Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  Just for playin’ music.

  “Tavarius,” the old man call you. “This man is Bronco and his brother, Eddie Wilde. We went to school together here. We was you once.”

  You look at his face and don’t see it, listenin’ to Run-D.M.C. and then flippin’ that song to “Rock Box.” You think about Malcolm and the way he died and you clench your jaw real hard. Sweat workin’ hard in this concrete room.

  “You still got it?” JoJo ask.

  The man he call Bronco, black with green eyes and a face like an Indian, show the back of his forearm and four scars runnin’ like tracks.

  “What happen to you?” you ask.

  “We had some women trouble.”

  You smile, take a swig from JoJo’s beer. He don’t say nothin’, like he can’t see it.

  “In fact,” Bronco say, “her name was T-R-O-U-B-L-E. And wadn’t worth the time.”

  Eddie Wilde, thin and tall and in a black suit, shake his head. “Pussy make you do some dumb shit.”

  “You right,” JoJo say. “Ever think about that? Everythin’ a man do is for pussy. His job, his clothes. Even drivin’ a silly-ass car. But he ain’t never believe it.”

  “I remember when you wore your first suit to church,” Bronco say. “You just met Loretta, I do believe, and just about lose your mind.”

  “Shit,” JoJo say, snatching the forty away from you and takin’ a sip.

  Y’all sit like this a long time. You can hear the trucks and cars prowlin’ down MLK and hear the country thugs talkin’ shit outside. The air is so hot your T-shirt sticks to your skin and soon you start lookin’ at yourself in the mirror when JoJo send you to get beers. You look back at the old men and flex the muscles in your arm.

  JoJo start playin’ blues on the jukebox and the old men come alive. Eddie Wilde dance with himself out on the smooth floor, waggin’ his old black-man finger. Bronco sing along with a song call “Feel Like Goin’ Home.”

  You could swear that your old man’s eyes get heavy with that, his lips moving over the words. “Late in the evenin’,” he say. His mind forty years behind.

  They all slammin’ beers and talkin’ shit when you see those young thugs walk into the joint. They little older than you, wearin’ black Ts with no sleeves and thick gold around their neck. They watch you from the end of the bar with their red eyes.

  Under the table, you feel for the knife in your pocket.

  While laughin’ at one of JoJo’s jokes, Bronco take the blade from you hand and starts cleanin’ his nails with it.

  The country thugs come to you.

  You kick the chair out. Ready to fight.

  One of the boys smiles. “You right,” he say. “ALIAS, my man.”

  Everybody slappin’ you on the back, pullin’ you away from the small corner where the old men drink.

  They keep talkin’ but no one is listening.

  42

  “HAVE YOU TALKED TO JOJO?” Maggie asked, very early and very bright the next morning. I rolled off the mattress I kept on the warehouse floor and cradled the phone closer to my ear.

  “No.”

  “He seemed pretty pissed,” she said. “You know, like he didn’t have time to talk.”

  “He always sounds that way.”

  “You doin’ okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You know what I did yesterday?”

  “No, but I’d like to know,” I said, growing awake thinking about Maggie. I knew she’d been up since dawn. Her skin would be flushed from taking care of her horses, the smell of hay on her sweaty T-shirt and in her dark hair.

  “I rode for about two hours up in the north county,” she said. “You know the land that Abby’s parents had?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just me,” she said. “I tried to keep in trees but I got all sweaty and my jeans and boots got hot as hell.”

  “I like you sweaty.”

  “Well, Tony finds this little creek that I hadn’t thought about since when I was a kid. I just kind of kicked out of my boots and clothes and jumped right in. Nick, it was so cool in there. Some nice big rocks to dry yourself in the sun.”

  “You lay in the sun without your boots?”

  “Nothin’ else.”

  “Nothin’?”

  I rolled over on my back and stared at the tin-stamp ceiling. Red chili-pepper lights burned in my kitchen. Morning light shot through the cracks in my bookshelves like lasers.

  “Nick?”

  “I wish I was in Mississippi.”

  “Me too.”

  “You’re in Mississippi.”

  “But not in Mississippi with you.”

  “The entire state is better with me?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I just need some help shoveling out the shit in my barns.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “Shit shoveler first class.”

  “Glad you finally found your calling.”

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

  I showered and shaved. Annie needed a short walk to fertilize a little tree and I grabbed a croissant and cup of chicory coffee down at Louisiana Products. I made some phone calls. Finally I got one back.

  HIGH GLASS walls surrounded Alyce Diamandis in the little fishbowl office where she worked on the third floor of the Times-Picayune. File cabinets filled almost every other inch of the research library, long and thick as coffins, loaded with newspaper clippings going back to the twenties.

  Alyce was a tall, thin woman who wore her black hair twisted up into a bun and held in place with chopsticks. She had on cat-shaped glasses with small rhinestones and a red Chinese dress embroidered with gold dragons.

  “Somewhere there’s an Asian drag queen running around naked,” I said, walking into the little cube.

  “I was feeling a little yin and yang.”

  I’d known Alyce for years through my longtime ex, who once worked at the paper as a crime reporter.

