New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

  Up and down DeSaix Boulevard and pretty much all over Gentilly, variously wrecked homes were still waiting on overpriced contractors to show up, a whole year after that bitch Katrina. Gangs of discriminating thieves and expert metal-strippers seemed to know exactly which houses were worth their while. My suspicions were the same as the neighbors’ suspicions, what was left of the neighbors: Maybe the wrong numbers knew where to go because when they weren’t contracting, they were thieving.

  Nobody was prowling around outside.

  I stepped back to where I was when I came across the money and Frank’s letter—stooped in front of my grandfather Benjamin Masson’s chifforobe, going through the drawers and shelves after anything worth keeping before the unhappy need of my cutting it down with a rented chainsaw.

  That chifforobe and the matching cherry wood blanket chest and Mama’s wide bureau, as we called it, along with the bed frame with the carved headboard and footboard, were Masson family heirlooms. They’d all been handed down to Daddy as Benjamin’s wedding gift. The heirlooms crowded up my parents’ first little bedroom in the St. Bernard projects, which is where I lived for the first ten years of my life until we left.

  We didn’t go far, at least not by the lights of Frank and me, resentful of being told we shouldn’t be playing with the project kids we ran with since now we’d moved up in the world. But Daddy was proud to leave the apartment in St. Bernard and move off Gibson Street not so many blocks to DeSaix Boulevard. He had enough to buy a small house there, a wood one painted pink with two bedrooms and a Queen Palm in the front and two Chinaberry trees in back.

  “Little no-account niggers,” Daddy called the St. Bernard kids we weren’t supposed to play with anymore. Never mind they came in approximately the same good-to-bad ratio as everybody else in New Orleans, little or big. Never mind that Daddy and Mama and all us Massons have been called that same hurting word at one time or another; never mind that everybody else on our new block, save for the Spagnuolo family, had to sit way up in the balcony at the Circle Cinema.

  So anyway, what was I doing there with a chainsaw?

  It was hard enough years ago to haul that chifforobe and the rest of the bedroom suite out of Gibson Street and onto Daddy’s pickup for the short drive to Gentilly. Daddy called it a bedroom suit. It was even harder to get the whole cherry wood shebang jiggled through the front door and the narrow foyer of the pink house. Daddy and two of his work crew buddies from the parks department grunted clear through a Sunday on that job.

  Now, thanks to that hellbat Katrina, there was no way of removing the family heirlooms out from the pink house. The cherry wood was all waterlogged, too swollen up to get through the door frames. Everything had to be cut into pieces, and the pieces carted out to the curb to wait a minor eternity for the garbage haulers to come fetch the mess.

  The cutting job fell to me for two reasons. First, I’m handy. Second, the house was automatically deeded over to me as next of kin by the state of Louisiana when its previous orphaned owner was convicted and sent up to Angola for what he did to a white woman by the name of Eugenia Malreaux, who lived uptown on St. Charles Avenue in a big old place with her prize tulip trees in the back garden.

  What in the name of Heaven I was doing hanging on to the pink house and the heirlooms these past years I do not know. I didn’t need a house. I have my own very nice little house uptown. And I didn’t need a suit for my bedroom.

  Before Katrina, my wife Toni was after me to rent out the pink house. But I always managed to stall by reminding her about Mama and Daddy both dying there in the cherry wood bed, both blind and crippled up from the sugar and helpless to keep from soiling themselves. And then how Frank took over the house after Mama died, and moved into our parents’ own room at night to sleep in the big cherry wood death bed—leaving me to wonder what he might be cursing there in the dark …

  … And how Frank took care of me in that house all the while I went through high school, then Xavier. And then on top of that, three years of law school at Loyola. No thanks to any of the cold relations who turned their backs on a pair of orphan boys. Just us two against the world, Frank and Walter.

  I only worked part-time construction jobs in my school years, and I didn’t manage to get half what I thought I might in scholarship money. But Frank always came up with the rest, always on the promise that I would not ask where the money came from.

