Let the Devil Out

by Bill Loehfelm

  Dice pouted, toeing the asphalt. Maureen noticed the toe cap of her boot was wrapped in duct tape. “Nothing more for me? No ‘How are ya’ or ‘How ya been’ for me?”

  Maureen rubbed her eyes. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s late and I’m tired. Of course I was hoping to find you, too, along the way.”

  “I’ll forgive you for a cigarette,” Dice said.

  Maureen obliged. Other than Dice, Maureen wasn’t sure there was another person in New Orleans who had spent any time with Madison Leary and lived to tell about it. As Dice had told the story, they had lived together at a hostel for a few weeks, when Leary had first arrived in New Orleans and before she had run out of the powerful medication that kept her demons at bay. Paranoia, schizophrenia, and who knew what else. Maureen had tried recruiting Dice to help find Madison when she’d first become a person of interest in a murder case.

  Soon after that, though, Madison had gone from person of interest to number one suspect. Then things had gone to shit for Maureen on the NOPD, and Dice and Madison had both disappeared into the New Orleans underground. For the past six weeks, Maureen’s conscience had been gnawed raw by the idea that she had gotten Dice killed for asking her to betray Leary.

  Maybe she does know where Leary is, Maureen thought. Maybe she needs a way to tell me. “I thought maybe you’d moved on. The weather is turning, it’s cold living on the streets. I thought maybe you’d headed for Florida or California.”

  Dice shrugged. She held her cigarette close to her mouth. On her hand was a fingerless black-and-white-striped glove. Tough picking pockets with gloves on, Maureen guessed. The things you learned staying out late in New Orleans, she thought.

  “I considered it,” Dice said. “Remember Taylor? The boy who wore the blue eye shadow over one eye, the one who wanted to fuck me so bad it oozed out of his pores? He begged me to come back with him to Orlando.”

  Maureen shrugged. “He seemed nice. Florida’s okay. Warm. My mom and her boyfriend are thinking of retiring there.”

  “The Empire of the Rat? Seriously?” Dice said.

  “Not Orlando,” Maureen said. “But Florida.”

  Dice waved away the idea, a disgusted look on her face. “No offense to your moms, but fuck that.” She tossed her cigarette in the street. “I like it here. New Orleans grows on you. I hear the winter doesn’t last, anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Maureen said. “This is my first one, too.”

  “And really, it’s only a couple of months, which is really only a few weeks, when you think about it, until Mardi Gras gets here. That I want to see.”

  I’m sure you do, Maureen thought. Tourist pockets to pick as far as the eye can see.

  “Actually, it starts right after Christmas,” Dice said. “So it’s practically fucking here already.”

  Maureen could hear the hope in Dice’s voice. She knew it wasn’t for the holidays, or for Carnival. It was for the end of the cold, and for the chance to steal enough money to eat hot food, take a hot shower, and maybe to live indoors at a hostel or a flophouse until the Mardi Gras money ran out and she was back on the streets again. Many of the kids who Dice ran with had homes and parents to return to; it was an ill-kept secret on the streets. Maureen knew that Dice had neither of those things.

  “She’s a murder suspect, you know,” Maureen said. “You withhold information and you’re committing a felony. And she’s dangerous. You know that as well as anybody.”

  Dice cocked her head, studied Maureen out of one eye. “Are you even a cop anymore?”

  “Of course I am,” Maureen said. “I’ve just been on kind of a hiatus for a while.”

  Dice nodded, sagely. “Because of that cop you knew who died in the river.”

  “Madison doesn’t have to talk to me,” Maureen said. “She can reach out to Detective Atkinson. She’s the one working those murder cases now. I know Atkinson. She’s the best there is. She’s good people.” She stretched out her empty hands. “You could talk to Atkinson.”

  “You’ve told her everything I told you?” Dice said.

  “Weeks ago.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Dice said. She turned in a circle on her boot heel. “This Atkinson’s already heard what I have to say. Why does she need to hear it from me in person?”

  “We could help you,” Maureen said. “Quid pro quo. You help us; we help you. Atkinson has a lot more juice than I do.”

