Murder in the Rue Ursulines

Predictably, I sneezed. He looked up from the computer screen and grinned at me. There was an open bottle of Coke next to his keyboard, and in one hand he held a bag of Funions. As I watched, he tilted the bag over his mouth and shook the crumbs out in a shower-some of them missing his mouth and dusting his cheeks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him when he wasn’t eating or snacking on something, but somehow he never gained a pound. He was taller than me-about six-feet-six with maybe 150 pounds on his long-limbed frame. He wore his light brown hair long and was always pushing it out of his pale face. His face was long and thin, and he was wearing his glasses. “Hey, Chanse, buddy,” he said, spitting out Funion crumbs as he wiped his hands on his Che Guevara T-shirt. “You got something for me, man?”

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the folder of e-mails. “I need you to trace the computer these came from.” I handed it to him.

He didn’t even look at them, just slid the folder on top of the stack closest to his computer. He waved a hand. “Piece of cake-so easy it’s hardly even worth my time. I keep telling you-let me teach you how to do it yourself, save you a trip over here and some money, too.”

I shook my head. “Nah, I’d rather pay you to do it.”

“Well, you know my rule. I have to charge for at least an hour’s worth of work.” He said it apologetically. He always seemed to regret charging me for the work he did for me, no matter how much I insisted it was more than worth it to me.

“That’s fine.” Jephtha’s hourly rate was ridiculously low. “I don’t want you to have to go back to a life of crime.”

“No worries on that score, trust me.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Like I said, it won’t take more than ten minutes, tops.” He grinned at me. “But you got to check this out, man.” He enjoyed writing programs, but his real love was designing computer games. He confided in me once that should one of his games ever catch on and become a success, he wanted to start a foundation to help kids like him.

“I don’t want some other kid to wind up in jail the way I did,” he said simply, “just because there wasn’t anyone around to help out.” That was the kind of person Jephtha was. There was no doubt in my mind that one day he’d finally design the game that would make him millions. I suspected the only reason he hadn’t so far was his macabre sense of humor. His games were usually inspired by something that irritated him. He used the computer games to vent his spleen. Some of them were so brilliantly funny-if slightly disturbing-that they just might catch on in the increasingly violent world of computer gaming.

I looked at the computer screen and recognized Tourist Season, his latest game. In it, the player walked through the streets of the French Quarter with an automatic weapon. You got points for killing tourists doing things they shouldn’t. But if the tourist was just walking along doing nothing wrong, you lost points for shooting them. You also lost points for killing locals. It certainly cracked me up. The more horrible the tourist, the more points you got. For example, if you shot a tourist taking a piss on the street, it was worth two thousand points. Shooting the couple having sex in public was worth five thousand points. Blowing away the jerk throwing trash in the street was only a thousand points.

The game was paused. An obvious tourist, in one of those ridiculous Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts, was pissing in front of the Cabildo. “I’ve been working on this some more. Pull up a chair, man.” He started the game again, blowing the man to bits, and then reset the game. “You want to play while I trace this? It won’t take ten minutes, I’m telling you.” He grinned at me. “You know you want to kill some tourists.”

It was a hard offer to resist. I moved a pile of newspapers, magazines and crumpled empty bags of chips on top of a pile already on the floor. I pulled the chair over next to his. He rolled his chair over to another computer, and started typing away at the keyboard. I looked at the computer screen in front of me and clicked on the mouse to start the game. I took aim and shot at a woman running across Burgundy Street pushing a baby in a stroller in front of her as a car slammed on its brakes. As the woman’s head exploded, I said, “Um, this game is kind of sick, Jephtha.”

“Yeah, well,” he replied grimly, looking over at the screen in front of me, “that very thing happened to me yesterday when I was taking Abby to work. Some stupid pregnant woman with a baby ran right out in front of my car. Why would anyone do something so stupid? I mean, what if my brakes were bad? And there wasn’t a car behind me. She couldn’t wait twenty seconds for me to go by?” He glowered. “Just because you can breed doesn’t mean you should.” He pursed his lips at me. “At least in the game she’s not pregnant. And besides, you don’t kill the baby. If you do, you lose points.” He shook his head. “I’m not that sick.” He gave me an innocent grin.

