Read Murder in the Rue St. Ann for Free Online Page B

doing what to Dominique?”
    “I know she told you about the trouble with the liquor licenses.” He shook his head. “You’d think the other clubs would welcome another one into the fold. More clubs means more people. I managed to get the club open for Southern Decadence, and you couldn’t tell a difference— all the bars were full.”
    “So you all managed to get it open for Decadence? How?” Paul and I had gone out during Decadence, but had never gone beyond the St. Ann line on Bourbon. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. That dividing line, invisible as it may be, was fixed in my head.
    He nodded. “We got them a special event license. She couldn’t stay open for 24 hours, but she could open at nine as an event and stay open till six in the morning. She did a bang up business too.”
    “And the other bars see this as threatening?”
    He held up his hands. “I don’t understand it, Chanse. It doesn’t make much sense. I have friends who bartend at Oz and they say it was the busiest Decadence there ever. My friends at the Pub say the same thing. Business was up everywhere. But both bars are trying to keep her from opening.”
    I scribbled that down. “And you’ve told Dominique this?”
    “She doesn’t believe me.” Mark shrugged. “They’re nice to her when she sees them, and act friendly, so she can’t believe they’d do her dirty like that.” His eyes hardened. “She doesn’t realize how things work here in the Quarter. How much do you know about the bars?”
    “Not much.” I’d been to all of them, but didn’t know much about them. Some of the bartenders and barbacks I recognized, but for the most part I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know who owned or managed either the Pub or Oz. I knew the same company owned Rawhide, Lafitte’s, Good Friend’s, and the Clover Grill, but I didn’t know the company’s name. The bars were just a place to go, drink, and meet guys. Since I’d met Paul, I’d gone mainly to drink and dance, back when we went out. Paul and I had taken to staying home more and more.
    Who owned or ran the bars hadn’t been of much interest to me.
    “It’s a savage, cutthroat business.” Mark said, shaking his head. “I’m telling you, Chanse, look no further than the bars.”
    “Do you have any proof? Have any threats been made?”
    “They’re way too smart for that.”
    This wasn’t much help, so I stood up. “All right, thanks Mark. If I have more questions—“
    “Please give me a shout. I want to help in any way I can.”
    I walked over to the door.
    He stood up. “Sometimes—“ He hesitated.
    I stopped. “Yes?”
    “I wonder if it’s because she’s black.”
    I froze with my hand on the doorknob. I wondered if this was going to come up. Since I’d first laid eyes on a publicity still of Dominique on a website, I’d hoped it wouldn’t.
    Race is a complicated issue. Most white people like to think it isn’t anymore. The Civil Rights movement had been a success, and all the problems of black people were finished, over, done with. They could vote, they could go to college, and they could get any job they wanted.
    But the vast majority of black folks in New Orleans were still unemployed, or working at minimum wage jobs. Black women still worked as maids and paid companions in the Garden District and Uptown—some of them worked for the families their mothers had worked for before them. The majority of the bellmen and porters at the hotels of the Quarter were black men. Burger flipper, grocery bagger, drug stores, waiter and waitress, convenience store clerk—these were jobs  the Civil Rights movement  had opened the doors to.
    If most white people liked to think that the problems were over, they did so only by ignoring the evidence of the poverty and desperation all around them.
    Which most of them did.
    But the blacks knew better. They were living it. Maybe they’d come a long way, but they still knew. They saw the way some white people looked