New Orleans Noir (17 page)
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.
And there’s the little matter of what everybody overlooked right from the jump: What about old man Malreaux, by which I mean Philip’s daddy? Mightn’t the old man himself have gone crazed over all the years of carrying around the sickening knowledge of what went on in his house?
But mostly my theorizing was informed by what I alone knew about—namely, Frank’s last letter and the money that came with it, and the contents of my long conversation at the Star Lounge with Malreaux. Three things I was not bringing up with the boss.
“My brother was no killer, he was just sad,” I continued. “Sad as a dead bird in a birdbath.”
“He was sure as hell a thief, I am sorry to inform you, Walter. And even if this Philip Malreaux was in on the crime like you are intimating, even if he was the one who did the whacking on his mama’s skull—well, as party to felony theft when the axe fell, you know your brother was equally guilty of murder.”
“But we don’t know that the theft and the murder occurred at the same time,” I said. “Or if Frank was even involved in the theft part.”
“Then how come that jewelry ends up in his bedroom?”
“He could have come by it honestly,” I lied. I thought about the Devil and his Christmas pie. “He could have bought it off Malreaux.”
“Sure, and boar hogs might grow teats some day … Are you talking like reasonable-doubt talk, Walter?” he asked. “Because if you are, I don’t like hearing that from a man supposed to be a prosecutor.”
He glared at me while taking a last chew of sandwich, like it was me he wanted in his teeth.
“Especially when we’re talking a heinous crime I prosecuted myself,” said the boss, “and which I don’t especially want to open up again. You get me?”
I said I sure did.
“Reasonable-doubt talk,” added the boss, “that could imperil a man’s career around here.”
And so, under threat as I considered myself to be, I had the right to remain silent, except for resigning from the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
The very next day, I found office space for no rent: The pink house in Gentilly. I am today waiting on contractors to come renovate the place as the offices of Walter Masson, Esq., criminal defense counsel.
I already have two clients: the late Frank Masson, whose case I am taking pro bono, and Philip Malreaux, who has the wherewithal to pay me handsomely.
That’s part of the deal I struck with Malreaux.
As for all that money in the chifforobe, I am keeping it, in a kind of solidarity with my big brother.
T
he rain will never stop.
And her landlord would never fix the air conditioner, she thought, while she sat naked at the kitchen table fanning herself, sweating and stinking. As the bath water faucet dripped, she took two ice trays from the refrigerator and emptied them in. She stepped into the claw-foot tub filled with bath water and ice cocktail, lay back, and submerged, eyes open. Through the ripples, she looked up at her drowning reflection in the full-length mirror on the ceiling. Her long black tresses floated around her lily white flesh like the passion of Ophelia.
Her long black tresses floated around her lily white flesh like the passion of Ophelia. Her ex was bartending at the Sugar Park, a dive bar at Dauphine and France Streets in the Bywater, what was left of it. She went in to use the ATM and there he was, not looking so good—not that anybody was looking good since the storm of two-thousand-ought-five. Curious, she sat down for a nightcap. He walked over to her stool like it was the last few steps to the electric chair. He politely asked what she wanted and she politely told him red wine. Like he didn’t know, the coward. That was their drink. She had an urge to lunge over the bar and rake his face for treating her like a stranger, like their time together didn’t matter.
“Why, thank you so much,” she said, sugary sweet when he returned with the beverage. At least she could savor the pleasure of having him serve her.
His new girl, an emaciated brunette, walked out of the kitchen like a coiffed skeleton in a red halter dress. Her scapulae jutted and the vertebrae stretched like a mountain ridge down her back.
They must be doing coke
, she noted. The brunette had those deer-caught-in-the-headlights eyes. They were more bugged-out than usual. Yeah, coke or crystal meth, and lots of it. The brunette sat at the other end of the bar near the TV. She had no jealousy for this girl, this brunette girl, she told herself. She started to chew her fingernails, then caught herself.
Thinking back on it, there was nothing heroic about their affair, her and her ex. It was cowardice on both accounts. He was a charming heartbreaker trying to extricate himself from another fling that had run its course and she was the willing vehicle of his getaway. Just to be a bitch. The luxury of it. There’s something alluring about being on the arm of a good-looking heartbreaker, like having something in your pocket everybody wants. And they indeed made quite an enviable ruckus, staggering around the Quarter arm-in-arm, howling merrily—beautiful, barefoot, and besotted. However, his attention began to waver toward the end of the summer. In fact, the night before the storm he made his move for the brunette.
