New Orleans Noir (16 page)
“I gathered up everything that those men might value,” she said as she came back down the stairs, then opened the bag for him to peer inside. “Credit cards. Bracelets, watches, rings. A few gold coins. All the cash I could find. Almost five hundred dollars. I have a key to the neighbor’s house, so I even went there, too. Looking for valuables they’d left behind. I found a few things.”
Sonny imagined adding every bit of cash and jewelry he had to her bag and knew it would still not be enough for men who were willing to steal children. Though he said nothing, Nga sensed his doubt. Or perhaps she read it in his expression.
Panic pinched her voice, making it shrill. “Then what shall I do?”
Sonny murmured another prayer to the Virgin. For courage. And for a return of skills he thought he’d never use again. Not in America, where there was no war.
“We will wait for them to come,” he said finally. “And we will get the children back.”
Or we will all die in the attempt
, he thought.
Hours later, the men came back.
For much of that time, Sonny had been waiting in the shelter of a collapsed carport opposite the Phams’ front yard. He’d been sitting above the water on a section of crossbeam, but when he saw the men approaching, he slipped into the water.
There were three of them, just as Nga had said. Two moved through the deep water on either side of a raft created from a section of privacy fence. Another walked behind. They were bare-chested, golden-skinned, and muscular. Despite the masks they wore, it was easy to see that they were young men. A tattoo of a sinuous green dragon curled around each man’s upper right arm.
The Pham children were sitting at the raft’s center, bound together shoulder-to-shoulder with duct tape. Facing outward. More duct tape covered their mouths. Above the tape, their eyes were terrified. It would take little effort, Sonny realized, to tip the raft and send the bundle of children tumbling into the water. Where they would certainly drown.
The children shared the raft with three handguns.
The procession stopped in front of the house, in front of the porch. Sonny watched as the two flanking men abandoned their positions and went up the steps. Two of the handguns went with them. They shouted loudly and waved the guns in Nga’s direction when she came to the door.
Maximum intimidation
, Sonny thought.
One of the men pointed at the raft, clearly threatening.
Nga nodded, looking nervous, but did just as she and Sonny had agreed. She gestured for them to come inside. To view the valuables she’d collected.
“Keep them inside for as long as possible,” Sonny had instructed her, silently admiring her courage when she’d immediately agreed. They had spread the ransom across the dining room table, then gotten rid of the pillowcase so that gathering up the money and jewelry would be less convenient for the kidnappers.
Nga had added to the plan: “There’s a wall safe upstairs. I’ll put half of the money back into it. When they demand more, I’ll reluctantly tell them about it. Then I’ll take them upstairs. After that, they can wait as I search the house for the extra jewelry I’ve just remembered.”
“Smart,” Sonny’d said, and then he’d grinned at her. “Be sure to move slowly, old woman. That way you’ll give an old man the time that he needs.”
Now, as he slipped quietly into the water, Sonny murmured another prayer to the Virgin. He apologized to her for previous transgressions, then asked her to intervene on his behalf. To ask the Lord’s forgiveness for what he was about to do.
“Ban cung sinh dao tac,”
he said finally. (“Necessity knows no laws.”) And he hoped that the old adage was respected in heaven, too.
Then he made sure his grasp was firm around the razor-sharp filleting knife he’d taken from his tackle box when he’d briefly returned to his little house. And he moved forward, only his nose and eyes above the water’s surface, the top of his head camouflaged by a small, leafy branch. When he’d tested it, Nga had assured him that it looked as if the branch were merely floating loose on the water.
Sonny had already checked his route, knew exactly where the obstacles lay between him and the porch. He moved forward quickly, detouring when he needed to, half-swimming, half-gliding through the water. Recalling how he’d once crossed rivers in just this way, intent on an enemy.
The man who’d been left behind was entertaining himself by terrorizing the children. He had retrieved his gun and, with his free hand, was leaning on the raft, pushing it downward against the water’s pressure, then releasing it abruptly. He was laughing at the children’s muffled cries.
