Let the Devil Out

by Bill Loehfelm

  She’d slept away most of the afternoon in a deep, dreamless slumber, the best hours of sleep she’d had in weeks. She felt as if she’d awoken from hibernation.

  When she imagined her next roll call, she couldn’t help seeing Quinn and Ruiz waiting for her, cracking wise in the corner like schoolboys and smirking at their private jokes that no one else on the squad understood. But they weren’t schoolboys, she thought, the warmth in her hands dying as she squeezed the mug tighter in search of more. And they weren’t cops anymore. And it wasn’t always jokes that they whispered back and forth and hid from the rest of the squad. Sometimes the secret commentary had been flat-out criminal. Her ankle ached.

  As she shifted her weight in the rocking chair to relieve the pressure on it, the wood creaked beneath her and she remembered that this new chair was a replacement for the first one, a gift from her mother that had been shot to pieces by automatic-weapons fire. Quinn and Ruiz had been connected to the people who’d shot at her. Quinn and Ruiz had been criminals in cops’ clothing, Maureen thought, and they had almost gotten her killed.

  She picked up her cigarette, took a long drag, and picked up her phone. Time to call her mother in New York, she thought, blowing out a plume of smoke. Time to let Amber Coughlin know that her daughter had kept her job.

  Amber’s feelings would be mixed, Maureen knew, as they always were concerning her daughter’s choices. Part of Amber would be glad for Maureen; she knew how much Maureen’s new career and new city meant to her. And even if Amber didn’t understand Maureen’s love for what she did and where she did it, Amber believed that her daughter’s love for both of those things was real. But Maureen knew that another part of her mother had rejoiced at the thought of her daughter flaming out in New Orleans, because failure in Louisiana kept alive the possibility of Maureen’s return to New York.

  Amber answered on the third ring. “What’s wrong?”

  “Really, Ma? I can’t call to check in?”

  “Sure you can,” Amber said, “but you never do. Whenever you call in the afternoon, it’s because you have bad news. When you want to check in, you call in the evening.”

  This is what happens, Maureen thought, when your mother falls in love with a detective. Weird, she thought, she never considered what had happened with Nat Waters and her mother “falling in love.” Had she ever even used those words? Her mother and Waters certainly never had. But here they were coming up on a year together, and they were happy, what else could it be? What else could she name it but love? And Maureen liked thinking about the relationship that way. She had never known her mother happy. Part of her ached at being so far away while it happened. But in her own way, Maureen realized, she was in love, too.

  “Your old mother’s smarter than you think,” Amber said. “So out with it.”

  Not that love and happiness had changed Amber much when it came to her daughter.

  “Shows what you know,” Maureen said. “I’m calling with good news. Great news, in fact. I got my badge back today. My next shift is tomorrow night.”

  Maureen heard the instant’s hesitation before Amber’s answer as she adjusted her response from what she really felt to what her daughter wanted to hear. “I’m happy for you. I know this is what you wanted. And I’m glad they didn’t use what those crooked bastards did against you. I have to say, I wasn’t optimistic.”

  “I was,” Maureen said.

  “I know, though I don’t know why. You always see the world the way you think it should be. It’s why you’re always getting disappointed.”

  Maureen set her coffee down. She lit another cigarette with the embers of the first. Whoever invented e-mail, she thought, had conversations like this one with his mother. “Ma, did you miss the part where I said I got what I wanted? That things worked out for me.”

  “You need to quit smoking,” Amber said. “How can they let you smoke at that job? Don’t you have to chase people, be in shape?”

  “Hey, Ma, my doctor says I have the resting heart rate—you know what, forget it. I wanted to let you know things worked out. I know you were waiting to hear. Tell Nat I said hello.”

  “Maureen, wait,” Amber said, “while I have you, there’s something we should talk about.”

  “Is it Nat?” Maureen asked. Please, she thought, don’t let there be a breakup. Or worse, another heart attack. The first one had been bad, a real close call, and he struggled with his weight. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine.” A long pause. “Well, do you remember Lori DiNunzio from across the street?”

