That Hardin had asked only for her and not for Cordts, too, when he knew they were together, told Maureen that he wanted to speak with them separately. She wouldn’t get a chance to talk to Cordts and square their stories before Hardin got to him. Cordts should’ve been the first person she went to when she heard the news about the death. She knew how cops—how she—questioned suspects. One of the most effective strategies was pitting them against each other. Getting them to sell each other out. She didn’t want to go through that. Maybe her mistake would work in her favor. Maybe she and Cordts would look less guilty because they hadn’t conferred.
She stopped walking. “We’re not guilty of anything. We didn’t do anything wrong. Remember that. We didn’t do anything wrong.” She continued on, repeating the words to herself. She didn’t want to meet Hardin looking or feeling guilty.
As she walked, bunches of beads splashed in the street around her as the riders on the last of the Krewe of Chaos floats overshot their targets in the crowd. She’d heard the masks they wore and the lights on the floats made the riders nearly blind to the crowd, like performers on a lighted stage in a dark theater. The colorful, tangled strands of plastic beads made a sound like water balloons exploding as they hit the pavement. Sometimes packs of kids darted into the street after them, but mostly the piles were left on the wet asphalt, like rotten, valueless fruit fallen from the bead-strewn tree branches over her head. Maureen knew that later that night, after the parades and the street parties had ended and before the sanitation crews raked the streets, before the street-sweeping machines scoured and sprayed, scavengers toting big plastic bags and pulling wagons would scour the avenue for abandoned and broken strands of beads in the low branches of the trees, the trampled grass of the neutral ground, and the gutters and potholes of the avenue, like divers searching the ocean floor for treasure spilled from a shipwreck.
She was fascinated by the elaborate and self-sustaining ecosystem that existed on the parade route. She wasn’t sure what the bead collectors did with their gatherings, if they hoarded them in closets or attics, if they sold them or recycled them. She had seen one man out every night, late, pulling his plastic-laden wagon along the street. Every night he wore the jersey of a different football team, though never the Saints. He seemed slow, or off in a quiet, harmless way. Clean and well fed enough that she could tell someone looked after him. She wondered what he did with the pounds and pounds of beads he collected after every night’s parades. She imagined him lying atop a mountain of plastic trinkets, like Scrooge McDuck in his vault full of money, waving his arms and legs, like someone making snow angels. She wondered what he did the rest of the year, when it wasn’t Mardi Gras. Tourists bought, wore, and threw beads around the French Quarter year-round. Maybe he shifted his efforts down there. Or did he have other things he collected? Did he hibernate? Taking his rest on Ash Wednesday and reemerging on Twelfth Night to begin his scavenging again.
Maybe there was money in it, this bead scavenging. Might want to look into that, she thought as she approached the intersection where her night had gone downhill.
She might be looking for a new way to make a living real soon.
21
As Maureen approached the intersection where the kid had died, she saw that the crowd along the route had grown even denser, the people packed closer together than she had seen at any of the previous parades. The air around her warmed. She could feel the collected body heat.
Muses, the night’s biggest parade, the main attraction, was on its way up the avenue, rolling at full steam right on the heels of Chaos, and the manic energy on the streets had increased tenfold. The opening acts had come and gone and the headliner, the real rock-’n’-roll star, was hitting the stage. Rotating spotlights bathed the huge glowing white balloon bearing the blue-lettered “Muses” logo that fronted the parade. Rolling cannons exploded, scaring the heart out of Maureen, shooting fluttering clouds of purple, green, and gold confetti into the broad, sweeping beams of the spotlights. The crowd roared and raised their faces and hands to the tumbling slips of paper like nomads lost in the desert greeting a long-awaited rain.
People packed the neutral ground, shoulder to shoulder, everyone drinking, smoking, eating, laughing, and dancing. Everyone got bumped and jostled and poked and stepped on while they did their thing. Drinks got spilled, food got dropped, chairs got toppled, and any and all personal space that had been carved out on the neutral ground was invaded—by friends, family, and complete strangers.
