New Orleans Noir (20 page)
His whole body jerked when he heard the rustling in the weeds across the alley.
“Mikey, hey, Mikey.” His fare emerged from behind a dead shrub and limped across to the carport. Mike held up the lantern expecting to see him covered with blood. Instead, he saw sheetrock dust and dirt, maybe a smear of blood on his dark blue jacket, and the evidence of hiding in a weed patch. He held one arm tight against his rib cage. “I was over on Argonne when I heard the shooting. I knew you’d come back, Mikey, I knew you’d come back with the gun.” He grinned.
How could he know it? Mike himself didn’t know it. He wanted to knock the grin off him. He didn’t even know why he felt so hostile. “Your face is a mess,” he said.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t much to begin with.” He was grinning again.
“I thought they’d stabbed you.”
The guy frowned. “They had a knife?”
“I saw a knife.”
“Glad I didn’t see it.”
“Looks like you lost a lot of blood.” Mike walked over to the stain.
“My nose,” the guy said. “Bled like a son of a bitch. I think it scared them.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “They stopped kicking me.” He glanced down the alley where the cab had been. “So what, you leave the keys in the car?”
“Hot-wired.”
He laughed, a short one, and clutched his arm tighter against his side. “Fuckin’ spics. They can do anything.” He tilted his head and looked at Mike, amused. “What I don’t get—you had a gun on ’em, right?”
“I went in the house looking for you, moron.”
He did his high-pitched laugh, keeping it in his throat to avoid hurting his ribs, and the night air sent it out, a sound to make the worst scoundrel’s skin crawl. He grimaced when he forgot his hurt leg, doing a little hop on his good one.
“You’re a bucket of cheer for a guy who just got the crap beat out of him.”
He rubbed at an eye, as though drying it, but touched the open cut on his cheekbone and winced. “Yeah, well, Mikey, what you gonna do? I tried to talk them into staying, but they weren’t buying it this time.”
“This happened before?”
“No, I mean they been stranded out here since my truck broke down.”
“So they decide to beat you up tonight?”
“I was supposed to get the truck Friday. I went to the casino Thursday night, remember? Lost the repair money. They said they’d wait till today.”
“I don’t get it,” Mike said.
The man’s good humor seemed to be deteriorating. He said crossly, “I been at the casino all weekend and lost most of their pay, too. They’re illegals. What they gonna do but beat me up?”
They started walking.
A block later, the guy’s amusement recovered, he said, “Not only that, I been taking cabs all over the place. Fuckin’ expensive.”
“I guess you get off cheap tonight.”
“Fuckin’-A. I gotta walk home.” He tried to elbow Mike, but Mike moved away from him. “Don’t be a sour puss. Come on, find us a bar. Buy me a drink. The spics get to party in a hot taxi.”
The guy was strangled with laughter until they got to the intersection of Filmore and General Diaz.
After that they walked awhile in silence, until he added, “Look, Mikey, that was a real stand-up thing you did, come back to get me.”
“Sure.”
“No, I mean it. Four of them, one of you. Even if you had a gun. You didn’t know what kinda weapons they had. You saw a knife. Hell, they had crowbars, sledgehammers, all kinda stuff.”
“I never thought about it.”
“That’s what I mean. You come back for a guy you don’t know, some fare you picked up. You coulda just gone home. That’s real stand-up stuff.” He brushed his knuckles across Mike’s arm. “I appreciate it, man. I mean it.” He limped along, grunting every few steps with the effort.
It was true, he’d gone back without a thought for his own safety. He couldn’t just run away from a man getting kicked like that, who could have been killed. He would never have known whether the guy was dead or alive. His thoughts careened around his brain, and his emotions with them—afraid when he shouldn’t be, not afraid when there was good reason. Maybe he didn’t think right, not like other people. Maybe he’d gone back because the guy was a fare, no other reason than still hoping for a payday.
Christ, where was that button on the side of his head? He needed to turn it off.
“Yeah, I guess they could have killed you.”
