by H Hiller
I motioned for the bartender, Jason, to pour a snifter of bourbon for me and braced myself with a drink before I listened to whatever absurdity Ryan had in mind. “What’s on your mind?”
“I think I need a male nurse,” Ryan declared and settled his gaze on our only male bartender. Tony and I prefer female bartenders, but Jason was a former star of Tulane’s baseball team and brought a following when we hired him. “I don’t see why you will not loan me that young man’s services.”
“In the first place I get the impression it is you who intends to do the servicing. And we can’t have the bartenders beating up our best regulars to defend their honor,” Tony raised a token argument.
“You are so provincial, my dear boy,” Ryan smirked and turned towards me to continue with his idea. “Do you think Chief Avery might have some sort of prison trustee program I could call upon? Someone’s prison bitch could do as a male nurse, wouldn’t you think?”
“I’ll tell him of your interest,” I lied with a smile and set my empty glass on the bar before stepping away to head upstairs.
I had hoped to slip into the private dining room and make it to my seat with minimal notice, but that was just wishful thinking. My mother had set my place to the right of my father’s empty chair at the far end of the table. This meant I had to pass her and walk the length of the table before I could even reach my seat. My sister was seated to the left of my father’s seat and her subdued expression let me know to expect a full dose of our mother’s anger for having made anything a higher priority than tonight’s dinner party.
“Sorry to be late,” I whispered in her ear. I could see the tension in her jaw. She barely turned towards me before she spoke.
“Oh, so you’re done playing with your doggie?”
“Yes.” It was all I dared say in response. My mother was undoubtedly aware of where I was and what I was doing with the pit bull. Chief Avery would not have been allowed to take his own seat in the middle of the table until he had explained why it had been necessary for my mother to alter her plans at the last moment to accommodate her absent children and hisself.
My mother pulled the three of us aside once the other guests had departed to remind us that her entire purpose in having Tulip bring me back to New Orleans, using her own political connections to get my commission with the Louisiana State Patrol, and pressing Chief Avery to hire the son of his former mentor and boss was strictly to enable me to have the resources to investigate the disappearance of my father. She remains unlikely to ever forgive me for having been reported killed by enemy action in Iraq until my father is found and given the news that the report was neither complete nor accurate. My father was under the impression I was dead when he disappeared. My mother was an emotional disaster when Tulip came to my hospital room and begged me to come home.
I had consciously allowed the investigation to ease out of my daily routine and was now waiting on someone to step forward with more information or a fresh memory they would share with me before I would take up the case again. There was no way Avery, Tulip, or I would ever confess to being in the majority which believed my father had died and his body lost in the floodwaters. The area he was patrolling would have likely washed a corpse out to the vast tidal lake or into the Mississippi River. I had found no activity on his debit or credit cards after he vanished, and his driver’s license was not renewed when it expired two years ago. Not a single report of people turning up in hospitals or police stations with amnesia anywhere in the country has ever fit his description, but I continue to monitor these reports out of habit.
FIVE
I didn’t wake up until after ten o’clock the next morning. Tulip and I had left the dinner party and argued about the dog as we drank our way through a string of Frenchman Street nightclubs before dining on beignets at Café du Monde as the sun came up. I would have been as happy as anyone at the scene to have shot the dog and closed the case had my sister not been there. Tulip’s argument as an attorney was that the dog deserved no less of a fair hearing than a human murder suspect. I pointed out that nobody would ever adopt Taz even if I could prove it had been induced to attack Biggie Charles.
I showered and pulled on a pair of khaki slacks and a clean polo shirt with the State Patrol emblem over the left breast, and put a round of ten millimeter ammunition into the chamber of the Glock pistol I clipped to my belt before I headed downstairs for a light brunch. I wanted to review the costs of last night’s dinner with Chef Tony, and discuss my assignment to what could be a high profile investigation, before heading off for what promised to be a long day of people swearing the dog's behavior came as a total surprise.
“I saw you on TV last night,” Hannah, our daytime bartender, laughed as I sat at the end of the long, zinc-covered bar. She brought me a Bloody Morgan, a Bloody Mary made with spiced rum, and the day’s Times-Picayune. “I asked my boyfriend to tape the late news.”
I contend that some people gravitate to the French Quarter because it is easier than joining the Foreign Legion. Hannah was not the bartender’s real name. She had come from New Jersey a couple of years ago to attend Tulane University with the goal of being a high school history teacher. She had abandoned this idea and became a bartender after changing her blonde hair to a coppery red and adopting a wardrobe that included thigh boots with absurdly high heels, which she actually did need to be able to reach over the bar.
“Great. Maybe we can show it at the Christmas party.”
