by Julie Smith
I sighed deeply and tried to remain civil, though my blood boiled and I could feel my face flush with anger.
“Knowing one’s place may be important, but Father Fitzpatrick came to Sacred Heart to talk things out and you insulted him, and then you were both rolling in the street. That can’t go on; someone is going to get killed.”
Father Murphy abruptly shouted, “You defend that fool, Fitzpatrick! He can go to hell! What is done is done. I will deal with him. What about you? Why do you keep company with such a man? You need to ask yourself why you live as though you are colored; you have a choice. You can turn your back on those people and trash like Fitzpatrick and live with dignity. I’ve talked to your father about this and he refuses to say more than you’ve made your decision and that you’re stubborn. If you were under my roof I wouldn’t allow you to degrade yourself associating with those who are obviously your inferiors. You aren’t the same as the common Negro any more than I am.”
Furious words burst from my mouth: “The English think you Irish are dogs. I’m not interested in your opinion of the colored, as I’m sure you’re not interested in the English’s opinion of you. My father came here to find his fortune and he did; he took up with a colored woman who loved me as he does. I am as colored as she was, and I’m proud of that.”
“You’re young,” he said with an odd smile. “Your sentiments are admirable. It would be good if this could be worked out.”
The anger was gone from his voice, and then Father Murphy moved his hand down to my thigh.
“Helen, I can give you far more than your father. I can help you if you’re kind to me. Why won’t you respond to my letters?”
I let his hand stay there for a second, paralyzed by the suddenness of it.
“Be kind to me, Helen,” he said with a smile that was more a leer, and he moved his hand higher up my thigh.
I reached for the lamp on the coffee table before I knew what I was going to do. He realized it, but he was a split second too late. I caught him flush on the side of the head. He dropped with the heaviness of someone dead; I stood over him for a moment, wondering what to do next.
“My God, Helen, did you kill him?” Father Fitzpatrick asked in horror.
He was a good-looking, tall, and well-built man with hair black as a crow’s feathers. He did have bad teeth, due mostly to his habit of getting into fistfights. Father Fitzpatrick insisted that we call him Billy and never Father unless he was in the church, and even then he looked pained when someone did.
He was seated on the steps of a very clean but small shotgun house that served as the temporary rectory of the Corpus Christi Church while the parishioners raised the money to build the real rectory. I stood in the shade fanning myself with a street car schedule.
“No, Billy, he moaned … and before I ran from the office, I saw him try to stand.”
“Good. He deserves to die, but not by you.”
“It’s not good. My temper has gotten me nothing but trouble. My father wants to send me to Baton Rouge.”
“Listen to him. You must know how vindictive Murphy can be. He can do most anything without remorse. He has no conscience, but he does have all the conviction of a man who speaks with the authority of Jesus Christ himself. If I see him on the street it’s unbearable. He mocks the priesthood and demeans it; and it’s shameful that no one will stand up to him.”
“So you must? No matter how awful Murphy is, you can’t think that beating him in the street will solve anything. Aren’t you afraid of losing your church or being defrocked?”
He laughed. “This from a woman who just bashed a man in the head. God knows the truth but waits. I trust in the Lord to guide and protect me. Or least to help me sober up before Mass.”
“Must you make light of everything?”
He shrugged. “Why are you afraid of Baton Rouge? It’s a fine town.”
“I won’t go to Baton Rouge. My father wants me to stay with relatives who I can’t tolerate.”
“Why can’t you tolerate them? From what I hear, they eat and dance in Baton Rouge just like they do here.”
“They drink and argue constantly. They have no culture.”
He poured himself another whiskey and laughed. “Sometimes I forget how haughty you are.”
