New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

  This, this here, ain’t no mystery. Run of the mill lover’s quarrel. Guy’s wife and her girlfriend—by which I mean, her girlfriend, her lesbian lover—decided they were tired of him. The three of them get to drinking and fooling around—fuckin’ and fightin’, really, what it amounts to—and one of them whacks him over the head with a hammer two times and then the pair of them stuff him in this here footlocker, pour cement in the damn thing, and push it out on the back porch. A few days go by, and a neighbor gets to smelling something ripe, drops a dime on them. And here I am. Do I know why, exactly? No. But I know what.

  It ain’t like TV. Most of the time, you do know who. You don’t know why, maybe, and you don’t care. Means and opportunity is all that matters. That thing about motive? Fuck motive. People kill each other for no damn reason at all.

  One or two other things I know about New Orleans. Termites and hurricanes. The intro and the outro, how it starts and how it ends. The micro and the macro. That’s what gonna do New Orleans in. Not crime. Not fucked-up terminal stupidity like we got ourselves here. Termites and hurricanes. If you could beam me forward a hundred years from now, set me down right here in this spot a hundred years in the future, it wouldn’t be here. No sir. Not just this house here, this rundown half of a double, lower Marigny, Spain Street shotgun. I mean New Orleans. Not here. Nothing. Just cypress swamp again. Malaria mosquitoes and alligators. Gulf water maybe, far as the eye can see, the Mississippi finally jumping its banks like it’s been wanting to ever since it can remember, over to the Atchafalaya. Just nutria and gators and skeeters. But New Orleans? Not a chance. Gone like the lost city of Pompeii. Drowned like Atlantis. The termites and the hurricanes gonna take care of all this shit. The lost city of New Orleans.

  Fifty years from now, I live that long, I’ll be fishing off my roof.

  Not that I don’t love New Orleans. I do. But I’m a pessimist, I guess, especially about the capacity of human beings to solve their problems. Comes with the territory, I believe. Being a homicide detective. Makes you a little bit cynical about the human capacity. Makes you think maybe people ain’t real bright. Otherwise why would they do the things they do? To themselves and others. Why would they live the way they do? Now there’s a mystery for you. Not this sorry situation. All that’s left to figure about this is which one hit him, and get the other to cop a plea and turn against her girlfriend to get a little something off the top of her sentence.

  What else I know about New Orleans? One or two things. They got some scruffy white people here. Scary looking. Take these three. Just beat to shit, generally. I mean, the dead guy, the vic, literally. One of the women, the girlfriend, five-nine, two-fifty, told the parish deputies she was a man, and they believed her. And the other one, the wife. Kinda scrawny and twitchy. And why on earth didn’t they get rid of the body? Oh, they were fixin’ to, but just “hadn’t got around to it.” Even bought some fishing poles. They were gonna take the footlocker out in the Gulf and dump it overboard. Plus, they got to drinkin’, to fuckin’ and fightin’ again, one thing and another, and just plum lost track of the time.

  One or two other things I know about New Orleans is the pull of the past. Never been anywhere the past had such a pull on a person as here. If I had me a time machine, I’d wear it out, me, and I wouldn’t be hitting no future button, no, no, no. Even if there was one. No, I’d dial me up old New Orleans. The French Opera House. Storyville. Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall. The New Basin Canal. Not even that far back. I’d be just as happy to hitch a ride back to the ’50s. South Rampart Street honky tonks and gin joints and every mobbed-up club in town before that self-righteous prick Jim Garrison shut them all down. Not that I could go in those places back then, not through the front door anyway. But still. All the glorious past.

  So much gone now, so much vanished. The Dew Drop Inn. Old Chinatown where City Hall is now. The amusement parks at Pontchartrain Beach and Milneburg and Old Spanish Fort and Lincoln Beach. North Claiborne before they tore up the old oak trees with bulldozers and rammed the interstate down our throats. Funny they didn’t run it through Uptown, ain’t it? I suppose I could use that time machine to go forward to when somebody apologizes for that, huh? I could set it for, let’s see, turn the dial to When Hell Freezes Over. I’ll be there.

