New Orleans Noir (23 page)

But now we don’t,
Cherice thinks.
It’s probably gone. We don’t have nothin’.

In the end, she can’t go that way. She reasons that an entire neighborhood can’t be destroyed,
something’s
got to be left, and maybe her house is. She wants to go see for herself.

“Cherice, you gotta pay attention,” Charles says. “Only way to go see it’s to swim. Or get a boat maybe. There’s people all over town on rooftops right now, waitin’ to be rescued. There’s still crazy lootin’ out there. The mayor wants everybody out of town.”

“That’s what he said
before
the storm.”

“He’s sayin’ it again. We goin’ to Highlands tomorrow.”

“Highlands?”

“Well, where else we gon’ go? Mathilde and Tony got room for us, they say come, get our bearings, then we’ll see. Besides, Mathilde wants us to bring her some things.”

There it is again—Mathilde asking a favor to get them to leave. So that’s how serious it is. Well, Cherice knew that, sort of. But it keeps surprising her, every time she thinks about it.

“How we gon’ get out with all that lootin’ goin’ on?” she says. “Might even be snipers.”

“Tony says the best way’s the bridge. We can just go on over to the West Bank—we leavin’ first thing in the morning. And I mean
first
thing—before anybody’s up and lootin’. Let’s try to get a few more hours sleep.”

Cherice knows this is impossible, but she agrees because she wants to be close to Charles, to hold him, even if neither of them sleeps.

De La Russe is in the parking lot at the Tchoupitoulas Wal-Mart, thinking this whole thing is a clusterfuck of undreamt-of proportions, really wanting to break some heads (and not all of them belonging to looters), when Jack Stevens arrives in a district car. Sergeant Stevens is a big ol’ redhead, always spewing the smart remarks, never taking a damn thing seriously, and today is no different.

“Hey, Del—think it’s the end of the world or what?”

De La Russe is not in the mood for this kind of crap. “There’s no goddamn chain of command here, Jack. Couple of officers came in, said they got orders to just let the looters have at it, but who am I s’posed to believe? Can’t get nobody on the radio, the phones, the goddamn cell phones—” He pauses, throws his own cell across the concrete parking lot. It lands with something more like a mousy skitter than a good solid thud.

He has quite a bit more to say on the subject, but Stevens interrupts. “What the hell you do that for?”

“Why I need the goddamn thing? Nobody’s gonna answer, nobody fuckin’ cares where I am, nobody’s where they’re supposed to be, and I can’t get nothin’ but a fuckin’ busy anyhow. Nothing around here … fuckin’ …
works!
Don’t you … fuckin’ … get it?”

“Del, my man, you seem a little stressed.”

De La Russe actually raises his nightstick.

“Hey. Take it easy; put that down, okay. Ya friend Jack’s here. We gon’ get through this thing together. All right, man?”

For a moment, De La Russe feels better, as if he isn’t alone in a world gone savage—looters busting into all the stores, proclaiming them “open for business”; whole families going in and coming out loaded down with televisions and blasters and power tools (as if there’s gonna be power anytime soon), right in front of half the police in the parish. Sure, De La Russe could follow procedure, order them out of there, holler,
Freeze, asshole
! like a normal day, but which one of ’em’s gonna listen? In the end, what’s he gonna do, shoot the place up? It’s not like he’s getting any backup from his brother officers and, as he’s just told Stevens, it’s not like he can get anybody on the goddamn phone anyway. Or the radio. Or anyhow at all.

“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 humiliation 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.”