Doing the Devil's Work (21 page)

She saw how she made an easy target, how she would be a good scapegoat for Drayton to blame for his sins and his failure. She was so new to the job and to the city. She hadn’t been around long enough to leave a memorable mark, to make friends or inspire deep loyalty. Would Atkinson take her side over another detective? Would Preacher fall on his sword to protect her? They might. Not that Drayton knew the nature of either relationship. But Quinn, and Ruiz, they had long, complex histories in New Orleans and on the NOPD. They had a network of friends and supporters. Drayton couldn’t tell who messing with them would anger. He thought he knew who he had to fear for crossing Maureen. No one.

She believed now that he wasn’t clever, he wasn’t a grand actor. He was a lousy, inferior cop, a mean and frightened man, an old façade worried that everything propping him up was about to be yanked out from behind him. Men like that were dangerous when scared, she thought. Petty and cruel, they could do a lot of damage before they finally lay down and died. To him, she was red meat he could use to keep the federal fangs out of his hide.

She wasn’t about to be anybody’s easy meal. Never had been. And if he kept trying it, and Maureen decided he very well might, she’d make sure he choked on her bones.

“This is the best you’ve got for me?” she said. “This is supposed to rattle me? Take this theory to the FBI tomorrow. Please. I fucking
dare
you. Waste of my fucking time.”

Maureen took off her baseball cap, tossed it on the table. She pulled out her ponytail and held up a fistful of hair. Fuck finesse. “For the record, Sherlock, as for your brown hairs, I’m a fucking redhead, you fucking genius. Everyone but you knows that. And if you ask me if the carpet matches the drapes, I will knock you the fuck out.”

16

Maureen sat in her cruiser, the engine running and the windows up. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel. Runners of sweat trickled down her temples. She breathed deeply as she processed what had happened in the district break room. Was there any way she had it wrong? No, she thought. No way Drayton lets her out of the room, out of the building, if he thinks he has a murder case against her, no matter how much venom she spat. No way Drayton gets alone in a room with her, she thought, if he believed her a killer. She chewed her bottom lip. If only he knew. She hadn’t hung around to hear Drayton’s reaction to her dare. He hadn’t followed her out of the room. She hadn’t seen him exit the district. The coward was probably waiting inside for her to leave.

When she’d burst through the back door into the parking lot, she’d glanced about for Preacher, who, no fool, was nowhere to be found. She didn’t go looking for him. She didn’t want to see or talk to him. She didn’t want to be seen, by Drayton or by anyone else, running for the shelter of a man or a superior. She checked the time on her phone. She forced herself to take deep breaths, one after the other. Approaching midnight. She dropped the patrol car into reverse. Time to get back to work.

Tonight was her turn to watch over closing time at Commander’s Palace in the Garden District, the highest of the high-end restaurants in New Orleans. The posting was a favorite gig of hers. She enjoyed keeping a watchful eye as the waitstaff in their vests and ties and long white aprons, and the valets in their dark pants and blue polo shirts, flush with cash from a night’s hard work, dispersed to their cars, talking and laughing and smoking, tiredness tugging at the corners of their eyes, bending their backs. The Commander’s gig was what she needed to get her mind right after the sordid business with Drayton—a simple, quiet task that made her feel useful and good. She turned to back the cruiser from the parking space.

Through the rear window, she spotted a dark figure standing behind her car, his face hidden in shadow, his blue uniform glowing red in her brake lights. “Where y’at, Cogs? Watch where you’re going.”

Fucking Quinn, Maureen thought.

“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t see you.”

Quinn came around to her window. “Some drunk asshat got punched out by a cabbie for puking up the taxi’s front seat. Then said asshat barfed all over
our
backseat when we hooked him up. We came to switch out cars. Another hotshit night in fuckstick paradise.”

Maureen couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“You all right?” Quinn asked. “You look pale. I mean, even for you.”

“Long night. These twelves get to me sometimes. Sorry about your car. I gotta roll.”

“I just gotta talk to you real quick,” Quinn said, squatting beside the car, wrapping his fingers over the top of the door.

“Not right now,” Maureen said. “My turn at Commander’s tonight. They call and complain if we’re late.”

