The Devil's Muse

by Bill Loehfelm

  “The guy who shot the teacher,” Sansone said, “we got him. We picked him up a while ago. So there’s no reason to go out looking for him. Dee is in no danger tonight, not from that guy. And while I’m not going to discuss the details of a police matter with you, I will tell you, as a courtesy to you being Dee’s friend, that we don’t think anybody else put him up to it. So I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want you to feel like you or your friends need to do anything to protect Dee. That’s what I’m telling you. If you hear about somebody gunning for Dee, they’re not. It’s old news. It’s already over. You understand?”

  Kenny nodded, lips pressed together, his expression serious.

  “I need to know you understand,” Sansone said. “Peace on the route is priority number one. Everyone needs to have a nice, calm, fun Mardi Gras. You hear me? You know how we do. The regular folk need to be able to enjoy their holiday.”

  “I hear you,” Kenny said. “I do. I mean, I don’t know what you want me to do, I’m just me, one person, you know. But I hear you.”

  “I want you,” Sansone said, “to keep doing exactly what you been doing. Hang with your boys, talk to those girls, have a drink, enjoy the parades, give the J-Street boys their space. Keep doing what you been doing is what I’m asking from you.”

  “I can do that,” Kenny said. “I can.”

  “I know you can,” Sansone said. “Off with you. Those girls are getting bored.”

  Kenny gave Maureen a last, long glance, committing her face to memory, and headed back to his friends.

  “There you go,” Sansone said, turning to Maureen. “Goody thought Cordell was Dee, a Three-N-G soldier, and tried to take him out. Shot the wrong guy.”

  “Shot a bunch of the wrong people,” Maureen said.

  Sansone nodded. “Roger that.”

  Maureen giggled to herself. Sansone was shocked to hear it. “What the fuck was that? I’ve never heard you make that noise.”

  “Lack of sleep. Lack of food. Really, I can’t believe how well this is working out. I’m so relieved. We got motive and everything.”

  “We got motive up to a point,” Sansone said, cautioning her. “We know Goody shot Cordell because he thought he was shooting Dee Harris. But we don’t know why Goody wanted to kill Dee Harris in the first place.”

  “Of course, of course,” Maureen said. “Wow. I was really happy for a few seconds there.” She sighed. “But that can wait, right? For tonight, Harris is safe from Goody. Goody is safe from revenge and he’s not doing any more shooting tonight. Kenny will listen to you and keep everyone cool. No more violence, right?”

  “Not from this situation here,” Sansone said, waving his hand over the scene in front of him. “No, I wouldn’t think so. But I can’t, like, promise you no one else gets hurt tonight. That’s impossible.”

  “But you’d be surprised?” Maureen said.

  “Yeah, I would. This just doesn’t feel like one of those nights.”

  “So I’m not making a mistake going back to Hardin with the full package—an arrest, a partial motive, moves to prevent further violence and escalation—in time for his press conference.”

  Sansone took a few seconds to think about it. “I think you’re good doing that. I would, if I were you. I’d feel pretty okay with doing that.”

  Maureen clapped her hands. “And on top of it all we did the good work while Drayton is spinning his fucking wheels. I love it. I love Mardi Gras.” She felt her phone buzzing her pocket. Probably Hardin, she thought. She was cutting it close with the press conference. She answered. “Sarge, I got good news.”

  “I am walking now to the press conference,” Hardin said, “and I don’t know what I’m telling Skinner. What’ve you got?”

  “Looks like the shooting was an isolated incident, a mistaken identity. Cordell looks a lot like a local player named Dee Harris. We think he was Goody’s target. Looks like Cordell, even has a white girlfriend that looks like Susan.”

  “And what’s the beef between Harris and Goody?” Hardin asked. “Do we have that?”

  “That we haven’t figured out,” Maureen said. Dispatch came over the radio, so she turned the volume down to better hear Hardin. “But with Goody in custody, that puts an end to it until after Mardi Gras, at the very least. Probably for much longer, considering Goody’s record. He may have seen the last of the streets. I’ve been talking to Sansone, and he’s talked to the neighborhood representatives, you could say. He’s got a good feeling about things.”

