Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Oh, hells no,” Marques said, recoiling at the sight of her patrol car. “I can’t get a ride home with you. In a cop car?”

  “Gimme a break. What’d you think I’d be driving? A Range Rover?”

  “Serious, OC. The whole block’ll think I’m snitchin’.”

  “You gotta go home. That was the deal I made.”

  “Yeah, that you made,” Marques said, walking away. “What I gotta do is go get my drum. Peace.”

  “Wait right there,” Maureen said.

  Marques kept walking, accelerating his pace. Maureen wasn’t sure it was her he was trying to escape.

  “I mean it,” she said, hustling after him. “Do not make me fucking chase you. I’ll call it in. I’ll leave you in the box this time.” She took a shot. “I’ve got Quinn and Ruiz down here to help me, and I know where you’re going. I get the feeling they’d be happy to help round you back up.”

  Marques stopped. He waited for Maureen to catch up to him, jaw set as he tried to drive the fear from his face. She’d seen that look on him in the past. She wanted to know the connection between the boy and the cops. Uncovering that fact without tipping off those two would be tough. Marques would lie to her. He’d deny knowing them. And he’d never, ever trust her to take his side over other police, no matter their personal history, asshole cops or not. That was the way things worked. That was the game. She couldn’t blame him. Were the situation flipped, she wasn’t sure she’d trust him.

  “I’m just playin’, OC,” Marques said. “I wouldn’t walk out on you. But I do have to get my drum. For real. Officer Fat Ass made me leave it behind.”

  “What was the officer’s actual name?” Maureen asked.

  She wanted to know who had told Quinn and Ruiz he was being held at the Eighth. Certainly Preacher wouldn’t give the kid up; he’d helped save him from Scales.

  “I don’t know no names,” Marques said. “Y’all all look the same to me.”

  “You have to go home,” Maureen said. “I made promises.”

  “Where am I gonna get the money for another snare drum? They ain’t cheap.”

  “And you have no desire,” Maureen said, “to tell your grandmother you lost this one. Forget the haircut, you’ll need a whole new head.”

  “I ain’t lost it,” Marques said. “That cop made me leave it. There’s a difference.”

  “None of your boys would’ve gone back for it?” Maureen asked. “Since you took one for the team? Seems to me the least they could do.”

  “By the time I track those guys down,” Marques said, “if they don’t have it, one a them gutter punks will have took it and probably sold it off on me. Then what am I gonna do? How am I gonna lead a band with no damn instrument?”

  Maureen took a deep breath. Marques had a point. A new instrument wouldn’t be cheap. His grandmother was on a fixed income. His mother was serving in Afghanistan. His father was a name nobody spoke, the few that knew it. Ruiz’s insults probably hadn’t been that far off the mark. Marques and his grandmother had moved since getting sideways of Bobby Scales a month or so ago. Their income was what it was and their new neighborhood, an older mixed-income development called River Garden, would stretch what they had to the limit. Maureen wanted those drumsticks in Marques’s hands, keeping him from picking up anything, in an effort to make money, that would make more trouble for him than curfew violations.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Maureen said. “I’ll take you down to Frenchmen. We’ll go get your drum. It’s probably right where you left it. If you’ve been playing down there, people will know what’s yours. From there, it’s home. Immediately.”

  “In a cab, though,” Marques said.

  “Marques, that’s the deal. I take you to Frenchmen for your drum, then home to your grandma’s, or I take you from here to the curfew hall and call your grandmother to come get you.”

  “Fuck that, she leave me there.”

  “Don’t hate the game,” Maureen said. “What’s it gonna be?”

  Marques pretended to think it over, running his tongue back and forth over his teeth. “I can ride in the front?”

  “You touch anything and you go to jail.”

  Marques was a good kid at heart, Maureen thought as they headed for the cruiser. Exasperating, but good at heart. He just struggled with authority.

  “On the real, no disrespect to you, OC,” Marques said, “but fuck that take-out-the-trash motherfucker. Fuck him.”

