by H Hiller
THE BLUE GAROU
By H. Max Hiller
For Carla and Karen. There would be no pages after this were it not for their encouragement and help in taking an idea and making it into a story.
ONE
I toss in a panicked sweat from my recurring nightmare of the first time I died. It was just after two in the morning on July 29th, 2004 and I was riding in a convoy of three armored SUVs speeding through a village on the outskirts of Baghdad. I knew we were likely to be attacked because we had been told not to detain our passenger in the first place. He was a colonel in Iraq’s secret police, and members of his family were part of the new Interim Government.
A car bomb stopped the convoy and lit up the night sky like a fireworks display as RPG explosions ripped into our vehicles. I was blinded for an instant with a combination of sand, cordite, and blood. I checked on our prisoner, who was still alive but with a piece of the front seat’s frame lodged in his chest. I forced the rear door open and rolled from my position into a bone-dry ditch. Our attackers were upon us immediately and one of them shot me at point blank range before I could raise a weapon. The one who shot me was maybe fourteen years old. His gun jammed so he began to batter my face with the butt of his AK-47. I found enough strength to raise my handgun and fired blindly, in both a literal and physical sense, at the dark shape above me before I lost consciousness.
I awakened to find myself safe from this scene in both time and distance. My breath and heart rate returned to normal and I stepped out of my bed to get a beer. I smiled at the framed banner hanging in my living room as I made my way to the kitchen. It was the campaign banner for a minor candidate named Manny Chevrolet who ran in New Orleans’s first mayoral election after Hurricane Katrina. He had campaigned as “A Troubled Man for Troubled Times.” I adopted it for my own mantra the first time I saw it.
My name is Cooter E. Holland, and I am a troubled cop for a troubled city. My father named me after his hometown in the bootheel of Missouri. Six successive generations of the Holland family have lived on a farm bordering the Mississippi River east of Cooter with a long tradition of the younger sons leaving home to find work elsewhere.
Ralph Holland, the youngest of five sons, was a member of the New Orleans Police Department for thirty years, working his way up to Chief of the Detective Division. He had also published a series of popular crime novels by the time I graduated from the military prep school he sent me to after one too many underage incidents in the French Quarter. I followed the family tradition by choosing a military career which meant being apart from the city of my birth for half of my lifetime before returning to a hometown that was as battered as I was. My involvement in these endeavors ended with my being pulled from the brink of death in the ambush of my recurring nightmares.
One of those actually killed in the ambush had been wearing a borrowed jacket with my own name in the lining. This led to my family being notified that I was killed in the line of duty. I had been impersonating an Iraqi police officer and it wasn’t until I was out of the country that my real name was divulged. Hurricane Katrina brought fresh tragedy to my parents and sister, who were still reeling from reports of my death. My father disappeared without a trace while volunteering to assist with the search and rescue operations following the collapse of the city’s floodwalls.
I was still in the hospital when I promised my kid sister that I would return to New Orleans to look for our father. As it turned out, there was a critical law enforcement situation in New Orleans in the first months after the storm. Over a third of the New Orleans police force had resigned or been fired and National Guard soldiers had been temporarily deployed to help out. NOPD was in no position to train new officers so I was encouraged to apply to the State Highway Patrol. My classified work history complicated the process, but I was hired, trained, and deployed to New Orleans in an arrangement my father’s former NOPD partner, William Avery, made with the Troop Commander. Avery had replaced my father as the Chief of Detectives, and I was assigned to fill one of the detective vacancies the storm had created.
The arrangement fell apart almost immediately. Chief Avery and I did not share the same priorities. His focus was on the present and mine was squarely on the past, specifically finding an answer to my father’s disappearance. I was stonewalled and sent down blind alleys by people I had every reason to believe should have been as concerned about my father’s disappearance as I was and wound up causing so many scenes that Avery had no choice but to make me a ‘reserve’ detective and relegate me to clearing the backlog of arrest warrants and handling the minor criminal investigations that were taxing his department.
I had spent the entire previous week camped out in an abandoned house to monitor one of the other homes in the Lower Ninth Ward which sat untouched since Katrina’s floodwaters had devastated the neighborhood. I called in the Fugitive Task Force earlier that Friday morning to serve its arrest warrant when I verified the identity of the squatter as a drug dealer wanted on homicide charges. The stakeout had begun to remind me of similar observation missions I had done as a military sniper and intelligence operative. The combination of those memories and the sound of thunder from the passing storm had likely brought on my nightmare. Waking from the memories of the ambush meant it was time to face the fresh nightmare of my father’s birthday party later that evening.
I returned to New Orleans with a friend named Antonio Vento. Chef Tony, as he now calls himself, made me a partner in a Creole-Italian bistro in the French Quarter. Tony paid cash for a vacant building on Decatur Street near the Old Mint building. We set aside the third floor for spacious loft apartments with a view of the Mississippi River for each of us. The first floor of the building was laid out for the kitchen, bar, and high-ceilinged dining room. The second floor was divided into private dining rooms, and it was in the smallest of these that I found my mother just after three o’clock.
