Disobeying such an order was close to staging a military coup. Therefor disobeying such an order was tantamount to treason.
But he was not an officer in the United States Army now. Well, not exactly. Not unless the National Guard was federalized by order of the president. And Governor George Hockenberry was not the president. And he was clearly a madman. A madman apparently being used by evil powers for evil purposes. And to obey his order would clearly have dire consequences. Might even result in gun battles between the Guard and the People’s Police.
As a Christian, was it not therefore his moral obligation to disobey such an order?
Which side are you on, Terrence Hathaway?
“Well, Colonel, are you going to obey the order of the nutcase in Baton Rouge or not?” Joe Roody demanded of him. “You gonna force the issue and arrest us right now?”
“Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,” Hathaway told him.
And “damned” was an accurate description in this case rather than a cuss word. Damned as a Christian if he obeyed Hockenberry’s orders to commit a terrible sin, and damned if he didn’t for violating his oath as an officer.
“The King of France, with ninety-thousand men, marched up the hill, and then marched down again.…” Hathaway muttered.
“What?”
“For now, I’m going to keep my troops engaged in snappy parade ground exercises until I can certify that they are ready for the mission. After all, most of my troops are currently on liberty in the city and sleeping off last night’s hangovers, and without proper sober MP squads, it could take quite a while to collect them all, marshall them at the Fairgrounds, dry them out, and return them to fitness for duty.”
During which I must pray as I have never prayed before for a miracle.
A moral miracle.
* * *
Who leaked the text? How much money went to who for doing it?
Even now nobody knows, but of course there are endless conspiracy theories.
That the ghostwriter has never been found is certainly suspicious, but then it had to be printed out, and taken to the governor’s office, and so forth, and could have been copied anywhere along the way, so the devil could have found well-paying dirty work for any number of hands.
Why, I’ve even heard it whispered that I did it! After all, I had my own copy, which I ended up releasing afterward, so I certainly could have done it. But why would I? Follow the money! I had a lot more to lose than to gain.
The only way I can explain why, even though I knew what MaryLou “Mama Legba” was about to proclaim, is that New Orleans was in such a state of dread at what Hockenberry was calling down on the city, such a state of conspiracy theory turmoil, and so was I who knew the lady personally, that it took me a while to ask myself the obvious next question.
Why was MaryLou gunned down before she could finish the speech?
And as soon as I found myself asking myself the question, I knew the obvious answer, and I knew that ol’ J. B. was in danger of a lot worse than having the National Guard throw me out in the street without a means of financial survival.
MaryLou Boudreau had been shot down to keep her from serving out her term, to keep her from using her executive power to forbid the carrying out of evictions by the National Guard.
Because the next thing she was going to do was make the threat of using her power of eminent domain to blackmail the Loan Lizards into writing down the principle and monthlies on all the loans into affordable superbuck numbers.
I knew this because I supervised the writing of the script with her.
Whoever had ordered the assassination must have known it too.
And I had a copy of the script.
Did whoever knew what was in it know that too?
I sure did not want to find out the hard way!
What in hell was I supposed to do?
It didn’t seem like destroying the script would protect me from anyone who knew that I knew what was in it.
The brave and righteous thing to do would be to make a bunch of copies and release it to the press come what may, and to my credit, I’ve got to admit that the thought did cross my mind.
But on second thought I realized that even if that didn’t get me killed, a lot of folks might believe that I had just made it up myself, which, of course, was kinda true. I could leave town and run away to Mexico or Brazil like I’d do if this were a movie, but in a movie the problem of what the hero does for money usually does not come up.
And while J. B. Lafitte may have been a lot of things and may have been called a lot more, a hero was not one of them.
But there were two real heroes of the people in New Orleans at the moment: Captain Luke Martin and Colonel Terrence Hathaway. Hockenberry had ordered the arrest of Martin, but Hathaway was the one he had ordered to make the arrest. Under martial law. Hathaway was currently a hero of the people with a giant cardboard key to the city to prove it.
And Governor Hockenberry had made him the law.
* * *
Colonel Hathaway had taken his sweet time calling his troops back to the Fairgrounds, given them their own sweet time to recover from their partying, and then given them much more parade ground marching back and forth to get into pointless spit and polish order than they needed or wanted, playing for time.
And praying to Jesus to enlighten him as to what to do when time ran out.
Arrest Martin, Mulligan, Roody, and anyone in the People’s Police refusing to stand down, and begin evicting citizens from their homes at gunpoint and perhaps precipitate chaotic armed confrontation?
How could any Christian possibly do that?
Disobey the direct order of the duly constituted civil authority, however evil it might be, however dire the real world consequences?
Resign?
No, he told himself, I can’t just fob such dishonor off on whoever they replace me with.
Hathaway had still neither been able to square this moral circle on his own nor received an answer from On High to his fervent and fervently desperate prayers, when, of all people J. B. Lafitte, a saloon keeper and pimp, made his way through the encampment and to his tent to present him with a possible answer to those prayers.