“Nah,” the guy said, “I’m the meal ticket.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not much of a businessman, are you, Mikey?” The arrogance—Judas Priest, Mike wanted to kill the asshole. “I get the work, collect the money, they gut the houses, I pay them.”
“The way I read it, you’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
“Whatever you say, Mikey. You saved my life, okay? I’m telling you I appreciate it.”
He said that, and all Mike felt was the weight of the gun against his back. “I didn’t save your life. They let you go before I ever got back.”
“That’s what I mean. They could have killed
you.”
“You’re right, they could’ve. Instead, they took all their belongings, all those crowbars and sledgehammers, their ice chest, clothes, and they took the first ride out they could get.”
The guy stopped dead. “So what’s your conclusion here? You scared them off?”
“No,
hombre
, I’m suggesting that you need to reconsider just who the meal ticket is. The Mexicans have
vamoosed
. They aren’t coming back.”
“Okay, I get it. You don’t need to tell me three ways to Sunday … Fuckin’ asshole,” he added under his breath. He started walking again.
Mike clutched the guy’s shoulder and stopped him. “You calling
me
an asshole?” He held the lantern up so it lit the man’s face.
“Get that thing outta my face.” He pushed Mike’s arm away and started moving again, limping down the street a little faster, trying to get away from Mike.
The lantern swinging at this side, Mike took a long step and caught up with him. “What’s your hurry? We got a long way to go. You better pace yourself.”
“Pace myself right outta this goddamn place,” he mumbled.
“What—back to Jersey?”
The guy walked, his head down. He grunted with each step.
“You mean you’re leaving the land of opportunity? One small setback and that’s it? What about that house back there? The one the Mexicans didn’t finish gutting.” Mike had read all the warnings about rip-off contractors.
The big businessman tried to go faster, but Mike lengthened his stride and walked comfortably next to him. “All you have to do is go down to Lee Circle and hire another crew at the gas station.” The illegals gathered there every morning, holding up signs for work.
The man wouldn’t talk to him. He was going to leave the city, leave people who had paid him in good faith.
“You have any other houses lined up?” He waited a second then went on. “How ’bout it, buddy. You gonna return the money?” He held the lantern up again, leaning so he was in the man’s face.
He didn’t see it coming. The guy from Jersey back-fisted him. Mike felt a tooth go. Blood filled his mouth.
The man grabbed the lantern from Mike’s hand. “Who’s gonna make me, huh? You?” He swung the lantern and threw it. It shattered against the side of the house they stood next to. Mike smelled gas. All the dry debris beside the house burst into flame. It pushed Mike back several steps, into the street.
The man was on him, hands all over him, feeling for the gun. As hard as he could, Mike kicked him in the shin of the bad leg. The guy landed full weight on his ass, yelling and wrapping both arms around his broken ribs.
Mike rushed forward as if he could stop the fire. But the heat stopped him first. The house had already caught; it would burn to the ground faster than he could get help.
Mesmerized by the fire, Mike felt the hand at his back too late. Jersey had the gun. Mike turned and caught his forearm, twisting the weapon away from them both. It fired off to the side. Mike kept twisting, the man’s thick forearm held against him. They stayed like that, both of their bodies tense, unmoving, until the tree next to them caught fire. Without much strength behind it, Jersey kneed Mike in the groin. Mike lost his balance but didn’t release his hold. He pulled Jersey with him as he fell against the tree. Both their jacket sleeves caught fire, but Jersey’s cheaper one went up faster and hotter. He started screaming. Mike released him, moved away from the tree, and started tearing off his own jacket. The man seemed almost frozen. He pointed the gun at Mike, still screaming. Mike threw his jacket to the ground. He watched his passenger shake the gun at him and waited for the bullet. But then he realized something else was going on. The man finally shook the gun free. The flesh of his hand went with it. Then the flames from the tree jumped to the man’s back, and in a moment the screaming stopped.
Mike watched until most of the body had melted away, until the stench of burning flesh was no longer overpowering. He kicked the gun out into the street. It was still hot. After it cooled, he picked it up, wiped the grip off on his trousers, and put it back in his waistband. He started walking toward West End, death all over him. His mind, for once, was still.
