Doing the Devil's Work (24 page)

“It’s a strange world we live in.” Dice rolled her shoulders, dismissive. “I mean, she stole the money, that was obvious, right? Drug money, probably. Nobody panhandles their way into a shoe box of cash money like that. Cash is like water through your fingers out here. We’re not
savers
. I know plenty of people who’ve been on and off meds. And I know plenty more who should be on them. It ain’t no thang. The money made me more nervous than the pills. Nobody chases after a few lost bottles of pills; they go out and get more. I never counted it, but I saw
stacks
of cash. Enough for whoever she took it from to come hunting for her. When I saw the money, it made more sense to me why she wanted to be off the streets and living indoors.”

“Clozaril’s no joke,” Maureen said. “It’s for severe cases of paranoid schizophrenia.
Severe
cases. Violent cases.”

“Well, had I known that,” Dice said, playing it casual while Maureen watched the fear in her rippling below the surface, “the fact that she slept with a straight razor under her pillow would’ve bothered me a whole lot more.”

Maureen felt her stomach drop, as if she’d been standing atop a trapdoor. The LaPlace connection and now this. Add in the brown hair and strange old outcast Madison Leary became a murder suspect. At least she was to Maureen, the only one who knew enough of the details to assemble the theory. A razor would match the murder weapon at the Magnolia Street killing, too. “A straight razor. Under her pillow. While rationing her crazy pills. That didn’t frighten you?”

“You’re funny,” Dice said. “You talk like Madison’s so different from everyone else I live with. Like she’s a, whadda you call it, an anomaly. Everybody I know, the women especially, carries something as a weapon. Who else is gonna protect us? Y’all?”

Maureen nodded. Women didn’t accessorize their egos with weapons like men did. They carried them for practical purposes, for use. She felt her gun pressing against her tailbone. Before she’d become a cop, since she was a teenager, she’d carried a switchblade. She had used it for more than ornamentation, as a girl and as a woman. It had saved her life. She had killed a man with it. And until she had become one, she had never counted on the cops, either.

“The under-the-pillow thing was slightly weird,” Dice continued. “I’ll give you that, but it’s not like she sat up nights sharpening and admiring it in the moonlight, doing tricks with it, or talking to it. She wasn’t Gollum. She cut her pills with it. Seemed like a nice razor, too. Shiny blade. Clean. I could see my reflection in it when she showed it to me. She told me the blade was new, but the handle was real old. Said her grandmother gave it to her. That
her
father had carried it in the First World War. She said the handle was real African ivory.”

“You believed her?”

“About the handle?”

“About any of it.”

Dice thought for a moment. “It was important to her. But where it came from, her story changed about that. Same as the stories about where
she
came from. She told me when we were drunk one night that the razor had belonged to her daddy, and that she’d killed him with it, and took it with her when she ran off. She told me another time she’d killed a bootlegger that had come after her back in the woods, when she was living in a cabin in North Carolina. She was mysterious about herself.”

“A bootlegger? Either she was mysterious or she watched too much TV.”

“Bootlegger, meth dealer, something like that. Some dude who tried to rape her. A rapist is what he really was. Doesn’t matter how he makes his money. Like I said, her story changed, her stories always changed depending on what kind of mood she was in or what level her meds were at when she was telling them.”

“You think she killed the guy she took the money from?” Maureen asked. “Before she left LaPlace.”

Dice shrugged and looked away, not eager to theorize about a possible homicide. Maureen thought maybe she could reach out to the LaPlace authorities. Or better yet, use the computer in the car to check the St. John the Baptist Parish crime records. See if anyone there had had his throat cut in the past few months.

Gage hadn’t come to town from LaPlace for the Saints game. He’d come looking for Madison Leary and her stolen money. He’d come to do business with or for Caleb Heath. They’d met at Pat O’Brien’s to discuss it. That was where Gage found Leary, either by plan or by accident. Pat O’s was a place someone like Heath would choose for a meeting, and that Madison Leary would choose for hunting. It was a target-rich environment for both overgrown frat boys and pickpockets alike, restocked every night with new packs of drunk young women. Had Cooley come after the lost money first, and when he went missing Gage came next? How did Caleb Heath fit in with an anarchist militia group? He did have plenty of the one thing Cooley and Gage and men of their ilk seemed to always lack: money. Madison Leary could answer these questions, if Maureen could track her down before the Watchmen Brigade did.

