The Devil's Muse

by Bill Loehfelm

  After another long, silent moment, Maureen and Wilburn continued their approach, their hands raised slightly at their sides. Though he never took his eyes off them, Maureen could see his shoulders relax a touch. Good, she thought. They were off to a good start. No panic. Do. Not. Escalate. No bullets, no blood in the Dublin House tonight.

  When Maureen and Wilburn had made it halfway across the room, she saw Cordts straighten and stiffen in his seat. They stopped walking.

  35

  “I’m gonna come sit with you,” Maureen said from a few feet away. “Just so we don’t have to yell at each other. Wils is going to give us some space.” She tried to smile. “We can send him to the bar for us.”

  Cordts did not smile back. “You can come over. Give your weapon to Wilburn first.”

  “Seriously?” Maureen asked. Already a request she hadn’t expected and did not like. “I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s me, Cogs.”

  “I know who you are,” Cordts said. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some neighborhood goon. Do it, please. Give it.”

  “This is a meeting,” Maureen said. “A conversation. It’s not a showdown.”

  “Then you don’t need your weapon,” Cordts said. “Be glad I’m not asking you to give it to me.”

  “You’re asking another officer to give up her weapon?” Maureen asked. “You realize what you’re doing? You’re disarming a police officer with a weapon in your hand.”

  Cordts rolled his eyes. “Do I look concerned with breaking the rules? Wilburn will give it back when this is over. It’s temporary.” He closed his hand over the weapon on the table. “Humor me.”

  It wasn’t too late, Maureen thought, to turn around, walk outside, and turn this mess over to someone else. To people with more authority and experience. She rubbed her burning eyes. She was so tired. She couldn’t stop sweating. She could hear a dance troupe going by outside. “Mardi Gras Mambo,” one more time. What a fucking night. But she was here now, she thought. Only a few feet away from Cordts and talking to him. She reached for her hip and unbuckled her weapon. She had to keep things moving; she couldn’t let the momentum stall.

  “You are so going to owe me for this, Cordts,” Maureen said. “Like season-tickets-for-the-Saints owe me. This is that big.”

  She did not like doing it, but she pulled her gun from her holster, double-checked that the safety was on, and surrendered it to Wilburn handle-first. He took it, set it on a table, and sat at that table, Maureen’s gun close to his hand, within easy reach. He let out a long sigh, slumping in the chair.

  “That’s it. Just make yourself comfortable, Wils,” Cordts said.

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Wilburn said. “This is fucking surreal.”

  Maureen couldn’t believe Cordts let Wilburn keep the gun that close at hand. Was that part of the plan? she wondered. Was Cordts going to force Wilburn to make a very bad choice?

  “Coughlin,” Cordts said. “Grab a chair. Sit over here at the end of the booth. Near me.”

  Maureen hesitated. She’d thought they’d entered the bar on a rescue mission. Now she wasn’t so sure Cordts hadn’t set them up for something much worse. Was he using them to get himself out of the bar, or to make sure he died here? Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t make one of us kill you, Cordts.

  “Cogs,” Cordts said, waving her over, “come sit with me.”

  Maureen did as she was told. What choice did she have?

  Cordts relaxed and, after a quick glance at Goody, smiled for the first time at Maureen. He folded his hands on the table. “Now, what shall we talk about?”

  “You tell me,” Maureen said.

  “You bring Drayton with you?”

  “He brought us, really,” Maureen said. “We were working something and he and Hardin caught up to us there. Couldn’t be avoided.”

  Cordts grinned. “I imagine he’s pretty pissed.”

  “He wants the collar,” Maureen said. “More than that, you know him, you’re messing with his chance to show off in front of a camera.”

  “The press conference. Ah.”

  “About fifteen minutes from now,” Maureen said. “But fuck Drayton, it’s Hardin you’re really putting on the spot with this decision. He’s got to report to Skinner so the commander knows what to tell the chief and what to say to the press. The mayor’s waiting for an update, too. They’re going to be looking at him.”

  “Fuck the brass and fuck the mayor,” Cordts said. “They’re as bad as Drayton, no help to any of us.”

