The Devil in Her Way

by Bill Loehfelm

  “It wasn’t one of the kids who got killed, was it?” Maureen asked. “Tell me that, at least.”

  “No. No, it was not.”

  Maureen stood there in the street, looking over at the dwindling crowd by the corner store, disgusted with herself over the wrong assumptions she had made that day: about the innocence of the kids, and because of his stumblebum appearance and obsequious patter with her, about Wright’s weakness and stupidity. What had one of those boys told her? Don’t hate the playas, hate the game. Congratulations, Maureen, you got played. All day.

  Atkinson grinned with no humor in her eyes. She stepped to the edge of the flares, gestured for Maureen to join her. Together, they stared into the figure outlined in the cracked street, the chalk turned pink in the glow of the flares.

  “It’s Wright who’s dead,” Atkinson said. “He’s the homicide vic.”

  Maureen ran her fingers through her hair. Relief dominated her emotions, namely relief that the man she’d decided not to arrest hadn’t killed anyone. She also recognized right away that it was better for her that Wright was the victim and not the killer. She wondered, the thought distant and weak, what that recognition said about her. It was just a fact. Seeing the facts wasn’t cause for guilt, it was her job, but guilt floated inside her just the same.

  Had she busted Wright, she thought, he might not be dead.

  And had he stayed away from the car like he’d been fucking told, she thought, he wouldn’t be dead. She wasn’t wearing the blame for this. Wright’s death was not her fault.

  “With the empty space,” Atkinson said, “the fresh oil stains, and the location of the body, I’m figuring Mr. Wright went back to the well again after dark. Whatever was in there, he sure wanted it bad.”

  “Maybe he owed a favor or money to someone else who wanted it,” Maureen said. “Maybe he was stealing on behalf of someone else.”

  “Another possibility,” Atkinson said.

  People milled around on the sidewalk and in the street, ignoring the police, who ignored them right back. Maureen looked for the kids from that afternoon. She didn’t see them.

  “So I guess the fact that Wright was murdered,” she said, “proves your theory about something of value hidden in the car and the need for lookouts.”

  “Maybe. People get shot for all kinds of reasons, complicated ones and not so much. Could be that something worthwhile was stashed in that car. Could be that whoever owns the car simply got sick of Wright fucking with it and figured no one would miss him.” She shrugged. “Could be the car owner didn’t think anything and started pulling the trigger for target practice. Also could be that someone else was the shooter, someone who figured the owner of the Plymouth would be grateful for the favor. Could be someone else entirely hid something in that car and the owner never knew it was there. Our options are multiple, unfortunately.”

  Atkinson dug into the front pocket of her jeans, producing a crumpled soft pack of cigarettes. She shook out two, offering one to Maureen. “The bottom line is he got caught, then killed for it, and whoever killed him probably took the car, too.”

  Maureen took the offer and a light from Atkinson’s brass Zippo. “So we need that car and we need to find those kids. I can knock on some doors, start asking questions.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Atkinson said. “First, I need you to write up for me everything that happened with Wright this afternoon, exactly as you remember it. Put it all in. Let me decide what’s important.” She took a drag on her smoke. “Tonight, before your day shift, would be a good time for that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Maureen hadn’t given returning to bed a thought. She’d known leaving the apartment that she wouldn’t get back to sleep that night. Not a problem. Working all night was easy; she’d been doing it since she was eighteen. Atkinson excused herself and stepped away to talk with a crime-scene tech. Maureen smoked her cigarette, wondering if she’d been wordlessly dismissed from the scene. She couldn’t take her eyes off the chalk-drawn figure.

  Had Wright really been that small a man? She remembered him as bigger. Taller, at least, than the outline suggested. The figure on the street was halfway curled up, as if Wright had seen his shooter at the last moment and thrown his arms over his head in surrender or a futile gesture of self-defense. He’d hit the street in the fetal position. He’d died that way. When Maureen had put him in the back of the patrol car the day she’d arrested him, his upper arm had felt so thin in her grip. Not an arm that was going to stop a bullet.

