The Devil in Her Way

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Waiting to hear from the coroner,” Atkinson said. “He wasn’t shot, though, which is interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about him.” She frowned at Maureen. “I knew there was a reason I wanted you out here with me. Stay right there. Don’t move.”

  After a quick side-to-side check for oncoming traffic, Atkinson backed a few steps away from Maureen. “Raise your right arm.”

  Maureen did so, as if asking a question in class. She searched her brain for what Atkinson was after; she wanted to figure it out without being told. She hoped the pigeons overhead had concluded their business. “Okay?”

  “No, no, I’m sorry. Out in front of you, like you’re raising your weapon.”

  Maureen made a pistol of her fingers then lowered her arm. Her back straight, she bent her knees slightly and rotated into a shooting stance. She settled her pretend pistol into her other hand, standing as she would at the range. She lined up Atkinson in her sights, surprised at how uncomfortable she was with pretending to shoot at another cop.

  “Hold the gun with one hand,” Atkinson said. “And lean away from it a bit. Really stretch your arm toward me.”

  Maureen started to catch on. She followed Atkinson’s instructions, positioning her body as if she feared the explosion about to take place in her hand.

  “Good.” Atkinson tapped her finger under her left collarbone. “Here.” She touched her throat. “And here.”

  Maureen closed one eye and raised her arm to line up the shot.

  Atkinson broke into a wide, brilliant smile. “That’s what I was looking for.”

  “I thought you said Mike-Mike wasn’t shot.”

  “Not Mike-Mike, Norman Wright.”

  “The shooter,” Maureen said, peering over her outstretched arm, the lightbulb going on, “was shorter than Wright. You think Mike-Mike was the shooter.”

  “The bullets that killed Wright,” Atkinson said, “had an upward trajectory. Whoever shot him was looking up at him. And shot him from close range.”

  “So it was probably someone he knew.”

  “Or at least recognized,” Atkinson said, “and had no reason to fear. Someone who could walk right up to him.”

  “Like a kid from the neighborhood,” Maureen said. “Damn.”

  “It adds up,” Atkinson said. “The small-caliber weapon, the upward angle, the easy access to the victim. I’ll put a hold on releasing the body. We can test Mike-Mike’s hands for gunfire residue. I’m pretty confident we’re going to find it.”

  She called in her orders to the coroner’s office. They stepped up onto the sidewalk as a car passed by, an old, broken-down Nissan sedan, the bass booming behind the dark-tinted windows. Maureen knew she was being paranoid, but the song, though muffled and distorted, sounded like the same one that had been playing in the Escalade. As each bass note hit, Maureen felt herself flinch. She tried to keep her face blank as she listened to the detective.

  “Figuring this out doesn’t give us a suspect in Mike-Mike’s death,” Atkinson said, raising her voice over the car as it waited to cross Claiborne, “but it gives us motive.”

  “A cover-up,” Maureen said, her eyes on the car, “of Wright’s murder. That points to a third party. Mike-Mike had orders.”

  The car rolled away, the volume fading. The car was a message, Maureen thought, it was a sign that she needed to tell Atkinson about the Escalade. Could she tell Atkinson without the story getting back to Preacher?

  “Somebody was confident we would catch the shooter,” Atkinson said, “and afraid of what he might say once we had him.” She grinned. “We’ve been getting better at that.”

  “But it opens a new investigation into a new murder,” Maureen said. “What’s the point of that?”

  “There’s only an investigation because we found the body,” Atkinson said. “Mike-Mike kills Wright over the car, for whatever reason, but most likely on someone else’s orders. That someone else kills Mike-Mike, puts him in the trunk and gets some other yo-yos to ditch the car. Bam, all the loose ends are tied off. But—and this is a big but—the yo-yos fucked up. We weren’t supposed to find the car or the body.”

  “The first time I saw Marques,” Maureen said, “wasn’t when I accosted Wright. It was at that domestic at the Garvey Apartments. He was in the area. He tried talking to me and Preacher.”

  “What did he say?”

  Maureen shook her head. “He didn’t get a chance to talk. Another kid, an older kid, whistled at him from across the street and Marques clammed up and walked away.”

