New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

  The uniforms loaded her into the back of their car and started cruising the side streets. Within a few minutes she began screaming and gesturing at a kid in a hoodie and ghetto-slung pants walking up Fourth Street toward Laurel.

  “That’s him,” she said. “The one that pushed my face.”

  The uniforms jumped out and confronted the kid, and he reached one hand under his sweatshirt. One of the cops yelled, “Drop the knife!” then fired three times.

  “So the first two guys to go in are the state troopers. They look at each other like—catch a rabbit, no fucking problem. These are Troop D guys, country boys. They go into the woods and they come back out in about five minutes with a goddamned rabbit. Mayor tells ’em good work and he sends in the second team, the FBI guys.”

  Ernie Lowell was about the nicest guy you could hope to meet. His nickname around the Sixth District was Reverend Ernie, a moniker bestowed upon him because he was always counseling fellow officers about staying on the straight-and-narrow, and avoiding the lure of drinking and dope, corruption, or ill-gotten pussy. He was married and had five children. To a lot of the other cops he seemed too good to be true, but Lew had always found him to be a sincere guy. He was a year younger than Lew, but had been smart enough to come on earlier, and was now in his twenty-fifth year, planning to retire in about six months. He’d never shown much interest in moving up in the ranks, and until tonight he had never, to Lew’s knowledge, drawn his weapon from its holster, much less fired it at anyone.

  Ernie’s sergeant was the first to arrive after the shooting, and he relieved Ernie of his gun. The sergeant put Ernie, shaking and in shock, in the backseat. Ernie’s partner told the story to the sergeant, and the mugging victim backed it up. There were no other witnesses on the street. No one but Ernie had seen a knife.

  Lew and Tommy arrived next, and Lew dropped Tommy in front of the scene, then drove a few yards down the street until he could pull over to the curb. He walked back to Tommy and the sergeant. The kid in the hoodie was face down at their feet, the hood of his dark green sweatshirt still covering the back of his head. There was a thin stream of blood running from under the body, and the slightest beginning of a damp red stain on the back of the sweatshirt, as though one of Ernie’s shots had almost, but not quite, gone through the body.

  “What have we got?” Lew asked. The sergeant repeated Ernie’s partner’s story. Lew walked over to the partner and got it again from him, then spoke to the mugging victim, who also corroborated it.

  “And you’re sure this was one of the guys who robbed you?” Lew asked.

  “That’s him,” she said, pointing to the body with her chin. “That’s him.”

  Lew turned to leave.

  “I think that’s him,” she said to his back.

  “So the FBI guys, they take out an attaché case filled with all kinds of bells and whistles. First thing they do is divide the area into two sectors, and each one picks a sector. Then they disappear into the woods with global positioning equipment, sonar, and who the fuck knows what else. They’re gone for about an hour, then they come back, and sure as shit they’re carrying a rabbit.”

  Tommy and Lew stood over the body and compared notes as the ambulance arrived.

  “Anybody else see the knife?” Tommy asked.

  “No,” Lew said. “Did you look at him yet?”

  “Not yet,” Tommy said. “Shame it’s Reverend Ernie.”

  “I know.”

  “At least Ernie’s black,” Tommy said, and Lew looked at him. “You know, no media. Black cop, black perp, offsetting minorities.”

  “No yardage gain?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lew looked over at Reverend Ernie in the backseat of the sergeant’s car and nodded to him. Ernie looked confused, as though he didn’t recognize him.

  “So now he sends in the last team, the New Orleans detectives, you know. Old-time guys, polyester pants and skinny ties. They disappear into the woods and nobody hears a thing for about three hours.”

  The bartender returned and stood in front of Lew. Lew looked at his glass and saw that it was empty again. How many was that? The bartender rapped his knuckles sharply on the bar twice, indicating that the next round was on the house. He gestured broadly at the row of bottles behind him. “Make a wish.”

  Lew looked at him and smiled for the first time that day. Make a wish.

  He wished that his hands didn’t shake so much in the morning. He wished that he didn’t hurt all the time, like there was an animal dying inside him. He wished that his daughter wasn’t living in Algiers with a drug dealer who might or might not be a member of the gang Lew just got assigned to monitor. He wished that he wasn’t having an affair with his doctor’s receptionist. He wished his wife didn’t know.

  “Jameson,” he said, still smiling. The bartender poured generously.

  He wished he wasn’t partnered with Tommy Mulligan. He wished he could still feel drunk when he drank, not just the dulling of pain. He wished he hadn’t stopped off tonight, or that he hadn’t had this last drink, or that he wouldn’t have the ones that would follow. He wished that he wouldn’t have to drive home tonight to Metarie as he did most nights, with his shield case open in his lap, badge and ID card readily visible for when he got pulled over. Mostly he wished he didn’t have three years to go. Three years was too long. It was too damn long to be stuck with the likes of Tommy Mulligan, a bad drunk, and a loud, stupid braggart. A man who couldn’t hold his tongue for three years. A man who would crack if pushed, even slightly.

