Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  Maureen leaned forward to stretch her hamstrings, her palms flat on the damp sidewalk. Drops of perspiration fell from her face onto the concrete. Winding bright green vines, their tiny white flowers winking from among the leaves, hung over the wrought-iron fence in front of her. She closed her eyes and inhaled their scent. Exotic. Tropical. Better than anything she encountered at work most days, though every now and again, when she slowed the unit to give some shady knucklehead the stink eye, the scent of frying chicken or a simmering pot of red beans would hit the car as hard as an ocean wave and knock her almost off balance.

  She opened her eyes, leaning forward with her hands on her knees. A tiny face materialized at eye level in the vines. A small, thin lizard colored the same bright green as the leaves watched her sideways with one swiveling eye. His eye fixed on her, the lizard puffed out the bright red pouch at his chin. He did three quick push-ups on his front legs and flicked his tail.

  No, this was definitely not Staten Island, Maureen thought, where she had grown up and lived her whole life until eight months ago. Not any place near or like it, which was the thing she loved about New Orleans the most. Steeped in the past as decadent ol’ New Orleans was, it wasn’t her past.

  A light sun shower started. Just because the sun was shining didn’t mean it couldn’t rain. Maureen stood up straight, tilting her face to the rain, pressing her hands into the small of her back. When she moved, the lizard disappeared in a flash into the foliage.

  On the other side of the fence, tall stalks of red-flowering ginger rose above the broad leaves of elephant ears. Several other green, fast-growing and flowering things, the names of which Maureen had yet to learn, formed a dense, chaotic garden swarming with dragonflies, glinting emerald bodies hovering on red-veined wings. In the middle of the garden, two plastic, wire-legged flamingos, one black and one gold, stood watch over a ceramic grotto of Drew Brees. Her own personal Breesus. The Saints. She was a fan now. A girl who’d never had more than a passing interest in team sports, New Orleans had made short work of her. That her deadbeat father had been a rabid Jets fan, she thought, had probably only helped her into the arms of another team.

  Football season’s opening Sunday, she’d found herself in Parasol’s bar at noon wearing a brand-new Pierre Thomas jersey and screaming at the TV along with the rest of her neighborhood. There wasn’t a social activity she’d ever found that asked less of her. Wear the right colors. Holler the right names. Learn the “Who Dat” chant. Talk about the big plays at work with the other cops. Maureen found the communal game watching scratched her itch to fit in, to belong in New Orleans, a feeling as new to her as her interest in football.

  The house she rented was a tiny shotgun single. The rooms ran in a row, front to back. She loved the exterior colors the landlords had picked: eggplant-purple walls with bright orange shutters that closed over the lone front window and the front door, tomato-red steps leading up to the baby-blue porch. It was as vibrant and conspicuous a place as she had ever lived, and a stark contrast to the grim, tumbledown Staten Island apartment she’d left behind. And, she thought, to the tumbledown abodes Caleb Heath rented out on Magnolia Street. She half expected her house to one day sprout canary-yellow wagon wheels and roll away in pursuit of the parade that had left it behind—because the place looked exactly like Maureen’s idea of an old-time circus wagon.

  Inside, the house was clean and sedate. Walls and ceiling painted a quiet off-white. Bare wood floors the color of honey. The structure was original, the freestanding fireplace between the rooms, the high ceilings, the tall windows. It had been built more than a hundred years ago for and by Irish immigrants, dirt-poor people who landed on and then worked the docks and wharves of the nearby Mississippi, people with the same roots as Maureen’s own New York–settled ancestors.

  One of the owners had been born in the house, Maureen had learned, in what was now her bedroom. His mother had been born there, too, in that same room. She had died in the place less than a year ago, which was how it had come up for rent after a long renovation. The old woman died in the same bed where she’d given birth to her only son fifty-some years ago. Maureen now slept where they had slept. When insomnia tormented her, as it often did, she let her eyes drift over the moonlit ceiling and walls, and into the lightless corners. She alternately feared and wished for a ghost to visit, to teach her secrets about the new city and for her to tell secrets about the city she had left behind. She never saw a sign.

