Murder in the Rue Ursulines by Greg Herren

have you been with her?”
    “Since she came to New Orleans.” Rosemary pushed an errant lock of hair back from her forehead.
    “So, about two weeks?”
    Her eyes widened. “Two weeks? Oh, no, she’s been here for about two months now. I was hired about a week or so before then—her former assistant had quit to have a baby—and I put the house together for her, found the housekeeper and everyone else.” She looked down. “It’s really an honor to work for her. I’ve been a fan for years.” She bridled a bit. “She says she wants me to come back to California with her when the movie wraps.”
    “Wow.” I smiled at her. “Are you going to go?”
    “I’ve always wanted to live in California,” she said wistfully. “And it’s a wonderful opportunity for me.” She took the piece of paper back from me and pulled a pen out of her pocket. “Let me give you my cell number. You can call me anytime. I’m at your disposal.” She wrote it down. “I’ll let everyone know you’re going to be getting in touch with them, and that it’s okay for them to talk to you.”
    “I appreciate that.” I folded the paper and slid it into the folder. I walked over to the front door.
    “It was nice meeting you.” She said, offering me her hand again. “And remember, call me if you need anything, okay?”
    All the way back to my apartment, I replayed the whole interview in my head. Rosemary seemed okay, but I didn’t quite buy the ‘she’s a great employer’ routine. It seemed a little rehearsed—and the way Glynis had acted toward her made it seem like bullshit. Granted, maybe Glynis was having a bad day—she’d said she was—but something my landlady told me once about another woman in her social circle kept coming back to me.
    Barbara Castlemaine moved in the stratosphere of New Orleans society—and had been one of my first clients. I’d handled something for her with discretion, and we’d become friends over the years. It had been at a party she’d given at her Garden District mansion, and after I ‘d been talking to this perfectly charming woman for nearly an hour, Barbara had peeled me away from her and in a low voice warned me away from her. “She’s a horrible woman,” she’d insisted over my protests. “You can always tell what kind of a person someone is by how they treat the help—and she treats hers like garbage.”
    Glynis had certainly treated Rosemary that way. I wondered if she was that way with her other employees.
    I called Loren to check in with him, see how he wanted me to proceed—or if he wanted me to. I got his voice-mail and left a rather detailed message about my progress so far—tracing the computer and so forth. I closed with, “Unless I hear otherwise, I’m going to proceed with checking out the people who had access to Glynis Parrish’s computer.”
    I left messages for Glynis’s posse, then sat down at my desk and turned on my own computer. I opened a spreadsheet, and started logging in the dates and times the e-mails had been sent. It didn’t take long for the pattern to start to emerge. All of them had been sent in the early afternoons—and always on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
    I started reading them again. Glynis had been right about one thing—the e-mails were all vile. They all alluded in some way to something Freddy had done—how his public persona was not who he really was. You act like such a do-gooder, one taunted, but those of us who know what you’re really like know better. You might be able to fool the world with your St. Freddy act, but I know the real Freddy. How do you sleep at night?
    What on earth did that mean?
    I logged onto the Internet and did a search for Freddy Bliss— and was promptly rewarded with over a hundred thousand hits. I moaned. It would take me forever to wade my way through all of them—and Glynis and Jillian probably had just as many on-line mentions. I sighed, and started clicking on links. A lot of them I was able to