  “This older kid, you think he’s involved? Based on a warning not to hang around near the cops? That’s thin.”

  “It’s more than that,” Maureen said. “I thought the guy might be Bobby Scales, until I saw him again, this afternoon, when I was out for a run. He and a buddy nearly ran me down with their Escalade.”

  “The guy driving the car, he knew who you were?”

  Maureen nodded.

  “So he knows you’re a cop,” Atkinson said.

  “He called me Little Girl Blue,” Maureen said. “Told me, warned me, to leave well enough alone.”

  Atkinson sighed. “We don’t scare people like we used to. It’s a fucking shame. What’s he look like?”

  “Dark skin,” Maureen said. “Hair up in twists, always decked out in Marley gear and shell jewelry. The car reeked of weed.”

  “Shadow,” Atkinson said. “I know that kid. Me and him, we go back. He’s probably twenty-one by now. He called me Little Girl Blue once. He thinks he’s funny. I broke his nose for him.”

  “He calls himself Shadow?” Maureen asked.

  “He got it from us,” Atkinson said. “I didn’t know he was doing business uptown. I know him from trouble over in the Sixth Ward a couple years ago. Haven’t heard from him in a while. I figured he’d got himself killed and we just hadn’t stumbled over the body yet.”

  “He was the driver,” Maureen said. “For another man in the car. I think that guy was Scales.”

  “That sounds right,” Atkinson said, nodding. “We called him Shadow because he was never the main guy, never the one we really wanted. He was always off to the side, against the wall somewhere while the real business was going down. I don’t know who started calling him that or how he found out about it, but he liked the name so much he kept it. You’re sure the passenger was Scales?”

  “It all stacks up,” Maureen said. “Goody is running Mike-Mike and Marques. Scales and Shadow are running Goody.”

  “Gimme a second to call in about the Escalade,” Atkinson said, holding up her phone. “It’s a pretty conspicuous vehicle. As for Shadow, I’m gonna name him as a person of interest in these murders. Because we need him in one piece, I’m going to leave out what he did to you. We can deal with that when we get him in a box.”

  “If you say so. Whatever you think is best.”

  “Maybe we can snatch up Shadow and Scales,” Atkinson said, “and put a stop to things this very afternoon.”

  While Atkinson was on the phone, Maureen walked a few steps away, to the other side of the overpass, Atkinson’s information rolling around in her head. She listened to the pigeons cooing and the traffic thumping overhead.

  She’d made assumptions about the young boys because of their age, though she’d been warned against that very mistake. An error not unlike, she thought, letting Arthur Jackson burst through his front door and land a punch. At every turn, what the boys appeared capable of only worsened. Marques had been at the scene of Jackson’s arrest and subsequent drug bust. Coincidence? Or was he on assignment, keeping tabs on the cops. The next day, while looking like kids on their way to the playground, Marques and his friends were in fact acting as lookouts in a criminal enterprise. But being a spy or a lookout was a long way from being a killer. Or was it? What did she really know? In a year and a half Mike-Mike had gone from lookout to killer to corpse.

  She turned and studied the intersection where the Plymouth had been found. She thought again of w
hat a terrible choice of location it was for dumping the car. She toed the edges of the burns in the street, thinking of the amateurish fire.

  The fire, it seemed to her, had been much more about destroying the car than disappearing the contents of the trunk. She wished they had the arson analysis. She knew it would show a common accelerant, something handy that could be scored at the last minute, and obtained without attracting attention: gasoline or kerosene, something easy to steal from around the neighborhood, from a car or an unlocked garage. Whatever it was, the fire starters hadn’t used enough of it. Not enough to disguise the most damning piece of the scene. Mike-Mike.

  His dead body, Maureen realized, was the only obstacle to her naming Marques and Goody as the car thieves and the fire starters. More precisely, her own squeamish feelings about the way the body had gotten there inhibited her conclusions. Marques and Goody could’ve killed Mike-Mike. They could’ve put him in the trunk and set the car on fire. They were physically capable of those actions. She couldn’t ignore the possibilities that she didn’t want to be true. What had Preacher called Goody? A time bomb. An alpha dog. He considered Goody capable of killing. And in the time they had spent together, Preacher had been wrong about very little, if anything.

