Not Dead Enough Page 9

  I kept looking at the still shot and the video. It was just a few seconds. Her bobbing at the back of the sidewalk group, weaving through them, then briefly in front before leaving that camera range. On the camera facing the other way, it was a brief second of her back, then the group came into the picture and blotted her out.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” I muttered.

  A ghost in the night. Most likely a random woman that my brain decided resembled the putatively dead woman because I was thinking about her so much.

  I finally gave up, emailed a copy of the snippet of video and the still shot to myself. I’d look at it in the sober daylight.

  With that I decided I was off work and had another beer.

  But my mind didn’t relax into the buzz. Instead it started going in agitated circles.

  Was Karen behind this? She was devious and manipulative. But her revulsion at the dead body was real. I could see her as a con artist, but not a murderer. Or had she gotten in over her head and involved me as some sort of bizarre cry for help? But could she possibly be this good an actor to keep playing a believable victim? With me watching? I had once been fooled by her blue-eyed good looks, but that was a long time ago.

  If it wasn’t somehow connected to Karen, why would anyone pick the two of us? Maybe it was just random, but I didn’t believe in those kinds of coincidences. If it wasn’t random, it made no sense. We weren’t friends or connected in business. We weren’t close enough that if someone wanted to get one of us, they’d pick the other. Maybe a vendetta against the lesbian community—but again, the two of us didn’t make sense. I was out, but not a big activist. Karen less so, at most discreet donations to a few organizations.

  It was time to go home. I was two blocks away when I remembered I’d parked here. I kept walking. I wasn’t as sober as I’d like to be when driving, and it was late enough in the evening that most of the street parking around me was taken by people heading to the French Quarter. I could get my car tomorrow.

  Plus I was hoping the walk might clear my head.

  It did not. I was hot and bothered, and not in a fun way, by the time I got home. Made more hot and bothered by the shaking of the shrubs outside my front steps. I bolted back to the street, only to have a small sparrow flit out.

  Damn snake.

  I stuck my head in the freezer door for a minute, then filled a glass with ice, leaving only a little room for the water. I guzzled half the glass before flopping down on the living room couch. I sat for about half a second, then got up again and went to the back where my office/reading/hide stuff for parties room was.

  I started writing things down. Aimee Smyth hired me to find her sister Sally Brand. Sally Brand went to Karen to buy a house—an expensive house at that, at least over 500k to be in the property Karen’s firm showed. Hadn’t she said just over a million? Who has that kind of money only to flake out?

  I can be a Jill of all PI trades but tend to do missing people and security. Places like Rob’s bar, nonprofits in the Lower Ninth, not the high-end stuff. There should be very little overlap between the people buying homes from Karen and those seeking my services. Occasionally a well-to-do gay guy or lesbian came my way so they could be open about who slept in what bed when we were going through their house to install a system.

  But I wouldn’t send my clients to Karen to buy a house—assuming I’d even known she was doing real estate. Nor would she be likely to send anyone down to my scruffy (albeit gentrifying) Bywater office.

  I took out a new piece of paper. I drew a big circle. Karen and I were at opposite ends.

  In the center was the dead woman in the morgue. She needed a name and someone to mourn her. But was she Sally or Aimee? Or neither of them?

  I put Aimee on my side; Sally on Karen’s, with lines connecting them to us. Then dashed lines from them to the dead woman.

  I stared at the page. Scribbled notes on my side about the possible phone call and possible sighting. But I couldn’t draw any lines connecting them to anything. In frustration, I drew a brain with question marks around it—the pictorial depiction of my fevered brain—and put the dashed lines between it and them.

  Then I got up and got another beer.

  I sat back down and stared at my scribbling some more. No enlightenment.

  I looked up flights to Atlanta.

  It was cheapest if I left on Saturday and came back on Tuesday. Dirt cheap, in fact, which meant they were hauling people in for some convention and wanted to do whatever they could to fill those leaving seats.

