The three of them sat together in silence for a while, the serene picture of the family they almost were, watching the tourists and street performers on the sidewalk and across the street in Jackson Square. Maureen wondered briefly what it might be like to work down here in the Eighth District instead of uptown in the Sixth. That was another exciting thing about Homicide; it was a citywide department. She’d see it all from there—if and when she got that shield. Get ahead of yourself much? she thought, grinning. You’re only hours out of the academy.
Their server bustled back to the table, the three coffees in foam cups and two plates of three beignets balanced on a plastic tray. The woman set everything down and named the price. Maureen had her wallet at the ready, but Waters was faster. He handed the server a twenty, saying, “No change.”
The server tucked the bill in her apron, gave a short, curt bow, and walked away.
“You’re welcome,” Amber said.
“Nicely done,” Maureen said to Waters.
He plucked a beignet from the stack, powdered sugar falling on the table. He tore it in half, steam rising from its soft, honey-colored insides. “I’m learning.”
“Does smell good,” Amber said. Using her fingertips, she turned a beignet by its corners on the plate, trying to avoid creating the same splash of powdered sugar that now adorned the front of Waters’s Hawaiian shirt.
“You can’t fight it, Ma,” Maureen said. “It’s part of the fun.”
She grabbed a beignet, shook it once, then tore off half in her mouth, spraying her face and the front of her uniform shirt with bright white sugar.
“All over your nice new uniform,” Amber said.
“I didn’t become a cop to stay clean.”
Waters chuckled as Maureen chewed her mouthful of hot pastry. Amber couldn’t help herself and smiled. “Even as a little girl, you always were half a mess.”
Maureen warmed up inside, as if she had a big bellyful of beignet; the casual insult from her mom was worth the smile that came with it. Considering what they’d been through together, and apart, sharing this table was no small miracle. Maureen took what she could get and was grateful when it came to her mother. The sugar tickled the inside of her nose and she thought she might sneeze. With the back of her hand under her nose to temper the itch, Maureen rose from her seat. A memory from not as long ago as it felt rose to her mind, a time when a different white powder tickled her nose. She felt glad and relieved those days were behind her in both miles and time. Right now was much, much better.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” Maureen said. “Lemme clean up a bit. I’ll show you the Moonwalk along the river.”
“It’s broad daylight,” Amber said.
“No, the guy who’s mayor now,” Maureen said, “his father, Moon Landrieu, used to be mayor. It’s named after him.”
“New Orleans had a mayor,” Amber said, “named Moon.” She looked at Waters, who chewed a mouthful of beignet.
Maureen realized her mom, though it was unintentional, did a quite respectable version of an incredulous middle-aged black woman. Maybe it was a universal mother thing, Maureen thought, or a middle-aged-woman look of knowing disdain that she herself would do well to master, considering her new line of work.
Waters finally got his mouthful down. “New York had a mayor named Lindsay,” he said, struggling to suppress a grin.
“Lindsay was his last name,” Amber said, nostrils flaring, her voice rising. She caught her breath when she realized she’d been baited. “The two of you. God give me strength.”
This sharp playfulness between Nat and her mother was new to Maureen. They’d always been sweet to each other, but there was an edge now, a charge. Maureen knew what it meant; they’d finally started sleeping together. She was relieved and proud and nervous and a little uncomfortable. Probably what Amber would feel, Maureen thought, if her daughter ever landed a decent partner and shared a bed with him on a regular basis. Amber grabbed her purse and moved to get up. Maureen set a light hand on her mother’s shoulder, keeping her in her seat.
“Ma, earlier this afternoon I was declared fit to police the mean streets of New Orleans. I don’t need my mother coming with me to the restroom.”
Purse on her lap, Amber raised her hands in surrender, slumping her shoulders. “Fine, fine. God forbid I have to go to the bathroom myself.”
“Do you?” Maureen asked.
“No.”
“Okay, then.” Maureen leaned down and kissed her mom on the head. “I’ll be back in a minute. Save me one, at least.”
“I’m not making any promises,” Waters said. “This is a tough city.”