Sonny emerged from the water directly behind him. He wrapped one arm around the young man’s shoulders as he slid the blade firmly across his throat. Just as he’d been taught back in Vietnam. Then he held the body for a moment, waiting for it to hang limp before lowering it slowly into the water.
The gun sank before he could retrieve it, but that didn’t matter.
He smiled at the children and touched his fingers to his lips. But he left them taped up and gagged. Impossible to trust ones so young to the silence that was essential to saving their lives. He pushed the raft back down the street, moving as quickly as he could, finally beaching it on his own tiny side porch.
He took the children up into the attic.
“Stay here,” he said in Vietnamese, and then again in English. “Your grandmother and I will be back soon.”
He tossed them a package of cookies, then wedged the attic door shut from the outside so that they couldn’t follow him. They would die slowly, he knew, if he did not succeed. If he did not return.
He went back to the Pham house.
Just inside the living room, he stood on his tiptoes to reach past the ornate façade at the top of a mahogany display case. His shotgun, fetched from his attic hours earlier, was exactly where he’d placed it. Ready to use.
He followed the angry voices. And the high-pitched wavering voice of a woman. One who Sonny knew was far too brave to be as panicked as she sounded. He crept up the stairs, now too busy concentrating to be praying. Then he swung around the corner into the master bedroom.
Nga had backed away from the men, left them standing before the small wall safe. When she saw Sonny, she dove for cover behind the bed. Just as they’d agreed.
“Drop your weapons,” Sonny said in Vietnamese, making the effort to keep his voice low and absolutely steady. “Or you’re dead men.”
The two did as he said, turning to face his shotgun. Impossible to read the expressions on the faces beneath the masks. But Sonny didn’t much care what they thought. He marched them down the stairs at gunpoint. Into the water of the first floor. Past the place where Charlie’s body had been before he and Nga dragged it up to the second floor, placed it in the bathtub, gently wrapped it with a sheet.
He showed them to the front door.
“Your friend is dead,” he said. “But I was able to take back the children without killing you. Say your prayers tonight and thank God and the Virgin for your worthless lives.”
Sonny stood on the porch, gun leveled in their direction, watching as they waded out into the deeper water.
Nga had come downstairs, too, and stood just behind him.
“The children are safe,” he murmured.
“Kam ouen,”
she replied quietly. (“Thank you.”)
Sonny would have smiled, but just then one of the men stopped moving. He turned to face the porch, and his friend followed his lead.
“As long as the water is high,” he shouted, “we own Village de l’Est! And we’ll be back. Perhaps we’ll take the woman next time.”
The other kidnapper laughed, nodded.
“Don’t sleep, old man. Because when you do—”
Sonny begged for the Virgin’s understanding as he shot them both.
Their bodies sank beneath the muddy water.
I hope that the one of my relations who come across this gift find a very exlent use for it since the old bag I hereby confess to steal it from was a lowdown evil person who actually deserve what I imagine they going to do to me up to Angola after they catch up to me, which is stick me with the ugly needle and put me down like a cat …
Maybe there was ten thousand dollars’ worth of “gift” slipping around in my hands, maybe twenty. A sheaf of beautiful green-gray bills fluttered to the floor, along with Frank’s last letter to anybody. I stared at etchings of dead presidents on paper money. But all I could see, really, was the memory of my brother’s face, how it so often wore the expression of a mutt dog expecting to be cuffed.
My brother wrote letters practically every day of his life, always on lined paper torn from the Big Chief notebooks he bought from Bynum’s Pharmacy. Frank bought Big Chiefs like other people buy newspapers and chewing gum.
I picked up his letter from the floor.
Probly you going to come across this here loot, Wussy Wally. You being the onlyest one of our so-called family ever care to be buzzing around my bizness …
He always wrote in jet-black Sheaffer Skrip fountain pen ink. His handwriting was strangely elegant; surely that would seem most odd to those who didn’t care to know anything about Frank besides the worst thing about his record in life.
