New Orleans Noir (25 page)
The light was dull orange now. The bearded trees giving long shadows.
The sound of birds.
And then a sucking sound of rotten, slow breath.
He turned blind down a waist-deep path. In the shadows, only the thinnest sliver of gold light ran down the middle of the still brown water, almost an arrow.
At the top step of a marble crypt sat a young boy, maybe ten, holding his swollen belly, covered in blood. He breathed thick and hard and wet and he watched Jack come down the waterway and soon emerge on a bottom step, and then another, until the man grew tall and towered above him.
Jack placed his rifle on the last step. His clothes dripping.
The boy pushed himself against the locked glass doors to the long-dead family, each of their names and dates of life written in gold on marble.
Jack took off his shirt and pressed it to the boy’s stomach. He reached for his radio but it had been shorted out. “I’ll fix it,’’ he said to the boy, even as the long shadows covered the lost cove. “I’ll fix it.”
Jack stayed there until the boy’s head grew cool in the dark, a soft green-marbled moon shining on the cemetery water like silver.
Pretty and sad, like New Orleans
—The Iguanas
A
sk me, things started to go to shit
way
before the hurricane. The Pizza Kitchen killings, for instance. Well, what would
you
have done? One of your coworkers, that sullen kid from the Iberville projects, that dishwasher you hired, him, he was a friend of a friend and needed a break, knocks on the door as you’re getting ready to open for lunch, him and a couple of his equally sullen, hunched-up, shifty friends, course you let ’em in. And then he pulls a nine and ties you and everybody else in the place up, and executes all y’all with a shot to the backa the head using a raw peeled potato as a silencer, for eighty-eight dollars and change. And somebody else, who got lucky and missed her bus and was a little late to work that day, finds five bodies a few minutes later, still warm and oozing.
And this on a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend morning, clear blue Creole sky in the French Quarter, for God’s sake, well, felt like the beginning of the end to me. Maybe more so ’cause it was a rare day off for me, and I’m taking the kids on a little stroll through the Quarter, pointing out this and that historic feature, and the difference between a slave quarters and a
garçonnière
, and I get the call to get on over there, sorry ’bout your day off, Reynolds, and I say, nah, I don’t need no address, I’m
lookin
’ at it, mac—and I am, standing across the street, taking in the crowd and the cop cars and emergency vehicles, and when I can’t bear it no more, looking up again at the soft blue Louisiana sky, trying to put the two together.
Or maybe it was when those kids popped that priest, Father Peterson, off his bike further down in the Marigny, almost to Bywater. Out for a sunset ride, beloved in the neighborhood, and these punks just whacked the padre for kicks, far as we know, wasn’t like nobody was ever arrested. And this sorta shit’s why the town was deserted after dark in most neighborhoods long
before
the hurricane tore it up—and talking about
that
, parts of this town were always so raggedy-assed, you’d be hard-pressed to know what piece of decrepitude was there before or after Katrina: St. Claude, Tremé, St. Roch, St. Bernard, Central City, Desire. I mean, I
defy
you to tell me—
Or maybe it was Officer Antoinette Frank that broke my particular camel’s back, where she and her cousin lit up her partner
and
the Vietnamese family they both moonlit for as part-time after-dark security. A
police
officer, sworn to serve and protect. She was that family’s guardian angel, and she did them like that—and again, all for a few bucks, supposedly. The cousin said she thought they kept gold bullion in the back room, them being Vietnamese and all. Maybe. But who’d be that stupid? And what the real reason was, how’ll we ever know? She’s still on death row, Officer Frank, and the hurricane probably gave her another five years of undeserved life at least, delaying as it did every judicial proceeding large or small in the great state of Louisiana. And her, we
know
she done her daddy, too, filed a missing person’s on him and moved right into his house, and they found his bones under it and didn’t even bother to charge her with that.
You smell that? I don’t mean that slop in the footlocker—a smell I could never possibly describe to a civilian, except to say you gotta burn your clothes after a crime scene like this. Never wear nothing you wanna hold onto to a crime scene, I tell the rooks. Nah. I mean
that
—the night air. Sweet. Jasmine.
Confederate
jasmine.