  If I left on Saturday, I’d be out of town for Torbin’s show. I could miss it and say I had to work. No one needed to know that work was a wild-ass goose chase after a chimera of a woman.

  I reminded myself no one was paying me for this. Then reminded myself Aimee’s check had cleared. It would about cover a trip to Atlanta with enough left over to buy a cup of coffee—if I didn’t go to the fancy place that rented my downstairs.

  I finished the beer.

  I could just let this go, let the cops with their greater resources hunt down who the woman was and why she died.

  I got up and got another beer. I’d need to buy more next time I went to the grocery store.

  I sat back down at my desk, still staring at the pages. Sober hadn’t worked; maybe being drunk would jar something loose.

  The beer helped, but only in mellowing out my mood. Everything else stayed the same, with nothing making sense. Except even if the police did solve the murder, that didn’t mean they’d find out why Karen and I were involved. Someone went to time and trouble—and spent money—to weave us into this. I wanted to know why.

  No, I needed to know why. One woman was dead. Whatever the game, the stakes were high. Right now, I didn’t even know if it was poker or chess. Or some new video game, to stretch the metaphor. If I was going to protect myself—okay, and Karen, too, I supposed—I couldn’t wait for them to make their next move. I had to be moving as well.

  I had to hope it wasn’t in the wrong direction.

  I booked the flight to Atlanta.

  In the morning nothing had changed except my level of sobriety. Sleeping on it hadn’t helped.

  You don’t have enough information yet, I told myself. Only Miss Marple could solve this as it currently stands. And she could only do it because she had a writer making sure she found the right clues.

  I did rounds for places I’ve put in security systems, checking to see how things were, good business practice to be attentive, but I mostly did it because it kept me in motion and distracted by New Orleans drivers and the heat. I spent most of the time cursing either one or the other and not obsessing around the case.

  I went back to Rob’s in the evening, watching the monitors, but I only saw the usual suspects, tourists, the bar locals, waiters. No one who resembled the dead woman. Or even the live woman I’d briefly glimpsed.

  The next few days passed, slow at the office—I did get the filing and invoices done—checking the monitors at Rob’s in the evening. But nothing. A big fat nothing. As much as my brain was on overload—or melting in the heat—it still made no sense.

  Chapter Eight

  What the hell are you doing? I asked myself as I stood in the slow-moving security line. Going on a stupid trip to a city that can be best described as Los Angles with humidity and no beaches. If you live in New Orleans, you pretty much have to fly through Atlanta. That or Houston, another traffic-jammed city with high humidity.

  Sobering up had made me question this decision every time I thought about it, but even stone cold sober, I couldn’t come up with anything else that might lead to useful information. I wanted to find out if Sally could be part of the Brande crime family. Maybe they were branching out to New Orleans. If she was, it might help ID the body. If she wasn’t, at least I could close this door.

  Finally through the checkpoint, I made my way to the gate. I found a seat off in the corner. I had to make some phone calls.

  I chose the one I want
ed to do the least first.

  “Hey, Torbin,” I said as he answered. “Sorry to do this, but work is going to make me miss your show tonight.” As if on cue, a flight announcement blared loud enough that he had to hear it.

  “Wait, where are you?” he said.

  “At the airport,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Work.”

  “What work?”

  “Confidential,” I answered.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Confidential.”

  “Really? Since when have you refused to at least let me know where you’re off to?”

  I sighed. “Since my client told me to tell no one.” He didn’t need to know the client was me.

  “Okay…” He yawned. Torbin was not a morning person.

  Which made me yawn. I wasn’t a morning person either, but the airline schedule didn’t seem to care about that.

  Before I finished yawning, he continued, “We’ll miss you. I even put in the ‘what Lola-Nola wants’ number for you.”

  “Others will enjoy it as well,” I said. “Besides, I’m sure you’ll have a crowd.”

