USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  “Yeah, you right,” Stevens says. “But just in case.” He turns to the busy knot of looters on the small appliances aisle and grabs himself one at random—a woman. Just shoves an arm around her, gets up under her chin, and pulls her against his body. De La Russe sees her pupils dilate, her eyeballs about pop out of her head with fear. Stevens whispers some­thing in her ear and she nods.

  When he lets her go, she reaches in the pocket of her jeans and comes out with a cell phone, which she hands over, meek as you please. Stevens passes it to De La Russe. “Now ya back in business.” He swings his arms wide. “Anything else ya need?”

  De La Russe feels sweat break out on his forehead. His scalp starts to prickle, and so do his toes. His heart speeds up a little. Weirdest part of all, he’s actually having a sexual reaction; he’s getting hard. Not all the way hard, just a little excited, like when he sees a woman he likes, maybe lights a cigarette for her, brushes her thigh, but that’s all, no kiss or anything. A woman who isn’t his wife but someone who’s not supposed to get him excited. This is how he feels now, except with sweat and prickles. Because he’s pretty sure this is not an idle question Stevens is asking. Thing about Stevens, there’s rumors about him. About how he makes stuff disap­pear from the property room, shakes suspects down for drugs, little stuff that tells you a lot.

  Thing about De La Russe, he’s not above the same kind of thing. And he doesn’t need rumors, he’s been disciplined and everybody knows it. Yeah, he’s been clean since then, but he’s starting to feel this is something else again, this thing he’s looking at. This thing that’s nothing less than the breakdown of the social contract. It’s just occurring to him that people are going to profit from this, and they’re not just gonna be the Pampers-and-toothpaste thieves. He decides to get right down to it.

  “What are you saying, sergeant?”

  “Hell, Del, it’s the end of the world and you’re callin’ me sergeant—what’s up with that shit?” But he knows perfectly well.

  De La Russe smiles. “I was just wondering if I heard you right.” He waits for an answer, not allowing the smile to fade. Keeping his teeth bared.

  “Remember that little eBay bi’ness you told me you and ya wife was runnin’? How she goes to garage sales and finds things she can sell to collectors? And then you photograph ’em and get ’em on up online? Y’all still doin’ that?”

  “Yeah. We still doin’ that. Why?”

  Stevens looks at him like he’s nuts. “Why? Think about it, Del. You can sell just about anything on eBay.” He pauses, does the wide-open this-could-all-be-yours thing again. “And we got access to just about anything.”

  De La Russe is getting his drift. His mind’s racing, going instantly to the problems and working on solutions. He shrugs. “Yeah? Where would we store it?”

  “Glad you axed, bro. Just happens I already hooked up with a lieutenant who’s got a room at the Hyatt.” The Hyatt has become the department’s temporary headquarters. “He’s got access to a couple other rooms we could use. And I don’t mean hotel rooms. Storage rooms. Pretty big ones. We keep it there for now and when things get back to normal, somebody’s garage, maybe.”

  De La Russe narrows his eyes. “What lieutenant?”

  “Joe Dougald.”

  The patrolman almost does a double take. “Joe Dougald? You’re dreaming. Guy’s a boy scout.”

  Stevens hoots. “Yeah? Ya think so? I been doin’ deals with Joe for fifteen years. Trust me. We can trust him.”

  De La Russe isn’t sure if he even trusts Stevens, much less Dougald, but what the hell, the regular rules just don’t seem to apply now that the apocalypse, or whatever this is, has come crashing in on them. And he’s got two kids in Catholic school, with college looming. That’s not going away.

  He assesses the place. “Let’s start with little stuff that’s easy to carry. iPods, video games, stuff like that. Electronics, small appliances. Hey, do they have jewelry here?” He gives a little snort. Wal-Mart jewelry isn’t going to make them rich, even if it exists. “Watches, maybe?”

  Stevens smiles as if he likes the way De La Russe is get­ting into this. “This ain’t the only store in town, ya know. And stores ain’t the only sources we got. You’re from the Second District, right? People there got real nice taste.”

