Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  “I think it’s too late for me as far as being uppity,” Maureen said. “You got that note?” She wished she hadn’t handed it over to Quinn. She’d made the same mistake she made with Gage, letting go of something important too easily. “You’ll make sure the detective gets it?”

  “It’s in the car,” Quinn said. “It’s safe.” He pointed across the street. “That there’s the kid who discovered the body.”

  Maureen saw a young man, early twenties, dressed in khakis and a yellow polo shirt. He wore his shirt collar popped. He leaned against the brick building, his head hanging, his hands on his knees, a big watch hanging loose on his left wrist. He had on boat shoes with no socks, wore his sandy hair in the goofy, bushy style favored by boys—young men, Maureen corrected herself—these days. These prep school kids, Maureen thought, they all looked the same to her. He was, she thought, a younger, slimmer version of Caleb Heath. “What’s he got to say for himself?”

  “Not much,” Quinn said. “Claimed he was headed for his car, meant to duck behind the VW for one last piss and literally walked right into our boy back there.”

  “So the body’s been disturbed,” Maureen said.

  “Not much.”

  “He left footprints?”

  “Nobody’s pulling anything useful from that gravelly mush,” Quinn said. “And who knows who else has been back there tonight before Gage got done.”

  “The kid call it in?”

  “Nope,” Quinn said, laughing. “He went back inside and told the bartender about it, yelling about it over the fucking music. Which was awesome, because that guaranteed the whole bar knew there was a dead body outside. Must have been ten of them standing around, polluting the scene when we got here. Fortunately, these kids chase easy, like pigeons. We didn’t have much of a time getting them herded back across the street.” He shrugged. “Which is good. It’s our asses getting chewed by the detective if the Junior League over there sours the scene.”

  They both turned as the crime lab van came around the corner, blinding them for a moment with its headlights. It made a K-turn on the street, throwing its lights on the shrinking crowd of kids, and backed up to the scene.

  Clad in dark blue cargo pants, ball caps, and their matching NOPD polo shirts and windbreakers, the techs climbed out of the van and readied their equipment. Ruiz went over to greet them. A few kids wandered into the street and up to the edge of the scene, watery cocktails in one hand, smartphones in the other, craning their necks to see through the shadows and to take pictures, attracted to the new arrival and activity, deciding if any of it was Facebook worthy.

  Maureen moved toward them, sweeping her flashlight beam across their faces, yelling at them, backing them up onto the opposite sidewalk and against the wall of the bar. Quinn was right. They were easy to push around. Not quite the same crowd, she thought, as Magnolia Street. At least no one was throwing bottles at her. Not even any insults or wisecracks like in Frenchmen Street. Not yet, anyway. She thought of the previous night’s tedious and fruitless Magnolia Street canvass. She was not looking forward to another one.

  “Are we gonna have to interview the whole bar?” she asked, returning to Quinn. “All of these kids, there’s probably fifty more inside. It seems pretty obvious to me that Gage was killed on this block, right where we found him. Who knows who saw what coming and going? Did any of them see him inside the bar?”

  Quinn sighed. “What we do next depends on what the detective says. We can take the initiative and ask around, but I don’t know that we’re gonna get any kind of useful statements from a barroom full of hammered college kids. Unless the detective is hard core, I’m thinking it’s too late at night for a neighborhood canvass.”

  “We did one on Magnolia Street,” Maureen said. “Most of those guys were drinking and smoking all day.”

  “They’re used to us in that neighborhood,” Quinn said.

  “I cruise this block twice a week on noise complaints.”

  “Atkinson was in charge on Magnolia Street. Unless we get her for this one, day shift’ll get stuck with the door-to-door in the morning. It’s gonna be fucking useless anyway. No one saw anything. I guarantee it. That way, every neighborhood is the same.”

  Maureen chewed her thumbnail. “I wanna know what Gage was doing back there. Hiding? Waiting for someone to come out of the bar? Maybe Heath stood him up the other night at Pat O’s. Maybe Gage hooked up with Leary and blew off the meet.” She looked at the mop-headed kid, who was now texting something on his phone. “Heath struck me as the arrested-development overaged frat boy type. I could see him digging this place. You think so?”

