Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (7 page)

“No worries.” Abby Grosjean was my business partner. She’d originally started as my assistant, but I’d made her a partner a few years back. She had amazing instincts and took to investigative work like an old pro. “So, your message said we have a new client?”

“Yeah.” I hesitated. “Doesn’t have a lot of money, though—so I’m kind of giving him a break.”

She sighed. “Taking in another lost puppy, are we?”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to help out.” She cut me off. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for lost puppies, too. What’s the story?”

I filled her in, and I could hear her typing as I talked. One of the things that absolutely amazed me about her (and made her completely invaluable) was how quickly she could type. She always took extensive notes of every business-related conversation she had—although she also had a phenomenal memory—which had come in handy more times than I cared to remember. She was also a whiz with gadgets—she was the one who’d convinced me I needed an iPhone, which I’d resisted for years. The iPhone and its ability to shoot video had more than paid for its cost since I’d broken down and bought one. She often called me a Luddite. She’d graduated from the University of New Orleans with a degree in pre-law (she paid her way through working as a stripper at the Catbox on Bourbon Street before she started working with me), but was trying to save up the money to pay for law school at either Loyola or Tulane.

When I finished, she said, “Okay, I think the best thing for me to do is try to find a connection between Morgan Barras and Mona—besides Jonny’s MMA thing. I’ll get Jephtha to do some checking, too.” Jephtha, her live-in boyfriend, was probably the most talented computer nerd in New Orleans. There wasn’t, he boasted, a system he couldn’t hack into. He’d spent a few years in the juvenile detention system for changing grades when he was in high school, and we had a strictly don’t ask, don’t tell policy on how he found the information I needed. What he really wanted to do was be a computer game designer, and he’d come up with several prototypes so far that I thought looked like winners. He hadn’t gotten anywhere with them yet—which was good news for me, since he needed the work I tossed his way.

He was so good I kept him on a retainer, and I dreaded the day he made it as a game designer.

“Okay, great,” I replied. “I’ll head over to St. Anselm’s, see if any of the protesters are willing to talk to me, see if they know anything.”

“All right. I’ll check in later.” She disconnected the call.

I rolled up the copy of
Crescent City
Venus had given me and walked out to my car.

St. Anselm’s was on Louisiana Avenue between Tchoupitoulas and Magazine. It was a beautiful building, made of yellow brick with a massive bell tower at one end. Like most Catholic churches, it was laid out in a giant cross. I parked underneath a live oak tree and looked around. I didn’t see a green Mercury Marquis parked anywhere on Louisiana, so I checked the side streets as well. It wasn’t parked anywhere nearby. I walked through the wrought iron gate and climbed the cement steps to the double doors. They were scarred from being kicked in, and I pushed slightly on them. They swung open without a problem, and I walked into the darkened church.

I’d never really set foot in a Catholic church besides St. Louis Cathedral before—I hadn’t set foot in a church of any kind since I’d left Cottonwood Wells, the little town in east Texas I grew up in, for LSU when I was eighteen. St. Anselm’s wasn’t as majestic as St. Louis; but then I doubted any church in New Orleans could compete with St. Louis. St. Louis was so magnificent it hardly registered in my mind as a church—particularly when compared to the Church of Christ I’d endured growing up.

There was a weird sense of peace and serenity inside St. Anselm’s, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I noticed at the far end of the church there were candles burning on the altar and there were several people seated in the front pews.

I walked up the aisle toward the altar, trying to process the calm. On the occasions when I’d been inside the Church of Christ when there was no service going on, it just seemed like a big empty room. It didn’t feel holy—not that it ever felt particularly holy to me during services, when the preacher was screaming about sin and fire and brimstone. Everything was a sin—makeup, skirts above the knee, being naked in front of another human you weren’t married to, mixed swimming, television—it seemed like every Sunday the preacher in our church condemned another function of modern life as a sin in the eyes of an angry God. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to really notice the hypocrisy. There was no way, for example, I could play football without being naked in front of another human being I wasn’t married to—but football trumped sin. My parents didn’t forbid my sister from wearing makeup, her cheerleading uniform certainly didn’t reach below her knees, and some of the moves she was required to do as a cheerleader certainly incited lust in teenaged boys—and in some adult men who shouldn’t have been looking.