I
swear I didn’t mean to kill him.”
If ever a person was meant to come with a warning label, it was my tenant, Phillip. He’d been renting the other side of my double shotgun in the Lower Garden District for two years now, and while he was a good tenant—always paid his rent on time, never made a lot of noise in the wee hours of the morning, and even ran errands for me sometimes—chaos always seemed to follow in his wake. He didn’t do it intentionally. He was actually a very sweet guy with a big heart, a great sense of humor, and he was a lot of fun to have around.
Every morning before he went to work, he’d come over for coffee and fill me in on the latest goings-on in his life. I usually just rolled my eyes and shook my head—there wasn’t much else to do, really. For all his good heart and good intent, somehow things always seemed to happen whenever he was around. Bad things. He attracted them like a magnet attracts nails.
I looked from the body on the kitchen floor over to where he was standing by the stove and back again. I knew I should have evicted him after the hurricane, when I had the chance.
I don’t need this,
I thought. My evening was planned to the second. My new book, the latest (and hopefully biggestsell-ing) suspense thriller from Anthony Andrews was due to my editor in three days. I was finishing up the revisions, and when I was too bleary-eyed to stare at the computer screen any longer, I was going to open a bottle of red wine, smoke some pot, and throw the third season of
The Sopranos
in the DVD player. A very nice, pleasant quiet evening at home; the kind that made me happy and enabled me to focus on my work. When Phillip called, panic in his voice, demanding that I come over immediately, I’d thought it was a plugged toilet or something else minor but highly annoying. I’d put my computer to sleep and headed over, figuring I could take care of whatever it was and be back at the computer in five minutes, cursing him with every step for interrupting my evening.
A dead body was the last thing I was expecting.
“Um, we need to call the cops.” I shook my head, forcing myself to look away from the body and back over at Phillip. I felt kind of numb, like I was observing everything from a distance that I wasn’t a part of. Shock, probably. Phillip’s eyes were still kind of wild, wide open and streaked with red, his curly hair disheveled, his face white and glistening with a glassy sheen of sweat. “We need to call the cops like right now.” I raised my voice. “Are you listening to me?”
He didn’t move or answer me. He just kept standing there looking down at the floor, occasionally shifting his weight from one leg to the other. There was a bruise forming on his right cheek, and his lips looked puffy and swollen. I peered back at the body. I hadn’t, in my initial shock and horror, recognized the man sprawled on the floor with a pool of blood underneath his head. “You killed Chad,” I heard myself saying, thinking,
This can’t be happening, oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this isn’t happening.
Chad was his scumbag boyfriend.
“We can’t call the cops. I mean, we just can’t,” Phillip replied, his voice bordering on hysteria. “Please, Tony, we can’t.” His voice took on that pleading tone I’d heard so many times before, when he wanted me to do something I didn’t want to. He was always wheedling, dragging me out to bars against my will, urging me on until I finally gave in. He could always, it seemed, wear me down and make me go against my better judgment. But this was different.
A
lot
different.
This wasn’t the same thing as a 4 in the morning phone call to pick him up at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel because he’d somehow lost his pants. Or to come bail him out of Central Lockup because he’d pissed in public in a drunken stupor. Or to help him buy his car out of the impound lot where it had been towed. Or any number of the minor crises that seemed to constantly swirl around him, like planets orbiting the sun.
Chaos.
“What happened?” I asked. I was starting to come back into myself. I’ve always managed to remain calm and cool in a crisis. Panicking never makes any situation better. A crisis calls for a cool head, careful thought, the weighing and discarding of options. I started looking around for the phone, cursing myself for not bringing my cell with me. We had to call the cops, and soon. The longer we waited, the worse it would be for him.
“You didn’t hear us?” Phillip stared at me. “I don’t see how—you had to have heard us, Tone. I mean, he was yelling so loud …” He shuddered. “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything? He came over in one of his moods, you know how he gets—
got
—and you know, just started in on me. I was making him dinner …” his voice trailed off and he made a limp gesture with his hand toward the top of the stove.
