The Sun, Reversed
Future plans clouded
“Yikes,” Paige said, glancing up at me. She looked pale. “These are revolting, and I didn’t think I could be shocked anymore.” She started flipping through the photos of Chloe again, her eyes wide. Every so often she’d stop, swallow, and shake her head. “My God.” She whispered finally, slipping them all back into the envelope and fastening it closed, “I think I need some brain bleach.”
I sipped from my cappuccino. I probably didn’t need more caffeine—my heart was beating a little too fast, and my mind was bouncing from one crazed thought to another.
What I needed was to take a Xanax and sleep for about three days, but that wasn’t an option—not with the possibility of Russian assassins showing up at any minute as I was hoping that Colin was okay and alive wherever he was and would stay that way, worrying about Taylor’s mental and emotional health, needing to figure out what to do about his mother…
On top of the murders. Because that’s just how things go in my life.
At least I felt safer knowing Lindy and Rhoda were watching the apartment. You can’t do better than Mossad agents when it comes to security.
A crazy laugh bubbled up. Taylor’s awful father and his partner in homophobic crime sure didn’t see the Ninja Lesbians coming.
I was only sorry I couldn’t be there when housekeeping discovered them in the morning, bound and gagged in the wreckage of their room.
Go ahead and file a police report, assholes. See how that works out for you.
Frank was right. There was no way they could without implicating themselves in a kidnapping.
At least they had plenty of time to come up with a story for the maid when she showed up.
“I didn’t like her when we worked together at the paper,” Paige went on, pushing the envelope across the table to me, shuddering slightly.
“What was she like?” I asked, pushing everything else out of my mind and forcing myself to focus. “Remy loved her…but I’ve not heard anything positive about her from anyone.” Which was kind of sad.
Paige made a face. “I feel like…well, like such a bitch now.” She ran a hand through her mop of hair. “I’m not—have never been—patient with what I see as bullshit, and Chloe was just so full of shit.” She pointed at the envelope. “Those pictures prove I was right, but it doesn’t make me feel better. I can’t imagine where she must have been in her life—what must have been going on with her—that resulted in those pictures being taken.” She barked out a laugh. “Those aren’t artistic nudes—I had friends who made money modeling nude for artists in college. You can’t claim those pictures have any value other than…” She shuddered again. “Fueling masturbatory fantasies.”
“Nudity doesn’t shock me,” I replied. “But those are…they need to be burned. I don’t even want to turn them over to Venus and Blaine.”
“The negatives aren’t there anyway,” Paige pointed out. “Destroying those won’t get rid of them forever.”
“Yeah.”
“Poor Chloe.” Paige stared into her coffee cup. “At the paper she was—I guess the right word is prissy.” She rolled her eyes. “Very uptight, like there was a stick shoved so far up her ass you could see it when she opened her mouth. Maybe it was a reaction to her past.”
“You mean like how someone can be a big partier and then find religion, and they’re more hung up about it than people who’ve been religious their whole life?”
“Exactly like that. You know, she actually put up one of those swear jars—you know, so if you swore you had to put a dollar into it? In a fucking newspaper office!” She smiled faintly at the memory. “I made a big show of putting a twenty in it as a prepayment, and then just stood there and talked as loudly as I could about how fucking stupid a fucking swear jar was…and that was the last of that. God, I was such a bitch. I should have been more supportive of her…but she drove me nuts.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women…but Chloe…she wasn’t good, you know? She wasn’t a good reporter. She flirted and played up to all the guys, and she didn’t support other women, but that doesn’t excuse my behavior.” A flush began spreading up from her neck to her face.
“No sense in beating yourself up over it,” I said, but clearly she needed to get it out of her system.
She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “There were rumors around the paper, of course, that she’d been a stripper at one of the men’s clubs in Biloxi, that she’d worked as an escort…and of course, when she was promoted to editor, people said she’d slept her way into that job, too.” She exhaled. “Instead of shutting that shit down I listened to it—what does that say about me? It was typical misogynist bullshit…but the truth was she wasn’t qualified for the job and she didn’t deserve the promotion. Maybe she was just better at office politics than the rest of us.”
“Did you read her book?”
“Crazy White People? Of course.” She fiddled with the lid of her cup. “It was terrible, you know, typical white savior bullshit…but I was jealous.” She looked at me. “I have three unpublished novels in a drawer in my apartment.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “She quit working at the paper when she married Remy?”
Paige nodded. “That was when she wrote her book. She wasn’t quitting because she got married but so she could write her book.” She rolled her eyes. “I know she meant well with it, but…white people solve racism books are so 1950s, you know?”
“Apparently there’s still a market for them.”