So she hadn’t found Leary, but she’d found a possible weapon and motive in the Gage and Cooley murders, and had, in the process, pushed herself closer to returning to work with a confession to make. She’d lose her job. Quinn, too. And Ruiz. And Preacher. And Drayton would bungle the case in the end, anyway. But if Leary was leaving a trail of blood across south Louisiana, Maureen thought, she couldn’t be ignored, right? No matter who she was killing. What had Atkinson said? It wasn’t their place to judge the victims.

If Maureen connected the Cooley and Gage murders, Atkinson would take on both cases for sure. Drayton and his problems would be shoved aside. Maybe, maybe, Atkinson could, what was Preacher’s word, help them
finesse
the situation. Maureen knew it’d be asking a lot of everyone involved. Could she, did she have the right to, make that decision on behalf of Quinn and Ruiz and Preacher? She’d have to go to them first.

“Do you think the money came from the rapist Madison said she killed?”

Dice raised her hands, and her voice. “Now you’re putting words in my mouth. I never said Madison ever killed anyone. I never said anything like that. Don’t write that down, don’t tell any other fucking cops I said that.”

“Okay, okay. I was asking your opinion.”

“Like fuck you were.” She took another of Maureen’s cigarettes.

“Back to the razor then,” Maureen said. “Why didn’t you steal the razor and sell it? Sounds valuable. Shit goes missing in hostels and shelters. You’re a thief.”

“Up to a point.” Dice looked away, thinking, watching pigeons bobbing about in the gutter on Frenchmen Street. Lost in thought, she looked to Maureen about fourteen years old. She released a long sigh. “I thought about it. It did look like it was worth something. But she would’ve known. She would’ve known it was me who took it.”

Maureen couldn’t help but admire Dice’s general lack of shame or guilt over her own survival methods. Her plans, her decisions were tactical, morals never factored in. What other people called ethics neither helped nor hindered. It was never personal. “And then?”

Dice shuddered, smiling at her recollected fear. “There was something about her, those crazy eyes, maybe. A vibration came off her. A hum. Deep, like an old iron bell.” Dice raised her hand, made it tremble. “Or like a tuning fork. Even with the meds, you got the feeling she heard things the rest of us didn’t. That she would, that she
could
do things if you crossed her.”

“What things?”

“I decided to leave that space blank. We lived in the same room. I never stole from Madison again, after those first couple of bucks. Not another dollar, not a single pill. A good thief picks good targets. Soft targets. Maximum profit, minimum blowback. Madison Leary was not a soft target.”

Maureen took out her wallet. She slid one of her business cards across the table. Dice palmed it, slipping it into her pocket. It was meaningful, Maureen knew, that Dice had so readily taken the card. Dice trusted her. Maureen knew she could come back to her. “If you see her, if you hear about her, anything reliable, call me right away.”

“She’s got your number,” Dice said. “If I see her I’ll tell her to call you.”

“The card is for you,” Maureen said. “She knows me, not in the way she led you to believe, but knows I’m a cop. She might vanish again if you tell her I’m looking for her. Reach out to me, and me only, no other cops, if she surfaces. I want to hear her side of the story, from her own mouth, before I make any decisions about what I can do for her.”

“I’m not promising anything,” Dice said.

“You don’t have to,” Maureen said. “I’m not promising anything, either. We’re gonna do the best we can, you and me.”

“And this is two favors you owe me now,” Dice said.

“You haven’t produced on the second one yet. Don’t get cocky. You ever call Madison out on her changing stories? Out of curiosity. To see what she’d say. To see if she’d tell you the truth?”

“And call her a liar over her precious antique straight razor?” Dice said. “Ha. How dumb do you think I am? Besides, we were roommates. What if the worst stories were the ones that turned out to be true? Then what? I don’t want her telling my story to the next girl.” She paused. “I have a question for you.”

“Ask,” Maureen said. “But I might not answer.”

“When Madison called you, what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything,” Maureen said. She felt her throat tighten. “She sang to me. The same lines, over and over. Something about an iron bell and a dark grave.”

