Doing the Devil's Work (11 page)

“That was you,” Maureen said, all statement and no question. She circled her finger around her head. “You didn’t have this business up here then.” As if the tattoo somehow made a major difference in the girl’s appearance. Her name popped into Maureen’s head. On the day she’d graduated from the police academy, with her mom and Nat Waters visiting, Maureen had broken up a bathroom purse snatching not far from Café du Monde. This girl had been the thief. Maureen had laid her out on the pavement.

“Dice,” Maureen said. “That was what Hardin called you. You still stealing, Dice? Tattoos ain’t free. Neither are banjos. And from what I remember, heroin ain’t free, either.”

“Why you gotta be like that?” the kid with the one-string ukulele whined from the shadows. He was the only one who’d stuck around. He had eye shadow over only one eye. He was sweet on Dice, Maureen could tell. It radiated from him like light. She felt something twitch in her gut. Envy again? Of this? Of these two? What was wrong with her?

“We were nice to your friend here,” the kid said. “We shared our space with him. It was a
cop
, like you, that busted up his gig and almost lost him that drum. We
helped
him.”

Both women turned and stared him down. He looked away, tuning his instrument, mumbling under his breath. Dice, for her part, hadn’t blanched at Maureen’s insult.

“I’m off that shit,” she said. “And I’ve
been
off it.” She shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her overalls and cocked one hip out to the side. “And don’t you worry how I make my money, Officer. I got talents and I use them, just like any other God-fearing American.”

“I’ll take that as a yes on the stealing,” Maureen said.

“Just like you, Officer,” Dice said. “I do what’s necessary to survive.”

“Indeed,” Maureen said, eyebrows raised. “Y’all have a good night.”

She headed for the car. Marques sat on the bumper, drum on his knees. The radio on her belt crackled. “Attention, fourteen-twelve.”

Maureen keyed the mic on her shoulder. “Fourteen-twelve here, go ahead.”

“Fourteen-twelve, duty sergeant requests your presence at a thirty-C, five hundred block of Lyons. Code One.”

Marques looked up at her, wide-eyed. “A thirty call? That’s a murder, yo. Can I come? Please? I won’t tell my grandma.”

“Dispatch, show me on my way. Fourteen-twelve out.” She led Marques away from the car, back to the kids on the corner. “Dice, come over here.”

Dice took her time, sauntering in Maureen’s direction. “Good thing you were down here hassling us over playing music while someone got murdered uptown.”

“Marques here
needs
to get home. Please help him catch a cab.”

Dice put out her hand. “Cabs ain’t free.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Maureen dug some cash from her pocket. She pulled out a twenty, handing it to Marques as she spoke to Dice. “He gets a cab home to his grandmother. That is the only acceptable option.”

“I look like a babysitter?” Dice asked.

“He doesn’t make it home,” Maureen said, “and I’m coming back with friends. We clean out and shut down this corner and nobody gets to play here. Not tonight. Not ever. Do not try me on this. Next time I won’t
almost
bust your skull.”

“Daaaaaaaaaamn,” Marques said.

“Enough outta you,” Maureen said. “We had a deal. I hear bad news about you, and you can forget about playing anymore with Roots of Music. I know Mr. Dodds don’t let anyone march in an ankle bracelet.”

“That’s cold, OC,” Marques said.

“It is what it is,” Maureen replied. She took out a business card, scrawled her number on it, and gave it to Dice. “Help him out and I’ll owe you a favor.”

“And what’s that worth?” Dice asked. “Can’t eat a favor. And I don’t get up the Sixth District much.”

“Use your head,” Maureen said. “Marques is on the street and not in juvie because he had a name to mention. You already said there’s a cop coming down here hassling this corner. You don’t want a name to use if you need one?”

She walked back to the cruiser and slid behind the wheel.

She backed the car off the sidewalk and hit the lights, palming the wheel as she hung a hard turn off Frenchmen and onto Chartres, headed for Elysian Fields, engine revving.

She’d come to the Eighth District to get Marques out of trouble. Instead, she’d left him on the same corner where he’d been arrested hours earlier by a cop who’d come hunting for him, only now he was in the company of an antisocial vagrant thief with a grudge who may or may not be a junkie. What could possibly go wrong?

