“Do you recognize the guys Wilburn is talking to?” she asked. “I don’t know them from the neighborhood.”
One of them, the taller one, wore an oversize purple polo shirt and low-slung jeans with fat white stitching and a white belt. He had thick-framed glasses, white, and long braids that he wore tied up in loose bunches at the back of his head. His friend, a light-eyed Creole kid in a flat-brimmed Saints cap, wore black tracksuit bottoms and a tight long-sleeved T-shirt, muscles rippling under the gray fabric. He had a thick hooded sweatshirt tied around his waist.
“Those boys? You mean do I recognize them from the gang detail?” He shook his head. “They don’t bang, those two. No way.”
“I didn’t think so,” Maureen said.
He spied Donna. “She part of this? She looks very L.A. to me.”
“She’s the, uh, she’s the on-camera talent, I guess,” Maureen said. “She does the interviews.”
“Well, we’re here, right?” Sansone said, hitching up his gun belt. “Let’s see what’s up. Maybe the TV people will make us famous.”
As they headed Wilburn’s way, an NOPD Explorer rolled up, pulling into the parking lot from Calliope Street and parking on the far side of where everyone stood, light bar pulsing.
Morello climbed out of the car, raising his hand in salute as he limped, though less severely than he had earlier, in Wilburn’s direction.
“Him, too?” Sansone asked. He shook his head, nudged Maureen with his elbow. “It’s almost as if he waited until he heard the all clear before he came over.”
“He was in the neighborhood,” Maureen said.
His presence told her that Drayton had made the arrest, releasing Morello and Cordts from their duties babysitting Goody. With Wilburn the one supposedly in trouble, though, she was surprised Cordts hadn’t come along to check things out. He’d probably had his fill of Morello and followed Hardin’s order to get back to his original route assignment, which was something Maureen realized she was quite looking forward to. After the overdoses, shootings, foot chases, fornicating couples, irate neighbors, citizen journalists, zombie stories, and gangland parleys, she was perfectly okay being bored for the last few hours of her shift.
As she approached Wilburn, though, the two young men who’d been venting at him became unnerved at the arrival of three more cops. She remembered what Sansone had told her about avoiding officer-instigated incidents. She did not want another chase, or to call for the dogs, or try to get ambulances across and around the parade again. Morello and Sansone, she realized, looked like enforcers, and these guys were worried now that Wilburn had pretended to listen to them and had kept them talking only while he waited for reinforcements to better take care of them.
“Do me a favor, Sansone,” she said. “Hang back a bit. You and Morello are scaring these two guys.”
“Roger that, Cogs. Good call.” He produced his cigarettes. “I’ll be close by if you need me. But let’s see if we can’t put this mess to bed with a quickness, please. We should all of us be back on the route. And I could use something to eat.”
“I got you,” Maureen said.
She walked up to Wilburn, determined to ignore the camera, which continued to roll. The teens had stopped talking at her approach. They couldn’t decide, she figured, whether the small white woman cop arriving first made things better or worse for them.
“Officer Wilburn,” Maureen said. “Everything copacetic?”
“I think so,” Wilburn said, eyeing the young men. “I think everyone has made themselves clear.”
“Officer,” the one with the glasses said, turning to Maureen, eager to press his case to a new audience, reading her name tag. “Officer Coughlin, we didn’t do a thing. Not a thing. We came to help the camera guy. The homeless guy attacked him. We could’ve watched, like those two white ladies who stood there doing nothing, but we came to help.”
“One of them did something,” the other guy said, acid in his voice. Maureen didn’t have to ask which women he was talking about; had to be Donna and Laine.
“Wils?” Maureen asked.
“More or less,” he said.
“Can we go?” the young man in the hat asked. He turned to his friend. “I’m telling you, we’re gonna get nowhere with this.”
“Gentlemen,” Maureen said. “Your names, please.”
“I told you,” the Hat said, disgusted at her question. “I told you. Now we’re going to get in trouble. Why else would this guy call for more cops? I told you.”