  From the corner of her eye, Maureen could see Sansone moving away from her with his head down, listening to his radio. She tried to watch him, but he moved into her blind spot.

  “I got a name on the OD, too,” Maureen said. “Benji Allen.” She waited for Hardin’s reaction. She was pretty proud of herself for getting that info, too, and wanted Hardin’s praise. But Hardin said nothing. “Allen was J-Street, too, like Goody. He went missing a couple of weeks ago.” She waited again. Nothing. Was Hardin even listening to her? “Warrant squad was looking for him. It was Allen’s sister who called in Goody from Harmony Street. Dee Harris is Three-N-G, but this shooting, according to the reaction Sansone isn’t seeing on the route, appears to be more a personal thing than gang business. Goody may have been trying to start one, but there’s no J-Street and Three-N-G war. Not tonight, anyway.”

  “All right, that’s good for now,” Hardin said, distracted. “Good work, Coughlin. I’ll let Drayton make the arrest so he can jerk off to himself on TV at the press conference. I owe him that favor. We’ve got half a parade to go yet. Get back on your route assignment. I’ll have Drayton send Cordts to meet you there. Let’s try to get back to normal, such as it is, and finish out the night strong.”

  “Ten-four,” Maureen said, but she could tell Hardin had already hung up. She frowned at her phone. “What was that, Sarge? I got everything you wanted and more.”

  Sansone tugged hard at her vest. “What the fuck?” she snapped, jerking away from him.

  “We got shit to do,” Sansone said.

  “Hardin wants me back at my spot,” Maureen said.

  She watched two mounted officers gallop past, down St. Charles toward the I-10 overpass. A few people in the crowd turned away from the parade to watch them. She watched Sansone’s crew drop their heads to better hear their radios.

  “We got to go, Cogs,” Sansone said. “We got a ten fifty-five under the Ten. Gotta let the air out of it before it becomes a thing. New mission. I’m sure Hardin will understand.”

  “Fuck me,” Maureen said. A 10-55 was an officer in need of assistance.

  “Let’s not overreact,” Sansone said. “It’s Code One, so it’s not life-threatening.” He frowned, shaking his head. “Something’s not right.”

  “What?” Maureen asked.

  “I think it’s Wilburn who put out the fifty-five,” Sansone said. “Didn’t you say something about him and a camera crew? I think they’re getting robbed under the overpass. That’s according to the original nine-one-one call, but now he’s saying something else. All right, what I hear is something approaching clusterfuck status. Let’s go sort it out, you and me. Stay close. Do what I do. We’re about to be outnumbered, by a lot. We don’t want things getting explosive if we can help it.”

  30

  Maureen jogged with Sansone to the intersection of St. Charles Avenue and Calliope Street, a few more officers now striding along several yards behind them, traffic running over the six lanes of the highway echoing above their heads as they moved under the overpass.

  As the parade rolled under the highway, the surrounding concrete scrambled the sounds of it into a disorienting and blurry echo: the rumble of the tractors pulling the floats, the screaming of the crowd, and the distorted, booming pop music combined into a vibrating cloud Maureen could feel in her chest. She couldn’t imagine what a full-throated drum line would sound like under here. The air was sticky, and it stank of cigarettes and corner-store cigars, of clothes wet with rainw
ater and sweat, of spilled rotgut alcohol and filthy tractor exhaust. Cologne. Perfume. Hair spray. The crowd was huge, young, and rowdy. Partying teenagers surrounded her. Maureen felt like she had crashed a party at a giant club. None of the partiers cared that a sizable group of police officers had come running. It wasn’t for them that the police had come, and they knew it. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for the police to be around while they were trying to have a good time. This intersection wasn’t where the trouble was happening.

