Let the Devil Out (28 page)

Atkinson handed Beatrice a business card. “Same goes for you. You remember anything else, if you see that man again, please call me. Day or night.”

“Of course,” Beatrice said. She pulled open her gate. “Well then, good night, ladies. Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Atkinson said. She waved at the dog. “Good night, Cosmo.” He growled at her before trotting up the stairs to wait for his owner at their apartment door, his tail wagging.

“Oh, Beatrice,” Maureen called, “I forgot one thing. Please tell the detective about the object.”

“The object?” Atkinson asked. “That sounds ominous.”

“I'm so sorry, of course,” Beatrice said. “Before she climbed the wall, the woman passed something up to the boy, for him to hold so she could climb. I saw him bend down and take it from her.”

“Any thoughts on what it was?” Atkinson asked.

“I couldn't really see it,” Beatrice said, “but there was this musical tinkling. I swear it sounded like wind chimes. I didn't think anything of it at the time. People often leave gifts for the dead in there. Helps with the guilt of going on living, I suppose.”

 

25

Three hours later, Maureen sat in her patrol car, chain-smoking.

She was parked under a big magnolia tree and between two streetlights, having positioned the car in a convenient pool of shadow. Her location, unknown to her fellow cops, put her not far from Audubon Park and not anywhere near where she was supposed to be at that hour. In addition to the cruiser's engine, Maureen had turned off the lights and the radio. She needed to concentrate. An hour ago, word had gone out that Preacher had survived his surgery. He had been moved into recovery. He certainly wasn't well, but he wasn't dying. Wasn't close to it. Earlier reports, Maureen had learned, had exaggerated the direness of his condition. With the news about Preacher, the emotional scaffolding inside her had collapsed, leaving her physically wobbly and mentally zombified.

To resharpen her focus, she'd rolled down the car window, inviting in the damp nighttime chill. She turned her face to the wet cold, breathing it deep into her lungs. Between drags on her cigarette she blew into her cupped hands. Running the engine so she could use the heater tempted her, but the steady warmth would put her right to sleep. She needed to be cold. Also, she needed to remain inconspicuous. Better if no one saw her sitting there. She wasn't on a street, or in a neighborhood, that the common street cop often visited, not without an invitation.

This particular short, narrow, smoothly paved dead-end street existed to access the two enormous homes on it. Homes that faced the park. One of them, the brick behemoth in Maureen's rearview, belonged to a retired federal prosecutor. The other home, the one she watched, was the regal antebellum mansion belonging to Solomon Heath.

The house was dark, and had been since Maureen had arrived. If Heath was home, he either slept or was sequestered deep inside the house. A lone gas lamp burned beside the back door, the reflected flame igniting glowing crystals in the door's cut-glass window. That was the same door Solomon had made Maureen use the night she'd met him, when she'd worked a security detail at this very house. That was the night he'd bribed her, or had tried to, depending on how she interpreted things. She'd done nothing for the man, but she'd kept his money.

Recalling that security cameras watched every inch of the Heath property, she had parked the cruiser beyond their range. She'd found a spot to be invisible, as she had in the Irish Garden. What she had to decide was what to do next. She wasn't tucked in a barroom booth, a big sweatshirt hiding her appearance. She was in a police cruiser tonight, in uniform.

Maureen settled deeper into her seat, her arm hanging out the window. She fixed her gaze on the gas lamp's dancing flame.

She didn't know what she had expected to discover sitting outside Solomon's house. Even if the lights were on, what did she hope to see? She felt he needed watching, so she watched. Her thought process hadn't advanced much beyond that basic instinct. Did she think he'd have a late-night visitor arriving at the back door? Or did she think she'd be able to accost
him
as he came creeping home in the wee hours from nefarious doings about town, maybe with a young girl or young boy on his arm? She had tailed him on and off for a month and had found no indication of such behavior. If only he would make it that easy, she thought. If only he were that sloppy. That ordinary. But you didn't get to where he was, and remain where he had managed to stay, by being sloppy. He wasn't the kind of man to commit common sins.