  Alyce kept on typing and pushed the glasses up her nose. Wall-to-wall books lined her office and reference guides waited crammed between metal bookends of an A and a Z. A Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary sat on her desk. “One minute,” she said. “Al-most.”

  I picked up the Rubik’s Cube and began twisting it around. “I used to have one of these.”

  “I read this morning that when you turn thirty-five,” she said, still typing, “you are officially no longer in a cool demographic.”

  “Already passed that.”

  “But soon Rubik’s Cubes, Pac-Man, and Duran Duran will be like our grandparents’ nostalgia over Benny Goodman or Clark Gable,” she said. “You know? When Generation X all passes over thirty-five, it’s all over.”

  “All those Corey Feldman movies on American Movie Classics.”

  She finished clicking, laughing, and turned to me and crossed her long arms across her chest. A small candle burned by the computer monitor, some kind of chocolate aromatherapy. There was a little Zen sand garden and two open Mountain Dew cans.

  “I need you to run a name.”

  “Can you leave it and come back later? I’m swamped.”

  “I don’t need you to dig around in those old clips,” I said. “It would be recent.”

  She turned around, gave a small grunt, and typed away. “Name?”

  “Trey Brill.”

  “You know you could’ve probably gotten this off the Internet?”

  “What’s that?”

  I stood watching the screen over her shoulder. Five hits. “Football player?” she asked. “Wait. Sports agent?”

  “Yeah.”

  She clicked more.

  I also asked for her to run the name I’d gotten from Teddy’s secretary, Robert McClendon Brill III.

  Twenty seconds later, the printer hummed to life and she handed me a couple of hot sheets of paper.

  “Sick,” she said.

  METAIRIE – A college student charged with the rape of a Chalmette teen made his first appearance in court
Monday.

  Christian Chase, 18, a freshman at LSU, pled not guilty to four counts of sexual battery. The charges stem from a March 5 arrest when a 16-year-old girl from Chalmette accused Chase and another young man of finding her passed out at a Bourbon Street bar and taking her to Chase’s family home in Metairie.

  The girl – not identified because she is a minor – told deputies the boys fondled and performed sex acts on her with foreign objects before dropping her in a Dumpster behind a nearby shopping mall. The girl’s face and body had been covered in lewd words and pictures written in permanent marker. The girl’s family has filed a civil suit against Cherries, the bar where police say the girl passed out.

  Last week, prosecutors dropped charges against Robert McClendon Brill, 18, a freshman at Vanderbilt University, who deputies say was with Chase that night.

  “It’s him,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You might want to make sure,” she said.

  “When did this run?”

  “Ninety.”

  “It’s him,” I said. “He’s about thirty.”

  “Let me run an AutoTrak on him to make sure,” she said. “Can you give me some connections?”

  I told her about Brill & Associates in the CBD and his connection to Ninth Ward.

  While I waited, I flipped back to the first story that ran on the arrest a few months earlier in 1990. About how Brill’s father was a local attorney and member of one of New Orleans’s big Krewes and Chase’s father owned one of the city’s biggest construction companies. Members of the Metairie Country Club. The boys had attended Metairie Country Day School and had academic scholarship rides. Both had been all-stars on the private school’s soccer team.

  “You’re right; it’s him,” Alyce yelled to me from her fishtank office. “Same address in Metairie. God, that’s evil.”

  I wondered how Christian Chase felt about being left to hang for what happened to this girl. I wondered how much he knew about Trey Brill now.

  “You know the guy who covered this?”

  Alyce looked over my shoulder at the byline and smiled. “Of course.”

  “Still around?”

  43

  TWO HOURS LATER, I sat in the Hummingbird Diner having a late breakfast with a seventy-year-old reporter named Orval Jackson. Apparently the paper had tried to force him into retirement a few years ago by taking his longtime beat. But as a man who’d started covering news when he was sixteen in Kansas and continued with decades at the UPI, he didn’t let a bunch of management assholes tell him what to do. He told me a little about covering the Kennedy White House with Helen Thomas and some about the early days of NASA in the sixties before we got to his stories on Trey Brill and Christian Chase.

  “So you remember them?”

  “I wish I could forget those two arrogant little pricks.”

  “How did Brill get off?”

  “His rich daddy.”

  Orval had a full head of white hair and clear blue eyes. He wore a short-sleeved blue dress shirt hard pressed and a red tie printed with tiny Tabasco logos. A white Panama hat lay by his elbow where he kept his coffee.

  He glanced around the old diner.

  “You eat here much?” he asked.

  “It’s a block from my warehouse.”

  “Hope you have all your shots.”

  The Hummingbird was a combination flophouse and diner where you could still get a room for twenty bucks a night. Orange vinyl booths, brown paneled walls, a big board painted with breakfast specials available twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Outside, a red neon sign blinked the word HOTEL. Two homeless men fought outside over a stuffed rabbit and a half-eaten cheese-burger.

  We ordered eggs, bacon, and toast. The waitress, a woman I knew named Jennie, plunked down a pot of coffee as a streetcar passed by the windows and shook the glass.

