Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

Phillip was going to jail.

Jesus FUCKING Christ.

I was going to have to help him.

“What are we going to do?” he asked, his voice hinting at rising hysteria once again. “I’m telling you, Tony, we can’t call the police! I can’t go to jail, I can’t.” He suddenly burst into tears, covering his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking.

“Well, the first thing is, you need to calm the fuck down,” I snapped. My head was starting to ache. I definitely didn’t need this shit. I was on deadline — I couldn’t exactly call my editor and say, Sorry, I need a few more days, I had to help my tenant dispose of a dead body and come up with a story for the cops. I raced through possibilities in my mind; places to dispose of the body where it might not be found for a while. Almost every single one of them was flawed. Seriously flawed — though an idea was starting to form in my head. “Is Chad’s car here?”

Phillip wiped at his nose. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, we’re going to have to get rid of that, too.” I refrained from adding dumbass , like I really wanted to. But there was no sense in getting him all worked up again, since he seemed to finally be calming down. And if we were going to do this — and, more importantly, get away with it — I needed him calm. “Give me a cigarette.” I’d managed to finally quit a few months earlier, but I needed one now. Get ahold of yourself, look at this as an intellectual puzzle, shut off your emotions. I lit the Parliament and sucked in the bitter smoke. I took a few deep breaths and decided to try one last time.

“Phillip, we really should call the cops. I mean, if this was self-defense—”

“What do you mean, if it was?” Phillip’s brown eyes narrowed. He pointed to his cheek, which was purple. “He slugged me again, Tony. He threw me against the wall — I can’t believe you didn’t hear him screaming at me.”

I hadn’t, though — no shouting, no crashing, no struggle. Sure, I had the headphones on, but — no, it was probably self-defense, there was no reason to doubt Phillip. Chad was an egotistical bully with no problem using his fists whenever he decided Phillip had looked at him cross-eyed. I looked down at the pale face, the sticky pool of blood under his curly brown hair. His eyes were open, staring glassily at the ceiling. He was wearing his standard uniform of Abercrombie & Fitch sleeveless T-shirt and low-rise jeans, no socks, and boat shoes.

“What exactly happened here, anyway?” None of this made any sense. But then, death rarely does.

“I don’t know, it all happened so fast.” Phillip’s voice shook. “Chad called and wanted to come over. I said okay, even though I was kind of tired. So I started making spaghetti. He came in the back way—” he gestured to the door I’d come through, “and he just started in on me. The same old bullshit, me cheating on him, me not being good enough for him, all of that horrible crap.” He hugged himself and shivered. “Then he got up and shoved me into the wall and punched me—” he touched his cheek again, “and was about to punch me again when I shoved him really hard, and he fell back and hit his head on the edge of the counter... Then he just kind of gurgled and dropped to the floor.” He gagged, took some breaths, and got control of himself again. “Then I called you.”

Two hours later — what did you do for two hours? “Well, good enough for him,” I finally said, stubbing the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray on the counter.

“Are you going to help me?”

“Give me another cigarette and let me think, okay?”

The plan was simplicity itself. Once I’d smoked two or three cigarettes, I’d worked it all out in my head. I looked at it from every angle. Sure, we’d need some luck, but every plan relies on luck to a certain degree. The Lower Ninth Ward above Claiborne Avenue was a dead zone. Hurricane Katrina had left her mark there, with houses shifted off foundations, cars planted nose-down in the ground... and bulldozing had recently begun. I’d clipped an article out of the Times-Picayune that very morning on the subject, thinking it might be useful with my next book. Out in the shed behind the house, I still had the remnants of the blue tarp that had been our roof after the one-eyed bitch had wrecked it on her way through. I had Phillip help me get it, and we rolled Chad up in it. We carried the body out into the backyard, and then we cleaned the entire kitchen — every single inch of it — with bleach. I knew from a seemingly endless interview with a forensic investigator with the NOPD for my second book that bleach would destroy any trace of DNA left behind. I made Phillip wash the pots and pans and run them through the dishwasher with bleach. When the kitchen was spotless and reeked of Clorox, I checked to make sure the coast was clear.

The Lower Garden District, before Katrina, had been a busy little neighborhood. We weren’t as fabulous as the Garden District, of course; when Anne Rice still lived here, I liked to tell people I lived on a street called Annunciation, about “six blocks and six million dollars” away from her. We didn’t have the manicured lawns and huge houses you would see above Jackson Avenue; we were the poorer section between I-90 and Jackson. Around Coliseum Square there were some gigantic historic homes, but most of the houses in our neighborhood were of the double shotgun variety, like mine. Our section of St. Charles Avenue — about four blocks away from my house — was where you’d find the horror of chain stores and fast food that you wouldn’t find further up the street.

But I liked my neighborhood. There’d always been someone around — kids playing basketball in the park down the street, people out walking dogs, and so forth; the normal day-to-day outside ramblings of any city neighborhood. The floodwaters from the shattered levees hadn’t made it to our part of town — we were part of the so-called sliver by the river. When I’d come back in October, the neighborhood had been a ghost town. And even though more and more people were coming back almost every day, it was still silent and lifeless after dark for the most part.

Tonight was no different. Other than the occasional light in a window up and down the street, it was as still as a cemetery. We carried Chad out to his car and started putting him in the trunk. The way things were going, it would be just our luck to have a patrol car come along as we were forcing the body in the blue tarp burial shroud into the vehicle, and I didn’t stop holding my breath until the trunk latch caught.

No one came along. The street remained silent.

Then Phillip got behind the wheel of Chad’s Toyota to follow me through the city. “Make sure you use your turn signals and don’t speed,” I cautioned him before getting into my own car. “Don’t give any cop a reason to pull you over, okay?”

He nodded.

I watched him in my rearview mirror as we drove through the quiet city. There were a few cars out, and every once in a while I spotted an NOPD car. The twenty-minute drive seemed to take forever, but we finally made it past the bridge over the Industrial Canal. I turned left onto Caffin Avenue and headed into the dead zone past the deserted, boarded-up remnants of a Walgreen’s and a KFC. It was spooky, like the set of some apocalyptic movie. We cruised around in the blighted area, my palms sweating, until I found the perfect house. There was no front door, and there were the telltale spray-paint markings on the front, fresh. It had been checked again for bodies, and the three houses to its right had already been bulldozed; piles of smashed wood and debris were scattered throughout the dead yards. Several dozers were also parked in the emptied yards, ready for more demolition.