  It was hard for Frank to be as responsible as all that. But not as hard as the rest of his life. This was a capital-B bone of contention between us.

  Frank claimed he was halfway a regular citizen for bringing me up, and so anything outside of his role of being a big brother was none of my business. It didn’t sit well with me to be shut out like that. So to spite him, I did the meanest thing I could think of doing.

  The day after commencement at Loyola, I marched down to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office with my law degree and got myself hired. I could just as easily have taken a job as a public defender. Frank never said anything about my spiteful choice, but I know I hurt him.

  The white man who hired me at the D.A.’s office soon thereafter prosecuted my brother and sent him up to Angola, where they eventually put him down like a cat for stealing Miss Malreaux’s money and afterwards splitting her head open with an axe.

  Even though the crime scene investigators never found that axe and had to rely on the coroner’s analysis at trial, the prosecution case against Frank was sufficiently solid. More solid, I admit, than a lot of cases I have prosecuted myself. People go to prison and get the needle for pitifully little evidence, really. All colors of people.

  Frank had long been working handyman jobs at the big Malreaux house—earning money for my tuition at Loyola University School of Law, no less. So Frank had access to the place. The forensics squad came up with a smudged thumbprint they claimed was Frank’s, right there on the dial of a private safe in the brick shed where Miss Eugenia was known to keep large amounts of cash. Add to that, investigators found a considerable number of Miss Eugenia’s jewelry items inside a chifforobe drawer in the pink house.

  They didn’t find the looted cash, though. Frank, of course, denied stealing money or jewelry from Miss Eugenia, just like he denied stealing anything else in his life. He’d wear that bad-dog look on his face when confronted on matters of theft, which was as close as he’d come to admitting his light-fingered predilection—until his last letter, that is.

  Certainly he denied murdering Miss Eugenia. Which flew in the face of jewelry found in the chifforobe. Which Frank’s court-appointed lawyer might have said flew in the face of common logic, therefore constituting reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror. Because why would a murderer keep mementoes of his victim in the same place he kept his socks and boxer shorts?

  At first, I thought it would be no problem to chainsaw the bedroom suit. Maybe in the past it was all worth some serious antique money. But the value was surely gone now—now that all that cherry wood was so nasty and swollen and probably full of termites, too. It was junk and nothing more. No problem.

  But there I was in my dead brother’s house, in the room where he used to sleep as a free man. Sentiment hammered me. The rented chainsaw seemed as disrespectful to Frank’s house as Mother Nature had been.

  Speaking of a hellish vandal woman, I took a long moment to gaze around the bedroom after a knock-down drag-out with Katrina.

  Schaefer Skrip bottles by the dozen had flown around like stones in the hurricane, smashing into walls where splattered ink adhered to glass shards and blue and yellow labels. The floor was a carpet of Budweiser cans, crushed the way Frank crushed them with his big right hand, sodden Camel butts and moldy paperback books with underlined pages. Crime novels mostly. The door to the hallway was cracked in two and the plaster ceiling had gone pulpy like ricotta cheese.

  Then I read the next parts of Frank’s last letter.

  Evil and lowdown ain’t my view alone of Miss Eugenia Malreaux. It’s what the old
bag son Philip call her. He told me things about his mama make you toss a meal. Told me when he was just a boy she’d come wake him up in his bedroom some nights wearing nothing but a peek-a-boo and she poke where she ain’t got bizness poking. Philip tell on her to his daddy one day. Then soon as daddy leave the house that lowdown Miss Eugenia take a strap to Philip and nearly skin him alive.

  Oh yes, Philip he told me lots of things about the grand life up on St. Charles Avenue where it all look peace and quiet respectable. He said he like it better where we live in Gentilly on account of pain and awfulness can’t be hid away so easy.

  Also Philip said he like talking to me whenever I come by to work for his mama in the garden since I understand the two of us is in the same boat—a couple of mens waiting around for the rest of their life to happen. Philip, he couldn’t get enough of that sad sack talk and start coming by to drink with me at the Star Lounge, my little briar patch by good old St. Bernard.

