Summer camp? Maybe. But with collared shirts and bulging book bags?
With his drumsticks he tapped out an up-tempo stutter-step rhythm on the jungle gym. He held the sticks palms up, like a jazz drummer or a snare player in a marching band. Deep notes rang off the frame, as if the kid sat atop the bass end of a giant xylophone. His hands were quick. His gaze stayed fixed straight ahead, his eyebrows knitted in concentration as if he were trying to visualize the next sequence of beats and the motions needed to make them.
Middle school age or not, Maureen knew male posturing when she saw it. She let him have his space. She stopped her approach a few feet away, slipped her hands into her back pockets.
“You’re pretty good.”
“And you would know.”
“Not really,” Maureen said. “What song were you playing?”
“That wasn’t a song,” the boy said, “it was a cadence, like for a marching band. They’re not the same thing.”
“I wasn’t in the band in school. I was an athlete. A runner. Where I’m from, it wasn’t cool to be in the band, like it is here.”
The kid grinned, not looking at her. He moved his sticks to his thighs, let them roll loose in his palms, as if savoring the smoothness of the wood. “Mike-Mike says you got speed.”
“Not enough, apparently.” Nice, she thought. That’s one name without even trying.
“Heard that.”
“So you know my name,” Maureen said. “And now I know Mike-Mike’s. Care to tell me yours? First name, at least?”
“Marques. Say it like with a ‘c’ but spell it with a ‘q,’ like Marques Colston.” He sat up straighter on his perch, waited one more beat for her to say something. “You know about him, right?”
“Wide receiver, number twelve. Enormous hands.” She smiled. “Gimme a little credit.” She took a step closer. “Listen, Marques. You know why I’m here, why the police have been around a lot.”
“Mr. Norman got shot,” Marques said. “Somebody killed him.” His hands picked up a slow rhythm. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that. I wasn’t around.”
“I know that. I know. But there are other questions we’d like to ask you. About the neighborhood. About that green car. The detective in charge would really like to talk to you, and to Mike-Mike. And to your other friend.”
Marques looked past Maureen to the cruiser. He pursed his lips and moved them around, like he had a mouthful of mouthwash. He blew out his breath. Maureen feared she was making him nervous. She wanted to bring Marques’s attention back to her, to ease his mind.
“She’ll come to your house. You won’t have to go to the district or anything. No one else will know. Tell me where you live, so I can tell her.”
“Ain’t no police coming to my house. I can tell you that.”
Maureen felt her pulse pick up; she was blowing it with this kid. “The other day at the Garvey Apartments, you looked like you wanted to tell me something. What was it?”
“I don’t remember that,” Marques said. “Prob’ly nothing.”
“That’s not true,” Maureen said. “That guy across the street scared you before you could talk to me. He’s not here now. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Marques dropped through a space in the bars, his sneakers thumping on the rubber mat covering the ground. “I got to go.”
Maureen watched Marques pack his sticks into his backpack, leaving the tips visible, to show the neighborhood he played. If he walked away, she’d have to let him go. She didn’t have orders to detain him, nor did she have cause to take him in if he hadn’t seen the killing. She didn’t think he had. She could haul him in anyway, on some excuse, and make him wait for Atkinson. But that would bring his family into it, maybe a lawyer, and the hassle would only make him more resistant than he was already.
A first name and a nickname were what Maureen had gotten, what she’d have for Atkinson. Not much. Nothing impressive, that was for sure. Shit, actually.
And here to rub it in was Preacher, folding his arms over the top of the chest-high fence separating the playground and the ball field. He held a gooey tennis ball in one hand. At his feet sat the adoring pit, panting away like a blast furnace. The man who the dog had been playing with wasn’t around anymore.
“Hey, kid,” Preacher said, talking to Marques. He touched his badge. “How long you been with Roots?”
“Been with who?” Maureen asked.