Maureen raised her hands. “No one is getting in trouble. I want to know what to call you while we have this conversation.” She looked at the Hat. “It’s called manners. Y’all don’t have name tags like we do.”
“Don’t need ’em,” Hat said. “We’re all the same to y’all anyway.”
“I’m Malik,” the young man in glasses said, “and this is Albert.”
“What can we do for you?” Maureen asked.
“I want to know where to get paperwork on this incident,” Malik said, “and Officer Wilburn won’t tell me that. I want to see the police report when it’s done, and get a copy of it.” He held up a tablet with a big crack across its screen, shook the device at Maureen and Wilburn. “I want to be reimbursed for this. This wasn’t cheap.” He pointed at the camera with the broken tablet, yelling to Laine, “Y’all owe me. We have the same rights to do our work as y’all do.”
“Fellas, give me one more minute,” Maureen said. “Hang out for one more minute. Let me talk to my fellow officer here.”
She and Wilburn walked a few feet away.
“Are these kids serious?” Wilburn asked. “I’m gonna have to write on this so they can have some goddamn paperwork for their computer insurance or whatever? I’m sorry, I feel bad for them. They seem like good guys. It’s a shitty break, but fuck that. I’m going home after work tonight. I’m not writing a police report for a broke iPad. What do they expect, bringing that iPad to a fucking parade. If it’s so valuable, leave it home.”
Violent retching echoed under the overpass. Maureen and Wilburn turned to see the homeless guy vomiting dark liquid between his legs.
“I am not holding his hair back,” Wilburn said. “Fuck him, too. Man, I’m fucking tired. And we got five more days of this shit.”
“Is this guy cuffed for a reason?” Maureen asked.
“It’s not necessary anymore, I guess,” Wilburn said. “It calmed him down.” He circled around the man’s back. “Sir, if I release you, will you remain calm?” The man heaved and gagged again, hacking and spitting. “I’ll take that as a yes,” Wilburn said. He unlocked the cuffs and freed the man’s hands.
Maureen and Wilburn backed away from him slowly as the puking continued, though less violently. The man didn’t hold his hair back, either. He had consumed quite a lot of something that was deep purple and was returning most of it to the world. To her relief, Maureen saw that the liquid was too dark to be blood. From the smell of it, wine was more like it.
“Do we call in a medical for him?” she asked.
“If he keels over, yes,” Wilburn said. “If he can get up and make it to his cart I figure he’s good to go. I think he’s pretty experienced at this stuff. Not his first rodeo. We’ll keep an eye on him.”
“What is this, Wils?” Maureen asked as they moved away from the man. “What’re we doing here?”
Wilburn stood with his mouth hanging open for a moment as he thought of where to start.
“Okay, I was bringing Laine and those guys through the neighborhood. They wanted shots of Lee Circle. We were taking the backstreets to get there instead of dealing with the route. We saw this guy heading this way pushing his shopping cart. He was half-dressed and shouting nonsense and thrashing around so I guess those guys thought, hey, maybe some good footage. More ‘real New Orleans’ shit. Laine, especially, got all excited. It was obvious to me that he was plain old living-under-the-highway crazy, these guys are a dime a dozen, and that what he was doing reall
y had nothing to do with Mardi Gras. I tried telling them that, but…” He shrugged.
“Anyway, they chase him under here, and I follow them. He parks his cart, and Donna walks up, trying to interview the guy. About ‘the real Mardi Gras.’ She thinks she’s discovered this angle that no one’s ever taken, you know, homeless Mardi Gras or whatever, like do they celebrate it or do they feel left out, when, suddenly, Whizzly Adams over there turns on her, pushes her to the ground. Starts snarling. Donna gets up and runs, screaming. Cortez and Larry, God love ’em, they have no idea if they’re supposed to keep shooting or help Donna get away, so they stand there and do nothing and crazy pants goes after them. He starts grabbing at the camera, chasing them around, roaring like an animal. They start screaming. That’s when the younger kids started noticing and I started getting a little nervous.
