New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

  “Now, first thing we’re gon’ do is go in there and get you another phone,” Stevens says.

  De La Russe knows what he means, and he’s not even shocked. What’s going on here is nothing short of the breakdown of society, and he thinks he’s going to have to roll with it. Something about having Stevens with him is kind of reassuring; he is a sergeant—not Del’s sergeant, but still, if he heard right, a sergeant in the New Orleans Police Department has just told him to go into Wal-Mart and loot himself a phone.

  Just to be sure, he tries something out: “Loot one, you mean.”

  “Hell no! We’re gonna commandeer you one.” And Stevens about kills himself laughing.

  They hitch their trousers and push past several boiling little seas of people, seemingly working in groups, helping themselves to everything from baby food to fishing poles. Nobody even glances at their uniforms.

  “Why are we bothering with the goddamn phone?” De La Russe asks. “Damn things don’t work anyhow.”

  “Yeah, you right,” Stevens says. “But just in case.” He turns to the busy knot of looters on the small appliances aisle and grabs himself one at random—a woman. Just shoves an arm around her, gets up under her chin, and pulls her against his body. De La Russe sees her pupils dilate, her eyeballs about pop out of her head with fear. Stevens whispers something in her ear and she nods.

  When he lets her go, she reaches in the pocket of her jeans and comes out with a cell phone, which she hands over, meek as you please. Stevens passes it to De La Russe. “Now ya back in business.” He swings his arms wide. “Anything else ya need?”

  De La Russe feels sweat break out on his forehead. His scalp starts to prickle, and so do his toes. His heart speeds up a little. Weirdest part of all, he’s actually having a sexual reaction; he’s getting hard. Not all the way hard, just a little excited, like when he sees a woman he likes, maybe lights a cigarette for her, brushes her thigh, but that’s all, no kiss or anything. A woman who isn’t his wife but someone who’s not supposed to get him excited. This is how he feels now, except with sweat and prickles. Because he’s pretty sure this is not an idle question Stevens is asking. Thing about Stevens, there’s rumors about him. About how he makes stuff disappear from the property room, shakes suspects down for drugs, little stuff that tells you a lot.

  Thing about De La Russe, he’s not above the same kind of thing. And he doesn’t need rumors, he’s been disciplined and everybody knows it. Yeah, he’s been clean since then, but he’s starting to feel this is something else again, this thing he’s looking at. This thing that’s nothing less than the breakdown of the social contract. It’s just occurring to him that people are going to profit from this, and they’re not just gonna be the Pampers-and-toothpaste thieves. He decides to get right down to it.

  “What are you saying, sergeant?”

  “Hell, Del, it’s the end of the world and you’re callin’ me sergeant—what’s up with that shit?” But he knows perfectly well.

  De La Russe smiles. “I was just wondering if I heard you right.” He waits for an answer, not allowing the smile to fade. Keeping his teeth bared.

  “Remember that little eBay bi’ness you told me you and ya wife was runnin’? How she goes to garage sales and finds things she can sell to collectors? And then you photograph ’em and get ’em on up online? Y’all still doin’ that?”

  “Yeah. We still doin’ that. Why?”

  Stevens looks at him like he’s nuts. “Why? Think about it, Del. You can sell just about anything on eBay.” He pauses, does the wide-open this-could-all-be-yours thing again. “And we got access to just about anything.”

  De La Russe is getting his drift. His mind’s racing, going instantly to the problems and working on solutions. He shrugs. “Yeah? Where would we store it?”

  “Glad you axed, bro. Just happens I already hooked up with a lieutenant who’s got a room at the Hyatt.” The Hyatt has become the department’s temporary headquarters. “He’s got access to a couple other rooms we could use. And I don’t mean hotel rooms. Storage rooms. Pretty big ones. We keep it there for now and when things get back to normal, somebody’s garage, maybe.”

  De La Russe narrows his eyes. “What lieutenant?”

  “Joe Dougald.”

  The patrolman almost does a double take. “Joe Dougald? You’re dreaming. Guy’s a boy scout.”

