Crescent City Connection (13 page)

A short walk with more media people in attendance than there were cops in the building.

Bazemore’s hands were cuffed behind him. Skip at one side, Boudreaux at the other, cameras everywhere. People eddied and swirled, shouting inane questions. Skip felt as if she’d been up for two days.

Perhaps, she thought later, she should have been more alert. In retrospect she had no idea where her attention had been when she heard the shot.

Bazemore stumbled and went down.

Reporters scrambled, some tripping over wires and falling as well.

Skip stared down at her prisoner for no more than a second— a split second, it couldn’t have been more—and immediately jerked her head up to the Broad Street overpass. A man was there, running. Traffic had slowed. But she had no shot, given the number of civilians both here and there.

She simply watched, frozen, unbelieving, as the man ran, holding what was apparently a high-powered rifle.

When they turned Bazemore over, his nose was gone.

* * *

Skip spent the next morning giving statements to other officers and avoiding giving any to the press. Cappello was handling that.

The letter came with her other mail—the only piece that wasn’t junk, but she would have noticed it anyway. It was in a plain white business envelope, with her name and address neatly typed, plain as you please. The arresting part was in the upper left-hand corner, where the return address should have been. It was only two words: The Jury.

It had been mailed the same day Nolan Bazemore was shot. Skip called Cappello. “Sylvia, come over here.” Cappello took one look and immediately came to the same conclusion Skip had. “Omigod. Let’s get the bomb squad. And the crime lab.”

They left it there, not touching it, till the bomb squad had pronounced it safe and the lab had dusted. Then, carefully, and in the presence of witnesses, Skip slit it open and read.

Dear Detective Langdon:

We wish to congratulate you on your swift and excellent work in apprehending Nolan Bazemore, a blight on the city of New Orleans and indeed on the entire country, which used to be worth something. That’s right—used to be. This used to be a country where it was safe for old ladies to walk down the street in the middle of the day, where public schools were excellent and every child assured a good education, where neighbors took care of each other, cared about each other, and where crime was negligible. In the event a crime was committed, the criminal was entitled to a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, twelve good men and true, and more often than not, justice was done. At any rate, we certainly expected it to be, and if it was not, we were surprised. We were shocked and we were outraged.

To our eternal sadness, this is no longer true. We no longer permit our grandmothers to walk alone (or our children, for that matter), we accept the decrepitude of our schools, many of us carry guns against the rising tide of crime, and we do not expect justice. We have become a nation of cynics. We expect judges to sleep on the bench, juries to acquit, and lawyers to get rich.

Why is this? It is because we do not care anymore. Because we are beyond caring. Because we do not see why we should care because we know the situation is hopeless.
Our
situation is hopeless.

We are too defeated to have any hope.

We know that the people selected to serve on juries will be poorly informed, poorly employed, possibly below average intelligence, and easily influenced by unscrupulous lawyers. We believe this is how the system has evolved. Yet we do not care enough to try to correct it.

Are we willing to serve on juries ourselves? Certainly not. We have bigger fish to fry. We have our jobs and our families—we cannot be troubled by a little thing like justice. And so the system has been subverted. And so we are without hope.

In Chief Albert Goodlett we had a chance at a real change in one of our major cities. In the only city in the world, possibly in the history of the world, that currently has two officers on Death Row. In what is possibly the worst police department in, once again, the history of the world.

There is much in a name. Chief Goodlett was a good man. An honest man. A competent man.

And he was shot to death by an unworthy enemy, an enemy of the church, the state, the Lord—of our very system of justice and the only decent chance it has had in years.

Nolan Bazemore was scum. He was not fit to lick the boots of Chief Albert Goodlett, and there will not be a single detractor among those who read this letter, black or white. This is not a racial issue. Yet Nolan Bazemore was a racist—an ignorant racist peckerwood who deserved to die. Nolan Bazemore was guilty of cold-blooded homicide and he was guiltier still of another outrage—of destroying our Hope! Just when we had Hope, he destroyed it.