9

Maureen found only one other unit on the scene when she turned off Tchoupitoulas Street and onto Lyons. With each week, she knew less what she was going to get when she rolled up on a scene, half the district or a single car could be waiting. The other unit was parked on an angle, closing off the street, its light bar pulsing. But Marques had correctly recognized the police code he’d overheard as a murder. Somewhere near that one other police car was a dead body.

A crowd had gathered on the corner outside a brick-faced, windowless late-night bar called F and M’s. Maureen knew the place. It was popular with Tulane and Loyola students current and recent, with a few LSU folks thrown in for flavor. She’d cruised this corner before, answering neighborhood complaints about kids doing everything from fighting to fucking in the dark spaces along Lyons Street. The same shit she used to see, and sometimes do, when she was younger. She parked her cruiser.

Climbing out of the car, Maureen recognized the familiar shadowy forms of Quinn and Ruiz, the orange embers of their cigarettes glowing in their hands. The young spectators across the street nursed drinks and cigarettes. They were close to the river, across Tchoupitoulas from the docks, and the air was damp and heavy with humidity. The street smelled like cigarette butts, stale piss, and staler beer. Fraternity-approved hip-hop throbbed from inside the bar. No crime lab techs, no coroner or ambulance, not even a detective had arrived yet. The homicide machine, with its multiple moving parts, took its time getting up and running late at night. Still, unlike on Magnolia Street, at least the body hadn’t lain undiscovered for a week.

From under the sagging eaves of the bar, curling clouds of cigarette smoke over their heads, kids called out questions to her. She ignored them as she approached the other two cops.

Quinn met her in the street, halfway between the cars. “You done with babysitting duty?”

“I traded him in,” Maureen said, “for babysitting you guys.” She lit a smoke of her own. “Preacher sent me up here. Special request. Y’all getting lonely?”

Quinn glanced over his shoulder at Ruiz, who leaned on the hood of his unit, arms crossed over his chest, watching them. “
We
asked for you. We had Preacher put the call out. We got something here you’re gonna want to see.”

His blue eyes were electrified, though his mood was dark. He’d taken something, Maureen worried, in an effort to counteract the drinks she’d smelled on him earlier. She hoped it wasn’t more than one too many Red Bulls. She had her doubts.

“You guys finished your errand downtown pretty quick,” Maureen said, loud enough for Ruiz to hear. She knew she shouldn’t push the matter, shouldn’t be antagonizing them. If Quinn and Ruiz had gone downtown looking for Marques, they’d never admit it to her. Not after she hadn’t played along outside the Eighth. But maybe if she pushed the right button on one of them, and Quinn was her best bet, she thought, they’d show her something. “Quick enough to get it done and be first on scene at this thirty call. Nice job. Everything work out?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, fine. Some bullshit thing Ruiz had to double-check. Nothing worth talking about. Don’t worry yourself over it.”

Quinn flicked his cigarette butt, arcing it over the street. He watched as it tumbled through the air. He gestured for Maureen to follow him. She did. It wasn’t like him to be this somber. And it wasn’t being at a murder scene that bothered him; she’d seen him cutting up and joking at worse locations, in the aftermath of worse crimes than an isolated homicide. Something heavy was on his mind. Was it Marques, maybe his trip to the Eighth District with Ruiz? She decided that picking at him, that treating him with suspicion, might backfire. It certainly wasn’t a tactic, she realized, that would work on her. If she took a different approach, talked to him like a coworker, like a teammate, she thought, maybe she’d get more out of him. Maybe the ex was at him again over his son. Maybe the kid had struggled through another bad day at school. She fought to recall the child’s name.

“How’s your boy?” Maureen asked. “He okay?”

Quinn frowned at her as though seeing her through a haze. “Who? Ruiz? I dunno, ask him.”

So much for creating a bonding moment, Maureen thought.

They stepped around the police car, approaching a pea-green VW bus, its paint job measeled with rust. The bus leaned to one side on two flat tires. Close to the vehicle, on his back, with his eyes open, lay the dead body, a white male with bad skin and a crew cut, his throat slashed. Even through the sheet of dried blood, and there was plenty of it, Maureen could see the fatal wound: a gaping smile cut across his throat, running under his jaw and an inch or two above the Adam’s apple, not terrible deep, but deep enough to get the job done. Blood was everywhere, which meant he’d been killed where he lay, and not dumped there after the deed.