  We used to all picnic on Mardi Gras day on North Claiborne, wait for the Indians to congregate. Still do, but instead of under the live oak trees, now it’s in the shade of the freeway. Pathetic, huh? We’re stubborn, or stupid. Set in our ways.

  So much gone. I’d give anything to see the glorious past of New Orleans. The octoroon balls. The slave market. Congo Square. I’d wanna see all that. One of the perks of this job, it teaches you not to flinch. The glorious and horrible past of New Orleans. Almost makes you believe in karma, doesn’t it? This beautiful place, paradise on earth, the City That Care Forgot, built on blood and tears and human misery.

  I sometimes wonder if maybe that’s why this job keeps me so busy. In the words of that great Southern writer, the past ain’t never past, is it? But you knew that, didn’t you? Don’t need me to tell you. We all know that. No excuse, anyway. You can’t be blaming karma when you kill somebody. You can’t go crying about history when you blow some old lady away. Shoot some tourist in a cemetery, just some ordinary nobody checking out our great and glorious past. But still, I get to thinking sometimes, wondering when the past is gonna run its course here in the Crescent City. Wondering when we ever gonna get past the past.

  Oh, I’d give that time machine a workout. Doesn’t have to be so far back. I’d settle for thirty years ago, when the parades still snaked through the Quarter on Mardi Gras day. Hell, I’d settle for last Saturday night, about 10 o’clock, when all this bullshit went down.

  I mean, it’s not a mystery, exactly, but I’d still like to know. What was said. Did they plan to do him, the two of them? Did he know that she was more than just his wife’s friend? Did he come home and catch them going at it? Or maybe he was into it and they weren’t? Or they weren’t anymore? How long, in the words of that old song, had this been going on, anyway? Kind of case that keeps them speculating at work, you know?

  Homicide. Our day starts when your day ends. Some of us have that on a T-shirt. Baseball cap. People say it ain’t respectful. But you gotta have a sense of humor in this job. I know that too.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  THOMAS ADCOCK is an Edgar Award–winning author of six novels, including Thrown-Away Child, set in New Orleans. He is a reporter for the New York Law Journal. Twenty-five years ago, thanks to marrying the New Orleans–born actress Kim Sykes, the Crescent City became his second home.

  ACE ATKINS covered the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast for Outside Magazine. The Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist is also the author of four crime novels based in and around the city. He lives and writes in Oxford, Mississippi.

  PATTY FRIEDMANN has lived in New Orleans all her life, except for slight interruptions for education and natural disasters. Her darkly comic novels include Eleanor Rushing, Secondhand Smoke, and A Little Bit Ruined. Her works have been selections of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and Borders Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 picks.

  DAVID FULMER’S Chasing the Devil’s Tail, a mystery set in turn-of-the-century Storyville, New Orleans, won a Shamus Award and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Barry Award, and a Falcon Award. His Storyville novels Jass and Rampart Street have drawn high praise. He lives in Atlanta with his daughter Italia.

  BARBARA HAMBLY was born in San Diego, California, and originally trained as an academic historian. She lived part-time in New Orleans for three years while married to science fiction writer George Alec Effinger; she now lives in Los Angeles.

  GREG HERREN is the author of six mystery novels set in New Orleans, including Mardi Gras Mambo and Murder in the Rue Chartres (forthcoming). He lives in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans and refuses t
o relocate. Ever.

  LAURA LIPPMAN, a Baltimore-based writer best known for her award-winning Tess Monaghan novels, believes New Orleans is the only other city where she could be happy for more than a few days, preferably December through March.

  TIM MCLOUGHLIN is the editor of the multiple award–winning anthology Brooklyn Noir. His novel, Heart of the Old Country, was a selection of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and won Italy’s Premio Penne award. He was married in St. Mary’s Chapel on Jackson Avenue in the Garden District.