  Over her shoulder, Maureen heard the crackle of the fire at the end of Atkinson’s cigarette as she took a drag.

  “You never forget your first time,” Atkinson said.

  8

  “Sit down, Coughlin,” Preacher said.

  Grunting, he shifted his weight in his too-small chair, the only kind available in the front courtyard of a cigar shop called the Mayan. He sat at a metal patio table, a heavy glass ashtray in front of him. The fanlike deep green leaves of a trio of potted palms shaded Preacher from the early-afternoon sun. With the foliage behind him, he reminded Maureen of a lazy gorilla relaxing in the underbrush, waiting out the heat.

  “You’re making me nervous,” he said.

  Maureen stood in the sun a few feet away from him, at the waist-high wrought-iron fence separating the courtyard from the busy Magazine Street sidewalk. She had her thumbs hitched in her gun belt, her sunglasses on. Bag-toting pedestrians, most of them college-age young women from Tulane or Loyola, meandered in and out of the shops across the street. Must be nice, Maureen thought, having that kind of money and that kind of time. In front of her, traffic eased to a standstill. Most of the drivers, middle-aged versions of the wandering browsers, sat sealed into their air-conditioned SUVs, talking on the phone or texting as they crept along. The fact that they weren’t paying much attention to their surroundings, Maureen thought, probably accounted for their patience. These women were the same sex as her, but a different breed entirely.

  “Coughlin, for chrissakes, I’m trying to relax,” Preacher said. “Over here, at the table.”

  “We’re working. I feel bad, sitting outside with a cup of coffee. It looks bad.” She looked at Preacher over her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll go sit in the car and try to look busy.”

  Preacher had a short, fat cigar in his mouth. He was rolling it between his teeth, sucking on it, trying to assure an even burn on the lit tip. His task accomplished, he studied the cigar with pride. He frowned at Maureen, as if disappointed he hadn’t been as successful with her.

  “It doesn’t look like anything. Relax.” He gestured with his cigar toward the traffic. “You think anyone cares what we’re doing? They hardly give a fuck about what they’re doing. Trust me, you’re not gonna change anyone’s opinion of the NOPD for the worse by having a coffee in the shade for twenty minutes. And not having it won’t raise us up in the public eye. We’re background, like this here palm tree.”

  He puffed on his cigar, raising a cloud of acrid smoke. He looked at Maureen wide-eyed, eyebrows buoyed by the obvious truth of his statement. Preacher’s cloud drifted over to her. Maureen wrinkled her nose and marveled at her training officer’s ability to find a brand of cigar that had to be horseshit rolled in banana peels. And he probably paid a fortune for them.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Preacher said, “I radioed in. They know where we are, and that we’re out of the car.” He held up their radio. “I brought the handheld. Should civilization collapse without you on patrol, we’ll hear about it.”

  “I’d rather stand for a while,” Maureen said. “We sat in the car all morning.”

  Preacher pointed with his radio antenna at the other chair. “Sit, rookie. That’s an order. Your coffee’s getting cold.”

  Maureen walked over to the table and sat. She lifted the plastic lid from her coffee cup with too much force, sloshing coffee onto the tabletop. It ran off the table, dripping onto her uniform pants. Well, at
least it was still hot. Preacher laughed, as he always did whenever Maureen spilled coffee on herself, which was every time she had a cup.

  “You ever have a dog, Coughlin?”

  Maureen mopped at the runaway coffee with paper napkins. Again with the dogs. She had a feeling Preacher watched a lot of Animal Planet. Preacher Boyd, the Rookie Whisperer. “No, sir. Never had any pets.”

  “Amazing creatures, dogs.” Preacher moved his hands around his head as if it were a bowling ball he was polishing. “Pack animals, very complex social structure. Makes them very sensitive to moods and emotions. Almost telepathic. Seeing as they can’t talk and such.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the street with his hand. “You think I’m trying to boss you around, but there’s wisdom to be gleaned here. These people on the street, they’re like dogs, and I mean that in a purely observational way, no insult intended.

