Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

“I want to talk about Eva Pierce.”

“Miss Ivonne,” he called out, eyeballing me up and down, “copper here.”

This over-the-hill fluffball with champagne hair clopped over to my table. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips. “What can I do for you, officer?”

“Eva Pierce” is all I said. Her lips were pink and puffed out like Vienna Sausages. They must have kept a vat of collagen under the bar.

“I’ve been waiting for this little bereavement call,” she said, sliding into a chair. “I’m still broke-up about Eva. She didn’t belong here, and I was glad to see her leave. All she ever did was write poetry and sip 7-Up. But she sure attracted the chicken-hawks.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“I don’t rat out my customers.”

“Eva liked it rough, and swung both ways, right?”

“Where you hear that, babe?” She yanked a Vantage from inside her bra and lipped it.

“Her roommate Pogo.”

“Me and his momma used to have the best damn time.” she shrieked, pounding the table. “But don’t ever cross that woman. No siree.”

“You know Lily Lamont?”

She slit her eyes at me. “You sure get around for a cop.”

“Some people pay me to.”

“Look, officer,” she said, shooting a stream of smoke toward the ceiling through those lips, “Eva went home with a couple of the girls here, but they just wanted somebody’s shoulder to cry on. Eva was a mommy, not a dyke. She took care of stray animals and people. Like that Brack creature and poor Pogo. She was like Dorothy in the goddamn Wizard of Oz. All she ever talked about was that farm in Ohio.”

“So who’d want to kill her?”

“You got me,” she said. “Maybe the wicked witch with her flying monkeys. Or the blue guy.”

“The blue guy?”

Miss Yvonne stifled a laugh. “Buffed-up psycho used to come in here, hair and beard dyed cobalt-blue. He wore a cat-o’-nine-tails around his neck. Sure took a liking to Eva, but I run him off.”

I was walking back down Chartres Street, thinking about Janice, when I heard a dog leash rattling behind me.

“Oh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” It was Pogo walking this dust mop named Welfare, now squatting at the curb. I hadn’t seen Pogo since last Tuesday at the Dragon’s Den. I was becoming a regular at the open mike, and starting to get a kick out of it. It was like a cross between a gong show and the observation room on Acutely Disturbed at DePaul’s.

“Been meaning to ask you,” I said. “Eva go to the movies a lot?”

“Never,” he said, picking up a dog turd between two fingers with a plastic baggie. “She preferred to star in her own epic drama.”

“So why was she carrying popcorn the night she died?”

He stopped. “Popcorn? I never thought about that. Maybe she swung by the Cloister after she said goodnight at Molly’s. Sometimes the bartender there hands out bags of popcorn. Just before dawn.”

I smiled. The Cloister. A few doors down Decatur from Molly’s.

Pogo put the plastic baggie in his pocket. Who would’ve ever thought that one day the Quarter would be filled with rich people walking around with dog turds in their pockets? The dagos moved to Kenner just in time.

“Ever see Eva around a man with a blue beard? Blue hair and beard. And a whip?”

“Oh, him.”

“She date him?”

“He followed her to the open mike from Les Girls. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Now we have to listen to his poetry.”

“His perms any good?”

Pogo pulled out the baggie of dog mess and waved it in my face. “See you at the open mike, Lieutenant Girlfriend.”

If the garage rock band at the Cloister banged out one more song, I thought my skull would pop. I nursed several Seven and Sevens while I jotted down random thoughts in my notebook, hoping Swamp Gas would finally run out of steam. The crowd was twenty-somethings dressed in black with all the hardware in Home Depot dangling off their mugs. I wondered if they got snared in each other’s rings and things when they got down to business and had to use a wire cutter to separate themselves. Nobody seemed to be having a particularly good time. Janice and I’d had more fun eating thirty-five-cent plates of red beans and rice at Buster Holmes. A steady stream of couples was going in and out of the bathrooms in back, but not for any lovey-dovey. They were wiping their noses and clenching their jaws when they walked out. That explained the coke residue on the straw in Eva’s purse.

Finally I was getting somewhere.

Swamp Gas petered out at about 5:00 in the morning. I was getting ready to leave when I spotted this geezer with a snowy white pompadour hobbling around in his bathrobe and slippers. When he turned around, I had to laugh.

“Hey, Uncle Dominic, it’s me, Vinnie. Chetta’s boy.” I hadn’t see the old guy since my daddy’s funeral.

“Vinnie, let me get a look at you.” He cuffed my head and patted my cheeks. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of my sweet little sister. How she making?”

“Same old, same old.” Mama was still fuming about how Uncle Dominic had gypped her on the inheritance. He stuck a knife in my back, she growled whenever his name came up.

“Remind her she still owes me three hundred bucks for property taxes the year she sold out.”

“What you doing here at this hour,” I asked, swiveling my hips, “getting down with the girlies?” His robe was covered with lint balls.

“Just checking on my investment. Got six, seven other buildings to see this morning. You?” he asked, swiveling his own hips. “Thought you was married. You just like your papa.”

“Here on a murder case. Know this young lady?” I flipped out the picture of Eva and he fished glasses from his robe pocket. “Killed the night of March 28.”

“Let me think,” he said, staring at the snapshot. “Yeah, yeah, I seen her here that morning. Last time I come in to check on my investment. Around this time. I axed her what she was writing down in her little book, and she says, ‘A perm.’ Looked like a bunny with them funny pigtails.”

“She leave alone?”

“Yeah, yeah. No, wait—” He slapped his forehead. “Madonna, how could I forget? She left with that pazzo what got the blue beard.”

Blue Beard.

Bingo.

Then somebody handed me some popcorn still warm in the bag.

The next morning I radioed Blue Beard’s description in to the Eighth District station in the Quarter, and rang Pogo, Miss Ivonne, Miss Ping, and Uncle Dominic to ask them to contact me the minute they spotted him. Uncle Dominic told me he wanted a cut of the reward, and lost interest fast when I told him there wasn’t any. But both he and Miss Ivonne promised to make a few phone calls to help locate Blue Beard. Mrs. Pierce sputtered “God bless you” when I reported that I was zeroing in on the killer.

Where the hell could he be? It wasn’t like a man with blue hair could hide just anywhere, even in the French Quarter.

That afternoon I got a staticky message on my cell phone.

Lily Lamont.

A husky, spaced-out voice said she needed to talk with me in person. That evening. She left an address that at first she couldn’t remember right.

My heels echoed on the flagstones in deserted Pirate’s Alley like the approaching footsteps in those radio plays my daddy used to listen to. A mist had rolled in from the river, wrapping St. Louis Cathedral in fog, and I squinted to make out the address under the halo of a streetlamp. I pictured Lily Lamont blowzy and toothless now, passed out on a filthy mattress cradling an empty bourbon bottle.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I found.

After I was buzzed in, I mounted a curved mahogany staircase that swept me up into a cavernous Creole ballroom under a spidery bronze chandelier. In a zebra-upholstered throne, there sat a mummified lady with white hair pulled back tight from her porcelain face, buttering a slice of raisin-bread toast.