Let the Devil Out (11 page)

“Ma, that's amazing,” Maureen said. That sly devil, he hadn't dropped a single hint. Even off the force and out of practice he could play it close to the vest with the best of them. Or maybe, Maureen thought, you're not much of a detective yet. “I'm so excited. Is Nat there? Can I talk to him?”

“See, there you go again,” Amber said. “We're
talking
about it and you're ready to send out the invitations. And before any of it goes any further, there's something we need to discuss, you and me.”

“What's that? The honeymoon?”

“Your father,” Amber said. “We need to talk about him.”

“I forgot about him,” Maureen said after a moment.

“I didn't,” Amber said.

“Of course not,” Maureen said. “And I didn't mean I
forgot
forgot. I just, I don't think about him much.”

“You know that I never divorced him after he disappeared,” Amber said. “I never did anything about it. Legally, we're still married.”

“I hate that thought,” Maureen said.

“So I'm looking into something,” Amber said. “As a possible solution.”

“And what's that?”

“Having him declared dead.”

“I can get behind that,” Maureen said.

“So if Nat starts the process of having him declared dead, which may involve looking for him, you're okay with that.”

“I have one request,” Maureen said.

“What is it?”

“If you find him,” Maureen said, “don't tell me. I don't want to know. Where he is, where he went when he left.”

“Believe me,” Amber said, “I don't want to know those things, either.”

“Good,” Maureen said. There was one thing concerning her father, she realized, that she wanted to know. “So this is kind of a weird question.”

“Yes, we're having sex,” Amber said. “We are consenting adults. We're old, we're not dead.”

“Oh. My. God. That was not what I was going to ask. At all.”

“Well, then,” Amber said, “what was your question?”

Maureen struggled to recapture the original thought. “Oh, I got it. Daddy's ring, the wedding ring. You won't wear it anymore, will you? Nat will give you a new one.”

“I stopped wearing it not too long after you left New York,” Amber said. “I think maybe I took it off after we got home from your academy graduation. I forget.”

That's a lie, Maureen thought. Amber had worn that gold band for eighteen years after the man who'd given it to her was gone. Amber would remember not only the day, but also the hour she took off that ring.

Maureen waited, listening to her mother's breathing through the phone, knowing Amber was carefully weighing what she would say next, and how much she would let it reveal.

Amber said, “It all, it seemed so much more over when you left. More final. Like that was really the end of me and you and … him.”

Maureen swallowed hard. “I never knew that.”

“Why would you?” Amber said. “Nothing would've changed if you did. And I didn't even know I'd feel like that until after you were gone.”

“What did you do with the ring?”

“Why, do you want it?” Amber asked, forced brightness in her voice. She was wearying of the topic, Maureen could tell. “I know you don't have much of his, not since you lost that coat.”

I didn't quite lose it, Maureen thought. The hospital burned it because they couldn't get Sebastian's blood out of the wool. But, she thought, her mother's point was the same. Her father's coat was gone and she had nothing left of him but his last name.

“I don't want that ring,” Maureen said. Except maybe to toss in a volcano. “It's of no use to me.”

“Oh, okay, then. I guess it's in a drawer somewhere. I can't throw it out, I'm sure it's worth something. Just not to me. Not anymore.”

 

10

Shortly after nine the following morning, Maureen was down in the Central Business District, sitting at a small table outside the PJ's coffee shop on the corner of Camp and Girod Streets. Despite the day's early hour, she felt more calm and clearheaded than she had any number of the past days when she'd slept much later, rolling around sore-legged and headachy in the tangled sheets into the early afternoon.

She lifted the lid off her paper cup and blew on her coffee, the rising steam fogging her sunglasses. She wore boots and jeans, and over a white thermal undershirt she'd pulled on a gray V-neck T-shirt featuring a gas lamp emblazoned with the name Kelcy Mae, a local singer-songwriter. She'd caught the show a couple of weeks ago, a good one, at a small bar in the Riverbend neighborhood called Carrollton Station. She didn't remember buying the T-shirt after the show, which was fine; she liked the music and the band, and the shirt, but she didn't remember the drive home, either. She didn't remember much of anything after the fourth double Jameson, and that was a problem. At least she'd woken up alone that morning. Thank the Lord for small favors. She was looking forward to putting those days behind her.

