The Devil in Her Way

by Bill Loehfelm

  She staggered to her feet, panting, frowning at the grit and the blood on her hands.

  Instead of continuing on, the Escalade had stopped. So had the music.

  This oughtta be special, Maureen thought. Wait till this prick finds out I’m a cop. If he didn’t believe her now, she thought, she’d deliver some incontrovertible evidence down the road.

  The truck’s door didn’t open, but the driver’s side window rolled down. The odor of marijuana drifted from the truck and into the street like fog rolling into town off the river. A young man in aviator shades and a black ball cap turned to one side showed Maureen his profile. He wore a cowrie shell necklace. The whistler, the Bob Marley wannabe who’d corrected Marques at the Garvey Apartments. He rolled a toothpick around in his back teeth.

  “Little Girl Blue,” he said. “You need to let the little boys be. They’re looked out for. Don’t you worry none, ya heard? Write some tickets.”

  Maureen said nothing, instead trying to get a look at the whistler’s passenger. The boss never drove; it was a point of honor borrowed from the Mafia and the Irish mobs before them. If anyone in that truck was Bobby Scales, it was the passenger, who had his face turned away. All she could see was the back of a shaved head wreathed in smoke. There he was, only a few feet away from her, and she had nothing on her, no badge, no gun, not even her phone.

  “You don’t know who you’re fucking with,” Maureen said, loud enough for both men to hear her.

  “Yeah,” the whistler said. “I do. Do you know who you fucking with?” With a faint whine, the window started back up. “Have a nice day, Officer.”

  The SUV drove away, the bass pumping, as loud and steady as artillery fire.

  20

  By the time Maureen got back to her apartment, she was rubber-legged and dizzy.

  As soon as she was through the door, she stripped off her shirt, tossing it on the floor. She pounded down two tall glasses of room-temperature tap water while leaning a hip against the kitchen counter. She put on a pot of coffee and smoked a cigarette in front of the air conditioner, which now made a new noise. That couldn’t be a good thing. She looked at her cigarette. One day soon, her lungs were gonna start making new noises.

  She checked her phone for messages. Nothing from Atkinson, though Maureen wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Preacher had called half an hour before she’d returned home. Nice of him, Maureen thought, to be checking up on her. She called him back. He answered after a few rings.

  “Feeling better?” he asked. “I take it you were catching up on that much-needed sleep and that’s why you didn’t answer when I called.”

  “I am,” Maureen said. “I was.”

  She knew she should, but she couldn’t tell him about the run-in with the Escalade. She was supposed to be staying out of trouble. Plus, as long as the Escalade was her secret, she had options for the next time she saw it, whether she was in or out of uniform. Her elbow throbbed like a warning. “Thanks. Good looking out, Preach. I’m grateful.”

  “Not a problem,” Preacher said. “Though I am getting sick of explaining to everyone that you didn’t quit. I didn’t know anyone else had even noticed you being around.” She could hear him drag on his cigar. “That’s more on me than on you, by the way, that rumor about you quitting. So how soon can you get here?”

  Get here? Shit. She bent forward and started pulling at the laces of her running shoes. Wherever she was now going, she’d need a shower before she left. She needed to destroy the evidence that she hadn’t been home like she’d said. “Um, where is that?”

  A sigh. “Did my message not go through? I hate fucking voice mail. Push this, beep that.”

  “I didn’t even listen.”

  “Not a new thing for you, I’m guessing. I’m at the Mayan. Spry young thing like you, you’ve had enough sleep for now. You need to get here before I get a call. I’m sitting here with a couple things of interest to you.” He paused. “Look a little ill, in case anyone spots us.”

  “I’ll be there in ten,” Maureen said.

  “Make it seven,” Preacher said. “I’m a busy cop in a dirty town. Believe.”

