The Marauders (5 page)

One bulge-eyed man kept raving about “the famous lawyer Jim Diamond Brousard.” “You just call Jim Diamond Brousard,” he said. “Tell him that Ricky Hallowell is in trouble.”

Another man with a port-wine stain on his cheek had his pants pulled down around his ankles and was shitting without compunction in the corner toilet. He shot Cosgrove a beleaguered look and went about his business.

The police report read like a furloughed sailor’s escapades, a story he and his roofing buddies back home would have laughed about. Public intoxication, disorderly conduct, pissing on a jukebox, resisting arrest. He doubted only one part, that he was crying about his father when they shoved him into the back of the police car.

No, that didn’t sound like him at all.

The judge must have hated him on sight because he sentenced Cosgrove to two hundred hours of community service, a punishment insanely disproportionate to the crime. Cosgrove stayed in New Orleans because there wasn’t much waiting for him back in Austin save for a crappy roofing job, hell on earth during the summer. Some underwear and socks in an Econo Lodge drawer. His other sole possessions, a cache of childhood mementos and his birth certificate, were still in a safety deposit box in Miami, where he’d left them after a short, ill-fated stint—he’d gotten sun poisoning—as a barback in a South Beach hotel pool-bar.

He feared he was turning into a gypsy, like his father. Maybe in a new place he’d find a career, a woman, a life. He certainly hadn’t in Austin.

And his fortieth birthday, four months away in January, loomed before him like a storm front. Maybe the best way to weather the sea change was in New Orleans.

Cosgrove rented one side of a sherbet-colored double shotgun in Mid-City and got a job at a neighborhood sports bar shucking oysters. And three days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, he showed up at eight in the morning for community service. With a dozen other offenders, deadbeat fathers and druggies and drunks, he waited outside the station in his Day-Glo vest and ragged jeans until a deputy carted them in a windowless white van to their duty for the day. Sometimes they
worked in groups of three or four, cleaning graffiti with wire brushes and sandblasters in Jackson Square. Other days they worked en masse, picking up condoms and carnival beads with pointed sticks from the squalid banks of the Mississippi.

A month into his sentence, Cosgrove was dropped off in front of a derelict two-story Victorian with faded purple shutters and lopsided porch columns. It was late August and hot, sparrows keening in the gray-green oaks, bougainvilleas in moribund bloom. A bantam-bodied man with a small pinched face and a black ponytail hanging out the back of his camouflage baseball cap got out of the van with him. They stood on the sidewalk regarding the house.

“Good God Almighty,” the ponytailed man said. He had on a
TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS
T-shirt and frayed denim shorts two or three sizes too large, held up by a canvas belt with a gigantic gold and silver rodeo buckle engraved with the initials
JHH
.

The deputy, a gourd-shaped Dominican named Lemon, looked at the ponytailed man and then glanced down at his clipboard. “Hanson, is it?” he asked.

“John Henry Hanson,” the ponytailed man said. “Yessir.” He hung his thumbs from his canvas belt.

“What does it look like, Hanson?”

Hanson turned again and considered the sagging house. Paint was peeling off the clapboards in great leprous swatches and the front porch steps were spavined and weather-warped. Off to the side was a carport with a corrugated tin roof. No car, only buckets and paint cans and pallets of lumber, shovels and rakes and other gardening tools leaning against the walls.

“I’m no carpenter,” Hanson said.

“Man of your mental caliber can manage a little sanding and painting, I’m sure,” said Lemon. “You have any trouble with the hammer and nails, ask Cosgrove. He’ll tell you which pound which.”

Deputy Lemon got into the van and lurched away into the morning traffic. Hanson sidled up next to Cosgrove and watched the van turn
down Magazine Street. Cosgrove, six foot two with a lumberjack beard, felt like a grizzly bear next to the little guy.

“Bet that son-bitch is on his way to fuck somebody’s wife,” Hanson said, gripping his belt buckle.

Up close the house looked even worse than from the street, beyond hope of repair. The front windows were cockeyed, many of the panes broken and covered with scraps of cardboard. Here and there the porch boards were missing, and from underneath the house the ammonia stink of animal piss wafted up as strong as poison.

Cosgrove and Hanson got to work with their scrapers. Lavender scabs of paint fell from the stanchions and motes of plaster swirled in the air. The only sounds for a while were the scratching of their tools, the rattle and groan of traffic on Napoleon. Ambulance and police sirens wailing in the distance.

When Hanson’s rhythm slowed, Cosgrove, feeling watched, glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the man was looking at him askance.

Cosgrove asked him what he wanted.

“Not very friendly, are you?”

Other people, mostly women, had told him the same. “Why don’t you talk?” they asked. “Why don’t you listen?” Because he liked silence, he wanted to say. Because there was nothing he wanted to say and nothing he wanted to hear. At first they found his silence alluring, mistaking it for mystery, depth. But then they learned there was nothing behind it except indifference, maybe a low-grade depression.

“Just trying to work,” Cosgrove said. Already his white V-neck T-shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.

“Work. Shit. We’re a corporation now?”

Cosgrove hadn’t wanted to seem unfriendly, just quiet. The less conversation, the better. Some guys never stopped once you let them get started. This guy already seemed one of them.

“Why you here?” he asked Hanson.

“Forged autographs.”

“Who?”

“Presidents. They busted me for selling pictures with fake autographs
on them in Jackson Square. Some tourist got his dick in a pretzel because I was selling signed photographs of George Washington. Went to the cops.”

“There’re no photos of George Washington.”

“Bullshit. How’d they have painted those pictures?”

