Doing the Devil's Work (27 page)

“My father has plenty going on around him,” Heath said, “to keep him distracted. Surgically enhanced wives and widows abound at these things. He doesn’t need me to catch his next trophy. I can stand out here with you for as long as you like. We’ve talked about my friends. Let’s talk about yours. Isn’t that what women like? To be asked about their lives? How’s your young friend Mr. Marques Greer? How’s his grandmother? They like their new place in the River Garden? We built that, you know. I pretty much own it. Maybe I’ll visit over there, ask how they’re getting on. See if anyone from the old neighborhood needs to find them. Maybe they miss their old friends.”

He recited his lines like a bad actor in a worse TV drama. Someone had armed him with them, Maureen thought. Who? Quinn again? Maybe Ruiz? Someone concerned she and Heath might end up talking. Had to be Quinn.

“This park closes at dusk,” Maureen said, “which was some time ago. I’d hate to have to cite you for trespassing. And I get the feeling that if I searched you, I’d discover contraband. Then we’re talking jail. I’d have to perp walk you through your father’s lovely party. He wouldn’t like that. Why don’t we not go there?”

Heath stepped closer to her, making a show of his fearlessness, swinging his foot wide, hands clasped behind his back. “How far do you think you’d get, really, with me in cuffs? At my father’s house? How do you think that would play back at the district when my father called? Last week, my father won the redevelopment contract for the row of old storefronts
across the street
from the Sixth District. Whose playground do you think you’re in, Maureen?”

Maureen closed the distance between them, her hands clasped behind her back. “I know you, Heath. I’ve known you my whole life. You’re as common and as tedious as herpes. So fucking impressed with yourself. You’re a titty baby, living on an allowance, everything bought and paid for by someone else’s brains and hard work. Never made anything in your life but a mess.”

“There’s the New York,” Heath said, smiling, leaning back. “It comes through so much clearer when you get angry, Maureen. I bet it comes out real strong when you fuck. I bet you fuck hard.”

“You don’t get to call me Maureen. You speak to me, you call me Officer Coughlin. I took shit from you people my whole life, I don’t have to do that anymore.”

“That badge is like your pussy,” Heath said, looking her up and down. “You think it can’t be taken from you with a few good slaps. This is New Orleans. That tin star may as well come with a popgun and a cowboy hat. It’s a half step above a Mardi Gras costume.”

“Walk back to the party,” Maureen said. She pulled a compact black cylinder from her belt. “Or get carried back. Your choice.”

Heath chuckled. “Pepper spray? Really?”

Maureen snapped her wrist. The cylinder released a telescoped, spring-loaded metal rod with a weighted ball at the end. Maureen held the weapon close to her thigh. Heath’s eyes flicked to it before returning to her face. “It’s called an ASP,” she said. “It breaks bones. I can get a new job faster than you can get new teeth, or a new jaw, or two new knees. Daddy’s money can buy you new things, but it can’t make the pain go away. Pain punches its own time clock.”

Heath opened his mouth to speak, a smile playing in his eyes, but he decided to say nothing.

“You walk around alone in the park at night often?” Maureen asked.

“What if I do?”

“You might want to rethink that habit,” Maureen said.

“Has the NOPD given up on solving the murder problem? Shifting resources to the trespassing issues, are you? Or are you threatening me, Officer Coughlin?”

“If I wanted to get you, Heath, why would I warn you
not
to wander around alone in the dark? It’s not us, or me, that you need to worry about. It’s dangerous times in this city.”

“Oh, it’s been dangerous times in this city since there’s
been
a city,” Heath said. “You new arrivals are all the same. You act like it’s some big revelation that New Orleans is a slippery place. The swamp and the things in it with wings and claws, with scales and teeth, they were here before you, and they will be here after you’re gone.”

“Mr. Heath,” she said, “it’s my sworn duty as an officer of the law to inform you, in the interest of public and personal safety, that the aforementioned Madison Leary, has, as of this moment, evaded capture. Her whereabouts are unknown. She could be anywhere. She is rumored to be proficient with a razor blade. We know she is familiar with Uptown.”

“How fun and cryptic,” Heath said. “We won’t meet again.” He turned away from her and walked toward his father’s grand house, hands deep in his pockets.