  “Maybe Gage was taking a leak behind the van like the rest of the neighborhood,” Quinn said. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Was he smoking rock? Maybe he was beating off to college-age pussy? The fuck should I know?”

  “You think he was with the person who killed him?” Maureen asked. “You think they knew each other?”

  “Then why do it here?” Quinn asked, exasperated. “Why kill him in a place where the body might be found before he even bleeds out? According to Eli Manning over there, this VW’s been around as long as anyone can remember. Back behind it is a popular spot for plenty of wonderful things. Techs’ll find an old condom or two back there, I figure.”

  “I could’ve done without that bit of intel,” Maureen said. She fought back a smile. No matter how hard Quinn pretended not to care, she’d noticed, he had answers, or theories, at least, for every one of her questions. His brain was working the scene, she thought, even if his heart wasn’t in it. Why hadn’t he ever gone out for detective? she wondered. Another time, she decided, she’d ask him that. “Maybe Gage didn’t know this bar, this corner. Maybe the killer didn’t know it, either.”

  “It’s fucking F and M’s,” Quinn said. “It’s infamous. People know it. Besides, it only takes half a minute to figure out that there’s plenty of foot traffic on this block.”

  “Gage wasn’t from here, remember?” She looked up and down the block. “The killer could be in the neighborhood. Could be in the bar, even.”

  “I doubt that,” Quinn said. “There’s a lot of blood here. A lot. He’ll be wearing a fair share of it. After a job this messy, he’s got to go to ground and clean up.”

  “The body’s fresh. The killer is bloody. He can’t be far. I wish we had more urgency here.”

  “Tell it to the detective,” Quinn said, nodding at the dark sedan pulling to a stop in the middle of the street. “Fucking finally.”

  Maureen watched as a short, jowly man in a gray suit climbed out of the driver’s seat. He had a heavily gelled gray and wavy pompadour, and thick lips. He looked like a lounge act’s bass player’s dad, Maureen thought. Quinn spat in the street. “Awesome. I love this guy. Really. I do. What a great fucking night we’re having.”

  “Fuck me,” Maureen said. “At least we won’t have to work too hard tonight.”

  “You got that right. Let me see how Rue’s doing with the techs. You wait here for His Majesty. Remember now, all he needs is the basics. The facts, no theories. The bare minimum. Keep it simple in the Sixth, Cogs. That’s how we roll.”

  Maureen watched the detective, Ronnie Drayton, also known as Defective Drayton, hitch up his trousers. He surveyed the scene, puffing out his chest for the chirping co-eds in short skirts and high heels now whispering behind their hands. Rumor had it he was sleeping with the new crime-beat reporter from the Times-Picayune, a recent Brooklyn émigré fifteen years his junior.

  “Thanks for nothing, Quinn,” Maureen said.

  Quinn raised his shoulders high, palms upturned. “Hey, you’re the one with the big-time professional aspirations. We drew the Lead Defective, the guy who couldn’t catch herpes in a whorehouse. That means you’ll have a shot at nabbing the killer yourself. The brass will love you. You’ll get a medal and a promotion. It’s totally a glass-half-full type of scenario for you. Enjoy.”

  10

&
nbsp; Drayton walked around the front of his car, somehow looking right through Maureen as he approached her, unbuttoning his suit jacket then adjusting his crotch with one hand. She’d worked other murder scenes that had become his cases. She didn’t follow up, but she wasn’t sure he’d cleared a single one of them. She didn’t like him and was far from the only one on the force, uniformed or otherwise, who felt that way. She wondered who or what he knew that allowed him to linger, indifferent, ineffective, and entitled while the rank and file got gutted by the merciless new regulations. A part of her wanted to come right out and ask him who he was blowing to keep his job. She kept her questions to herself. Instead, she met him in the street, her hand extended. “Officer Maureen Coughlin.”