  Stevens hoots. “Yeah? Ya think so? I been doin’ deals with Joe for fifteen years. Trust me. We can trust him.”

  De La Russe isn’t sure if he even trusts Stevens, much less Dougald, but what the hell, the regular rules just don’t seem to apply now that the apocalypse, or whatever this is, has come crashing in on them. And he’s got two kids in Catholic school, with college looming. That’s not going away.

  He assesses the place. “Let’s start with little stuff that’s easy to carry. IPods, video games, stuff like that. Electronics, small appliances. Hey, do they have jewelry here?” He gives a little snort. Wal-Mart jewelry isn’t going to make them rich, even if it exists. “Watches, maybe?”

  Stevens smiles as if he likes the way De La Russe is getting into this. “This ain’t the only store in town, ya know. And stores ain’t the only sources we got. You’re from the Second District, right? People there got real nice taste.”

  De La Russe decides he’s just fallen into a real deal. Here they are, right this minute, he and Stevens, policing Wal-Mart and helping themselves while they’re at it. He sees how he can patrol his own district, get credit for coming to work, arrest a few of the real looters—the street guys—and help himself to whatever he wants while everybody’s still out of town. How come he hadn’t thought of it first?

  It’s early the next day when De La Russe sees the black couple—oh, excuse him, the two African-Americans—packing up their car in front of the biggest-ass goddamn house in the Garden District, or so near it doesn’t matter. What the hell are they thinking? There aren’t any cops around here? He decides he’s really going to enjoy this.

  He parks his car and strolls up all casual, like he’s just gonna talk to ’em. “How y’all?” Dicking with them.

  They go rigid though. They know from the get-go he’s trouble, and it has to be because of their guilty little consciences. “What y’all doing?”

  “Leavin’,” the man says. “Gettin’ out of town quick as we can. You want to see some ID? My wife works here and the owners are in North Carolina. So we rode out the storm here.” He starts to put his hand in his pocket, maybe to get the ID, and that gives De La Russe an excuse to slam him up against the car, like he thinks the guy’s going to go for a weapon.

  He pats the man down, and sure enough, there is one. Doesn’t that just sweeten this whole deal. Worth a lot to a couple guys he knows. “You got a permit for this?”

  The guy doesn’t answer, but his wife pipes up: “It’s not ours. It belongs to Tony. My employer. When the looters came …”

  De La Russe smiles. “… ya thought it might be okay to steal ya boss’s gun, huh? You know how pathetic that story sounds? Know who I think the looters are? Yeah. Yeah, I guess ya do. Let’s see what else ya got here.”

  The woman says, “My boss, Mathilde … she asked me to bring—”

  “Mrs. Berteau,” the man says. “My wife works for Mathilde Berteau.”

  “Right,” says De La Russe. “Y’all get in the backseat for a while.”

  “What about …?” The woman’s already crying, knowing exactly what’s in store for her. He grabs her by the elbow and rassles her into the car, shoving her good, just for the fun of it.

  “What about what?”

  “Nothin’, I just …”

  The husband is yelling now. “Listen, call the Berteaus. All you have to do is call ’em, goddammit! Just call ’em and let ’em tell you.”

  “Like there was the least chance of that,” Cherice says ten months later. The encounter had led to the misery and indignity of incarceration for three days and two nights, plus the humiliati
on of being accused of looting—almost the hardest part to bear. But she has survived, she and Charles, to tell the story at a Fourth of July barbecue.

  “Know why I was wastin’ my breath?” Charles chimes in. “’Cause that peckerwood was enjoyin’ himself. Wasn’t about to ruin his own good time.”

  She and Charles are living in Harvey now, in a rental, not a FEMA trailer, thank God, until they decide what to do about their gutted house. Their families have all heard the story many times over, but they’ve made new friends here on the West Bank, people they haven’t yet swapped Katrina yarns with. Right now they have the rapt attention of Wyvette Johnson and her boyfriend Brandin. Cherice didn’t catch his last name.

