New Orleans Noir (24 page)
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t’ve got on CNN if it hadn’t been for you,” Charles says, smiling at her. “Or in the
New York Times
neither.”
Wyvette and Brandin are about bug-eyed.
“See what happened,” Charles continues, “Cherice went on eBay and found Mathilde’s mama’s engagement ring, the main thing she wanted us to bring to Highlands. Those cops were so arrogant they just put it right up there. In front of God and everybody.”
“But how did you know to do that?” Wyvette asks, and Cherice thinks it’s a good question.
“I didn’t,” she says. “I just felt so bad for Mathilde I was tryin’ anything and everywhere. Anyhow, once we found the jewelry, the cops set up a sting, busted the whole crime ring—there was three of ’em. Found a whole garage full of stuff they hadn’t sold yet.”
Brandin shakes his head and waves his beer. “Lawless times. Lawless times we live in.”
And Cherice laughs. “Well, guess what? We got to do a little lootin’ of our own. You ever hear of Priscilla Smith-Fredericks? She’s some big Hollywood producer. Came out and asked if she could buy our story for fifteen thousand dollars, you believe that? Gonna do a TV movie about what happened to us. I should feel bad about it, but those people got
way
more money than sense.”
Right after the holiday, Marty Carrera of Mojo Mart Productions finds himself in a meeting with a young producer who has what sounds to him like a good idea. Priscilla Smith-Fredericks lays a hand on his wrist, which he doesn’t much care for, but he tries not to cringe.
“Marty,” she says. “I
believe
in this story. This is an important story to tell—a story about corruption, about courage, about one woman’s struggle for justice in an unjust world. But most of all, it’s the story of two women, two women who’ve been together for twenty-two years—one the maid, the other the boss—about the love they have for each other, the way their lives are inextricably meshed. In a good way.
“I want to do this picture for
them
and … well … for the whole state of Louisiana. You know what? That poor state’s been screwed enough different ways it could write a sequel to the
Kama Sutra
. It’s been screwed by FEMA, it’s been screwed by the Corps of Engineers, it’s been screwed by the administration, it’s been screwed by its own crooked officials …
Everybody’s
picking carrion off its bones. And those poor Wardells! I want to do this for the Wardells. Those people have a house to rebuild. They need the money and they need the … well, the lift. The
vindication.”
Marty Carrera looks at the paperwork she’s given him. She proposes to pay the Wardells a $15,000 flat fee, which seems low to him. Standard would be about $75,000, plus a percentage of the gross and maybe a $10,000 “technical consultant” fee. He shuffles pages, wondering if she’s done what he suspects.
And yes, of course she has. She’s inflated her own fee at the expense of the Wardells. She thinks she should get $100,000 as an associate producer, about twice what the job is worth. And not only that, she wants to award the technical consultant’s fee to herself.
Marty is genuinely angry about this. She’s roused his sympathy for the wrongfully accused couple, and even for the beleaguered state, and he too believes the Wardells’ story—or more properly, Mathilde and Cherice’s story—would make a great movie for television.
However, he thinks Ms. Smith-Fredericks is a species of vermin. “After looking at the figures,” he says, “I think I can honestly say that you seem uniquely qualified to do a piece on looting.”
But she doesn’t catch his meaning. She’s so full of herself all she hears is what she wants to hear. She sticks out her hand to shake
Well, so be it,
Marty thinks.
I tried to warn her.
His production company doesn’t need her. So what if she found the story and brought it to him? He’s not obligated to … Well, he is, but …
“Marty,” she says, “we’re going to be great together.”
He shakes her hand absentmindedly, already thinking of ways to cut her out of the deal.
T
he child was small and black, shirtless, wearing only a filthy pair of Spider-Man pajama bottoms and carrying a skinned-up football. His fingers still felt numb from holding his mother’s hand all night and he now found himself standing on top of the interstate overpass looking down at a maze of swamped streets.
For a long time now, since the morning heat started shining hard off the top of the downtown buildings, he’d been watching the man with the gun.