  She’d assumed that the three boys were close friends, though when she stopped to think about it, she had seen no real evidence of this. She hadn’t, she noted, seen them together before or since that afternoon by the car. Marques had been alone in the playground when she’d talked to him. What if they were actors? Middle school business associates thrown together by a common task. Anyone watching Maureen and Atkinson have lunch at Handsome Willy’s would’ve assumed that the women were friends. Maureen knew they weren’t friends. They were two women who’d only just met, who would never have had lunch together if not for work, who might never again spend as much time in each other’s company, or talk as personally as they had today. What if she saw what the boys had wanted her to see, because they intuited by her new blue uniform and her white skin what she wanted? She felt a headache hatch at the base of her skull.

  “Is it possible that we’re overthinking this?” Maureen said.

  “How so?” Atkinson asked.

  “Well, I was thinking,” Maureen said, her ideas suddenly elusive, loose strands that she couldn’t capture and weave. “Well, wait a minute.”

  “Talk.”

  “What if,” Maureen began again, “what if instead of looking at some elaborate plan here, we’re looking at a string of mistakes and misjudgments, one fuckup after another, and that’s why the choices made here don’t seem to make any sense. Because they don’t. They’re not supposed to. Maybe it’s a stupidity explosion.”

  “Uh, okay. Keep going.”

  “Preacher’s been teaching me about the neighborhoods, about how tight and self-contained they are. That, for a lot of folks, if it hadn’t been for the storm they’d never have left New Orleans in their whole lives. That the ones who came back will probably never leave it again. That a trip to the Superdome or the Quarter is a major excursion.”

  She pointed back up Claiborne Avenue, toward the hospitals, back toward Central City.

  “For young kids living their lives in the same eight-, ten-block radius, we’re a long way down Claiborne. We’re far from home.” She shrugged. “Besides the fact, how far is a twelve-year-old driving a car going to get, even in the middle of the night? All the good places to dump a car, and a body, out in the east, or even down in the Ninth Ward, there’s no getting out there without driving on the highway, or taking some convoluted twisty route through half the neighborhoods in the city. No kids are gonna want to do either of those things, even if they’re capable. As soon as we put nervous kids behind the wheel of the Plymouth, everything starts to make sense.”

  “And the body in the trunk?” Atkinson asked.

  “I’m holding out hope,” Maureen said, “that Goody and Marques were only in charge of disposal, that they never knew it was in there.”

  Atkinson grinned at her. “Cling to that optimism, Coughlin. It’s misguided, but it’ll keep you showing up for work every day.”

  “You really think Goody and Marques killed him? And that they tried to dump the body?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Atkinson said, “and I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t you. Everyone else is on the list. Goody has an ugly record. He reads like a bully. Maybe he put Mike-Mike up to killing Wright.”

  Maureen lit a cigarette. “Middle School Murder, Incorporated. Christ Almighty.”

  “More than you bargained for?”

  Maureen knew that no was the correct answer. It was what she wanted to say. She got close. “Maybe. A little bit.”

  “This is it, this is the job,” Atkinson said. “You want that ugly feeling in your gut to be the tacos, but it’s not.”

  “It goes away?”

  Atkinson wrinkled her nose, as if catching a whiff of the feeling they were discussing. “Sometimes you don’t feel it as much.”

  “That’s not the same as it going away.”

  “No,” Atkinson said. “It’s not.”

  “But what possible motive could Mike-Mike or Goody have had? Or anyone, for that matter? Wright was a bum. Why kill him?”

  “He was a bum,” Atkinson said with a shrug. “Who’s gonna miss him?”

  “Kill him because there’s no reason not to?” Maureen said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Even if it’s just a bum, we, the police, still show up when a body drops. That’s got to be counterproductive to somebody’s agenda. I don’t like it.”

  “It’s proof you can pull the trigger,” Atkinson said, “and that you can take orders. It’s a way to prove yourself.”

  “Maybe Wright was a snitch?”