  Torbin knows me too well. I thought my voice was neutral, he knew it wasn’t. “Ah, so you heard.”

  “Yes, Joanne bothered to tell me.”

  “I know. She told me. Which is why I didn’t tell you. Is this trip just to avoid running into her?”

  “If I wanted to avoid anyone, I could stay at home and do that,” I answered. I had been planning on this being one of the fake polite calls. I’d say I couldn’t make it; we’d say we’d catch up later and ring off and be done with it. He’d know and I’d know and we’d never discuss it. It’s the way of all Southern families.

  “Look, I’m sorry I’m out of town. I would be there otherwise. Our paths will cross; it will be okay. You don’t need to choose.” There, nice and adult of me, I thought.

  “I thought it was kind of shitty myself. But Danny and Alex were talking about it in Danny’s kitchen, girlfriend overhead and thought it would be great fun to go. I couldn’t exactly say no, that’s not your part of New Orleans and I’m doing a special number that will embarrass the hell out of my dear cousin Micky and it’s not going to be nearly as much fun with you there.”

  “You didn’t invite them?”

  “Not on our dear grandmother’s grave!”

  I hazarded a guess. “You don’t like her, do you?”

  Torbin sighed. “We need to talk when you get back.”

  “What, you can’t admit that over the phone?”

  “More important things. Girlfriend doesn’t think it’s fair you got the house and they’re living in an uptown condo.”

  “But—” And I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Another flight announcement; this time mine. They were about to start boarding.

  “We’ll talk when you get back.”

  “Yeah, we’ll do that. Break a leg. Or a wig. Or whatever.”

  I clicked off the phone, then dialed another number. I needed to get through my calls. I had also been putting this one off, dithering about whether or not to bother.

  “Karen,” I said, not sure if I was talking to her or a machine. “I’m going to send you a picture. I want you to see if you recognize it.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said.

  “I’m traveling, but I’ll call when I get back and you can tell me what you think.” I hung up. I’d said what I needed to say. I sent her the picture, then got in line to board.

  Like I needed any more complications in my life. Okay, so Cordelia and I hadn’t exactly worked things out. But…But she’d left. First to Houston for treatment for her cancer. I went there when I could. Just…not enough. Not enough for someone who was ill and scared. My fault. I couldn’t rationalize myself out of that. I hadn’t been there when she needed me, too afraid I’d lose everything, if I locked my office for a few months, turned away all clients. At the time I thought I had done what I could, getting to Houston most weekends. But then she left without telling me, going to the Northeast where her mother’s family was. With someone new, the nurse who had been at her side every day.

  That was it. I kept living in the house we’d lived in.

  Paying the entire mortgage. What? Almost two years now. She couldn’t just barge back into my life and tell me to give her the house back.

  Could she?

  I’m not a lawyer. But even I knew I didn’t have the strongest of legal cases. She’s a doctor from a well-to-do family. She had the money for the down payment. We’d split the costs after that. I was stubborn that way, too proud to not pay my way. It wasn’t always easy or always the best choice, but at least I had that. Plus, I’d done more of the work that needed to be done, arranged my schedule for the plumber, painted a good part of the interior, stuff like that. I had the more flexible schedule.

  I found my seat, going halfway to the back in hopes that at least the middle seat would stay open.

  Torbin had dropped a bombshell on an already hazardous path. Sitting next to Chatty Cathy might drive me over the edge.

  We’d been together for over a decade, bought the house after three years together. She’d paid half the mortgage for seven years; I’d paid it all for two. Even if we agreed on it being the same price we’d paid, that would still be a chunk of change for me to come up with. We’d bought in the Treme section of town, just a few blocks out of the French Quarter, back when it was considered a “bad” part of town (mostly meaning the black people outnumbered the white people). Since then the area had gentrified and our house was worth a lot more.

  If she wanted what it was worth now…I couldn’t cover that. It would probably be more than our original note.

  I watched the passengers slide by, desperately searching for overhead space.

