Vieux Carré Voodoo (2 page)

It makes me want to kiss him.

“When I was a kid, pro wrestling was my porn,” he went on
with a sheepish smile. “I used to love watching them wrestling around in those
little trunks, sweating, rolling around.” He winked at me. “So, yeah, that’s
part of it. But it’s also pretty amazing, you know, the things those guys can
do.”

“So, it was pro wrestling or the FBI?” I teased him. We were
sitting on the couch in our apartment in our underwear, watching some stupid
reality TV show about a bunch of incredibly spoiled and selfish women who’d been
to the plastic surgeon a few times too many—one of those awful so-called “real
housewives” shows
,
or as we liked to call them,
Trailer Trash with Cash—
and I
couldn’t resist adding, “It was the WWE’s loss. You’re going to look amazing in
one of those outfits.”

And so one chilly morning in mid-March, I put Frank on a
plane to Ohio. The training school that had accepted him was one of the best in
the country. I kissed him good-bye and watched him go through security. He
turned and looked back just before he went through the metal detector—and I
forced a smile on my face and waved.

The drive back home sucked. I don’t think you ever realize
how much space someone takes up in your life until they aren’t around anymore.
The apartment seemed so vast and empty with Frank gone. I spent the first few
days finishing up paperwork on cases we’d finished, doing billing and other
busywork that I had a bad habit of putting off.

Then the days until Frank would be back stretched before me
like an endless boring nightmare.

“When did I get to be so boring?” I asked my best friend
David at the gym one afternoon. We’d been working out together for almost eight
years. He is about my height, but has one of those metabolisms that make it hard
for him to gain weight of any kind. He has fair skin and a massive tattoo of a
dragon curling around his left shoulder. He’s a great guy, and you couldn’t ask
for a better friend.

“You need to come out,” he replied as he put another
twenty-five-pound plate on each side of the bar we were using for shoulder
presses. “Your fans miss you in the bars.”

I laughed and started my next set. But as I lifted the
weights and my shoulder muscles screamed in protest, I began to think he might
be right. It was dumb to just mope around the apartment feeling lonely and sorry
for myself.

I finished my set and put the bar down. I stood up, and
David took my place. I stepped behind the apparatus to spot him. As the bar
moved up and down, I starting thinking about everything that had happened the
year I turned thirty. That was the year everything had changed.

Frank and I had met just after I’d turned twenty-nine. It
was during Southern Decadence—one of the great gay party weekends here in town,
every Labor Day weekend—and he was here on a case that I wound up accidentally
getting involved in. I wanted him the first time I laid eyes on him—but we
didn’t have the usual courtship. Instead of dating, our “getting to know you”
period was spent stumbling over bodies and racing against the clock to foil a
madman’s destructive schemes. I also got kidnapped.

Nothing like a wild adventure for bonding, right?

After Decadence, he put in for early retirement and decided
to move to New Orleans.

Unfortunately, I also met someone else during that same
Southern Decadence. He told me his name was Colin Cioni, and he worked for an
international detective corporation known as the Blackledge Agency. Frank and
Colin fell for each other as well, so the three of us worked it all out. We had
a nice three-way relationship (the sex was mind-blowing), and all three of us
went to work for the Blackledge Agency. We even opened up our own little office
on Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, just a short walk from
where we lived on Decatur Street between Barracks and Esplanade in the French
Quarter.

Alas, our happily ever after was rather short-lived. Over
Mardi Gras, another case dropped into our lives involving the Russian mob,
Chechnyan terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda, and my family. I discovered that my
maternal grandfather had had an affair with a Russian ballerina who’d given
birth to triplets. As my half-uncles were being murdered, one after the other,
it turned out that Colin wasn’t who he said he was—he was actually an
international assassin who’d been after my uncles all along. He didn’t get all
three of them—we managed to keep Uncle Misha alive, and he was now an integral
part of my family.

