at his computer screen. “This e-mail address is one of those dummy ones, you know, the kind where you don’t have to give any personal information?” His fingers flew over the keyboard. He shrugged.  “Okay, so this is going to take a few more minutes. I’ll have to trace the computer—if they registered it.” He glanced over at me. “Don’t look at my screen, okay? I’m going to have to do something you won’t approve of. Just keep playing
Tourist Season.”