  8

  The popular Frenchmen Street, the dusky crown of an oddball neighborhood called the Marigny, with its multiple blocks of bars, cafés, and live music clubs, bustled most nights until close to dawn. Musicians like Marques and his band, who couldn’t get or didn’t have inside gigs, busked for change on the street. Some played solo. Others played in duos and small groups. Self-appointed chefs cooked everything from tacos to turkey legs atop various smoking mobile contraptions built from Weber grills, shopping carts, and random spare parts. Local artists hawked handmade clothes and books and jewelry from car trunks and bicycle baskets. Fedora-topped hipster poets smoking hand-rolled cigarettes perched typewriters on folding cocktail tables, scratching their beards and tapping out poetry on demand, hoping for enough in cash donations to cover their next round.

  The street was noisy and dirty and casually chaotic. Most of its outdoor commerce was illegal. The city authorities talked of cracking down. Maureen ignored both facts, as did the majority of her compatriots on the NOPD, content to let it be, at least until the orders came through. The action—musical, culinary, literary, and otherwise—was self-regulated with moderate efficiency and fairness. The surrounding neighborhood concerned the police much more. With the street vendors and the servers and bartenders from the restaurants and music clubs heading home along its dark and quiet streets, cash in their pockets, the area made for a popular hunting ground for pistol-toting stick-up boys.

  Among the buzzing industrious locals lived a population of street kids in their teens and twenties, almost exclusively from out of town and out of state. Travelers, they called themselves. To Maureen they didn’t seem to travel much. Maybe from the front of one bar to the front of another until shooed by the next bouncer. When she came down to the Marigny for a meal or a brass-band show, Maureen saw many of the same faces in the same doorways and on the same corners. “Gutter punks” was the common pejorative for these kids, a name born out of their worn and torn clothing, their affinity for piercings and bad tattoos, their antipathy toward employment and hygiene, and the aggressive nature of their panhandling.

  They hung together in packs, eschewing the solitary way of working the streets embraced by the city’s older, more traditional homeless. Often the kids had surprisingly well-fed and well-behaved dogs in tow. Most cops, Maureen had learned, even those who’d roll up on a gangster-heavy corner at midnight, would bypass dealing with a thirty-pound dog in a dirty bandana, and the kids knew it, too. Maureen didn’t see much of the kids in her district. The nicer parts of Uptown were less bohemian and therefore less tolerant and less lucrative than downtown neighborhoods like the Quarter, the Marigny, and the adjacent Bywater. The tougher parts of Uptown where Maureen spent most of her time would eat them alive. She’d noticed the kids played threatening to tourists or folks in from the suburbs for festivals and Saints games, but they made sure to avoid as much real danger and the people responsible for it as possible. They kept to their own.

  Cops who dealt with these kids had told her that their searches and pat downs often uncovered cell phones and credit cards. Some kids were desperate runaways, fleeing real abuse or flailing in the grips of brutal addictions, packing homemade weapons they clutched in their sleep and could wield with inspired and dangerous fury. Others, most, were poseurs and dilettantes, going through a phase, Maureen had learned, living with their parents’ phone numbers packed in the back of their wallets, dabbling in the minor criminal pseudo-rebellions of drug use, graffiti, and vandalism until the weather turned cold and th
e tourist charity dried up.

  Maureen rolled up on a bunch of such kids clustered around the intersection where Marques had directed her. They loitered in a back corner of the empty lot, their backs to Frenchmen and to the patrol car. Maureen bumped the car up onto the sidewalk. She hit the driver’s side spotlight and put it on the kids to get their attention. They turned to face the car, boys and girls alike looking like unisex extras from a Dickens novel, shielding their eyes and complaining about the light and the hassle as they staggered back into the shadows. They had musical instruments of their own, Maureen noticed. One boy held a ukulele with one string. An accordion sat on the ground, propped up against a battered fiddle case. A young woman with the shadow of a buzz cut covering her scalp sat wide-legged on an upside-down pickle bucket as she tuned a banjo.