  JAMES NOLAN, a fifth-generation New Orleans native, is a widely published poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator. His collections of poetry are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, both from Wesleyan University Press. He is a regular contributor to Boulevard, and recent stories have come out in Shenandoah, the Southern Review, and the Chattahoochee Review. He lives in the French Quarter, and currently directs the Loyola Writing Institute at Loyola University.

  TED O’BRIEN moved, somewhat arbitrarily, from South Florida to New Orleans in 2000. He signed on as a bookseller and continues, post-Katrina, to live and work in the Garden District.

  ERIC OVERMYER’S plays include On the Verge, Native Speech, In a Pig’s Valise, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin, and Dark Rapture. At one point he had a home in the Faubourg Marigny on Kerlerec Street, and he has been a “near” Orleanian for twenty years.

  JERI CAIN ROSSI is the author of Angel with a Criminal Kiss (Creation Books) and Red Wine Moan (Manic D Press). Since Katrina, she has resided in San Francisco, but she left her heart on the wild streets of New Orleans. She dedicates her story in this collection to the loving memories of Jason and Tommy, two beauties who will always be young, sipping cocktails on Decatur Street.

  KALAMU YA SALAAM is a New Orleans–based editor, writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He is director of Listen to the People, a New Orleans oral history project; moderator of e-Drum, a listserv for black writers; and comoderator, with his son Mtume, of Breath of Life, a black music website. Salaam is also the digital video instructor and the codirector of Students at the Center, a writing-based program in the New Orleans public school system.

  JULIE SMITH is the Edgar Award–winning author of two detective series set in New Orleans. A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the San Francisco Chronicle, she lives in the Faubourg Marigny section of New Orleans, which is much funkier than it sounds.

  MAUREEN TAN is the author of the critically acclaimed Jane Nichols suspense novels. Her focus on strong, independent female protagonists and Southern locales continues in A Perfect Cover—set in the Vietnamese community in New Orleans—and in her most recent book, Too Close to Home.

  JERVEY TERVALON was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles. He has written two novels set in New Orleans, Dead Above Ground and Lita. He’s almost obsessed with Creole Cream Cheese, stuffed Mirliton (militon), and good grits.

  OLYMPIA VERNON is the author of three critically acclaimed novels published by Grove Atlantic. Her first, Eden, was written in Uptown New Orleans and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2006, A Killing in This Town was published to rave reviews. Vernon is a Louisiana native and is now the Hallie Brown Ford Chair at Willamette University.

  CHRISTINE WILTZ has written five books: a detective trilogy—The Killing Circle, A Diamond Before You Die, and The Emerald Lizard; a novel, Glass House; and a biography, The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld. All of her books are set in New Orleans, where she was born and still lives.

  Also available from the Akashic Books Noir Series

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  GEORGE PELECANOS is a screenwriter, independent-indepen-and dent-film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of the bestselling series of Derek Strange novels set in and around Washington, D.c., where he lives with his wife and children.

  BROOKLYN NOIR

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  These books are available at local bookstores.

  They can also be purchased online through www.akashicbooks.com.

  To order by mail send a check or money order to:

  AKASHIC BOOKS

  PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009

  www.akashicbooks.com, Akashic7@aol.com

  (Prices include shipping. Outside the U.S., add $8 to each book ordered.)

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: BEFORE THE LEVEES BROKE

  TED O’BRIEN

  What’s the Score?

  PATTY FRIEDMANN

  Two-Story Brick Houses

  TIM MCLOUGHLIN

  Scared Rabbi
t

  OLYMPIA VERNON

  Schevoski

  DAVID FULMER

  Algiers

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  Pony Girl

  JERVEY TERVALON

  The Battling Priests of Corpus Christi

  JAMES NOLAN

  Open Mike

  KALAMU YA SALAAM

  All I Could Do Was Cry

  BARBARA HAMBLY

  There Shall Your Heart Be Also

  PART II: LIFE IN ATLANTIS

  MAUREEN TAN

  Muddy Pond

  THOMAS ADCOCK

  Lawyers’ Tongues

  JERI CAIN ROSSI

  And Hell Walked In

  CHRISTINE WILTZ