Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Funny,” Quinn said. “I never figured you for a dancer. Who do you go with?”

  Maureen shrugged as an answer. She went out alone, though she sometimes didn’t go home alone. She wasn’t telling Quinn any of that; she’d already told him too much. That thing about the Spotted Cat was stupid. Maureen’s cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She grabbed it, grateful for the distraction. She checked the number. Atkinson. No doubt she’d heard about the similar murder. Maureen knew she was that on point. Bit of a difference, Maureen thought, between her and that tool Drayton. She let the call go to voice mail. She didn’t want to talk to Atkinson around Quinn and Ruiz. She didn’t like feeling that way, but there it was, a strong signal from her gut.

  “Listen to me,” Quinn said. “Maybe you and I should talk about last night.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Quinn raised his hands. “It’s no big thing, it’s not. It’s just that after you left, Preacher kind of squashed taking Gage to jail.”

  “Squashed?” Maureen asked. “What do you mean squashed?”

  “We had the woman. We had the stolen goods. You did good work.”

  “The guy was a witness,” Maureen said. “At the very least. At worst he was dangerous. I didn’t like him. I told Preacher that at the time. You never even ran his record, did you? I could’ve been right about him. We could’ve put a real threat back out on the street.”

  “He ain’t dangerous no more,” Quinn said.

  “Really? That’s what you have to say.”

  “We didn’t have anything serious on him. He was useless baggage, Cogs. Best possible outcome, you ask me. Look forward, think ahead. You fill a case file with a bunch of random drunken white-trash bullshit, you think anybody important appreciates it? You think the DA’s office wants a case like that? There aren’t enough PDs for the killers and dealers already locked up. Think about it. People remember, Cogs. Lawyers, judges, brass, they remember people who make their jobs more difficult. People who muck up the works.”

  “So that fairy tale about him bonding out so quick?”

  “Don’t get mad at Rue,” Quinn said. “He didn’t think we should bring you into it. He was covering for me. He was being a good partner.”

  “I can’t believe you let me stand there and tell Drayton stuff that wasn’t true.”

  “Good thing he ignored you,” Quinn said. “And I pulled you out before it got worse.”

  “Fuck you, Quinn. And the pickup truck?”

  “Gage drove away in it, far as I can tell.”

  “We never got a decent look around inside it,” Maureen said.

  “Looking for what?” Quinn asked. “What are we gonna find? You pulled him over because he was a dirty white boy. What we got on him was dirty white boy bullshit. Who knew some crazy other shit like this would fucking happen? I could see this coming, I’d be down in Jackson Square with a bunch of pretty rocks conning the fucking tourists. And this murder would’ve happened anyway. What Rue said about the bond is true, you know that. You know the rules if anyone does. Gage would’ve been out by tonight. No doubt. He’d be dead anyway, even if we had arrested him. It was out of our hands the whole time.”

  “I have to tell Drayton about Leary,” Maureen said.

  “Do you?”

  “Christ, Quinn, they were together the night before Gage was murdered. According to her they had sex. You don’t think that’s relevant? Worth looking into?”

  “You dealt with her,” Quinn said. “You really think she’s relevant to this? Did Gage express any real concern or interest in her? You think she’s anyone’s lover? That she’d be helpful or credible in any way? She’s the one who got locked up. She’s in jail. She’s got a better alibi than us, for chrissakes. C’mon.”

  “I’m not saying she’s the killer,” Maureen said. She didn’t see the point of correcting Quinn concerning Leary’s whereabouts. “But she’s a person of interest.”

  “Only to you. Save yourself the trouble. And think about if you wanna waste Drayton’s time with that dirtbag Leary. Use that busy brain of yours to make less trouble for once. That broad was some local hustler skank he talked into the truck for a five-dollar blow job. We both seen worse.”

  “I’m not having it come back on me,” Maureen said, “that I had info a detective could have used and I held it back. I’m not taking that weight.”

  Quinn lit a cigarette. “Preacher was rank on scene. He said squash the thing, so we did. No paperwork, no nothing, you know what I mean? You can’t bring Leary into it without putting Preacher in, too. We can all be in this mess, or we can all be clear of it. How is this even a hard decision for you? Why is this conversation ongoing?”

