G.T. Herren - Paige Tourneur 02 - Dead Housewives of New Orleans Read Free Page B

groom.”
    Remy Valence was the last of an old moneyed New Orleans family, and it was no surprise to me they had no children. I’d eventually learned that Chloe herself was from Monroe— there were rumors she’d paid her way through college by working in some of the less classy strip clubs over in Biloxi. The story I’d been told was that Remy’s mother had been an old battle-axe and had flatly told Remy he needed a wife or the Valence family fortune was going to be divided up amongst her favorite charities in her will… so he grudgingly married the first woman he could find. Apparently they got along so well they’d stayed married even after Remy got his inheritance.
    Then again, that could have all been just vicious gossip. It was almost too good to be true.
    After Katrina, she was promoted to city editor, and then it was only just a matter of time before I left the paper. When the job as editor of
Crescent City
was offered to me, I grabbed it with both hands and never looked back.
    Ironically, Chloe left the paper shortly after I did to pursue her dream of being a novelist.
    The world was still breathlessly awaiting her first novel.
    Of course, once she learned I was now in charge of the magazine, her attitude changed towards me dramatically. Now, every time she saw me she acted like I was her long lost best friend, giving me her big phony smile and a big hug and air kiss that made me want to shove the bitch down a flight of stairs. But I was always polite and friendly to both her and her husband, Remy— who definitely set off my Gaydar.
    The story I’d heard was she’d joined the cast to try to jumpstart her writing career.
    Yeah, good luck with that,
I thought, as the next grande dame appeared on the screen,
actually writing might work even better.
    I didn’t really catch anything about the next two women, since I was so caught up in reliving my utter hatred of all things Chloe Valence. I knew Megan Dreher was a former Miss Louisiana and married to a real estate developer with a rather bad reputation in town, and Serena Castlemaine was a many-times married oil heiress from Texas who’d moved to New Orleans after Katrina and bought a penthouse at 1 River Place. The story was she was trying to buy her way into New Orleans society— which wasn’t as easy as one might think, and had broken many women before her. She was somehow related to Chanse’s landlady and biggest client, Barbara.
    The final grande dame actually
was
a grande dame, and I still couldn’t believe Margery Lautenschlaeger had agreed to be on this show. She’d been the sole heir to the Schwartzberg liquor fortune. The Schwartzbergs had been selling liquor in southeastern Louisiana for well over a hundred years, and it was hard to imagine a business more lucrative than hawking booze in New Orleans. She’d also married into a liquor family— Lautenschlaeger Schnapps was one of the more popular brands of the German liquor in the world. Margery threw money around lavishly— she was a huge supporter of museums, the ballet association, the Tennessee Williams Festival, anything that could remotely be considered the arts. She lived in an enormous mansion on St. Charles Avenue, and her picture frequently appeared on the social pages of the
Times-Picayune
. In fact, she appeared in the paper so often that less kind people joked that she must have a press agent. She was also a bit of a local character— she said what she thought and didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her. She always had a coterie of adoring gay men around her. She used a long marble cigarette holder, wore turbans with diamond brooches, loved large brimmed hats with veils, and was purported to single-handedly keep the Saks at Canal Place open. Her husband had died in a tragic yachting accident, and all three of her sons— who now ran the companies— were married with kids. There was a daughter, too, but I didn’t know anything about her.
    In the opening montage, Margery