After weeks of watching his house, of following him to work, she had witnessed no wrongdoing of any kind. She had gained no leverage against him, had none to provide to Atkinson or Detillier. She could sit outside his house a hundred nights in a row and Solomon would give her nothing. Anything useful she got from him, she was going to have to take.

 

26

Before ending up outside Solomon's house, Maureen had visited the construction sites of the new jail and then the new hospital. She'd even smoked a couple of cigarettes parked by the demolition site of the Iberville projects. She stared down security guards who stared right back at her, hoping she'd move along so they could go back to sleep or smoke another joint.

As she moved from site to site, she had started wondering—as she stared at the deep holes and the rising structures, at the boards and the bricks and the girders, at the silent enormous machines that tore down and built up, at the placards on the fences with the Heath Design and Construction logo alongside their licenses and permits and their long list of worksite rules—about who was
really
in charge of the world she lived and worked in. Her house had been shot up, she realized, only days after she'd taken money from Solomon that he'd intended as a bribe, only for her to work against him in the end. Who had really given that first order to kill her weeks ago? Had it come from Caleb? That was hard to imagine. He was a spoiled punk. He had provided the Watchmen her street address, but he hadn't picked up a gun against her.

A group like the Watchmen—angry, violent people who fancied themselves
revolutionaries
in their grandest, suicidal fantasies—wouldn't look to a weak man like Caleb as a leader. He was the rich kid they let hang around the clubhouse because he had money to buy guns, because he knew people who had information and influence. They didn't embrace him; they tolerated him. They would follow someone else.

Solomon wouldn't lead the Watchmen directly, wouldn't dirty his own hands with their particular brand of USA crazy. Were he involved with them, Maureen thought, whether for his son's sake or for other reasons, he'd exert his authority through a proxy.

Maureen figured Leon Gage, despite his middle-school math teacher looks, was that leader Solomon used. He had the air of the pulpit about him. She could see him raging at a crowd, those blue eyes blazing. She knew she had no evidence connecting Solomon to the doings and dealings of the Watchmen, no proof that Leon took his orders from Solomon.

Light from inside the house suddenly filled the back door's window and spilled onto the slate steps. Floodlights illuminated the yard and the back door opened. Solomon stepped out of the house. Maureen could see his breath as he pulled the door closed behind him.

He wore, as he always did, khakis and brown loafers. Against the cold he wore a thick down vest over a red flannel shirt. He had a wool snap-brim cap pulled low on his head and wore leather gloves. He carried something in his left hand. Maureen sat up straight for a better look. A thermos. He clutched it to his chest like a football as he walked in her direction.

Maureen zipped up her leather jacket, pulled on her knit cap, and got out of the car. Fuck it, she thought. She unbuckled her weapon. For weeks, you've been hoping to stumble into exactly this moment. And now there's no one else around, no joggers in the park, no construction workers at the worksite. And no Preacher to rein her in and scold her.

Maureen decided as she stepped into the street that Solomon had ordered the hit on Preacher. She had seen Solomon recognize him in the park. And he had revived the kill order on her; she was sure of that, too.

With Caleb safely sequestered in the UAE and the NOPD working overtime to erase Quinn's dirty history and look the other way at the circumstances surrounding his death, Maureen decided Solomon had convinced Leon Gage that now was the time for starting his war against the NOPD, using Gage to get rid of the cops that threatened his son. Gage was a leader to his men, but he was a weapon for Solomon—as Quinn had been, one of his countless tools.

Maureen figured that Leon, who was mourning a son who had crossed over much more than an ocean, hadn't needed much prodding.

She closed the cruiser door, keeping her eyes on Heath, who had stopped his approach when Maureen left the car.

