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Nine Lives

Page 14

by Dan Baum


  Then, out of nowhere, she missed a period. Soon she felt ill; the baby was in trouble. The doctor ordered her to bed, and there went her college education, again. She spent seven months lying flat in the hot little house on Delery Street, imagining where she’d be in her studies. Latisha, whom everybody called Mookey, was born in 1988.

  Now she was a mother of two, trapped in the Lower Nine and living on one meager salary. The white-picket-fence life that had loomed so close receded again beyond a screen of snowy static, like an episode of Happy Days during a lightning storm. If Lionus knew she was unhappy, he didn’t let on. He got up every morning to work, came home every evening to play with the girls. He was a good man. She couldn’t complain about him. But somewhere along the way, he’d moved in to his bedroom, and she’d moved in to hers.

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE

  March 1990

  Everybody was misunderstanding him. That was the problem. And even Pete Fountain was fed up. His voice on the phone was fading from commiseration to petulance.

  “What can I tell you, Frank?” he said. “We took a shot.”

  “You’re sure they got the tape to the right person? You asked Doc?” Frank asked. Doc Severinsen knew Frank. They’d played together on the Endymion float. They’d had a lot of laughs. And Doc and Pete—they were genuine pals. Surely Pete explained it to Doc.

  “For the hundredth time,” Pete said. “It’s not up to Doc. It’s up to the producer, and the producer’s call was no. Way he put it was, ‘Pretty good for local TV.’”

  “But that’s my whole point!” Frank said. “I know I’m not good enough on the trumpet to be on the Carson show. For Christ’s sake, Pete, I’m not that dumb. Like we talked about; I’d be funny! The big-city coroner. Dr. Jazz. If they let me play something, the fact that I’m so bad would be part of the joke. Johnny would have had a ball with it.”

  “It didn’t fly, brother,” Pete said tiredly. “Take it from me; that’s showbiz.”

  Frank thanked him, said goodbye, and hung up. Damn. Pete and Al Hirt had really got him believing they might get him onto The Tonight Show. He’d have been terrific, too. Could have talked about his friendship with Jim Garrison, and being medical adviser to Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie, JFK. Could have told the story of getting arrested for playing jazz in the French Quarter. Could have talked about his eighty-year-old mother playing honky-tonk piano at his annual Jazz Roots concert. In that context, his inept trumpet playing would have been funny.

  THE SHOUTING in the reception area was getting louder. Frank walked over and opened the door. Gloria Boutté was crying. Two Orleans Parish sheriff’s deputies stood beside her, red faced and agitated. “What’s going on?”

  “Earl Hauck’s been shot.”

  “No!” Earl was Joe Maumus’s pal, a hell of a guy—a New Orleans cop on his own with two adorable little girls. “How bad?” Frank asked.

  “We don’t know,” one of the deputies said. “We heard it on the radio. And listen to this.” He held out a police radio, pinned to his shoulder like a corsage. Angry voices competed. “Somebody kill him.” “Somebody shoot that motherfucker.”

  “Jesus,” Frank whispered. “They got the guy?”

  “Apparently.” They all bent to listen.

  “They ought to start killing these assholes or we all going to die,” a cop shouted. He sounded like he was crying.

  “Hey,” a cop hissed. “This is all being taped at headquarters.”

  “Fuck the tape!” someone shouted. “Where is he? I’ll shoot him myself!”

  “In the balls!”

  “Execute the fucker!”

  It was sickening. Frank had never heard anything like it. Louder and clearer, a voice Frank knew well said, “Listen, ah, we’re pulling up to Charity with him, but I don’t know.” It was Joe Maumus—he had the suspect. That was Joe, always in the right place at the right time.

  But, Jesus. Earl was Joe’s best friend in the department.

  “There’s a pretty big crowd of cops here on the Charity ramp,” Joe was saying. “I don’t know it’s safe to bring him in here.” Frank shook his head in admiration. The bastard shoots Joe’s best friend, and Joe’s thinking about his safety.

  “He hurt bad?” a cop said.

  “Gunshot to the arm,” Joe said.

  There was a pause, filled with cries of “Kill him!” “Shoot him!” They’d tear the guy apart. Joe was thinking straight, to get him out of there.

  “Joe,” someone said. “Why don’t you take him to First District until this quiets down.” The First District police station was on North Rampart Street, a short drive from Charity.