Maureen couldn’t help but be impressed, both with the sheer turnout for a nighttime block party in truly shitty weather and with the way the crowd, despite the increase in its size and its sheer frenzied power, for the most part policed itself. That was a very good thing. Even if the NOPD weren’t as depleted as it currently was, there was no such thing as enough cops to control an environment like a Mardi Gras parade. Too many moving parts, too much space, too many people. She couldn’t stop imagining and dreading what prolific mayhem would ensue if someone with a weapon opened fire on a crowd like this. The stampede would do more damage than the bullets. She hoped that with Goody caught and secured, they’d seen the last of the night’s gun violence. She hoped Morello knew what he was doing. She realized she had no real reason to think he didn’t. She knew the face he presented on the street, and knew next to nothing about what he hid behind it and how he really operated.
“You were able to get him out of here pretty quickly,” Maureen said to Hardin as he approached her out of the crowd. She had to raise her voice over the din of the surrounding throng. Hardin didn’t come across as very angry to her. She reminded herself that the surface impression didn’t matter; he wouldn’t show how he felt in public.
“I’m sure you heard,” Maureen said, wanting to lead with good news, “that we caught that runner. We have him hooked up. Morello and Cordts are with him, waiting on Drayton.”
“Cordts doing okay?” Hardin asked.
“Of course,” Maureen lied. Nervous as Cordts had made her tonight, she couldn’t sell him out to their superior. Not when she needed him on her side. Once these reports about her and the John Doe got cleared up, if Cordts stayed dangerously weird, she’d come back to Hardin.
“We were lucky to get an ambulance over here,” Hardin said, “considering we had two out of service because of the shooting, to get that John Doe off the route that fast, though I wish we’d been the first to find him. That really would have been better.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Maureen said. “I wish we had seen it coming. We didn’t know it was going to go that bad. We didn’t think his life was in danger. You know that, right?”
Waiting for a reply, she saw that Hardin was looking at something behind her. She turned and saw Laine and her crew gathered around the tangled roots of a big live oak, like a pack of jackals. Cortez had the camera on his shoulder, pointed right at them. Fuck these people, Maureen thought. They could be doing some real good, keeping everybody honest while that kid cuffed in the back of a patrol car waited on the detective. Instead, they wanted their money shot, the one where the rookie cop got her skinny ass busted in the street by her tall, strapping superior officer. Ignore them, she thought. Just ignore them.
“Crowd doesn’t seem very spooked,” she said.
“There was no blood,” Hardin said. “No visible signs of violence on the kid. To look at him, he may as well have been passed out. The EMTs did a hell of a job playing it cool.” Hardin shrugged. “I don’t know how many of these people believed he was dead. They’ve probably convinced themselves by now that those gunshots up the way were firecrackers. You and I, though, Coughlin, we do not have the luxury of these delusions, Mardi Gras or not.”
He gestured at the parade-goers. “There’s not much else for these people to do, anyway. And no matter what they believe, dead or alive, gunshots or fireworks, the parade’s not stopping, and no one’s getting out of the neighborhood for hours. We’re stuck here together.” He raised his c
hin at the passing parade. “And there are plenty of distractions, of course.”
A woman came striding toward them, yelling at them as she approached. She kicked beer cans out of her way as she marched closer. She was about Maureen’s height. Her corn-silk hair was done up in short pigtails. She wore an old leather pilot’s helmet and aviator goggles with big round lenses. A blue-and-white-checked dress with a puffy skirt and sleeves, black-and-white-striped tights, and fingerless leather gloves completed the ensemble. She had a hand-rolled cigarette burning in one hand. The woman reminded Maureen of a steampunk biplane-pilot Dorothy who’d never made it back to Kansas from Oz and instead buzzed the Emerald City in a sputtering Sopwith Camel. Maureen noticed a frail bug-eyed dog peeking its quivering head out of her shoulder bag.