She realized as she straightened her gun belt on her hips that her return to work, to the NOPD's good graces—hell, there was no reason he couldn't know about her work with the FBI—had spurred Solomon into action. Being a cop again made her a threat again. He'd waited to see if she'd quit the department and leave New Orleans like Ruiz had done. Instead, she had rubbed her continuing presence in his face. So Solomon had acted and had done so in the way that men like him preferred, through others, by putting those others' baser instincts and desires to work for him. Leon Gage fancied himself a man with a cause and an army. Solomon Heath gave him an enemy. A target. Then he sat back safe and distant in his big house and watched the bodies drop.

But she must have done something right, Maureen thought, because here he finally was. The man himself, the man that neither the NOPD nor the FBI would touch, had come to face her in the street. He was twenty yards away. Closer to her now than he'd gotten with his golf club.

Those other two cops, Maureen decided, the ones who had died, Mays and Harrigan, they'd been collateral damage, camouflage and distraction for the Watchmen's real intentions as they came after her and Preacher. In fact, she was pretty sure that Leon Gage had been setting her up for the kill that afternoon. She should have opened fire on that passing van. It had to be the van. Should've lit those fuckers up. Gage couldn't take the shot at her himself, because if he did he couldn't be sure he'd walk out of the café. Not in a place as popular with city law enforcement as L'il Dizzy's. Maureen wouldn't be the only one in there with a gun, which wasn't something that Gage would know, but Heath would.

Heath gave the orders and Gage had escape plans, Maureen thought, because the so-called leaders never did the dirty work themselves. Gage, like Solomon, passed off the risk and the bloodshed to underlings. The ones who made the speeches never did the dying. Bin Laden didn't pilot one of the planes. The guy who held the press conference wasn't the one who climbed aboard the bus wearing the suicide vest, or the one who drove the car up to the embassy entrance. That job always went to the poor schmuck who the fake patriots and false prophets had convinced that dying in a bomb blast or a hail of bullets was the only thing worth living for. Only their death could make their lives worth anything in this world and the next. Solomon Heath and Leon Gage were those salesmen. In that way they were alike.

She'd picked Dizzy's to irritate Gage, and in defiance of Detillier's protestations, Maureen thought, and had quite likely saved her own life in the process. Had Solomon come outside to finish the job by himself, she wondered. Had she become worth that much to him? It had been a long time, she figured, since Solomon had done his own dirty work. Here she was, though, standing in the street as living proof that if you wanted something done right …

She watched as Solomon tucked the thermos under his left arm, jamming that hand into the pocket of his vest. He raised his other hand in a salute, telling her with the gesture that he'd come no farther without her permission. Maureen raised her hand and waved him closer. His leather soles scratched on the asphalt as he walked toward her.

Maureen knew that for Solomon, killing her and Preacher was the only way to make New Orleans safe for Caleb's return. Once she and Preacher were dead, with Quinn dead and a discredited Ruiz fled to another state, there'd be no one left to link Caleb to the Watchmen and the New Orleans drug gangs they worked with to hide and move their guns for their war. She was sure by now that he knew Madison Leary, the one other threat to his son, was dead.

Solomon smiled at Maureen as he got closer, walking with both hands buried deep in his vest pockets. Here was a man, Maureen thought, who had never in his life thought twice about approaching a police officer with his hands in his pockets. And despite everything she thought she knew about him, she'd let him come this far without protest. Were he a twenty-year-old black man, she thought, she'd have asked to see his hands before he crossed the street. And this was a man she knew wanted her dead.

“Am I in danger?” Heath asked.

“Excuse me?”

“I asked, am I in danger?” He continued smiling. He had perfect teeth.

“And why would you think that?” Maureen said.

After a chuckle, Heath said, “Because there is a police officer parked outside my house in the middle of the night.”

“And that means danger to you,” Maureen said, “the presence of the police.”

“Has there been a threat against me?” Heath asked. “You're out here to protect me from something. I was wondering what that is.”

“If you're worried for your safety,” Maureen said, “why leave the house?”

Heath nodded. “I'm under surveillance?”

“Not as far as I know. But the bosses don't tell me everything. I'm just a foot soldier.”

Heath looked over his shoulder. “We can have this conversation in a much warmer place, Officer. You're welcome to come inside.”