  “I’m with you,” Maureen said. She leaned her elbow on the table. “I’m going to ask the obvious question first. How about the three of us walk Goody outta here, hand him over to Drayton, and get on with our night?”

  “Not likely. We’re not all gonna make it.”

  “What can we do to change that?” Maureen asked.

  Cordts lifted his beer glass and drank a few big gulps. “Fucking warm.” He set the glass down carefully, turned it atop a coaster that featured a map of divided Ireland. “I want to know why.” He raised his glass, gestured with it at Goody, drank down the rest of his warm beer, and set the glass back down. “I want to know why he did it.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” Goody said. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.”

  Maureen turned to look at him. “We got the gun.”

  “What gun?” Goody asked.

  “That gun right in front of you,” Maureen said. “The gun you used to shoot those people, we found it at the scene.”

  “Fuck y’all and your bullshit planted gun,” Goody said. “Don’t matter to me.”

  Cordts slammed the glass on the table. “I fucking found it myself.”

  The pint glass had cracked up the side, knicking his fingertip. Cordts watched a pearl of dark blood forming there. He reached across the table and pressed his bloody fingertip into Goody’s forehead, pushing the boy’s head back against the padding of the bench.

  “In case you don’t make it to Ash Wednesday,” Cordts said, returning his hand to his weapon. Maureen swallowed hard as she watched Cordts bleed onto the grip of the gun.

  Now Goody was scared. The kid wasn’t dumb. He knew that a crazy cop pretty much destroyed any case against him in court, but he had to survive the encounter first. Maureen could see Goody losing confidence in his survival chances. She saw no reason to change his perspective.

  “Everything okay over there?” Wilburn asked.

  “We’re good,” Cordts said. He picked up the gun, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, set the gun back on the table. “You all right, Wils? That fifty-five was you, right? Sorry, I didn’t think to ask right away.”

  “I’m fine,” Wilburn said. “I’m good. No problem. I had plenty of help. Long story, I’ll tell you later. We’re here for you, Cordts. You could avail yourself of this assistance? We walk through those doors, me, you, Cogs, the perp here, even. We’ll tell the world whatever story you want them to hear. You tell us what to say and we’ll say it.”

  Cordts ignored him. He stared down Goody instead. “Even if I kill you, we’ll still prove you did it. We’ll do a residue test on your hands, anyway, and run your prints. And I know you’re in the system. So, since we got the gun, we’ve got you. So this ‘I didn’t do nothing’ bullshit is over. Stop it. We’ve moved on to bigger issues. We have the gun you used, we have witnesses who saw you use it, and we’ll have video of the whole goddamn circus by sunup. Own it, like a man. Because that’s how you’ll be tried, and that’s how you’ll jail, like a grown man, with all the other grown men.”

  Goody looked at Maureen, beads of sweat making tracks through Cordt’s bloody fingerprint. “You heard that. He said I gotta confess or he’ll kill me.”

  “What I heard,” Maureen said, “is calm, quality advice from a man who’s running out of patience.”

  “A man who’s lost his fucking mind,” Goody said.

  “You and I,” Cordts said to Goody, “after tonight,
one way or another, we’ll never see each other again. So I need answers from you tonight, because I won’t get another chance to ask you. Why? What made you think you had the right to open fire on a crowded street? What were you thinking?”

  Goody was breathing heavily. His eyes cast about as if someone might walk in and save him, or yell “surprise” and reveal this whole night to have been one big joke. Maureen imagined the way his mind was turning. Cops like these had killed his uncle. Part of him, a small part, the youngest part, continued to think that he could get away with what he’d done if he kept denying he’d done it, continued to believe that he could wear them down with stubbornness. And these cops would lie, he was thinking, about finding a gun, because they were cops. They did that shit constantly. Kill black people they didn’t like, frame them. But a bigger part of Goody, Maureen thought, a part of him that was growing stronger by the second, was getting more and more concerned with walking out of that restaurant alive, and if that had to happen in cuffs, so be it. He could beat the rap later. His case would probably never even make it to court, he was thinking, crazy as this thing had gotten. But he had to get out of this room alive first.