The man was white and wearing green, a big plug of tobacco in his left cheek. To the child, it seemed his eyes were superhuman, taking in everything in their thick mirrored lenses and occasionally shouting to a group of shackled men who sat and slept.
He kept the gun tight in both hands and would walk from the beginning of the chain of men—bearded and smelling of rotten eggs and garbage—to the end, his boots making hollow sounds on the overpass. His steps seemed like a drum over the murmur of men and families who’d found refuge on the high ground.
By early afternoon, the child stood close to the railing, trying to catch the breeze that would sometimes come across his face, his eyes lazily opening and closing, watching the waves break and shift on top of the roadway and on the parched roofs of partially sunk buildings and shotgun houses.
He felt his fingers slip from the sweaty hand of his mother and he wandered, walking and swaying, toward the man with the gun.
The boy tugged at the rough material on his leg and the man stared down at him, his silver glass eyes shining an image of a grinning child back at him.
He looked at the twin images of himself and said: “Mister, when you gonna fix our city?”
Jack Estay woke at 5 a.m. to the sound of the big yellow locomotive’s engines chugging away and keeping the entire station juiced with power. He took the twelve-gauge from his lap, stood from where he’d fallen asleep in a chair the night before, and washed himself in the lavatory.
At 5:15 he walked five men caught looting a Vietnamese restaurant (they’d been found eating dried shrimp and guzzling bottles of 33 beer) down the endless train platform and into the holding cells fashioned with chain link, metal bars, and concertina wire. In each of the sixteen cells there was one portable toilet.
Orleans Parish Prison sat filled with water, so it was the best they could do.
As Jack locked up and walked the line back to the old Amtrak station, men and women hollered and yelled. A homeless man on the way tried to piss on him, but his short quick stream stopped shy of Jack’s leg.
Jack looked at the man and spat some brown juice at the base of the cell.
Another guard called out to him about the next row of cells. “That one has AIDS,’’ the thick-bodied woman said. “Be careful.’’
Most of the prisoners were looters, some stole cars, some broke into mansions, and about ten had tried to kill folks. Mainly taking shots at cops who were trying to rescue people from their swamped neighborhoods.
“Hey, Audie Murphy!’’ yelled a man with a long gray beard stained yellow. “Go suck a turd.’’
Jack walked into the wide expanse of the train station, the newspaper racks selling a copy of
USA Today
from August 26, a picture of Martha Stewart on the cover with a big shit-eating grin on her face.
Welcome to Angola South
read a cardboard sign by the door.
Jack got a break just before sundown.
He used his cell phone to call his father back on Grand Isle, a man who’d been left alone to pick through the wreckage of a shrimp company he’d owned since ’64, surviving even Hurricane Betsy. His dad told him that every boat they owned, the refrigerated warehouse, and their stilt house had all washed out into the Gulf.
“Say hello to Mama for me,’’ Jack said before ending the call and heading out in his truck along the river.
Jack rode through the city and drank a cold Budweiser, a cooler in the back of his Chevy loaded down with ice brought in by the Indiana National Guard. The radio carried nothing but news, so he shut it off and just drove slow out Canal Street past the carnival of TV trucks and reporters camped out on the neutral ground. At one point, he slowed, noticing a leg sticking out from under a tarp.
But raising his sunglasses, he saw it was only a mannequin. He glimpsed a couple of cameramen in the shadows laughing and pointing.
He drove on.
Rampart at Canal was the foot of the swamp, water all the way to Lake Pontchartrain. He turned around and crossed back through the Quarter, found higher ground and crossed Rampart further downriver, ending up at the corner of St. Louis and Tremé, right by the old housing projects, St. Louis Cemetery, and the looted-out Winn-Dixie. All along Tremé, tree branches and drowned cars filled the road. Birds and loose trash skittered in the warm breeze.
Jack polished off the Bud and pulled a plug of tobacco from his pouch. Sitting on his hood, he brushed off the brown pieces of Redman from his mustache and spit into the swampy water covering his truck tires.