He called me “Wussy Wally” only when it was just the two of us. I imagine Frank believed his little brother would be embarrassed otherwise. So I was properly Walter, or sometimes Walt, when anybody else was around.
I considered the private name a gesture of my brother’s affection and gentleness. For indeed, I did care to know about the thoughtful dimensions of an angry man’s life.
Frank was right. Nobody else cared anything about him beyond keeping him far away. All our uncles and aunts and cousins kept their doors shut to Frank—and, by extension, to me too. This was due to Frank’s light fingers. As Aunt-tee Viola said for the whole bunch of our relations, “That boy Frank, he’d steal anything but a red-hot stove.”
But he was more than a thief, of course. Just as surely as crooks in high places got where they are because of doing some good things for people now and then. A man’s life is not so petty it can be measured up at the end as all good or all bad. Frank was plus and minus like anybody else, except for cheap schooling and black skin, which of course magnifies all minuses.
When I recollect his plus side, I would describe Frank as a philosopher. The things he said!
Such as things he’d whisper in the dark of night when we were boys in a shared room, me in one twin bed drifting off to sleep, Frank in his—only I can’t recall ever seeing him sleep. Frank would be sitting up, sounding out important thoughts before scratching them into a Big Chief by the light of a radio dial.
One night it was, “It’s a damn lie they say down to Asia Baptist Church about God create us all equal. But anyhow, every life is a big deal.”
Another night, “Since I am only a poor man walking around to save on funeral expenses, maybe I ought to find a way of doing somebody a good deed when I leave. That sound like suicide. Well, suicide is just a trick played on a calendar.”
And another night, “I am too sad to be dangerous. I am sad as a dead bird in a birdbath.”
The night I especially remember from back in those years came the summer when Frank turned sixteen—on his birthday, actually. Mama said he was a man now according to the law, and that a man didn’t need his mama’s birthday fuss anymore. Just about everything was a fuss for Mama by then. She had the sugar, and it was taking her down fast and furious, even faster than diabetes killed Daddy six years before.
So Frank and I went out and had a birthday party, thanks to thirty-one dollars I’d squirreled away for the big occasion. Frank knew how to spend it, due to his knowledge of where a couple of teenage boys could purchase whiskey and the attentions of certain ladies who frequented the alley behind the Star Lounge on Senate Street.
I remember Frank grabbing hard on my arm when a police siren sounded faintly in the distance. The party was over for some reason; I didn’t bother to ask why, as my brother was long in the habit of cringing and fleeing whenever a siren went off. I remember a party lady’s voice calling out behind us—“Where y’all going, baby?”—as we sprinted together up the alley and around over to Harrison Avenue toward home.
It was the hottest night I have ever known, running aside. So hot the chameleons that usually skittered across the screens outside our bedroom windows were hanging loose by their sticky little toes, and I swear they panted like hounds under a porch. I don’t believe I slept any more that night than Frank did.
In one of the tiny hours, Frank whispered something that froze the sweat on my neck. He cursed the city is what he did.
The page where he wrote down that curse must have floated off with Katrina someplace, along with all the rest of Frank’s life collection of Big Chiefs. But I don’t need that long-lost page to remind me of what he said.
“New Orleans be a jazzy town,” he said, “full of dead markers, a funeral urn of polished-up brass on top a flowery grave, and underneath the box going rotten.”
So there I was in our old room in the old house—what was left of it—with all that money slipping and sliding through my shaking hands. I stepped over to a smashed-out window and took a sneaky look through a slit in the plywood cover to make sure no wrong numbers were out there in the street or the yard picking through trash or casing storm-bashed houses or otherwise prowling around.
Up and down DeSaix Boulevard and pretty much all over Gentilly, variously wrecked homes were still waiting on overpriced contractors to show up, a whole year after that bitch Katrina. Gangs of discriminating thieves and expert metal-strippers seemed to know exactly which houses were worth their while. My suspicions were the same as the neighbors’ suspicions, what was left of the neighbors: Maybe the wrong numbers knew where to go because when they weren’t contracting, they were thieving.
Nobody was prowling around outside.