  Wyvette gets tears in her eyes. “Mmmm. Mmmm. What about those poor dogs?”

  This annoys Cherice, because it’s getting ahead of the way she usually tells it. But she says, “I nearly blurted out that they were there at the last minute … before he took us away. But I thought they’d have a better chance if he didn’t know about ’em. Last thing I wanted was to get my dogs stole by some redneck cop.” Here she lets a sly smile play across her face. “Anyhow, I knew once Mathilde knew they was still in the house, that was gon’ give her a extra reason to come get us out.”

  “Not that she needed it,” Charles adds. “She was happy as a pig in shit to hear we’d been dragged off to jail. I mean, not jail, more like a chain-link cage, and then the actual Big House. I ended up at Angola, you believe that? The jail flooded, remember that? And then they turned the train station into a jail. Oh man, that was some Third World shit! Couldn’t get a phone call for nothin’, and like I say, they put you in a cage. But one thing—it was the only damn thing in the city that whole week that worked halfway right. Kept you there a couple days, shipped you right out to Angola. But they got the women out of there just about right away. So Cherice was up at St. Gabriel—you know, where the women’s prison is—in just about twenty-four hours flat. And after that, it wasn’t no problem. ’Cause they actually had working phones there.”

  Wyvette is shaking her silky dreads. “I think I’m missin’ somethin’ here—did you say Mathilde was happy y’all were in jail?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Cherice says. “She was outraged—’specially since I’d been there for two days when they finally let me make the call. It’s just that outrage is her favorite state of mind. See, who Mathilde is—I gotta give you her number; every black person in Louisiana oughta have it on speed dial—who Mathilde is, she’s the toughest civil rights lawyer in the state. That’s why Charles made sure to say her name. But that white boy just said, ‘Right,’ like he didn’t believe us. Course, we knew for sure she was gon’ hunt him down and fry his ass. Or die tryin’. But that didn’t make it no better at the time. In the end, Mathilde made us famous though. Knew she would.”

  “Yeah, but we wouldn’t’ve got on CNN if it hadn’t been for you,” Charles says, smiling at her. “Or in the New York Times neither.”

  Wyvette and Brandin are about bug-eyed.

  “See what happened,” Charles continues, “Cherice went on eBay and found Mathilde’s mama’s engagement ring, the main thing she wanted us to bring to Highlands. Those cops were so arrogant they just put it right up there. In front of God and everybody.”

  “But how did you know to do that?” Wyvette asks, and Cherice thinks it’s a good question.

  “I didn’t,” she says. “I just felt so bad for Mathilde I was tryin’ anything and everywhere. Anyhow, once we found the jewelry, the cops set up a sting, busted the whole crime ring—there was three of ’em. Found a whole garage full of stuff they hadn’t sold yet.”

  Brandin shakes his head and waves his beer. “Lawless times. Lawless times we live in.”

  And Cherice laughs. “Well, guess what? We got to do a little lootin’ of our own. You ever hear of Priscilla Smith-Fredericks? She’s some big Hollywood producer. Came out and asked if she could buy our story for fifteen thousand dollars, you believe that? Gonna do a TV movie about what happened to us. I should feel bad about it, but those people got way more money than sense.”

  Right after the holiday, Marty Carrera of Mojo Mart Productions finds himself in a meeting with a young producer who has what sounds to him like a good idea. Priscilla Smith-Fredericks lays a hand on his wrist, which he doesn’t much care for, but he tries not to cringe.

  “Marty,” she says. “I believe in this story. This is an important story to tell—a story about corruption, about courage, about one woman’s struggle for justice in an unjust world. But most of all, it’s the story of two women, two women who’ve been together for twenty-two years—one the maid, the other the boss—about the love they have for each other, the way their lives are inextricably meshed. In a good way.

  “I want to do this picture for them and … well … for the whole state of Louisiana. You know what? That poor state’s been screwed enough different ways it could write a sequel to the Kama Sutra. It’s been screwed by FEMA, it’s been screwed by the Corps of Engineers, it’s been screwed by the administration, it’s been screwed by its own crooked officials … Everybody’s picking carrion off its bones. And those poor Wardells! I want to do this for the Wardells. Those people have a house to rebuild. They need the money and they need the … well, the lift. The vindication.”