That was months ago, and her insides were still charred like so many buildings in the neighborhood. There’s nothing like knowing where you really stand when your man goes off with another girl during a cat-five hurricane, leaving you to die. She took a long gulp of Vendage and shuddered at its horribleness.
Maybe she read it somewhere in a book at the Isle of Salvation Botanica, maybe she imagined it, but this is what she figured: She’d fuck a hundred men. Each man would be a pin stuck deep into her ex’s cheating voodoo-doll heart. Each seduction would be a ritual to cleanse herself of his brutal rebuff. Then she wouldn’t want him anymore. Furthermore, she imagined her indifference would revive his interest, because that’s how it is with heartbreakers. He would be cursed to want her forevermore. And all evidence of the hurricane would go away as if it didn’t happen. The shotgun houses would rebuild the way they were before. The people would come back. The music would play. Paradise would return.
One hundred men.
And she set off on her goal with abandon, especially in those first months. National Guardsmen, Louisiana SWAT, Texas Rangers, NOPD, animal rescue workers, paramedics, firemen. The second wave brought in demolition and salvage crews, construction workers, electricians, Latin migrant workers. Her bed was open to musicians, artists, poets, the drunken, the sad, the crazy. Men she would have never slept with before the hurricane. Men who would never have slept with her before the hurricane. By her calculation, she was at ninety-nine. She had been one man short for weeks now, peculiarly relishing the idea that with one more fuck her suffering would be over. So why did she hesitate? She stared deep into her wine glass.
“Gigolette!”
There was Jimmie Lee. The most beautiful boy in town. He waved at her drunkenly from the pool table, wearing a T-shirt with a frog drawing on it. To be anywhere near this creature was to be blessed by the gods. Pretty, pretty Jimmie Lee. Like many youth in New Orleans, he started carousing early. He was everything innocent and pure yet wicked that was the Big Easy. A naughty manchild. Girls giggled and blushed when they passed him, peering back to see if he was looking at them. Men measured him with their eyes. Jimmie Lee flirted with everybody, but he wasn’t a heartbreaker. More like a boyfriend to the world. He was the one good, true thing that seemed untouched by the storm. Everybody looked after Jimmie. He was like something holy.
She took her drink and sauntered over to him. Jimmie Lee leaned against the table aiming his shot with the pool stick, a cigarette butt with a long ash resting precipitously between his lips, ash stains on the green cloth. The balls clacked and, as drunk as he was, he still managed the solid into the hole.
“Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Me!” he chirped.
“Who are you playing?” She glanced around.
“Myself!” The ash fell on the pool table.
Her cruel lover and his skinny brunette were necking at the bar, for her benefit no doubt. That’s what wild animals do.
“Oh fuck it all to hell,” she said under her breath.
Jimmie Lee looked at her, put down the stick, grabbed his beer, and took her by the hand. “I want to show you something.”
He took her to the door and outside. Even at night, the weather was oppressively sauna-like. He took a swig of his beer.
“What, Jimmie Lee?”
He giggled like a little mischievous boy, then pulled her close and kissed her. It was like a third-grade kiss behind the magnolia tree in the school yard.
“Don’t be silly, Jimmie Lee. You’re too good for me.”
She looked into his handsome brown eyes under the luminescent, almost full moon. He wiggled his eyebrows in his comical, precocious way. They both started laughing. The more they laughed the funnier and funnier it seemed. They laughed harder and harder there on the street at the corner of Dauphine and France in the Bywater, where before the storm, teenagers from the projects used to die with regularity from gangland drive-bys—neighbors would wake up and find a dead body on their lawn. Yet they laughed. A few blocks away across the Industrial Canal was the Lower Ninth, where the frail had floated in their attics, unable to breech their roofs during the storm. Laughed and laughed. They hugged long and hard.
“Let’s go to a hotel and use their pool,” he said.
“You got one in mind, Jimmie Lee? It’s 3:00 in the morning.”
“We could go swimming in the river.”
“Are you out of your mind?” The undertow was notoriously fierce. The Mississippi was like a snake that swallowed its prey whole.
He pulled out a joint. “Well, how about we smoke this in my car?”
I walk along the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigolette
Can take a kiss without regret
So they forget their broken dreams*
She could hear the phone all the way up the stairs. She was coming home from waiting tables at Elizabeth’s Diner near the levee. The voice on the phone wouldn’t stop crying. A tugboat captain, the voice sobbed, reported a body caught on a floating tree near Poland Avenue Wharf in the late morning.
