The police superintendent had instituted what he called an “honesty and truthfulness” policy not long before she’d enrolled in the academy. Any lie, the policy declared, about anything, no matter how minor, constituted grounds for termination. She’d seen three dismissals in her short time on the job already, one of them an officer, over things much less significant than impeding a homicide investigation. She could probably stay out of jail if what she was doing came to light. The NOPD had seen enough of its own people go to prison over the last few years. But keeping her job would be impossible. She’d be a washout. A failure and a reject.
As a young girl she’d been kicked out of two junior high schools for bad behavior. Smoking, fighting, cutting class, abusing her teachers. Mostly, she had trouble with male authority figures, or they had trouble with her, depending on who was asking. She could be viciously hostile toward them; other times she was too welcoming of their attention to her misbehaving. She liked boys. Her mother, Amber, blamed Maureen’s runaway father for everything. He’d disappeared when Maureen was eleven. Maureen blamed him, too, because it was convenient and none of the adults in her life were willing to contradict her. Most seemed willing to let her rage, as long as she did it somewhere else.
She’d squeaked through a third school when her mother, crushed flat by heartbreak, loneliness, a full-time department store job, and a maniacal offspring had threatened her with doctors, medication, and boarding school. After the eighth grade, somehow, Amber got Maureen admitted to a last-chance all-girls Catholic high school. She did better there, suddenly disdainful of the attention she used to crave, turning her anger inward in the school halls, and finding an outlet for it as a runner. She ran like mad, for miles, like something was chasing her.
She’d graduated, though as a senior she’d been bounced from the track team, despite setting school and Staten Island records as a long-distance runner. The nuns had no sense of humor about an athlete running on cigarettes and amphetamines. Not one that ran Cs in the classroom. After high school, except for running and cigarettes, she struggled to stick with anything, even drugs, unless she counted waiting tables. Which, she thought, sitting on her porch, there was a good chance she’d be doing again before Halloween the way things were headed. For the first time in fifteen years, for the first time in her adult life, she didn’t want to be on her own anymore. She wanted to be part of something. Something bigger and stronger, something that made her feel bigger and stronger, than she was alone. Something she had chosen. In the NOPD, in New Orleans, she’d found a place, finally, where she wanted to belong, to stay. Whatever happened to her in the future, she decided, it would happen in New Orleans. No fucking way was she going back to Staten Island. No way was she moving back into her mother’s house. She’d walk into the Mississippi before she’d go back up north. This place, as brief as her time in New Orleans had been, this was her life now, for better or worse.
Across the street, two crows perched bobbing and cawing in the sunlight on the red-tiled spine of the roof. Preacher was right. He was always right. She needed to put some distance between herself and the Gage case, to get back to regular, standard, non-attention-grabbing police work. She activated her phone. She’d call Quinn, firm up their plans for the evening, see if there was anything she needed to bring with her. She saw that in the night, the early morning, really, while she’d slept, she had gotten a phone call. She thumbed her way to the lone message on her voice mail. The number was blocked, or unlisted. The caller had left a message.
At first, Maureen took it for a wrong number, or a pocket call. The message began with several moments of near silence, whispers, slow breathing, maybe the muffled sounds of distant traffic. Out of the background noise a voice arose, softly singing. A woman’s voice, singing low, as if she wanted no one other than Maureen to hear her. Look at that deep well, the voice sang. Look at that dark grave.
The same lines, the same melody, repeated three times before the caller had hung up. Gentle, like a secret lullaby. Or a spell. Or a warning. The throaty voice was unmistakable. From somewhere in New Orleans, Maureen knew, Madison Leary was singing to her. Maureen looked at her phone, put it back to her ear. Beyond bizarre. The question was why. And how had she gotten the number? What else did she know? Maureen’s address? Preacher would understand her pursuing something like this, Maureen thought. Handling it solo was the best way to keep it quiet, right? She wouldn’t even wear her uniform. Where had Leary gotten the number? Maureen wondered again. Someone had given it to her. Maureen had an idea who, and where to find her.