The warm air was calm. The city completely still, with huge clouds above the Central Business District. A skinny, mangy dog wandered past him.
An old black man on a bicycle peddled through the foot-deep water and waved.
The only sound came from helicopters loaded down with machine guns passing over the Mississippi and the Lower Ninth Ward looking for bodies and looters. An old-fashioned Army Jeep passed, driving in reverse with a young kid in the passenger seat wearing an NOPD shirt and Chinese hat. He eyed down his rifle, scoped a bird on the cracked cemetery wall, and then, satisfied he had the shot, dropped the gun at his side.
Jack spit and smiled.
He wasn’t even back at the train station for his next shift when he saw the smoke curling and twisting like a mythical snake. Jack followed the smoke and called in on his handheld radio, arriving before the firetrucks at a block of row houses at Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and Jackson Avenue. Two of them burned, crackling and popping as only ancient wood can. Hard and buckling, turning to coal-black smoke.
Six firetrucks. And then seven.
The sun set through leafless oaks, the light orange and slatted and broken through black smoke. A helicopter passed overhead and dropped a huge bucket of water on the dying buildings. The falling water stirred up dead leaves and stale wind and fell with a whoosh.
Dried pieces of debris and smoke blocked out the sun.
“So you were scared?” Jack asked the pretty girl from Indiana.
“Hell yes, I was scared,’’ she said.
It was the next day at sunset and they talked at an old convent in the Bywater near a statue of the Virgin Mary.
“They dropped us off in the middle of the night,’’ she said, smoking. Her hand shook a bit. “The water was up past the transport’s tires and you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face. No moon. Nothing.’’
The girl was pretty. Blond and muscular with brown eyes. She wore camouflage but sat like a girl, on her butt with her knees pulled up to her chin. Jack met her when she’d delivered the ice.
He turned away when she exhaled.
“You want one?”
“I don’t smoke.’’
She nodded. “So they dropped us off on the high ground,’’ she said. “When was that, a few weeks ago?”
“Last week.”
“Last week,’’ she repeated, thinking. “And they dropped us off, like I said. On the high ground. Well, we didn’t have orders or anything. We just sat there.’’
“All night.’’
“All night,’’ she said. “We could hear gunshots and people yelling. Families passing us on boats and little pool floats … So anyway, I finally fall asleep and I hear something at the edge of sleep. You know how that can go? Kind of a dream but you’re awake. And it’s a trudging sound through the water and this heavy breathing. I couldn’t see anything. It was so dark I wasn’t sure if it was just in my head.’’
“What was it?”
“You’ll laugh at what I thought it was.’’
“What did you think it was?”
“Demons.’’
“What was it?”
“Horses.’’
“You religious?’’ Jack asked.
The pretty Indiana girl stubbed out her cigarette on one of the statue’s base stones and tucked back on her uniform hat. “Not at all.’’
At midnight there was a riot. A man who’d shot at the police from the top of the hot sauce factory in Mid-City had decided to lock himself in the portable toilet.
A few minutes before, he’d stuck his penis through one of the holes and told a female guard to “suck it’’ as he masturbated with his eyes rolling up in his head. Instead, she’d whacked it hard with a billy club and then two of the other inmates in an adjoining cell had started climbing the chain link and screaming at the guards.
The guards were able to mace the two on the walls but the man who’d started it all had run and shut himself in the toilet.
Jack said: “Give me the hose.’’
Guards pulled the hose from the edge of the train platform and ran the nozzle to Jack.
“Turn it up.’’ And he unlocked the gate and walked inside and thumbed open the toilet’s door.
The flush of water blew the man against the back wall of the toilet and washed him outside in a long brown stream until he rolled and crawled to the far corner of the cell.
“Goddamn!’’ the man yelled, curling into a ball. Both hands on his privates, his brown pants at his knees.
“Turn it down,’’ Jack said.