“Fuck them,” Quinn said. “Nobody’s robbed that place in a hundred years. Even the skells know better than that. That used to be a paid detail, you know. We used to get something for that, for the effort, instead of bitchy fucking complaints when we get distracted by crack and murders and shit and have to be fifteen minutes late for babysitting.”

Maureen raised her shoulders. “Yeah, well, from what I hear, not much about paid details is gonna be the same anymore, not even the name.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Quinn said. “Not everything’s gone to shit in that department, not yet anyway. You got a smoke?”

Maureen reached her pack on the dash, gave one to Quinn, lit one for herself.

“I feel bad,” Quinn said, “about doing you wrong over the traffic stop. It would’ve been no kind of thing if not for that murder, but even if that hadn’t happened, we shouldn’t have gone behind your back like that.”

The way you told it to me at the murder scene, Maureen thought, everything was on Preacher’s orders. Now it’s different? Why? She let Quinn keep talking.

“It was a disrespectful thing,” Quinn said. “And yet you kept it close around Drayton last night when you could’ve punched us in the dick. I owe you a solid. I want to make it up to you.”

“It’s nothing,” Maureen said. “Trying to be a team player. Buy me a beer.”

“For true,” Quinn said. “Players look out for each other, though. Ain’t none of us getting rich out here. You’re off duty tomorrow night, right? I got a sweet detail, a fat charity gig in one of the mansions out by Audubon Park. I usually do it with Rue, but his daughter’s in this school play or some shit and his wife has to work. He tells me this and I think I might ask around, and then I think, why hand an easy three hundred cash to some other bum when I can lay a little well-deserved payback on my boy”—he smiled at his mistake—“excuse me, on my podna, the Cog that turns the wheel?”

“Quinn, I appreciate this, I do,” Maureen said. “And I’m not judging, I swear I’m not, but with the feds around and all—these details, they’re like one of the first things the feds and the brass are going after. Probably not something I should get into.”

“I hear you,” Quinn said. “But this gig ain’t like that. Me and Rue, we’ve done it six years in a row. It’s no secret. It’s on the up-and-up. No worries. It’s for
charity
, for chrissakes. The mayor will probably
be
there. The chief, too. Let him come out and send us home if he’s worried about the feds.” Quinn flipped open his notepad, scratched something down with a pen. He tore the sheet off and passed it to Maureen. “Next year, yeah, the gig goes to a couple of captains, or we get taxed on it or whatever, but this year people who need it get it.” He stood. “I’ll see you there tomorrow evening. Regular blues. Six thirty.”

Maureen folded the notepaper, tucked it into the pocket of her shirt. “Thanks, Quinn. I appreciate the hookup. Now I really gotta roll. I don’t want my night being the first night in a hundred years that shit goes wrong.”

“No doubt,” Quinn said, standing. He looked pleased with himself. He tapped his fist twice over his heart. “Roll out, soldier. Protect and serve like a motherfucker.”

17

Maureen arrived at Commander’s Palace to find Preacher waiting for her. He had parked across Washington Avenue from the restaurant, sitting in his NOPD Explorer with one arm hanging out the window, fingers drumming on the door. The truck leaned to one side, with two wheels up on the curb. Maureen parked the cruiser a few yards ahead of Preacher, beside the whitewashed walls and the piked black iron gate of Lafayette Cemetery, under the canopy of a sprawling live oak a century older than either the cemetery or the restaurant. As if to protest the intrusion, a handful of acorns panged off the roof of the cruiser.

Maureen climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and walked over to Preacher. The sweet, syrupy smell of bread pudding hung in the air. Frogs chirruped in neighborhood yards. The street was covered in smashed acorns. They crunched under her feet. She wasn’t used to it yet, October acorns on the ground while warm breezes rustled the huge green and leafy branches overhead and sweat dampened the small of her back.

“I’m not that late,” she said, approaching the Explorer. “No more than five minutes. They couldn’t have called already.”

“I didn’t know how long you’d be with Drayton,” Preacher said. “Figured I’d go ahead and cover it until you got here. I wanted some air, anyways.” He put his cigar to his lips, puffed on it. “Everything went okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” Maureen said, looking away. She watched a cab go by up Washington, the driver chattering on his phone, making a rolling right turn at the red light. A stray cat, a mangy orange tabby, strolled across the street, fearless, looking right at them before slinking under a parked car nearby.