19
Maureen found Dice in the Marigny, sprawled in the newly cut grass in a corner of Washington Square, a small, pretty, tree-dense park between Frenchmen Street and Elysian Fields, not far from the corner where she’d left off Marques.
In the center of the park, Dice’s friends sat in a circle, passing around a thin joint. Dice sat off to the side of the group, cross-legged, plucking a slightly funky repeating riff on the worn strings of her banjo, tapping her booted foot in the grass. As Maureen approached the circle, she recognized a few faces from the other night. They made no attempt to hide their weed as they packed a bowl to follow the joint around the circle, daring Maureen to say something to them. She could hear the righteous diatribes percolating in their throats.
She ignored them. She headed straight for Dice.
“Afternoon, Officer,” Dice said, without looking up from her instrument.
“We need to talk,” Maureen said.
Dice looked up. “I don’t know what about. I brought your friend home, like I promised. I watched him walk into his grandmother’s house.” She smiled. “That is one serious lady. She’s not a huge fan of yours. I liked her.”
“It’s not about Marques,” Maureen said. “It’s about someone else.” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Come to the Rose Nicaud with me. I’ll buy you lunch and a coffee. When was the last time you had a salad? You could use one.”
“What if I already had lunch?” Dice asked, peering up at Maureen from her pickle bucket, one eye closed. “And I hate salad. What else you selling?”
“Coffee and lunch. And I won’t call for a unit to come by and kick your pot-smoking friends out of the park and run warrant checks on them on this beautiful sunny day. Best deal you’re gonna get.”
Dice stood, turning toward her friends. “Hey, I’m going over the dark side with lady law over here. I’ll be back in a few.”
A couple of the other kids grunted to show they’d heard. The skinny boy from the other night waved and grinned. The others glowered at him and he blushed. Maureen tried to remember the last time she’d been that high.
“Let’s go, copper,” Dice said, striding through the grass, her banjo over her shoulder.
“You don’t want to leave that here?” Maureen asked.
“With those thieves?” Dice replied. “I wouldn’t trust them with my worst pair of panties. If I wore any, that is.”
Maureen and Dice left the park through the open iron gate and crossed Frenchmen Street. They took an outside table for two on the narrow sidewalk, under the awning of the café. Big, cartoonish faces had been drawn in colored chalk on the concrete. Maureen thought she recognized one, by her glasses, as the city council president. Inside the café, she bought each of them a large black coffee and something to eat. Dice accepted a microwave-warmed slice of broccoli quiche. Maureen had a jerk chicken sandwich that left her sweating under her eyes.
“You mentioned the last time I saw you that you’d kicked the heroin,” Maureen said, dabbing at the moisture on her cheeks. “Nice work. I can see the difference in you.”
Dice scoffed at the compliment, catching a scrap of quiche in her palm as it bounced off her chin. “Yeah, that’s why you didn’t recognize me the last time you saw me, ’cause I look so healthy these days.”
“You do look better,” Maureen said. “You do.”
“Officer, if this is gonna get weird,” Dice said,
“I don’t roll that way. Pickin’s are slim around here, a clean working dick is hard to find, but I do prefer boys nonetheless. Pretty much exclusively. And I don’t do the gay-for-pay thing.”
“There’s something we can agree on,” Maureen said.
“As long as we’ve got that straight,” Dice said, with a wry smile. “So to speak.” She studied her fork. “Tell you what else I haven’t done in a long while, eat with real utensils. The metal feels weird in my mouth.”
Maureen resisted the urge to crack wise about Dice’s multiple lip piercings. “What is that tattoo on your head?”
“Smaug,” Dice said, shoveling food into her mouth. She wasn’t letting a crumb escape. “From The Hobbit.”
“I know it,” Maureen said. “The greedy dragon with the mountain of stolen treasure. Very nice.” She’d eat half her sandwich, she decided, and send Dice back to the park with the other half.