  * * *

  Wearing jeans, her boots, and a tight black tank top, Maureen walked to the Mayan, having decided fighting for parking would take up as much time as walking. The sun felt good on her bare shoulders. After a couple of blocks she was glistening again, of course. She was starting to accept perspiration as a permanent condition of being outdoors in the summer. She dabbed at her throat and forehead with a bandana she had brought. She sipped from her water bottle. She was learning to handle the heat. Moving in it without the weight of the Kevlar or the equipment belt was pleasure enough to set her dreaming again of plainclothes work.

  She found Preacher in the tobacco shop courtyard, seated alone at a table, an extra button undone on his uniform. He had the day’s Times-Picayune spread out in front of him. His cruiser was parked in front of a fire hydrant. A lone Sixth District detective, his badge clipped on his belt, stood at one of the cocktail tables by the shop door. He puffed an enormous stogie while talking on a cell phone. If he noticed or recognized Maureen, he gave no sign.

  “Tight clothes look good on you,” Preacher said. “I thought I told you to look ill?”

  “Couldn’t live a day without me?” Maureen said, coming through the gate. She joined Preacher at the table.

  “Don’t know what the fuck to do with myself,” Preacher said. “I’m rudderless without you, Coughlin.”

  She gestured at the newspaper, the crossword half finished. “You seem to be managing.”

  “Despite everything you’ve done,” Preacher said, “to redefine what it means to be a trainee in this department, I do have a few tricks of my own.”

  He slid two files out from under the newspaper. Maureen wasn’t sure if he’d been hiding them or if he was being dramatic with his presentation. “Your boy Mike-Mike, the prints came back from his corpse. He was in the juvie system.”

  “He had a record?”

  “Brief and unspectacular. On the other hand, he was thirteen years old.” He reached the file across the table. “The particulars on the late Michael Travis Pilgrim.”

  Maureen took the file. She lit a cigarette, opened the file, scanned it.

  Shoplifting, truancy, trespassing. Everything from the past eighteen months. So Michael had started fucking up recently and had tumbled downhill fast. Shit, she thought, my file wouldn’t be any different if I’d been put through the system at his age instead of given slaps on the wrist and rides home to my mother. She didn’t know it then, but being a little lost white girl had its advantages. She read on. As the charges on Mike-Mike got more recent, they got more serious. Accessory after the fact in an armed robbery. A weapons charge from a separate incident, possession of a stolen gun.

  She closed the file, trying to piece some things together. The pattern wasn’t hard to see. After a few misadventures he should have outgrown, Mike-Mike had hooked up with more serious criminals who had led him, used him, and she was sure, finally, had killed him, discarding him under the overpass. Mike-Mike had watched someone wield a gun and liked what he saw. He’d then gone out and got a gun for himself. Who was it, she wondered, that he’d first watched on the accessory charge? Someone older. Someone intimidating and dominant. An alpha. Had that same person put him up to murdering Norman Wright, only to throw him away like an empty shell casing when the job was done?

  “It says here he was living in Baton Rouge,” Maureen said.

  “Probably where his people landed after the storm. I think they got flushed out of the Magnolia and never made it back.” He shrugged. “And then that project and three others like it got torn down, of course. Maybe they’re on the waiting list for the new development. Maybe not. Maybe they stopped trying to get back.”

  “So he’s a runaway?”

  “Oh, they probably sent him back here, to the old neighborhood. They knew he was here. Bought his bus ticket.
Maybe got him a ride with a friend of a friend.”

  “He was here alone? At his age? To live on the streets?”

  “That’s the story with a lot of these young knuckleheads,” Preacher said. “They’re living in exile with grandparents or cousins or whatever, cutting up in Atlanta or Houston or Baton Rouge. The other kids at school hate them ’cause they’re black, or they’re poor, or just ’cause they’re different and kids are cruel, and that’s if they even go to school.

  “Who knows who or where the fuck their real parents are, if the kids ever knew to begin with. The people they’re staying with get sick of the trouble, maybe they got real problems of their own—health, their own kids, money—so they send their Mike-Mikes back to New Orleans, to some other cousin or aunt or friend. To go to school, of course.” He put “go to school” in air quotes. “Most of ’em get an education, but it ain’t in school.”