“Is the staff following your orders?” I gave her a peck on the cheek.
My mother was taller than me in her heels and was impeccably dressed in a pale champagne Chanel skirt and jacket with a matching silk blouse. Her flawless makeup and improbable mane of lustrous brown hair made her look much younger than sixty-eight years of age. A cosmetic surgeon had smoothed out what Estee Lauder could no longer conceal.
“Why wouldn’t they?” She came around the table and looked at my clothes and then at my face, her frown growing by the minute. “Tell me that you are not wearing those clothes or that beard to your father’s birthday party.”
I was not about to defend appearing before her in jeans and a Jazz Fest t-shirt. Nor was I going to suggest that my father was unlikely to attend his party, mention that her annual party for a man she was divorcing at the time of his disappearance was a private topic of discussion among her guests, or that some of them find a celebration on September 11th to be in poor taste.
“Of course not, Mother. I just came by to say hello.”
I made a strategic withdrawal and returned to my apartment to shower again, and to also shave the week’s growth of facial hair I had sprouted on the stakeout. I dug deep in my closet for the white Armani dinner jacket and black slacks I wear only for this party each year. I then headed to the main floor in search of Tony so we could review the party’s menu and proper plate presentations one last time.
The bar area was filling up with locals who came to enjoy the tapas Chef Tony set out to entice them to the Quarter rather than start their weekend in the revitalized strip of bars and cafes on Tchoupitoulas in the Warehouse District or further Uptown. The rain that began the night before had thinned to a d
rizzle and the breeze coming through the open French doors carried the faint stench of decay from the gutters filled with rain water that had rinsed the rooftops and exteriors of the centuries-old buildings of the Quarter. I checked the reservation book with Marie, our hostess, and said hello to a couple of the early diners I recognized.
Chef Tony was standing at the bar with Chief of Detectives William Avery. The career lawman is a towering figure who still has the gait and bulk of the LSU linebacker he once was. His voice still has its deep timbre and local accent but his thick silvery hair betrays the way this job, especially since the storm, has aged him. Avery was barely thirty years old when he started trailing behind my father as a rookie detective.
“I hear you found my bail jumper this morning,” my boss said and patted my back.
“He was crashing in his uncle’s place.” I shrugged as though any detective would have thought to stake out an abandoned house the suspect had given as an address when he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge ten years ago.
“Well, good work,” he complimented me and then turned his attention to the frosty mug of beer in his hand and leaned slightly towards Tony. “So, what’s on the menu tonight?”
“Don’t worry, whatever it is will taste good covered in hot sauce.”
Avery thought about this for a moment before bursting into laughter. I couldn’t help laughing as well, and Tony gave us a wide grin. Our laughter was cut short by the sound of police cruisers and an ambulance racing past the double doors open to Decatur Street. Most of the regulars merely waited for the noise to stop and resumed their conversations, having long ago lost their sensitivity to, and curiosity about, police sirens. Avery’s cell phone buzzed about the same time the ambulance passed. He glanced at the text message and broke into a wide grin. I had never seen him this happy and I raised an eyebrow in query.
“Yes, indeed. Someone just killed Biggie Charles Lynley at the Hard Rock Café.”
“I’ll go with you. Tony, don’t tell my mother or sister where we went.”
I poured our beers into plastic cups before following Avery out the door and heading towards Canal Street. My mother would not appreciate our being late to the party or regaling the table with gory stories from the crime scene but neither of us saw any reason to hurry to see the city’s latest dead guy. He wasn’t going anywhere.
TWO
The sidewalks were packed with the usual late afternoon foot traffic of tuxedo wearing wait staff on their way to work and gutter punks in filthy rags and expensive boots. There were also tourists in town for the Saints game against the Detroit Lions on Sunday. Avery and I were prepared for 2009 to be another in a long line of Saints’ seasons that start well but end up in shambles. Last year’s fourth place finish in the division did not inspire much hope this year.
We walked past the bank of television reporters using the murder scene as a backdrop as they recounted the life of the deceased for the audience of their breaking newscast. Biggie Charles Lynley was a product of the Calliope Projects and a dismal public education system. He was dealing drugs by the time he finished high school, and was solidly in control of the heroin trade between St Charles Avenue and the river by the time he was twenty two. His undoing was executing two undercover DEA agents, but the murder trial had been so poorly prosecuted that the DEA agents were being cast as the bad guys by the time the judge accepted a plea bargain to end the travesty. Biggie Charles had been sentenced to fifteen years in Angola State Prison. He was paroled after only seven years over the strenuous objections of everyone who could make one. He had then returned to New Orleans and built his rap music empire. The question nobody knew the answer to was where Biggie Lynley had found the money to open a recording studio in the first place. He had spent a small fortune but was never any sort of competition for other local labels such as Cash Money Records because his acts lacked the level of talent of the musicians at the more successful studios.