I had no interest in seeing myself in the ridiculous outfit I had cobbled together to face down the embarrassingly passive pit bull. The Times-Picayune had buried the story below the fold of the local news section. Stories about tomorrow’s Saints game against the Lions and yesterday’s 9/11 commemorations around the country occupied the front page. A story about the death of one more local thug was not going to sell newspapers. The Times-Picayune, and apparently every local radio and television station, were referring to Biggie’s death as being the result of the pit bull attack. Pit bull attacks had made the news so many times in the past few years that another mauling was a surprise only to its victim.
I had received a phone message from the pit bull rescue group Tulip represents within hours of taking the case, assuring me they were available for anything I might need. They drew the line short of offering Taz a foster home, but emailed me a list of websites on the internet with helpful information.
What I found is that pit bulls are a dog breed with an unfortunate reputation. A summary of news articles would have you believe they are a naturally aggressive animal with a hatred for young children. Sites operated by dog owner associations and breeders portray them as friendly dogs that are fiercely loyal to their owners, and that the occasional attacks are due to inadvertent mixed signals between the dogs and their victims; such as toddlers getting into their food bowls or strangers entering their territory. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two points of view.
I suppose if all I knew of airplanes was what the newspapers reported I would assume they are a ridiculously unsafe means of getting anywhere and that planes never take off or arrive on time, and have a tendency to fall out of the sky and kill hundreds of people at a time. You never see an article about any aircraft landing safely except space shuttles and Air Force One, and you almost never see articles about pit bulls saving their families by dragging them out of burning buildings. But they do.
I kept coming across the opinion that the breed makes very poor guard dogs because of their friendly nature. I also noted their success in being trained as drug and explosives sniffers for police and military forces. The irony of a criminal like Biggie Charles dying in the jaws of a dog better suited to finding his drugs than protecting his life was something to savor over a cocktail with Avery when this was all behind us.
“Christ, Cooter, what the hell is that?” Gina asked as she stared at the evidence bag holding the dog collar. I had not looked at the bag since sealing it the night before, but now I noticed that the smea
red blood inside the bag gave it an appearance eerily similar to the car windows of the Land Rover.
“It's the collar from the dog I arrested last night.”
I threw the Sports section of the newspaper over the collar before anyone else saw it. Gina muttered something I was probably just as well off not hearing and retreated to the waitress station to finish her side work before the lunch rush started. Gina is the den mother of the bistro. She is in her late forties and will happily be a waitress for the rest of her life. She is already getting a little stooped in her stance from leaning over guests and carrying armloads of plates at a time, but she never stops grinning with pleasure at meeting new people. Having her wait on you is like visiting your crazy aunt’s house.
Gina’s quirk is that she spends her time off stalking a former Saints quarterback living between her apartment and the streetcar line to the Quarter. Her last Christmas card included a picture of her standing in front Archie Manning’s house while Olivia, his wife, unloaded groceries in the background. This behavior in any other city would be cause for a restraining order, but here she is tolerated as long as she keeps her distance.
I finished my eggs Benedict and gathered up the dog collar in its evidence bag. I could have carried it loose considering the odds against it ever being presented at a trial, but treating it as viable evidence was both good practice and a reminder that this was an actual police investigation. I would drop the bag off at the evidence room and e-mail a complete report of my interviews to Avery later in the day.
“You have a phone call,” Hannah waved the bar phone at me as I started towards the kitchen to confer with Chef Tony.
“Who is it?”
There was a pause while she spoke with the person on the other end of the line. I have tried for some time to get the bartenders and servers to do this before they bother Tony or me with phone calls. They have permission to be as rude as they wish with unsolicited sales calls.
“She says she is Miss Ann, Charles Lynley’s grandmother,” Hannah said and slapped her hand over the receiver. I am not sure what she thought I might blurt out. I leaned over the bar and motioned for her to hand me the phone.
“This is Detective Holland.”
“You the one looking after my grandson’s murder?”
“I am still trying to establish that it even was a murder.”
“I want you to come talk with me. Just you. I got no reason to trust no police, but you be the only one goin’ to worry about my Charlie. I know somebody killed him because he were afraid of dogs and wouldn’t ever want one around him.”
The woman gave me an address in the St. Thomas projects and I agreed to see her in an hour. She gave me half that long to get there, saying her lunch would be coming in a little while. I hung up and told Tony I would have to get with him later.
“Book ‘em, Danno.” This was just another reminder that my friend’s vocabulary and understanding of American crime fighting come from late-night TV re-runs of old cop shows like Hawaii Five-O.
SIX
I opted for the joy of driving my XLR roadster instead of the station wagon for my day’s running around. I preferred the larger car for normal patrol work because nobody believed it was a police car. The coupe is faster than the wagon and allows me take the top down and feel the air rushing past. I had some fear of it being taken for a joyride while I was visiting with Lynley’s grandmother, but counted on the local thieves making a connection between the vanity plate reading COP CAR, the make of the car, and myself, and backing off. I have pulled enough felons out of the St. Thomas projects in the past few years that I am well known there.