  “That your tip bucket she’s sitting on?” Maureen asked.

  “No way the fellas left cash money behind,” Marques said. “Ain’t you learned nothin’ yet? That bucket’s hers.”

  Before getting out of the car, Maureen leaned toward Marques. “Anything I should know here? You had problems with these people before? Has there been fighting over this corner?”

  “Not with me and my band,” Marques said. “We usually share pretty good. Some of the other bands?” He shrugged. “Bunch of black kids makes everyone nervous, yo. They on their best behavior.”

  “Ever use that to your advantage?” Maureen asked.

  “Don’t hate, OC.”

  “Wait here, playa,” Maureen said. “I mean it.”

  “Ten-four,” Marques said.

  Maureen climbed out of the car. The air smelled of cheap weed, unwashed bodies, and patchouli oil. A couple of the boys drifted away from her, down the dark side street, a glowing ember hovering between them. “Bacon on the hoof,” one of them shouted. He followed the comment with a squeal. Maureen glared into the dark, because the kids expected it, but the taunts of cowards, they didn’t do much for her. Never did. When you motherfuckers get stuck up at gunpoint for your hard-begged cash later, she thought, you’ll be crying that I wasn’t around.

  The girl in the buzz cut set down her banjo, balancing it carefully across the plastic bucket. She walked over to Maureen, leaving the other kids behind. She wore knee-high black leather boots with the buckles undone, and a black-and-white-striped bodysuit under gray overalls cut off mid-thigh. As she got closer, under the shadow of her hair, Maureen could see an elaborate tattoo winding around her skull. A dragon, or an alien, maybe. One of those snakes eating its own tail? Maybe it was an alligator? Something ugly, Maureen thought, whatever it was. The girl had another tattoo in the center of her collarbone, something dark and blurry that Maureen couldn’t make out. A bat? A raven? Bad work, whatever it was. Three tiny barbells pierced her right eyebrow. She wore a silver stud in the vertical groove of her upper lip.

  “I’m looking for a drum,” Maureen said to her. “A snare drum. The young man in the car left it behind earlier this evening. I was hoping it was around.”

  “He was forced to leave it,” the girl said, “by that other nasty cop. They weren’t bothering anyone, you know. They’re pretty decent. People in this town actually like live music, I don’t know if you’ve heard. It’s kind of a tradition.”

  “So you’ve seen it?” Maureen said. She wanted the drum, not an argument about city culture.

  “We have it.” The girl smiled, her teeth surprisingly white. She had a streak of lipstick on one of her canines. “We held it for him, for when he came back.”

  Maureen turned and signaled for Marques to get out of the car. The girl in turn made a gesture, and a skinny, dreadlocked boy of no more than nineteen, his long fingernails painted black, appeared out of the dark and brought forth the drum, holding it out for Marques to receive. Marques took the drum, turning it over, holding it up in the streetlight, looking for damage. With a nod, he pronounced it fit and tucked it under his arm. Maureen felt as if she’d presided over some ancient tribal peace negotiation. It seemed to be a success. Peace achieved, she moved on to other business.

  “Did you or any of your friends,” Maureen asked, “catch the name of the cop who picked up Marques and busted up the band?”

  “You can’t find that out yourself?” the girl asked. “You need us for that?”

  Just my luck, Maureen thought. I got the halfway smart one. “I’m just asking.”

  “Like I want him down here looking for me next.” The girl grinned, shaking her head. “Cop problems are cop problems. Don’t even.”

  Maureen turned to Marques. “And you have no idea who he was?”

  Marques shrugged.

  “Y’all all look the same to us,” the girl said.

  Maureen turned back to the girl. “You said you don’t want him down here looking for you next. Did he bust up the band, or was he looking for Marques by name? Has he done this kind of thing before? He a regular down here?”

  The girl pursed her lips and made a “talk to the hand” gesture.