  “A cop pacing the fence, eyeballing the stores, the traffic, the passersby, it makes them nervous. They might not even know they’re doing it, but they pick up your vibe. They start looking for whatever it is they think you’re looking for.” He dabbed some sweat off his forehead. “But if you’re mellow, it keeps them mellow.”

  “So, actually,” Maureen said, “we’re performing a public service by taking a public break.”

  “Exactly,” Preacher said, drawing out the word. “Protect and serve. It’s what I’m about. You’re finally learning.” He honked his nose into his hankie. He admired his deposit there and then his cigar as if the first affirmed the quality of the second. “So smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  Maureen raised her hips and dug a new pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She tossed the pack on the table. “I shouldn’t be smoking.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.” Preacher pushed his lighter across the table in her direction. “But don’t let that stop you.”

  Maureen tore the cellophane from the pack, crumpled the foil, and pulled out a cigarette. She wasn’t sure how much she even wanted one, but the debate in her head over whether to have one would end the moment she touched the lighter flame to the tip and inhaled.

  A high-end cigar store and tobacconist melded into a block-long, ocher-colored, brick-faced condo building that had been converted from a long-abandoned orphanage, the Mayan functioned as a de facto social club for veteran uptown police. Whenever she and Preacher stopped by, half a dozen cops, mostly plainclothes and detectives with the occasional older uniform like Preacher peppered in, stood around the tall cocktail tables by the front door or sat in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes and cigars, sipping at a coffee from the CC’s or a brandy from the top-shelf selection the tobacconist kept in stock. Some of the men Maureen recognized from around the district station. Some were strangers. None of them ever gave her so much as a nod.

  Her throat tickled and she coughed. “It doesn’t help that Spirits are five bucks a pack down here. Way less than half of what they cost me up north.”

  Maureen stopped, clearing her throat to buy time, regretting mentioning New York, even in cigarette terms. Preacher had demonstrated only mild interest in her past. She wanted to keep it that way.

  Preacher reached across the table, picked up the bright orange cigarette pack. “These’re new to me.”

  “All-natural tobacco,” Maureen said. “These’re the super ultralights or whatever. They’re not bad, though I think I might smoke more now because they’re so light.”

  “You’ll quit for good someday. You’re the type.”

  Maureen took another long drag. “And what type is that?”

  “The type that can’t tolerate failure. Now that you’ve tried to quit and failed, you’ll never let that go. If you’d never tried to quit, you could go on smoking with a clear conscience. But now you’ve soiled it by trying to improve yourself.” He turned his cigar in his mouth, puffing smoke like a cartoon train. “Put money on it.”

  “Speaking of failure,” Maureen said. “You think we’ll have better luck with those kids this afternoon?”

  Preacher growled. “You do know how to ruin a good break.”

  “You’re my training officer,” Maureen said, grinning. “How are you not proud of me for getting this assignment?”

  “Proud of you? Because I get to cruise Central City in this fucking heat all day, eyeballing schoolchildren, looking for three punks that’ll lie to us and everyone else with a badge easy as breathing air, when instead I could be sitting here supervising the arrivals at the two o’clock Pilates class?” He puffed at his cigar. “You do that stuff? That pie-lates? Probably, the shape you’re in. I see the Garden District housewives going up and down the stairs to that gym over the CC’s. Seems to be something to it, the look of them.” He resettled himself in his seat. “At least you quit nagging me about Mother Mayor.”

  “Oh, I still wanna talk to her, too. Now more than ever, with Wright getting shot.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “You’re killing me,” Maureen said. “This is how you teach someone to be a cop? I can’t stand it.”

  “Atkinson seems to think you’re turning out okay,” Preacher said. “Take that for what it’s worth. Of course, I don’t have to tell you what they say about her around the department.”

  “Really? That dyke shit is so tired.”

  “You know what they say, you are what you eat.”

  “I’m gonna need another one of those harassment forms.”

  Preacher smiled. “You know where they are.”