  Drayton stopped, leaving her hand hanging in the air. Behind them, the cameras flashed as the techs took photos of the body and the scene. He stood motionless for a moment, posing, Maureen thought, just in case someone was taking his picture. He sucked his teeth and gave Maureen the slow and deliberate once-over with his eyes, a smirk curling one corner of his mouth. She noticed he had fat fingers and wore a pinkie ring.

  “I thought there was a body to check out around here,” Drayton said.

  “Other side of the van.”

  Drayton nodded. “You new?”

  “Relatively,” Maureen said.

  “What makes a striking young thing like you want a dirty job like this?”

  “Assholes,” Maureen said after a beat. “I get to do something about them, rather than just helplessly tolerate their shit. It’s empowering.”

  “The body’s behind the van, you say?” Drayton stayed where he was. “Messy?”

  “I do,” Maureen said. “A bit.”

  She noticed the number of kids on the corner had dwindled. She couldn’t say how many had gone back inside the bar and how many had wandered off into the night. How many potential witnesses they’d lost. The music from inside the bar was louder. She couldn’t be sure, and her knowledge of hip-hop was minimal, but she thought she’d heard the same song playing on Magnolia Street. Welcome to New Orleans. Above all else, on went the party.

  “Detective,” she asked, “would you like us to secure the bar, start doing interviews? Names and numbers, at least?”

  Drayton chuckled. “Collins, I doubt the murderer came out here, shot this guy, and then sauntered back in the bar for a Jägermeister.”

  “The COD is a throat slash,” Maureen said, knowing as she did it that she shouldn’t correct a detective. He’d find out soon enough how his vic had died. “And as for the bar patrons, I was thinking witnesses more than a perp.”

  “A slash? What did I say? Isn’t that what I said?”

  “My mistake,” Maureen said. “The bar, Detective? The witnesses?”

  “Eh. Sure. If you need something to do.” Hands in his pockets, he wandered around the front of the VW, checking out the van and jingling his change. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Classic. Damn shame, the state of it. This is why we can’t have nice things.”

  Maureen watched him observe himself in the dirty windshield, acting again as if the cameras on scene were for him and not the dead man on the ground. He released a long, low whistle when he saw the body, now illuminated under the bright white light of the crime scene lamps. Maureen could more clearly see the blackish-red wound across the throat, the exposed viscera, the apron of deep red blood down the man’s front. The blood pooled around him on the street glistened on the dirt and gravel like leaked oil. Flies alighted in it, more of them on his face and chest.

  “Will you look at that,” Drayton said, tucking his tie into his shirt, pulling on latex gloves, and squatting beside the body. His new leather shoes squeaked as he moved. “A dead white boy. Go figure. Haven’t seen one of those in a while, either.”

  “We had one in Central City just last night,” Maureen said. She waited for a response from Drayton. “Throat cut like this guy. Dead about a week.” She waited again. He didn’t even look at her. He was humming to himself. Was that Sinatra? She felt her own throat tighten with rage. Quinn had warned her to keep it simple. This was why. What he’d meant was “lower your expectations.” “We found him in a vacant on the dead-end block of Magnolia. Detective Atkinson caught it. It was in the twenty-fours.”

  She looked at Gage’s wallet, balanced right there on his hip, waiting like a book to be opened. Pressure built behind her eyes. Her ankle throbbed. She was tempted to go back to her car. She thought she might scream if Drayton didn’t pick up the wallet. Instead, as if to taunt her, Drayton picked up a stone from beside the body, studied it, put it back where he’d found it. Maureen thought she might give him one more nudge.

  “There’s things about this vic that you might want to know,” Maureen said. “Like, for starters, the fact we arrested him last night.”

  Drayton looked up at her, his hands draped over his knees, one eye closed. “Maybe you should secure the bar, after all, Costigan.”

  “It’s Coughlin,” Maureen said. “Coughlin.”

  Drayton waggled a finger at her. “Wait a minute, I know you.”

  The lascivious glint had returned to his eyes. While flies buzzed over a throat wound, Maureen thought, not two feet away from him, he beamed like a college kid who’d recognized a local stripper in the grocery store.