I noticed a pot of congealing spaghetti floating in starchy water and another one with skin starting to form on what looked like red sauce. “We’ve got to call the cops, Phillip. We don’t have a choice here.”
“He started hitting me.” He went on as if I hadn’t said a word, beginning to shake as he remembered. “Yelling and screaming. You didn’t hear? You had to have heard, Tony, you had to have heard.”
“I was working. I had the headphones on.” I always put on headphones when I am writing so I can shut off all external distractions and focus. The littlest thing can take me away from my work, so I try to avoid all outside stimulus at all costs. The iPod had been a huge help in that regard.
“And I just pushed him away and he slipped and hit his head on the table.” Phillip started to cry. “Oh, Tony, what are we going to do?”
“We have to call the cops. Where’s your phone?”
“We can’t call the cops!” His voice started rising in hysteria. He buried his face in his hands. “I can’t go to jail again. I just can’t. I’d rather die than do that.”
I looked at him, starting to get exasperated. Even now, in a panic and terrified, he was handsome, with his mop of curly brown hair and finely chiseled face with deep dimples and round brown eyes straight out of a Renaissance painting of a saint. He was wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt that said,
NOPD—Not our problem, dude
. Phillip always wore T-shirts a size too small, to show off his defined arms, strong shoulders, and thickly muscled chest. I’d been attracted to him when he first moved in, and even considered trying to get him into my bed for a few days. Seeing him shirtless and sweating in the hot August sun as he moved in certainly was a delectable sight; almost like the opening sequence of one of your better gay porn movies. Yet it didn’t take long for me to realize that as sexy and lovable as he was, I just couldn’t deal with the chaos that followed him around like a dark cloud. No, I’d spent most of my adult life getting chaos
out
of my life, and wasn’t about to let it in again just so I could fuck the hot guy who lived next door. I didn’t mind listening to his tales of woe every morning—but that was as involved as I got. Just listening to him some mornings was tiring enough.
“So, what do you suggest? We dump the body in the river?”
Phillip let out a big sigh and smiled. “Oh, I knew you would understand! You’re the best! I knew I could count on you!”
I stared at him. He could
not
be serious. “That was sarcasm, Phillip.” I looked down at Chad again, and my stomach lurched. I’d never liked Chad, couldn’t understand what Phillip saw in him, and every day for the month or so they’d been dating I told Phillip to dump him at least once. He was a jerk, an arrogant ass who thought because he was handsome and had a nice body he was better than other people, as though spending hours in the gym every week somehow gave him the right to treat people like something he’d stepped in. He’d been awful to Phillip almost from the very start of their relationship. He seemed to take great pleasure in tearing Phillip down in front of people, and I could only imagine what he was like in private. After a while, I gave up trying to get Phillip to wake up and see Chad for the loser he was. I just wanted to scream at Phillip,
Get some goddamned self-esteem!
After Chad hit Phillip the first time, I was ready to kill the son of a bitch myself—but ultimately decided he wasn’t worth it.
And now, as I looked down at the pool of blood under his head, I realized I wasn’t sorry he was dead. The world was a better place without the arrogant son of a bitch.
“I wasn’t serious.”
“Come on, Tony, we can’t call the police.” Phillip shakily lit a Parliament. “You know what that’s like. Even if they believe me, that it was self-defense and an accident, it’s still going to be a big mess.” He shuddered again. “That night I spent in Central Lockup—Tony, if I go back there, if I have to spend one night there again, I’ll kill myself. I will. And you know how the cops are. You
know.”
He had a point. I didn’t blame Phillip one bit for not having any confidence in the New Orleans Police Department. No one really did after the hurricane and all the allegations of police looting and car thefts and so forth, whether they were true or not. Their reputation hadn’t exactly been great before the storm either. Phillip might be right—getting the police involved would probably only make matters worse. He needed to protect himself. They’d been pretty awful when he’d been arrested that one time. And, as it later turned out, he’d spent the night in jail for something that was merely a ticketing offense. He’d been a hysterical mess when I bailed him out. I’ll never forget the look on his face when they finally let him go, and the stories he told me about that night in jail made my blood run cold.