  I always feel sorry for Philip when he come slumming, a puffy little white guy in there with us Negroes. But I don’t feel sorry enough to forget about asking him where do they hide the money up to his place on St. Charles. And he told me. Told me his mama keep a wall safe in the very last place I’d ever think to look, which is the garden shed behind the tools.

  Also, he told me how he steal money from the evil lowdown old bag first as a boy, then as a grown man when he hide it down to the bank on Poydras Street where he keep a safety box in the vault on account of he trusts banks even if his mama don’t …

  Because Frank had secured them so carefully in a false compartment he’d constructed in the back of the chifforobe, the only thing in the room that wasn’t ruined by greasy water were the Big Chief pages of his long letter. Oh—and the money, which made me nervous on many levels and which trembled my hands to the point where I couldn’t help but spill the cash over the muck of cans and butts.

  What especially unnerved me was my own larcenous first impulse on seeing all that green: how I’d spend it on my own selfish self, or at least pay off my bills. Which is not the way a sworn man of the law such as I am, after all, is supposed to think. The first thing I am obliged to do under the circumstances of tainted money is turn it in lickety-split, along with anything else incriminating, such as Frank’s letter of a singular confession to theft in this particular instance.

  But somehow I knew I wasn’t going to feel so obliged. Maybe this was because of the crappy trial that Frank endured; not quietly, as they often tied him down on the defendant’s chair and stuffed a bailiff’s hanky in his mouth when he cursed the judge too much. Maybe it was because of my own rage that I had to keep bottled up since I myself am part of the crappy system, prosecution side. Maybe it was because of the parade of incompetent drunkards Frank kept hiring, since that’s all he personally knew of the city’s criminal defense bar and refused to consult me on the matter of his defense.

  “Sorry, my Wussy Wally, but I ain’t about to trust nobody who work for the Man going to get me needled for a lawyer reference—not even my own brother.” Frank had told me this on the one occasion he agreed to see me in his cell.

  Or maybe I was feeling rebellious against the whole crappy system, because once again Aunt-tee Viola spoke for the whole bunch of my cold relations when she came on the bus to the D.A.’s office on South White Street, right in the middle of my brother’s highly publicized axe-murder trial, for an approving look-see. She told me, “Walter, we’re so proud of you for rising above your brother’s miserable failure of a life.” I bottled up what I thought right then: In my brother’s case, the words South and white were not harbingers of justice.

  No doubt I was seriously conflicted because of my guilt for spiting Frank. It was a guilt settled in for life after I read through the transcript of his trial in the Superior Criminal Court of New Orleans, especially the part I can’t help but remember by heart:

  Mr. Masson: I want another attorney.

  The Court: Well, I don’t think I’m going to do that.

  Mr. Masson: Y’all go ahead and have your trial if you want, but leave me out of it. You can sentence me, hang me, stick a needle to me, do what you want. If you don’t give me no other lawyer, I ain’t taking part in this stupidity. I already told you I didn’t steal no money and I didn’t bash the brains out of no white lady. Go on now, have court without me. I don’t care.

  The Court: It’s your life that’s involved. Don’t you care about that?

  Mr. Masson: I care about my life just as much as you care about it.

  The Court: Don’t you want to protect it?

  Mr. Masson: Do you want to protect it?

  Late as I was, I was finally doing the right thing by Frank, and set about business.

  First, I confirmed with the senior barflies at the Star Lounge that a puffy-faced white guy used to pal around there with my brother.

  “Oh, he still comes by here,” according to somebody called Shug. “Real wormy kind of a man, just sit over to the end of the bar and complain. I ain’t saying we don’t got our share of complainers, but things that guy said—well, seems to me he was creeped by his own life.”

  Before I left, Shug told me, “Your brother was all right, you know? Sure, I know what they say he did. But that’s lawyers making the charge. You know what your brother said about lawyers one time?”