  Goody rolled his shoulders, slumping a tiny bit deeper into the bench, trying to affect a more relaxed posture, as if that would make him seem less defiant. That move was a welcome sign. When suspects did that, Maureen thought, it was like they were trying to physically, literally loosen their tongues. Goody looked at her when he spoke.

  “He make it sound like a different thing than it was,” Goody said. “I ain’t saying what happened was anything I did”—Cordts slapped the table, hard, and Goody threw his hands up—“or that it wasn’t, I’m just sayin’ it didn’t happen the way this man said it did.”

  “Why don’t you tell us, then,” Maureen asked, “how it happened?”

  Quick as a rattlesnake strike, Cordts reached across the table and grabbed Goody’s face. The palm of his hand crushed Goody’s nose. The boy’s eyes, wide and terrified, stared out from between Cordts’s fingers. Maureen could hear his wet, frantic mouth-breathing against Cordts’s hand.

  “I had a little girl once,” Cordts said, leaning across the table, his fingers white with the pressure they applied to Goody’s skull. “A little girl I’d love to dress up in feather wings and little red shoes. For almost six months, she was mine. I never saw her open her eyes. I never saw her take a breath in the world, never felt her breath on my skin. But I heard her heartbeat. I listened to it every night. Until it stopped. Just. Stopped. No one could ever tell us why. For a long time after she died, even after my wife left me and left New Orleans and I started to forget her voice, if I could get the house real quiet, I could close my eyes and hear that tiny heartbeat again. Out of the darkness like a drum.”

  Cordts paused, releasing his grip on Goody, grabbing the gun off the table. He held it loosely and dug in his pockets with his other hand. Maureen feared he could pull out anything, from a human heart to a hand grenade.

  Instead he produced orange prescription bottles, stood them on the table. Three of them. Empty. “Cymbalta. Klonopin. Xanax. Tried them all. I stopped when I couldn’t hear that drum anymore.”

  He turned to Maureen. “You know what I’ve been thinking about all night tonight? Those times you thought I couldn’t hear you? I was trying to imagine her weight on my shoulders. My daughter. She’d be Lyla’s age. She’d look just like her if she’d lived. I know it. I saw it when that girl was lying in my arms.”

  Cordts softly touched the sneaker, then the fairy wings, adjusting them ever so slightly, as if they were charms on an altar.

  “We fucking know how tonight happened, don’t we?” Cordts said. “All of us. We all know.” Cordts raised the gun, still held it loosely, gesturing at Goody with it. Wilburn shouted for him to put the gun down. Just above a whisper, Maureen said, “Cordts, the gun. Be careful.”

  “Like this stupid motherfucker?” Cordts asked. “This stupid child, who ran into the middle of a crowded intersection, blocks from a fucking Mardi Gras parade, and started throwing bullets? What I want to know is why should I be careful? He shot a little girl just like mine. These wings are hers. She should be on her father’s shoulders, wearing her wings on her back, the colored lights in her eyes and her hair, catching beads from a float. Instead, she’s in fucking surgery.” He turned to Goody. “You shot a little girl, a grandmother, and a middle school teacher. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Goody raised his hands, shaking his head. “Man, fuck that. Fuck this. You gonna let him do this to me? I don’t know what y’all are talking about. Shot a teacher? Somebody’s grandma? I don’t know nothing about any of that. I don’t know nothin’ about no wings, no dead girls. None of it.” He was close to tears. “Y’all are trying to kill me.”

  “Nobody’s trying to kill you,” Maureen said. “We’re just trying to question you. To understand you.”

  Cordts tapped the gun on the table. “But I don’t feel like I’m getting through to you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Goody said. “Y’all can’t do me like this.” He looked right at Cordts. “I got a little girl, too.”

  Of course, Maureen thought. The little girl in Alisha’s arms, at the house on Harmony Street. Cordts set the gun down and went very still. Maureen jumped on the moment.

  “Dee Harris,” she said. “We know everyone else was an accident. But Goody, why were you out to kill Dee Harris tonight?”