In the wake of finding out someone we’d welcomed into the
family was a sociopathic murderer, probably wanted in most civilized countries
for crimes too numerous to even begin to list, it would have been easy for all
of us to be bitter, hurt, and angry. But even though it was hard, we all stayed
positive. We may have lost two of our Russian uncles, but the one who was left
was truly a gift from the Universe. I know that whenever I started going down
that dark path to anger and bitterness, all I have to do is pick up the phone
and call Uncle Misha—once I hear “Hello?” in that thick accent I am cheered
immeasurably.

And even if everything Colin had ever said to us was a lie,
we
did
have good times together.

The only thing he took with him when he fled the country was
a photograph of the three of us in our Halloween costumes. That had to mean
something, right? He wouldn’t have taken it if he hadn’t cared on some level.

Every once in a while, I’d miss him—and wonder where he was,
if he was even still alive. I never really doubted he was alive—the man had more
lives than a herd of cats—but I couldn’t help but wonder if sometimes when he
was lonely, if that picture of the three of us in our harem boy costumes made
him feel better.

What can I say? I’m sentimental by nature.

So we survived, and got through it all with our spirits
intact. Our little detective agency wasn’t doing so great—turned out the
Blackledge Agency was another one of Colin’s little lies, and I didn’t want to
know where the funding he provided came from—but we picked up little jobs here
and there, and there was Frank’s pension from the FBI.

But I kind of missed the old excitement of murder
investigations. At the time, I didn’t think they were all that fun or
exciting—you never get used to stumbling over a dead body, having a gun pointed
at you, or being kidnapped—but now that those times seemed to be past, I was
getting a little, well,
bored.

I also used to have a bit of a psychic gift. I could usually
channel it through a deck of tarot cards—and sometimes the Goddess Herself
actually spoke to me. I’d go into a trance (which usually scared the shit out of
people who saw it happen) and go to a place between dimensions where She would
give me hints and clues as to what was going to happen in the immediate future.
There was even a time, during a murder investigation, when I communicated with a
dead man.

But after Colin’s betrayal, I wasn’t interested in communing
with Her anymore. How could She have let me—and everyone I loved—be completely
deceived by a sociopathic killer? She never even gave me one of Her “figure this
out for yourself” vague clues.

She was dead to me, and good riddance to you, bitch.

Okay, maybe I was a
little
bitter about the Colin
thing.

So the summer of 2005 dragged on, and about mid-July my
family and friends suddenly woke up to the fact that my thirtieth birthday was
approaching.

And the teasing started.

My birthday is in August, which means I was born under the
sign of Leo. (And every single time someone asks me for my astrological sign, I
always get the same reaction when I tell them I’m a Leo. They smile, nod
knowingly, and say, “Of course you are.”
I
choose to take it as a
compliment.) All the weeks leading up to my birthday, there seemed to be a
concerted effort by every single person I know—relatives, friends, etc—to
convince me that I was going to wake up on my thirtieth birthday to discover
that my life was over. I personally didn’t think it was a big deal—age is just a
number, and I believe you can enjoy life at any age—my grandparents and parents
are prime examples of this. When they started giving me shit about it, at first
I just laughed it all off. But after a while, the constant teasing and warnings
started to get inside my head a little—which, of course, was their evil plan all
along. My best friend and workout partner, David—who I might add is almost
forty
and was one of the worst teasers—finally let me off the hook the day before my
birthday at the gym, when I was freaking out a little bit.

“Get a grip, girl.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as I
struggled with the leg press machine. “You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and
have no sex drive, no hair, and no teeth. My thirties were way better than my
twenties. You look great; you have a hot as hell boyfriend, a great family, and
lots of friends—so you’re going to be thirty. Forget about the number and just
enjoy yourself.” He winked at me, shaking his head. “Such a drama queen.”