  From whispers of a long-ago night I had a fair idea.

  “The Devil makes his Christmas pie with lawyers’ tongues,” said Shug. “That’s Frank’s own words. Oh, but he could talk some.”

  Next, I searched for a record of a safe deposit box rented to one Philip Malreaux, after which I pulled a few strings, thanks to my official capacity as a lawman, and quietly obtained a court order to open it up and inspect the contents. I had a fair idea what I’d find.

  It was not difficult to crack Malreaux after a long talk at the Star Lounge, accompanied by a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red, which mostly he drank while softly weeping as I told him what I’d found—and what I made of it. As I was looking into Malreaux’s white face, I saw my dead brother’s own black dog face; it was as if the two of them, Philip and Frank, were some old married couple who came to resemble one another.

  I asked Malreaux if he’d care to tell a detective to back up my theory of what really happened to the lowdown woman who shattered his life as bad as Katrina shattered the city. He took a long pull of Johnnie Walker before saying, “Yeah, that’d be all right.”

  As we rode in a taxi together down to police headquarters on South Broad Street, Malreaux said, “You being Frank’s brother, I offer my word of honor—I’ll protect you like Frank protected me.”

  That’s when I realized we both knew the all-around score: He knew that I knew that he knew.

  “Deal,” I said to Malreaux. “Just say what I tell you to say.”

  Finally, I had a little talk with the boss—the man who had hired me and sent Frank to Angola.

  “You found what?” he said, annoyed. I had interrupted the tuna sandwich he was eating at his desk.

  “The axe.”

  “Don’t matter about a murder weapon all this time after the fact.”

  “It matters if it’s new evidence—grounds for a new trial for my brother.”

  “Who is a dead and gone man.”

  “True, but that doesn’t mean the case is. Besides the axe, there was a whole lot of cash in Philip Malreaux’s box.”

  “I don’t see how that matters.” The boss used the back of his hand to wipe a string of tuna off his lip. “That money could have come from anywhere, anytime.”

  “Including it could have come from Eugenia Malreaux’s wall safe, a strong possibility I’m having the forensics squad consider.”

  In the worst way, I wanted Frank’s name cleared. Frank might have said I wanted this in the best way.

  And—hoo-whee!—what would my aunt-tee say if things turned out to clear Frank? What would any of my chilly relations say when it was written up in the newspapers the way
I reasoned how things really went down in connection with the death of Eugenia Malreaux?

  Frank helped himself somehow to Miss Eugenia’s wall safe, that’s for certain. But legally speaking, maybe there was a way of muddying up certainty. That thumbprint of Frank’s? He must have brushed the dial of that safe a hundred times reaching for tools to tend the old lady’s tulip trees. Frank’s fingerprints that no doubt would be found all over the murder weapon? Well, of course Frank’s prints are on that axe—probably a hundred times over the years of pruning trees.

  But why would Frank murder Miss Eugenia anyhow? If it was true what was said at his trial and he’d stolen jewelry from her before, then he hardly needed a goose that laid golden eggs to be dead. Philip Malreaux, on the other hand, had plenty of motive, which he’d been brooding over since his awful boyhood; since the first night his mama raped him.

  Philip’s fingerprints were never found on the wall safe in the brick shed. Why not? Maybe he was careful to wear gloves. But if Philip’s fingerprints showed up on the axe, which was likely, it was for the simple reason that nobody but the owner of a safe deposit box account is allowed to put anything into it. So why would he do that?

  Maybe Philip Malreaux came across that axe before the police did and ran down to the bank with it, thinking his buddy Frank Masson must have got liquored up and killed Miss Eugenia on account of hearing so many stories about the old bag that you could toss your lunch.

  Having seen a bunch of loose ends in every single criminal matter that ever crossed my desk at the D.A.’s office, I was unsurprised by the case of my own brother and his wormy pal. For instance, how come Frank took the fall for murdering Miss Eugenia? Well, maybe it was his way of doing a good deed for somebody before playing a trick on the calendar.