  He wished he didn’t make decisions that were wrong; knowing they were wrong, feeling compelled to make them anyway.

  He wished there hadn’t been three men on the scene before he arrived today, and he wished there hadn’t been three knives under the body when he’d turned it over. Three knives stupidly, amateurishly tossed, practically on top of one another. He wished he didn’t feel the sickening weight of two of the knives in his left pocket. He had left the one that most closely resembled Ernie’s description. He wished he had six months to go, like Ernie, instead of three years. Three years if he could even get Tommy Mulligan past a grand jury without stepping on his own dick.

  The bartender replaced Lew’s drink again as Tommy turned and winked at him.

  “So, after like three hours, there’s suddenly all this fucking noise. Bang. Crash. Whap, whap, whap.” Tommy emphasized every sound by pounding his hand—palm flat—on the bar. “The two New Orleans boys come out of the woods, and they’re carrying this deer. And the deer is like, all beat up. He’s been worked over. So the deer looks at the mayor, and the deer says,” and Tommy paused, savoring the moment. He was just telling a joke in a bar. Not a care in the world. He was beaming. “‘Okay, okay, I’m a rabbit.’”

  Lew raised his glass and let the laughter behind him blend in with the background bar din. It sounded distant, and somehow warm and cozy. Inviting. He wished he was there with everyone enjoying himself. He thought about where he’d toss the knives into the lake out at the West End tomorrow. He drank half his drink in a swallow and held the glass in front of him, looking through the amber fluid and ice at the bar mirror. Tommy Mulligan nudged him, hard, and some of the drink spilled from the glass and ran down his arm. He felt it inside his shirtsleeve.

  “Get it?” Tommy said. “Do you get it? ‘I’m a rabbit.’”

  “Sure,” Lew said, feeling the cold liquid almost to his elbow. He continued to look through his trembling glass at the faraway party in the mirror.

  “I get it,” he said, “I’m a rabbit.”

  SCHEVOSKI

  BY OLYMPIA VERNON

  University District

  For my brother, Ricky S. Vernon

  She vomited on Magazine Street.

  She stumbled in. The sign read, Miss Mae’s. A bar. She and the other white girls, their angular faces melting and disobedient like a blade, a glacier. She and the other white girls, laughing, laughing and stumbling about on the corner of Magaz
ine Street in Uptown New Orleans.

  Yes, they laughed and stumbled about with their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them—the whiteness of them collectively—caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.

  What was his name?

  Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.

  The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.

  Where had she met him?

  At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.

  Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it; help me, it whispered.

  And there, Schevoski stood.

  He had been pronouncing a singular word, like beast, and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her: Can you? he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said: Say it, beast.

  Beast, she whispered. Beast.

  How did he look to her now? Could she recall the drunken weave of his posture when she met him? It was that, that, that cooing sound he made, as if he were calling out to her, Come here, there is something I need you to do.

  For no one needed her, not really.

  Or was it that he had no face at all? Even when her friends asked her to describe the boy she’d come across at the corner of St. Charles and some other street, she could not remember—Napoleon, was it?—she could only say that he was from Russia and something had bitten her about the flesh.

  He was invisible.

  It was no wonder that because she had felt like this, that he was invisible, he wove around her a feeling of powerlessness. He had crept up behind her, just behind the ear, and let her go.

  Now, now that she and the white girls stood near the edge of the jukebox at Miss Mae’s, they, too, cooed, as Schevoski had cooed, and lifted their angular faces upward; a water stain the shape of a guitar lay flat on the ceiling.

  One of the girls whispered: Look where he died.

  And they all laughed again when she whispered, Look where he died, all laughing and shouldering each other, as if they knew, inwardly, that this was Schevoski and that thing he called music; the beast was dead.

  They looked at her, the broken-hearted girl who had driven them here, and yelled: Look where he died, Look where he died. Schevoski. Schevoski is dead!

  Why had they been so cruel? the girl thought. Because she could not remember one street? One word? Because this water-stained guitar was his voice and mind? Why ever had she driven them here?

  She leaned over the edge of the jukebox and vomited.

  And the other white girls, the girls who had come to mock her in their drunkenness, shouted as she vomited: Schevoski! Schevoski is dead!

  And she vomited and vomited, her index finger over the Bee Gees label of the jukebox, until her mouth grew immediate and she turned, held her stomach, and stumbled through the shouting girls and their exclamatory language, stumbled until she reached the wooden door of the bathroom, stumbled until everything she had eaten this morning came up.

  Finally, her stomach was bare.

  And the world seemed to spin around her and the water-stained guitar seemed to crawl upon the ceiling, follow her through the wooden door of this place and mock upon her the power of its language; Schevoski is dead. And you are dead. You, beast.

  And the girls who she had driven here, the Tulane girls, as if they had suddenly become aware of their cruelty, took their fists and banged on the outer walls of the lavatory; they banged and their banging seemed to echo throughout Magazine Street and the city of New Orleans that there was a girl in the john and she was weak and her old man had dumped her and she brought us to this place so we could mock her, make her afraid, tear down these walls she had collapsed into and whatever it was she had left, we would take it. Everything would come true.