  Maureen stepped up onto a curb beside Sansone and looked around, searching for an anomaly in the crowd, a glitch like she had seen when Benji Allen had come sprinting her way up St. Charles Avenue earlier that night, punching bystanders as he ran.

  Under the highway in both directions was a series of parking lots. The city had long-standing plans to fence them in and turn them into pay lots, but that hadn’t come close to happening yet. So, in recent years, the lots had become a long-term homeless encampment complete with dirty tents and scrounged furniture. The campers stood at every traffic light along both sides of Calliope Street, asking with cardboard signs for money and prayers and help. Before the holiday got into full swing, which meant before the tourists arrived in droves for the street parties and parades, the city sent charity and health workers and then the police department to clear out the campers and haul whatever they left behind to the dump.

  With the encampments broken up and the homeless scattered into the nearby neighborhoods on parade nights, the parking lots closest to St. Charles were filled with parade-goers and their folding chairs and makeshift bars and barbecue grills. The lots behind those were a free-for-all, herds of kids stampeding across them like bison on the Great Plains. Maureen and Sansone now stood on the edge of this sea of kids, all of them laughing and running at and away from one another, many of them holding phones at their ears. The vibrations that Sansone had talked about radiated from them. Simple physics, he had called it. Maureen felt as if she were watching two hundred bouncing atoms, powerfully attracted to and forcibly repelled from one another. The charge they created in the air was tangible, undeniable. She could feel it on her skin. Sansone seemed to be reading her mind.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t like the feel of it either. It’s not them that’s the problem, though, these kids. They’re just reacting to what’s in the air. They hardly even know what they’re doing.”

  “Those other guys will follow us into the crowd, right?” Maureen asked. “There are four of them.”

  “So that would make six among two hundred,” Sansone said. “What’s the difference, numbers like this? The more cops we bring into the crowd, the more danger and trouble we’re communicating to the crowd. What those four can do is watch our backs.”

  “If something happens to us deep in that crowd,” Maureen said, “they won’t get to us in time.”

  “But they can,” Sansone said, pointing at the mounted officers.

  The mounted officers had stayed outside the crowd, watching everything from Calliope Street, from the wings of the big show, seated high and upright atop their saddles. Maureen had figured they’d go riding through the crowd ahead of everyone else, cutting a wide swath to the endangered officer, like the cavalry. It was a powerful image to think about, but it was a dumb idea to put into action, she realized. The reality, the end result of that ride would be a dozen trampled seventh graders, which was exactly the kind of damage that no one wanted.

  Right now, the true advantage of the mounted officers, Maureen realized, was that high up on those horses they could see everything, the edges of the crowd and everything that was happening deep within it. One of the officers, a short, thick-thighed woman, keyed her radio mic and spoke. Maureen listened as the report came over the radio.

  It was indeed Wilburn who had called in the 10-55. From the tone of the mounted officer’s voice, though, she felt his report had been a touch hasty. She described an ongoing incident involving a homeless person, a bunch of teenagers, a couple of women, Wilburn, and what looked like a camera crew. One person was now down on the pavement and that person was not Officer Wilburn. Other than some arguing, as far as she could see, not much else was happening. The main problem seemed to be the teens’ refusal to disperse. And the flood of kids was creeping closer to the incident, in which case Wilburn could be overrun if something set them off.

  The camera crew was the problem, Maureen thought. There’d be no getting rid of the crowd of kids as long as they thought a TV camera was pointed at them.

  She listened as the dispatch officer advised the others on foot to proceed with caution. The mounted officers would track their progress through the crowd. They’d advise and assist as necessary.

  “Before we go into the crowd,” Sansone said, “a few things to remember. First, they’re kids. So they’re going to be stupid and annoying. Plus, it’s a parade and there’s way more of them than us so they’re feeling pretty full of themselves already, and whatever happened back there with Wilburn has them even more fired up. We don’t care about any of that. None of it. You’re gonna hear a stream of shit from them, about being a cop, about being a woman, about being white, and various combinations of the three. Ignore it. All of it.