She tilted her chair back against the building, her face turned up into the sunshine, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses, her back pressed against the warm wall of the coffee shop. The air was cool but the sun warmed her face, the cotton stretched over her chest, and the denim stretched over her thighs. She felt as if she hovered slightly above her own body, lifted skyward, lightened by the autumn sun. Not asleep, but not entirely present. This is what it's like, she thought, to wake up without a hangover. To wake up not wondering who saw what you did last night. Remember this? This is what it's like, she thought, to relax. Having that back, even for a few short moments, was serious progress. Maybe now that she was a cop again she'd fight her way back to sane.

At the next table along the wall, not five feet away, sat Preacher. She'd called him last night, told him about the meeting with Skinner. He'd agreed to sit in on her meeting with the FBI before she'd finished asking the question. He wore civvies like Maureen, dressed in an olive Guevara shirt and matching pants, sandals and thick black socks on his feet, a black felt porkpie hat on his head. He sat with his wide face held at the same angle as Maureen's, soaking up the sun. Taken together they gave the impression of two beach bums wasting away the day, as if the concrete sidewalk they sat on was instead white sand, and the parking garage across Girod Street was a green and rolling ocean that smelled of salt instead of car exhaust.

“You feeling okay?” Maureen heard Preacher ask.

“Never better.”

“Long night?”

“Nope. Quiet. I talked to my mother. I read. Slept like a stone.”

“Sounds nice,” Preacher said. “You look pale, though. Even for you.”

“I'm redheaded Irish, Preach. And a Yankee. Cadaverous is my natural look.”

“I see you're limping again,” Preacher said.

“It's that ankle thing. It comes, it goes.”

“I don't know if you heard,” Preacher said. “I'm guessing you didn't, but some guy in the Irish Channel had a rough time of it the other night.”

“I'm sure there's more than one of them out there.”

“Young man took a hell of a beating,” Preacher said. “Got left bleeding in the bushes. Couldn't talk much since he had a couple of cracked ribs. Punctured lung, as it turned out. Could've gone way worse for him. He woulda died there in those bushes if he'd been left there much longer. Wouldn't have made it to dawn. We'd be calling your buddy Atkinson for him.”

Maureen willed herself not to look at Preacher. Instincts, or was it her guilty conscience, warned her that he was fishing. He had instincts of his own, she recalled, and they were much better than hers.

“What saved him?” she asked.

“Girl who lives in the house where he took the beating, her dog wouldn't stop barking. She finally went out to check, found the poor bastard in the bushes. Girl called nine-one-one. Turns out she was a witness to the beat-down.”

“Good for her for making the call,” Maureen said. “She's a fine citizen. And why would I have heard about this?”

“It happened in your neck of the woods,” Preacher said. “On Philip Street. Only a few blocks from your house. You must've heard us coming out, the sirens.”

“I miss the job,” Maureen said. “I'm eager to get back to work tonight, but I haven't been sitting home listening to the scanner. I hear sirens every night, up and down Magazine, Tchoupitoulas, all over Uptown.”

“The girl with the dog,” Preacher said. “She'd had a few at the Irish Garden. She said the guy was attacked right there in the front yard. He appeared out of the dark. Like he'd been there in the bushes waiting for her to get home.”

“Or like he followed her home,” Maureen said. Nailing the guy had taken strong detective work. Having to hide that part of what she'd done gnawed at her professional pride.

“So this guy appears and then, boom, out of the shadows leaps contestant number two, who then proceeds to kick this guy's ass six ways to Sunday.” Preacher shrugged. “Girl did say she might've walked into a fight that had already started before she got there. She couldn't say for sure the order of what happened. One of them yelled at her to get inside. She was scared enough to listen. Never got a good look at either the victim or the assailant.”

