Ill Will Read online

  “It’s true; they did reopen,” Cordelia said. She reached over and took my hand. “I hate going to the grocery store because I always forget something and you get upset.”

  Peeved perhaps, I started to argue, but not really upset. But I have gotten old and wise enough to know that sometimes right and wrong isn’t the issue. I kept my mouth shut.

  She continued, “There are things that I just don’t think about—like garlic—and if it’s not on the list, I overlook it.”

  She had a point. Things like garlic, onions, and lemon are staples; they’re always on the list, even if they aren’t written down. But just because I know that in my head doesn’t mean she does.

  “Okay, how about I make the list and if it’s not on the list, it’s on me.” I turned into the parking lot. Either not many people knew this store had opened, or it was late enough that it wasn’t very crowded.

  “Okay, fair enough,” she said. “Thank you.”

  We went and made groceries, as they say down here.

  Chapter Three

  As I was drinking my coffee after having just arrived at my office, I remembered how nice it was to have someone to share the daily chores with. In our grocery run last night we had flirted over the avocados. I’d found out that Cordelia liked a variety of apples, not just Red Delicious. We splurged on a really nice piece of salmon and a decent bottle of wine. If it had just been me, I would have gotten the usual apples, passed by the salmon and wine. And been prosaic over the avocados.

  We held hands on the way home.

  More importantly, we agreed that we had to find more ways to do this, to capture the small moments and be together. We had gotten too practical, dividing things so we ended up doing them alone to save time. But how you spend time can be more important than saving time.

  The avocado flirting had led us to the bedroom and we’d made love, slowly, gently, not a hard passion, instead a tender connection.

  “You devil, you,” I said aloud to my coffee cup. “You’re always in a better mood after sex.” Good sex, I amended in my head.

  I needed that good mood to get me through the morning. As Joanne had requested, I tried calling my former clients who had been scammed by Carl Prejean. As I had expected, I wasn’t able to reach half of them and the other half were skeptical of reporting it to the police.

  “Now, why would I want to waste my time going down there, waiting for someone to see me, waiting for someone to take a report, waiting to fill out some paperwork to be told that they’ll get to it when they can. That’s a day’s worth of time, and I don’t have any days to spare,” was the typical response.

  I mentioned his burned house to several of them just to see what their reaction would be. The only person who said, “Well, damn, wish the match had been in my hand,” was eighty-two-year-old Dolores Murphy in Houston. If her spirit was guilty, her flesh certainly wasn’t. The rest muttered appropriate responses along the lines of “Good karma to bad people,” but there was no one who struck me as hiding something or guilty.

  By lunchtime I’d done my duty. I could report to Joanne that I’d done—mostly, I wasn’t going to call again those I hadn’t reached—as she had asked and no one had confessed to arson.

  As I was rooting in the small refrigerator for my sandwich, I was interrupted by a brief knock on the door. It opened to reveal my cousin Torbin.

  “A sandwich? A mere sandwich?” he said, looking at the two slices of bread in my hand.

  “Smoked turkey with sliced avocado,” I defended. Torbin could be a food snob.

  “Only if you made your own mayonnaise.” He knew I hadn’t. He knew I preferred mustard to mayo. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing in a cousin like Torbin.

  I put the sandwich back in the refrigerator, admitting defeat. “You treating?”

  “You can’t afford a burger and onion rings?”

  “I take it treat is off the table.”

  “It is so totally a comfort food day. Look at the gray skies outside. We’re not talking McBurger Thing. Bywater Bar-B-Que. Onion rings, pulled pork, big juicy burgers.”

  He was right, there were a few clouds in the sky; it might rain this week. I ignored the rational voice that reminded me that just about every week in New Orleans brought rain and let Torbin drag me out of my office and off to a comfort food lunch. The sandwich would keep until tomorrow. I could even sleep in five minutes later in the morning rather than slathering mustard on bread.

  He waited until we were ensconced at our table and had ordered our food before getting down to his real reason for this lunch. He understood me well enough to know once the food was ordered, I’d have to stay.

  “I need a favor. A big favor,” he said.

  “So you are treating?”

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, “I’m not bankrupt yet.”

  I caught the serious undertone to his voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I love Andy dearly, but he does computers well, not slicing and dicing. Last night he lost focus for a moment and opened what I’m sure is an artery on his thumb.”

  “Ouch.” I didn’t correct Tobin about the location of arteries. When it’s your kitchen absorbing the blood, you get to engage in hyperbole.

  “Yeah, ouch. We took a trip to the ER and used every old T-shirt we had to sop up the blood on the way there. It turns out neither Andy nor I do especially well at the sight of blood.”

  “Had to channel your inner lesbian?”

  “Inner and outer. Our actual outer lesbians were not answering their phone.”

  He was referring to me, well, me and Cordelia, since I think he was more interested in her expertise in the situation. “Ah, sorry. We were otherwise occupied.” I had turned the phone down for important bedroom activities.

  “Still? Aren’t you two well into the lesbian bed death era? The funeral should be a distant memory by now.”