“We’ll call the police and then call a lawyer.” It sounded reasonable to me. “I won’t let you go to jail,” I said, as though I had any control over what the police would do. The more I thought about it, the less I liked it.
“I can’t afford a lawyer.” Phillip worked at the Transco Airlines ticket counter out at the airport. He made a decent living—always paid his rent on time—but there wasn’t a lot of money left over for extras. I was always loaning him a twenty when he fell short. “And what if they don’t believe me? What if they arrest me? I don’t have bail money. I’ll lose my job. My life will be ruined.”
“We can’t just dump the body somewhere,” I replied, it finally beginning to dawn on me that he was completely serious.
He wants me to help him dump the body.
“They’d find out, and that would just make things worse.” I shook my head. “Phillip, this isn’t something we can just cover up. They always find out … and then they definitely wouldn’t believe you.”
“You’ve said a million times that anyone can get away with murder if they’re careful.” He crossed his arms. “I mean, you write about stuff like that all the time, right?”
I looked at him. “Murder? I thought you said it was self-defense?” I chewed on my lower lip.
“We could dump him in the Bywater. We could make it look like it was a mugging, couldn’t we? How hard could it be?”
“Phillip …” I sighed. I could think of at least a hundred reasons off the top of my head, minimum, why that wouldn’t work, but there wasn’t time to go through them all. Besides, I knew Phillip. He wasn’t going to listen to any of them. “We can’t dump him in the river. We need to call the police.” I looked back down at Chad’s staring eyes, and noticed the congealing blood again. “Oh my fucking God, Phillip!
How long has he been dead?”
He bit his lips. “Um, I didn’t know what to do. I freaked!”
“How long has he been dead?” I gritted my teeth.
“Maybe about an hour.” He shrugged. “Or two.”
My legs buckled and I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from falling to the floor next to Chad. We couldn’t call the cops. It had been too long. I could hear the homicide detective now, see the look on his face:
And why did you wait so long to call us? Why didn’t you call 911?
It looked bad. What if Chad hadn’t died instantly? What if they could have saved him?
What if he’d bled to death?
And once the history of physical abuse came to light—and there were any number of Phillip’s friends who’d only be too glad to tell the cops all about it, not realizing that they’d be sealing Phillip’s indictment, thinking they were helping by making Chad look bad, like he deserved killing.
Phillip was going to jail.
Jesus FUCKING Christ.
I was going to have to help him.
“What are we going to do?” he asked, his voice hinting at rising hysteria once again. “I’m telling you, Tony, we can’t call the police! I can’t go to jail, I can’t.” He suddenly burst into tears, covering his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking.
“Well, the first thing is, you need to calm the fuck down,” I snapped. My head was starting to ache. I definitely didn’t need this shit. I was on deadline—I couldn’t exactly call my editor and say,
Sorry, I need a few more days, I had to help my tenant dispose of a dead body and come up with a story for the cops.
I raced through possibilities in my mind; places to dispose of the body where it might not be found for a while. Almost every single one of them was flawed. Seriously flawed—though an idea was starting to form in my head. “Is Chad’s car here?”
Phillip wiped at his nose. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, we’re going to have to get rid of that, too.” I refrained from adding
dumbass
, like I really wanted to. But there was no sense in getting him all worked up again, since he seemed to finally be calming down. And if we were going to do this—and, more importantly, get away with it—I needed him calm. “Give me a cigarette.” I’d managed to finally quit a few months earlier, but I needed one now.
Get ahold of yourself, look at this as an intellectual puzzle, shut off your emotions.
I lit the Parliament and sucked in the bitter smoke. I took a few deep breaths and decided to try one last time.
“Phillip, we really should call the cops. I mean, if this was self-defense—”
“What do you mean,
if
it was?” Phillip’s brown eyes narrowed. He pointed to his cheek, which was purple. “He slugged me again, Tony. He threw me against the wall—I can’t believe you didn’t hear him screaming at me.”