Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

And this on a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend morning, clear blue Creole sky in the French Quarter, for God’s sake, well, felt like the beginning of the end to me. Maybe more so ’cause it was a rare day off for me, and I’m taking the kids on a little stroll through the Quarter, pointing out this and that historic feature, and the difference between a slave quarters and a garçonnière , and I get the call to get on over there, sorry ’bout your day off, Reynolds, and I say, nah, I don’t need no address, I’m lookin ’ at it, mac — and I am, standing across the street, taking in the crowd and the cop cars and emergency vehicles, and when I can’t bear it no more, looking up again at the soft blue Louisiana sky, trying to put the two together.

Or maybe it was when those kids popped that priest, Father Peterson, off his bike further down in the Marigny, almost to Bywater. Out for a sunset ride, beloved in the neighborhood, and these punks just whacked the padre for kicks, far as we know, wasn’t like nobody was ever arrested. And this sorta shit’s why the town was deserted after dark in most neighborhoods long before the hurricane tore it up — and talking about that , parts of this town were always so raggedy-assed, you’d be hard-pressed to know what piece of decrepitude was there before or after Katrina: St. Claude, Tremé, St. Roch, St. Bernard, Central City, Desire. I mean, I defy you to tell me—

Or maybe it was Officer Antoinette Frank that broke my particular camel’s back, where she and her cousin lit up her partner and the Vietnamese family they both moonlit for as part-time after-dark security. A police officer, sworn to serve and protect. She was that family’s guardian angel, and she did them like that — and again, all for a few bucks, supposedly. The cousin said she thought they kept gold bullion in the back room, them being Vietnamese and all. Maybe. But who’d be that stupid? And what the real reason was, how’ll we ever know? She’s still on death row, Officer Frank, and the hurricane probably gave her another five years of undeserved life at least, delaying as it did every judicial proceeding large or small in the great state of Louisiana. And her, we know she done her daddy, too, filed a missing person’s on him and moved right into his house, and they found his bones under it and didn’t even bother to charge her with that.

You smell that? I don’t mean that slop in the footlocker — a smell I could never possibly describe to a civilian, except to say you gotta burn your clothes after a crime scene like this. Never wear nothing you wanna hold onto to a crime scene, I tell the rooks. Nah. I mean that — the night air. Sweet. Jasmine. Confederate jasmine.

Now, I’m a Seventh Ward, all the way. That’s the Creole ward, y’all, the Mighty Seventh. And I always lived in the Seventh Ward — always. Where I live since the hurricane, my mama’s house. I mean, same house I come up in on Dauphine Street in the Marigny, the Triangle, between Touro and Pauger — a double camelback with a screened-in side gallery, that we all piled into since our place in Gentilly had thirteen inches of water in it... on the second floor. I lie in bed, windows thrown open in the nice weather, I can smell the jasmine, the coffee roasting down along the river, hear the carriages rattling home at night after a day in the tourist trade, the clack clack of the mules’ hooves. I just lie there, I can hear the train whistle way down in the Bywater. Can hear the ferry boat horns out on the river. The out-of-tune calliope on the Creole Queen . All kinds of birds. The rain rattling in the gutters. The wind whipping the palm fronds. I don’t know. Place makes my heart ache. Way it smells, way it sounds. Way it looks. No place as pretty and sad as New Orleans. Depending on if the sun’s shining or not. You ever notice that? Sun’s out, ain’t no prettier place on earth. No place more... resplendent. But gray and gloomy, cloudy, rainy, this town is so shabby, dreary, and downright depressing, makes you wanna take morphine and die. As the old song goes.

If I believed in karma I’d be worried I’d come back as one of those mules. Those carriage mules. I would just hate like hell to come back as a mule.

It is a beautiful night. Despite this shit here. Sweet and soft, balmy. Dark . I know that sounds odd to say. The night is dark. But it is. Here in New Orleans, it is really dark. One or two things I know about New Orleans. The nights are darker here. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’m not talking about human darkness. About evil, or shit. I’m talking about the quality of the night. The feel. I been everywhere, all over this country. The Gulf of Mexico. Jamaica. I’m telling you. I seen a lot of darkness, stayed up a lot of nights. It’s just a fact. The nights are darker here. Palpably darker. And thicker. You can reach out and stroke the darkness. Touch it. Run your hand over it, like somebody’s skin, or a piece of soft cloth. Got a soft feel to it, New Orleans nights. The nights are always soft here. No matter what else has happened. No matter what kind of horror show. The nights are always soft. I can’t tell you how many times, how many blood-stained crime scenes I been privy to, how many murders. I just stepped away, stepped outside, into the night, and been struck by how thick and soft and sweet and downright dark the nights are here. Struck dumb. It’s a mystery.

This, this here, ain’t no mystery. Run of the mill lover’s quarrel. Guy’s wife and her girlfriend — by which I mean, her girl friend, her lesbian lover — decided they were tired of him. The three of them get to drinking and fooling around — fuckin’ and fightin’, really, what it amounts to — and one of them whacks him over the head with a hammer two times and then the pair of them stuff him in this here footlocker, pour cement in the damn thing, and push it out on the back porch. A few days go by, and a neighbor gets to smelling something ripe, drops a dime on them. And here I am. Do I know why, exactly? No. But I know what.

It ain’t like TV. Most of the time, you do know who. You don’t know why, maybe, and you don’t care. Means and opportunity is all that matters. That thing about motive? Fuck motive. People kill each other for no damn reason at all.

One or two other things I know about New Orleans. Termites and hurricanes. The intro and the outro, how it starts and how it ends. The micro and the macro. That’s what gonna do New Orleans in. Not crime. Not fucked-up terminal stupidity like we got ourselves here. Termites and hurricanes. If you could beam me forward a hundred years from now, set me down right here in this spot a hundred years in the future, it wouldn’t be here. No sir. Not just this house here, this rundown half of a double, lower Marigny, Spain Street shotgun. I mean New Orleans. Not here. Nothing. Just cypress swamp again. Malaria mosquitoes and alligators. Gulf water maybe, far as the eye can see, the Mississippi finally jumping its banks like it’s been wanting to ever since it can remember, over to the Atchafalaya. Just nutria and gators and skeeters. But New Orleans? Not a chance. Gone like the lost city of Pompeii. Drowned like Atlantis. The termites and the hurricanes gonna take care of all this shit. The lost city of New Orleans.

Fifty years from now, I live that long, I’ll be fishing off my roof.

Not that I don’t love New Orleans. I do. But I’m a pessimist, I guess, especially about the capacity of human beings to solve their problems. Comes with the territory, I believe. Being a homicide detective. Makes you a little bit cynical about the human capacity. Makes you think maybe people ain’t real bright. Otherwise why would they do the things they do? To themselves and others. Why would they live the way they do? Now there’s a mystery for you. Not this sorry situation. All that’s left to figure about this is which one hit him, and get the other to cop a plea and turn against her girlfriend to get a little something off the top of her sentence.