  As she headed up her porch steps, legs heavy from her run, her phone buzzed in her hand. She checked the number. Nat Waters, a retired NYPD detective and her mom’s live-in boyfriend. Other than the move to New Orleans, he was the one good thing to come out of her troubles in New York.

  “Where y’at?” Maureen asked.

  “Listen to you,” Waters said. “Going local in record time. I’m out in the yard, waiting on your mother to get ready for dinner. Soon, it’s gonna be too cold to sit out here. Getting it in while I can.”

  “How’s Mom? She okay?”

  “She misses you,” Waters said. “She’s fine. The new place coming together?”

  “Bit by bit,” Maureen said. “I know it’s small, but it feels like a palace after six months in that studio apartment. At night, I keep walking from room to room just because I can.” And because I can’t sleep, she thought. But Nat already knew that. Whenever it was her calling him, it happened in the middle of the night.

  Maureen sat in a wooden rocking chair, painted purple. She put the phone on speaker, set it on a small table beside the chair, and leaned forward to untie her running shoes. “I finished repainting that kitchen table and chairs I told you about.”

  “I remember. You got any more furniture?”

  “The couch and the bed came last week,” Maureen said. “The couch is brand-new. This luscious chocolate brown. So comfy. The bed’s an antique. Both are gorgeous. I can’t believe they’re mine. I keep expecting the delivery guys to come back and take them away. Sorry, miss, wrong house.”

  She kicked off her running shoes and stretched her legs out in front of her. She liked watching her strong quads pop to life, though she did worry that her thighs were getting thick. She rotated her right foot. An old injury from her high school track team days meant the ankle tightened when she ran, which was often, daily if she could fit it in. Twice a day if she was feeling restless. A couple of weeks ago she’d twisted the ankle in a foot chase, hurting it worse than she’d thought at the time. She didn’t need to be out running on it, not five miles at a time, but she didn’t like what happened in her head when she didn’t get her exercise. She got anxious, sleepless, and temperamental. Twitchy. Angry. She struggled with her impulse control. Not a good thing for a cop.

  “I’ll send you and Mom pictures,” she said. “I financed both of them. My credit is mediocre, but both places liked that I’m a cop. Chris Atkinson’s family owns the antique shop, so that helped.”

  “Membership has its privileges,” Waters said. “You know, your mother and I could help, too. Think of it as an ongoing housewarming gift.”

  “The porch rocker was plenty,” Maureen said. “It’s perfect. I sit in it all the time. I’m sitting in it right now. I love it in the early mornings, after my shift. I watch the neighborhood get up and go to work and then I go to bed. Besides, paying these things off will help my credit. For when I make an offer on this house.”

  “Thinking of the future,” Waters said. “Good. Do me a favor. Take a picture of you in the rocker, too. Send it to your mother. She’d like that.”

  “Will do,” Maureen said. “I know it wasn’t easy for her, sending something homey and impractical like that to me. I know she hates New Orleans.”

  “She misses you,” Waters said. “She worries. Hate is a strong word. You’re her only child. She’s glad you’re out of that cramped studio and in a real house. After you take that picture in the rocker, call her up, tell her what you just told me.”

  “I painted the
rocker purple,” Maureen said. “It’s a popular color down here. Just warn her before you show her the picture.”

  “She really loved the white,” Waters said. “She put a lot of thought into the color.”

  “You saw the card she sent with it,” Maureen said. “So you don’t smoke in the house, it said.”

  “She’s your mother,” Waters said. “You know how she is.” He paused. He knew when to let things go. He was especially good at stepping aside of these passive-aggressive campaigns that arose between Amber Coughlin and her daughter. Maureen really liked that about him. When to disengage was one of any number of things she knew she could learn from him.

  “What else is happening?” Waters asked. “You been doing that thing we talked about?”

  “Kinda. Not really. No.”

  “Maureen. You’re putting me in a tough spot.”

  “I tried a shrink last month. I saw that one woman, remember? I went a couple of times. It didn’t work out. She asked so many questions. And then I ran into her in the coffee shop. Thank fucking God I was not in uniform.”