  De La Russe decides he’s just fallen into a real deal. Here they are, right this minute, he and Stevens, policing Wal-Mart and helping themselves while they’re at it. He sees how he can patrol his own district, get credit for coming to work, arrest a few of the real looters—the street guys—and help himself to whatever he wants while everybody’s still out of town. How come he hadn’t thought of it first?

  * * *

  It’s early the next day when De La Russe sees the black cou­ple—oh, excuse him, the two African-Americans—packing up their car in front of the biggest-ass goddamn house in the Garden District, or so near it doesn’t matter. What the hell are they thinking? There aren’t any cops around here? He decides he’s really going to enjoy this.

  He parks his car and strolls up all casual, like he’s just gonna talk to ’em. “How y’all?” Dicking with them.

  They go rigid though. They know from the get-go he’s trouble, and it has to be because of their guilty little con­sciences. “What y’all doing?”

  “Leavin’,” the man says. “Gettin’ out of town quick as we can. You want to see some ID? My wife works here and the owners are in North Carolina. So we rode out the storm here.” He starts to put his hand in his pocket, maybe to get the ID, and that gives De La Russe an excuse to slam him up against the car, like he thinks the guy’s going to go for a weapon.

  He pats the man down, and sure enough, there is one. Doesn’t that just sweeten this whole deal. Worth a lot to a couple guys he knows. “You got a permit for this?”

  The guy doesn’t answer, but his wife pipes up: “It’s not ours. It belongs to Tony. My employer. When the looters came . . .”

  De La Russe smiles. “. . . ya thought it might be okay to steal ya boss’s gun, huh? You know how pathetic that story sounds? Know who I think the looters are? Yeah. Yeah, I guess ya do. Let’s see what else ya got here.”

  The woman says, “My boss, Mathilde . . . she asked me to bring—”

  “Mrs. Berteau,” the man says. “My wife works for Mathilde Berteau.”

  “Right,” says De La Russe. “Y’all get in the backseat for a while.”

  “What about . . . ?” The woman’s already crying, know­ing exactly what’s in store for her. He grabs her by the elbow and rassles her into the car, shoving her good, just for the fun of it.

  “What about what?”

  “Nothin’, I just . . .”

  The husband is yelling now. “Listen, call the Berteaus. All you have to do is call ’em, goddammit! Just call ’em and let ’em tell you.”

  * * *

  “Like there was the least chance of that,” Cherice says ten months later. The encounter had led to the misery and indig­nity of incarceration for three days and two nights, plus the humiliation of being accused of looting—almost the hardest part to bear. But she has survived, she and Charles, to tell the story at a Fourth of July barbecue.

  “Know why I was wastin’ my breath?” Charles chimes in. “’Cause that peckerwood was enjoyin’ himself. Wasn’t about to ruin his own good time.”

  She and Charles are living in Harvey now, in a rental, not a FEMA trailer, thank God, until they decide what to do about their gutted house. Their families have all heard the story many times over, but they’ve made new friends here on the West Bank, people they haven’t yet swapped Katrina yarns with. Right now they have the rapt attention of Wyvette Johnson and her boyfriend Brandin. Cherice didn’t catch his last name.

  Wyvette gets tears in her eyes. “Mmmm. Mmmm. What about those poor dogs?”

  This annoys Cherice, because it’s getting ahead of the way she usually tells it. But she says, “I nearly blurted out that they were there at the l
ast minute . . . before he took us away. But I thought they’d have a better chance if he didn’t know about ’em. Last thing I wanted was to get my dogs stole by some redneck cop.” Here she lets a sly smile play across her face. “Anyhow, I knew once Mathilde knew they was still in the house, that was gon’ give her a extra reason to come get us out.”

  “Not that she needed it,” Charles adds. “She was happy as a pig in shit to hear we’d been dragged off to jail. I mean, not jail, more like a chain-link cage, and then the actual Big House. I ended up at Angola, you believe that? The jail flooded, remember that? And then they turned the train sta­tion into a jail. Oh man, that was some third world shit! Couldn’t get a phone call for nothin’, and like I say, they put you in a cage. But one thing—it was the only damn thing in the city that whole week that worked halfway right. Kept you there a couple days, shipped you right out to Angola. But they got the women out of there just about right away. So Cherice was up at St. Gabriel—you know, where the women’s prison is—in just about twenty-four hours flat. And after that, it wasn’t no problem. ’Cause they actually had working phones there.”

