New Orleans Noir (8 page)
Then I heard Aunt Odie’s voice.
“Stop!” She had a knife in one hand and an open jar in the other filled with what looked to be water.
The big redhaired man didn’t seem impressed. He pulled a blackjack from his pocket and started toward her while keeping an eye on me.
“Run home now, before something bad happens to you,” Odie said, as if she were talking to a child.
“Nigger woman, don’t order me.”
Aunt Odie tossed the contents of the jar into his face and he screamed and smashed against the wall and the door before stumbling outside, begging for water for his eyes.
“Lye,” she said as she locked the door. “It’s as good as a bullet or a knife.”
I was in Baton Rouge when I heard about Father Fitzpatrick; that he never made it home the night before from the Napoleon House, the bar he frequented in the French Quarter.
We were sure that he was dead, beaten to death by one of Murphy’s hooligans and tossed into the river. I wasn’t surprised, though I was grief-stricken. My father insisted that I stay in Baton Rouge, but I was nearly losing my mind with my relatives.
I spent weeks at my aunt’s bakery, sweat blinding my eyes, roasting while the bread baked. My unhappiness was too much for words; I didn’t want to drown in my sweat in a town without culture, without my friends and loved ones. I was finished with Baton Rouge; my time in exile was done. I had to return to New Orleans with or without my father’s permission. My mother hadn’t raised me to be a coward, living in fear, in seclusion. I had to know what happened to Father Fitzpatrick.
Rumors continued to roil that the colored would be attacked if they tried to enter Sacred Heart, and worse. I wanted one last conversation with Father Murphy, one that he wouldn’t recover from, but that wasn’t to happen. I can’t say I was unhappy when I heard that Murphy was found beaten to death in the rectory, but the bitterness in my heart would last as long as my memory of Father Fitzpatrick.
T
here must be hundreds of kids who have wound up dead in the French Quarter. Eva Pierce was just one of them. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood you see fliers about them taped to lampposts:
Information Wanted
or
$5,000 Reward
. And below is a blurry snapshot of some scruffy young person. After Eva’s body was discovered, bundled inside a blue Tommy Hilfiger comforter floating in Bayou St. John, the girl’s mother moved down here from Idaho or Iowa or Ohio—however you pronounce it—and blanketed the Quarter with those signs. She even printed her daughter’s last poem on the flier, but no dice. The fifteen hours between when Eva was last seen and when her body was found in the bayou remained a blank.
That’s when the mother rang me. I’m listed in the Yellow Pages:
Off-Duty Homicide Detective: Dead or Alive, Inc.
Mrs. Pierce met me under the bingo board at Fiorella’s restaurant at the French Market. It wasn’t my suggestion. I hadn’t been to the market since I was a kid, when my daddy used to take me on Saturday mornings to squabble with his wop relatives while we loaded up at a discount on their fruits and vegetables. On my daddy’s side I’m related to everyone who ever sold a pastry, an eggplant, or a bottle of dago red in the Quarter, and on my mother’s side to everyone who ever ran the numbers, pimped girls, or took a kickback. I peeked inside the rotting old market, but sure didn’t see any Italians or tomatoes. Now it’s just Chinese selling knock-off sunglasses to tourists.
Mrs. Pierce was short and round as a cannoli, with a stiff gray bouffant and a complexion like powdered sugar. With those cat’s-eye bifocals, she looked like someone who might be playing bingo at Fiorella’s. But when she opened her mouth …
Twilight Zone
. Mrs. Pierce said it wasn’t drugs or sex that did her daughter in, but—get this—poetry.
“And the police aren’t doing anything,” she said with a flat Midwestern whine that made me want to go suck a lemon.
“Look, lady, I’m a cop—Lieutenant Vincent Panarello, Sixth District—and the police have more trouble than they can handle in New Orleans. They don’t pay us much … I got a wife and three kids in Terrytown, so that’s why I moonlight as a detective.”
“My daughter loved moonlight.”
“I bet.”
“She read her own original poetry every Tuesday night at that rodent-infested bar on Esplanade Avenue called the Dragon’s Den.” She was twisting the wrapper from her straw into a noose.
“Yeah, that used to be Ruby Red’s in my day. A college joint, the floor all covered with sawdust and peanut shells.” I didn’t tell her how drunk I used to get there in high school with a fake ID. While I was going to night school at Tulane, Ruby Red’s was where I met my first wife Janice, may she rest in peace.
“Well, the place has gone beatniky.” Mrs. Pierce leaned forward, her eyes watering. “And do you know what I think, Lieutenant Panarello?’
“Shoot.”
“I think one of those poets murdered my daughter. One of those characters who read at the open mike. And that’s where I want you to start. To listen for clues when the poets read. Eventually one of them will give himself away.”