“Well, no video game company would allow that. People would get pissed.”

“And it would make the national news. The family values assholes would get up in arms-even though women who risk their kids’ lives like that-that’s who they should be pissed at-and every teenaged boy in the country would want to play it, and I’d make a bazillion dollars.” He reached for the folder he’d set down on the desk beside the computer screen. He opened it and removed one of the e-mail printouts, then handed the folder back to me. “All I need is the information on one of these.” He peered at the paper, and laughed. “Chanse, this is not even a challenge, you know? When you going to give me something hard to do?” He sighed. “It’s like taking candy from a baby. You want lunch or something? Abby’s making a strawberry cobbler…her cobblers are fucking awesome, man. It’s like going to heaven.” He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips.

My stomach growled, but Jephtha had treated me to lunch once before. He’d made me an ‘Elvis special,’ a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. It had sat in my stomach for the rest of the day like a lead weight. “No, I’m meeting someone for lunch in about an hour,” I lied, glancing at my watch. “You’ll be done by then?”

“I told you, I’ll have this IP address in like two seconds…there it is.” His eyes gleamed. “Okay, give me another few minutes and I’ll know whose computer this is…well shit fire.” He sneered at his computer screen. “This e-mail address is one of those dummy ones, you know, the kind where you don’t have to give any personal information?” His fingers flew over the keyboard. He shrugged. “Okay, so this is going to take a few more minutes. I’ll have to trace the computer-if they registered it.” He glanced over at me. “Don’t look at my screen, okay? I’m going to have to do something you won’t approve of. Just keep playing Tourist Season.”

“I don’t want to know what you’re doing.” I turned back to the screen in front of me. A man and a woman were copulating in a doorway. I aimed, fired and they both exploded. Five thousand points! In spite of myself, I grinned in satisfaction. Everyone in New Orleans is going to want to play this game, I thought to myself. “You know, you’re probably right about this game.” I said as I took aim at another drunken tourist, this one staggering out in the road carrying a forty-eight ounce daiquiri cup and wearing a feather boa. BLAM! Another twenty-five hundred points. “It’s kind of addicting.” I fired at a car with MICHIGAN plates crawling along at about five miles an hour while everyone in the car gawked at the buildings going by. It exploded, body parts flying everywhere, giving me another ten thousand points. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.

It was fun. “The New Orleans Tourism Board would probably pay you not to put this on the market.” I added, aiming at a couple of girls in sorority sweatshirts puking in a gutter. I missed, and shot a woman walking her dog on the other side of the street. I lost ten thousand points. Locals were worth a lot more than tourists.

“There.” Jephtha leaned back in his chair with a triumphant grin. One of his printers began to hum. Pages began coming out into the drop tray. “I told you it would be a piece of cake. I’m printing out the bill of sale right now. But-“ he held up a long and bony index finger, “this is the person who bought and registered the computer. It doesn’t mean they still have it.” He picked up a page and whistled. “Glynis Parrish? As in Glynis Parrish, the movie star?”

With real regret, I turned away from Tourist Season and took the paper from him. Sure enough, there it was in black and white. A MacBook Pro, purchased at an Apple store in Beverly Hills. I definitely didn’t want to know how he got this. I stood up and smiled at Jephtha. “E-mail me an invoice, and I’ll get a check to you this week.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me if it’s the Glynis Parrish or not?” He stuck out his lower lip in a pout that made him look about ten years old.

I laughed and winked at him. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” I slipped the bill of sale into the folder with the rest of the e-mails, and tucked it under my arm. I called out a goodbye to Abby, and headed out the front door.

My cell phone rang just as I was getting into my car. I grinned. It was my best friend, Paige. “What’s going on,