  Wyvette is shaking her silky dreads. “I think I’m missin’ somethin’ here—did you say Mathilde was happy y’all were in jail?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Cherice says. “She was outraged— ’specially since I’d been there for two days when they finally let me make the call. It’s just that outrage is her favorite state of mind. See, who Mathilde is—I gotta give you her number; every black person in Louisiana oughta have it on speed dial—who Mathilde is, she’s the toughest civil rights lawyer in the state. That’s why Charles made sure to say her name. But that white boy just said, ‘Right,’ like he didn’t believe us. Course, we knew for sure she was gon’ hunt him down and fry his ass. Or die tryin’. But that didn’t make it no better at the time. In the end, Mathilde made us famous though. Knew she would.”

  “Yeah, but we wouldn’t’ve got on CNN if it hadn’t been for you,” Charles says, smiling at her. “Or in the New York Times neither.”

  Wyvette and Brandin are about bug-eyed.

  “See what happened,” Charles continues, “Cherice went on eBay and found Mathilde’s mama’s engagement ring, the main thing she wanted us to bring to Highlands. Those cops were so arrogant they just put it right up there. In front of God and everybody.”

  “But how did you know to do that?” Wyvette asks, and Cherice thinks it’s a good question.

  “I didn’t,” she says. “I just felt so bad for Mathilde I was tryin’ anything and everywhere. Anyhow, once we found the jewelry, the cops set up a sting, busted the whole crime ring—there was three of ’em. Found a whole garage full of stuff they hadn’t sold yet.”

  Brandin shakes his head and waves his beer. “Lawless times. Lawless times we live in.”

  And Cherice laughs. “Well, guess what? We got to do a little lootin’ of our own. You ever hear of Priscilla Smith-Fredericks? She’s some big Hollywood producer. Came out and asked if she could buy our story for fifteen thousand dollars, you believe that? Gonna do a TV movie about what happened to us. I should feel bad about it, but those people got way more money than sense.”

  * * *

  Right after the holiday, Marty Carrera of Mojo Mart Productions finds himself in a meeting with a young producer who has what sounds to him like a good idea. Priscilla Smith-Fredericks lays a hand on his wrist, which he doesn’t much care for, but he tries not to cringe.

  “Marty,” she says. “I believe in this story. This is an important story to tell—a story about corruption, about courage, about one woman’s struggle for justice in an unjust world. But most of all, it’s the story of two women, two women who’ve been together for twenty-two years—one the maid, the other the boss—about the love they have for each other, the way their lives are inextricably meshed. In a good way.

  “I want to do this picture for them and . . . well . . . for the whole state of Louisiana. You know what? That poor state’s been screwed enough different ways it could write a sequel to the Kama Sutra. It’s been screwed by FEMA, it’s been screwed by the Corps of Engineers, it’s been screwed by the administration, it’s been screwed by its own crooked officials . . . Everybody’s picking carrion off its bones. And those poor Wardells! I want to do this for the Wardells. Those people have a house to rebuild. They need the money and they need the . . . well, the lift. The vindication.”

  Marty Carrera looks at the paperwork she’s given him. She proposes to pay the Wardells a $15,000 flat fee, which seems low to him. Standard would be about $75,000, plus a percentage of the gross and maybe a $10,000 “technical consultant” fee. He shuffles pages, wondering if she’s done what he suspects.

  And yes, of course she has. She’s inflated her own fee at the expense of the Wardells. She thinks she should get $100,000 as an associate producer, about twice what the job is worth. And not only that, she wants to award the technical consultant’s fee to herself.

  Marty is genuinely angry about this. She’s roused his sympathy for the wrongfully accused couple, and even for the beleaguered state, and he too believes the Wardells’ story—or more properly, Mathilde and Cherice’s story—would make a great movie for television.

  However, he thinks Ms. Smith-Fredericks is a species of vermin. “After looking at the figures,” he says, “I think I can honestly say that you seem uniquely qualified to do a piece on looting.”