I stepped back to where I was when I came across the money and Frank’s letter—stooped in front of my grandfather Benjamin Masson’s chifforobe, going through the drawers and shelves after anything worth keeping before the unhappy need of my cutting it down with a rented chainsaw.
That chifforobe and the matching cherry wood blanket chest and Mama’s wide bureau, as we called it, along with the bed frame with the carved headboard and footboard, were Masson family heirlooms. They’d all been handed down to Daddy as Benjamin’s wedding gift. The heirlooms crowded up my parents’ first little bedroom in the St. Bernard projects, which is where I lived for the first ten years of my life until we left.
We didn’t go far, at least not by the lights of Frank and me, resentful of being told we shouldn’t be playing with the project kids we ran with since now we’d moved up in the world. But Daddy was proud to leave the apartment in St. Bernard and move off Gibson Street not so many blocks to DeSaix Boulevard. He had enough to buy a small house there, a wood one painted pink with two bedrooms and a Queen Palm in the front and two Chinaberry trees in back.
“Little no-account niggers,” Daddy called the St. Bernard kids we weren’t supposed to play with anymore. Never mind they came in approximately the same good-to-bad ratio as everybody else in New Orleans, little or big. Never mind that Daddy and Mama and all us Massons have been called that same hurting word at one time or another; never mind that everybody else on our new block, save for the Spagnuolo family, had to sit way up in the balcony at the Circle Cinema.
So anyway, what was I doing there with a chainsaw?
It was hard enough years ago to haul that chifforobe and the rest of the bedroom suite out of Gibson Street and onto Daddy’s pickup for the short drive to Gentilly. Daddy called it a bedroom
suit
. It was even harder to get the whole cherry wood shebang jiggled through the front door and the narrow foyer of the pink house. Daddy and two of his work crew buddies from the parks department grunted clear through a Sunday on that job.
Now, thanks to that hellbat Katrina, there was no way of removing the family heirlooms out from the pink house. The cherry wood was all waterlogged, too swollen up to get through the door frames. Everything had to be cut into pieces, and the pieces carted out to the curb to wait a minor eternity for the garbage haulers to come fetch the mess.
The cutting job fell to me for two reasons. First, I’m handy. Second, the house was automatically deeded over to me as next of kin by the state of Louisiana when its previous orphaned owner was convicted and sent up to Angola for what he did to a white woman by the name of Eugenia Malreaux, who lived uptown on St. Charles Avenue in a big old place with her prize tulip trees in the back garden.
What in the name of Heaven I was doing hanging on to the pink house and the heirlooms these past years I do not know. I didn’t need a house. I have my own very nice little house uptown. And I didn’t need a
suit
for my bedroom.
Before Katrina, my wife Toni was after me to rent out the pink house. But I always managed to stall by reminding her about Mama and Daddy both dying there in the cherry wood bed, both blind and crippled up from the sugar and helpless to keep from soiling themselves. And then how Frank took over the house after Mama died, and moved into our parents’ own room at night to sleep in the big cherry wood death bed—leaving me to wonder what he might be cursing there in the dark …
… And how Frank took care of me in that house all the while I went through high school, then Xavier. And then on top of that, three years of law school at Loyola. No thanks to any of the cold relations who turned their backs on a pair of orphan boys. Just us two against the world, Frank and Walter.
I only worked part-time construction jobs in my school years, and I didn’t manage to get half what I thought I might in scholarship money. But Frank always came up with the rest, always on the promise that I would not ask where the money came from.
It was hard for Frank to be as responsible as all that. But not as hard as the rest of his life. This was a capital-B bone of contention between us.
Frank claimed he was halfway a regular citizen for bringing me up, and so anything outside of his role of being a big brother was none of my business. It didn’t sit well with me to be shut out like that. So to spite him, I did the meanest thing I could think of doing.
The day after commencement at Loyola, I marched down to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office with my law degree and got myself hired. I could just as easily have taken a job as a public defender. Frank never said anything about my spiteful choice, but I know I hurt him.