  “Not for Homicide,” Atkinson said. “I checked. Not that there weren’t plenty of other opportunities for him. Beyond him getting shot, any other reason to think snitch?”

  “He got kicked through the system awful fast the last time he got busted.”

  “Talk to whoever busted him that time,” Atkinson said. “Maybe they did him a favor.”

  “It was me. I arrested him last.”

  “And the next time you caught him fucking up?”

  “I talked to him,” Maureen said, “and then I let him go.”

  “Think about how that looks.”

  “No,” Maureen said. “He wasn’t mine. I would’ve told you that the night he was killed. I just got here. I don’t have anyone on the street. The neighborhood knows that. I was trying to cut the guy a break.”

  “Since you’d kicked someone’s ass the day before?”

  “It’s a give-and-take,” Maureen said. “That’s what Preacher told me. Pick when and where to be gung-ho and to look the other way. That next time I ran into Wright I was trying to give a little leeway, instead of running him off to jail.”

  “So you could ask for favors from him later.”

  “What? You don’t do it?”

  “All the time,” Atkinson said. “Relax. I’m not accusing you of anything. That’s the game.”

  “I can’t figure out the rules in this department.”

  “Nothing comes for free, especially from the cops. Pay now or later, but pay you will. That’s a rule of life, not the NOPD. The neighborhood knows that.”

  “I might have thought that later,” Maureen said, “but the only thing on my mind at the time was to cut the guy a break, do him a favor.”

  “You need one of those T-shirts,” Atkinson said.

  Maureen didn’t get it. “T-shirts? What kind of T-shirt?”

  “One from the Road to Hell Paving Company.” She checked her phone. “Not a bad start to a shift that hasn’t officially started yet. I’m pretty confident we got Wright’s killer. That’s one in the black.”

  “I wish we didn’t have him at the morgue.”

  “Me, too,” Atkinson said. “I do. And those other two boys. We need to track them down. Word is out by now that we found Mike-M
ike and the car. Scales will know. I don’t want those boys paying with their lives for this mistake.”

  “Preacher’s looking,” Maureen said. “One of us would’ve heard had he found something.”

  “Maybe I’ll put a call in to him anyway. Okay. I really have to go. The night shift awaits. I wish I didn’t have a dozen other cases to work, but I do.” Atkinson put out her hand. “Thanks for coming out here on your day off. And for your help.”

  “Thanks for lunch,” Maureen said.

  What else should she say? Good luck with that divorce? Good luck with those murders? Maureen found it hard to let Atkinson go without making plans to meet her again.

  “Thanks for letting me see some of how you work.”

  “There will be more opportunities,” Atkinson said. “I don’t think we’re running out of murders anytime soon. The minute you find those other boys, I want to know.”

  “Will do.”

  “Who else knows about this run-in with Shadow? You tell Preacher?”

  Maureen shook her head. “You and I know. That’s it.”

  “You got your service weapon on you?” Atkinson asked.

  “Not right now,” Maureen said.

  “Carry it,” Atkinson said. “Everywhere. Shadow or Scales gets near you again, do what you have to do to protect yourself. Come strong. No empty threats. He’s not our only route to the truth about these murders.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s an order, Coughlin. Understood? And for the time being, do your running indoors.”

  “Yes, Detective Sergeant.”

  “I’d rather speak at your weapon-discharge hearing, where I can help you,” Atkinson said, “than at your funeral, where I can’t.”

  23

  Outsmarting herself in pursuit of a shortcut back uptown, Maureen ended up lost and frustrated in the medical district of the CBD. The streets formed a maze of one-ways and intersections. Even with the windows open she sweated like a savage, beads of moisture trickling down her temples, the back of her tank top stuck to the seat. Not the situation, not the time of year, not the city, she thought, to be driving a piece-of-shit Honda with no AC. Not when you don’t know where the hell you’re going. She knew, intellectually, that the pedestrians and the other drivers around her didn’t know she was lost, but she was embarrassed in front of them anyway. She felt stared at, felt watched and judged. Not a good sign when those feelings started coming on. Just breathe, she told herself. She tried to stretch her legs, but the car was too small.