I absolutely love David. He’s a great friend—and through all
the murders and things he was always right there by my side. Considering the
fact being my friend has directly resulted in his car being totaled, his nose
broken, and his house shot up, I really am lucky he still talks to me.

And he was right. In fact, my thirtieth birthday rocked
pretty hard, to be honest. It fell on a Saturday, and Frank woke me up with
breakfast in bed wearing just a black jock. “Now this is something I could get
used to every morning,” I said as I sat up in bed, giving his amazing body a
longing once-over with my eyes. He’d made my absolute favorite
breakfast—blueberry pancakes with strawberry syrup, with some bacon crisped up
in the microwave—with a mimosa and a cup of coffee spiked with Baileys. Frank
climbed back into the bed with me, and when I finished everything on the tray he
gave me a pretty nice dessert.

Ah, if only every day could start that way!

And that was just the start of an absolutely amazing day. I
got lots of nice presents (an iPod I’d been coveting, a new laptop, tons of
clothes, and an ounce of killer pot from Chico, California, from my parents)—and
maybe the best present of all came from my two grandfathers.

They released my trust funds. They’d frozen them when I’d
dropped out of Vanderbilt, and to be honest, I kind of figured the money was
gone for good. Instead, with a couple of signatures and notary stamps, I went
from having eight dollars in my checking account and about fifteen in my savings
to having a net worth (on paper) of about eight figures. I had no idea there was
that much money in my trusts. I couldn’t touch the principal—all of our family’s
trusts are set up that way, to protect us from fortune hunters and our own
stupidity, as my mom says—but I could access the interest income. That was
enough so that I never had to work another day in my life if I so chose.

Timing is everything. As I said before, our little private
eye agency wasn’t exactly a smashing success. We’d even been considering closing
the office and just working out of the apartment to save money. It had even
gotten to the point where I was seriously considering breaking out my thongs and
shaking my ass on bars for dollars again.

The other thing I hadn’t known about the trusts was that all
the money was invested in oil and health insurance stock, so it was just going
to continue to increase in value.

I felt a little guilty about that. In my mind, those two
industries are the modern-day epitome of evil. So I asked my mother about it—I
mean, this is a woman who has chained herself to the front gates of nuclear
power plants. She just shook her head. “Scotty, blood money spends just like any
other kind,” she said, “and when a charity is cashing your check, they don’t
care where the money originally came from.” She sighed. “I know that might seem
like a justification, but real life isn’t black and white—there’s an awful lot
of gray.” She winked at me. “It helps me feel better about the money. I mean, if
the oil companies knew what I did with my share of their profits, a lot of
high-powered executives in board rooms would need to change their underpants.”

So I wrote a nice check to the NO/AIDS Task Force, and Frank
and I decided that every quarter when I got the interest checks, we’d donate
half of it to charity.

And there would still be more than enough money left over
for us to live on, quite well.

That night, my best friend David provided us all with some
of the best Ecstasy I’ve ever had and we went dancing at the gay bars in the
Quarter, going back and forth from Oz to the Parade and back again. The deejays
played the best music ever, and I danced and danced and danced like there was no
tomorrow. I felt beautiful, and happy, and loved.

All in all, it was one of the best birthdays I ever had.

And the next afternoon when I woke up in Frank’s arms, I
remember thinking how blessed I was. I lived in the greatest city in the world
with the man I loved, I had the best friends and family any gay man could ask
for, I had more money than I knew what to do with, I had my health, and I just
couldn’t imagine life getting any better than it was at that very instant.

How was I supposed to know that just around the corner was
the biggest bitch-slap reality could come up with?

Just eight days after that wonderful lazy afternoon in bed
with Frank, a Category 5 one-eyed bitch named Katrina came roaring ashore just
to the east of New Orleans. For those of you who don’t have televisions or
computers, the storm surge came into Lake Pontchartrain, and the federally
built, funded, and maintained levee system that was supposed to protect the city
from just such a thing was a little, shall we say,
inadequate.