  The deputy holding the radio made a face. “Why aren’t they taking him to another hospital?”

  “I wish they’d say something about Earl,” Frank said. “I want to go see him.” Earl had more than twenty years on the force, and he had those terrific little children.

  A voice broke through the shouting on the radio: “Earl’s dead.”

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK the next morning, Frank’s phone rang. It was James Brown.

  “I’m bringing Adolph Archie in from Charity,” James said.

  “You mean Earl Hauck,” Frank said sleepily.

  “I got Hauck, too,” Brown said. “But, no, I mean Adolph Archie, the guy that killed Hauck.”

  “He’s dead, too?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All right,” Frank said, swinging his feet to the floor. “I’ll be right in.” It would be a long day. Deaths in police custody were a headache.

  Frank arrived at the office as the coroner’s wagon was pulling in. James and the driver wheeled the draped bodies of Hauck and Archie into two separate examination rooms. Frank couldn’t bear to look at Earl, but he followed James, who was pushing Archie.

  James switched on the garish overhead light and heaved the body onto the stainless steel examination table. Frank pulled back a corner of the sheet. “Christ almighty.”

  The bruises, the swelling, the split skin—Archie had been beaten very badly. He dropped the corner of the sheet.

  James nodded at him, expressionless.

  “Let me know, as soon as you know.”

  “Mmhmm. McGarry’s on his way.” The pathologist.

  Frank walked back upstairs and pushed open the door to his office. Joe sat in the visitor’s chair, in uniform. Frank closed the door.

  “You should see Earl’s kids,” Joe said.

  “I can’t even imagine,” Frank said, giving Joe’s shoulder a squeeze as he crossed to his desk. “I’ll go over there this afternoon.”

  “Twenty-one years on the force,” Joe said. “He had his gun in his holster. He was all by himself, trying to cuff Archie.”

  “Terrible,” Frank said. They fell silent. Joe rubbed his hands on his thighs and looked out the window.

  “Why’d you take Archie to First District?” Frank asked. “I mean, I heard the radio traffic, the mob at Charity. But why not University Hospital?”

  “I don’t know. First District was close, and we didn’t think we’d have him there long, till they cleared Charity.” Joe looked at his hands, then up at Frank. “Archie was fighting like a bastard. Maxie and I got him inside, which wasn’t easy, and stuck him in a chair with his hands cuffed behind him. Next thing we know, he’s stepped through the cuffs and he’s going for Maxie’s gun. Actually had his hands on it. We got to fighting him all over again. I had to hit him a bunch to get him to let go. He may have slipped and fallen a couple of times, too.”

  Frank nodded, thinking of Archie’s face.

  “Then the chief showed up, and we got Archie over to Charity. He was fucked-up, but he was okay. He was conscious. Wasn’t till this morning I heard he’d died.”

  A CLUTCH OF REPORTERS gathered in Frank’s office around closing time. They looked about sixteen years old, hollering questions all at once, like a cheering section at a high-school football game. The lights on thei
r cameras were hot.

  “Adolph Archie died from a basal skull fracture,” Frank said. “That’s what the pathologist, Dr. Paul McGarry, found.”

  “Police baton?” someone called.

  “Gun butt?”

  McGarry wouldn’t say what did it, and neither would Frank. All he could say—all he had to say—was the cause of death: basal skull fracture. He said it over and over.

  “And the man Archie killed,” Frank called above the din, “a police officer with two little girls, died from four bullets fired at close range into his chest, because he was trying to take Archie alive. I don’t know if that interests you.”

  The reporters kept braying for a guess about what had killed Archie.

  “Adolph Archie murdered one police officer, shot at another, and tried to shoot more, but his gun was out of bullets,” Frank said. “He resisted arrest the entire time. Several officers had to subdue him. He continued fighting at the First District station. But he was alive when he reached Charity Hospital, so it does not appear that he was ‘beaten to death,’ as you say, at the police station.”

  “But if he was beaten badly at First District and died later at Charity, wouldn’t that constitute being beaten to death?”

  “He could have slipped on the floor,” Frank said.