You wrote a report, fingerprinted them, and then tagged them. Pink for federal cases, green for misdemeanors, and red, yellow, and blue for different kinds of felonies. They were locked up, given something to eat, and then shipped on buses by gun bulls out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola the next morning.
“Move ’em in, herd ’em out,’’ Jack always said.
A few days before, a two-time loser had driven a stolen car to the drop-off zone at the old Amtrak station, walked up to the front desk, and asked the warden for a one-way train ticket.
The warden, ten years on the job running Angola, asked for his driver’s license and registration, and it wasn’t but a second later that he nodded to Jack and another guard.
“Yes sir. Yes sir.
One-way ticket to Angola coming up.’’
They took him to the platform and locked him in with a French Quarter street musician who’d been caught stuffing his pockets with cold medicine and NoDoz at what was left of the Walgreens on Canal.
The next day, transport carriers and Humvees passed by the Convention Center carrying soldiers with farm-boy grins and buzz cuts. They waved and smiled in a slow, steady parade, most of them carrying cameras and camcorders aimed at all the wreckage.
Jack watched another Humvee roll by the La Louisiane Ballroom—two skinny, goofy kids giving a thumbs-up—where the Guard held two prisoners. The officers came from Arkansas and rolled their own cigarettes and wore sunglasses like Jack.
“Y’all got to clean this up?” Jack asked.
“Good God Almighty, I hope to hell not.’’
Jack eyed the mess and walked under the shaded outdoor roof. There were: folding chairs and MRE packs, spoiling milk and open Heineken bottles, inflatable mattresses, CDs, overnight cases, water jugs and suitcases, rotting food and bottles of urine and piles upon piles of garbage, a faded World War II veteran’s hat, baby blankets and some kid’s New York Giants helmet, jumper cables, unopened bottles of Corona, and hotel beach chairs.
A chopper’s propellers beat overhead and along the Mississippi.
Jack picked up the vet’s hat, studied the gold pins, and placed it back, softly, on the chair.
In an old pile of dog food sat an empty bottle of champagne. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. Forty-five-dollar label.
There were millions of flies and the foul smell of rotting food and human waste. Jack reached into his pocket for a bandana and covered his mouth. He felt lunch back up in his throat.
From the other side of the building, one of the Army men yelled: “It’s a grand ol’ ballroom, ain’t it?”
There was better cell phone coverage up on the overpass, and even though I-10 didn’t go anywhere, Jack would drive his truck up there, heading north toward the airport until the water started coming up at the Metairie Cemetery. And he’d sit there and call his dad and talk about busted boats and files lost at sea and insurance folks who wouldn’t respond to messages. Mostly he’d eat MREs with the sun going down, occasionally giving directions to rescue workers from other states who didn’t know the damn interstate was closed.
It was a week or so after the storm when he felt that bullet zip by his ear and heard the sharp report of a pistol.
He rolled off the hood and found his footing.
Reaching into the passenger seat, he pulled out a rifle and duck-walked back behind the concrete barrier. He didn’t have field glasses or a scope but could pick out the rough-shadowed shape in the sun setting through the endless marble mausoleums.
Another shot pinged off the concrete.
With breath held, he took aim and shot.
He heard a scream.
Jack jumped over the barricade and moved across the interstate and into the waist-deep water, rifle in the crook of his arm, his eyes following the shadowed shape through the rows of crypts and canals of golden water under oaks.
The water grew up to his chest and he waded into the city, breathing hard, and stopped to listen, slowing down his heart and lungs, hearing that splashing frantic sound in the distance, and then he turned and took in another row of mausoleums, another grand monument to wealth, another angel, another sphinx, another proud man in marble staring down with sad dead eyes.
He lost the sound.
He heard birds and a siren, and standing there he knew he was lost. He could not see the road or even find it. He only saw the sun, the giant glowing orb of light painting everything orange and gold and making all the dead things shine so soft.
Jack spat some tobacco juice into the stale water and walked, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand, following the rows. Past a giant monument to the lost Confederate dead and then past a small statue of a fat man holding a quill pen.