Murder in the Rue Ursulines Read Online Free PDF Page A

dark hair white-blonde and applied for work as a dancer at the Catbox Club. “I was on the drill team in high school,” she’d told me after she’d moved in with Jephtha. “I just use the same moves we learned at drill camp and voila, I became a stripper.” I liked her because she was honest and a hard worker, and unlike her predecessors, she actually cared about Jephtha. She did her best to make sure he ate decent and regular meals, and tried to keep the house as tidy as she could. She was taking a couple of classes at the University of New Orleans, majoring in pre-law, no less.
     The house on Constantinople had belonged to his grandmother. She’d died while he was in prison and left it to him. It was a typical New Orleans shotgun house—so-called because if you stood in the front door and fired a shotgun, the bullet would go all the way through the house and out the back door without hitting a wall. Typical of the style, the house was long and narrow. It was badly in need of paint. The yard was also a mess—Jephtha rarely remembered to mow the small patch of lawn, and the roses his grandmother had planted grew wild and out of control. The house also listed slightly to the right. Jephtha’s beat-up old Oldsmobile, with its cracked windshield, leprous-looking paint job, and a screwdriver holding the driver’s window shut sat out in front. Some of the shutters on the windows hung loose—Abby was always nagging at him to do something about them because of the way they banged against the house in the wind. “It’s like talking to a wall,” she’d once told me after haranguing him to no avail.
    I parked behind his car, wondering again why no one ever had it towed as abandoned.  I opened the gate and winced as it screeched. Inside the house, the dogs started barking. The front door opened before I even made it up the groaning steps onto the porch.
    “Hey,” Abby said. She was wearing what looked like a Catholic school uniform—at a school with very lax moral standards. There was no bra under her white shirt, which she’d tied to show her midriff, and I could see the nipples outlined through its tightness. Her feet were bare, showing dark pink polish on her toenails and the scorpion tattoo on her inner calf. She looked like she was about thirteen—except for the massive breasts—and her face was clear of make-up. She never wore make-up unless she was going to work, and she’d tied the bleached hair back in a ponytail that made her look even younger than she usually did. She was smoking an unfiltered Camel. She flicked ash and stood aside. “Go on in—he’s at the computer, where else would he be?” A hint of annoyance crept into her voice.
    “Everything okay, Abby?”
    She shrugged. “I just get tired of nagging him to mow the damned lawn. I might as well just give up and do it myself.” She took another drag, and winked at me. “Go on in, Chanse. I just made some sweet tea—it’s in the fridge. Help yourself.”
     I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks.”
    “I just put a strawberry cobbler in the oven. It’ll be ready in about an hour. You want some?”
    I winked and patted my stomach. “Not on my diet.”
    She made a farting noise with her lips. “You and Jephtha both could use a little more meat on your bones, you ask me.”
     I laughed and walked inside. Despite Abby’s best efforts, the house on the inside always looked unkempt. It was probably the dog hair coating the 1950’s style furniture. I greeted Rhett and Greta, the huge matching black labs, with the head rubs and back scratching that sent them in paroxysms of dog ecstasy, and headed back to the ‘computer lab’, as Jeptha called it.
    The computer lab always looked like a bomb had gone off recently. Sometimes I thought my need for order in my house bordered on the neurotic—my therapist claimed it was a ‘control issue’—“subconsciously, you have a need for control, and since you cannot control the