  “I’m guessing he got sent here about a year and a half ago.”

  “You noticed that,” Preacher said. “No troubles till he got sent home. We’re reaching out to Baton Rouge PD, see if they got anything on him.”

  Maureen closed the file. “So who was Mike-Mike living with here?”

  Preacher handed over the other file. “He was living with one Todd Goodwin Curtis, as far as we can tell. Known to friends, family, the Sixth District, the Eighth District, the Second District, and several officers and judges of the New Orleans juvenile justice system as Goody.”

  Maureen opened the file. Another mug shot clipped to another criminal record. He looked familiar enough. It was the taller, older kid from when she’d accosted Norman Wright. The bossy one, to go with Marques, the quiet one, and Mike-Mike, the dumb one. Goody was nearly fifteen. His record was considerably more violent than Mike-Mike’s: numerous assaults with and without weapons, armed robbery, other weapons charges, drugs. Maureen felt she was looking at the future Mike-Mike would’ve had, and the one Marques was approaching, should he survive his entanglements with Bobby Scales.

  “So Goody and Mike-Mike are related?” Maureen asked.

  “In some distant and meaningless way, probably. The definition of family gets stretched in this town, especially in the tougher neighborhoods. They might’ve known each other, been friends before the storm.”

  “I feel like I’m looking at things I shouldn’t be seeing. How did you get this file, these names?”

  “Like I said, Michael’s prints came up in the system. That gave us his name. And then I asked for any other file with a name that came up more than twice alongside Michael’s. Kids are creatures of habit, maybe even more than adults. They got busted together three times, Goody and Mike, the last time for riding around on bikes, sticking up tourists right here in Uptown, over by the B and Bs on Marengo. They were using a stolen gun.”

  Preacher tried relighting the stub of his cigar, but it wouldn’t take. “I wouldn’t say Mike-Mike was harmless. He might be one to pull a trigger out of fear, but Goody, a record like that, he’s got the meanness in him. I don’t know how many people they stuck up before we caught ’em, but every one of those victims is lucky they didn’t eat a bullet.”

  Preacher stubbed out his cigar. He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “What you’re looking at, right there, with Mr. Curtis is a ring leader in training. And a time bomb, if you ask me. That’s one pissed-off little boy. He’s an alpha dog looking for a pack. He’s destined for the business end of a gun. That’s where his life is gonna end. It’s just a question of whether he’s doing the shooting or getting shot. I don’t need no child psychologist to tell me that. Believe.”

  Maureen slowly closed Goody’s file and placed it side by side with Michael’s, their full names written in block letters in black ink. Some cop’s careful handwriting that didn’t look much better than what she figured the young boys would produce.

  “What’s it take to go to jail in this town?” Maureen asked.

  “If you’re a juvenile,” Preacher said, with a shrug, “murder one is a sure thing, but killing someone in any ol’ way is a good place to start. Anything that can get you tried as an adult, really.”

  “And for the kids who do everything but kill someone?”

  “Diversion programs.”

  “Diversion from what?” Maureen asked.

  “School, gainful employment, productive futures,” Preacher said. “At least that seems to be the end result, if not the desired effect. We got no place to put these kids. No room, no money. They stay on the street, where they can keep tearing apart their lives. Why do you think we’ve got twenty-year-old drug lords with twelve-year-old soldiers? The kids take the rap for everything.”

  Maureen wanted to slip the files back under Preacher’s newspaper, to hide them. From herself, and from everyone else. She wanted the boys in the files to be the boys that she’d first taken them to be on the street. It would be safer for them and a lot of other people to hear Preacher tell it. She would feel a lot less naïve and a lot less unprepared for her new career.

  A third file seemed inevitable. May as well get it over with. What crimes awaited them? Car theft? Bank robbery? Capital murder?

  “Marques?” Maureen asked.

  “No sign of him. Not in our records, anyway. That’s a very good thing. He’s either better behaved or slicker than the other two.”

  “I’m gonna choose to believe in better behaved,” Maureen said.