But in the form of yet another conundrum, this one practical and legal. Or so at least it seemed when he read the full text of what Lafitte claimed was MaryLou Boudreau’s interrupted speech.
“I don’t understand what you expect me to do, Mr. Lafitte, I could keep you here under protective custody, but—”
“Don’t you get, Hathaway?” Lafitte demanded shrilly. “This is what she was killed for! MaryLou Boudreau was murdered to keep her from making this threat in public! To keep her from serving out her term and making good on it! Doesn’t that make your fuckin’ good Christian blood boil?”
Terrence Hathaway thought about it.
Could this be a Sign from Jesus? God worked in mysterious ways His miracles to perform, so could He not send the moral miracle he had prayed for via such an amoral sinner? Certainly the Lord had done such things before. Certainly if Lafitte was speaking truth, his paramount duty, both as a Christian and the responsible police authority under martial law was to arrest.…
Arrest who?
“This may be clear evidence of motive, Lafitte, and I am willing to proceed on the belief that it is in theory, but I ask you again, what would you have me do?”
“Arrest whoever bought the professional hit, what else!”
“And who is that?”
Lafitte stared at him silently.
“Oh…”
Hathaway stared back. Hathaway nodded.
“Well, you were in the Military Police, weren’t you? Can’t you—”
“My experience with detective work is zero, and I am now in command of the National Guard, not even a real military police force, and I very seriously doubt that there is a homicide detective among them…”
“Well then, the People’s Police—”
“I’m under or
ders to arrest their leadership and any of their officers attempting to exercise policing functions.…”
J. B. Lafitte had no answer to that.
“Look, Mr. Lafitte,” Hathaway told him gently, “I know you must be frightened. I would be if I were in your shoes, and I am willing to keep you under protective guard here—”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“That’s the best I can do without even having a suspect to arrest.”
Lafitte regarded him with something that seemed like anger, then contempt, then fear, then what seemed to be fear overcome by a bravery that Terrence Hathaway could not but find admirable.
“Well, Colonel Hathaway, that may be your best but I haven’t yet done my worst,” Lafitte told him. “And back in my high-school baseball days, our unofficial team motto was, when all else fails, play dirty. And I’m from New Orleans, my man, and believe me, ol’ J. B. knows how.”
30
Well, this was the Big Easy now, wasn’t it? This was semisecret Party Town for the weasels in Baton Rouge, wasn’t it? I was a bordello owner, wasn’t I, one among many, and didn’t we all keep video of the weirder kinks of our political guests for use where and when doing what was good for business required a little … political leverage?
So I hightailed it back to Lafitte’s Landing, closed the place down, convened an emergency meeting of the French Quarter Pissing and Moaning Society and while waiting for arrivals, phoned as many other of my fellow whoremasters and madams, high and low, as I knew, which was just about all of them in town, and told them what was needed, namely juicy footage of state legislators in perverse pornographic action.
Someone that one of us had the goods on had to know something, right, wasn’t a detective commonly called a dick?
Well, I guess you don’t have to imagine there was plenty of it, but let me tell you, you’d have to be a real dirty bird to even imagine some of it. We had the means to control enough votes in the legislature to repeal the law of gravity. But we were stymied until Charlie Devereau slunk into the joint uninvited. About as welcome as a friendly visit from an IRS agent until he told us why he felt constrained to seek our forgiveness and redeem himself in our eyes.
“Hey, look, guys, I might have been fool enough to have been responsible for running Mama Legba in the first place, but y’all know damn well I live and die with the tourist trade just like you, and I sure don’t want an asshole like Hockenberry screwing it up—”
“So?” I demanded sourly. “We don’t have the time to listen to your bullshit, we don’t even have enough time to spare to beat you up!”
“Then shut up and listen, will ya! Two state representatives dining in one of my establishments got roaring shit-faced drunk, maudlin babbling drunk, and before I had finished gracing them with the ol’ genteel VIP 86, they blubbered out the terrifying secret they had unsuccessfully tried to drown out of their pinhead brains—”
“Which was—”
“Which was a secret meeting of maybe a dozen representatives, a couple of senators, the usual mouthpieces of You Better Not Ask, and the then lieutenant governor. A day or two before Mama Legba’s scheduled speech.…”
“So what?”
Charlie stared me right in the eye. “So they had a copy of the speech, J. B.”
“Oh shit.…”
“This savvy conclave was called to figure out what to do about it, and had come up dry, until George Hockenberry, who was anything but dry, rose far enough from his stupor to offer up his shit-faced unfunny sarcastic suggestion.
“‘Too bad the Klan ain’t around to just solve our problem with a 12-gauge shotgun or a stick of dynamite, hee, hee,’ he had drooled. ‘’Cause if I wuz governor, hey, right, no problem.’”
“You don’t suppose—”
“You think they really—”
Everybody was talking at once, so I had to shout them down.
“It doesn’t matter.”
That shut up the barroom babble. Was my barroom anyway, now, wasn’t it?
“It doesn’t matter,” I told them. “These two guys testify, we got the goods on Hockenberry for conspiracy to commit murder.”