“So you saw the movie,” Dice said.
“I read the book,” Maureen said. “In junior high. And again in high school.”
“A cop who reads,” Dice said. “I’m about to fall out of my chair.”
Maureen smiled. “Smaug. Huh. So you’re the girl with—”
“Don’t even,” Dice said, raising her hand. “Don’t go there. I’m so sick of hearing about that. I didn’t know when I got the tattoo, okay? I was fucking high. Like for months. It’s not my fault. You’d think living on the streets I’d get some kind of break from that kind of pop culture shit. But the fucking tourists…” She shook her head. “I’m gonna start telling people it’s a dragonfly, or a magic eel or something. It’s almost enough for me to grow my hair back.” She rubbed her buzz cut. “Almost. I make decent dosh having my picture taken because of it. It’s hard to reject a good revenue stream in a down economy.”
“You ever get off the streets?” Maureen asked. “Like, what happens when the cold comes?”
“Depends,” Dice said, rubbing her fingertip over the glass plate. When she noticed Maureen watching, she slid the plate aside. Maureen knew better than to offer her leftovers right then. Dice would throw them in the gutter. Dice lifted the lid from her coffee cup, sniffing the contents. “Some people go home. Not everyone out here has nowhere to go. For some kids it’s an adventure out here, like backpacking across Europe.
“Those of us who stay, sometimes we try to move indoors. In the winter, there’s plenty of vacants left, especially deep in the Bywater and into the Nine. Hard to keep warm, though, and not burn the place down, or strangle ourselves on carbon monoxide. And Deep South or not, it does get fucking cold down here some nights. And wet. For days. It gets in your bones. High summertime we go inside, too. This place stays fucking hot at night, and the bugs, and the rats. I’m not about to get rabies or that West Nile bullshit. And you know when late August comes people get cranky and start shooting. It’s worse than the winter sometimes.
“We don’t do shelters much. The older people don’t like us, and straight couples have to split up. None of them take dogs. And the shelters can be more anal about wine and weed than you guys.” She shrugged. “Some of those places, the staff are grimier than we are. And shady, quick with their hands. A couple of the hostels cut us a break sometimes, if tourism is slow and if we can scrape together a couple of bucks and do some work in the kitchen and shit.”
“You ever do that? You ever stay in the hostels?”
“I can wash a dish,” Dice said. “I’m not helpless. I can fold sheets and hot mop a floor if I have to.”
Maureen sat back in her chair. “You talk like it’s embarrassing to want to be warm when you’re cold, or cool when you’re hot. It’s human nature to protect yourself.”
“It’s not that,” Dice said, bristling. “It’s getting warm yourself and leaving others in the cold while you do it. Sometimes we pool the money, try to work it so we each can get a night inside. A shower. A real bed with heat or air-conditioning. But those arrangements never last. They degrade with a quickness. People bitch, they jump the line. That’s the problem with any larger money-based system, it condones that ‘fuck everyone else, I’m getting mine’ mentality.”
She lifted her chin at Maureen. “Like y’all, doin’ that devil’s work, using people against each other, to rat each other out. Using their pasts and their addictions and troubles against them. You’d let us all kill each other with sticks if you could get away with it.”
Maureen knew the credit she’d earned with her charm offensive and her ten-dollar lunch was maxing out. “I’m looking for someone. I thought you could help me find her. No ratting, no snitching. It’s not like that. You’d be doing a good thing.” The feminine pronoun snagged Dice’s attention, as Maureen had hoped it would. She took Dice’s silence as encouragement to continue. Thievery was the connection between Dice and Madison, that was Maureen’s best guess. Like the cops who halfheartedly pursued them, the downtown pickpockets and petty thieves, which was most of the kids on the streets, knew and kept track of one another—who was in jail or rehab, who was on the run, who had left town, who had returned. They had a threadbare camaraderie that sustained them, a target-rich environment, places to get out of the heat and the cold, as Dice had said. It might have been Dice who turned Madison on to Pat O’s in the first place.