Preacher said nothing. He turned his cigar in his mouth, looking at her with narrowed eyes.

“Okay, enough already with the eyes,” Maureen said. “Our meeting went poorly.”

“I had a feeling,” Preacher said. “Tell me about it.”

Maureen knew Preacher could have sent another unit down to Commander’s to cover for her. He had concerns, naturally, and he wanted to give them a chance to talk about the meeting away from any eavesdroppers or interruptions, and away from Drayton. If the detective had it out for her, if that meeting tonight was the beginning, she needed to build her defense. She needed Preacher to stay on her side. She wondered if Drayton would push back against a group of cops, male cops. Would he have the spine for it?

She patted her uniform pockets, looking for the pack of cigarettes she’d left on the dash of the cruiser. “I don’t know what there is to tell. He and I, we don’t like each other.”

“You don’t know what you
want
to tell,” Preacher said. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m not a perp in a box, Preach. Ease off.”

“I’m here to help you, Coughlin. It’s my job. You’re in my platoon. Relax.”

“He comes at me mysterious, like some stupid high school teacher with this ‘we both know why you’re here, don’t we?’ game. When that doesn’t work, he gets hostile. And
then
, you were right, he starts asking me where I was and what I was doing at the time of Gage’s death—like I’m a suspect. Like he expects me to wilt under that bullshit.”

Preacher pinched the bridge of his nose. “Is his blood on the walls?”

“It didn’t get
that
bad. Close. But he got nothing from me he can use.”

“So these crazy accusations,” Preacher said, “what was his ammunition?”

“He had an evidence bag,” Maureen said, “with bloody hairs pulled from the blood on Gage’s shirt, and from his hands. Long brown hairs that he said could be mine.”

Preacher tapped his temple. “And you corrected him? About your business up here?”

“I don’t think he’ll ever forget I’m a redhead.”

“I swear to Christ, Coughlin, you’re the only reason I come to work sometimes.”

Preacher shifted in his seat as if pain had crawled through his gut. He looked at his cigar as if it had been the thing to pain him, stuck it in his mouth for a few puffs, removed it.

“You know what? I think we’re okay for now.” He stuck his cigar in his mouth. “Anyway, keep me posted on this.”

“One more thing,” Maureen said. “Speaking of the feds, Quinn asked me to work this detail with him tomorrow night. This charity party out by the park.”

“You off duty tomorrow?”

“I am.”

“Knock yourself out,” Preacher said. “It was me that told him to give it to you when Rue bailed, anyway. He owes you.” He hung his elbow out the window. “How tight are you with Ruiz?”

“I can’t say I am,” Maureen said. “I like the guy well enough. He’s a good cop. He makes me nervous, though. You want to know about Ruiz, Quinn is the guy to ask. You know that.”

“Do you have any idea,” Preacher said, “why Ruiz would want out of the Sixth? He talk to you about it?”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it. He asked for a transfer?”

Preacher nodded. “Out of the Sixth, and off the night shift until the transfer goes through. And he wants it kept quiet.”

“Quinn told me it was his idea for me to work that detail. He told me Ruiz had a family thing and that’s why he couldn’t do it. That prick.”

“Calm down,” Preacher said. “Quinn’s repeating the excuse that Ruiz gave him. Ruiz asked especially that Quinn be kept in the dark till the transfer goes through.” He shook his head. “Quinn was gonna give the detail to Hollander. He asked me about her schedule.”

“She’s got bigger boobs than me,” Maureen said.

“Some people’s motivations remain elusive,” Preacher said. “Quinn, not so much. Though I have to say he didn’t fight me when I told him to give it to you. As for working details, you’ll hear when the serious changes come. The cries of the aggrieved will echo in the halls, believe me. Don’t worry about it till then. You’re covered.”

“In the midst of this symphony of ass covering,” Maureen said, “are we giving any thought to who might’ve killed Gage and Cooley? That seems to have gotten lost.”

“Not our problem,” Preacher said. “We’ve done our part. It’s Atkinson and Drayton’s problem now.”

“Preach, we both know who that brown hair probably came from.”

“Anybody find any trace of her at the Cooley murder?” Preacher asked.