Doing the Devil's Work (6 page)

Maureen tossed the bag in the car. “Don’t say I never tried doing you a favor.”

Preacher slipped a cigar from his pocket. He unwrapped it, crumpling the plastic and tossing it in the street. “You better get going with her, you don’t want a mess on your hands. She really did fuck that boy, I wouldn’t wanna be the poor slob that’s gotta inventory that truck at impound. Who knows what went where and what happened when it got there.”

“If she fucked that moron,” Maureen said, “I’m glad I’m not the one who’s gotta inventory
her
at lockup.”

5

The next afternoon, the rain slowed in time with her pace as Maureen jogged to the corner of Constance and Sixth Streets. As if dispersed by the wave of a magic wand, the rain clouds vanished. The sunshine tumbled down, brilliant, wet light, golden with a weight of its own. The heat returned like fog, rolling in off the river heavy and thick with moisture. Sweat mixed with rainwater trickled down her forehead and into her eyes. She wiped her face with her T-shirt, soaked from the run and the rainstorm.

Fall and its hard-earned break from the heat were coming, she told herself. She could catch traces of the change of seasons in the night breezes, a coolness that lingered on her skin for moments before vanishing. Coworkers had promised her the heat always broke. She was plenty ready for the end of her first New Orleans summer, the end of her first hurricane season. It was like counting down the days until Christmas

Across the street, a small black girl, six or seven years old, wearing pink shorts and a matching sleeveless pink top, pedaled a pink-and-white tricycle up and down the cracked and buckled brick sidewalk, her hair tied up in a riot of braids, her forehead glistening with sweat, her face scrunched in determined concentration. Maureen knew that look. The little girl’s fists gripped the handlebars as she worked her bike to the corner, where she turned around and struggled back the other way. Maureen wondered what mission was under way in the little girl’s head, what story unfolded.

Maureen leaned forward to stretch her hamstrings, her palms flat on the damp sidewalk. Drops of perspiration fell from her face onto the concrete. Winding bright green vines, their tiny white flowers winking from among the leaves, hung over the wrought-iron fence in front of her. She closed her eyes and inhaled their scent. Exotic. Tropical. Better than anything she encountered at work most days, though every now and again, when she slowed the unit to give some shady knucklehead the stink eye, the scent of frying chicken or a simmering pot of red beans would hit the car as hard as an ocean wave and knock her almost off balance.

She opened her eyes, leaning forward with her hands on her knees. A tiny face materialized at eye level in the vines. A small, thin lizard colored the same bright green as the leaves watched her sideways with one swiveling eye. His eye fixed on her, the lizard puffed out the bright red pouch at his chin. He did three quick push-ups on his front legs and flicked his tail.

No, this was definitely not Staten Island, Maureen thought, where she had grown up and lived her whole life until eight months ago. Not any place near or like it, which was the thing she loved about New Orleans the most. Steeped in the past as decadent ol’ New Orleans was, it wasn’t her past.

A light sun shower started. Just because the sun was shining didn’t mean it couldn’t rain. Maureen stood up straight, tilting her face to the rain, pressing her hands into the small of her back. When she moved, the lizard disappeared in a flash into the foliage.

On the other side of the fence, tall stalks of red-flowering ginger rose above the broad leaves of elephant ears. Several other green, fast-growing and flowering things, the names of which Maureen had yet to learn, formed a dense, chaotic garden swarming with dragonflies, glinting emerald bodies hovering on red-veined wings. In the middle of the garden, two plastic, wire-legged flamingos, one black and one gold, stood watch over a ceramic grotto of Drew Brees. Her own personal Breesus. The Saints. She was a fan now. A girl who’d never had more than a passing interest in team sports, New Orleans had made short work of her. That her deadbeat father had been a rabid Jets fan, she thought, had probably only helped her into the arms of another team.

Football season’s opening Sunday, she’d found herself in Parasol’s bar at noon wearing a brand-new Pierre Thomas jersey and screaming at the TV along with the rest of her neighborhood. There wasn’t a social activity she’d ever found that asked less of her. Wear the right colors. Holler the right names. Learn the “Who Dat” chant. Talk about the big plays at work with the other cops. Maureen found the communal game watching scratched her itch to fit in, to belong in New Orleans, a feeling as new to her as her interest in football.