  But she doesn’t catch his meaning. She’s so full of herself all she hears is what she wants to hear. She sticks out her hand to shake.

  Well, so be it, Marty thinks. I tried to warn her.

  His production company doesn’t need her. So what if she found the story and brought it to him? He’s not obligated to . . . Well, he is, but . . .

  “Marty,” she says, “we’re going to be great together.”

  He shakes her hand absentmindedly, already thinking of ways to cut her out of the deal.

  THE PRISON

  BY DOMENIC STANSBERRY

  North Beach

  (Originally published in San Francisco Noir)

  It was 1946, and Alcatraz was burning. I had just got back into town and stood in the crowd along the seawall, looking out toward the island. The riot at the prison had been going on for several days, and now a fire had broken out and smoke plumed out over the bay. There were all kinds of rumors running through the crowd. The prisoners had taken over. Warden Johnston was dead. Capone’s gang had seized a patrol boat and a group of escapees had landed down at Baker Beach. The radio contradicted these reports, but from the seawall you could see that a marine flotilla had sur­rounded Alcatraz Island and helicopters were pouring tracer fire into the prison. The police had the wharf cordoned off but it didn’t prevent the crowds from gathering. The off-duty sailors and Presidio boys mixing with the peace-time john­nies. The office girls and Chinese skirts. The Sicilians with their noses like giant fish.

  In the crowd were people I knew from the old days. Some of them met my eyes, some didn’t. My old friend Johnny Maglie stood in a group maybe ten yards away. He gave me a nod, but it wasn’t him I was looking at. There was a woman, maybe twenty-five years old, black hair, wearing a red cardi­gan. Her name was Anne but I didn’t know this yet. Her eyes met mine and I felt something fall apart inside me.

  * * *

  My father had given me a gun before I left Reno. He had been a figure in North Beach before the war—an editor, a man with opinions, and he used to carry a little German revolver in his vest pocket. The gun had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, but he’d gotten himself another some­where along the way and pressed it into my hand in the train station. A gallant, meaningless gesture.

  “Take this,” he said.

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “You may be a war hero,” he said, “but there are people in North Beach who hate me. Who have always hated me. They will go after you.”

  I humored the old man and took the gun. Truth was, he was ill. He and S
al Fusco had sent me to borrow some money from a crab fisherman by the name of Giovanni Pellicano. More than that, though, my father wanted me to talk with my mother. He wanted me to bring her on the train back to Reno.

  Johnny Maglie broke away from his little group—the ex-soldiers with their chests out and the office janes up on their tiptoes, trying to get a glimpse of the prison. Maglie was a civilian now, looking good in his hat, his white shirt, his creases. My old friend extended his hand and I thought about my father’s gun in my pocket.

  I have impulses sometimes, ugly thoughts.

  Maybe it was the three years I’d spent in the Pacific. Or maybe it was just something inside me. Still inside me.

  Either way, I imagined myself sticking the gun in my old friend’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

  “So you’re back in town,” said Maglie.

  “Yeah, I’m back.”

  Maglie put his arm around me. He and I had grown up together, just down the street. We had both served in the Pacific theater, though in different divisions. He had served out the campaign, but I’d come back in ’44—after I was wounded the second time around, taking some shrapnel in my chest. This was my first time back to The Beach. Johnny knew the reason I had stayed away, I figured, but it wasn’t something we were going to talk about.

  “We fought the Japs, we win the goddamn war—but it looks like the criminals are going to come back and storm the city.”

  I had liked Maglie once, but I didn’t know how I felt about him anymore.

  “You going to stick around town for a while?”

  “Haven’t decided,” I said.

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Good.”

  He didn’t mention my father. No one mentioned my father.

  “You know,” he stuttered, and I saw in his face the mix of shame and awkwardness that I’d seen more than once in the faces of the people who’d known my family—who’d moved in the same circles. And that included just about everybody in The Beach. Some of them, of course, played it the other way now. They held their noses up, they smirked. “You know,” he said, “I was getting some papers drawn up yesterday—down at Uncle’s place—and your name came up . . .”