  “You’re that redhead,” Drayton said. “From the drug dealer thing, with the dead kid in the car. I heard about you. You’re Atkinson’s girl. We did that thing together on Jackson and Annunciation, that daytime shoot-out with the car crash about three months ago. Weren’t you there for that?”

  Maureen caught her breath, stunned. Girl? She wasn’t anybody’s fucking girl. And she sure as shit could not see Atkinson, who outranked Drayton not just on the NOPD, but also in every discernible human quality, tolerating Drayton’s condescending lounge singer clown show for one second. He wouldn’t have the balls to talk to Atkinson, or to look at her, or to not look at her, the way he did those things with Maureen.

  “Listen, Detective,” Maureen began, “maybe there are some things, some information that you’re missing, things that happened last night that I should—”

  She felt a strong hand grip her elbow. Quinn. “Hey, Cogs. Great work here. Fantastic. Just who I was looking for. Now that everyone’s up to speed, let’s leave the hard work to the high pay grades. All right then. Nice seeing you, Detective, thanks for coming out. Cogs, let’s do something else, way over there away from here.”

  Maureen allowed Quinn to lead her away.

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Quinn said. “I forget he’s a whole ’nother level of intolerable with female cops. We think of you as one of the guys, sometimes it gets in the way. It’s a compliment, in a weird way.”

  “Oh, I get the feeling he’s intolerable with females in general,” Maureen said.

  “So we gotta canvass the bar?” Quinn asked. “What did Drayton say?”

  Maureen blew out a long sigh. She needed to be smart. She was swimming against the current here. On Magnolia Street they’d talked to every person they could find willing to stand still in front of them. But now? Nothing. No interest. True, they’d been shut out for leads on Magnolia Street, but, at least, unlike this time, it wasn’t the cops doing the stonewalling. Why should she nag and beg to make more work for herself? She was tired. Her ankle ached. She’d get no help here from Quinn or Ruiz. The detective was on scene. Useless asshole or not, he was in charge now. He was responsible. When she was a detective, she could run things her way. Until then, maybe there were some benefits to being an injun and not a chief. “He was noncommittal.”

  “Then that’s a negative, Ghost Rider,” Quinn said. “I promise you, we ain’t missing anything. Nothing those kids say is gonna be worth shit.”

  “I have noticed,” Maureen said, “that no one’s come running outside to offer us their assistance.”

  “Astute,” Quinn said. “You feel me?” He looked around, shaking his head. “Man, it sucks to
be here for this. I used to hang at this joint, back when I was younger. High school and after. Now and then I’ll work a detail out here for some private party in the back barroom. Nothing’s changed. Place doesn’t get going until after midnight. Lots of drunk girls, not one of ’em over twenty-five. A pool table used strictly for dancing on. Killer cheese fries.”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Maureen said. “I can’t believe I missed this place.”

  They watched as workers from the coroner’s office loaded the corpse onto a stretcher, zipping closed the body bag after tucking in the head.

  “Yeah, I’m surprised Preacher let you get through training without sampling those fries,” Quinn said.

  “I guess he left me some local treasures to discover for myself.”

  The stretcher went into the back of the van with as much care as an old couch headed for Goodwill.

  “Where do you hang, Cogs?” Quinn asked. “What’s your thing? Me and Rue were trying to figure that out the other night.”

  “I don’t get out much,” Maureen said.

  “I got that impression,” Quinn said. “Rue thinks you have secrets.”

  “I mean, I do some stuff,” Maureen said. If she wanted Quinn to warm up to her, to trust her more, she had to give something. And in the back of her mind, despite her recently formed suspicions about his agenda and his loyalties, she didn’t want Quinn seeing her as a friendless loser. Even if it was true, she didn’t need him knowing it. “I go to Parasol’s for the games. I’ve been to Bon Temps, seen the Soul Rebels there a couple of times. I’ve been down to Frenchmen, to DBA and the Blue Nile. Brass bands are cool. Nothing like that where I come from. I like the Spotted Cat. I like watching the jazz dancers through the window.”