  Marty Carrera looks at the paperwork she’s given him. She proposes to pay the Wardells a $15,000 flat fee, which seems low to him. Standard would be about $75,000, plus a percentage of the gross and maybe a $10,000 “technical consultant” fee. He shuffles pages, wondering if she’s done what he suspects.

  And yes, of course she has. She’s inflated her own fee at the expense of the Wardells. She thinks she should get $100,000 as an associate producer, about twice what the job is worth. And not only that, she wants to award the technical consultant’s fee to herself.

  Marty is genuinely angry about this. She’s roused his sympathy for the wrongfully accused couple, and even for the beleaguered state, and he too believes the Wardells’ story—or more properly, Mathilde and Cherice’s story—would make a great movie for television.

  However, he thinks Ms. Smith-Fredericks is a species of vermin. “After looking at the figures,” he says, “I think I can honestly say that you seem uniquely qualified to do a piece on looting.”

  But she doesn’t catch his meaning. She’s so full of herself all she hears is what she wants to hear. She sticks out her hand to shake

  Well, so be it, Marty thinks. I tried to warn her.

  His production company doesn’t need her. So what if she found the story and brought it to him? He’s not obligated to … Well, he is, but …

  “Marty,” she says, “we’re going to be great together.”

  He shakes her hand absentmindedly, already thinking of ways to cut her out of the deal.

  ANGOLA SOUTH

  BY ACE ATKINS

  Loyola Avenue

  The child was small and black, shirtless, wearing only a filthy pair of Spider-Man pajama bottoms and carrying a skinned-up football. His fingers still felt numb from holding his mother’s hand all night and he now found himself standing on top of the interstate overpass looking down at a maze of swamped streets.

  For a long time now, since the morning heat started shining hard off the top of the downtown buildings, he’d been watching the man with the gun.

  The man was white and wearing green, a big plug of tobacco in his left cheek. To the child, it seemed his eyes were superhuman, taking in everything in their thick mirrored lenses and occasionally shouting to a group of shackled men who sat and slept.

  He kept the gun tight in both hands and would walk from the beginning of the chain of men—bearded and smelling of rotten eggs and garbage—to the end, his boots making hollow sounds on the overpass. His steps seemed like a drum over the murmur of men and families who’d found refuge on the high ground.

  By early afternoon, the child stood close to the railing, trying to catch the breeze that wo
uld sometimes come across his face, his eyes lazily opening and closing, watching the waves break and shift on top of the roadway and on the parched roofs of partially sunk buildings and shotgun houses.

  He felt his fingers slip from the sweaty hand of his mother and he wandered, walking and swaying, toward the man with the gun.

  The boy tugged at the rough material on his leg and the man stared down at him, his silver glass eyes shining an image of a grinning child back at him.

  He looked at the twin images of himself and said: “Mister, when you gonna fix our city?”

  Jack Estay woke at 5 a.m. to the sound of the big yellow locomotive’s engines chugging away and keeping the entire station juiced with power. He took the twelve-gauge from his lap, stood from where he’d fallen asleep in a chair the night before, and washed himself in the lavatory.

  At 5:15 he walked five men caught looting a Vietnamese restaurant (they’d been found eating dried shrimp and guzzling bottles of 33 beer) down the endless train platform and into the holding cells fashioned with chain link, metal bars, and concertina wire. In each of the sixteen cells there was one portable toilet.

  Orleans Parish Prison sat filled with water, so it was the best they could do.

  As Jack locked up and walked the line back to the old Amtrak station, men and women hollered and yelled. A homeless man on the way tried to piss on him, but his short quick stream stopped shy of Jack’s leg.

  Jack looked at the man and spat some brown juice at the base of the cell.

  Another guard called out to him about the next row of cells. “That one has AIDS,’’ the thick-bodied woman said. “Be careful.’’