Maureen watched him walk away as she lit another cigarette, her hands shaking. Quinn would be wondering what was keeping her. Heath never looked back her way, only throwing his hand in the air like a wave as he crossed from the park onto his father’s property, the flab of his soft body jiggling under his expensive shirt. The people on the porch thought the wave was for them, and returned it, but Maureen knew the gesture had been meant for her.

She watched as he sauntered up the stairs, ignoring the line at the bar and getting himself a drink before hugging and handshaking with several guests who’d been waiting for cocktails. None of them minded deferring to him. She didn’t know how much she really believed Madison Leary was out there in the shadows with her ivory-handled razor at the ready, waiting for her shot at Caleb Heath. She couldn’t be sure Heath mattered to Leary, if a real connection existed, or if it was wishful thinking on her part that Leary would come after him. She’d given Heath what she could tell her conscience and her superiors was a warning, and, another part of her hoped, a nightmare or two. Men like Heath, though, she thought, could not imagine themselves being killed by a woman. Or a poor person. She wondered if they believed they could die. Wealthy, powerful men did die, though, Maureen thought. They could be killed. Same as everybody else. She had proved it. She had killed one herself.

Heath entered the enormous glowing house, a man vanishing into fire, the butler opening both of the tall oak doors for him like the gates of Heaven. She knew Caleb Heath was not another Frank Sebastian—a vain and evil man who had won his power with his willingness to do savage things others would not do. Caleb Heath by comparison was a weak-chinned bully, a capricious and spoiled man-child. Heath would never in a million years go himself to the River Garden to threaten Marques and his grandmother. He would pay someone else to do it for him. He could do damage, but he didn’t have power, not really. People he paid would turn on him for the right price. What people like Caleb Heath had, what they mistook for power, Maureen thought, was permission. Permission to indulge their callous whims and bloated visions of themselves because of their names and their stations. Once you had power, Maureen thought, it was yours until and unless you gave it away. Permission, unlike real power, wasn’t yours. Permission could be revoked by those who bestowed it, whether you liked it or not. You had no say. Maybe you were allowed the illusion of influence, but even that was a courtesy awarded from the outside. In that way, Caleb Heath, Maureen thought, was somewhat like her. Until her probationary period was over, she had permission from the powers-that-be to be a cop. When that time was over, when she was a real cop on her own, then she’d have real power.

Unlike her, though, left to his own devices, given nothing but a broken bottle and thirty seconds to fight for his life, Caleb Heath would die a pathetic, tearful, and lonely death. If you took away his checkbook, and the family name and money that made it more than a worthless pile of paper, Heath could not protect himself. That dependence, to Maureen, was the very definition of weakness. It was what separated them. What made Heath dangerous to her and to others, Maureen worried, was that on some deep, unconscious level, Heath knew his needs and weaknesses, too, and lived in mortal fear of their exposure.

Maureen rubbed out her cigarette in the dirt at her feet and tucked the filter into her pocket. At some point during her conversation with Heath the frogs had gone silent. The bats had flown away. Sticking to the shadows and the alley that took her around the back of the mansion, she returned to find Quinn to finish her shift.

* * *

Over the course of her night outside, she saw neither Caleb nor Solomon Heath again, though she could occasionally hear their voices and their laughter bleeding out into the night from the house. She did not tell Quinn of her encounter with Heath. He’d probably know about it soon enough. She knew it wasn’t true, but at times she felt that Caleb laughed extra loud so that she would hear him. He knew she was out there, patrolling the yard like a good dog.

At the end of the night, after the last of the guests had left, a young man in a suit who Quinn didn’t recognize came out the kitchen door and handed each of them an envelope.

Maureen tucked her envelope in her back pocket, tipped her cap to Quinn, and headed for her car. She wanted to sleep on what to do next with him. He’d tried getting tough with her at Gage’s murder scene. Then he’d gone the other way and sweetened the deal with the offer of this detail and the others it would lead to. He’d let her know he was hooked into important people who, at least to hear Quinn tell it, could do things for her in the future. Quinn was slick. She had to give him that, the way he played bad cop, good cop with her, better than Drayton did, feeling her out for what would work. She did have things of her own to hide. Quinn might know what some of them were. She couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t an ally anymore, if he ever had been, but making him an enemy wouldn’t do her any good.