  “Can we go?” Marques asked. He’d forgotten his worries, Maureen noticed, about riding in a cop car or facing his grandmother.

  The girl sucked her teeth, rocking on her heels. Maureen pulled a five-dollar bill from her wallet, offering it.

  “Five whole dollars? Seriously?”

  “The next thing I hand you is a summons,” Maureen said.

  “For what?”

  “I’ll find something. You want me searching your pockets?”

  The girl took the money, moving smooth and quick as a rattlesnake strike. Maureen wasn’t sure she’d seen it happen. Her hand was just suddenly empty. A pickpocket, she was, Maureen thought. And a good one at that. The girl said, “I believe the exact quote was, ‘Which one of you punk-ass motherfuckers is Marques Greer?’”

  “Dammit, bitch,” Marques said. “Mind your fucking business.”

  The girl lunged for him. Maureen stepped in between them. The girl bounced off her. She weighed nothing, Maureen thought. Thin skin and hollow bones under those ragged clothes. Two hundred pounds of attitude in a ninety-pound body. I could break her in half, Maureen thought. I could. “Okay. Okay. Back off, both of you.” Everyone separated. “Marques?”

  “I don’t remember it like that,” he said. “I remember it like I told it to you at the district. She looking for another five dollars. Maybe she can buy some soap with it.”

  “Marques, put your drum in the car. Wait for me there.” Marques had the attention of someone in the NOPD, Maureen thought, the wrong kind of attention. That someone had the pull to make Quinn and Ruiz their errand boys, and authority enough to make Hardin, a sergeant like Preacher, nervous and sneaky about his defiance. Who could that be? Whoever it was, Maureen knew she didn’t want their attention on her.

  “Whatever she say to you, OC,” Marques said, “don’t believe her. She a punk-ass dope fiend. And she a thief. You know me.”

  “Marques, please,” Maureen said. She was getting a headache, from the aggravation or the patchouli and body odor it failed to mask, she couldn’t tell. “Take care of your drum. It’s what we came down here for, right?”

  He headed for the car.

  “OC?” the girl asked.

  “Officer Coughlin,” Maureen said.

  “I know you,” the girl said to Maureen. “I never knew your name but I recognize your face. I remember your elbow. And your shoulder. You don’t remember me, but I know you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Maureen said, not turning around. “I don’t work down here.”

  “You really don’t remember, do you? You nearly busted my skull open behind Café du Monde, back in the spring. And you don’t even remember me. My ribs hurt for two weeks.”

  “That was you,” Maureen said, all statement and no question. She circled her finger around her head. “You didn’t have this business up here then.” As if the tattoo somehow made a major difference in the girl’s appearance. Her name popped into Maureen’s head. On the day she’d graduated
from the police academy, with her mom and Nat Waters visiting, Maureen had broken up a bathroom purse snatching not far from Café du Monde. This girl had been the thief. Maureen had laid her out on the pavement.

  “Dice,” Maureen said. “That was what Hardin called you. You still stealing, Dice? Tattoos ain’t free. Neither are banjos. And from what I remember, heroin ain’t free, either.”

  “Why you gotta be like that?” the kid with the one-string ukulele whined from the shadows. He was the only one who’d stuck around. He had eye shadow over only one eye. He was sweet on Dice, Maureen could tell. It radiated from him like light. She felt something twitch in her gut. Envy again? Of this? Of these two? What was wrong with her?

  “We were nice to your friend here,” the kid said. “We shared our space with him. It was a cop, like you, that busted up his gig and almost lost him that drum. We helped him.”

  Both women turned and stared him down. He looked away, tuning his instrument, mumbling under his breath. Dice, for her part, hadn’t blanched at Maureen’s insult.

  “I’m off that shit,” she said. “And I’ve been off it.” She shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her overalls and cocked one hip out to the side. “And don’t you worry how I make my money, Officer. I got talents and I use them, just like any other God-fearing American.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes on the stealing,” Maureen said.

  “Just like you, Officer,” Dice said. “I do what’s necessary to survive.”