Marques stretched the emblem on his polo in Maureen’s direction. “The Roots of Music. It’s a marching band.”
“Kids from all over town,” Preacher said. “Best marching band in New Orleans.”
“After St. Aug,” Marques corrected.
“Heard that,” Preacher said. “Bobby Scales play with y’all?”
“Mr. Bobby a grown man,” Marques said. “He can’t play with Roots. It’s kids only, yo.”
Preacher raised his hands in apology, exciting the dog. He wiggled the fingers on his free hand, imitating fingering notes on a horn. “A name like Scales, I thought maybe he played a horn or something.” Preacher turned and threw the ball. The dog exploded after it. “He at least help you guys out any? Drive you downtown to practice?”
Marques shrugged. “He ain’t like that.”
“Then what’s he like?” Preacher asked.
Marques shrugged again. “Busy.”
“How about Mike-Mike?” Maureen asked. “Is he in the band?”
Marques shook his head at Preacher, as if expressing silent sympathy for suffering such a dimwitted partner. “Mike-Mike can’t even play checkers, yo. He too dumb.”
“What about your other boy?” Preacher asked.
“Goody used to play,” Marques said, “but then he got to fighting and Mr. Elvin kicked him out. In the spring.” Marques shook his head again. “Mr. Elvin don’t mess around. I slapped a kid last year, right, for spilling his grape soda on my homework? I had to do a thousand push-ups so I could stay in the band.”
“A thousand?” Preacher asked. “One thousand.”
Marques nodded with pride. “Not in a row, but I did ’em. We added ’em up day-to-day. We kept count on a blackboard. I did ’em all, yo.”
Preacher smiled, genuinely impressed. He turned to Maureen. “Can you do a thousand push-ups, Coughlin?”
“Don’t know,” Maureen said. “Never tried.”
“Give it a shot,” Preacher said. “Let me know how it goes.”
The dog trotted over to them with the ball. Preacher pulled it from her jaws, held it before the pit’s face. “Last time.” The dog didn’t look like she believed it.
Preacher threw the ball. The dog bolted. Maureen followed the arc of the ball. Where was the dog’s owner? Preacher’s voice brought her back to the playground.
“You know where I can find Goody?” Preacher asked. “We’re trying to help find Mr. Bobby’s car.”
“I ain’t seen him since yesterday. Last time you saw him was the last time I saw him. I ain’t nobody’s babysitter.”
“But you saw Mike-Mike,” Maureen said. “You saw him not long ago if you talked about me chasing him.”
“You didn’t ask about no Mike-Mike.”
“I’m asking now,” Maureen said. “Is he in the neighborhood?”
“Where else he gonna be?”
“Keep it up,” Maureen said. “You think Mr. Elvin is scary?”
“Enough,” Preacher said. Reaching over the fence, he handed Marques a business card. “You see Goody, you tell him to call the Sixth. Ask for me, Officer Boyd, or my partner, Officer Coughlin. Mike-Mike, too. If we’re not in, people can find us. We want to talk about the car, maybe Mr. Bobby. What the hell, tell him to call us, too. No big deal, but we’d like to do it soon. Before there’s any more trouble.”
The dog returned. She dropped the ball between her paws and flopped in the grass, panting like a locomotive, her squinty smile fixed on Preacher. Marques took the card, buried it deep in his shorts. From the way he watched t
he dog, and despite the fact that the pit paid him no mind, Maureen could tell that Marques was glad for the fence.
“I can go, right?”
“Roll out, soldier,” Preacher said.
Marques waddled away under the weight of his backpack, out of the playground and across the basketball courts. Maureen waited until Marques was half a block away before she spoke. “The guy with the ball? What happened to him?”
“That rope this dog is trailing,” Preacher said, “is from a rape post.” The calm benevolence he’d shown Marques had dissipated. “You know what that is? What it’s for?”
Maureen looked down at the dog, snoozing now, its big square head resting on its paws. “It’s a dog-fighting tool,” she said. “It’s for forced breeding.”