Once I left Cottonwood Wells for LSU, I never set foot in another Church of Christ.

But then, the Church of Christ didn’t have enormous stained-glass windows on both sides of the building depicting incredibly gory and violent deaths of saints. The bright sunlight streaming through the windows and spilling over the pews was colored brilliant hues of yellow, green, blue, and red. And of course no Church of Christ had an organ, and certainly there would be no enormous cross with a bloodied and suffering Jesus on it behind the altar. The Church of Christ didn’t go in for such nonsense; while they did adorn their bare chapels with a cross, it was always a big metal one—and there was never a leanly muscled man in a loincloth with a crown of thorns on his head hanging from it.

That was idolatry, specifically prohibited in the Old Testament.

Funny how you never really get away from religion
,
I thought as I walked up the aisle.

Between the windows were marble statues of what I assumed must be saints, with their heads bowed over hands clasped together in prayer.

How do people find comfort from such a horrible sight?
I wondered as I drew closer to the front and could see how exquisitely detailed Christ’s passion was depicted. The eyes were so incredibly mournful, pained, and sad as they looked up to heaven. The muscles stood out in agonized relief. The sword wound in his side dripped blood.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

“May I help you?” a female voice asked quietly from the gloom to my right.

I turned; I’d reached the steps of the altar without realizing it. The woman who’d spoken was smiling at me. She was very short, maybe five foot tall or so. She looked to be in her late fifties, with graying hair that hung to the shoulders of her purple LSU sweatshirt. She was round, with a moon face and very kind eyes. Her hands were folded in front of her, and she exuded an aura of peace and calm that was hard to resist.

I cleared my throat, which sounded ridiculously loud in the quiet church. “I was wondering if I could ask you and your friend a few questions?”

“Why?” This came from a man sitting in the front pew. He made no move to get up. He just sat there and glared at me with suspicious eyes. “Who are you? Did Archbishop P. U. send you?”

“My name’s Chanse MacLeod, I’m a private investigator, and I’ve been hired to find Mona O’Neill by her son Jonny. I just have a few questions—”

“Go ask the Archdemon,” the man interrupted me angrily. “That’s who’s behind it, you can bet your bottom dollar. That son of a bitch needs to be tarred and feathered and run out of town before he finishes destroying the faith in this city.”

“Ed, hush. Don’t be disrespectful. That’s not going to get us anywhere, and you know it.” The woman waved her hand at him. “Pay him no mind, Mr. MacLeod. We might not agree with His Eminence, but we don’t wish him any ill will. He’s not a bad man, he’s just a little misguided, that’s all. We all pray that he sees the light and changes his mind. We must have faith, right, Ed?” She held out her right hand, which I shook. “I’m Belle Browning, and the disrespectful lout over there in the pew is my husband, Ed.” She smiled, taking the sting out of her words. “We’ll be glad to help you in any way we can. Mona is a wonderful person. Her family must be so worried.”

“You can defend that prick all you want, Belle, but I’m not so forgiving,” Ed snapped. “He’s sold his soul—”

“Language!” She gave him a nasty look. “Not in the church, Ed.”

“So, did you two know Mrs. O’Neill well?” I asked, figuring the best course was to ignore the bickering and move forward.

“We’ve known Mona for years, since before Danny was killed.” Belle gestured to the pew where Ed was sitting. “Shall we sit? My feet are killing me.”

I sat down next to Ed, and Belle sat down on my other side.

“That was a tragedy—Danny O’Neill was a hell of a man.” Ed Browning shook his head. “Poor Mona—at least the two older kids were old enough to help her out with the baby.”

“We all rallied around Mona,” Belle said. “I knew her before that only slightly, but it was after Danny was killed that we really became friends. Mona always said that if it weren’t for this church she wouldn’t have made it.” She patted me on the leg. “That’s why St. Anselm’s meant so much to her. It shames me to admit that were it not for her, this church would have been closed already. But she rallied us all, got us organized—”

“And now she’s missing,” Ed snarled. “And you know that bastard Pugh is behind it.”

“We don’t know any such thing!”