“Listening to the perms will cost you extra.” And so will the French Quarter, but I’d already averaged that in when I quoted her my fee.
“I’ll meet you there Tuesday at 9 p.m. It’s above that Thai restaurant. Just go through the alley—”
“I know how to get up there.” I could have climbed those worn wooden steps next to the crumbling brick wall in my sleep. That’s where I first kissed Janice. Funny, but she also wrote poems she read to me on the sagging wrought-iron balcony. The life I really wanted was the one I had planned with her. The life I settled for is the one I got.
Mrs. Pierce handed me a picture of her daughter, a list of her friends, and a check. I eyed the amount. Local bank.
“What your daughter do for a living?” I pushed back my chair, antsy to blow Fiorella’s. I could already smell the fried chicken grease on my clothes.
“Why, she was a poet and interpretive dancer.”
“Interpretive dancer. Gotcha.”
I studied the photo. Eva was about twenty-four, pretty, with skin as pale and powdery as a moth’s wing. But she was dressed in a ratty red sweater over a pink print dress over black sweatpants. Her dyed black hair was hanging in two stringy hanks of pigtail like a cocker spaniel’s ears. Who would want to kill her, I wondered, except the fashion police?
When I got down to the station I pulled the report. Eva was last seen at Molly’s bar on Decatur Street at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, where she told her roommate, Pogo Lamont, that she was going home to feed their one-eyed dog named Welfare. They lived on Ursulines at Bourbon, upper slave quarter, uptown side. She never made it home. After an anonymous 911 tip, her body was hoisted out of the bayou at 7 p.m. the next evening. One clean shot through the temple, real professional. No forced sexual entry. Her purse was lying open on the grassy bank, surrounded by a gaggle of ducks trying to get at the bag of stale popcorn inside. A cell phone and twenty-five dollars were tucked in the bag, so the motive wasn’t robbery. Also inside the purse were a red lipstick, a flea collar, a black notebook filled with poems, two 10 mg. Valiums, an Ohio picture ID, a plastic straw that tested positive for cocaine residue, and a worn-out restraining order against Brack Self, a bartender and “performance artist” who turned out to have been locked up the whole time in Tampa for beating on his present girlfriend. That, and an Egyptian scarab, a petrified dung beetle supposed to be a symbol of immortality.
Which didn’t seem to have worked for Eva Pierce, poet and stripper.
I made it to the Dragon’s Den on a sticky Tuesday evening, with a woolly sky trapping humidity inside the city like a soggy blanket. It had been trying to rain for two weeks. The air was always just about to clear but never did, as if old Mother Nature were working on her orgasm. I carried an umbrella, expecting a downpour. The place was right next to the river, and hadn’t seen a drop of paint since I last walked in the door thirty years ago, with all my hair and a young man’s cocky swagger. A whistle was moaning as a freight train clacked along the nearby tracks, and the huge live oak out front shrouded the crumbling façade in a tangle of shadows. An old rickshaw was parked outside, where an elfin creature with orange hair sat scribbling in a notebook. He shot me a look through thick black plastic glasses, and then went back to writing.
Guess I’d found the poets.
I slapped a black beret on my head as I headed through the clammy alley, the bricks so decrepit that ferns were sprouting from the walls. I needed to blend in with the artsy crowd here, so I wore a blousy purple shirt and tight black pants, and carried a paperback by some poet I’d had to read at night school called Oscar Wilde. A wizened old Chinese guy was squatting over a tub of vegetables in the patio, and the air smelled like spices. Something was sizzling in the kitchen. I felt like I was in Hong Kong looking for my Shanghai Lil.
Except for the Far East decor, the bar upstairs hadn’t changed that much. A small stage and dance floor had been added at the center, and the tables were low, surrounded by pillows on the floor. Is that where poets eat, I wondered, on the floor?
“I’ll have something light and refreshing, with a twist of lime,” I lisped to the two-ton Oriental gal behind the bar, waving my pinky. A biker type in a leather cowboy hat was observing me from across the bar.
“You a cop?” he yelled.
“Why no,” I said, batting my eyelashes, holding up the lavender book so he could read the cover. “I’ve come for the poultry.”
“Hey, Miss Ping,” he shouted to the bartender, “give Lieutenant Girlfriend here a wine spritzer on my tab.”
Just as I lurched forward to knock this asshole’s block off, in walked Mrs. Pierce with that orange-haired garden gnome from out front.
“Here you go, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Miss Ping said, setting down the drink.
“Lieutenant,” Mrs. Pierce said, “this was Eva’s roommate, Pogo Lamont.”
“Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo cackled, extending his hand.
“Come on, son, I want to talk to you on the balcony,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.
“Unhand me this instant!” the little creep cried out.
“Watch out,” grunted the joker in the leather cowboy hat. “Lieutenant Girlfriend’s already hitting on the chicken.” Miss Ping barked a throaty laugh.