The house she rented was a tiny shotgun single. The rooms ran in a row, front to back. She loved the exterior colors the landlords had picked: eggplant-purple walls with bright orange shutters that closed over the lone front window and the front door, tomato-red steps leading up to the baby-blue porch. It was as vibrant and conspicuous a place as she had ever lived, and a stark contrast to the grim, tumbledown Staten Island apartment she’d left behind. And, she thought, to the tumbledown abodes Caleb Heath rented out on Magnolia Street. She half expected her house to one day sprout canary-yellow wagon wheels and roll away in pursuit of the parade that had left it behind—because the place looked exactly like Maureen’s idea of an old-time circus wagon.

Inside, the house was clean and sedate. Walls and ceiling painted a quiet off-white. Bare wood floors the color of honey. The structure was original, the freestanding fireplace between the rooms, the high ceilings, the tall windows. It had been built more than a hundred years ago for and by Irish immigrants, dirt-poor people who landed on and then worked the docks and wharves of the nearby Mississippi, people with the same roots as Maureen’s own New York–settled ancestors.

One of the owners had been born in the house, Maureen had learned, in what was now
her
bedroom. His mother had been born there, too, in that same room. She had died in the place less than a year ago, which was how it had come up for rent after a long renovation. The old woman died in the same bed where she’d given birth to her only son fifty-some years ago. Maureen now slept where they had slept. When insomnia tormented her, as it often did, she let her eyes drift over the moonlit ceiling and walls, and into the lightless corners. She alternately feared and wished for a ghost to visit, to teach her secrets about the new city and for her to tell secrets about the city she had left behind. She never saw a sign.

As she headed up her porch steps, legs heavy from her run, her phone buzzed in her hand. She checked the number. Nat Waters, a retired NYPD detective and her mom’s live-in boyfriend. Other than the move to New Orleans, he was the one good thing to come out of her troubles in New York.

“Where y’at?” Maureen asked.

“Listen to you,” Waters said. “Going local in record time. I’m out in the yard, waiting on your mother to get ready for dinner. Soon, it’s gonna be too cold to sit out here. Getting it in while I can.”

“How’s Mom? She okay?”

“She misses you,” Waters said. “She’s fine. The new place coming together?”

“Bit by bit,” Maureen said. “I know it’s small, but it feels like a palace after six months in that studio apartment. At night, I keep walking from room to room just because I can.” And because I can’t sleep, she thought. But Nat already knew that. Whenever it was her calling him, it happened in the middle of the night.

Maureen sat in a wooden rocking chair, painted purple. She put the phone on speaker, set it on a small table beside the chair, and leaned forward to untie her running shoes. “I finished repainting that kitchen table and chairs I told you about.”

“I remember. You got any more furniture?”

“The couch and the bed came last week,” Maureen said. “The couch is brand-new. This luscious chocolate brown. So comfy. The bed’s an antique. Both are gorgeous. I can’t believe they’re mine. I keep expecting the delivery guys to come back and take them away. Sorry, miss, wrong house.”

She kicked off her running shoes and stretched her legs out in front of her. She liked watching her strong quads pop to life, though she did worry that her thighs were getting thick. She rotated her right foot. An old injury from her high school track team days meant the ankle tightened when she ran, which was often, daily if she could fit it in. Twice a day if she was feeling restless. A couple of weeks ago she’d twisted the ankle in a foot chase, hurting it worse than she’d thought at the time. She didn’t need to be out running on it, not five miles at a time, but she didn’t like what happened in her head when she didn’t get her exercise. She got anxious, sleepless, and temperamental. Twitchy. Angry. She struggled with her impulse control. Not a good thing for a cop.

“I’ll send you and Mom pictures,” she said. “I financed both of them. My credit is mediocre, but both places liked that I’m a cop. Chris Atkinson’s family owns the antique shop, so that helped.”

“Membership has its privileges,” Waters said. “You know, your mother and I could help, too. Think of it as an ongoing housewarming gift.”

“The porch rocker was plenty,” Maureen said. “It’s perfect. I sit in it all the time. I’m sitting in it right now. I love it in the early mornings, after my shift. I watch the neighborhood get up and go to work and then I go to bed. Besides, paying these things off will help my credit. For when I make an offer on this house.”