“If she'd had a couple of drinks,” Maureen said, “her facts might be off. Even so, it's a shame we couldn't get any kind of description from her on the guy giving the beating.”

Preacher raised his hands. “Yeah, a shame.”

Maureen reached for her coffee, lifted the lid, and sipped, content to let the subject drop. Where in the hell, she thought, was this FBI stooge?

“It got me thinking,” Preacher said.

Maureen's stomach dropped. She did
not
want Preacher thinking about crimes she had committed. “Were you at the scene? Did you work this?”

“I was at the St. Charles Tavern,” Preacher said. “I caught the details on the radio. Figured I might as well swing by. It was you that put the idea in my head. Those calls you were asking me about last week at the park, with the girls getting followed home from the bar. It was that Irish Garden bar, wasn't it?”

“Is there a point to this?” Maureen asked.

“The address, it was another one not far from the bar.” Preacher rolled out his plump bottom lip. “I wanted to see what I could see. I'm curious, I'm thinking, what if maybe that was our guy? Maybe somebody caught on to him, lit him up on their own.”

“The girl,” Maureen said, “she have a boyfriend? Someone that could've seen this guy following her, like from the apartment or the porch or something?”

“No boyfriend,” Preacher said, shaking his head. “He'd dumped her that afternoon.” He rolled his eyes. “I heard
plenty
of detail about that. Job transfer. He ditched her by text. Anyway, that was why she was out alone in the first place, she said. If anyone saw what happened, we don't know who they are.”

“So is there anything to move on?” Maureen asked. “Or are we shelving it?”

“I want to see if those calls stop coming,” Preacher said. “Far as I'm concerned, that'll tell us if Johnny Lungblood is our man.”

“Or maybe the calls stop coming,” Maureen said, “because we never did anything about the first few.”

“Maybe.”

“The guy,” Maureen said, taking a deep breath, “he have any idea who put the hurt on him?”

“Beats me,” Preacher said. “I haven't heard anything since he got taken to the hospital. They were working on him in the yard when I got there. I don't think anyone at the scene talked to him much. Wasn't much he could say. I'm sure the detective will talk to him. Eventually. Maybe when he gets out of the hospital.”

“So no one at the scene questioned this guy?” Maureen asked. “No one asked him what he was doing in that yard? If he knew that girl?”

“Coughlin, somebody caved in the guy's ribs for him,” Preacher said. “Somebody nearly
killed
him. Did you miss that part of the story? Because I'm pretty sure I told it. Ambulance guys suspected a weapon like a pipe. Maybe a bat. Guy has a knee that looked like a fucked-up hamburger cauliflower. EMTs had to cut his pants off him right there in the yard.” He brushed his fingers over his pants, dismissing imaginary crumbs. “We'll see tonight if there's any updates when we go in. Anyways, it'll be easier for you to stay in the loop, now that you're back on the job.”

“Believe it,” Maureen said.

Preacher puffed out his cheeks, blew out the air in a long sigh. He raised his chin at something over her shoulder. “Hey, look, I bet this is your FBI guy.”

 

11

Maureen turned her head, rolling her skull along the concrete wall of the coffee shop.

A short, slender, clean-shaven black man in a charcoal suit, his head down, phone at his ear, stood at the nearby corner. His name, as he'd told her on the phone last night, was Clarence Detillier, and he was an FBI agent, domestic terrorism unit. He was going to give her a chance, he had said, to go from being a liability to a commodity. His words. She could tell over the phone that he was proud of them. She'd told him she'd be happy to talk. She even let him name the time and the place. Then she had called Preacher. She knew when to roll with backup.

Preacher had worked his web of New Orleans contacts and called Maureen back to vouch for the guy. It was Preacher who'd found out he was in the domestic terrorism unit. So it didn't seem, as far as Preacher could tell, that Detillier was setting her up for a fall, or worse, looking to somehow use her against her fellow cops in the Gage murder case.

The FBI agent finished his phone call, tucked his phone in his jacket pocket, and headed for Maureen's table, where an empty chair awaited him. He dusted it off with a handful of paper napkins before he sat. He extended his hand across the table.