“Mona always said Pugh wants to sell the land.” Ed went on like she hadn’t said anything. “How much is this land worth, do you think, Mr. MacLeod? We might be down in the Irish Channel, but this is still pretty damned close to the Garden District—and what are the property values down here? Even before Katrina they were pretty high. And now? They tear this church down, put up some condos—how much do condos go for in New Orleans since the flood? This land is worth a lot of money—and that carpetbagger of an archbishop damned well knows it.” He shook his head. “And the Archdemon is hand in glove with that devil Morgan Barras.”

I thought about the check from Morgan Barras I’d found. “Do you know if any developers were looking at buying the land?”

Ed shook his head. “No, can’t say that I do. But it wouldn’t surprise me.”

Belle smiled at me. “Pay him no mind. He doesn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

I couldn’t help but smile back at her. “When was the last time you saw Mona?”

“Mona always took the overnight shift here. We always keep vigil in pairs, you know. Sometimes there are more than two—usually in the evening, when people get off work—but overnight sometimes it was just Mona. She was here every night, no matter what.”

“Since she disappeared, we’ve had trouble getting people here overnight,” Ed added.

“Ed and I usually get here around seven, to relieve Mona and whoever was keeping vigil with her,” Belle went on, frowning at Ed. “But Friday morning when we got here, there was no one here. I know she’d had to sit by herself on Thursday night, but we didn’t think anything about it, did we, Ed?”

“So you didn’t see her Friday morning?”

“No, she was here Thursday morning when we arrived—and everything seemed fine—she seemed her usual self. We just figured Friday morning she’d left early—she did that sometimes, you know, but not usually unless she had someone here with her.” Mona scratched her head. “She didn’t come that night, either. We didn’t really start worrying until we got here Saturday morning and there wasn’t anyone here. That wasn’t like Mona, you see. If she couldn’t make it she always got someone to fill in for her. She didn’t ever want the church to be left empty, and you know she was in charge. So I called her boy, Jonny. He hadn’t seen her since Thursday night himself, and he called the police.” She snorted. “Fat lot of good that did, though. Do you know not a single policemen has come by to talk to us?”

Ed laughed nastily. “Like the cops aren’t owned lock, stock, and barrel by the archdiocese.” He snorted. “You saw them acting like storm troopers on Wednesday! Kicking in the doors of a
church
! Arresting us like we were some kind of criminals—how many crimes were committed in the city that day while the damned cops were wasting their time here doing the Archdemon’s bidding?”

Something occurred to me. “Didn’t the raid take place in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Yes, in broad daylight!”

“But Mona was here for the raid, right? I thought she always took the overnight shift?”

They exchanged a look, and Belle bit her lower lip. “Mona had a source inside the archdiocese,” Belle whispered. “We knew the raid was coming, and so we got as many people here as we could. She let the newspapers and the TV stations know, too.”

“Do you know who her source was?”

Belle shook her head. “No, she thought the fewer people who knew, the better.”

I asked them a few more questions, but they didn’t know anything helpful.

I excused myself and made my way out of the church.

To have a bad meal in New Orleans, you really have to work at it. The general rule of thumb for locals is to avoid places that cater to tourists—and be willing to take a chance every once in a while.

The Please You Café certainly doesn’t look like much from the outside—just another hole-in-the-wall greasy-spoon dive with a faded linoleum floor, bad overhead lighting, and water served in thick, red plastic cups. It was sandwiched between a dive bar and a Sherwin-Williams paint store on the block of St. Charles Avenue just before the light at Felicity Street. There’s also a quick oil change place and a ridiculously overpriced chain restaurant on that same block. The Please You was a throwback to the days when there wasn’t a fast food place on pretty much every corner; when customers preferred to sit in a booth and be waited on by a gum-chewing waitress with a carefully coiffed bouffant and an apron, and an order pad in her hand. The place was immaculately clean on the inside, even though the big front windows were kind of grimy. There was always a dry-erase board in one of the windows with the day’s specials in barely legible handwriting scrawled on it, sandwiched in between some Jazz Fest posters from the early 1990s. The inside walls were covered with old Saints schedules and Mardi Gras posters thumbtacked haphazardly here and there. The faux wood paneling had probably been the height of style in the 1970s, but now it just looked dated and tacky. There was a counter with old-fashioned swivel-top stools amd an ancient cash register, and the menu probably hadn’t changed since the Eisenhower administration.