  Every head bobbed in unison, every pen flickered, and Frank knew he’d blown it.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  WASHINGTON CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTE, ANGIE, LOUISIANA

  1991

  Darryl walked into the visitation hall in white trousers and a white pullover shirt. The older he got, the more he looked like Tootie, the same high cheekbones, pointed chin, and caramel-colored skin. He smiled the sweet, wise smile from his childhood, the smile that had disappeared during the years he was mixed up with them drugs. Joyce’s heart grew full as he crossed the hall. Rain beat hard on the tin roof with the sound of a grinder. Joyce and Mutt-Mutt sat on hard plastic chairs, facing each other, their knees almost touching. “I am sorry to make you come all these ninety miles, Joyce,” Darryl said quietly, looking at the floor. He and the other children had always called her Joyce instead of Mama.

  “You my son.” Joyce longed to fold him into her arms, but the rules were no touching.

  “I’m Tootie’s son, too,” Darryl said.

  “Oh, don’t fret about that. He just been had enough of visiting the jailhouse with Boobie.” Boobie was back in Angola, this time for good.

  Darryl looked at Joyce intently, drinking in her face, her glasses, her whitening hair, as though to store them for the coming days of drought. “You tell him I have a tribe of three hundred guys, singing Indian songs every day in the fields,” he said. “Even the guards on horses, with their shotguns, say, ‘Montana, you going to sing today?’”

  Joyce smiled. “You won’t believe this. I have Tootie going to church.” Darryl reared back in disbelief. Joyce nodded. “St. Augustine has a new priest from Lake Charles named Father LeDoux, and I’ll tell you, he’s something else. He meet you one time, he remember your name, just like that. He speak German, he speak Creole, he speak every language.”

  “St. Augustine is Sixth Ward,” Darryl said.

  “I guess so,” Joyce said.

  “But you go to Corpus Christi.”

  “I can go to St. Augustine, and Tootie likes it!”

  “Tootie?” Darryl shook his head, the wise smile making Joyce giggle.

  “He a Catholic just like me!” Joyce said. “He went to Holy Redeemer before Betsy tore it up. Lots of people from Holy Redeemer moved to St. Augustine.”

  “He go every Sunday?”

  Joyce laughed. “No. He mostly go when there’s a funeral. The way Father LeDoux does a funeral touch his heart.”

  Darryl took her hands in his. A guard blew a whistle and pointed with his nightstick, and Darryl recoiled in a way that made Joyce think he’d felt that nightstick before. He clasped his hands to his chest. “Before they sent me up here, Tootie told me, ‘Boy, you need to get some feathers on,’ and I wish I’d listened. I might not be here if I had. So you tell him, I’m changed. You tell him, when I get out, I want to be his son. I want to be his son for real.”

  BILLY GRACE

  2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE

  December 19, 1991

  Billy’s study, on the second floor, was his favorite room anywhere. Its ceiling was high, the built-in bookshelves stuffed with volumes from his boyhood. On the walls hung heads of kudu, white-tailed deer, and a Cape buffalo, each redolent of fabulous hunting trips around the United States and in Africa. Above the fireplace hung a yard-long tarpon that Billy’s grandmother had landed in the 1930s, the long brass lure still in its mouth.

  Billy sat in one of the two giant oxblood-leather chairs that dominated the center of the room, taking no joy, for once, in his surroundings. The images on the television were too awful. John Charbonnet, the owlish captain of Rex and one of the most decent men in New Orleans, sat at a table in front of a microphone under harsh lights that made him look a hundred years old. He hunched behind the mic in a defensive crouch, head pulled deep between the lapels of a fine suit, speaking in clipped, nervous monosyllables. Beside him, broad-backed Beau Bassich, co-chair of the mayor’s Mardi Gras Advisory Committee, sat crumpled in on himself like a schoolboy being scolded. Billy’s mentor and boss, Harry McCall, a legal giant and the fairest of men, was struggling for the right tone.

  “The essential character of any voluntary organization is the privilege of its members to choose those with whom they will associate,” McCall said.

  Billy winced. White men had been defending segregation with the “freedom of association” line as long as he could remember.

  “It is implicit in any organization that new members will be congenial with existing members,” Harry said, and Billy groaned. In the run-up to the gubernatorial election, Harry had made a stink by urging the Chamber of Commerce to reject the reelection bid of the legendarily corrupt governor Edwin Edwards. The problem was, the other candidate was the Klansman David Duke. Harry wasn’t the best person to be arguing against the forced integration of the Mardi Gras krewes to a majority-black city council.