  Dice laughed out loud. “The police? The city? Help me? Help me do what?”

  “Sure,” Maureen said. “There are diversion programs, shelters, halfway houses, all kinds of resources.”

  “Diversion programs,” Dice mocked, making air quotes with her fingers. “Because I need my face jammed into some bull dyke’s muff in the middle of the night. Or some creepy old perv slipping his cold fingers down the back of my pants. No fucking thanks.” She laughed again. “You’re terrible at this, Officer. You’re a terrible storyteller. You don’t believe a single word coming out of your own mouth.”

  “Fine, you’re right,” Maureen said. “But you know as well as I do that Madison killed two men.”

  “Allegedly.”

  “You’re her attorney now?” Maureen said.

  “Those two men followed her to New Orleans,” Dice said, her voice heating up, “and hunted her when they got here. All Madison wanted was to get away from them and the rest of their stupid group of fake soldiers. What did they call themselves?” She made air quotes again. “The Watchmen Brigade.” She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Whatever. Those two men who died, you and I both know they had it coming. The world is better off without them. Don’t even tell me you don’t believe that.”

  “We don’t get to make those decisions.”

  “There you go again,” Dice said, “spouting shit that you don’t believe.” She moved a step closer. “Think of it this way, then. If Madison is the killer you seem to think she is, look at what she did to those Watchmen. She cut both of their throats. You think it’s best being out here alone after dark chasing after her when she’s this crazy murderer?”

  Maureen scratched at her scalp. Why had she not gone home hours ago? She’d forgotten what a pain in the ass Dice could be, like a gremlin you couldn’t quite grab. And how smart she was. “Can you even tell me if she’s stayed in town?”

  “I could,” Dice said, smiling, “but I won’t.” She paused. “Maybe.”

  “Look who’s playing games now,” Maureen said. “What does that even mean?” She reached for her wallet. “You know what.” She pulled out a ten, handed it to Dice. “This is why you followed me. Because you need fucking money. The rest of this is playing games to make yourself feel better about begging from me.”

  Dice shook her head. She didn’t take the money. Her face had darkened. The games were over. “You should stop looking for her.”

  “And why is that?”

  “People are starting to talk about you.”

  “Like I give a fuck about that,” Maureen said.

  Dice picked at a thread on her glove, considering, Maureen could tell, what to say next, how much of a chance to take. Dice said, “You’re not the only one looking for her, either. Someone else has been coming around asking questions.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s not important,” Dice said, “and I don’t know who he is or who he’s with, I haven’t talked to anyone in person about her myself, I’m only telling you what I’m hearing. Now, the other street kids, they’re starting to talk. They want to know who this Madison Leary person is that the cops are looking for, that other people are looking for. None of this attention is doing anybody any good. There’s a mess about to be made.”

  “Tell me who this guy is,” Maureen said. “Tell me what he looks like. I can help back him off. Trust me on that. Is he with the militia, too?”

  She waited. Dice said nothing.

  “Can you tell me if he’s law enforcement, then?” Maureen asked. “Can you tell me that much?”


  “No,” Dice said. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Dice sighed. “This conversation is having the opposite effect I wanted it to.”

  “Is it the Watchmen again?” Maureen asked. “Is that who’s looking for her? She stole from them. She knows things about them law enforcement can use against them. They’re going to keep coming after her. These guys, Dice, you laugh at them, but they’re fanatics and they’re armed to the teeth. Completely psycho. They shot my house to shit in broad daylight. I have bullet holes in my headboard.”

  “You’re bragging,” Dice said, giving Maureen a wry smile.

  “These guys think of themselves as an invading army,” Maureen said. “They’re moving crates of guns into the city.”

  “Tell me more about your headboard.”

  “Spare me the flirty bullshit,” Maureen said. “They’ll kill you without a second thought.”

  “You should leave her be,” Dice said. “Leave Madison alone.”

  “So she’s in town,” Maureen said. “If she wasn’t here you wouldn’t tell me to leave her alone.”