“Mr. Etienne couldn’t seem to remember where he found her,” Preacher said, looking down at the sleeping animal. “A dog like this, considering the rope, probably has a history. Not a good one. The teats on her, she’s had some pups. See those scars on her head? I’m gonna pretend those are birthmarks for the sake of my own sanity. I encouraged the gentleman to forget he ever found her, and that he ever saw me today.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crack pipe that he twiddled between his fingers. “And I told him I’d forget about this. And maybe forget to decide whether or not to violate his ass back to fucking Rayburn Correctional.”
He dropped the pipe into his pocket, looked down at the dog. “I got someone from pit rescue coming to get her. To clean her up and check her out.”
Preacher snapped his fingers. “Let’s go, girl.”
The dog, exhausted, struggled to her feet, obedient.
Maureen walked with Preacher and the dog back along the fence toward the police car. If the dog had taken notice of Maureen, she wasn’t showing it. She only had eyes for Preacher.
“So you know this guy who had the dog,” Maureen said.
“From around the neighborhood, yeah. Howard Etienne, Junior. Little E. His dad was Big E, owned part of the Fox Den lounge up by Broad Street, was a Wild Man for years for the Wild Tchoupitoulas. Died in Houston after the storm. Heart or something. Anyways, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Little E. He took a gun charge three years ago, went to the state lockup. Always claimed he was holding the weapon for someone else and I believed him. He woulda killed himself carrying a gun before he hurt anyone else with it. Who’s he gonna rob? He’s a crackhead. Everyone he knows has less than nothing. Besides, guys like E have been cycled through the system so many times, he probably never believed he’d really do time until they put him on the bus to Rayburn. A friend of a friend probably offered him a hundred bucks and a pack of lies to take the charge. So, to his credit, he did do a three-year bit for someone else in the state pen.”
“Could that someone else be Bobby Scales?” Maureen asked. “If Etienne was gonna do time for someone, it would be someone who mattered, who scared him.”
Preacher shook his head. “E never heard of Scales, that’s what he told me when I asked.”
“You believe him?”
“Undecided. E is on the streets only a couple of weeks. Just ’cause he’s back on the rock doesn’t mean he’s back in the game, if he was ever really in it.”
Preacher slid his cigar from his shirt pocket. Maureen hoped he wouldn’t light up. When he was in especially good spirits, he’d smoke in the car. Unbearable. He rolled the cigar around under his nose, sniffing it, and put it back in his shirt pocket.
“Pop quiz, hotshot. If Etienne has a record and had a crack pipe in his possession, why isn’t he under arrest?”
Maureen suppressed a smile. She had the answers. Her first one, that the crack pipe belonged to Preacher and was a plant—she suppressed that, too.
“You wanna haul him in,” she said, “and put charges on him, you wouldn’t be wrong. Good luck getting him to show up for court, though, or you, for that matter, for a Mickey Mouse paraphernalia rap. But, on the other hand, maybe we get a stat that makes us look good. He is a recidivist.”
“Not bad so far.” The dog mooned up at him, her stump of a tail twitching. “What else you got?”
“We leave Etienne out and about,” Maureen said, the gears clicking like they had at Wright’s murder scene with Atkinson, “and we see if Scales’s name reaches him. Fresh out of the pen, he’s a clean slate. We roll up on E again in a couple of days and see what the news is. On the street he might hear something about the Wright murder, and now he owes us a favor. In lockup, he’s worth nothing to us.”
“We might make a cop outta you yet,” Preacher said, smiling. The smile vanished. “It’s good, Coughlin, that what happened to Wright hasn’t made you scared.”
“What happened to Wright wasn’t my fault.”
“And people never blame themselves for things that ain’t their fault? I’ve seen plenty who can’t live with not saving the world. You’re doing good, that’s what I’m saying. You can’t play this game scared. You can’t play it not to lose.”