“Still, it’s pretty hilarious, to tell the truth, and no one’s really getting hurt, when Albert and Malik come running over. They’re both of them premed at Xavier, and they’re filming the whole shebang on their iPad, ’cause they’re making a documentary about out-of-town people exploiting the real Mardi Gras with their ‘real Mardi Gras’ documentaries about it—and this is just too perfect—when hairy man finally gets a good grip on the camera and it looks like he’s going to get it away from Cortez and Larry. They run to help Cortez, but Donna turns out to be a racist bitch who calls nine-one-one while I’m fucking standing right here because she thinks the med students are trying to steal the camera from Cortez and Larry while they’re distracted by the homeless guy. That’s why she’s in time-out. Tits and boots or not, I can’t deal with her act anymore.
“I was able to call off the nine-one-one, but…” He hesitated, taking a breath. He was clearly still furious with Donna. “With the running around and yelling we were starting to get more and more attention from that mob of kids over there. They look over and see a couple of black kids struggling with a bunch of white folks, including a white cop. I thought they might bum-rush this circus back here and I didn’t know how much backup I was going to need to get everybody out of here, including them, and me, in one piece. I decided to err on the side of caution and call it in.”
“So, to be clear,” Maureen said, “we’re not detaining anyone, no one is hurt. No one is being arrested or charged. Nobody actually stole anything.”
“No,” Wilburn said. “Really, I’ve kept everyone here because I want Laine to make Donna pay for that fucking busted iPad but Laine’s having none of it and the students, they’re not letting it go.” He shook his head. “So here we are. At an impasse, as they say. Like we got nothing fucking else going on tonight. If there was a way to arrest Donna for this ridiculousness, I wish I could.”
“Do those guys know what Laine is doing with her camera crew?” Maureen asked. “Do they know about her series on YouTube?”
“I don’t know,” Wilburn said. “I doubt it. She won’t give them her name. They keep yelling at me now because I won’t let them go over there after her, or Donna, and settle things themselves. I can’t have tempers getting out of control.”
“So tell them who Laine is,” Maureen said, thinking of Philippa and her accountability crusade. “Tell Malik and Albert everything we know about Laine and the On Fire series. Then they can get on their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and her YouTube channel and whatever else is out there and call her out on this whole mess. Her shit pay for her crew. Her racist on-air host. Her exploitation of violence, drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness for crowd-sourcing dollars.”
“Well, damn, Coughlin,” Wilburn said, smiling, leaning back. “That’s a great idea. I didn’t think you understood the Internet like that. You’re mean.”
“I don’t understand jack shit about the Internet,” Maureen said, “but I know plenty about getting even. Tell the med students what I told you. Either they get reimbursed or they get even. That way they don’t leave here with nothing. Go talk to them. If they’re savvy they can put Laine out of business by morning and she knows they can. They can make her a villain real quick. I’ll go talk to Laine, woman to woman, redhead to redhead, and get her to see reason.”
Maureen and Wilburn watched as the homeless man struggled to his feet and staggered to his shopping cart. He unwound the boa from the cart’s handle and wrapped the feathers around his neck, wiping his mouth with one end of the boa before proceeding. If he had any recollection that he’d recently been handcuffed or violently ill, or that there were other human beings in his immediate vicinity, he gave no indication.
“Wils,” Maureen said, “looks like our boy is going to make it.”
“That’s a real New Orleanian right there,” Wilburn said, watching the man push his cart across the parking lot, away from the parade. He pulled a broken strand of beads from his wagon and tossed them into the middle of Calliope Street.
“The parade goes on,” Maureen said, admiration in her voice.
“We’re a resilient city,” Wilburn said.
“He gets to go?” Albert complained, walking over to them. “He assaulted that cameraman and he gets to go and we have to stay here?”
“I never said y’all had to stay here,” Wilburn said. “Y’all can go whenever. Staying was your idea. Don’t make this something it’s not.”
“I thought you wanted to get reimbursed for the broken tablet?” Maureen said. “One of you should take a few pictures of it. Create a record, for your own personal use. Officer Wilburn here will give you some ideas on what to do from here. Discuss it with him.”