  “Still. Lesbian bed death is a vicious rumor started by straight men who can’t stand the competition.” I took a sip of my iced tea. “However, we have slowed down a bit, only a couple of times a week now instead of every day.”

  “No wonder you don’t have time to answer phone calls from desperate friends,” he grumbled.

  “How’s Andy?” It was time to get away from my sex life and onto the reason for this lunch.

  “It was not a fun experience. I was sure he was going to bleed to death before he was seen. His folly with a kitchen knife was regrettable, as it seemed every drug dealer in the city chose last night to get into a gun battle. Shotgun wounds trumped paring knives.”

  “Damn, you picked the wrong emergency room.”

  The serious look on Torbin’s face was one I rarely saw. One of the reasons I loved my cousin was his ability to find the humor in just about everything. “We didn’t have much choice,” he said softly.

  “Andy doesn’t have insurance,” I said.

  He nodded.

  Our appetizers were served. A heaping plate of onion rings seemed the only comfort available.

  He took a bite out of one, chewed, swallowed, then said, “That’s the favor I need to ask for. Andy’s okay, but the cut looked kind of red and swollen this morning and he’s in pain. Do you think Cordelia would be willing to take a look at it? We tried a regular doctor, but the earliest available appointment is sometime next week. And I think Andy would cut off his hand before going back to the ER.”

  Cordelia—and I—didn’t want to be the local on-call doctor, so we had tried to discourage friends from cadging medical help from her. When she had her own clinic she was pretty good about working people in, but that clinic had been washed away in the floods and there didn’t seem to be enough returned people to justify the cost—financial and emotional—of rebuilding it. Now that she was just a “doc for hire,” she had far less leeway in who she saw. Torbin knew he was asking a big favor.

  “Let me call her,” I said. “Don’t eat all the onion rings.”

  I walked outside before dialing. J
ust to be safe, I didn’t want Torbin overhearing our conversation. Not because he would hear her saying no, but to avoid him hearing me tell her she could say no.

  Luck—of some sort—was with me, as she answered the phone. When she’s working it can be hard for her to take a call. I quickly explained the situation. “You don’t have to do this. I know how tired you are and—”

  She cut me off. “It’s okay. Tell them it’ll have to be after I’m home this evening. If they can wait until then. Tell Torbin if it gets worse, if Andy has a fever or something, then he needs to go to the ER.”

  “Andy doesn’t have insurance.”

  “Damn,” she swore softly. “He still needs to go. It’s probably cheaper and easier than having his arm cut off. And I’ll give him the lecture tonight about taking this as a wake-up call. He can get away with a knife wound; it’ll heal. If it’s cancer or a car accident, no insurance might kill him.” Then she had to go.

  Torbin had been good about the onion rings. No more than one had disappeared in the time I’d been gone.

  “Come by the house tonight. If he has fever or things get worse, drag him back to the ER. You want your boyfriend to be hard, not stiff.”

  Torbin smiled his relief. And ate another onion ring.

  Our main dish arrived, a burger for me and ribs for him. Major comfort food.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What happens if you get hit by a Mack truck?”

  He put down the rib he had been eating. “We used to be good. Before Katrina, Andy worked enough time with a computer company to have benefits and we eked out enough to cover an individual policy for me. But that company went underwater—literally, of course, so Andy lost his job and the insurance. He does okay for work freelance, but that doesn’t have benefits.

  “You know how the mail is, even now. My renewal notice came back when everything was delayed weeks and weeks, and we had to go Uptown to the post office to get it. I’d gotten nothing from two trips, so didn’t get back, and when I finally did there was a big stack of mail for me to go through and I didn’t want to go through it, so left it sitting for another week…”

  “They didn’t give you any leeway for being in New Orleans?”

  “Maybe if I’d written enough letters and begged hard enough. But at that time Andy wasn’t making much, I wasn’t making much, and it felt like something we could hold off for a little while until things got better.”

  “It’s been two years, haven’t things got better?” I wanted to tell him, You can’t live so close to the edge because I can’t bear to see you fall.

  He ate another rib before replying. “I reapplied a couple of months ago and they turned me down.”

  “Why?”

  “They didn’t really say, basically being a gay man in New Orleans. They probably assume that if I’m not HIV infected, I soon will be.”

  “Oh, Torbin, honey, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me, too. So I applied for a big-boy job.”

  “Doing what?” Torbin had previously survived by being the best drag queen on the block and always being in demand for shows.

  “That place on Frenchmen Street, an office of NO/AIDS? They need someone who knows the gay community to do outreach and testing.”

  “But you don’t know anything about public health.” I put half my burger on his place and grabbed a couple of ribs.

  “But I do know the gay community and I’m used to working odd hours and I know just about everything there is to know about sex. Well, gay sex. Don’t ask me how to do it during her period.”

  “Dildos, no. Tampons, sí.”

  “Please, I don’t need that image while eating barbeque sauce.”

  I grabbed another rib to save him from menstrual barbeque sauce. “I’ll leave you the rest of the onion rings.”

  I let him have the rest of the mac and cheese as well. I even treated him. A trip to the ER doesn’t come cheap. He didn’t argue, which told me he was worried. I rarely ever saw my buoyant cousin show strain.