  I smoked a cigarette, trying to blow the smoke away from Orval, while we waited for our food.

  “Brill just called Daddy from jail,” Orval said. “His father had this lawyer from Baton Rouge named Newcomb swoop in, make a few calls. The boy only spent maybe two minutes in front of a judge before the case was dropped.”

  “And Christian Chase?”

  “You ever heard of Booker Chase?”

  “No.”

  “He started his construction company when he was nineteen with one dump truck,” Orval said. “Now most of the new building going on in New Orleans has his name attached. He grew up in the Irish Channel. Scrapped for everything he owned. He expects his kids to hold their water.”

  “Didn’t make that call,” I said, stubbing out the cigarette as the plates were laid on the table. I cut into some eggs.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Kid got six long years in Angola.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “I heard he’s working for his father,” he said. “Booker has the boy driving a dump truck, just like he had to. He’s got an office over in Old Metairie, not far from the country club.”

  “Think he’ll talk to me?”

  Orval shrugged, buttering his toast and taking a bite. “What’s going on with these kids now?”

  “Brill works for a friend of mine,” I said. “His brother was just killed.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Teddy Paris.”

  “Football player, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I read about that,” Orval said. “Sounds like his brother was a thug.”

  “Yeah, I read that too. The reporter called him a gangster rapper. This kid was a music producer. I’d known him since he was fourteen.”

  “Good kid?”

  “I liked him a lot,” I said. “He was always respectful and smart. One of those kids wise beyond their age.”

  Orval looked at me, still sizing me up, but so good at it that it didn’t show much.

  “You work for Teddy Paris?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I sometimes research stuff for friends,” I said. “It’s what I do at Tulane and sometimes people hire me for favors.”

  “What’s that pay?”

  “Teddy bought me a bar in the Quarter.”

  Orval nodded. “Maybe I can do something like that when I retire,” he said, taking a bite of toast. “Don’t want to sit on my ass and learn how to drool.”

  We ate for a while and I thought about finding Christian.

  Orval pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and wrote a few notes on the back. “This is a Belgian beer I’ve been trying to find for ten years. It’s brewed by monks and called Orval, spelled the same way. Can you ask your distributor about it?”

  “When I get the bar up and running, I will.”

  “When will that be?”

  I shrugged.

  I looked outside and noticed the sun was gone. Rain began to splat the hoods of Yellow and United cabs parked along St. Charles. The hammering of the hoods grew more intense and I sank into my seat. I knew I’d be soaked all day.

  My day was just starting.

  “Kid won’t talk to you.”

  “I have to try.”

  Orval looked around at a prostitute sauntering into the grill with a stained dress and two Japanese tourists in black leather. Both men ordered a couple of Budweisers.

  “Jail changes people,” he said. “But you still live a long way from Old Metairie.”

  44

  OLD METAIRIE WAS NEW MONEY that had grown old. Big houses and big cars huddled under sprawling oak branches and lined idyllic streets; children rode bicycles and played football in between the rare traffic. There was a pink stucco country club and a ton of small boutiques, coffee shops, and little bistros. A little oasis away from downtown. The neighborhood streets disappeared off Metairie Road under a dome of oak branches as if to hide the secret garden. Marble statues. Stone walkways.

  Ferns grew on oaks in the richness of the humidity as a light shower hit the top of the canopied trees and dropped down
with a splat on my windshield. The sky had turned a dark gray and pink in the north. I slowed to a stop down on a street called Nassau.

  The Chase house was whitewashed brick with big green shutters held down firm with wrought iron. A white lawn jockey showed his lantern to the walkway. I rang the bell. Christian hadn’t been at his father’s office and I’d found his family’s home address in the White Pages.

  A black woman appeared, laughing and holding a highball in her hand. Her gray hair pulled straight and tight into a comb. Green eyes wrinkled at the edges. She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt splayed open with several buttons loose.

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Chase,” I said, guessing.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Is Christian around?”

  She looked back into the house and I heard several people talking and some jazz playing low. It sounded like Earl Hines. Mrs. Chase looked into my eyes and then turned away back into the house, her heels clicking on the marble floors.

  I heard her call her son’s name.

  I took a few steps back and saw a couple of Mercedeses and Cadillacs parked in a little cove by the four-car garage. No one came to the door for a while. Mrs. Chase did not ask me if I wanted to join the party or have a drink with a few of her friends.

  I walked down a stone path back to my truck to make a call when a young man in his late twenties opened the door and followed.

  Blue-jeaned and shoeless. A tight black T-shirt hugging his muscular upper body. I almost didn’t recognize him as the man I’d seen with Trey at his firm in the CBD. As he walked toward me, I remembered him playing ball while we waited and the foul smell coming from his body.

  Shit.

  Christian Chase flexed his arms across his chest and I saw the scarred brand on his arm. The flesh on his biceps had grown pink and swollen where he’d been touched by a hot iron. He smelled like a ton of Calvin Klein.

  “Good to see you again.”

  “What’s your problem, man?”

  “Kenny G, Michael Bolton, Dave Matthews, and Fred Durst. I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”