  “Because she blurted out you were a patient?” Waters asked.

  “No, she acted like she didn’t even know me. Thank God. That’s not the point. It was a sign. Whatever I tell her, it goes out in the world. I can’t have that. You know why.”

  Waters laughed. “Asking questions is her job. C’mon, Maureen.” She could hear him take a deep breath. “It can take a few tries to find the right person. You promised. These people are professionals, like you. They’d be out of work if they couldn’t keep secrets.”

  “Don’t tell me you told my mother,” Maureen said. “I was going to do that, when I was ready. That was part of the deal. I’m gonna do it, the therapy, just not right now.”

  “I haven’t said a word,” Waters said. “But I don’t like having secrets from your mother.”

  “There’s plenty you know about me and things I’ve done,” Maureen said, getting up from the chair, “that she doesn’t know. And that you would never tell her.” She went into the house, found her cigarettes on the kitchen table. She lit up and sat. She crossed her ankles under her chair. “Nobody here knows what I did up there, why I left, and I want to keep it that way.” She paused. “I’m just saying, let’s concede neither one of us can claim the moral high ground here about secrets.”

  “I’m not saying tell everyone what happened,” Waters said. “Just tell someone. You said you needed help for the anxiety from that thing up here. For the insomnia and the nightmares. For your temper. So you could keep your job. PTSD is a real thing. Ask anyone who lived in that city in ’05. Or up here after 9/11. I’m just repeating what you told me.”

  “I was drunk when I said all that.”

  “What does that tell you?” Waters asked.

  “See? What do I need with a therapist? I have you.”

  “I’m not there. I’m fourteen hundred miles away.”

  “You know, Nat, I think maybe sometimes I’m better this way,” Maureen said. “You ever think about that? Because I do. I’m tougher now than I was. I have sharper edges. I can be dangerous if I want to. What if I’m a better cop like this? I’m not linebacker-sized, like you. I have to compensate in other ways.” Her sore ankle throbbed. She’d caught the guy she’d been chasing when she reinjured it. He’d split his temple on the curb when she’d tackled him in the street—bad luck how he fell. Didn’t pain her, though, that he was somewhere in New Orleans with a swollen face etched with stitches. She stretched her legs under the table, as if that would put the pain farther away. “And I’m not a man. I have things I have to do to keep control of situations, to stay in charge. I need a lot of fuel to burn to stay humming. I have to prove myself every time I walk into the station, every time I get out of the car. You must’ve seen it when you were on the job.”

  “I saw what it was like for the women,” Waters said. “With the other cops as well as the criminals. I know things haven’t changed on the job as much as they should. But I saw a lot of cops short-circuit their good careers ’cause they fell in love with the power they thought they had. They liked drawing blood. They liked how good fear looked in another person’s eyes. They made a lot of excuses for themselves, too, while they circled the drain.”

  “You didn’t like it? You didn’t like what you could do with that big body?”

  “I worked in a different time, Maureen. People got medals for shit that gets you brought up on charges nowadays. I’m not saying it was a better time, but it was different. Everyone didn’t have a camera in their hand twenty-four seven for one thing.”

  “Did you get one of those medals?” Maureen asked. She knew as she spoke that Nat wouldn’t rise to the bait; he never did when she antagonized him. She wanted him to know she was never afraid to poke the bear.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Waters said. “Is there anyone down there you can talk to? Somebody away from the job? And I don’t mean beers after work with the other cops. I mean like a friend. Somebody to take a long lunch with, shoot the shit with over coffee. You ever see Patrick anymore? You said the two of you stayed friends.”

  “He’s been by once or twice,” Maureen said. “A couple of nights. But he’s not, you know, what you said. We don’t have coffee when he comes over.” She got up from the table, hobbled toward the bathroom. If only that dope-slinging motherfucker had stopped when he was told, she thought, she wouldn’t be gimped up like this. She had another long shift ahead of her. “It’s tough. I haven’t been here that long. I work a lot. And the job doesn’t exactly leave me feeling like socializing.”