  We’re getting older, I thought as I waved him away after he dropped me back at my office. We were both beyond forty—that seemed so impossibly old back when we were in our twenties and all the years stretched before us—the gray in our hair no longer an anomaly. It was sobering to think of Torbin in a regular job—well, as regular as handing out condoms in a bar could be.

  I had insurance, but I paid a high—and increasingly higher—price for it. While I occasionally hire people to help out, especially when I’m doing surveillance, I’m essentially a solo operation. I do what most solo practitioners do, join professional associations and use their buying power to get group rates. It wasn’t something I thought about much, other than every year to pay my dues, pay for the insurance, liability, health, shove the policy in a file, and hope that I never needed to use it. So far I’ve been pretty lucky. And my luck has been helped enormously by having a live-in doctor in the house. Being able to whine, “Honey, I think I’m getting a cold,” and get actual doctor advice instead of tea and sympathy, has saved me from the usual run-of-the-mill medical visits.

  I can still make it up three flights of stairs, I thought, as I climbed them, not too out of breath. Just one gasp and I was good to go. Okay, two.

  I opened my door to the ringing of the phone. It was a little unnerving, as if someone was aware of me walking in the door.

  “Knight Detective Agency,” I answered, reminding myself I’d already had my one wheeze.

  “You fucking bitch.” My caller was not a happy person.

  “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number; there are only celibate bitches here.” I started to hang up the phone.

  “I’m going to get you, Knight,” was the kind of phrase that caught my attention, so I kept the phone close enough to my ear that I could hear, and far enough away that his voice was reduced to tiny insignificance. It made the threat easier to take.

  “Who is this?” I asked, not exactly expecting a reply.

  “The guy whose house you burned down, bitch!”

  “I didn’t burn anyone’s house down.”

  “Lying bitch!” His vocabulary was limited; “bitch” seemed to be the only epithet he could come up with.

  “I don’t break the law, unlike lying contractors who cheat—”

  “You shut the fuck up. I’m going to do to you what you did to me, you get that?”

  “Good. As I’ve done nothing to you, you’ll do nothing to me,” I said in as obnoxiously cheery tone as I could muster.

  “You burned my house and my car.” My good cheer was not infectious.

  “No, I didn’t.” Why am I arguing with this idiot? It was highly unlikely an appeal to reason would work here.

  “Someone did. You led them there.” Ah, some wavering.

  “No, I didn’t. It’s illegal to burn houses or encourage people to do so.”

  “Then who the fuck burned my house down, bitch?”

  “I the fuck don’t know, bitch. But I do the fuck know that making threats is illegal, and when people break the law, I call the police. Got it, bitch?”

  “I’m not a bitch,” he said, and beat me hanging up by a millisecond.

  Was he outside lighting a match right now? I hurried to the window but couldn’t get a good view of the street. I had to run down half a flight of stairs to get to a window that gave me clear sight to the road below. A large black truck was turning the corner, but it was too far away to get a license plate or even the make of the vehicle.

  I kept going down the stairs, wondering if I’d encounter flames and gasoline at my door step. Shoving through the security door at the ground floor, I didn’t slow, my momentum carrying me halfway across the street.

  And into the path of a puzzled bicyclist. I jerked to a halt, barely missing her front tire, forcing her to swerve to avoid rolling over my toes.

  No flames, no gas, not even a spent match. Only a partly cloudy day and a bike rider who was muttering vague obscenities as she rounded the next corne
r.

  Had he been watching me? Or was that just some random truck?

  A threatening phone call, a big black truck right outside where I work. Was my fear causing me to see more than was here? Gigantic ugly trucks aren’t a rare sight. If I stood here for ten minutes, I might see five of them. It didn’t mean he was here, about to do something unpleasant. Why waste the gas when you can make a nasty call from the comfort of home?

  I tried to picture him in bunny slippers calling me bitch.

  The image didn’t help. It only made him seem more psychotic and therefore more dangerous.

  Okay, now I was panting. It’s not the stairs, I told myself, it’s the fear that I might have been trapped in a building engulfed in flames. However, the three flights of stairs back to my office convinced me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a look around down here.

  The street was quiet, the bicyclist gone. No abandoned gas cans by the side of the road. The only thing flammable was a cigarette butt halfway down the block. Nothing to indicate someone had been watching my office—no tire marks by the side of the road or tossed-out drinks with ice still in them. The cigarette butt was at least a couple of days old and had been rained on. What happened to the good old days when the perps would leave a telltale pile of smoked butts? Had the crooks gotten as healthy as the rest of us?

  There was nothing to do but trudge back up the stairs.

  But once in my office—and after catching my breath—there were things to do. Like call Joanne.

  After I gave her the rundown, she asked, “Are you sure?”

  “What do you mean am I sure? Who else would be threatening me like that?”

  “I don’t know, you have a talent for pissing people off.”

  “Not many who have recently accused me of arson.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said quickly. “You met this guy once, talked to him for five minutes at most. A couple of weeks later someone you allege to be him calls you on the phone and threatens you. A bottom-of-the-class defense lawyer could rip that one apart.”