  “Man, anyone would want to kill Dee Harris,” Goody said. “You gotta ask me that? Like y’all don’t know. He a dirty piece of shit. Nothing good about that man. Not in any way.”

  Maureen took out her phone. She found the picture of Cordell that Dakota had sent her, and showed it to Goody. Cordts leaned forward to get a look at the picture. He was letting Maureen play out her plan. A good sign, she thought. Something sane and logical remained at work inside him.

  “That’s the motherfucker right there,” Goody said. “Man, fuck him and that tie. He ain’t no businessman, he evil. Straight up.”

  “Evil is a strong word,” Maureen said.

  “Listen, Dee so devil he can’t catch fire, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “He’s Three-N-G though?” Maureen asked. She thumbed her way to the photo of Benji.

  “What difference does that make?” Goody asked, trying to see what Maureen was doing with her phone. “I don’t know if he is or isn’t.”

  “You’re J-Street,” Maureen said, “he’s Three-N-G. You see where I’m going with this.”

  “Alla y’all police with this J-Street this, J-Street that. There ain’t no J-Street family no more. Not like it used to be.” He tried to affect a steely-eyed glare. “Y’all made sure of that.”

  “We both know these things don’t die with one person,” Maureen said. “Somebody’s running a J-Street posse. You know it. We know it.”

  “Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t,” Goody said. “But if there’s a new J-Street thing going on, I ain’t part of it. I been out of town, me, until a few weeks ago. So whatever mess y’all are chasing around, I’m not in on it. No way. I’m done with that shit. I been in Baton Rouge, learnin’ some shit.”

  “You shot three people tonight,” Cordts said, “but you’re telling us now that you don’t roll with a gang anymore? So you’re a freelance assassin now? Is that it?” He laughed. “Well, let me tell you something, you fucking suck at it.”

  “Hey, Cordts,” Maureen said, “I got this.”

  But he ignored her. “That guy you shot? That’s not Dee Harris. That’s a middle school music teacher. His name is Cordell and you’re a fucking retard. You’re a father? You’re a stumblebum punk.”

  Fuck it, keep rolling forward, Maureen thought. She enlarged the photo she’d pulled up on her phone and showed it to Goody. “And who’s that?”

  For the first time that night, for an instant, Goody looked to her like the child, the teenage boy he was. A flash of sadness crossed his face
, then maybe love, then straight rage erupted in his eyes and burned everything else away, setting his face back into the hard, blank mask Maureen had recognized at Ms. Cleo’s house. He looked like, it made her sad to think, himself again.

  “That’s my boy Benji,” Goody said. “Benji Allen.” He looked closer at the photo, frowning, picking up the phone before Maureen could grab it away from him. “Look how fucked up he is. Nothing but skin and bones now. We been looking for him, me and a few other people, for weeks. Motherfucker up and disappeared on us. Y’all found him?”

  “Do you know why he vanished?” Maureen asked.

  “Who took this?” Goody asked, his distress growing as he continued studying the photo. “Why do you have a picture like this? Where is he?”

  Maureen reached for her phone; Goody held it away from her. “He passed out in the street or something? His eyes are kind of open, that’s weird.” And then she saw it hit him. Just because Goody was fifteen years old didn’t mean he hadn’t seen people lying dead in the street. Maybe it had taken him a minute to remember it, but he knew what death looked like, knew the mask it laid over the face of people like him and like his friends. “He’s dead.”

  Maureen held out her hand. “Return that phone to me.”

  Goody held the phone in the air away from her and Cordts, his face falling apart one section at a time, like a visage crumbling off a statue. The eyes welled and weakened first, then the cheeks sagged, then the jaw quivered. She could hear Wilburn’s chair creak behind them.

  We get this wrong, Maureen thought, we fuck up how we handle this, and Goody’s going to get violent. Then we all get violent.

  “He’s dead,” Goody said again.

  “Return that phone to the officer,” Cordts said. “Now.”

  Goody slammed the phone on the table, cracking the screen, bouncing the dirty plates. Cordts’s cracked glass fell off the table and broke on the floor.

  “He overdosed on the parade route,” Maureen said. “We did everything we could for him.”