“I think she was genuinely surprised when the backlash came, and of course they canceled the film version.” Paige rubbed her temples with her thumbs. “I didn’t like her, but now that she’s dead I’m kind of second-guessing that, I suppose. Maybe I could have been kinder to her while she was alive. Maybe…”
“Maybe your instincts were correct,” I said, staring into the bottom of my now-empty cappuccino cup. “My mother always says how much she hates the hypocrisy of death; how an awful person dies and then everyone cries about how wonderful they were when they actually weren’t.” Mom’s always pragmatic, if a little callous at times.
“Yeah, if someone hadn’t killed her, I’d still loathe her.” She laughed. “That, though”—she pointed at the envelope—“now I can’t help feeling sorry for Chloe. Digging those pictures up was some serious dirty pool for Margery to pull, and especially for reality television. This franchise of the show…Lord.” She waved her hand. “Oh, I know people have parlayed sex tapes into reality stardom and made entire brands and careers from it, but that wasn’t what Chloe was doing. I don’t know how she thought being on the show would improve her brand as an author…maybe some publicity for her next book, but…these pictures,” she swallowed, “would have destroyed her in New Orleans. She was all about being a Garden District lady, even though she wasn’t to the manor born.”
It was one of the great reality show mysteries: why go on a reality show when you have skeletons in your closet?
Because they always wind up on camera.
“All right, enough about Chloe. Fill me in on Fidelis.” I took the file folder from her and slipped it into my backpack.
“She was also killed sometime after the party on Friday night, maybe early Saturday morning,” Paige replied with a shiver. “They didn’t find her until today, when her cleaning service showed up—she didn’t have someone in every day. According to the cops, there were no signs of a break-in, nothing was taken. She was in her nightgown and robe, on the floor of her living room. Just like Eric and Chloe, struck in the head with a blunt instrument with terrific force…a blunt instrument they think was most likely a baseball bat.”
“What about the security guard?”
Paige looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What security guard?”
“At the guard shack. No one gets into English Turn—”
She cut me off. “She doesn’t live in English Turn anymore. She bought a house in old Metairie and moved a few months ago.” She rolled her eyes. “Moving back to this side of the river was part of her storyline for the show.”
As a fan of the Grande Dames shows, I shuddered inwardly. There was nothing more tedious than a Grande Dame building a story line out of finding a new place to live…but tired as those stories were, they popped up on every franchise almost every season.
“The cops are still canvassing the neighbors, but last I heard, no one had seen anything out of the ordinary.” She shivered again as she finished her coffee. “Producer and two of the cast, all killed on the same night with the same kind of weapon.”
“If it was the same killer, he had a busy night,” I said idly. “From the Aquitaine to the Garden District to old Metairie.”
“He or she,” Paige said grimly.
“You’re sure it was Amanda, aren’t you?”
Paige nodded. “She killed someone when she was a teenager, Scotty. Deliberately. And her mother bought her out of it. She went after Billy’s wife with a bat. That can’t be a coincidence.”
Or, I thought as we got up to go, someone’s doing a great job of framing Amanda.
Paige’s car was parked about two blocks away from Café Envie, and we walked as quickly as possible. As we shivered in her car while waiting for the heater to start blowing hot air, she commented, “Hard freeze again the next two nights, and it may snow tomorrow.”
Snow in New Orleans is rare—so rare, in fact, that when it does happen no one knows what to do. The city literally comes to a screeching halt. City hall and city services shut down; they sometimes even close I-10 through the city. Most of our pipes aren’t insulated, so hard freezes mean having to leave faucets running slightly so the pipes don’t freeze and crack. Houses in New Orleans are built for comfort in our miserably hot and humid summers and are designed to be colder inside than outside. Heat rises, so when you turn on the heat it just rises up to those gorgeous eighteen-foot-high ceilings. The cold creeps in through the windows and the wind somehow finds every crack and crevice. Instead of running up the power bill in a futile attempt to heat up the apartment, it’s just easier to put on layers and bury yourself under blankets.
Taylor’s apartment, the top floor of our building, turns into a sauna if the lower three floors have their heat on. He’s even had to turn the air-conditioning on when it’s in the forties outside because his apartment is over ninety degrees.
That’s life in New Orleans for you.
The former Jane Meakin Barron had remarried after divorcing Billy—I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the divorce that upset his father so badly he’d cut Billy out of the will—and was now living in a huge house in Broadmoor, just off Napoleon Avenue, on Derbigny Street on the lake side of Claiborne Avenue. Paige took Claiborne just as it started raining. We were passing the Superdome when I started hearing this weird clicking sound and realized it was ice hitting the windshield.
Some of the rain’s turning to ice.
Sleet? Hail? Madness.
I gasped when Paige pulled over in front of Jane Barron Bullard’s house.