BC Studios was making some of its money operating as an unlicensed after-hours club. They catered to local bad-boy athletes, twenty-something college coeds, and thirty-something young urban white collar types who wanted to pal around with what they thought were gang members who had pulled themselves off the path of destruction. Discovering the violent and ugly truth about Biggie Charles Lynley’s background had run the smarter ones off, yet Biggie Charles continued to show up in venues he should have been barred from and in photographs with people that should have known better than to stand so close. Avery’s detectives mentioned him from time to time in connection with an unsolved murder or some sort of drug or weapon sale on which they could never make a case on more than their gut instinct and circumstantial evidence. He was more of a boogey man than a crime lord.
Avery led me to the knot of NOPD detectives dressed in sport coats who were milling about while their supervisors, dressed in suits, were trying to decide how much effort to put into the case. A single New Orleans homicide detective could be assigned more active cases at one time than the entire police department of some communities would see in a year. They would find any number of their active cases were an intertwined mess of back-and-forth retaliation for some incident none of the participants could even remember. A detective’s failure to make prosecutable cases on many of these homicides would have nothing to do with their personal ability to solve the crimes. The conviction rate for the nearly two hundred homicides this year was running under sixty percent and fear of prosecution was not something any gang members were worried about. Most homicides in post-Katrina New Orleans involve turf battles over drug dealing or minority-on-minority crime, both of which tend to be settled on the street and not in the courts.
“Big Chief and Cadillac have arrived. We can all go home,” the beefy head of the Homicide detectives laughingly greeted us. Avery had been known as Big Chief for as long as he had carried a badge. NOPD’s fleet of squad cars had been destroyed while patrolling neighborhoods still flooded with brackish water following Katrina. Sewell Cadillac’s entire inventory had been appropriated and pressed into service. Avery had assigned me one of these sedans when I arrived and it had given NOPD’s patrolmen and detectives an easy derogatory nickname for me. I was still driving a Cadillac, but now I bought my own.
“Back off, fellas. This is well in hand,” one of the other detectives said and held up a hand in a not entirely insincere effort to keep us at bay. He looked the two of us up and down and grinned. Avery was in his best Brooks Brothers suit and I was way over-dressed for this scene. “Did you two just come from a James Bond convention?”
“The hell you have this under control. You don't even have coffee yet,” I countered.
“Whataya got?” Avery asked bluntly. It is one of those things he gets to do as Chief of Detectives. A large part of the respect and deference he gets has to do with the fear of his reaching over and thumping anyone he feels is not in line with the program at the moment.
“Charles Lynley’s new pit bull got hungry with just the two of them in the vehicle.”
The afternoon’s rain had likely washed away anything of investigative value from the parking lot, but I thought there was little to have been lost by the look of things. The crime scene seemed neatly contained within the interior of the Land Rover. The side windows were tinted to start with, but were now further darkened by what appeared to be gallons of somebody's blood. The front windshield was nearly obscured by the splashes of arterial spray from the behind the passenger seat.
“How do you know what kind of dog it is?” I could not even see into the vehicle’s interior because of the gore on every window.
“His fiancée gave it to him for a birthday present. She and the bodyguard had left the two of them alone for about twenty minutes and came back to this.”
The Homicide Chief spoke up in an effort to regain control of the scene. “Who is going to shoot the dog? You can't see the thing so someone will have to open the door so someone else can shoot it.”
“You can’t do that!”
I heard an unexpected voice. I had not noticed my sister’s arrival at the scene, and wondered if Tony had spilled the beans or if she had noticed us as her cab passed the scene. “You can't just shoot the dog.”
“Damn, Tulip, the dog just killed a guy. What's the problem?”
I was over-dressed for the occasion, but Tulip was absolutely distracting. She had her auburn hair in a tight chignon and the salon-applied make-up accented the dark brown of her eyes. My kid sister is thirty-two years old but looks considerably younger. She has been saddled with a name, Tulip Holland, our parents found even more amusing than my own.
“Dogs don’t just attack their owners. Not without some sort of provocation,” Tulip persisted. “And a trained pit bull would certainly be unlikely to attack its owner.”
“It's also the only witness to the crime.” I turned to one of the uniformed officers who had been first on the scene. “Did they say it was acting funny?”
“No.”
I looked at the Land Rover and then to where one of the detectives had pointed out Biggie’s driver and his fiancée. They both looked a lot more nervous than sad about the way the evening was going. It was as if someone had told them they were going to have to take the dog home with them.
I walked over and introduced myself as Detective Holland, figuring that they could believe I was an NOPD detective if they wanted. I was not here in any official capacity at the moment anyway. The burly Black male identified himself as Bumper Jackson, Biggie’s bodyguard, and the woman as Tyshika Barnes. She claimed she was engaged to Biggie.
“How long has he had the dog?” I asked the bodyguard. He was probably in his mid-thirties and carried a lot of muscle on his nearly seven foot frame. He was using his body to block my access to the fiancée. I couldn’t help noticing that Tyshika was not crying. She just seemed especially angry.
