Murder in the Rue Ursulines

detective, I could have found him sooner, I could have found him when there was still a chance for him to make a recovery and he would still be with me. Instead, he’d died, and that guilt haunted me.

But maybe none of that would come up.

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that.

Maybe, like my therapist said, I was just imagining the worst again.

But I was in a bad spot, and the best way out was to solve the case.

But how? I wouldn’t be able to interview witnesses, get access to evidence, or even conduct any semblance of a normal investigation. The police wouldn’t want me interfering in their investigation.

As for the fame, truth be told, it was a nice fantasy. When I was young, I used to fantasize about being rich. I always, when I was a kid, thought the reason our lives were so miserable was because we were poor, because we lived in a trailer park, because we didn’t get to wear nice clothes and have nice things like so many of the other kids in Cotttonwood Wells. Daphne, Rory and I weren’t the only poor kids in town-but it seemed to me like we were. Other kids didn’t have mothers who wore faded old sweats and reeked of gin or vodka at the Kroger. Other kids didn’t have clothes that didn’t quite fit right, didn’t wear their clothes till they wore through in places, and didn’t have to eat bologna sandwiches for lunch every day.

When I started playing football and became someone more than the big kid from the trailer park, when I started getting invited to the parties the rich kids threw, I never felt like I belonged there, no matter how badly I wanted to. I wanted to be rich and famous and come back to Cottonwood Wells and make all those rich kids who made me feel like trailer trash grovel before my wealth and power. But as I got older, I was more concerned with getting out of Cottonwood Wells then avenging myself on the rich kids.

At LSU, I had a taste of fame as a three year letterman on a damned good football team. Other students recognized me when I walked to class, and in restaurants and bars, so did the more rabid football fans. But I knew damned well that if I wasn’t on the football team, Beta Kappa would have never given me a bid to join their fraternity. I was never comfortable with the status I had as a football player…

So forget the fantasy. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t even care about being rich any more. All I cared about was being comfortable, not having to worry about paying my bills-and I’d already achieved that.

But if Glynis Parrish’s killer was never brought to justice, my credibility would be gone forever. I would be known as ‘that guy who blew the case because he couldn’t make a positive identification of Freddy Bliss-who paid him money.’ I’d be even more notorious than Mark Fuhrman.

Could Barbara Castlemaine, my boss at Crown Oil, afford the bad publicity of keeping me on under those circumstances?

I could lose everything.

That reality was the final trigger. As I slid behind the wheel of my car, the anxiety attack started for real.

You’re going to lose everything you’ve worked for your entire life. Your life is fucked now. You don’t have a choice. You’re going to have to hope that either the police solve the case or you solve it for them. If the killer is never found, it isn’t just Frillian’s heads it will hang over-it will hang over yours. You will always be known as the guy who fucked up the Glynis Parrish murder. No one will hire you. People will whisper about you when you walk by. You’ll lose your job with Barbara, and then what the fuck are you going to do?

The thoughts swam through my mind as my heart raced and my breath came in gasps.

Think happy thoughts, Chanse. Go to that beach in your head. Green waves lapping against the white sand. The sun is shining and a soft breeze is blowing. You’re lying on a towel, soaking up the sun’s rays, everything is peaceful, everything is fine.

My heart rate slowed.

The dark spots in front of my eyes disappeared.

I’d beaten it again.

I sat there, behind the wheel, focusing on breathing in and out slowly and carefully. I started the car, turning the defroster on high, and watched as the fog on the windshield started to clear from the bottom up. I glanced at my watch. It was barely nine o’clock. They were about to send out their press release.

Even if they didn’t say a word about me, it was only a matter of time before my name would be uncovered as a witness.

My life was going to change completely-it would never be the same again.

You should have gotten out of this when you had the chance.

In less than twenty-four hours, my life was going to be completely different. I pounded on the steering wheel in frustration.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me. No matter how many times it happens, though, you never get used to it. You go through life always expecting things to be the same, or the changes to be small and gradual. You never think about all the horrible things that could happen to take the wind out of your sails and knock you off your feet. The first time my life had changed due to circumstances beyond my control was when Paul died. The second time was Hurricane Katrina, obviously. The evacuation, the destruction, the long time away, the return to a city that at the time seemed-and sometimes still seemed-broken beyond repair; the way of life that all of us who lived in New Orleans had known and loved and somehow taken for granted was gone forever. Again, I began dividing my life into before and after.

But this wasn’t the same. My therapist was helping me deal with my feelings of guilt over Paul’s death, and I was coping with it a lot better. The two ordeals, barely a year apart, had forced me to reevaluate my life and myself-who I was, the kind of person I was and the kind of person I wanted to be for the rest of my life. My therapist helped a lot-I was doing a lot better than I had been, and I’d was a better boyfriend to Allen than I had been to Paul. I no longer felt as though I needed to be punished, and the truth was, I had started to realize that I had always felt that I needed to be punished, and this went back to my childhood. A sense that I didn’t deserve good things to happen to me, and anything good that came into my life was just a tease, a tantalizing glimpse of what happiness could be-something to be yanked away from me just as I was beginning to enjoy myself and my life again.

I’d really had no choice in either of those situations-Paul wasn’t kidnapped and murdered to punish me; it had happened because he had made soft-core porn wrestling videos and had attracted the notice of someone who belonged in a mental hospital. And the hurricane? Well, I have no control or say over the forces of nature, and it would have been the height of self-absorption to think that an entire city had been destroyed to punish me for any sins I may have committed in my life.

This was different. This time I had a choice, some control over what was going to happen. I realized this as I sat there in my car waiting for the windshield to clear. I could be proactive and take charge of the situation. Frillian was going to do what was best for them. They didn’t care what impact all of this might have on me, my career and my life. Why should they? They were trying to protect their own careers, the life they’d built together, the work they were doing to rebuild New Orleans.

I needed to do the same thing. I had a good life. I’d rebuilt it after the hurricane. I’d taken control. I’d gone to a therapist to work through all of my own issues. I was doing better emotionally. My career was going well. My personal life might not be the greatest, but I was working on it.

It was a very bad situation for me. But I could take this bad situation and turn it into an opportunity. It would come at a price, of course.

Everything does. It’s a question of being willing to pay that price.

I could feel the anxiety rising again, and I cleared my mind again.

Can your life bear that kind of scrutiny?

“Stop it,” I said out loud. “Just don’t go there, Chanse.”

After I graduated from LSU and went to work as a cop in New Orleans, I scrimped and saved every cent I could, worked every overtime hour I could get my hands on, so that I could leave the force and go out on my own as a private eye. I was a good cop, but I hated being accountable to superiors with their own agendas and ambitions. My career with the force had no blemishes-those two years could certainly bear scrutiny.

My first client as an investigator was my landlady, who was so grateful for the job I did for her that she’d reduced my rent to $100 a month and gotten me the gig with her company, Crown Oil. There are undoubtedly many negative things people could say about Barbara Castlemaine, and most of them were true. But it was also true that she never forgot when someone did her a good turn, and she was incredibly loyal. I knew I could count on her not to turn her back on me. There was also Paige-and Venus and Blaine. They’d stand by me. The Maxwells would,