It was a three-story Caribbean plantation style house, with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up from the circular driveway to the second-floor gallery. It was painted dark green, with bright yellow shutters on the windows.
But I couldn’t’ stop gawking at the Christmas decorations.
Jane Barron Bullard’s house was decorated like there would never be another Christmas in New Orleans. Her former father-in-law’s decorations on his North Shore home purportedly could have been seen from space; her decorations would give his a run for his money. A colossal plastic statue of Santa Claus underneath a palm tree waved at passing cars. A sleigh and eight reindeer stretched across the roof. All the bushes and palm trees had white lights strung through the branches and up their sides, as did the round two-story-high columns on the gallery. Three gigantic red plastic bells took turns flashing on the front door. The windows were decorated with lights and fake candles. The lights of an enormous Christmas tree, just inside the window to the right of the front door, blinked in the gray late afternoon.
A black woman in her late fifties, wearing a hideous Christmas sweater and a pair of jeans, answered the door.
“Is Mrs. Bullard home?” Paige asked sweetly.
She looked at both of us suspiciously. There was a streak of flour on her cheek. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Paige Tourneur from Crescent City magazine and this is my assistant, Scott.”
Assistant?
But it worked. “I don’t think Mrs. Bullard is expecting company today,” she said with a frown, standing aside to let us inside the overheated house. The hallway led to a back door. Holly and mistletoe were hanging from the ceiling, big red flashing bells were hung over the doorways, and tinsel was wrapped around the railing of the staircase. “Please wait in here,” she gestured to a doorway, “while I go check on Mrs. Bullard. Crescent City magazine, you said?”
“Yes.” Paige walked through the doorway. I hesitated a second before following her. This was the living room, which contained the Christmas tree visible through the windows. It was even larger than I’d imagined, and there was yet another tree on the other side of the room. The entire room smelled of pine and cinnamon. Candles were burning on the mantel and on the coffee table. Stockings hung from the fireplace, candy canes everywhere one could be hung.
It was much too warm, so I slipped off my coat just as Jane Bullard joined us. “Jesus CHRIST, it’s hot in here,” she said. She called out, “Toy, will you turn down the heat, please?” She gave us both a huge smile. “I may have to open some windows. My apologies, it was ice cold in here this morning, so I turned up the heat and wasn’t paying attention to how hot it was getting! My bill is going to be insane.” She rolled her eyes. “But you don’t care about that. I’m Jane Bullard.”
I know it’s rude to stare, but I couldn’t help myself. Jane Bullard and Rebecca Barron could have easily passed for sisters to anyone who didn’t know them. Jane’d had some work done, obviously; her eyelids had that strange hollow look indicating they’d been lifted more than once, and her forehead was remarkably free of wrinkles. Her figure was slender, an almost impossibly small waist accentuated by a black cable-knit turtleneck sweater and the almost impossibly large breasts straining at the wool. She also wore slim-fit jeans that hugged her curves. She was maybe five three, five four at the most; her equally impossibly blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail made her seem more youthful.
Paige introduced us both, and Jane offered us drinks, which we declined. We sat down on the dark sofa, and she sat down across the coffee table from us, the Christmas tree behind her almost looking like it was growing out of her head.
“Your decorations are amazing,” I said.
She laughed, pearl-white teeth flashing beneath her red lips. “I overdo it,” she admitted, glancing around the room. “I can’t help it, I love Christmas. I can’t get enough of it.”
“It reminds me of Steve Barron, on a much smaller scale,” Paige replied.
Jane laughed again, sounding genuinely delighted. “Well, I kind of always felt responsible for that,” she said as she crossed her legs. “He was my father-in-law and was very competitive, to say the least. When I was married to his son, I did up our first house like this for our first Christmas together.” She waved around. “Steve stopped by, and the next thing I knew his place was lit up like a Roman candle. I always felt like I owed his neighbors an apology, and then it turned into an annual thing.” She rolled her eyes. “What can I do for you? I don’t remember being asked for an interview with Crescent City.” She frowned. “I mean, I’d love to talk to you about the charity and the work we’re doing, but I’m terribly unprepared. But we can certainly get started today!”
“Well, this actually had to do with something that happened to you when you were married to your first husband,” Paige said carefully. “You were attacked by—”
“That crazy bitch Amanda Lautenschlaeger.” Jane’s lips compressed into a tight line. “I saw her the other day at Whole Foods, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. How she is not in a straitjacket and locked up is…well, money talks.” She shook her head angrily. “You know we all went to school together, right? To Newman? Yes, I was in the same class as Amanda and Billy.” Her face was a taut mask. “Amanda was obsessed with Billy, for as long as I can remember. They started going steady when we were sophomores, I think? Oh, she was so awful and crazy and possessive, even then. If Billy so much as looked at another girl—” She closed her eyes and shivered, delicately. “And I don’t care what anyone says, she murdered that girl senior year. No one will ever convince me that was an accident.”