  “I had a feeling you might.”

  “And Bobby Scales? Do you see him anywhere in this? These kids had to get their guns from somebody.”

  Preacher shrugged and raised his hands. “Nothing on him on paper. Not a sign, not a word. I’m wondering if the guy’s a myth. Or a mask.”

  “Like an urban legend?”

  “More like a random name,” Preacher said. “A name somebody heard on TV, maybe. A stranger slips those kids some cash, says, ‘Tell anyone who asks that this car belongs to Bobby Scales and they better not fuck with it.’ Could be a game the kids were playing, to collect a little cashish and to mess with people in the neighborhood. Who knows who really owns that car? I wouldn’t count on anyone coming forward to claim it. Especially not now, not with a body in it.”

  “If it’s games,” Maureen said, “why kill Wright?”

  “We don’t know why Wright was killed. Remember that. And sometimes, most times, even, there’s not some criminal conspiracy at work.” Preacher set his hands on the table, frowning at them. He laced his fingers together. “Sometimes it’s just a whole bunch of stupidity going off at the same time in a real concentrated area. That happens. Especially in the summertime ’round here. Stupidity and fireworks.” He raised one hand in the air, sitting back in his chair. “But that’s what Atkinson gets paid the big bucks for, to find out who killed Wright.”

  “And who killed Mike-Mike.”

  Preacher nodded, hands now folded Buddha-like over his belly. “That, too.”

  “Speaking of Atkinson.” Maureen pressed one hand flat on each of the files. “I really should take these to her.”

  “That’s the next logical step,” Preacher said.

  Maureen waited for the unspoken “but” that she’d heard at the end of the sentence.

  “What?” Preacher said. “You don’t think I’m going to interfere with the detective sergeant’s investigation, do you? You don’t think I want to be associated with a trainee who can’t get the job done? Didn’t she ask you to find out who these kids are in the first place?”

  “She did.”

  “But don’t think I’m delivering these files over to Homicide myself. I ain’t got time to go downtown. I’m a busy man. I don’t get extra bonus days off, like some other people.”

  Maureen fought back a smile. Preacher was hooking her up, sending her over to Homicide with important information, really making her look good in front of Atkinson.

  “You know what they call her, don’t you?” Preacher asked, as if reading her mind. “Atkinson?”

  “I ca
n only imagine,” Maureen said. “And I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

  “The Spider,” Preacher said.

  “Oh, please,” Maureen said, standing. She couldn’t wait to call Atkinson. How could she be losing patience with Preacher, in the middle of what he was doing for her? She tucked her pack of cigarettes in her pocket. “Is it because she weaves elaborate theories about her cases, or is it something more traditionally sexist, like she devours her mates?”

  “If she mates at all,” Preacher said, “nobody knows who with. I never asked.” He chuckled. “They call her the Spider because she’s patient. She sits and she waits and she waits some more and what she’s after always seems to come to her.”

  He lifted his chin, eyed Maureen down the bridge of his nose. “Don’t forget your files.”

  21

  Maureen walked Preacher to the cruiser, made a promise to see him bright and early and ready to go in the morning. One day left. Whatever he wanted, she would do. Everything between them needed to be super smooth. When her training ended, she was going to miss their relationship. Not that she wouldn’t see him around the district, but things wouldn’t be the same. She trusted him to be straight with her about important things. She certainly knew him better than she knew anyone else on the NOPD. She hoped that after her training ended she’d be able to reach out to him, for advice, for a few laughs.

  From behind the steering wheel, Preacher called Maureen over to the car. She leaned in the passenger side window, forearms across the top of the door. Not getting in the car with him felt strange.

  “Anything breaks around the neighborhood today,” Preacher said, “and I’ll let you know.” He started the car. “I’ll put the lean on Little E, too. I get a feeling I won’t see those kids, but him I guarantee I’ll see. Maybe he knows a thing or two. He will, if he knows what’s good for him.”

  “I appreciate that, Preach, and the hookup with the files, too.”