  Maureen sighed. She didn’t know where this was going, but she was sure Lori DiNunzio wasn’t what her mother wanted to talk about. “Yeah, of course, Ma, we walked to P.S. 42 together almost every day for years.”

  “I always thought it was a shame you two drifted apart. You two played at her place every day and then you never saw each other.”

  “We went to different schools after 42,” Maureen said. “You know how little girls are, everything or nothing.” Which was true, though it didn’t help the friendship that Lori’s skeevy older brother kept trying to put Maureen’s hand down his pants when Lori was in the bathroom or went to get snacks. And that Lori pushed Maureen down on the sidewalk when Maureen told her what her brother had been doing. “It was no big deal. We stayed friendly when we grew up. I’d see her around the island. She’d come in now and then where I worked sometimes. Have a drink.”

  “You know, you never had another friend like that,” Amber said. “A close one.”

  “I had no friends after the fifth grade,” Maureen said, “that’s right, Ma. That’s so true. Thanks for reminding me. I guess it’s why I’m so easily disappointed. And I did so have friends. Like the whole track team in high school. Just ’cause you didn’t meet them.” Maureen caught herself. She knew she sounded like she did when she was fifteen. Lying then, lying now. She took a deep breath. “Is Lori okay? Did she die?”

  “Good Lord, no,” Amber said. “The morbid way you think. She got married. Finally. I was worried. She got so heavy when she moved back in with her mother. And I don’t think she works.”

  Aha. There was the point, Maureen thought. Thirty-year-old, living-with-her-mother fatty Lori DiNunzio had landed a man. And I have this backwater career. “Listen, Ma, if you want me to move home and get fat so I can land a man, just say so.”

  “It’s lovely,” Amber said. “To be reminded that there’s someone for everyone.”

  Who was this person she was talking to, Maureen wondered. “Ma. Are you drinking in the afternoon again?”

  “It gives you hope.”

  “Ma.”

  “Who’s gonna love you when I’m gone?”

  “Ma.” Amber was hitting the box wine again, had to be. Though she didn’t sound like it.

  “Maureen, Nat and I have been talking. We’ve been discussing the future.”

  “I’m staying in New Orleans,” Maureen said, exasperation creeping into her tone. “I’m staying a cop in New Orleans. I’m sorry if that doesn’t make me as marriageable as old pride-of-Eltingville Lori DiNunzio.”

  “Young lady,” Amber said, “we weren’t talking about your future. You’re a grown woman. You can do what you want. We’re talking about our future, his and mine.”

  “Oh, wait, what are you trying to tell me? Did y’all decide about Florida?”

  “Kind of.”

  Maureen stood up. The blanket she was wrapped in fell to the porch. Amber and Nat had been discussing the move south for a while. Maureen knew this; they’d kept her in the loop. Amber had hesitated to consent, though, claiming reluctance to part with the only house she had ever owned, the only thing of real financial value that was hers. Maureen partially believed her. She also thought Amber was old-fashioned and wouldn’t move and cohabitate with a man she wasn’t married to. The obstacle there was Maureen’s father, twenty years in the wind.

  “Ma, did Nat propose?”

  Amber waited a long time to respond.
“We’re not kids. It’s not like he’s going to get down on one knee and do something silly like that. Lord knows, we don’t need to be throwing away money on a ring.”

  Maureen felt such an ache in her heart for her mother to have those things that she could barely breathe.

  “But, yes,” Amber said, “Nat and I have discussed it. It would be much easier for us to move, to get a mortgage on a condo if we were married. And I could drop my insurance and get on his plan. With his retirement package from the city, it’s a much better plan than mine from Macy’s, and, well, I’m not getting any younger.”

  “Ma, that’s amazing,” Maureen said. That sly devil, he hadn’t dropped a single hint. Even off the force and out of practice he could play it close to the vest with the best of them. Or maybe, Maureen thought, you’re not much of a detective yet. “I’m so excited. Is Nat there? Can I talk to him?”