“It wasn’t?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Billy had just broken up with Amanda and asked Deborah Holt to Homecoming.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “I didn’t see it happen, but less than three days later Deborah is dead, killed in an accident”—she made air quotes as she said accident—“and my friend Megan saw it happen. She was there wtih Deborah. She said Amanda sped up the car, didn’t hit the brakes or anything, didn’t try to stop.”
“Megan? That would be Megan Dreher, wouldn’t it?” Paige was making notes as she spoke.
“Why, yes, it would be. She was Megan Tortorice then, of course. And we never, you know, saw Amanda again.” Her face twisted. “She had a nervous breakdown.” More air quotes. “And was whisked away to a boarding school. No one will ever convince me Margery Lautenschlaeger didn’t buy off the cops and the DA. Amanda murdered Deborah in cold blood. Megan and I both have always believed that.” She barked out an unamused laugh. “And of course, she came after me with a baseball bat when I was married to Billy.”
“How did that happen?” I was genuinely curious. I’d always known justice was sort of for sale in New Orleans—I suspect my parents have gotten away with things people who didn’t have the Diderot or Bradley bloodline would have; the pot, for example—but I’d never had any real evidence of it.
We like to believe justice is blind and fair for everyone.
But it really isn’t.
And it’s not just a New Orleans thing, either.
“Billy and I started dating when we were both at LSU. He was on a baseball scholarship, of course, and I…well, I didn’t want to go to school outside the state. We ran into each other at a fraternity party, I think he was a Beta Kappa? Long story short, we got involved and we got married after we graduated while Billy tried to make it as a pro.” Her smile was sardonic. “He didn’t, you know. And there’s nothing worse than a failed jock who suddenly has to find something to do with his life. But Billy…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked off into the distance, a faint smile playing on her lips. “He’s so charismatic, and charming. But he also can’t keep it in his pants. I don’t remember how long we’d been married before Amanda came back into our lives. But she did. I think we’d been married five years when he started up the affair with her again?” She sighed. “Yes, that was right, I was pregnant with Kyan, my second son.” She pointed over at a framed photograph of a handsome young man in an LSU graduation cap and gown. “But she got it into her head that Billy wanted to marry her and that I was in the way and if I were gone…” She shrugged. “Somehow she got into the house when I was the only one home, me and my oldest. She came after me with one of Billy’s bats from college. He kept them all, you know, including the one where he hit the home run that won the College World Series. He has a trophy room.”
“How did you—how did you get away from her?”
“Stupid bitch didn’t know I had a gun in the kitchen.” She laughed. “I was in the kitchen, making dinner, slicing vegetables when she comes in with the baseball bat and takes a swing at me, telling me how I don’t deserve Billy and she’s going to get him back and all that nonsense.” She ran a hand through her hair. “And me four months pregnant. I got to the drawer where I kept the gun and pulled it on her. I ran out the door and over to the neighbors’ house and I called the cops. I wanted to press charges but Billy didn’t want me to, said the scandal would be bad for the restaurants. But what he really meant was it would piss off his father. I think our marriage lasted like another five years before I was finished with him, once and for all.”
“And what happened to Amanda?”
“Margery sent her off to another hospital.” Again with the air quotes. She laughed. “I’m not ashamed to admit I made the old bitch pay me off, too. Fuck the restaurants, you know? I was pregnant. She belonged behind bars.”
“Did you also know Fidelis Vandiver?”
“Of course. We were all in school together.” Her eyes widened. “Oh my God, she was murdered the other night, wasn’t she?” She stood up. “It was Amanda, I’m telling you. Oh my God, Amanda is killing people again, isn’t she?”
“We don’t know—”
“It said in the paper blunt force trauma to the head.” Jane went on like Paige hadn’t said a word. “Dollars to donuts it was a baseball bat. You should tell the police to check Billy’s bats.” She got up and started pacing. “Oh my God, someone told me the other day—maybe a week or two ago? That Fidelis was seeing Billy. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” She walked over to the Christmas tree, fidgeting with an ornament. “And Chloe Valence, too. Wasn’t she killed recently? I’m so glad I refused to do that show.”
“You were asked to be a Grande Dame?” I asked, startled.
She nodded. “Margery herself called me, to try to recruit me. Like I would do anything that horrible old witch wanted me to. She’s just as crazy as her daughter.” She rose. “I’m sorry, but I have a meeting I must get to.”
She walked us to the door, and as we said our goodbyes, she snapped her fingers. “You know, if you’re looking into Amanda, you need to talk to Ilana Holt.”
“Ilana Holt?” I asked.
“Deborah’s younger sister. She worshiped Deborah.”
The door shut.