Dice shivered. “Oh my God. That scares the
shit
out of me.”

“I’ll lock my door tonight,” Maureen said. And sleep with the gun on the nightstand. She got up from the table, collecting their plates and silver and trash to take back inside.

“There’s something else I’ve never seen a cop do,” Dice said, rising as well. “Clean up their own mess.”

“Why the buzz cut?” Maureen asked, heading for the café door. “You pull it off, but what made you do it the first time?”

Dice slipped the fork she’d been holding into her pocket. She reached for the door, stopped. She took a deep breath. “When I was a little girl, I had hair past my waist. Thick and gold like honey. My mother, she used to pull it when she lost her temper with me. My father used to wrap it in his fist, when he did the things to me that made my mother lose her temper.” She ran both her hands over her scalp. “Can’t neither of them do that anymore. Nobody can. Ever.”

You have to protect yourself, Maureen heard Waters say.

20

Arriving early for her detail that evening, Maureen parked a couple of blocks away from the house hosting the party, an enormous, rambling two-story antebellum home on the edge of Audubon Park, sheltered under the moss-draped and twisted boughs of giant live oaks. Maureen had seen the place before. Every now and then, on her longer runs through Uptown, she added a couple of loops around the bayou at the heart of the park. Running through the park, she had seen and admired the house, one of several regal mansions skirting Audubon Park, with its tall, glinting windows and its high and wide wraparound porch. Tonight, though, along with the rest of the hired help, she approached the house from the back.

The caterers, solemn-faced black men and white women in black slacks and white jackets, dashed up and down the flagstone steps and in and out the back gate as they made last-minute preparations for the party. Two older black men in neat tuxedos chatted as they set up and stocked a small bar in the rear sunroom. Maureen knew that in her own uniform, carrying on it a fresh whiff of the dry cleaner’s, with sharp creases in her pants and sleeves, she looked clean-cut and professional. Her badge shined on her chest. Her boots shined on her feet. She had her hair, damp from the shower, pinned up under her NOPD ball cap. She’d even touched on some makeup, on her cheeks and her eyes. Light lipstick. Less than she wore to court, more than she wore on patrol.

Outside the house, she lingered on the sidewalk, dodging the caterers, thumbs hooked in her gun belt, craving a cigarette and unsure of the event’s nicotine etiquette. She looked around for Quinn, but didn’t see him. She knew she’d arrived early. After the trip to the Marigny and the conversation with Dice, she’d had a long run and a shower. Even after that, with what she’d learned about Madison Leary, she’d had no luck trying to relax around the house.

The caterers nodded to her as they hustled back and forth from their vans to the kitchen, not meeting her eyes as they passed. More than one, she was sure, was on parole or probation. More than one had something in his or her pocket for after the party. Others were plain busy.

Quinn soon appeared at the back door, shouldering past a scowling woman headed inside carrying a covered silver tray. He said something to her that he thought was funny. Maureen couldn’t hear it. The woman didn’t laugh. Quinn had a half-eaten deviled egg in one hand. Food flecked the corners of his mouth. The top three buttons of his uniform shirt were undone. His cheeks shone with aftershave. He took his time coming down the steps and along the walk, surveying the activity around him with a smug grin and a cheek swollen with pilfered food, a spoiled-aristocrat swagger in his stride as if the surrounding bustle were happening at his behest, on his behalf, and with his blessing.

Maureen felt something at that moment she had yet to feel for a fellow police officer, a dislike so intense it bordered on disgust.

During her time as a cocktail waitress she’d witnessed and endured that contrived arrogance in the pinkie-ringed faux-gangsters who’d piss their pants in the presence of a real, blood-on-his-hands mafioso. She saw it in her current job from the wannabe gangstas who clutched the front of their baggy jeans and rolled their toothpicks across their teeth, making kissing noises as she rolled by their corner in her cruiser. And Quinn was hardly the first of her fellow cops she’d seen giving off that brat prince attitude like body odor. She’d never seen it from him, though. Not until tonight. Was it the environment that made him like this? she wondered. Did he think himself a member of the posh circle he hovered around? Was it the small amount of power he held over the rest of the hired help? He raised his chin at her from the steps, grinning, when Maureen caught his eye.