Maureen wove her way through the tourists and the tables and out the back entrance of the patio, over by the to-go window. She headed along the cobblestone path toward the restroom. The line for the women’s room stretched out of the building. Maureen took her place on the end, behind a tall woman in a wide sun hat. The woman gave Maureen a polite grin as she looked her up and down, noting the uniform. Maureen straightened her shoulders, puffed out her chest.
“Military school?” the woman asked.
Maureen leaned forward a few inches, forcing her lips into a smile. She tapped the blue-and-gold patch on her sleeve. “Police academy, ma’am. I graduated today.”
“Congratulations, dear,” the woman said. “Though I have to say, I’d have thought you needed to be bigger to be a police officer.”
Before Maureen could answer, a sharp, high-pitched scream echoed inside the bathroom, followed by gasps and the sounds of a struggle. No one in line moved, but several ladies glanced at one another and leaned forward, trying to peek into the building. Maureen stepped out of line and moved for the doorway. For a moment, she thought some drunken dope had wandered into the wrong bathroom. Instead, a stick figure of a young woman in torn-up black clothes stumbled out, a big black purse wrapped in her tattooed arms. She collided with two women in the line.
The young woman regained her balance and turned to run into an alley behind the nearby shops, watching the bathroom doorway over her shoulder. Before she could get up to speed, Maureen stepped into her path, her left arm tight to her side. She bent her knees, lowered her shoulder, and threw a block on the purse snatcher that would’ve brought the Superdome crowd to their feet. The air she’d knocked from the thief’s lungs hit her face. It stank like bad wine. The other woman hit the ground hard, the back of her head striking the cobblestones with an audible thud, her buzz cut not cushioning the impact. The purse flew from her arms, contents spilling in every direction.
At the sound of her name from behind her, Maureen turned and saw Waters trotting in her direction. People from Café du Monde gathered by the fountain and the take-out window. Like zombies, people wandered out of the trinket and T-shirt shops, blinking in the sunlight. Some took pictures.
Peering over Waters’s shoulders, she couldn’t find her mother in the crowd. Street crime, Maureen thought, live and in living color. Absolutely the last thing she wanted her mother to see before heading back to New York. Maureen knew her mom had cultivated careful illusions about her daughter’s career, despite the fact that she’d been the one to pin badge number 1412 on Maureen’s uniform at graduation. She looked down.
“Thanks for fucking nothin’.”
She rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath, trying to calm down before anyone in a uniform, anyone else in a uniform, showed up to commandeer the situation. The purse snatcher groaned, rolling onto her side. Maureen squatted, placing her hand firmly on the back of the woman’s neck, squeezing.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” the skinny woman said.
“You should stay where you are, miss,” Maureen said. “You fell and you may have suffered an injury. Someone will be along shortly to assist you.”
Waters arrived at her side, breathing hard. Sugar coated his fingertips. He was trying not to laugh. “You gotta be kidding me. Already?”
“She ran right at me,” Maureen said. “What w
as I supposed to do?”
The wild-eyed owner of the purse, holding it tight to her chest, ran up to Waters. “Thank you so much. That scumbag scared the hell out of me. He jumped out of the stall like a crazy person.”
“It’s a woman,” Maureen said. “And it was me that caught her.”
The thief made to sit up. Maureen set her hand on the small of the woman’s back and held her down. The thief uncorked a barely discernible rant about fascism and oppression into the pavement. The victim, confused, looked at Maureen, then back at Waters.
“Aren’t you the crossing guard?” she asked.
“This isn’t even my district,” Maureen said.
An enormous coal-black cop in uniform emerged from the crowd and approached Maureen and Waters. The big cop smiled while shaking his head at the woman lying at Maureen’s feet.
“Dice,” the cop said. “Another day, another dollar, huh? How did I know it’d be you on the other end of this? What would I do with myself without you and your junkie bullshit to clean up after? Where are all your junkie friends at now? Waiting for you to show up with your score?”
From the ground, Dice said something Maureen couldn’t hear. The big cop didn’t hear it, either. He ordered Dice, whom he addressed more like an unruly child than a criminal, to get up and take a seat on the edge of the nearby fountain and not move. The woman continued grumbling but complied with the big cop’s orders, straightening her tattered clothes and her pocket chains, muttering to no one, finally sitting on the fountain’s edge with her hands between her knees and her head down.