Had he stood trial, Nolan Bazemore, poor as he was, ignorant as he was, would have had a lawyer, and that is right and good. But that lawyer would have had that courtroom full of psychiatrists. They would have presented a defense that would have shamed us all as Americans and there is not a one among us who is not aware of it. We would have heard that Nolan Bazemore was deprived of love, he ate too many sweets, or he had a rare disease that caused hatred of people of color, and we would have watched helplessly as he was found innocent of the murder of a good man.

This is the truth, fellow Americans—there will not be one who reads this letter who expected him to be convicted, any more than Billy Ray Hutchison was convicted. Because we do not expect our system of justice to work, and we are not disappointed. IT DOES NOT WORK!

And so we The Jury claim responsibility, as the newspapers say, for the trial, conviction, and execution of Nolan Bazemore. It saddens us deeply that such action is necessary and yet we know that it is, and you, Detective Langdon, know that it is, and you, fellow Americans, know that it is.

We refer you to the Bible:

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

Romans 12

In anger and in wrath I will execute vengeance.

Micah 5

If I whet my glittering sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will requite those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh.

Deuteronomy 32

He said, I will rise, I will cover the earth … That day is the day of the Lord God of hosts a day of vengeance, to avenge himself on his foes, The sword shall devour and be sated, and drink its fill of your blood.

Jeremiah 46

The letter was signed, “Very sincerely yours, The Jury.”

A “c.c.” note indicated the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, and New Orleans Times-Picayune had also received it, along with various television stations.

Sergeant Adam Abasolo had come up behind them as they were reading it. “Well,” he said. “Gets my attention.”

“That,” said Skip, “says it all.” She felt her lips tight against her teeth.

She hated this. It terrified her. It scared her a great deal more than mindlessness, or simple craziness. This was complicated craziness. This was a very effective mind at work. And it made her want to run screaming into the woods.

She felt her heart beating, her pulse racing, and realized that part of what she was feeling was anger.

We might expect our system to be falling apart, but we’ve got other expectations, too—criminals are supposed to be stupid. I don’t need goddamn Professor Moriarty here.

Part of it was irrational anger, but part of it was rational. She was pissed off at anyone who had a brain that functioned as well as the letter-writer’s and still went around killing people. A person who most assuredly knew right from wrong, and who had chosen wrong.

Chosen evil.

She shivered. It gave her goose bumps. And made her think of Errol Jacomine.

Her heart pounded faster as she scanned the letter again.

Maybe there’s a reason it makes me think of Jacomine.

“Bigger fish to fry.” That phrase again.

And the cadences. The rhythm—so like a sermon. The Bible verses at the end, as if tacked on—first the rational mind, then a little glimpse of craziness, as if the writer couldn’t stop himself.

And New Orleans—why focus on New Orleans?

I’m crazy. I’m not thinking like a cop.

But the idea wouldn’t leave her. She let it be for a while, decided to go home and sleep on it. And an hour later found herself wandering back to Abasolo’s cubicle.

Abasolo was someone with whom she’d partnered up a number of times and if truth be told, she’d probably rather work with him than anyone in the department—not that she’d rather have him for her sergeant than Cappello; this way she felt a little more free to run crazy ideas by him. Like her bizarre notion that The Jury was very likely a group instead of one crazy person— because that was the way Errol Jacomine worked. He always managed to draw people into his schemes, get them blind-loyal; he had a dark charisma that was lost on her but was dangerous to underestimate. Because he was crazy—and she was quite sure he was—he didn’t mind looking like a fool, or asking others to do crazy things.

He had once mounted a letter-writing campaign against her that was so transparent a seventh grader would have been ashamed of it. Yet it worked—most of the brass took his side against her.

“Adam, tell me if I’m crazy.”

“You are. We all are. Nothing that happened today could really have happened. We hallucinated it.”

She slipped into the chair across from him, chewing on a pencil. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this Jury thing.”

“Well, yeah. Sure you’re crazy. All right-thinking people are thrilled about it.”

“Now, don’t laugh. The letter reminded me of Jacomine.”

“Well, look, all these nuts—” he broke off. “How, exactly?”

