Garden District Gothic by Greg Herren

Author:Greg Herren [Herren, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626396685
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2016-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Magician, Reversed

Use of power for selfish gains

I pulled up in front of Jerry Channing’s house and tried to steel my nerve to get out of the car.

I’d rather have had a root canal than go knock on his door, but it couldn’t be helped.

A woman in her eighties, wearing a black T-shirt with WHO DAT written in gold glitter across her rather large breasts, walked two enormous poodles with glittering collars past, undoubtedly on her way to Coliseum Square, the park at the end of the block. A Cox Cable truck rumbled past me, followed by a couple of shirtless, sweating joggers who were clearly insane—the heat index was hovering around 105, even at this early hour. A hipster wearing cut-off brown slacks with long strings hanging down his legs came around the corner riding a bicycle, his long kinky beard almost reaching the handlebars of what appeared to be an 1980s-era Schwinn girl’s one-speed, complete with a white basket with plastic daisies affixed and pink and white streamers from the handlebars.

Given the porkpie hat, I assumed he was riding the bike ironically.

I took a deep breath, summoned my courage and nerve, and opened the car door.

The heat hit me in the face like a bitch-slap from an angry drag queen. I could feel my armpits, feet, and forehead getting wet with sweat. It was too damned hot to dress in long pants or anything with sleeves, but Frank and Colin both insisted I dress “business casual” since this was actually a professional interview.

It was just as well. I didn’t like the idea of going to Jerry Channing’s wearing a tank top and cargo shorts or anything clingy and revealing, no matter how hot it was.

To be honest, I hated the idea of going to Jerry Channing’s house, period.

I leaned back against the car, delaying some more. It was actually a nice house, a late nineteenth century Victorian double he’d bought and renovated into a single. Even as a double, the individual units had been gigantic—they had to be at least two thousand square feet each. Why he wanted four thousand square feet of house was beyond me—we had more room with our two twelve-hundred-square-feet places than we knew what to do with, and there were four of us. He’d been able to get it on the cheap, too, before the Lower Garden District’s renaissance in the late 1990s sent the price of houses there into the stratosphere. When I was growing up the Lower Garden District was an undesirable, high-crime area with crumbling houses, and Coliseum Square itself was a known drug dealers’ hangout. Now, of course, it was gentrified—the St. Thomas Housing Projects and the partially demolished highway on-ramp distant memories.

Jerry had done some of the renovation work himself, hiring contractors to do what he couldn’t—plumbing, electrical wiring, things like that—and it took him just over two years to complete. The house was raised about six feet above the ground, and the front porch, painted a dark emerald green, had square columns.

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