Maureen knew she needed to be gentle with the question. Going right to the accusation would backfire. “In your travels, have you ever met a woman named Madison Leary? She’s older than y’all, but I think she’s spent some time on the streets. She’s hard to miss. Her eyes are two different colors.”
To Maureen’s surprise, Dice broke out into a huge smile. “Madison? The singer? With the long brown hair? Yeah, I know her. She’s cool as shit.” Dice’s smile crumbled. She’d remembered, Maureen figured, that she was talking to a cop. “Did something happen to her?”
“You could say that.”
Dice bounced her palm off her forehead several times. Tears welled in her eyes. “This fucking city, I swear.” She picked up her fork, dug the tines into the denim over her knee.
“It’s not that,” Maureen said, resisting the urge to reach across the table and snatch away the fork. “Not yet. She’s lost. And I’m trying to find her, before something terrible happens. She reached out to me. She called me. It was a strange call. Upsetting.” She paused, giving Dice a window to speak. “Not a lot of people have my number, Dice. I can’t remember the last person I gave it to, other than you.”
“She said she knew you,” Dice said. “That she was part of a case you were working.”
“If that were true,” Maureen said, “why would she need to get my number from you?”
Dice sat up in her chair. “I know, right? That’s what I said. So she said that she had your number, but lost it, and that you were expecting to hear from her. She made it sound like a real crisis.” She shrugged. “I mean, you’re a bitch. I wouldn’t be on your bad side. She said she didn’t want the others knowing she was working for the cops, which was why she hid from you that night.”
“What night?”
“The night you came for Marques’s drum. She hid down the street, in the dark, mixed in with the other kids, but she was here. She saw us talking, watched us. That’s how she knew to ask me for your number. She saw you give me your card. I used her red bike to take Marques home to his grandmother.”
Maureen frowned. There was a piece of the story missing. “So she just walked up to you, this complete stranger, and offered the use of her bike?”
“She’s not a stranger,” Dice said. “That’s why she was on the corner with me when you showed up. We met in the spring, panhandling, working the St. Claude traffic lights with cardboard signs. Hers said something about sick kids. Bullshit, natch. She was clever. She could work it. You could tell she’d been hard done by. It was us and a bunch of guys, so we stuck close, looked out for each other. And we hit it off. Musical backgrounds and shit. For a while we split a room at the Bend in the River hostel, over on Esplanade in t
he Treme? They reach out to people on the street. Not everyone in the charity business is a scumbag.”
“Tell me what you know about her.”
“She came to New Orleans from outside LaPlace,” Dice said. She looked at the fork like she’d just found it, put it back on the table. “She’d been there a few months, but that wasn’t where she was from originally. I think that was like North Carolina, or Virginia, someplace like that. One trailer park’s the same as the next, she used to tell me.” Dice smiled at the recollection. “Like the suburbs, she said. She was funny.”
“She came to New Orleans to be a singer?” Maureen asked. “Is that what she told you?”
“I don’t know if she told me that,” Dice said, “or if I guessed it because she had such an awesome voice. She liked that dark Appalachian shit we’re always pretending to play on Frenchmen, but she knew it for real, you know? But she had no instrument, which I always thought was odd. Showed up without one, far as I know. If I could get a banjo, I figured she could manage some old guitar or something.”
“She ever get any gigs?”
“We’d talked about gigging together, playing on the corner for change, like a duo, that kind of shit. It was another way to make a little money. Her voice, it woulda stopped people in their tracks. We know a lot of the same songs. I can play some guitar, too.” She shrugged. “Never happened. After a few weeks at the hostel, we lost touch. I was getting into the shit again at the time. I don’t hide it real well. Bend in the River put me out. She might have tried looking for me over the summer, not that I would’ve known it.”
“You think she stayed in the hostel without you?”
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