Now, I’m a Seventh Ward, all the way. That’s the Creole ward, y’all, the Mighty Seventh. And I always lived in the Seventh Ward—always. Where I live since the hurricane, my mama’s house. I mean, same house I come up in on Dauphine Street in the Marigny, the Triangle, between Touro and Pauger—a double camelback with a screened-in side gallery, that we all piled into since our place in Gentilly had thirteen inches of water in it … on the
second
floor. I lie in bed, windows thrown open in the nice weather, I can smell the jasmine, the coffee roasting down along the river, hear the carriages rattling home at night after a day in the tourist trade, the
clack clack
of the mules’ hooves. I just lie there, I can hear the train whistle way down in the Bywater. Can hear the ferry boat horns out on the river. The out-of-tune calliope on the
Creole Queen
. All kinds of birds. The rain rattling in the gutters. The wind whipping the palm fronds. I don’t know. Place makes my heart ache. Way it smells, way it sounds. Way it looks. No place as pretty and sad as New Orleans. Depending on if the sun’s shining or not. You ever notice that? Sun’s out, ain’t no prettier place on earth. No place more …
resplendent.
But gray and gloomy, cloudy, rainy, this town is so shabby, dreary, and downright depressing, makes you wanna take morphine and die. As the old song goes.
If I believed in karma I’d be worried I’d come back as one of those mules. Those carriage mules. I would just hate like hell to come back as a mule.
It
is
a beautiful night. Despite this shit here. Sweet and soft, balmy.
Dark
. I know that sounds odd to say. The night is dark. But it is. Here in New Orleans, it is really dark. One or two things I know about New Orleans. The nights are
darker
here. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’m not talking about human darkness. About evil, or shit. I’m talking about the quality of the night. The
feel.
I been everywhere, all over this country. The Gulf of Mexico. Jamaica. I’m telling you. I seen a lot of darkness, stayed up a lot of nights. It’s just a fact. The nights are darker here.
Palpably
darker. And thicker. You can reach out and stroke the darkness. Touch it. Run your hand over it, like somebody’s skin, or a piece of soft cloth. Got a soft feel to it, New Orleans nights. The nights are always soft here. No matter what else has happened. No matter what kind of horror show. The nights are always soft. I can’t tell you how many times, how many blood-stained crime scenes I been privy to, how many murders. I just stepped away, stepped outside, into the night, and been struck by how thick and soft and sweet and downright dark the nights are here. Struck dumb. It’s a mystery.
This,
this here, ain’t no mystery. Run of the mill lover’s quarrel. Guy’s wife and her girlfriend—by which I mean, her
girl
friend, her lesbian lover—decided they were tired of him. The three of them get to drinking and fooling around—fuckin’ and fightin’, really, what it amounts to—and one of them whacks him over the head with a hammer two times and then the pair of them stuff him in this here footlocker, pour cement in the damn thing, and push it out on the back porch. A few days go by, and a neighbor gets to smelling something ripe, drops a dime on them. And here I am. Do I know why, exactly? No. But I know what.
It ain’t like TV. Most of the time, you do know who. You don’t know why, maybe, and you don’t care. Means and opportunity is all that matters. That thing about motive? Fuck motive. People kill each other for no damn reason at all.
One or two other things I know about New Orleans. Termites and hurricanes. The intro and the outro, how it starts and how it ends. The micro and the macro. That’s what gonna do New Orleans in. Not crime. Not fucked-up terminal stupidity like we got ourselves here. Termites and hurricanes. If you could beam me forward a hundred years from now, set me down right here in this spot a hundred years in the future, it wouldn’t be here. No sir. Not just this house here, this rundown half of a double, lower Marigny, Spain Street shotgun. I mean New Orleans. Not here. Nothing. Just cypress swamp again. Malaria mosquitoes and alligators. Gulf water maybe, far as the eye can see, the Mississippi finally jumping its banks like it’s been wanting to ever since it can remember, over to the Atchafalaya. Just nutria and gators and skeeters. But New Orleans? Not a chance. Gone like the lost city of Pompeii. Drowned like Atlantis. The termites and the hurricanes gonna take care of all
this
shit. The lost city of New Orleans.
Fifty years from now, I live that long, I’ll be fishing off my roof.