“Well, he quoted the Bible.”

“Yeah.” Abasolo looked interested.

“And he wouldn’t stop. That’s exactly what Jacomine did. He’d get started and he’d go on and on. Like he’d memorized a lot of verses with a particular word in them, but that didn’t really make much sense when you put them together.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s the kind of thing a nut would do, right?”

“This is a reality check—you tell me.” She put out her hands, palms up. “I never saw anyone else do it. Did you?”

“I don’t know.”

“And there was this one phrase he used to use—’bigger fish to fry.’”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He was biting his lip a little.

“And then there’s the way the thing reads like it was done by more than one person—like a ghostwriter did the real work, and then along came the boss and screwed it up with Bible verses. I mean, it seems so normal except for that.” She felt her face twitch with embarrassment. “I don’t mean normal. I mean …”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Lucid, I guess. Like nobody but a crazy person would do this, but he doesn’t talk so crazy.” He sighed and leaned back. “Have you talked to Cindy Lou at all?”

“No.”

“Well, I think she’s in the building. I had to take something down to Juvenile and she was coming in when I left.” He picked up the phone without waiting for Skip’s concurrence. “Hey, Cece. Is Cindy Lou still down there?”

Cindy Lou was the department’s consulting psychologist and coincidentally Skip’s best woman friend. She was black, she was brilliant, she was breathtakingly beautiful, and—what had drawn Skip to her—she could handle hotshots who liked to put down women.

Though the two women had been close, their friendship had suffered when Errol Jacomine ran for mayor and Skip tried to expose him as a psychopath. Because he was strong on minority rights, Cindy Lou supported him. And because she knew Skip wasn’t any too stable at the time, she was inclined to dismiss her friend’s fears about him. The friendship was more or less healed, but inwardly Skip winced at the notion of opening up old arguments.

Waiting the five or ten minutes for Cindy Lou to show up, she remembered the other times they’d been through this—except Skip hadn’t needed a reality check. That time she was sure she was right, and Cindy Lou was equally sure she was wrong.

“Adam,” Skip said. “You present the problem, okay?”

Cindy Lou—Lou-Lou to her friends—was dressed in lime-green, a color that would turn most people pea-green. But on her it looked great. It was funny—she was tiny, but had such presence that the first time Skip met her, she thought Lou-Lou was almost as tall as her own six feet. Yet she could make Skip feel clumsy and lumbering.

Adam ran the question past her, and before he was done, Skip knew how Cindy Lou was going to respond—with extreme caution, because she’d been wrong before.

“It’s possible,” she said, and Skip almost said it with her. But then she started to pick up steam. “In fact, it’s a perfect role for Jacomine in lots of ways. It’s anonymous, and he certainly can’t be public again—being wanted for murder is pretty awkward for most people’s careers. It may very well use the services of other people, which we know he’s good at getting—in fact, if he really has followers, they could be some of the same ones from before. Most of all, though, it seems to be about power.”

“Power,” said Abasolo, mulling it.

“Well, Jacomine certainly isn’t after money. I mean, being mayor isn’t a high-paying job—of course, some say it’s a license to steal, but that’s not Jacomine’s thing. We know that from the tight control he kept on his followers.

“I mean, we know that’s his thing—tight control. Anyhow, it’s always the same with these gurus—they think they’re God and they set themselves up as God.” She started to get excited. “Look what’s in the letter: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ That’s usually interpreted as ‘don’t take the law into your own hands.’ So The Jury’s taken over the Lord’s job by their own admission.

“Then there’s New Orleans. He picked us to operate in, for openers. He can’t have been too far away, because there wasn’t enough time …”

“Or more likely he got someone else to do the shooting for him. That’s completely Jacomine’s style. I mean, but
completely
.”

Cindy Lou nodded. “That’s his M.O. And he’d have known about the Hollywood walk—that we do that, I mean. And nobody, but nobody could know that who hasn’t spent time here.” She nodded again, adding things up and getting answers. “The gunman knew exactly where to stand … he was definitely someone familiar with the layout.”