“I am not haughty,” I said, and waved goodbye to him as I rushed to catch the trolley. I couldn’t help but like Father Fitzpatrick. He was a kind and worldly man who was ill-suited for the priesthood, and largely lived his life as though he wasn’t part of it. I knew that he frequented bars and gambling dens, and it was rumored that he had more than one female admirer, but he had a good heart and made sure that those who had need in the Seventh Ward were tended to, and that the Creoles and Negroes were treated with the same respect as the whites. The rumors that Father Fitzpatrick was on the way out of town were very hard to ignore, but until the day they ran him out of town, his rage at Murphy would be uncontrollable. It was only a matter of time before he’d get a couple too many whiskeys in him and walk the few blocks to Sacred Heart to bust Murphy’s eye once again, and this time Murphy would most certainly be ready for him.
When I arrived home on Gravier she was already on the porch, fanning herself with her hat. Even from a distance she looked tall and imposing, an iron rail of a woman, black as night and fiercer than a lioness.
“Your father asked me to escort you to Baton Rouge. He explained to me his thinking and I agree with him. He has very good reasons for you to go.”
“Yes, Aunt Odie, he does, or so I’ve been hearing for the last few days.”
“Have you gotten threats?”
“Threats? Not yet. I can’t say that I expect threats.”
“Child, think. You assaulted the kind of man who has the means and the temperament to hurt you.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Listen to your father. If you don’t go to Baton Rouge, you need to leave this house and move in with him for a time.”
“I can’t do that. This is my mother’s house and I promised her I wouldn’t become a child tethered to his ankle.”
“Well, if you’re not going to Baton Rouge, I will stay with you until this situation is resolved. Murphy holds sway with those drunken countrymen of his. Those Irish thugs drove the colored off the docks. They want to chase us out of town and they will certainly hurt you if given a chance.”
I always listened to Aunt Odie, but of course she didn’t necessarily feel the same sort of obligation to listen to me. If she thought I needed watching, I would be watched. I was a woman with some means and I did have a mind equal to a man’s, and though I loved my father, sometimes it seemed I was still that child wrapped around his ankle.
I was preparing to stew a rabbit that evening and my hands were bloody with it, when I heard someone rattling the screen. I supposed it might have been Aunt Odie, who had gone to the market for lemons. I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. I turned to the door and saw a redhaired white man standing there, rubbing his hands together with a brutal look on his face.
“You know why I’m here,” he said with vicious pleasure.
“Get out of my house!” I shouted at him.
“I will teach you a lesson.”
“Damnit, I said get out of here!”
He ignored me and took a step forward, pulling at his belt. I retreated to the kitchen, hoping to get my hands on a knife before he reached me.
Then I heard Aunt Odie’s voice.
“Stop!” She had a knife in one hand and an open jar in the other filled with what looked to be water.
The big redhaired man didn’t seem impressed. He pulled a blackjack from his pocket and started toward her while keeping an eye on me.
“Run home now, before something bad happens to you,” Odie said, as if she were talking to a child.
“Nigger woman, don’t order me.”
Aunt Odie tossed the contents of the jar into his face and he screamed and smashed against the wall and the door befor
e stumbling outside, begging for water for his eyes.
“Lye,” she said as she locked the door. “It’s as good as a bullet or a knife.”
I was in Baton Rouge when I heard about Father Fitzpatrick; that he never made it home the night before from the Napoleon House, the bar he frequented in the French Quarter.
We were sure that he was dead, beaten to death by one of Murphy’s hooligans and tossed into the river. I wasn’t surprised, though I was grief-stricken. My father insisted that I stay in Baton Rouge, but I was nearly losing my mind with my relatives.
I spent weeks at my aunt’s bakery, sweat blinding my eyes, roasting while the bread baked. My unhappiness was too much for words; I didn’t want to drown in my sweat in a town without culture, without my friends and loved ones. I was finished with Baton Rouge; my time in exile was done. I had to return to New Orleans with or without my father’s permission. My mother hadn’t raised me to be a coward, living in fear, in seclusion. I had to know what happened to Father Fitzpatrick.
Rumors continued to roil that the colored would be attacked if they tried to enter Sacred Heart, and worse. I wanted one last conversation with Father Murphy, one that he wouldn’t recover from, but that wasn’t to happen. I can’t say I was unhappy when I heard that Murphy was found beaten to death in the rectory, but the bitterness in my heart would last as long as my memory of Father Fitzpatrick.
