Marais Street was narrow and potholed, with cars parked at the curbs on both sides. Shotgun singles and doubles crowded the lots, sitting close together, along with a scattering of two-story houses, some of them looking as though they’d been converted to apartment buildings.
I located Doucette Properties in a storefront office near an intersection. The plate glass window was decorated with pasteboard signs and photographs showing apartments and houses available for rent. A woman was seated behind a desk, gesturing as she talked on the phone. When she saw me, she waved, as though to let me know she would be with me soon. A moment later, she ended the call and stood up, stepping from the desk through the doorway. She was tall and shapely, her hair in long cornrows decorated with colorful beads. Her fingernails were a vibrant purple, and a lavender scarf set off her beige knit top. She smiled, assuming I was a prospective renter.
“Are you Patrice Doucette?” I asked.
“Yes, I am. Are you looking for a place to live? We have a number of apartments available.”
“It’s about the fire in one of your units here on Marais Street, back in March.”
Now her brown eyes flashed. “Are you from the insurance company? Because if you are, I have been going round and round with you people. And I’m tired of it.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not from the insurance company.” I handed her one of my business cards.
She examined the card and looked up. “Oakland, California? Girl, you are way off your home turf.”
“I’m doing a favor for a friend.”
She still looked skeptical. “Even so, why should I talk to you?”
“Because Antoine Lasalle is helping me with my investigation.”
Her face relaxed. “Oh, Antoine. We grew up together, right here in the Treme. We may even be cousins, somewhere down the line.”
“I get the impression New Orleans is a small town, no matter what the population figures say.”
“You got that right. How do you know Antoine?”
“We met a few years ago at a convention.”
“Now, who knew private investigators had conventions.” She laughed. “Call me Pat. My mother’s the only one calls me Patrice. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for information on a guy who calls himself Slade. I understand he rented the apartment from you and moved out some time before the fire.”
Pat’s cheerful expression turned into a thundercloud of fury. “That son of a bitch. Moved out indeed. I evicted his sorry ass. He wasn’t paying the rent. Owed me two months before I had him served with the five-day notice, which he ignored. So I took him to court. It took weeks and cost me a bunch of money. By then he was four months in arrears. And I never got any money from him, that’s for damn sure.”
That put the lie to what Slade had told Laurette. His story was that he’d been forced to move because the property owner wanted the unit for a relative. All the better to persuade her to let him move into her apartment. “He stiffs you for the rent. And then the fire.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he torched the place to get back at me,” Pat said.
The possibility of arson had been hovering in my mind ever since I’d heard about the fire. “You’re sure it was Slade?”
She gave me a look. “Who else would it be? The place went up in smoke less than two weeks after he left. What do you think?”
“You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “I can see his torching the apartment as retaliation for you evicting him. But where does Ray Brixton, the dead guy, fit in?”
“Beats the hell out of me. I understand he was a musician. Maybe he came along to help torch the apartment.”
It was a plausible theory, I thought. If it weren’t for the claims made by the dead man’s sister. “I understand that the victim’s sister says her brother was murdered. By Slade.”
Pat frowned and fingered a strand of her beaded hair. “Good Lord, I didn’t know that. I just know they found that man’s body in that apartment after they put out the fire. The investigators haven’t told me anything other than that. Murder? I wouldn’t put it past Slade.”
The phone rang in her office. Pat beckoned to me to follow as she moved through the doorway to her desk. She answered the phone and sat down in her desk chair. I took a seat in a chair in front of the desk, listening as Pat fielded questions about a two-bedroom rental she was offering on North Rocheblave Street. She set up an afternoon appointment to show the unit to the prospective renters, then she hung up the phone and pointed to a coffee mug on the desk. “I have a pot of coffee in the back room. You want some?”
“No, thanks. I’m coffee’d out for now. Tell me about Slade.”
Pat sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Where do I start?”
“The beginning. When you rented him the apartment. How long ago was that?”
“Last fall, October. I had a bad feeling about him, from the start. I should have gone with my gut. My gut steers me right every time. But the apartment had been empty for a while, and he was interested in renting it, so I went ahead. Then I wound up with this mess on my hands.”
“Why did you have a bad feeling?”