  “You tell me they’re in your pocket,” Maureen said, “and I will shoot you.”

  “The only thing in my pocket,” Preacher said, “is my pen.”

  “Keep it there.” She couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Preacher stood, hiking up his pants and adjusting his gun belt. “Well played, rook. You’re gonna do superlative once you leave my care and protection. And now I gotta sneak Sally through the alley before we go anywhere. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Maureen waited on the sidewalk outside the courtyard, leaning against the warm hood of their patrol car, watching the neighborhood, her neighborhood, go by.

  Around town, she’d run into a few people she would have sworn were New Yorkers who had turned out to be New Orleans born and bred. The Irish Channel accent of New Orleans sounded a hell of a lot like New York Irish-American, Brooklyn, especially. One more thing left out of the Lonely Planet guide. One thing the guide had included, though, was how traditional directions didn’t apply in New Orleans. No witness was going to tell you the perp ran east or west. On the police radio, dispatchers used the compass points, but to everyone else, nothing was north or south; it was lake side or river side. Nothing was east or west; it was downtown or uptown. At least from where she stood at the moment.

  She turned, watching three detectives in dark glasses and expensive suits laughing with one another as they stood around the cigar store Indian. God, there was a lot to learn. The cop stuff, she’d anticipated, but New Orleans was like a foreign country. The place was full of tribes. Each tribe had a code and a dialect. No one had a key to it all, either. She had to learn on the fly. Waiting for Preacher, she practiced. The Mayan was on the river side of Magazine, uptown from the intersection with Seventh. The corner grocery she liked was on the river side of St. Charles, on the uptown corner of Sixth. She lit another cigarette. Norman Wright’s body had been chalked up on the downtown side of Washington, on the lake side of the intersection with Dryades. She checked her watch. Almost two thirty. She wanted to get moving.

  Preacher appeared atop the Mayan’s stone steps, a fat minor god emerging from a stone temple. He shook hands and chatted with the guys beside the door. He tilted his chin at the car. Everyone laughed. Coming down the stairs, he patted the fresh cigar in his pocket.

  He stopped to adjust his belt after he passed through the gate and onto the sidewalk, then continued over to the car. “All right then,” he said, getting in the driver’s seat. “I
don’t have all day.”

  Maureen took her seat beside him. Don’t ask, she thought. Don’t ask what the men were laughing at. “Where’re we headed?”

  “Mother Mayor’s place,” Preacher said. “You did well with Atkinson, you’ve got me down to a science, let’s see how you handle a true hard-ass.” Grinning, he slipped his sunglasses on and eased the car into the slow-moving traffic. “Let’s find out how tough you really are.”

  9

  Approaching Mother Mayor’s front steps, Maureen recognized the older woman’s small house as new construction intended to imitate a shotgun double, though the tacky vinyl siding undermined the effort. Built poststorm on the fly and on the cheap, Mother Mayor’s place was one of four long, narrow, and charmless boxes right up against the sidewalk with two shared concrete stoops where their respective steps met in front. It was obvious that Mother had relocated there after Katrina.

  Maureen wondered where Mother Mayor had lived before the storm. Had she lived in an authentic Creole cottage or a century-old shotgun on this same spot, maybe, or had she lived someplace else that she’d lost in the flood? On another block, or in another neighborhood. The way this neighborhood’s people treated her, though, and the way the cops treated her, for that matter, Mother Mayor had probably supervised her small section of Central City for quite some time.

  Everyone returned from the storm to something different from what they had left, Maureen had learned. Not a lot of people, not most people. Everyone. Even if it was just a part-time job or the way the light came through the trees in the evening, everyone had seen something change for good. Over the course of a morning, an entire city of people had lost their present lives. The sense of immediate loss she could relate to, the idea that one day your life is this way and the next it’s not. The head you lift off the pillow isn’t the same one you laid there the night before. She’d been through that kind of thing, when she was a kid and her father left for good, while standing on the roof of her mother’s house, watching the smoke billow from the Twin Towers, in her personal nightmare with Sebastian from a little over a year ago.