Maureen recognized the victim as Clayton Gage, from the previous night’s traffic stop. Her eyes flicked to his crotch. At least this one had his pants pulled up. There was nothing remarkable about his belt buckle. “What the fuck? How is this joker not in lockup?”

“We only hit him with misdemeanor charges,” Ruiz said over her shoulder, by way of explanation. Maureen hadn’t heard him approach from behind. For a big man, he moved quietly. She was furious with herself; he shouldn’t be able to do that to her. She moved away from him.

“We never heard from you about anything more serious,” Ruiz went on, “about the woman and such. We had next to nothing to book him on, especially if the woman stole the bags. Bond couldn’t have been much. And the hold on misdemeanors is twenty-four hours max. Judge or no judge.”

“So he got kicked right on time?” Maureen glanced from Ruiz to Quinn and back to Ruiz. Neither spoke. “How often does that happen? He had no priors? No warrants?” Neither man answered her. “I woulda sworn he had a file as thick as the Bible.” She shook her head, hands on her hips, looking down at Gage. “Go figure. The one time the system works like it’s supposed to, this is what we get. Waste of fucking time, the whole fucking traffic stop.”

“You’re an English major,” Ruiz said. “Isn’t this what you call irony?”

“You got the stolen purses back,” Quinn said. “Your instincts were pretty on point about pulling over the pickup truck.”

“Just smart enough,” Maureen said, “to not see this coming.”

“I don’t see a connection,” Quinn said, “between what we did with this guy last night and what happened to him tonight.” He held his hands a foot apart. “Two separate, unrelated incidents. How the fuck you gonna see this coming?” He turned to his partner. “Back me up here, Rue.”

Ruiz shrugged.

“I’m not saying we should’ve seen this coming,” Maureen said. “That we should’ve been able to predict it. I just really thought this guy, the feeling I got off him—I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Fucking prove it,” Quinn said. “That’s all
I’m
saying. You can’t connect last night to this mess. No way.”

Maureen said nothing, running the beam of her flashlight over the body at their feet. She understood Quinn’s point, but thinking the previous night’s events might not matter was foolish. Gage had gone from police custody to dead on the street. Someone, an NOPD detective most likely, would be interested in the time in between. And then would come family, the lawyers, too, probably. If there was a way to implicate the NOPD in his death, Maureen thought, specious connections or not, somebody would find it. Preacher told no lies. The NOPD were a fallible group. One with a bad reputation. She looked down at the body. Thanks for nothing, motherfucker. You couldn’t get killed on someone else’s beat?

Gage wore dark cargo pants, unbuttoned at the waist, his white belly exposed over the top of them. Auburn hair crusted with blood spread across his flesh like ivy crawling from his belly button. The amount of blood spilled down his front told Maureen he hadn’t collapsed right away. He’d stumbled or staggered, blood pumping out of him. His hands were painted red from clutching at the wound. Bloody handprints from his efforts to stay upright, as if that would somehow save him, smeared the dirty side of the VW. His platinum necklace and diamond earrings were gone.

“Another throat slash,” Maureen said. She turned to Quinn. “Like our one over on Magnolia. Two in a week? That’s kind of fucked up.”

“Agreed,” Quinn said, with an authority that surprised Maureen. “This is fucked up. We don’t get ’em much like this. Not out in the street like this. Everything’s gunplay now. Shit like this is usually indoors, domestic. Some dickhead gets a steak knife in the ribs.”

Maureen pulled on plastic gloves and squatted down beside the body. “Similar wound.”

“Ixnay this junior detective stuff, Cogs. Leave it for the dicks. They like it better that way. I’m telling you for your own good. I heard the four-one-one on the Magnolia vic. Crazy. Think about him. Be glad you didn’t fuck around with him.”

Maureen ignored him. She was thinking of Preacher’s hopes for a spark from the Sixth. Similar vic, similar wound. If there was another connection, she wanted to be the one to find it. If no connection existed, she thought, if the resemblance of this killing to the other murder was coincidence, no harm done. “Similar vic, too. White, kinda trailer-parkish. Killed on-site with a single wound to the throat.”

She waved the flies away from Gage’s face. She hung her forearms over her knees. She took several deep breaths, leaning over and around the body.

“What was he doing back here behind this van?” Maureen asked. She clicked on her flashlight, moving the beam over the ground around her.