She thought about it for a moment. “His attitude. He’s one of those people who acts like the world owes him something. Oh, he hit all the check marks on his application. He had a job, a work history, a bank account. On paper, he looked like a good bet.”
“May I see the application?”
“Oh, sure.” She swiveled in her chair and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. She leafed through the tabs on the manila folders. Then she pulled out one, turning back toward me. She handed over the file folder and I opened it, examining the rental application. Here, finally, was Slade’s full name—Eric Charles Slade. Calling himself Slade wasn’t far off the mark. For identification, he’d provided a Texas driver’s license, with a date of birth that told me he was twenty-seven years old, and an address in Austin.
At the time he’d filled out the form, Slade had been employed as a stocker at a warehouse here in New Orleans. Pat assured me she’d verified his employment status and his salary, which wasn’t much. Evidently he’d been supplementing his income by playing gigs. Or, as was more likely for a musician, the day job was something he took so he could supplement what he really wanted to do, which was playing guitar. His previous job, in Austin, was similar, working in another warehouse. According to the form, he’d held that position for five months. Before that, he’d spent two years working as a carpet installer for a flooring warehouse in Concord, California. Was he from California?
Austin. The Texas capital was a music hub, just like New Orleans. There was nothing unusual about a guitarist leaving the Lone Star State to try his luck in the Big Easy. But Brenda Kohl, Laurette’s coworker, and Troy, the fellow guitarist who’d lived briefly with Slade, had both said that Slade didn’t have an accent that readily identified his origins. Troy theorized that Slade was from somewhere out west. Austin was certainly west of New Orleans, but if Slade was from Texas, I would have expected a hint of a Texas twang in the way he talked. Was Austin just another way station on Slade’s journey? And had he decided to go back, taking Laurette with him?
“He told me he was new in town,” Pat said. “And I didn’t think anything about that. At least not at the time. His income wasn’t that great, but he told me he was making money playing gigs. I try to be fair with musicians. They’re all over New Orleans, and they’re in and out. I rent to a lot of them in this part of town, because it’s close to the Quarter and Frenchmen Street. We lost plenty of housing during and after Katrina, and rents went up. I keep my rents reasonable, and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes that backfires on me, like it did with Slade.”
She paused, then went on. “About that job, when he stopped paying rent and I called that place, they told me he’d quit his job. I wonder if he got fired.”
“I’ll check it out. The bank, too.” Slade had listed an account at a local bank. If he’d left town for good, he’d probably cleaned it out.
At the bottom of the application form was an entry asking for an emergency contact. The name Slade had given was Millicent Patchett, with a phone number in the 925 area code. That was in California, the East Bay, and it encompassed most of Contra Costa County as well as the eastern part of Alameda County. Concord, where Slade had worked before moving to Austin, was in Contra Costa County. It appeared Slade was from California, or at least he’d lived there for a while. Did that mean he was on his way back to the Golden State, with Laurette in tow?
The other papers in the folder were related to the eviction proceedings. There was a copy of the five-day notice and the court filings. I glanced at them, but it was the information on the application that was most useful to me. I could follow up with the employer, and the former address and employer in Austin would be helpful as well. “May I have a copy of this form?”
“Sure.” Pat took the form from me and stood up, crossing the office to a small copier on a table in the corner. She made the copy and handed it to me, then put the original application back in the folder. “I hope that helps. I hadn’t really thought much about that man who died. I honestly thought he could have been the one who set the fire. I have been focused on my battles with the insurance company and dealing with all that property damage.”
“Sounds like it was a major hassle,” I said.
“Oh, Lord, it’s been nothing but a mess.” She threw her hands in the air. “Almost as much of a mess as what I went through after Katrina. The unit that burned is part of a fourplex, at the back. The other apartments had some fire and smoke damage and the guy next to the unit that burned already gave notice and moved out. And the people in the front units, they’re talking about leaving, too. It has been such a hassle. Like I said earlier, I’ve been fighting with those insurance people. They act like I torched the place myself. Believe me, I would not have done that. That was a good rental property, four units, and now I’ve got all that fixing up to do. Filling out paperwork and dealing with the police and the fire department. Then to have somebody die in the fire. It’s just too much.”