Not that I don’t love New Orleans. I do. But I’m a pessimist, I guess, especially about the capacity of human beings to solve their problems. Comes with the territory, I believe. Being a homicide detective. Makes you a little bit cynical about the human capacity. Makes you think maybe people ain’t real bright. Otherwise why would they do the things they do? To themselves and others. Why would they live the way they do? Now there’s a mystery for you. Not this sorry situation. All that’s left to figure about this is which one hit him, and get the other to cop a plea and turn against her girlfriend to get a little something off the top of her sentence.
What else I know about New Orleans? One or two things. They got some scruffy white people here. Scary looking. Take these three. Just beat to shit, generally. I mean, the dead guy, the vic, literally. One of the women, the girlfriend, five-nine, two-fifty, told the parish deputies she was a man, and they
believed
her. And the other one, the wife. Kinda scrawny and twitchy. And why on earth didn’t they get rid of the body? Oh, they were fixin’ to, but just “hadn’t got around to it.” Even bought some fishing poles. They were gonna take the footlocker out in the Gulf and dump it overboard. Plus, they got to drinkin’, to fuckin’ and fightin’ again, one thing and another, and just plum lost track of the time.
One or two other things I know about New Orleans is the pull of the past. Never been anywhere the past had such a pull on a person as here. If I had me a time machine, I’d wear it out, me, and I wouldn’t be hitting no future button, no, no, no. Even if there was one. No, I’d dial me up
old
New Orleans. The French Opera House. Storyville. Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall. The New Basin Canal. Not even that far back. I’d be just as happy to hitch a ride back to the ’50s. South Rampart Street honky tonks and gin joints and every mobbed-up club in town before that self-righteous prick Jim Garrison shut them all down. Not that I could go in those places back then, not through the front door anyway. But still. All the glorious past.
So much gone now, so much vanished. The Dew Drop Inn. Old Chinatown where City Hall is now. The amusement parks at Pontchartrain Beach and Milneburg and Old Spanish Fort and Lincoln Beach. North Claiborne before they tore up the old oak trees with bulldozers and rammed the interstate down our throats. Funny they didn’t run it through Uptown, ain’t it? I suppose I could use that time machine to go forward to when somebody apologizes for that, huh? I could set it for, let’s see, turn the dial to When Hell Freezes Over. I’ll be there.
We used to all picnic on Mardi Gras day on North Claiborne, wait for the Indians to congregate. Still do, but instead of under the live oak trees, now it’s in the shade of the freeway. Pathetic, huh? We’re stubborn, or stupid. Set in our ways.
So much gone. I’d give anything to see the glorious past of New Orleans. The octoroon balls. The slave market. Congo Square. I’d wanna see all that. One of the perks of this job, it teaches you not to flinch. The glorious and horrible past of New Orleans. Almost makes you believe in karma, doesn’t it? This beautiful place, paradise on earth, the City That Care Forgot, built on blood and tears and human misery.
I sometimes wonder if maybe that’s why this job keeps me so busy. In the words of that great Southern writer, the past ain’t never past, is it? But you knew that, didn’t you? Don’t need me to tell you. We all know that. No excuse, anyway. You can’t be blaming karma when you kill somebody. You can’t go crying about history when you blow some old lady away. Shoot some tourist in a cemetery, just some ordinary nobody checking out our great and glorious past. But still, I get to thinking sometimes, wondering when the past is gonna run its course here in the Crescent City. Wondering when we ever gonna get
past
the past.
Oh, I’d give that time machine a workout. Doesn’t have to be so far back. I’d settle for thirty years ago, when the parades still snaked through the Quarter on Mardi Gras day. Hell, I’d settle for last Saturday night, about 10 o’clock, when all
this
bullshit went down.
I mean, it’s not a mystery, exactly, but I’d still like to know. What was said. Did they plan to do him, the two of them? Did he know that she was more than just his wife’s friend? Did he come home and catch them going at it? Or maybe he was into it and they weren’t? Or they weren’t anymore? How long, in the words of that old song, had this been going on, anyway? Kind of case that keeps them speculating at work, you know?
Homicide.
Our day starts when your day ends.
Some of us have that on a T-shirt. Baseball cap. People say it ain’t respectful. But you gotta have a sense of humor in this job. I know that too.