The students hesitated, Albert looking over his shoulder at Laine. “Don’t let her leave.” He pointed at Wilburn while speaking to Maureen. “While he handles us, you let them get out of here. Don’t do that to us. They already treated us like criminals. Don’t you treat us like we’re stupid.”
“Her name is Laine Daniels,” Maureen said. “She slips away from me, you google that name. But she won’t leave. Give your information to Officer Wilburn, please, and we can all get out of here with everybody moderately happy. Can you do that for me?”
The students nodded. “But we got y’all’s names, too,” Albert said.
“Yes, you do,” Maureen said. “But you’re not getting my phone number. We good here?”
“We’re good,” Wilburn said. “Gentlemen, come this way with me. The air’s turned sour over here.”
Keep everyone moving, Maureen thought, good idea, watching Wilburn lead the students away from her. Keep everyone separate. Nothing coagulates. Don’t let pressure or tension build up.
She walked over to Cortez and Larry, her hand in the air to get Morello’s attention. “Shut it down,” she said to them. “Shut it down now.”
Cortez lowered the camera and Larry lowered the microphone, seemingly only too happy to obey. Morello stood right behind them, and they knew he was there, but Maureen didn’t think the large police officer at their side had inspired their ready compliance. They looked very tired, and ready to commit the remainder of their night to packed bowls and fried chicken and waffles. The boys looked as if they’d only be too happy to go along should Maureen tell them to lay their equipment on the pavement and walk away. She was tempted to give the order. Everyone else would feel better without the camera watching them, and Laine would be pissed that her project had stalled. Win-win, as far as Maureen was concerned.
“Officer Morello,” she said, “would you help these young men keep an eye on this expensive gear?”
“Why the fuck not?” Morello said. “We meet again, fellas. How you liking the Muses parade?”
Maureen walked away, knowing Laine would follow her.
“You don’t think I see what you’re doing?” Laine said. “Siccing that big cop on those two poor kids. That’s state terrorism. That’s abuse of power.”
“Please,” Maureen said. “It’s giving two tired, overworked, and underpaid local kids a perfect excuse to ignore their domineering boss. Look, Laine, don’t you think it’s time to pack
it in for the night? Give those two, and the rest of us, a break. There will be more drug abuse and violence tomorrow, I promise.”
“Mardi Gras is a public event that happens on public streets,” Laine said. “That’s part of the point, and one of its biggest selling points. You can’t manage what parts of it the world gets to see. You can’t control it. Give me a break, it’s like a stripper saying I’ll take the money but don’t look at my stretch marks. If you put your shit on worldwide display then you can’t complain when everyone looks. That’s not how the world works.”
“And you,” Maureen said, “are creating a public nuisance tonight. And I am this close to fucking arresting you for it. Enough. Enough of this shit. You know what else Mardi Gras means? It means the ordinary rules go out the window. One parking lot away I’ve got two hundred kids hopped up on sugar, energy drinks, liquor, hormones, a full night of parades, and who knows what else, and they’re all wondering what’s going on down here with a bunch of cops, a camera, and a couple of other black kids. I don’t need their attention. I don’t want their attention. I want it back on each other and their phones and the last half of this parade.”
Laine put her face in her hands. “You don’t know how much pressure I’m under.”
Maureen’s first impulse was to laugh, but she choked it back. Pressure? she thought. Have you been paying any attention to what my coworkers and I have been dealing with tonight? But she didn’t say that, either. She didn’t much care whether Laine understood her job or not. She just wanted the camera out of the way so she could keep doing it.
“Here’s what I can do for you,” Maureen finally said. She raised her arm and waved at Sansone. He waved back. “You see that very handsome tattooed hunk over there?”
“I’m a lesbian,” Laine said.
“Congratulations,” Maureen said. “That’s not what I’m offering.” She laughed. “Jesus, I’m not a pimp.”
Laine couldn’t help a laugh, either. “Gotcha.”
“My point,” Maureen said, “is that Officer Sansone over there is with the Special Tactics squad. He’s done the warrants task force. He’s done gang work. I know for a fact he’s got a buddy who’s almost as good-looking as he is who’s got a great flakka story.”
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