Miss Ann Lynley was living on the top floor of one of the new buildings that had replaced the old projects’ warehouses of the poor. The projects these buildings replaced had been notorious as much for the gangs using this as a base of operations as it was for the number of generations of some families that had been raised in apartments meant for short-term housing. The federal housing authority took advantage of the evacuation of New Orleans to knock the old buildings down and rethink the entire idea of low-income housing.
The new projects were being touted as “mixed housing” neighborhoods of a blend of townhomes and smaller apartment buildings. The idea was that mixing income levels of the tenants would provide role models for the lowest income families, as though a lack of peer pressure caused poverty. The displacement of the former tenants actually accomplished nothing more than taking the concentration of criminal gangs that had been a cancer within the body of the projects and spreading them through the lymphatic system of the city at large.
I parked at the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street and walked across the street to the address I was given by Biggie’s grandmother. I was just hoping the parking lot cameras were working today. I put the top up as an added safety precaution and set the alarm. There was tenant parking beneath Miss Ann’s building that I might have used but it lacked security cameras. The building’s elevated design is an example of the valuable lessons learned from the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Two thoughts came to me as I was driving here from the bistro: This elderly woman was likely to be the lone voice speaking on Biggie’s behalf, and I might take what she told me at face value. The bodyguard and fiancée were already suspects, and any musicians under contract to the studio had a business relationship with the deceased. I also knew she would likely want me to think of him as misunderstood or a victim of his surroundings, or however she lived with having such a monster as a relative. She might have some insights and background on her grandson’s associates and business dealings that could be useful but, to be honest, I was coming here mostly because she had asked me to do so and I considered it to be something of a duty.
“Get in here, you,” the slight woman that answered the door snapped at me and grabbed my arm. “I don’t need to be seen talking to the likes of you.”
“You were the one who asked me to come see you, Miss Ann.”
The apartment was immaculate and smelled very faintly of bleach, and of the hot meal someone had delivered in the last few minutes. I looked through the sliding glass door to the balcony and saw she had one of city’s best views of the river. The store parking lot and massive metal wharves between here and the water were beneath her line of sight unless she was on the balcony.
Biggie’s grandmother was probably in her seventies or early eighties. Black women grow old in a fashion that makes it impossible to accurately judge such things past a certain age, and I had learned not to ask or speculate. She was barely five feet tall and walked with a metal cane.
She waved me to the floral print sofa and stepped into the kitchen for a pitcher and plastic glasses filled with sweet tea. She handed me a full glass and then set the pitcher on the wobbly TV dinner tray between the sofa and the high backed chair she now settled into before she muted the game show on the flat screen television set in the corner. There were family pictures on the wall behind my hostess but I was unable to make out any of a young Charles.
“You mentioned that your grandson was afraid of dogs.”
“Yes, indeed. Charlie was born in the Calliope but his momma sent him to live with his grandpa and me in Bogue Chitto until he got to be about ten. He started acting up in school but that weren’t why we sent him back. My husband had an old hound dog that that boy started pestering. Charlie started whipping it with a stick one day and that dog bit him so bad we had to take him to the hospital. The sheriff made us put the hound down and his grandpa beat that boy with that same stick until he couldn’t scream no more.”
“Wow.”
“After that, Charlie wouldn’t go nowhere near no dog, least not till he got outta Angola.” We settled into a silence that only ended when I spoke again.
“Miss Ann, did your grandson have any brothers or sisters, maybe any cousins, who might tell me anything else that might be useful?”
She shook her head and took a sip of her tea.
“Char
lie had an older brother, but he got killed in Vietnam. His aunties and uncles is all gone now, too. My husband died on an oil rig the same year as the World’s Fair, and then I moved here to take care of Charlie’s momma when she got cancer and he was still up in Angola. After she passed it was just Charlie and me.”
“And when was the last time you spoke with Charlie?”
“Must be three or four years, except at Christmas and my birthday.”
“Why’s that? Did you two not get along?”
“Ask that girlfriend of his. I ain’t spoke to her at all since then neither.”
I had nothing much to say about that family history. Tragic as it sounded, it was no more so than a dozen others I could have listened to in this building alone. The city’s murder toll is a long list of names of young Black men who died over petty grievances, to protect criminal enterprises, and in a system of street justice and retribution that used to be settled with fists.
I had witnessed the civil war and grudge killings that erupted in Baghdad in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s own brutality, but it had nothing on what was festering in my hometown as the police department was still trying to find its own footing. Under-strength police districts were still working out of temporary trailers half a decade after Katrina. The criminal turf battles settled years earlier had returned as the city’s repatriation had disrupted the established neighborhoods.
The city’s drug trafficking, armed robberies, and burglaries were fueled by chronic unemployment which was leading young men with more anger than employment opportunities to pick up a gun. The police force was overwhelmed and had made its increasingly limited focus to keeping the tourist districts safe from the crime wave that was crippling the remainder of the city’s recovery.
“Maybe you could tell me why anyone would have dyed a dog blue as a present?” This was not something I was going to figure out on my own.