The kid followed me onto the balcony, which was pitching precariously away from the building. I steadied myself as if stepping onto a boat, not trusting the rusted iron-lace railing to keep all 250 pounds of me from rolling off.
“Okay, you know why I’m here,” I said, plunking down my drink on a wobbly table. “Who’s this Brack Self character that Eva took out a peace bond against?”
“Oh, that snarling beast,” Pogo said, curling up like a cat into a chair. “A former beau who used his fists to make a point. Black and blue weren’t Eva’s most becoming colors.”
“She liked it rough, huh?”
“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo squealed.
“Say, you little—” Play it cool, I thought. This is just a job.
“She met him here at the open mike when the poetry series started. That first night he got so wasted he just unzipped, whipped it out, and pissed sitting right at a table. While I was performing, I might add. Now that, honey, is what I call literary criticism. Eva mopped it up, and never stopped. And ended up mothering him.”
“How long they together?”
“Until the third occasion she summoned the police.”
He couldn’t have killed her from a jail cell in Tampa. Maybe he had friends.
“How long you been coming here?”
“Since I was a boy. When Mother couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d haul me here when it was Ruby Red’s—”
“I used to come here then, too. Who was your mom?”
“Lily.”
“Lily Lamont?” She was the fancy-pants Uptown debutante who used to cause scenes whenever I was here with Janice. In those days the port was right across the train tracks from the Quarter, and Lily Lamont was usually being held upright between a couple of Greek or Latino sailors. Once I swung open the door to the can to find her on her knees giving one of them a blow job while a rat looked on from the urinal. That’s when I stopped bringing Janice to this dump.
“Did you know Mother?” Pogo squirmed in his seat.
“Only by sight.” So this was the stunted offspring of one of those Ruby Red nights. If Janice were still here, we’d have children his age.
“Your mother still alive?” I asked. “If you care to call it that. She’s secluded inside her Xanadu on Pirate’s Alley.”
I softened to the little creep. He told me that as a kid, his mother would often show up at their apartment on Dumaine with a strange man and they’d lock themselves inside her room for three days with a case of bourbon. Now Pogo lived on a trust fund from the Lamonts, which paid the rent on the apartment. He was finishing a book of poems dedicated to his mother titled
The Monster Cave.
“Where did Eva strip?”
“At Les Girls on Iberville. She gave it up soon after she moved in with me. You see, I paid for everything. Because Eva was my teacher and muse.”
“She ever bring any guys home from there?”
“Not guys. Other strippers sometimes.”
“So she swung both ways?”
“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” Pogo nudged my leg with his foot. “Do you?”
I heard some ranting and raving from inside the bar, and edged my way in to listen. The place was packed, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke hovering in the spotlight. First up was Millicent Tripplet, an obese woman with ruby lipstick, who recited a poem about how oppressed she felt when she was being fucked by a certain guy, and how depressed she felt when she wasn’t. That got a howl of appreciation. Then a rapper named Pawnshop took the stage, coked out of his gourd, to blow the trumpet and rap about how all the bitches and ho’s weren’t down with his skinny black ass in the baggy jumpsuit. His rhymes were catchy but the rhythm was a snooze. Then came a comic from the racetrack who sounded like my Uncle Dominic; next up was some nerd in a plaid sports coat who read a sonnet about peat moss and death; and then some anorexic lady dressed all in lilac who choked up in the middle and had to sit down. I couldn’t figure out what her poem was about. I think her pooch died.
One thing I clocked: The better the poet, the shorter the spiel. The worst ones droned on forever. I gave Mrs. Pierce an empty shrug, as if to say,
No clues here, lady
. Then she took the stage, hands folded, looking like a Methodist Sunday school teacher. She held up the flier and announced that she would read the last poem her daughter ever wrote:
I’ve always known you
though we haven’t met.
I know how your name tastes
though I’ve never said it.
You linger on the last step
of stairs I never descend.
I stand with my address book
on a landing to which you never
climb, and every day we stop
just short of each other.
I invoke you to appear,
to kiss childhood back
into my skeptical mouth,
rain into this parched air.
I invoke you at the sudden angle
of smoke, secrets, and zippers,
at the hour when earlobes,
skin along inner thighs,
a smooth chest is tenderest,
love unfolding like a hammock
to fit whatever is nearest.
I invoke your breath’s fur
on my neck, your curve of lips,
the blue seaweed of your hair where
we’ll weave a nest of lost mornings.
The words sent a chill down my spine. It was as if Eva had been waiting for her murderer. Had a date with death. All I could see was Janice, her face bent over a glowing red candle holder, her straight blond hair swaying as she read poems to me. I had to rush out onto the balcony where I could sit alone and be twenty again, if only for a moment, and remember what a love so fragile felt like.