21

Around midnight, Maureen sat in her rocking chair, the night cooling around her. The last of the cicadas buzzed in the crepe myrtles and palm trees. A sweating glass of cold white wine rested on the table beside her. She watched the haloed streetlight, waiting as she often did for the flitting silhouettes of hunting bats. She had never seen one in the Irish Channel, not that she would swear to, only possibilities out of the corner of her eye, but her general environment seemed so damn tropical Gothic, they had to be out there. The evidence was too strong to resist. She watched for bats nearly every night.

Next to her wineglass, a cigarette burned in the ashtray. Next to the ashtray sat her phone. She was thinking about calling Quinn, hadn’t yet worked up her plan.

He’d promised her three hundred dollars for working the party. When she’d checked the envelope at home, she’d found thirteen hundred dollars, thirteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills so new that they stuck together. She couldn’t accept the money. She wouldn’t. The question was what to do next. The cash had come from Solomon but had to do with Caleb. A son tangled up in a homicide case had to be pretty fucking counterproductive when it came to landing city and state construction contracts. Especially when word got out, and it surely would, that both Cooley, who’d died in a house he owned, and Gage, who he’d planned to meet at Pat O’Brien’s, were active in a domestic terrorist organization. Strong circumstantial evidence indicated that Caleb was guilty of the same. Evidence all around her, she thought, suggested the night sky be full of bats, and yet she’d never seen a one.

Was the money advance payment for whatever was coming next? she wondered. An invitation, maybe, over to Solomon Heath’s way of doing things. Or was the extra thousand a threat, a “look at how little a grand means to me, Officer” kind of gesture. A “think of what I pay people a lot more powerful than you” message. One thing it wasn’t, Maureen knew, was a no-strings-attached gift.

When she had waited tables and a certain kind of high roller left a big tip at the end of the night, it wasn’t for the service he’d already received, it was for what he expected next time he came calling. It was a demand, an expression of power. Solomon Heath was that kind of high roller, the kind who slid his hand down your hip and over the curve of your ass while you took his order, looking you in the eye while he did it, daring you to respond. Making sure you knew, because he had money, he could touch you wherever he wanted. Making sure you knew he could cost you your job.

Nobody ever asked, she heard Preacher say, for only one favor. No. Fuck no. She was not about to go to work for the Heaths.

Considering what she now knew about the Heath family, Maureen believed that Drayton would never pursue the case and risk exposing them to association with Gage or Leary. So she and Quinn and Ruiz were covered there. She wasn’t sure who had murdered Gage, but she knew his connection to Heath killed the investigation into his death. So why pay her, then, if Caleb was already protected by Drayton? Because, she thought, a thousand dollars was nothing to the Heaths, a dollar bill tossed in the bucket of a French Quarter tap dancer, and having another cop in their pocket couldn’t hurt, especially with a son like Caleb on the loose. What if they needed her a week, a month, a year from now? They wanted her paid for and safe on the shelf.

Had Quinn been paid the same as she had? Maureen wondered. She knew that if she asked Quinn, she wouldn’t get the truth. He’d tell her what he’d told her at the party, that she should enjoy her good fortune, that these breaks were part of being a New Orleans cop, compensation for the unrelenting onslaught of insanity-inducing bullshit they faced every day. She’d considered calling Preacher, but couldn’t think of a way to talk to
him
about the money without feeling like she was ratting on Quinn. Like more tales of shady shit was what Preacher wanted to hear from her anyway.

And what to do about Leary? Maureen had to do something. Right? Wasn’t it her duty? Circumstantially, with what Dice had revealed, Leary had emerged as a viable homicide suspect. The Gage murder was Drayton’s case. How much, exactly, was she in a position to tell him about Leary? Maureen believed the things that Dice had told her about the money and the pills and the razor blade and where Leary had come from. But Maureen also believed that Drayton wouldn’t even take an interview with a tattooed homeless woman, if Dice could even be persuaded to give it, something that Maureen knew was very much in doubt.