The white man who hired me at the D.A.’s office soon thereafter prosecuted my brother and sent him up to Angola, where they eventually put him down like a cat for stealing Miss Malreaux’s money and afterwards splitting her head open with an axe.
Even though the crime scene investigators never found that axe and had to rely on the coroner’s analysis at trial, the prosecution case against Frank was sufficiently solid. More solid, I admit, than a lot of cases I have prosecuted myself. People go to prison and get the needle for pitifully little evidence, really. All colors of people.
Frank had long been working handyman jobs at the big Malreaux house—earning money for my tuition at Loyola University School of Law, no less. So Frank had access to the place. The forensics squad came up with a smudged thumbprint they claimed was Frank’s, right there on the dial of a private safe in the brick shed where Miss Eugenia was known to keep large amounts of cash. Add to that, investigators found a considerable number of Miss Eugenia’s jewelry items inside a chifforobe drawer in the pink house.
They didn’t find the looted cash, though. Frank, of course, denied stealing money or jewelry from Miss Eugenia, just like he denied stealing anything else in his life. He’d wear that bad-dog look on his face when confronted on matters of theft, which was as close as he’d come to admitting his light-fingered predilection—until his last letter, that is.
Certainly he denied murdering Miss Eugenia. Which flew in the face of jewelry found in the chifforobe. Which Frank’s court-appointed lawyer might have said flew in the face of common logic, therefore constituting reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror. Because why would a murderer keep mementoes of his victim in the same place he kept his socks and boxer shorts?
At first, I thought it would be no problem to chainsaw the bedroom suit. Maybe in the past it was all worth some serious antique money. But the value was surely gone now—now that all that cherry wood was so nasty and swollen and probably full of termites, too. It was junk and nothing more. No problem.
But there I was in my dead brother’s house, in the room where he used to sleep as a free man. Sentiment hammered me. The rented chainsaw seemed as disrespectful to Frank’s house as Mother Nature had been.
Speaking of a hellish vandal woman, I took a long moment to gaze around the bedroom after a knock-down drag-out with Katrina.
Schaefer Skrip bottles by the dozen had flown around like stones in the hurricane, smashing into walls where splattered ink adhered to glass shards and blue and yellow labels. The floor was a carpet of Budweiser cans, crushed the way Frank crushed them with his big right hand, sodden Camel butts and moldy paperback books with underlined pages. Crime novels mostly. The door to the hallway was cracked in two and the plaster ceiling had gone pulpy like ricotta cheese.
Then I read the next parts of Frank’s last letter.
Evil and lowdown ain’t my view alone of Miss Eugenia Malreaux. It’s what the old bag son Philip call her. He told me things about his mama make you toss a meal. Told me when he was just a boy she’d come wake him up in his bedroom some nights wearing nothing but a peek-a-boo and she poke where she ain’t got bizness poking. Philip tell on her to his daddy one day. Then soon as daddy leave the house that lowdown Miss Eugenia take a strap to Philip and nearly skin him alive.
Oh yes, Philip he told me lots of things about the grand life up on St. Charles Avenue where it all look peace and quiet respectable. He said he like it better where we live in Gentilly on account of pain and awfulness can’t be hid away so easy.
Also Philip said he like talking to me whenever I come by to work for his mama in the garden since I understand the two of us is in the same boat—a couple of mens waiting around for the rest of their life to happen. Philip, he couldn’t get enough of that sad sack talk and start coming by to drink with me at the Star Lounge, my little briar patch by good old St. Bernard.
I always feel sorry for Philip when he come slumming, a puffy little white guy in there with us Negroes. But I don’t feel sorry enough to forget about asking him where do they hide the money up to his place on St. Charles. And he told me. Told me his mama keep a wall safe in the very last place I’d ever think to look, which is the garden shed behind the tools.
Also, he told me how he steal money from the evil lowdown old bag first as a boy, then as a grown man when he hide it down to the bank on Poydras Street where he keep a safety box in the vault on account of he trusts banks even if his mama don’t …