“Thinking of the future,” Waters said. “Good. Do me a favor. Take a picture of you in the rocker, too. Send it to your mother. She’d like that.”

“Will do,” Maureen said. “I know it wasn’t easy for her, sending something homey and impractical like that to me. I know she hates New Orleans.”

“She misses you,” Waters said. “She worries.
Hate
is a strong word. You’re her only child. She’s glad you’re out of that cramped studio and in a real house. After you take that picture in the rocker, call her up, tell her what you just told me.”

“I painted the rocker purple,” Maureen said. “It’s a popular color down here. Just warn her before you show her the picture.”

“She really loved the white,” Waters said. “She put a lot of thought into the color.”

“You saw the card she sent with it,” Maureen said. “
So you don’t smoke in the house
, it said.”

“She’s your mother,” Waters said. “You know how she is.” He paused. He knew when to let things go. He was especially good at stepping aside of these passive-aggressive campaigns that arose between Amber Coughlin and her daughter. Maureen really liked that about him. When to disengage was one of any number of things she knew she could learn from him.

“What else is happening?” Waters asked. “You been doing that thing we talked about?”

“Kinda. Not really. No.”

“Maureen. You’re putting me in a tough spot.”

“I tried a shrink last month. I saw that one woman, remember? I went a couple of times. It didn’t work out. She asked so many questions. And then I ran into her in the coffee shop. Thank fucking God I was not in uniform.”

“Because she blurted out you were a patient?” Waters asked.

“No, she acted like she didn’t even know me. Thank God. That’s not the point. It was a sign. Whatever I tell her, it goes out in the world. I can’t have that. You know why.”

Waters laughed. “Asking questions is her job. C’mon, Maureen.” She could hear him take a deep breath. “It can take a few tries to find the right person. You promised. These people are professionals, like you. They’d be out of work if they couldn’t keep secrets.”

“Don’t tell me you told my mother,” Maureen said. “I was going to do that, when I was ready. That was part of the deal. I’m gonna do it, the therapy, just not right now.”

“I haven’t said a word,” Waters said. “But I don’t like having secrets from your mother.”

“There’s plenty you know about me and things I’ve done,” Maureen said, getting up from the chair, “that she doesn’t know. And that you would never tell her.” She went into the house, found her cigarettes on the kitchen table. She lit up and sat. She crossed her ankles under her chair. “Nobody here knows what I did up there, why I left, and I want to keep it that way.” She paused. “I’m just saying, let’s concede neither one of us can claim the moral high ground here about secrets.”

“I’m not saying tell everyone what happened,” Waters said. “Just tell
someone
. You said you needed help for the anxiety from that thing up here. For the insomnia and the nightmares. For your temper. So you could keep your job. PTSD is a real thing. Ask anyone who lived in that city in ’05. Or up here after 9/11. I’m just repeating what you told me.”

“I was drunk when I said all that.”

“What does that tell you?” Waters asked.

“See? What do I need with a therapist? I have you.”

“I’m not there. I’m fourteen hundred miles away.”

“You know, Nat, I think maybe sometimes I’m better this way,” Maureen said. “You ever think about that? Because I do. I’m tougher now than I was. I have sharper edges. I can be dangerous if I want to. What if I’m a better cop like this? I’m not linebacker-sized, like you. I have to compensate in other ways.” Her sore ankle throbbed. She’d caught the guy she’d been chasing when she reinjured it. He’d split his temple on the curb when she’d tackled him in the street—bad luck how he fell. Didn’t pain her, though, that he was somewhere in New Orleans with a swollen face etched with stitches. She stretched her legs under the table, as if that would put the pain farther away. “And I’m not a man. I have things I have to do to keep control of situations, to stay in charge. I need a lot of fuel to burn to stay humming. I have to prove myself every time I walk into the station, every time I get out of the car. You must’ve seen it when you were on the job.”

“I saw what it was like for the women,” Waters said. “With the other cops as well as the criminals. I know things haven’t changed on the job as much as they should. But I saw a lot of cops short-circuit their good careers ’cause they fell in love with the power they thought they had. They liked drawing blood. They liked how good fear looked in another person’s eyes. They made a lot of excuses for themselves, too, while they circled the drain.”