  “See, there you go again,” Amber said. “We’re talking about it and you’re ready to send out the invitations. And before any of it goes any further, there’s something we need to discuss, you and me.”

  “What’s that? The honeymoon?”

  “Your father,” Amber said. “We need to talk about him.”

  “I forgot about him,” Maureen said after a moment.

  “I didn’t,” Amber said.

  “Of course not,” Maureen said. “And I didn’t mean I forgot forgot. I just, I don’t think about him much.”

  “You know that I never divorced him after he disappeared,” Amber said. “I never did anything about it. Legally, we’re still married.”

  “I hate that thought,” Maureen said.

  “So I’m looking into something,” Amber said. “As a possible solution.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Having him declared dead.”

  “I can get behind that,” Maureen said.

  “So if Nat starts the process of having him declared dead, which may involve looking for him, you’re okay with that.”

  “I have one request,” Maureen said.

  “What is it?”

  “If you find him,” Maureen said, “don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Where he is, where he went when he left.”

  “Believe me,” Amber said, “I don’t want to know those things, either.”

  “Good,” Maureen said. There was one thing concerning her father, she realized, that she wanted to know. “So this is kind of a weird question.”

  “Yes, we’re having sex,” Amber said. “We are consenting adults. We’re old, we’re not dead.”

  “Oh. My. God. That was not what I was going to ask. At all.”

  “Well, then,” Amber said, “what was your question?”

  Maureen struggled to recapture the original thought. “Oh, I got it. Daddy’s ring, the wedding ring. You won’t wear it anymore, will you? Nat will give you a new one.”

  “I stopped wearing it not too long after you left New York,” Amber said. “I think maybe I took it off after we got home from your academy graduation. I forget.”

  That’s a lie, Maureen thought. Amber had worn that gold band for eighteen years after the man who’d given it to her was gone. Amber would remember not only the day, but also the hour she took off that ring.

  Maureen waited, listening to her mother’s breathing through the phone, knowing Amber was carefully weighing what she would say next, and how much she would let it reveal.

  Amber said, “It all, it seemed so much more over when you left. More final. Like that was really the end of me and you and … him.”

  Maureen swallowed hard. “I never knew that.”

  “Why would you?” Amber said. “Nothing would’ve changed if you did. And I didn’t even know I’d feel like that until after you were gone.”

  “What did you do with the ring?”

  “Why, do you want it?” Amber asked, forced brightness in her voice. She was wearying of the topic, Maureen could tell. “I know you don’t have much of his, not since you lost that coat.”

  I didn’t quite lose it, Maureen thought. The hospital burned it because they couldn’t get Sebastian’s blood out of the wool. But, she thought, her mother’s point was the same. Her father’s coat was gone and she had nothing left of him but his last name.

  “I don’t want that ring,” Maureen said. Except maybe to toss in a volcano. “It’s of no use to me.”

  “Oh, okay, then. I guess it’s in a drawer somewhere. I can’t throw it out, I’m sure it’s worth something. Just not to me. Not anymore.”

  10

  Shortly after nine the following morning, Maureen was down in the Central Business District, sitting at a small table outside the PJ’s coffee shop on the corner of Camp and Girod Streets. Despite the day’s early hour, she felt more calm and clearheaded than she had any number of the past days when she’d slept much later, rolling around sore-legged and headachy in the tangled sheets into the early afternoon.

  She lifted the lid off her paper cup and blew on her coffee, the rising steam fogging her sunglasses. She wore boots and jeans, and over a white thermal undershirt she’d pulled on a gray V-neck T-shirt featuring a gas lamp emblazoned with the name Kelcy Mae, a local singer-songwriter. She’d caught the show a couple of weeks ago, a good one, at a small bar in the Riverbend neighborhood called Carrollton Station. She didn’t remember buying the T-shirt after the show, which was fine; she liked the music and the band, and the shirt, but she didn’t remember the drive home, either. She didn’t remember much of anything after the fourth double Jameson, and that was a problem. At least she’d woken up alone that morning. Thank the Lord for small favors. She was looking forward to putting those days behind her.