OPEN MIKE
BY JAMES NOLAN
French Quarter
There must be hundreds of kids who have wound up dead in the French Quarter. Eva Pierce was just one of them. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood you see fliers about them taped to lampposts: Information Wanted or $5,000 Reward. And below is a blurry snapshot of some scruffy young person. After Eva’s body was discovered, bundled inside a blue Tommy Hilfiger comforter floating in Bayou St. John, the girl’s mother moved down here from Idaho or Iowa or Ohio—however you pronounce it—and blanketed the Quarter with those signs. She even printed her daughter’s last poem on the flier, but no dice. The fifteen hours between when Eva was last seen and when her body was found in the bayou remained a blank.
That’s when the mother rang me. I’m listed in the Yellow Pages: Off-Duty Homicide Detective: Dead or Alive, Inc.
Mrs. Pierce met me under the bingo board at Fiorella’s restaurant at the French Market. It wasn’t my suggestion. I hadn’t been to the market since I was a kid, when my daddy used to take me on Saturday mornings to squabble with his wop relatives while we loaded up at a discount on their fruits and vegetables. On my daddy’s side I’m related to everyone who ever sold a pastry, an eggplant, or a bottle of dago red in the Quarter, and on my mother’s side to everyone who ever ran the numbers, pimped girls, or took a kickback. I peeked inside the rotting old market, but sure didn’t see any Italians or tomatoes. Now it’s just Chinese selling knock-off sunglasses to tourists.
Mrs. Pierce was short and round as a cannoli, with a stiff gray bouffant and a complexion like powdered sugar. With those cat’s-eye bifocals, she looked like someone who might be playing bingo at Fiorella’s. But when she opened her mouth … Twilight Zone. Mrs. Pierce said it wasn’t drugs or sex that did her daughter in, but—get this—poetry.
“And the police aren’t doing anything,” she said with a flat Midwestern whine that made me want to go suck a lemon.
“Look, lady, I’m a cop—Lieutenant Vincent Panarello, Sixth District—and the police have more trouble than they can handle in New Orleans. They don’t pay us much … I got a wife and three kids in Terrytown, so that’s why I moonlight as a detective.”
“My daughter loved moonlight.”
“I bet.”
“She read her own original poetry every Tuesday night at that rodent-infested bar on Esplanade Avenue called the Dragon’s Den.” She was twisting the wrapper from her straw into a noose.
“Yeah, that used to be Ruby Red’s in my day. A college joint, the floor all covered with sawdust and peanut shells.” I didn’t tell her how drunk I used to get there in high school with a fake ID. While I was going to night school at Tulane, Ruby Red’s was where I met my first wife Janice, may she rest in peace.
“Well, the place has gone beatniky.” Mrs. Pierce leaned forward, her eyes watering. “And do you know what I think, Lieutenant Panarello?’
“Shoot.”
“I think one of those poets murdered my daughter. One of those characters who read at the open mike. And that’s where I want you to start. To listen for clues when the poets read. Eventually one of them will give himself away.”
“Listening to the perms will cost you extra.” And so will the French Quarter, but I’d already averaged that in when I quoted her my fee.
“I’ll meet you there Tuesday at 9 p.m. It’s above that Thai restaurant. Just go through the alley—”
“I know how to get up there.” I could have climbed those worn wooden steps next to the crumbling brick wall in my sleep. That’s where I first kissed Janice. Funny, but she also wrote poems she read to me on the sagging wrought-iron balcony. The life I really wanted was the one I had planned with her. The life I settled for is the one I got.
Mrs. Pierce handed me a picture of her daughter, a list of her friends, and a check. I eyed the amount. Local bank.
“What your daughter do for a living?” I pushed back my chair, antsy to blow Fiorella’s. I could already smell the fried chicken grease on my clothes.
“Why, she was a poet and interpretive dancer.”
“Interpretive dancer. Gotcha.”
I studied the photo. Eva was about twenty-four, pretty, with skin as pale and powdery as a moth’s wing. But she was dressed in a ratty red sweater over a pink print dress over black sweatpants. Her dyed black hair was hanging in two stringy hanks of pigtail like a cocker spaniel’s ears. Who would want to kill her, I wondered, except the fashion police?