Maureen set her hands on her hips. This oughtta be good.
“She’s the one,” the woman yelled. She was speaking to Hardin and pointing quite emphatically at Maureen. “She’s the one I was telling you about.”
This, then, Maureen thought, is the “people” that Wilburn was talking about. One angry woman with a camera in her phone.
“Philippa,” Hardin said, “we spoke about your tone. Professional respect, please.”
Maureen watched Hardin. Since avoiding the general public is not an option in this line of work, she thought, I really need to learn how to talk like that.
Philippa walked right up to Hardin, stood toe to toe with him, red cheeks flaming, blue eyes blazing, unchastened by his size and authority. She looked like a toy come to life next to Hardin’s bulk. The dog burrowed deeper into the shoulder bag. That dog, Maureen thought, is the smartest creature I’ve met all night.
“I’m glad you’re finally listening to me,” Philippa said. She stuck her cigarette between her lips and began thumbing away at a cell phone she seemed to have had up her sleeve. She raised the phone, attempting to take a photo of Maureen.
“Hey, no way,” Maureen shouted, moving out of what she guessed was the picture frame. Philippa followed her with the phone. “Don’t do that.” Everyone with a fucking camera, she thought. Is this what it’s like to be famous? Or notorious? “This isn’t The Hunger Games, everyone doesn’t need to see everything.”
Hardin reached out a big hand and blocked Philippa’s shot. “You’re making a mistake.”
“You’re interfering with freedom of the press,” Philippa shot back. “And my First Amendment rights.”
“I told you,” Hardin said to her. He took a deep breath. Maureen marveled at his patience. “A smartphone and a Twitter account don’t make you the press.”
“It makes you a clown at a parade,” Maureen said. “An angry clown with a frightened dog.”
“No need to provoke,” Hardin said.
“I don’t need corporate lame-stream media creds to have First Amendment rights. I have my platform, and I have my rights.”
“My officer has rights, too,” Hardin said. “You’re making serious accusations. And I did not bring her here to answer to you.”
“She’s the one who that other officer was talking about,” Philippa said. “He said he’d been waiting for her to kill someone. He said it. I heard it. Lots of people heard it.”
“You heard him say it?” Maureen asked. She stepped closer to Philippa. She couldn’t imagine that she would not have noticed her hanging around on the route earlier, when she was first dealing with the kid. Maureen had made sure to stay aware of the crowd. The lady plain stood out; Maureen would’ve noticed her. “I don’t remember you. You weren’t there.”
“I have three people who heard him say it,” Philippa said, shaking her phone. “I recorded their statements.”
“But you didn’t hear it yourself,” Maureen said, “did you? You didn’t see anything, either. You wandered across after the action was over with your phone and your leather helmet looking for trouble. So people would pay attention to your shitty blog.”
Philippa would not look at or speak to Maureen. She would only address Hardin. “That other officer said that it was about time she killed someone.” She held up her phone again. Maureen wanted to snatch it from her and shove it down her throat. “It’s a matter of record.”
“What record?” Maureen said. She turned to Hardin. “It was a joke. Ask Cordts. He was making a joke.” She pointed to the camera crew under the tree. “This is them. I bet Laine set this up. They’re filming this whole thing. You in on this gag, Philippa? I warn you, working for Laine doesn’t pay that well.”
“Police brutality may be a joke to you,” the woman said, finally rounding on Maureen, presenting physically as if she and Hardin were a unified front, “but it’s not to the people of color in this city. I have photos of the body. You can’t hide this. You can’t make him disappear, that poor boy.”
“I’ll know that poor boy’s name before you do,” Maureen said.
“We’ve had enough of your blue privilege and your blue cone of silence.”
“We? Who’s this ‘we’? You’re whiter than I am,” Maureen said. “What’s that accent? Midwest, isn’t it? Do you even live here?”