  “Just think about it,” Waters said. “You have to do something. Something other than work. Take a class. Join a running club. You can try yoga again. I thought you liked it. That helped, right? Maybe something more intense, like kickboxing.”

  “I thought I’m supposed to be trying to stop hitting people,” Maureen said. In the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet, careful not to see herself in the mirror. “Classes? That’s what you did to deal? What classes did you take? You did two things with your life, Nat, play football and be a cop.”

  Waters chuckled. “Save me the sarcasm. I haven’t seen my sons in twenty years. I was a shambles when you and I met. Face it. I weighed almost three bills. I wasn’t much good at being a cop anymore. And I only quit when I almost died of a heart attack. I was even worse at being a functional human being than I was at being a cop. You don’t want to live like I did for my whole career. You don’t. Trust me. Don’t be ridiculous.

  “All I’m trying to say is I remember how it was when we met, Maureen, when you were waiting tables. All you did was work. Everyone you knew, you knew from work. You didn’t move as far away as you did, take the chances you did, work your ass off in the academy and training with Preacher to live the same life you had up here.”

  “I hear you, Nat,” Maureen said. She started to settle down. She felt herself warming inside toward him, remembering how much she liked him. He took shot after shot from her prickly temper, her sharp tongue, and he never flinched, never snapped, never hung up on her. Never gave up on her. She felt a pang of something new, something she’d never felt: envy for her mother. She took an orange pill bottle from the medicine cabinet shelf, shook out two pills.

  Percocet. For her ankle. She shook out a third. Additional favors from Patrick. Friends with benefits, indeed. “I do hear you. I know you’re on my side. It’s just hard.”

  “I know it is,” Waters said. “That’s why I keep telling you to get some help with it. I was a cop as long as you’ve been alive. Trust me, the job’ll take everything from you if you let it. Everything. And I know it’s more than the job that eats at you. People you knew were murdered. You were almost murdered yourself. You had to kill two men to survive.

  “The thing I never learned, Maureen, the thing that no one ever taught me that I’m trying to teach you, is that you have to protect yourself not only from what’s coming, but from thing
s that have already happened. Something is always coming up behind you, breathing on your shoulders, chasing you. Most people get to live their lives oblivious to this fact, but you and I know different. Protect yourself. No one else is going to do it for you. I’ve been telling you that since the day we met.”

  “I’m trying,” Maureen said. Her runner’s high, her endorphin-laced confidence, had vanished. Her righteous anger had dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. She didn’t want to talk anymore. She wanted to lie down on the floor, feel the cool tile against her cheek. “Sounds like it’s gonna take more than fucking yoga.”

  “You need people,” Waters said. “You need friends.”

  Sadness flooded through her. She swallowed her pills dry. She wondered when she had learned how to do that. Years ago, she figured, waiting tables. She couldn’t remember not knowing how. “I am trying.”

  “Try harder,” Waters said. “Be braver. Or you’re going to lose more than your job. That’s the reality, Maureen. I gotta go, your mom and I have plans. I’ll give her your love.”

  He hung up.

  Maureen walked back to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of cold coffee. She had been planning a nap for after her shower, but right then she needed something to wash the bitter taste of the pills from her mouth.

  6

  Around ten o’clock that night, Maureen smoked a cigarette and nursed a cup of cold coffee under the spotlights of the Orleans Parish Prison intake and processing center, a boxy cinder-block bunker painted the dull cream and brown of the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office. The one-story building stood hidden behind the dirty six-story art deco shell of one of the old city jails, flooded during Katrina and abandoned in the years since. At the end of the street lay the flat, ugly expanse of the construction site that would in two years be the new intake center and jail. It might all get built, she thought, before she retired.

  When she finished her smoke, she walked up the wooden ramp and pushed through the heavy green door, dropping her coffee cup in the trash as she passed the long benches and the humming vending machines in the lobby, the smell of institutional antiseptic rising from the freshly mopped floor. Her head was fuzzy from the lingering effects of the afternoon’s three Percocets. She wasn’t entirely sure the buzzing in her ears came from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. She headed for the intake and information office, separated from the lobby by a wide window of bulletproof glass and a locked metal gate.