  “Why would Preacher do that? What’s he care about Clayton Gage?”

  “You got me,” Quinn said. “We were following orders. Me and Rue, we’re covered. You, too, I’m sure. Talk to Preacher if you got a problem with the way it played out.”

  “I will,” Maureen said.

  “Good luck with that. Don’t forget that he agreed to send you here tonight. You don’t think it was ’cause he knew we should have this exact conversation? Maybe he wanted you on board with us when this case, and Gage’s name, started making the rounds? You got a good rep going around the district. Here’s some free advice: don’t blow it over low-rent dirtbags.”

  “Is that a threat, Quinn?”

  “It is what it is. I don’t understand why you’re so hostile. We’re only trying to help you out.” Quinn leaned close to Maureen, “Listen, I’m gonna remind you of something important here. Don’t throw Preacher under the bus with Drayton. You’ll come out of that the worst. Going over your duty sergeant’s head will look bad. And I know you got this teddy bear image of him ’cause he was your training officer and he smoothed some things over for you so you could get out of field training with a clean record. He’s done it before. He’s a pro. He knows how to look good. But fuck with the guy’s livelihood and you can enjoy a new career being a meter maid in Houston. He’s got juice up and down the ladder. He’s a player. We’ve all known him longer than you. We all know him better than you. Believe it.”

  “Gimme a little credit, Quinn. I’m not that hotheaded. I’m not a rat. I know I owe the guy. I know I’m better off on his good side.”

  “Nobody’s trying to hurt you,” Quinn said. “I swear. This guy Gage doesn’t get offed, none of us are even talking about last night. We’re friends. We’re a team. We had us a minor miscommunication. Nothin’ to it. Remember that.”

  “The note from Gage’s wallet?” Maureen asked.

  “What note?”

  “I’m gonna remember this, Quinn,” Maureen said.

  “You should,” Quinn said. “Trust me on this, Cogs. I’m looking out for you. For all of us. Forget any ideas about connecting Heath and Gage. Don’t cross Preacher, don’t cross people like the Heaths, and you’ll have a good life in this town. They do more good than harm. A lot more good. Trust me for a little while. I’ll prove it to you.”

  They watched as Drayton headed their way.

  “I’m sure this douche canoe has cracked the case by now, anyway,” Quinn said. “Without our help.”

  “Colligan,” Drayton called out.

  “Seriously?” Quinn said, eyebrows raised.

  “That’s the third different one,” Maureen said, shrugging. “Collins, Costigan, Colligan. At least they’re all Irish, I’ll give him that.”

  “The ID on the stiff, give it to me again,” Drayton said.

  He hadn’t asked for it a first time, Maureen thought, but she let it go. She glanced at Quinn. “Clayton Gage. Thirty-six years old. LaPlace address on his driver’s license. Could be old, though. The license is expired. ID’s in his wallet.”

  “You went through his wallet?” Drayton asked.

  “You didn’t?” Maureen replied.

  “So what the fuck’s he doing in New Orleans?” Drayton asked Quinn. “Let’s start there.”

  “Saints game yes
terday,” Quinn said. “Party trip into town.” The quickest glance at Maureen. “It’s a possibility.”

  “So he gets from alive yesterday in the Dome,” Drayton said, “to dead tonight outside F and M’s. How’s that happen?”

  Maureen studied her shoe tops. Think about Preacher, she told herself. She was wary of both Quinn and Ruiz after the past two days, but Preacher she trusted. If he’d asked for a favor from Quinn and Ruiz, he had his reasons. Couldn’t be smart, she thought, helping Drayton at Preacher’s expense. And there was no helping Gage now. Any connection between the Cooley and Gage murders was for the detectives to investigate. Atkinson certainly didn’t need her help and Drayton clearly didn’t want it. Why make useless noise? And how could Preacher know Gage would turn up dead? The guy did keep questionable company. Going by his wallet, Gage’s life’s pursuits were strippers and guns, and if he was connected to Cooley, maybe much worse. Maybe the real mystery was not that he’d been murdered, but how he’d survived as long as he had. And maybe Quinn was right. Maybe Heath and Leary had nothing to do with any of this. Maureen didn’t quite believe that, though, and she was pretty sure Quinn and Ruiz didn’t, either.