“You don’t really believe—”
“Doesn’t matter if Hockenberry doesn’t end up convicted. These two jerks sign paper with the charge written on it, it’s sworn testimony, and Colonel Hathaway will happily arrest Hockenberry and let the courts settle it in their own sweet snail’s time. And what do we all do in the Big Easy when we need some sworn testimony?”
That, no one needed to be told. And sure enough when we went through our collective whorehouse footage, we had more than what we needed on the two guys who had spilled the beans in Charlie’s restaurant, and better than merely disgusting, some of it was humorously pathetic, gorilla suits, chocolate syrup, bananas, an’ all.
Even so, I insisted that we pass the hat to buy them a judge who would guarantee them immunity for their testimony, it might even be sort of legal, so it shouldn’t be unreasonably expensive.
“Come on, guys,” I told them, “this is the Big Easy, now, isn’t it? Go along, and get along.”
* * *
Was this manna from Heaven? Terrence Hathaway asked himself when J. B. Lafitte returned to his headquarters with the deposition papers. Were these documents actually an answer to his prayers?
Sworn testimony by two eyewitnesses, along with an utterly evil motive that would make the arrest morally correct, politically correct, and a distinct personal pleasure.
Answer to good Christian prayers from a whorehouse pimp?
God works in mysterious ways, His miracles to perform. And after all, He is omnipotent. So how can it be blasphemy to suppose that the Lord might be able to contain an occasional mordant sense of humor?
“As a temporary officer of martial law and a permanent Christian gentleman, I somehow believe that I have a need not to know how this testimony was obtained,” he told J. B. Lafitte in something of the same spirit.
“I somehow believe you are right,” J. B. Lafitte told him. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“My duty under the very martial law decree laid down by the governor of Louisiana, which is to enforce the laws of both man and God, and arrest George Hockenberry for conspiracy to commit murder, and I care not a swamp nutria’s ass that they just happen to be one and the same.”
“Like the Good Book says, ‘God works in mysterious ways His miracles to perform.’”
“Why, Mr. Lafitte, I didn’t know that a … bordello impresario could quote the Bible.”
“Why, Colonel Hathaway, I didn’t know a Christian soldier could have a sense of humor.”
31
Colonel Hathaway might have been a Christian soldier and all that, but he soon proved that a Christian soldier could have political street smarts and media smarts as well, but then again, you just might be able to say that about Jesus, too, given the history of the last couple of thousand years.
In an admirably publicly humble manner which was also cunningly political by my lights, Hathaway didn’t go up to Baton Rouge to make the arrest himself. He just sent a small unit commanded by a mere sergeant to the Governor’s Mansion to arrest Governor George Hockenberry on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. And it was done a little after midnight, and the news media was not informed beforehand, so there was no coverage until morning and the first footage that was seen was that of Hockenberry in a cell.
Hathaway, after all, had been an Army Military Police commander, and though I’ve mercifully had not personal experience being arrested and hustled off by MPs, I would imagine this was how they’d do a VIP version, especially when arresting one’s own superior.
Hockenberry was under arrest, but he was still governor or so he claimed, and this in a state where Earl Long had remained governor while in the state bughouse by firing medical directors thereof until he finally hired one cynical enough to certify that the governor wasn’t crazy in order to keep his job.
So Hockenberry fired Hathaway from his jail cell.
Or tried to.
“I had hired two outside civilian lawyers, one from New Orleans, who knew Louisiana constitutional law, and one from Chicago, who was known as a political operative, so I figured that together they could walk me through the legalities,” Governor Hathaway told me over lunch about six years later.
Which they had.
Sort of.
Terrence denied Hockenberry’s legal right to fire him on the grounds that he was no longer governor because he was under arrest for murder, and therefore the state of Louisiana did not have any governor with the legal power to either remove him or lift the state of martial law.
While teams of expensive lawyers were having a high old time duking that one out with the meter running, Terrence announced that as far as he and his lawyers were concerned, the legal last orders he had were those issued by Mama Legba moments before she was killed by order of the cabal headed by Hockenberry.
Which was to withdraw his troops forthwith from New Orleans and return policing powers there to the People’s Police, leaving him in charge of policing powers in the rest of the state under her no victim, no crime, no forced evictions, rules of engagement, which had never been rescinded and could not be because Louisiana did not have a legal governor with the power to do so.
Which he then proceeded to do, parading them ever so slowly up toward Baton Rouge, while the secretary of state was arguing that he was now the governor under the current constitution, and the legislature was threatening to write a new one tout suite so that they could grab the power to appoint a new governor and fight among themselves as to who among them it would be.
Marching on Baton Rouge was never meant as threat of a military coup, Governor Hathaway still insists, with an almost straight face.
“How could there be a coup against a duly constituted civilian government that did not exist, J. B.? I was simply following my last orders from the last one that did, that of Mama Legba to withdraw the National Guard from New Orleans and maintain martial law and order until Louisiana somehow managed to come up with one.”
The People's Police Page 23