“Officer Coughlin,” Hardin said. “I’m not asking you to respond to these accusations. In fact, I’d prefer you didn’t. Philippa, we’ve said what we’re going to say on this matter. My officer and I have other matters to attend to.”
The woman thumbed madly away at her phone, shaking her head, speaking her words as she typed them. “I am witnessing the NOPD cover up a police killing. This is going viral. This is huge. We’re changing the paradigm in real time.”
“Are you serious?” Maureen asked.
Was this woman turning her into an Internet villain right before her eyes? Maureen wondered. She’d had such a hard time taking this self-serving woman as a real threat, but she’d dabbled enough in social media to know the basics of how the Web worked, namely how fast things could spread across it. She knew the Web was a magpie economy, that the dull truth didn’t matter compared with shiny provocation; it was like her standing next to Morello. Who did people listen to, no matter which of them was telling the truth? Nobody vetted the value of what made the rounds, or the veracity of who was doing the talking. And who could tell anymore if a person had ten, had a thousand, had ten thousand people who listened to them?
She’d never have guessed in a million years that three hundred thousand people would watch Laine’s trumped-up home movies about Burning Man. She was weak in the knees with relief that Hardin had stopped the photo from being taken. But really, what could she do if Philippa decided to take another one, later, from a distance? She could say anything she wanted about Maureen and no one could stop her. She knew how women fared on the Web. New Orleans was a small city. In no time at all, like before Muses was over, a lot of people, including people on the route, would know exactly what cop Philippa was talking about. She turned to Hardin. “Sarge? Can she do this?”
There was fear in her voice, and she hated that Philippa could hear it. That was, of course, if the woman could stop talking long enough to listen to anyone.
“You can try to continue this pattern of harassment,” Philippa said, “but I wouldn’t advise it.” She stuffed her phone in her bag. “People listen to me.” The dog yipped at his master’s hand.
Maureen hoped Philippa would race off down the road to the next stop in her digital revolution, bored by Hardin’s polite stonewalling, but instead the woman produced a pink business card. Again with the business cards, Maureen thought. The parade had stalled. The balloon had gone by, but none of the floats had arrived. Marchers carrying huge fiber-optic butterflies danced in the street, waving the glowing wings of their insects overhead. Stilt walkers and unicycle riders did acrobatic tricks in the street waiting for the sign to keep marching. These delays happened a lot with the big parades, Maureen understood that, but the break meant that several people from the crowd had turned to watch the Philippa show. Why should Philippa go anywhere, Maureen considered, when she was the center of attention
right here? Maureen looked at the card. First you want to attack me and ruin my life, she thought, now you want my attention. Fuck it, she thought. She took the card. She had to admit she was curious about how far this woman took her act. She read a false name and a Twitter handle: Philippa Marlowe, @JaneDoeJustice. How exciting. How brave. How very original.
“Philippa Marlowe,” Maureen said. “Cute.”
“So you’ve seen the films,” Philippa said, unable to mask the surprise in her voice over Maureen getting the reference.
“I’ve read the books,” Maureen said. She handed the card back to the woman.
“I have plenty,” Philippa said. “Keep it.”
“Consider it recycling,” Maureen said. She noticed the ground around them was littered with trampled pink cards that had been dropped among the rest of the trash. Apparently, Jane Doe Justice was having trouble rallying people to her cause. Judging by the litter, the difficulty was not due to lack of effort. Like Hardin had said, distractions were everywhere. Maureen found herself actually feeling sad for Philippa. Fighting Mardi Gras for attention was probably a pretty lonely business.
Hardin had turned to chat with someone in the crowd, which Maureen knew was his way of turning the situation over to her. He knew she needed practice when it came to working on de-escalation and dealing one-on-one with people who needed a pair of ears more than they needed a pair of handcuffs. Maureen considered taking a less adversarial approach.
“I have the information memorized,” she said. “You made it easy to remember. That was smart. And the cards are not free to make. I know that. You must go through a lot of them.”
The Devil's Muse Page 13