  11

  In response to Atkinson’s message, Maureen met the detective at the St. Charles Tavern, a grungy twenty-four-hour corner restaurant on St. Charles Avenue in the Lower Garden District, and the closest thing Maureen had found in her police district to the Staten Island diners she haunted back in her waitressing days.

  The setup of the place was simple: a big square room with a scarred and dirty linoleum floor, a low ceiling, and bad lighting that turned everyone’s skin yellow, though some blamed the food for that. A bar crowned by silent TVs and neon beer signs stood against the right-hand wall. Video poker machines huddled against the back wall and a jukebox glowed in one corner. No matter the time of day or night she was in there, the air smelled of old kitchen grease, moldy air-conditioning, and cheap ketchup. The dim tavern was popular with night shift folk, Maureen’s kind of people, with service industry workers, cabdrivers, cops and firefighters and EMTs, the occasional Uptown insomniac hunched over a paperback or a crossword puzzle. Most nights, a few tourists wandered through on their way home from the Quarter to the St. Charles Avenue hotels, looking to satisfy their late-night drunken munchies.

  That night, as Maureen sat eating with Atkinson, three cabbies huddled close together at the bar, chattering in a guttural Middle Eastern language Maureen didn’t know, throwing hostile glares at her table. Earlier that night, a fellow driver had been pistol whipped and robbed out in Gentilly. They resented the fact, Maureen figured, that she was in the tavern eating instead of out hunting for the assailant or protecting the next potential victim. Two ambulance crews in uniform, young, clean, and loud, surrounded a big table in the back.

  At a nearby table, a group of tourists, their store-bought, out-of-season plastic beads draped in bunches around their sweaty necks, argued over whether or not it was appropriate to order Bloody Marys. The affirmative side argued that since it was now technically morning, Bloody Marys were the way to go. The negative side did not buy into the “it’s so late, it’s early” argument. Since they hadn’t been home yet, the counterargument went, it was still “last night” and Blood Marys were for, and only for, everybody knows, the morning after. Nobody suggested that everybody had had enough to drink already.

  Atkinson smiled at the argument, shaking her head, her curly blond hair falling about her cheeks and shoulders in chaos as usual, the sleeves of her shirt rolled up over her muscled forearms to avoid the gravy into which she dipped her mushy, thick-cut French fries and her rubbery fried shrimp. “You used to cocktail, Coughlin. You have an opinion on this great debate we can’t help but overhear?”

  “Negative,” Maureen said. “I try to tune it out.”

  She’d ordered her usual: a bowl of pungent gumbo with two fried eggs on the side and a bottomless cup of black coffee. She drowned the eggs in Louisiana Red Dot, dipping the fork-cut slices into the gumbo. For a late-night hole-in-the-wall, the tavern had killer seafood gumbo, at least according to her limited experience, with a dark roux and always half a crab’s jointed legs poking out. She wondered what their secret was. Probably never cleaning the gumbo pot. One day she’d learn to make it. She’d do it the old-fashioned way, where the roux was hand stirred for hours. As a practice in patience and delayed gratification, she told herself. As a practice in commitment. Maybe she could get Patrick to give her a recipe. She had a real kitchen now. She could do those things. Or maybe she could call him up, invite him over, fuck him without the bullshit pretense that embarrassed them both, and get the recipe off the Internet. Maybe she should forget about Patrick altogether. It was going nowhere, had already gone nowhere; they’d been hooking up as exes for longer than they’d been dating. She could head off that humiliating and inevitable moment when he stopped answering her texts. It was coming. She could feel it. She pushed her food away and reached for her coffee mug. The tavern also served their coffee the way she liked it, old and burned. Or as she liked to tell her coworkers, hot, black, and bitter like her heart.

  “Earth to Maureen,” Atkinson said. She dipped a shrimp in her gravy, held it dripping over the bowl. “So what was it Drayton called you?”

  “A girl,” Maureen said. “Your girl, to be precise.”

  “And this bothered you?”