  She tilted her chair back against the building, her face turned up into the sunshine, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses, her back pressed against the warm wall of the coffee shop. The air was cool but the sun warmed her face, the cotton stretched over her chest, and the denim stretched over her thighs. She felt as if she hovered slightly above her own body, lifted skyward, lightened by the autumn sun. Not asleep, but not entirely present. This is what it’s like, she thought, to wake up without a hangover. To wake up not wondering who saw what you did last night. Remember this? This is what it’s like, she thought, to relax. Having that back, even for a few short moments, was serious progress. Maybe now that she was a cop again she’d fight her way back to sane.

  At the next table along the wall, not five feet away, sat Preacher. She’d called him last night, told him about the meeting with Skinner. He’d agreed to sit in on her meeting with the FBI before she’d finished asking the question. He wore civvies like Maureen, dressed in an olive Guevara shirt and matching pants, sandals and thick black socks on his feet, a black felt porkpie hat on his head. He sat with his wide face held at the same angle as Maureen’s, soaking up the sun. Taken together they gave the impression of two beach bums wasting away the day, as if the concrete sidewalk they sat on was instead white sand, and the parking garage across Girod Street was a green and rolling ocean that smelled of salt instead of car exhaust.

  “You feeling okay?” Maureen heard Preacher ask.

  “Never better.”

  “Long night?”

  “Nope. Quiet. I talked to my mother. I read. Slept like a stone.”

  “Sounds nice,” Preacher said. “You look pale, though. Even for you.”

  “I’m redheaded Irish, Preach. And a Yankee. Cadaverous is my natural look.”

  “I see you’re limping again,” Preacher said.

  “It’s that ankle thing. It comes, it goes.”

  “I don’t know if you heard,” Preacher said. “I’m guessing you didn’t, but some guy in the Irish Channel had a rough time of it the other night.”

  “I’m sure there’s more than one of them out there.”

  “Young man took a hell of a beating,” Preacher said. “Got left bleeding in the bushes. Couldn’t talk much since he had a couple of cracked ribs. Punctured lung, as it turned out. Could�
��ve gone way worse for him. He woulda died there in those bushes if he’d been left there much longer. Wouldn’t have made it to dawn. We’d be calling your buddy Atkinson for him.”

  Maureen willed herself not to look at Preacher. Instincts, or was it her guilty conscience, warned her that he was fishing. He had instincts of his own, she recalled, and they were much better than hers.

  “What saved him?” she asked.

  “Girl who lives in the house where he took the beating, her dog wouldn’t stop barking. She finally went out to check, found the poor bastard in the bushes. Girl called nine-one-one. Turns out she was a witness to the beat-down.”

  “Good for her for making the call,” Maureen said. “She’s a fine citizen. And why would I have heard about this?”

  “It happened in your neck of the woods,” Preacher said. “On Philip Street. Only a few blocks from your house. You must’ve heard us coming out, the sirens.”

  “I miss the job,” Maureen said. “I’m eager to get back to work tonight, but I haven’t been sitting home listening to the scanner. I hear sirens every night, up and down Magazine, Tchoupitoulas, all over Uptown.”

  “The girl with the dog,” Preacher said. “She’d had a few at the Irish Garden. She said the guy was attacked right there in the front yard. He appeared out of the dark. Like he’d been there in the bushes waiting for her to get home.”

  “Or like he followed her home,” Maureen said. Nailing the guy had taken strong detective work. Having to hide that part of what she’d done gnawed at her professional pride.

  “So this guy appears and then, boom, out of the shadows leaps contestant number two, who then proceeds to kick this guy’s ass six ways to Sunday.” Preacher shrugged. “Girl did say she might’ve walked into a fight that had already started before she got there. She couldn’t say for sure the order of what happened. One of them yelled at her to get inside. She was scared enough to listen. Never got a good look at either the victim or the assailant.”

  “If she’d had a couple of drinks,” Maureen said, “her facts might be off. Even so, it’s a shame we couldn’t get any kind of description from her on the guy giving the beating.”