  “What we cannot have is an additional incident. We cannot have escalation. You do not want to end up in the middle of something that could have been avoided, where your fellow officers have to come to your rescue, using force and putting everyone around us in danger. We can’t be down here guns drawn because you couldn’t take hearing ‘Suck my dick, white bitch’ from a drunk fourteen-year-old.”

  “Like it would be the first time,” Maureen said.

  “That’s the Mardi Gras spirit,” Sansone said.

  “Just one thing,” Maureen said. “I have to ask. Why don’t we go around them instead of through?”

  “And cede territory?” Sansone said. “Nonsense. We can’t send that kind of message. Believe me, they would notice. We can’t give them too much permission, either. We’re the police. We go where we want, when we want, and they get out of the way.”

  “Gotcha,” Maureen said.

  “Hands at your sides,” Sansone said. “Eyes front.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Shall we, then?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Maureen said.

  31

  It wasn’t every day, Maureen thought as they moved through the crowd, that she heard “Fuck the police” from someone whose voice hadn’t changed yet, or “Drop dead, white bitch” from someone who was obviously a young girl.

  But it didn’t take Maureen long to realize that the catcalls and insults were not really for her. The kids were talking to, were performing for, the other kids, like birds chirping their boasts and claims to territory. As if the cops were cats who couldn’t climb trees, Maureen and Sansone didn’t concern them; they didn’t expect or even want a reaction. They were showing off for one another. The boys trying to impress the girls with their consequence-free braggadocio, the girls proving that they could be as tough and fearless, as daring and profane, as the boys. The groups of kids even moved in murmurations like starlings in flight—swirling, twisting, and gliding this way and that, the flock changing direction simultaneously as if of one mind as they ran out of the path of the slow-walking police officers who clearly had no intention of chasing them. All the time chirping and chattering, shrieking and shouting and laughing.

  They found Wilburn in a heated but respectful discussion with two well-dressed teenagers, the three of them bathed in the white light of Cortez’s camera, a microphone on a pole nearby. The situation didn’t appear to be an argument as much as the teenagers were vigorously complaining and Wilburn, arms crossed, was marshaling his last reserves of patience as he listened to them. He was, Maureen thought, observing the same rules of parade police physics that Sansone had mentioned. He was letting the pressure release rather than adding to it in defense of his own ego.

  Laine observed the scene from a
few feet away. Donna sat on a curb across the parking lot, her long legs splayed out in front of her, leather jacket zipped to her neck, smoking a long white cigarette and looking away from the action, dejected. A shopping cart piled high with clothes, newspapers, aluminum cans, and God knows what else sat off to the other side. A yellow boa that had been wrapped loosely around the handle drooped to the ground. Alone on a curb, as distant from the center group as Donna was, hands cuffed behind his back, sat a shirtless, long-haired homeless man. Maureen knew it was impossible, but, the way they were sitting, Donna and the homeless man looked quite a lot like a sparring couple that had been separated by cooler-headed friends.

  “This could be fucking anything,” Sansone said.

  “Could be a lot worse,” Maureen said. “No blood, no bullets.”

  “Let me call it in, I guess.”

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s hurt,” Maureen said, as Sansone told Dispatch that the scene was under control. She felt disappointment as she watched the mounted officers trot away. She wasn’t sure what she felt she had missed, or what she had wanted them to do. Something about seeing horses, maybe just the sheer strangeness of the sight on city streets excited her.

  “I like Wilburn,” Sansone said, clipping his mic back on his shoulder. “But a fifty-five for this?”

  “Do any of us show up if he calls in anything else?” Maureen asked.

  “That’s a good point,” Sansone said. He scratched at the stubble on his chin.

  “This the camera crew you were telling me about?” Sansone asked.

  “It is indeed,” Maureen said. “That’s the producer, the redhead behind the camera crew. The guys filming, they’re local. It’s an Internet documentary of some sort. About what I’m not exactly sure. It’s a long story.”

  To Maureen’s surprise, Sansone said, “Cool.”