  The camera switched to council members, sitting at a raised dais. “What is before us is discrimination! Discrimination; that is what is before us,” said Dorothy Mae Taylor, her eyes wide behind severe, square glasses. With her hair pulled back in a bun, she looked like the school librarian from hell. Taylor had picked up the baton from Joe Giarrusso, who’d first proposed an antidiscrimination ordinance three years earlier in order to get Italians into the krewes, and she was sprinting for the finish line. This whole hearing was a charade. The ordinance to refuse parade permits to Mardi Gras krewes that excluded blacks was sure to pass. She was roasting John, Beau, and Harry for the sheer pleasure of it. “You get upset by the word ‘dis-crim-i-na-tion,’” she said, articulating every syllable. “Then stop discriminating.”

  Billy put his face in his hands. The world of the Mardi Gras krewes was full of genteel bigots, but these guys weren’t. Rex wasn’t Momus, Comus, or the Atlanteans. They’d had Jews at the Rex ball since George started bringing his friends back in the 1960s. Mayor Dutch Morial had always come. The current mayor—Sidney Barthelemy, another Creole—regularly put in appearances. “What krewes do you belong to?” Dorothy Mae asked Beau Bassich.

  The camera switched back to John, Beau, and Harry, cowering behind their microphones like a trio of Watergate villains. The angles worked against them, shooting up at Dorothy Mae and imbuing her with grandeur, and down at the Rex officers, shrinking them to bugs under a microscope. “It’s secret,” Beau said with a mirthless laugh. “That’s part of the tradition. It’s part of the fun. We don’t discuss what krewes we belong to. That’s why the riders on the floats are masked.”

  “No,” Billy whispered. This was no time to be justifying masks and hoods.

  Beau finally relented, listing his krewes and throwing in a short primer on the selection of
members. “There’s no set system,” he said. “A member proposes someone. If people know him and like him, he might be invited to join. The blackball system is to prevent people joining whom the members don’t like, who don’t have the right character profile. But membership isn’t exclusive by design.” Billy knew what he meant. It no more made sense to throw membership open than it did to invite strangers to a party at your house. But that line, “right character profile,” was sure to come back and haunt the krewes.

  It was all so unnecessary. Rex could have invited Norman Francis, the president of Xavier University, or Hank Braden, a well-known physician, years ago. The same names have been coming up for a decade. But it would have taken someone actually to put them up for membership. That would have meant putting other Rex members in the position of saying no and explaining why. There was always a reason to put off such an uncomfortable conversation, and the years had simply slipped past.

  Councilman Jim Singleton took the microphone. “I think you gentlemen are here only to stonewall,” he said.

  Mike Smith, captain of the krewe Hermes, had already announced that if the choice was being forced to admit black members, his krewe wouldn’t parade. The Louisiana Club had said it would no longer request a city permit to erect grandstands outside its house on Union Street, lest the city use the permit as a cudgel to force integration. Moreover, the Louisiana Club announced that its parading krewe, Momus, which had paraded annually since 1872, would not parade. Ditto Comus, founded in 1857. Mardi Gras was going to be a disaster.

  BILLY EASED THE Mercedes out onto Third Street, turning left onto St. Charles and lowering the window. The air was cool on his face, and the avenue looked beautiful, the mansions and hotels decked out for Christmas. The opulence faded, though, by about Jackson Avenue. Solid Victorians gave way to vacant display windows, abandoned cars, and boutiques converted to discount stores. The rot was creeping uptown. He turned left on Poydras Street and cruised past the gleaming high-rise, now half-empty, that had once housed Amoco. What’s wrong with us? he thought. Are we proud of being backward and insular? When New Orleans was awash in oil money, it had refused to invest in the harbor, which was now being superseded by such pikers as Mobile. It had failed, when it had the chance, to correct a school system that produced students who could barely speak English or do sums. When northern companies fled unions and taxes for the Sunbelt, and cities like Memphis and Dallas were doing all they could to attract them, New Orleans turned a cold shoulder. No tax breaks, no city-built industrial parks, no incentives at all. Worse, Billy’s face heated as he recalled the times he’d had to explain to newcomer executives that, no, you had to wait to be invited onto a Mardi Gras krewe. No, you can’t just walk into the Boston Club. No, it’s not simply a matter of fees.

 

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