Two more officers, a short white man and a rotund black woman with a blond crew cut, came around the back of Café du Monde, shouldering their way through the crowd, which had now thinned at the officers’ loud insistence that the cameras disappear or be confiscated, or end up in the river. Not far away, loud hip-hop music announced the start of another acrobat performance up the street. On to the next attraction, Maureen thought.
None of the three cops, Maureen noticed, was in any kind of hurry to apprehend Dice. The cops resembled office workers gathering early for a notoriously boring weekly meeting. Maureen had the strange feeling they were mad at her for mucking up their afternoon. One of them was going to get stuck with the paperwork. If they arrested anyone. Maureen had yet to see a set of handcuffs.
The giant cop finally noticed her uniform. He frowned at her, noticed the silver numbers pinned to her lapels.
“You’re from the Sixth?” he asked. “I know you?”
“Starting on Monday,” Maureen said. “Maureen Coughlin. Just graduated today.”
“You saw what happened, Coughlin of the Sixth?”
“Dice snatched a purse in the ladies’ room,” Maureen said. “The vic, this lady over here, said she’d been hiding in a stall. God only knows how long she was in there. I knocked her over when she came running out.”
“You knocked her over?”
“Yo, she lit that dirty bitch up, yo.”
A white kid, gym-buff and maybe twenty years old, in low-slung plaid shorts and a white tank, his white LA Dodgers hat turned to one side, bounced out of the crowd. “That shit was fire, yo. Pow!”
The big cop raised his hand. “Dial it down, Kid Rock.”
The kid rolled back-and-forth-back-and-forth, heel-to-toe-heel-to-toe in his big white sneakers, his steady motion almost hypnotic. Maureen recognized that particular stimulant-driven rhythm. “I’m just sayin’. I saw it. I can give a statement and shit, if I can give it to her.”
Maureen was ready to knock the kid down and search his pockets and his socks and sneakers. Her palms itched. They were damp. She’d find something on him: coke, meth, any number of expensive pills. The kid was that fearless kind of wired. The kind that made you not only feel too strong, but too smart, too slick, as well. She’d probably be doing him a favor, she thought. The way he was hopped up, he was going to end the night in an ambulance or a squad car anyway, depending on whether he was on the giving end or the receiving end of a beating.
“I got you,” the cop said to the kid. “Thanks for your input.”
“I got you,” the kid said to Maureen, backing away, one hand tucked under his chin, his other arm outstretched, index finger pointing in her direction. “I’m over at Coyote Ugly, when you’re ready to take that statement.”
Didn’t this punk see her uniform? Maureen wondered. Wasn’t she wearing the same uniform as the three other cops? A hundred profane retorts tumbled around in her head. But even if this joker didn’t seem aware of her dress blues, she had to remember who she was now. She could express herself, but she couldn’t let it fly like she had in the bars. “Tell it walking, Vanilla Ice. We got the witnesses we need. Thanks for your help and have a good day.”
Her sharp dismissal caught the kid by surprise, piercing and deflating his drug-induced illusion that he was charming. The insult and the mood shift it had produced flickered in his eyes. He palmed his crotch, leaned maybe four inches in Maureen’s direction, his chin stuck forward. It was enough. That lean caught the big cop’s attention. He loomed over Maureen’s shoulder like a rising wave.
“Have a good day,” he said, calm and kind as could be. “Sir.”
The kid said nothing, the strut blasted out of him. He backed away into the alley between the shops and was gone. That reaction, Maureen thought, that is real authority. It was worth more than any number of TV-ready wisecracks. She stepped out of the big cop’s shadow. It was then that Maureen finally spied her mother.
Amber stood at the back of the crowd, on the fringe of the scene, in the shadow of the striped awning, her dark glasses hiding her face, her hand covering her mouth. Maureen’s heart sank. This episode in the alley was the last thing she wanted her mother to witness before leaving New Orleans. Crime and criminals. This was Maureen’s life now. That’s what her mother was thinking. Maureen looked away from Amber, watching as the big cop turned to Waters.