It was times like these Maureen thought Preacher might actually care how she turned out.
They’d reached the end of the fence dividing the field and the playground. They exited through their respective gates and reconvened on the sidewalk.
“Listen, Coughlin, after you write up everything Marques told you for Atkinson, let me see it before you send it over. Write it before you go home for the day. Make sure Atkinson has it for her shift tonight. She’ll need to know what got done today, and what didn’t.”
Maureen stopped on the sidewalk before they got to the cruiser. “I’ve got one request.”
Preacher squeezed his forehead in his hand. “Why am I suddenly overcome with dread?”
“This Mr. Elvin guy, the band director, can we go downtown and talk to him? He knows these boys.”
Preacher shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“He’s got info we need, Preach. Stuff that Atkinson wants.”
“She can get it from him,” Preacher said.
Maureen puffed out her cheeks, holding her breath. Don’t call him lazy, she thought. Don’t accuse him of anything. “It just seems like the natural next step. That’s all I’m saying.”
“It is the next step,” Preacher said, “for the detective in charge of the case. Chain of command, Coughlin. Your information gets passed upwards. If this guy is important, who do you think Atkinson wants talking to him? You? Me? Or you think she wants to handle it herself?”
Maureen held up her hands. “Okay, I get it.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“So that means I won’t hear about you venturing outside the radius of your ken and suchlike activity.”
Maureen saluted him.
“Tell me you understand me, smart-ass.”
“Yes, sir,” Maureen said.
They continued toward the car.
“I would’ve made notes back there,” Maureen said, “but you had Marques going. I figured, why remind him he’s talking to the police?”
“And that was the right move.”
“Well, at least I made one of them.”
“Give yourself a break, Coughlin. I’ve got a few more miles on me. If you leave the dog out of your report, that’ll make two right moves today.”
“You got that information from Marques,” Maureen said, “and saved this dog without even breaking a sweat or raising your voice. I hafta bow down.”
“Let this be a lesson to you, rookie,” Preacher said. It cost him some effort, but he bent down and scratched the pit behind her ears. “When I do get out the car, I make it fucking count.”
13
Maureen parked a block up Third Street from her apartment, under a streetlight nimbused with moths and mosquitoes, in front of a sprawling Greek Revival mansion with curbside tie-up posts left over from the days of carriage horses. Gas lamps flickered at the front door, their flames refracted in a kaleidoscopic stained-glass window like a palmful of gemstones held under a candle. The m
ansion was one of many in her neighborhood. She lived in a mansion, as a matter of fact, one with its own enormous stained-glass window looming over the lobby and the winding staircase to the second floor. Of course, her mansion had been cut up into twenty rental apartments decades ago. Still, on the outside, it was a grand and impressive building.
She climbed from the Honda on tired legs, the backs of her thighs damp from sweating on the seat. She pinched the wet collar of her sleeveless T away from her collarbone. Her eyes burned from sleeplessness. Parking a block from her place really wasn’t a problem. She felt safe and she liked any excuse, really, to stroll around the neighborhood. The strange beauty of it was why, despite joining a gym she could walk to and that boasted a whole room of top-flight cardio equipment, and despite the rain-forest heat of summertime New Orleans, she took most of her runs outdoors.
She grabbed her gym bag from the backseat. Her arms sang with pumping blood after her postshift workout in the district weight room. On her phone, she checked the time. Nearly eleven. Christ, between the paperwork and the workout, she’d lost most of the night. She threw her bag over her shoulder, took a deep breath of the damp, perfumed air.
A greenhouse, she thought. A greenhouse attached to a castle where the owners had died and the plants had grown out of control. Some of what she inhaled was sweet olive, some of it was jasmine; she’d learned that much, though she couldn’t remember which was which when she saw it. And somewhere in there, way in the back of the bouquet, was a neighbor’s garbage can in need of a rinse, probably out in the street to save a parking space.
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