  “She only did what any woman would’ve done,” Dice said. “What you would’ve done, what I would’ve done. She was just defending herself. As is her right as an American. She was standing her ground.”

  “If you’ve got nothing useful to tell me,” Maureen said, “why’d you even come find me tonight?”

  “Word’s around that you’re looking,” Dice said. “It’s in the streets. I heard people talking and I knew it was you. I don’t think they’ve figured you out for a cop, but that’s coming. And if they don’t figure you for a cop, they might figure there’s something valuable in protecting her in a more emphatic way than just saying they don’t know her, since she’s so interesting. So what I came to tell you is that you should stop looking.”

  “Is that a threat?” Maureen asked, laughter in her voice. “Who are you delivering messages for? Who’s got you making threats for them? How well do the Watchmen pay?”

  Dice sighed. Good, Maureen thought. Her turn to have her patience tested. “You’re such a fucking cop. Everybody always with an ulterior motive, even me.”

  “Especially you,” Maureen said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You tried to do good by me before. I’m only trying to do you a favor, one woman to another.”

  “How do you know,” Maureen said, “that you’re not next on Madison’s list?”

  “I just do,” Dice said. She snatched the ten-dollar bill from Maureen’s hand, stuffed it into the deep pocket of her big coat. “Besides, I know how Madison operates.” She started backing away down the street. “Leave her be, Officer. Like there’s no other crime in this town? From what you tell me, you cops are about to have your hands full, more than ever. Get on with your life, Officer Coughlin. Do that, and you and me, we can stay friends.”

  3

  Late afternoon the next day, Maureen left her house in the Irish Channel for a run. She jogged up Sixth Street, crossed Magazine Street, crossed Prytania Street, and then made a left turn onto St. Charles Avenue.

  She wanted to reach Audubon Park, circle the park twice, and start heading home before dark. She had plans for that night. Big plans. If she didn’t run and lingered around the house, she wouldn’t be sharp later. She’d feel slow and tired, especially after seeing so little daylight. She’d start drinking early. Earlier. She might even change her mind about going through with her plan and stay home, hiding in her living room. Not an option.

  At a half mile or so into her run, when she hit the intersection of Louisiana and St. Charles, her legs started to lighten and loosen. Her blood pumped hard through her arms and legs. She flexed her fingers as she ran. Her chest burned from the previous night’s abundance of cigarettes, but her wind was good overall. She felt her body coming back to life for her once again, her run beating back the ravages of another daylong hangover. She knew she demanded a lot of her body. Between what she did with it and what she put into it, she also sent it a lot of mixed signals. It always responded and gave her what she demanded of it. Pretty quickly, too.

  How long her body would remain so responsive, she didn’t know. She was thirty. She lived hard, had done so since eighteen. These past few weeks, the ones away from work, she’d begun bumping up against her physical limits. By the time she’d gotten home from Frenchmen Street, cleaned up, and climbed into bed, her conversation with Dice turning over in her head, the sunrise, and her hangover, had arrived.

  No Frenchmen Street tonight, she thought. That had been dumb luck, a surprise opportunity, running into that feuding couple in d.b.a. Tonight, she was getting back on target, back to her plan, and the hunting ground was closer to home. Right in the neighborhood. Which, of course, made things much riskier. This project was as important, she reminded herself, as anything she’d be doing were she on the job. And not only important to her. She might quite possibly be saving someone’s life.

  Picking up her pace, she followed the streetcar tracks along the dusty neutral ground of St. Charles, passing under the branches of the live oaks, their leaves staying green into the heart of November. Three miles later, she’d reached her destination.

  She skipped across St. Charles through stopped rush-hour traffic and into Audubon Park, chastising herself for being tempted not only by the water fountain, but also by the empty benches on the banks of the lagoon. Maybe tomorrow, she told herself. Maybe later in the week she’d get up to the park to hang out and relax for once, to read a book, to watch the ducks and squirrels from one of the benches. Everyone else could rush by her for a change. Such a beautiful park, she thought. She couldn’t believe sometimes that she ran under the boughs of oak trees draped with wispy gray Spanish moss. Like something from a movie or a postcard. Right there, inches above her head. So many gorgeous, quiet hideaways in the park, and she was always running right by them. Panting. Pushing. Of course, park benches and ducks, peace and beauty, they were not the reasons she had added the loops around the park to her runs.