“And you, sir?”
Waters put out his hand. The cop shook it.
“Nat Waters. NYPD, retired. I’m a friend of the officer’s here. Just down with her mother for the graduation. I got here after the perp had been subdued. With appropriate force, I would say.”
“Damn, probie,” the cop said. “This has got to be some kind of record. Graduated this afternoon, you said?”
“First in her class,” Waters said.
“Congratulations and welcome to the job.”
“Thanks. So you’ll call me if you need me?” Maureen said, drawing her shoulders back. “Coughlin, over at the Sixth.”
The big cop noticed the powdered sugar on her shirt. “Go back to your beignets and your nice family, Coughlin of the Sixth. We got this.”
16
Heading downtown over the Claiborne Avenue high-rise on her way to meet Atkinson, Maureen drove past the Superdome. Lit up with spotlights to show off its new metallic skin, the Dome looked like a brass-jacketed bullet that had flattened against a wall. Driving with the windows open, she smelled the crime scene before she saw it. Acrid smoke, burned plastic, like a trash fire. The source of the smell had to be her destination, unless the Central Business District was having an especially bad night and she was passing a fire on her way to a murder.
She closed in on the scene, taking the ramp back down to street level. Something organic and sour hung in the air, underneath the chemical smells. The odor was familiar, but Maureen couldn’t place it. She hoped the first idea that popped into her head, that someone had burned a body, was wrong. She hadn’t expected fire. Leaving her apartment, she’d assumed the call involved another shooting. Poor investigative technique, she knew, to make assumptions, but the gun was far and away the city’s most popular lethal weapon. Wherever she went, whatever the call, it was smart to anticipate a gun in the mix one way or another. She had hers in its leather holster, tucked in the back of her jeans.
She breathed in the tainted air again and wondered if crime scenes became like wines, ea
ch with their own smells and flavors—top notes, grace notes, and finishes. Girl, she thought, her own ideas making her queasy, you did not get out of the cocktail business quite fast enough.
As she descended the exit ramp, the crime scene materialized ahead on her left. The city used much of the long, narrow space under the overpass as an impound yard, the run of concrete slab intersected by narrow cross streets connecting the business district on one side of the highway to Mid-City on the other side. High fences topped with curving spikes boxed off and guarded the impound lots. A dark car parked in the middle of the scene, its four doors thrown open, was the focus of everyone’s attention.
Half a dozen cops in uniform, along with a handful of crime-scene techs in their NOPD windbreakers and plainclothes in shirtsleeves, milled about. Maureen cruised past. A couple of the uniforms threw blank glances her way. There was an ambulance, but no coroner’s van. She couldn’t tell whether the coroner had already left or hadn’t yet arrived.
Maureen made the right, turning off Claiborne onto Cleveland. She turned right again onto South Robertson, passing an island of buildings in a sea of empty parking lots: a small fire station, the bar called Handsome Willy’s, the one Atkinson had mentioned in her phone call, a pizza place, and an abandoned Vietnamese restaurant, its windows filthy and cracked. She parked on the street outside the bar. She killed the lights and the engine and got out of the car. She secured her gun at the small of her back.
Brass-band music blasted out into the night from the open door of the bar, carrying loud voices and laughter with it. The life in the music, the cheer in the voices, struck Maureen as incongruous with the desolate surrounding neighborhood.
At the end of the street, across Tulane Avenue, looming over a smaller, newer medical building, was the dark, empty hulk of the old Charity Hospital, a sprawling, bone-colored Art Deco complex that had flooded in the days after Katrina and had been left to rot in the years since the storm. Coming from her green and noisy neighborhood, Maureen felt like she’d walked onto a Gotham City movie set. Taking in the enormity of the Charity complex, she understood the serious acreage around her devoted to parking. Before the storm, the neighborhood had probably teemed with doctors and nurses and staff, with patients and visitors. Now the area reminded Maureen of a neglected graveyard surrounding the ruins of a giant spectral cathedral, maybe one like the abandoned church where she caught her breath on her runs.
The Devil in Her Way Page 13