  Her head spun inside the lavatory and the banging of the other girls from Tulane now began to bang inside her head and she could see them, each of them at once, their mouths open and childlike, swimming around in her heart and mind the torturous chaos of one’s not knowing how vulnerable, how thin she is.

  Just then, she thought of Schevoski, thought of how she’d met him, how cunning he was to have met her there on the corner of St. Charles and that street she could not remember—she wasn’t the only one; now, now amidst the other girls from Tulane and the water-stained guitar, she remembered the photos of the other girls, the other exes, and the labels he had written underneath, all named after the streets on which he had met them—Elba, Dupre, Willow, General Pershing, Eden—and there, scribbled beneath her own name, on the corner of St. Charles and …

  Now, now that these things had come to her, she looked up to where the water-stained guitar had been and did her own laughing. And the other girls from Tulane heard it, how powerful it was, and stepped away from the wooden door of the lavatory and stumbled, stumbled back to the abandoned jukebox, back to where the vomit had begun to swell.

  Each of them noticed, one at a time and collectively, the image of the water-stained guitar: the Schevoski is dead! had now disappeared into the odorous air of Magazine and it was no matter, they were all dead, as the girl who’d brought them here was dead, as Schevoski was dead, like a blade, a glacier.

  A beast.

  ALGIERS

  BY DAVID FULMER

  Algiers

  Valentin St. Cyr crossed to Algiers on the ferry. It was the end of a hot day in May of 1905, and the fading sun reached out to paint the sky in bloody streaks and spread little points of light over the river like early stardust. Every so often, the wake of a barge would traverse the surface. Then the water got quiet again.

  The ferry moved unperturbed through the green shifting swirls. Valentin leaned on the stern railing as the profile of New Orleans retreated. It was good to get out of the city, especially out of Storyville, if only for one night. To get paid for it made it even better, even if he dropped a few dollars while he went about running off the card cheat.

  What was the character’s name again? McTier?

  In any case, it was a Tuesday, and the red light district would be quiet. The Basin Street madams and the sporting women and their gentlemen callers could do without him for one night, and any problems would still be there when he got back.

  Valentin spent a few moments patting his clothes in what must have looked like some sort of private genuflection. In fact, he was checking his weapons. The weight of his favored Iver Johnson revolver settled in the pocket of his light cotton suit jacket. His whalebone sap was lodged in the back pocket of his trousers, so that he could reach in with his right hand to swing it around with the force to roll up eyes and buckle knees. Finally, he kept a stiletto in a sheath strapped to his ankle, so it would be easy to grab if some rascal tried to drag him to the floor.

  Not that he expected that sort of trouble tonight. He had handled cheapjack hustlers by the dozens. He wouldn’t be walking into a rough back-of-town saloon to encounter a sport down on his luck and desperate for a good score, a rounder who thought he owned the place, or, worst of all, some low-down, no-good son of a bitch on a cocaine jag who saw things that weren’t there, imagined everyone in the room was out to get him, and itched for an excuse to pull out his own weapon of choice and have at it.

  There would be none of that tonight, or so said Valentin’s employer, Mr.
Tom Anderson. This McTier fellow was just another loud-mouthed, bullying sort, which meant he was most likely a coward, and would quail and run as soon as someone showed up to beat his hand—someone like Valentin St. Cyr. Sometimes all it took was a cold-eyed stare to get a sharp to pick up his loose change and crooked cards or dice and clear out. Other times, a fellow made his exit with his bloody forehead in his hands. And every now and then, nothing but a promise of deadly violence would do. So far, it hadn’t gone any further than that.

  Once the ferry docked, he stepped onto the pier and walked up the incline and through the narrow avenues of the little town until he found Evelina Street. When he arrived at the corner address, it was little more than a storefront that had been set up with a plank bar and some tables and chairs, not all of them matching. A ceiling fan creaked overhead and the floor was spread with dunes of sawdust that had gone dark with tobacco juice and spilled whiskey. The windows were open on two sides so the breezes off the river could carry away some of the smell. There was a trough in back that served as a toilet. It would take a hurricane to blow that stench away.

  A Negro boy who was standing watch opened the door for Valentin, who tossed him a nickel and stepped over the threshold. Two working men leaned their elbows on the near end of the bar. Valentin stepped up and asked for Mr. Roy. The bartender, a tall and lank mulatto, pointed a finger toward the back of the room.

  Settled behind the wooden table in the corner was Mr. Roy, a hugely fat man with broad African features and skin a mottled brown, as if he was suffering from some odd ailment. His hair was woolly and the whites of his eyes were a deep yellow, matching his large teeth. He wheezed on every breath and his body and clothes reeked of sweat.

  Valentin had never seen him before and didn’t know if he was a lawman, a criminal, or a nobody. Valentin didn’t know much of anything, other than the fact that Anderson, “The King of Storyville,” owed the owner of this rundown establishment a debt, and that Valentin was there to pay it off.