  A couple of circuits helped Maureen accomplish two things. First, the extension added almost four miles, bringing her nearer an even ten miles.

  Second, it gave her a reason to pass by the Heath house.

  * * *

  Solomon Heath’s mansion sat on the edge of the park behind a screen of squat, sprawling live oaks, ancient dark-bodied trees whose knotted branches dragged in the grass like the impossibly long and bendy arms of great jungle apes. Running by the mansion in the late afternoons and evenings, Maureen had often glimpsed Solomon sitting in one of the throne-like white rocking chairs on the wraparound porch, his hand gripping a highball glass. He seemed to be watching the birds and squirrels flitting about in the branches of the oaks.

  One evening she’d seen him standing, looking contemplative, at a tall second-floor window, the curtain held aside with one hand. That time he seemed to be looking at her instead of the park’s modest wildlife, watching her as she ran past his property. She’d seen him on several evenings standing watch over a generously smoking grill.

  Every time she saw him, he was alone. Every time one hand clutched a glass. Bourbon, she figured. Really excellent bourbon, she imagined, that he bought by the case.

  Half a dozen times Maureen had taken the liberty, during the day, of following Solomon’s black Jaguar in her Honda from his Central Business District offices to the job sites of Heath Design and Construction’s larger current projects: the housing development on the edge of the Quarter, the new jail and new hospital in Mid-City. Even on weekends, she never saw anyone else at the house. Solomon was a man who had his work and nothing else. At least, she believed, that was what he wanted anyone who might be paying attention to think about him.

  She’d been to the house once. Not long before her suspension she’d worked a security detail at a cocktail party fund-raiser hosted by the family. She’d met Solomon, shook his hand. And she’d had a run-in under the live oaks of the p
ark with his troublesome sociopath slumlord of a son, Caleb. She hadn’t actually made it inside the place, restricted that night to the mansion grounds like a guard dog.

  She watched Solomon, but the Heath she wanted most was Caleb. He had fled the country following the death of his friend and Maureen’s coworker, NOPD officer Matthew Quinn. The cop in the river whom Dice had mentioned. A schoolmate of Caleb’s, Quinn had been in Solomon’s pocket since he’d gotten his badge. Six weeks before, in an effort to protect Caleb from being outed as a member of the Watchmen by a drug dealer and murderer they’d worked with named Bobby Scales, Quinn had snatched Scales from Orleans Parish Prison and drowned him in the Mississippi.

  Problem was, Quinn had gone in the river, too, sucked by the wake of a passing freighter under the same currents that swallowed Scales. Maureen had been there at the riverside, had watched them both go under the frothing water, helpless.

  Nobody knew when, or if, Caleb was coming back to New Orleans. A few people knew—and Maureen was one of them, Solomon had to be another—that Caleb had played a role in Quinn’s death. And had played a larger role in an attempt on Maureen’s life. Caleb Heath was the reason she had bullet holes in her bed. Caleb had given her address, which he had gotten from Quinn, to a van full of heavily armed Watchmen. She wanted to talk to him about that. Preferably in an interrogation room, handcuffs cutting into his bleeding wrists. And with a black eye inflating one side of his face.

  She watched Solomon because he was the only man with the power to call Caleb home. Not that NOPD had tried. Maureen got the impression they were relieved he was out of reach. As far as she could tell, Solomon had no interest in bringing the boy home. Judging by what she had learned about their relationship, Maureen figured Solomon was only too happy to be rid of his youngest son. And there was quite possibly another reason Caleb had been sent halfway across the globe. The two men Madison Leary had killed knew each other, did things together. Those men knew Caleb Heath and did things with him, too. Things for which Caleb put up the money. It seemed Madison Leary had a list, and Caleb Heath was probably on it. Maybe even next. And Caleb knew it. Maureen was the one who had told him so.