Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

“I’m famished,” Lily Lamont said, taking a bite. “Would you care for some toast and tea? That’s all I ever, ever eat.”

I shook my head. Perched in the zebra chair next to hers was a bulky goon with a body like a boxer’s gone to seed. He was caressing the top of his shiny bald head, several shades paler than his face.

“I don’t believe we’ve ever formally met, Lieutenant Panarello,” she said. Her bones, thin as chopsticks, were swallowed by a red silk kimono fastened by a dragon brooch.

“Not face-to-face.” What was I supposed to do, tell this lady I saw her on her knees in a men’s room thirty years ago?

“And this is my associate, Lucas,” she said, gesturing to Baldie.

I nodded, taking a seat in an elaborately carved bishop’s chair under an alabaster lamp of entwined snakes.

“Nice place,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were draped with damask swags. Outside, shadows from the extended arms of a spotlit Jesus loomed over the cathedral garden.

“I bought this house last year from your uncle, Dominic Zuppardo.” Her sharp little teeth gnawed on the toast like a rat’s. “At a pretty penny. Actually, I paid him twice as much as the sale price we registered. That helped with my property assessment and his capital gains taxes. Smart man.”

Bet Uncle Dominic is kissing her butt now, I thought. So that’s who tipped her off to my investigation.

“Met your friend Miss Ivonne,” I said, since we were having a family reunion. “Place where Eva Pierce used to strip.”

“How is Ivonne?” Lily asked with a tight smile. “I set her up with that club. I’ve never been in it, of course.” Her frail shoulders shuddered.

Ditto, I thought. Miss Ivonne probably called her, too.

“Look, I won’t beat around the bush,” Lily Lamont said, brushing toast crumbs from her fingertips. “I want you to call off your investigation into Eva Pierce’s death. The killer is probably in Timbuktu by now. Questioning all of these people is silly.”

“But I know who did it. A guy with blue hair and beard.”

“Have you ever seen him?” Her enormous hazel eyes studied me slyly over the gold rim of an ornate teacup.

“No, but he used to come to the open mike at the Dragon’s Den all the time to read his lousy perms.”

Baldie winced. Then a shit-eating grin spread across his face. Why the hell would he care about Blue Beard’s poems?

Unless he wrote them.

“Do you have children, lieutenant?” Lily’s voice was filling with church choirs.

“Three. A boy at De la Salle, a girl at Mount Carmel, and another girl starting out at Loyola University next year.” That was why I moonlighted — to pay all those tuitions. The older girl worked at a pizza parlor after school to save up for Loyola. Her dad, you see, was a New Orleans cop.

“And wouldn’t you do anything to help your children?”

“Anything short of—”

“Eva Pierce was a horrible influence on my son.” Lily swayed like a cobra as she mouthed the words in a slow, woozy monotone. “She turned him against me. You should read the venomous words about me she inspired him to pen. She was just using him.”

“Maybe he liked being used,” I said, locking eyes with Pogo’s mother. “Maybe it’s all he’s ever known.”

“Here, this is for you.” Her long indigo fingernail flicked an ivory envelope across the coffee table. “It’s a check for $25,000. Eva’s mother hired you to investigate. I’m hiring you to stop the investigation.” She arched a penciled eyebrow. “Simple.”

I stood up. “Can I used the john?”

“Lucas will show you the way.”

I studied the rolls of skin on the back of Baldie’s head as I followed him down a long corridor, trying to picture him with blue hair and beard. The smartest thugs know the best disguise is something attention-getting but dispensable. And who would testify against Lily and this hitman? My uncle? Miss Ivonne? Trust-fund Pogo? The whole Quarter owed Lily Lamont a favor.

In the bathroom I tore open the envelope with an Egyptian scarab embossed on the flap: 25,000 smackers, made out to cash. I folded the check into my wallet. It was five times what Mrs. Pierce was paying me. I splashed water on my face and took a long look in the mirror. The jowly, unshaven mug of my daddy stared back at me, the face of three generations of Italian shopkeepers who worked like hell and never managed to get ahead. What, you crazy or something? they screamed at me. You want your daughter to graduate from college? Take the damn dough and run, Vinnie.

I picked up the plush blue bath towel folded next to the mirror. Underneath was a syringe, a packet of white powder, and a silver iced-tea spoon.

I rang Mrs. Pierce as soon as I’d escaped the junkie fog in Pirate’s Alley.

“Look, lady,” I told her, “the investigation is off. Your daughter just got mixed up with the wrong crowd, that’s all. Blue Beard is probably unidentifiable by now. He could be anywhere. I can’t, in good conscience, waste any more of your money.” All true.

Mrs. Pierce started sobbing and then hung up. She’d been right. It wasn’t sex or drugs that got her daughter killed, but poetry. Me, I was never so glad to drive home to Terrytown, to the wife and life that I’ve got.

I didn’t make it back to the Dragon’s Den until one sweltering August night later that year. The air smelled of river sludge and the façade was shimmering in the heat like a mirage made of shadows and memories. The old Chinese guy was still hanging over his tub of vegetables in the patio. He shot me a thumbs-up as I mounted the stairs, mopping my face with a handkerchief.

Every step was an effort.

“Look what the cat drug in,” Miss Ping said, setting me up with my Seven and Seven.

“Where’s that sign-up sheet for the open mike?” I asked her. She pushed a clipboard toward me. With a shaky hand I scrawled Vinnie P., third name on the list. I couldn’t believe what I was about to do. It seemed like jerking off in public. So I sat on the balcony to calm myself down and go over what I’d written.

“Hey, honey, what you doing in the den with the TV off?” my wife had asked me. “You sick?”

“Writing a report.” I’d swatted her away.

What I’d been writing for two weeks wasn’t exactly a report but some buried feelings — poems, I guess you’d call them. I couldn’t sleep or concentrate, and had even thought of going to Saturday confession, but then nixed that dumb-cluck idea. I couldn’t tell the Father who would marry my kids and christen my grandbabies that I, a cop, was the accessory to a murder. Those poets that I’d listen to during the open mike, something like this was eating them up, too. Their girlfriends left them or their parents never loved them or they felt lonely and empty — I don’t know — they just needed to spill their guts and be heard. By anyone. Just heard . They didn’t tell it straight but in a symbolic way, you know, twisting it up enough so that it wouldn’t be only their story but everybody’s. So that’s what I’d been writing: what happened to me investigating Eva Pierce’s murder. And with Janice.

Where it all went wrong and how I wound up feeling the way I did, as old, corrupt, and dirty as this French Quarter.

I had to get it off my chest.

Pogo stuck his face into the balcony, eyes popping out at the sight of me.

“She’s a vile bitch,” he hissed, biting his lip. Then he waved me inside.

Only about ten of the usual suspects were sprawled around the room. The first two poets went on forever. I was so wound up I couldn’t concentrate on a word they said.

Finally, the clown with the leather cowboy hat held up the clipboard.