Her instinct was to get drunk. She listened to her instinct. She parked her bike at the corner of Lesseps and Burgundy and entered BJ’s, an old neighborhood dive bar, and proceeded to wallow. It was a skill she was good at. Several of the colorful older regulars had disappeared since the storm, but there was always another drunk to spring up and take the vacant barstool. She sat at a table away from the new faces.
A great many drinks later, the welcome feeling of indifference washed over her. Indifference over losing electricity every other day. Indifference over having to ride the bus for miles to find a decent grocery store. Indifference over nobody knowing what they were doing or how they were going to do it. She reckoned New Orleans as the best loverboy in the neighborhood who all the husbands cornered and mutilated while the wives wailed.
“Why are you crying?” He was dripping wet, his sparkly brown eyes mischievous. She jumped up and held him. Hard. He smelled of Old Man River.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do. Everybody thinks you’ve drowned.”
The strains of a brass band reached a crescendo. The bar door opened and a second-line entered loudly, marching drums, trumpets, tuba, trombones, good-time people swaying with the good-time music, customers smiling, waving their drinks as they danced.
“See what you’re missing?” she yelled to him over the cacophony.
She looked long and hard in the bathroom mirror and didn’t like what she saw.
I wonder if I’ll die tonight
, she thought, and sat on the toilet.
Now that’s a sign you’re wasted
, she mused,
when you actually sit on the toilet at the Abbey
.
Back in the bar, the jukebox was screaming a Tom Waits song about the end of the world. She spied Wyatt nursing a cocktail in the corner and sauntered over.
“That really sucks about Jimmie Lee,” he said after hugging her.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she whispered in his ear, “but he’s in hiding.”
Wyatt looked at her, incredulous.
“He’s too embarrassed.”
“You mean it’s a hoax?”
“Just like Tom-fucking-Sawyer.”
Wyatt grinned ear to ear. “I’m going to kill him!”
They laughed and drank with renewed vigor. They drank all night long and made out at the bar. She’d already slept with Wyatt. He had been number forty-six or so.
By the time they decided to part company the next morning, it was already humid and scorching. The thought of her air conditioner still on the blink prompted her to order an ice-cold cocktail in a to-go cup. She remembered the pill someone had given her the night before and popped it in her mouth. As she walked down the street, she heard the low purr of a muscle car. It stopped next to her.
“Gigolette!”
She leaned into the open passenger window. “Aren’t you dead? Did you fall off the dock or jump?” She grabbed his cigarette and took a drag.
“Funny girl. Thirsty?”
“Always.”
She climbed in and they barreled down to the Saturn Bar on Saint Claude. They sat in a booth drinking whiskey, smoking Camels, and listening to George Jones on the old dime jukebox. The pill took effect, making the music sound like she was in a tunnel. She looked at her hand and it seemed a mile away.
“You’re really gone, aren’t you, Jimmie?”
“Yes, I’m surely dead.”
“I must be crazy then.”
“I like you because you’re crazy, girl.”
“I’ve been a terrible, terrible person. Horrible. I’m just a wreck, Jimmie. Sometimes I think I stick around just so another hurricane can finish the job.” She wiped her brow. “Your funeral’s tomorrow. You coming?”
He took a drag off his Camel. “I think it’s going to storm again.”
She sat down on a stone bench in front of the mortuary in Metairie. The service was proceeding inside but she couldn’t bring herself to go in. Instead, she remained outside and smoked cigarettes. A pair of crows landed near her, cawing loudly. Thunder sonic-boomed in the distance.
“You going in or what?”
“You asshole, Jimmie! This prank has gone on long enough. You’re coming with me now.” She took him by the arm and pulled him to the front door. The crows shrieked as she opened the door and marched to the chapel.
“Look who I found!” she announced loudly to the room. Jimmie Lee’s grandmother, mother, stepfather, sisters, aunts, uncles, other relatives, friends looked up. The priest paused. Jimmie Lee’s cousin Ronnie slipped his arm out of hers and coughed. The priest held up the Eucharist and the service resumed. She watched Ronnie walk away to sit down with a girl who glared at her. She felt bewildered and faint, and ran outside to the parking lot as the rain came down.
She woke up suddenly from an afternoon nightmare about trapped, dying cats and dogs howling from the evacuated houses around her. Drenched in sweat, she arose and started the bath water.
She was depressed in the first place, so it was hard to differentiate the new despair from the old. Everything was a chore. Everything was broken. Someone opened the door to Paradise, and Hell walked in.
After the bath she donned a leopard-print wraparound dress with strappy high heels, barelegged. Too hot for stockings. Her long black hair reached to her lower back. The Latin migrant workers, brought in to secure blue tarps over roofless houses, wolf-whistled after her.