  “I know, right?” Maureen said. “Not his associating me with you. But the word girl?” She blew out a long breath. “Normally, I’m not like that.” She raised her hands. “I admit, I’m still getting used to every other person around here, man or woman, calling me baby and honey and sweetie, but I get it’s a local habit. It’s not personal. And I guess I’m a feminist or whatever, but I never got hung up on bad vocabulary, on whether I was a girl or a woman or a lady. It was pointless and a waste of energy, considering the places I worked.

  “And I don’t make a big deal of it on the job, when it happens. Every now and then one of the older guys calls me dear or missy. Who cares? Think of what I get called on the street.”

  Atkinson raised her right hand. “Been there, bought the T-shirt.”

  “Exactly.” Maureen wrinkled her nose, as if a bad smell had drifted up from under the table. “But something about him, about the way Drayton said the word, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up—and not in a good way.”

  “You’re not the first to have that reaction to him,” Atkinson said. “Give him as wide a berth as you can. He’s got a rep for scapegoating the rank and file when his cases go south, which, you may imagine, happens fairly often. Keep me in the loop. I don’t know what I can do, but … with the similarities you saw to the Magnolia Street killing, I may want to take this one from him.”

  “How’s Drayton going to feel about that?” Maureen asked.

  “As long as we keep it quiet, he and I,” Atkinson said, “and protect his ego, make it look like he’s doing me a favor, like he’s giving it to me and I’m not taking it from him, it won’t be a problem. Matter of fact, if the case doesn’t turn into a slam dunk in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, he’ll be only too happy to give it up. He might be calling me.” She paused. “Not the kind of thing I should really be sharing with a platoon officer, but there it is.” She dunked and ate another shrimp. “I heard you saw our boy Marques tonight. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about him.”

  Maureen slowly set down her fork. She shifted her eyes away from Atkinson. After weeks of what she felt was departmental failure to look out for the kid, a lot of people were interested in Marques tonight. “Do I wanna know why?”

  “Mother Mayor called me earlier,” Atkinson said. “She told me Marques showed up at home a couple of hours ago, perched on the handlebars of some dirty, bald-headed white girl’s bike, with his drum tucked under his arm, asking for change for a twenty. And telling her the whole situation was your idea. She was less than thrilled.”

  “That I kept her gr
andson out of jail?” Maureen rubbed at her temples. “That woman.”

  “Oh, come on,” Atkinson said. “You’re gonna act surprised Marques didn’t tell his grandmother he got arrested? She said Marques told her he had to help you out with something on Frenchmen Street, and that’s why he was coming home so late. So now she’s thinking we’re the reason he keeps sneaking out of the house, that we’re encouraging it, and dangling him out there as bait for Bobby Scales. She’s talking about calling my boss. And yours. And her city council rep. And the mayor.”

  Maureen shook her head. “Good Lord.”

  “You want to tell me what really happened?”

  Maureen told the story about picking up Marques at the Eighth District, about their trip to Frenchmen, and about how she had to leave in a hurry to help with the body on Lyons Street on Preacher’s orders. For the time being, she left out running into Quinn and Ruiz outside the Eighth District and their open hostility to Marques, though she would’ve liked Atkinson’s input. Any concerns she had about her fellow officers had to go through Preacher first. Preacher knew Atkinson had taken Maureen under her wing, and he liked and respected her. But Maureen knew that wouldn’t stop him from resenting her taking squad problems outside the squad. Quinn and Ruiz would like it even less. Atkinson herself would notice the breach in protocol. Maureen didn’t want to undermine Atkinson’s trust or confidence in her.

  “That kid kills me,” Atkinson said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe we oughtta forget about looking out for him and hire him to work for us.”

  “I’ll stop by his grandmother’s place,” Maureen said, “or over by Roots of Music rehearsal tomorrow and straighten him out.”

  “Don’t waste your time,” Atkinson said, chuckling. “If he’s not listening to his grandmother, no way he’s listening to one of us, even you, OC. Besides, what’re you gonna tell him that he doesn’t already know? That he didn’t do what was smart, he didn’t do what he was told, he didn’t do what he promised you he’d do, but things turned out okay anyway. Where have I heard that story before?”