When I got down to the station I pulled the report. Eva was last seen at Molly’s bar on Decatur Street at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, where she told her roommate, Pogo Lamont, that she was going home to feed their one-eyed dog named Welfare. They lived on Ursulines at Bourbon, upper slave quarter, uptown side. She never made it home. After an anonymous 911 tip, her body was hoisted out of the bayou at 7 p.m. the next evening. One clean shot through the temple, real professional. No forced sexual entry. Her purse was lying open on the grassy bank, surrounded by a gaggle of ducks trying to get at the bag of stale popcorn inside. A cell phone and twenty-five dollars were tucked in the bag, so the motive wasn’t robbery. Also inside the purse were a red lipstick, a flea collar, a black notebook filled with poems, two 10 mg. Valiums, an Ohio picture ID, a plastic straw that tested positive for cocaine residue, and a worn-out restraining order against Brack Self, a bartender and “performance artist” who turned out to have been locked up the whole time in Tampa for beating on his present girlfriend. That, and an Egyptian scarab, a petrified dung beetle supposed to be a symbol of immortality.
Which didn’t seem to have worked for Eva Pierce, poet and stripper.
I made it to the Dragon’s Den on a sticky Tuesday evening, with a woolly sky trapping humidity inside the city like a soggy blanket. It had been trying to rain for two weeks. The air was always just about to clear but never did, as if old Mother Nature were working on her orgasm. I carried an umbrella, expecting a downpour. The place was right next to the river, and hadn’t seen a drop of paint since I last walked in the door thirty years ago, with all my hair and a young man’s cocky swagger. A whistle was moaning as a freight train clacked along the nearby tracks, and the huge live oak out front shrouded the crumbling façade in a tangle of shadows. An old rickshaw was parked outside, where an elfin creature with orange hair sat scribbling in a notebook. He shot me a look through thick black plastic glasses, and then went back to writing.
Guess I’d found the poets.
I slapped a black beret on my head as I headed through the clammy alley, the bricks so decrepit that ferns were sprouting from the walls. I need
ed to blend in with the artsy crowd here, so I wore a blousy purple shirt and tight black pants, and carried a paperback by some poet I’d had to read at night school called Oscar Wilde. A wizened old Chinese guy was squatting over a tub of vegetables in the patio, and the air smelled like spices. Something was sizzling in the kitchen. I felt like I was in Hong Kong looking for my Shanghai Lil.
Except for the Far East decor, the bar upstairs hadn’t changed that much. A small stage and dance floor had been added at the center, and the tables were low, surrounded by pillows on the floor. Is that where poets eat, I wondered, on the floor?
“I’ll have something light and refreshing, with a twist of lime,” I lisped to the two-ton Oriental gal behind the bar, waving my pinky. A biker type in a leather cowboy hat was observing me from across the bar.
“You a cop?” he yelled.
“Why no,” I said, batting my eyelashes, holding up the lavender book so he could read the cover. “I’ve come for the poultry.”
“Hey, Miss Ping,” he shouted to the bartender, “give Lieutenant Girlfriend here a wine spritzer on my tab.”
Just as I lurched forward to knock this asshole’s block off, in walked Mrs. Pierce with that orange-haired garden gnome from out front.
“Here you go, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Miss Ping said, setting down the drink.
“Lieutenant,” Mrs. Pierce said, “this was Eva’s roommate, Pogo Lamont.”
“Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo cackled, extending his hand.
“Come on, son, I want to talk to you on the balcony,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.
“Unhand me this instant!” the little creep cried out.
“Watch out,” grunted the joker in the leather cowboy hat. “Lieutenant Girlfriend’s already hitting on the chicken.” Miss Ping barked a throaty laugh.
The kid followed me onto the balcony, which was pitching precariously away from the building. I steadied myself as if stepping onto a boat, not trusting the rusted iron-lace railing to keep all 250 pounds of me from rolling off.