  I’d have to sell. We could split the proceeds. That was the only way.

  Or she could buy me out. And she and her new partner could live there. I would drive by every time I went to visit Torbin.

  Why was I saving Karen, her cousin, again?

  Oh, right, only because I’m also involved.

  Maybe it was just talk. Maybe it wouldn’t happen.

  “Thanks, Torbin, like I needed to know this,” I muttered.

  The plane was filling up. The flight attendant announced it would be a full flight. A dude eyed the middle seat, then decided he could do better than being stuck between a middle-aged woman and an old guy in a suit.

  An old woman with a hat—a frumpy hat—threw a small bag in the overhead and swung into the middle seat.

  Great. Now I was going to have to spend the entire flight looking at pictures of her grandkids. Or her cats.

  Politely, I handed her the seat belt that had fallen between our seats.

  She took it, gave me a quick look, then said, “Thanks. Hope you’re not the talkative type. I hate chatting over the noise of a plane.” She buckled herself in, took a book out of her purse, and pointedly ignored me. I glanced at the title. Treme Tango by Greg Herren. Never heard of him. Probably some Yankee who didn’t know anything about New Orleans, let alone Treme.

  I didn’t want to talk to you, either. Rejected by both the young and the old.

  I took a book out as well.

  One of the biggest mercies of flying to Atlanta is that it’s short. They now list it as about an hour and a half, but I can remember when they didn’t pad the flight time and, crossing back into the New Orleans time zone, you left at the same time you arrived.

  I managed fifty pages in the book by the time we landed.

  It was the usual mess getting off. People pushing into the aisle and other people deciding they didn’t need to get their overhead baggage until they were standing up and blocking the aisle. I had my bag already in hand and sprinted down the aisle the first chance I got.

  I had checked baggage. I brought several changes of clothing, really costume. I couldn’t very well knock on the Brande door and say I was a private detective and want
ed to know if any of their female relatives might either be dead or pulling a scam on me. Did I want to be frilly pink (yes, on occasion I have) or professional suit or all black? Also, it was summer, and summer in Atlanta isn’t much cooler than summer in New Orleans. I’d already sweated enough that I wanted to change clothes after I got to the hotel.

  Once I got my bag, I went to the car rental area. I’d need a car. I’d thought about driving; it’s only about six hours or so. But I decided it was safer to have an anonymous vehicle, with plates that didn’t lead anyone directly to my address. Yes, I was using credit cards, and those could be traced, but that’s mostly the realm of law enforcement, and I was planning to avoid that. I didn’t want the Brandes to be able to recognize my car.

  It was a tin-can compact, but navy blue and generic enough not to stand out. Cousin Torbin drives a red Mini. Cute and fun to drive, but not a ride for a PI.

  I plugged in my phone and turned on the navigation. Atlanta is a great big freeway.

  One city got burned down in the Civil War and one city didn’t. I’ve always said if you told someone no more than that and then dropped them into Atlanta and New Orleans for a five-minute look around, they would know which was which. The old homes and aged oaks of New Orleans and the big freeways, new buildings of Atlanta.

  The change has been around for so long it feels like forever, but the scars linger. It changed things. Maybe like Katrina, eventually, it would be better for New Orleans, as Atlanta had built back after the Civil War into something different with a changed future. Maybe. Even so, those caught in the maelstrom lost. Their lives. Their homes. Better would never arrive for those caught in the change.

  I took the beltway around the city. The Brandes weren’t in downtown Atlanta but the tony northern suburbs.

  I found an exit that would suit my needs. A few reasonably priced hotels, a choice of places to eat in addition to the usual McBurger Things. A seemingly random stop. A businesswoman in a rental car at a hotel that wasn’t a destination, only a stop on the way.

  I wasn’t sure if I was being too cautious or not cautious enough. A lot of traffic, travel, and people in this area. Not that anyone was looking for me, but if they were, this was not where they would look.