They got back to work. After a while Hanson asked Cosgrove how he ended up here.

“Public drunkenness,” Cosgrove said.

Hanson shook his head and snorted incredulously. “In New Orleans?” he said. “That’s like cops going out to the cemetery and arrestin’ folks for being dead.”

The next few days of Cosgrove’s community service were much the same. In the morning Deputy Lemon dropped them off and left them to their business. In the late afternoon he returned and surveyed their work like a plantation dandy, touring the house with his hands clasped behind his back. Whether Cosgrove and Hanson put in two minutes or two hours of work, his reaction was always the same. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “that’ll do.” Sometimes Lemon even gave them coupons. For laser tag, for free pancakes and car washes, for complimentary admission into a Bourbon Street strip club called Love Acts.

Lemon seemed to give even less of a shit than other cops in New Orleans, which Cosgrove had thought impossible.

One afternoon, about two weeks into his community service, Cosgrove finally caught glimpse of the widow. In a rose-colored terrycloth robe hanging askew from her bony shoulders she watched him querulously through the kitchen window, her snowy hair as bed-headed as a child’s.

Cosgrove, digging up a dead rosebush, leaned against his shovel. Raised his hand, half smiled.

The window blind dropped as swiftly as a guillotine blade.

That afternoon as they took a break Hanson asked Cosgrove if he knew why they were fixing the old widow’s place.

Cosgrove grunted, didn’t give a shit.

“Lady’s going to die any day now and she owes county taxes all the way back to 1982,” Hanson said. He took off his cap, stroked his ponytail. “Soon as she kicks it, state’s taking everything. Down to the lightbulbs and hinges and every aspect.”

“So?”

“So? So, her family comes from French pirates. Lafitte. Exiles from the Caribbean. Been here all the way back. Practically invented crime in this city. Practically invented fuckin’.”

Sitting on the porch step chewing on a tuna fish sandwich, Cosgrove wondered if there was a moment in the day when shit wasn’t flying out of Hanson’s mouth. He stuffed the remaining half of his sandwich back into the brown paper sack and asked Hanson how he knew all of this.

“Did a little snooping around,” Hanson said. “Came out here on my day off with a tie on and knocked on some neighbors’ doors. Told them I was from the Census Bureau. This old lady, turns out she’s a real piece of shit. Always starting hell with the neighbors. Kicking them off her lawn during Mardi Gras. Every goddamn aspect.”

Cosgrove wondered what kind of person would believe this man had anything to do with the Census Bureau. Someone blind and deaf, he suspected. Someone crazy. Someone brain-damaged.

But he was intrigued despite himself. “I don’t see how it should make one bit of difference to us.”

Hanson smiled, crooked but clean teeth. “You seem like a man who can keep a secret,” he said.

“You know nothing about me.”

“I know enough. You’re not a rat. You’ve seen me fucking around here all day and haven’t said anything to Lemon. That counts for something in my book. Money, I’m guessing you don’t have much. Otherwise a lawyer with a state school diploma would’ve gotten you off.”

“That’s a whole lot of assuming.”

“Am I wrong?”

“What’re you on about?”

“Okay, what am I on about. The old lady, I bet she’s got some treasure in that house.”

Brady Grimes was here on behalf of the oil company. In their parlance, a liaison to minimize liability. Some such horseshit. Whatever designation they bestowed on him, he knew his purpose: to gather the signatures of as many fishermen and trawlers as he could. The public relations clusterfuck of the next several years was unavoidable, but the flood of compensation claims and lawsuits, the mob of lawyers and ambulance chasers, could be held at bay.

So, the oil company sent Grimes to shake trawlers’ hands, to listen to their stories, to offer words of promise and consolation. But most importantly, to collect signatures. For a ten-grand settlement, a pittance compared with what British Petroleum might have to pay years down the line, the company would protect itself from further claims. Better to open the checkbook now and make amends before the true extent of the oil damage surfaced years ahead.

“Do what you do,” Ingram, Grimes’s boss, told him. “Show your all-American face. Smile your all-American smile. Commiserate. Apologize, promise, lie. Anything. As long as they take the money and sign on the dotted line.”

At first Grimes protested. Why him? Why not someone who never stepped foot in southern Louisiana? After all, he was born in the Barataria,
and as soon as he graduated high school he couldn’t leave fast enough.

Ingram said this was precisely the point. “Those swamp people will notice a Yankee right away,” he said. “And we want to send somebody who seems like they have a stake in the place.”

“But I don’t,” Grimes said. “I hate it there.”

“Seems, I said.”

“What if they don’t sign?”

“Grimes. Who am I talking to here? Of course they’ll sign. They’ve got no money. They’ve got to eat, right? Do I like it any better than you do? No. But it’s business. Trick is, you make it seem you’re doing them a favor. ‘Oh, this is terrible, a fucking tragedy, but let me help you out.’ You offer them ten grand at first, enough to make a difference. If they put up a fight the first few weeks, up it to fifteen. No way they’ll turn down fifteen. That’s enough to pull the stakes, take the circus somewhere else. Up it to fifteen but only give them a day. After that, then the settlement goes back down to ten. Put on the pressure.”

In the thrall of his deviousness, Ingram continued. “Tell them whatever huge payoffs and settlements they’re waiting for? A mirage. Which is true. You know how many forms they’ll have to fill out? How many of their forms will be quote-unquote lost? It’ll drive them crazy. They’ll never want to see another piece of paper as long as they live. Then there will be one appeal after another. As all that so-called settlement money gathers interest. A win-win situation.”