Greg Herren - Murder in the Rue Ursulines

Tracing an e-mail back to the computer it came from is completely beyond my limited computer skills. From time to time, I think I should learn how to be more effective with the computer-and it’s not like I don’t have the time when I’m not working. Yet somehow I can never bring myself to take a course, or even spend the extra time to go through the tutorials that come with the software.

Fortunately, I have a great computer nerd to turn to.

It was my best friend, Paige Tourneur, who found him for me. I had just spent a small fortune getting some repair work done on my computer, and it still didn’t work right-even though they’d kept it for three weeks. Every time it froze up on me, I had to resist the urge to put my fist through the screen, or pack it up and shove it up the ass of the guy at the computer hospital. That night, Paige had come by in a fine foul mood with a bottle of wine. After relaxing over a couple of joints and when the bottle was half empty, she was finally ready to let me know what had gotten her goat that day. It was one of her favorites: the incompetence and total failure of the Louisiana public school system. After listening to her rage about how we as a society were failing our youth for quite a while, giving my obligatory nods and agreeing noises (which is all she requires while on a tirade), I asked what triggered this latest and well deserved disgust with the school system.

“I talked to this kid today, and he was the sweetest guy, Chanse, and we failed him.” She took another hit off the joint. “Take this kid,” she said flourishing the joint, “a poor kid from the Irish Channel. His mother was a manager at a McDonalds and trying to raise a family of three kids on those wages, if you can imagine that. Not a goddamned pot to piss in. His father was a total deadbeat, a drug-addled loser who killed someone in an argument over drugs and was sent up to Angola before any of the kids were even in school. Like those kids are going to have any kind of chance, right? And we wonder why they turn to crime. And one of the kids is this incredibly bright kid, with an aptitude for computers, but no one notices or sees or cares at his school because they’re too busy trying to keep all the rest of the kids from killing each other-rather than teaching them anything. So, he teaches himself all about computers, how to use them, how to build them, how the software and hardware works, all of that, you know? It’s almost like he’s a genius with computers, right? So, he starts using his self-taught skills to hack into computers, change grades for money…and no one catches him, and then he moves on to other things…stealing credit card numbers, people’s personal information…and when he’s seventeen, he gets caught. His mother can’t afford a lawyer, so he gets a public defender-and you know what those are worth in Orleans Parish. He cops a plea, goes away for three years, gets out after eighteen months, and who’s going to hire him? He got his GED while in jail, and learned even more about computers there. Bright, sharp, and the sweetest guy you can imagine, and he’s barely eking out an existence because no one cared, or noticed, his abilities and nurtured him from an early age.” She sighed. “It’s just awful…the way we waste the youth in this town.”

“He’s really good with computers?” I asked, glaring at mine from across the room.

“Brilliant-he’s absolutely brilliant.” She shook her head. “Such a fucking waste-because you know he’s eventually going to have to go back to criminal shit if he wants to eat.”

“Do you have his name and number?” I hooked a thumb at my computer. “That stupid fucking thing is still all fucked up. And I’d rather pay this kid to fix it than those know-nothing assholes at the repair shop.”

Fixing my computer was the first job I’d given Jephtha Carriere. He came over, and did a few things on it. Fifteen minutes later it was working better than it had when I’d first bought it. He tried explaining what the problem had been, but it made no sense to me. I wrote him a check, and then asked, “Could you design a hack-proof system for a computer network?”

“There’s no such thing as hack-proof,” he’d scoffed, shaking his head. “As long as someone wants to get in, they will. Anything I design might work for now, but someone would crack my system soon enough.” He gave me a sunny smile. “You know, for most hackers, it’s not so much about the information they can access or crashing a system-that’s what people don’t understand. It’s the challenge…to see if you can outsmart the original programmer. The harder it is, the harder they’ll try. And when you pull it off, it’s a rush better than any drug.”

“Are you willing to give it a try?” I asked. Paige had been right. He was incredibly bright and likeable. I also liked that he hadn’t assured me he could do something he didn’t think possible. “The pay would be really good, and it could be a regular gig-updating the system, making it even more secure. I’ll tell you what-why don’t you see if you can hack into the system, and give me an analysis of what needs to be done. Like I said, the pay would be really good. And I might need you to do some things for me from time to time-like fix my computer, or things I don’t have the skills to do.”

“I don’t want to do anything illega,.” He replied. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to do anything illegal. I could lose my license.”

“Yeah, sure,” he’d shrugged. “How good is the pay?”

I told him, and his eyes widened. “Are you serious?” When I nodded, he said, “I’ll get right on it.” Two days later, he e-mailed a detailed analysis of the weaknesses in the system-and it went right over my head. But one thing I did understand was I was able to hack into the computer network in less than ten minutes. The only reason I can see that no one has so far is because it hasn’t occurred to anyone.

I took the report to my boss at Crown Oil, Barbara Castlemaine, and she immediately authorized me to hire him. He started work that very day.

A week later, we did a test run on his system.

Not a single computer programmer or expert at Crown Oil could break into it.

He’s been working for me ever since.

Over the years, I’d become fond of Jephtha. His jail experience had the effect it should have-he was firmly on the straight and narrow path now. He had no desire to ever go back.

Jephtha lived with his current girlfriend in a single shotgun on Constantinople Street in the Irish Channel. His girlfriends were one of Jephtha’s freely admitted problems. The Bourbon Street strip clubs-and the huge-breasted bleached blondes who danced there, were his biggest weakness. He’d dated a string of them-falling madly in love each time, swearing she was ‘the one’-until she walked out on him or stole from him. Since he’d started working for me, I started doing background checks on every last one of them-not that it made a bit of difference to him. When Jephtha was in love, he didn’t want to hear anything bad about the object of his affection-because she was a goddess of perfection in his eyes.

His current girlfriend’s stage name at the Catbox Club was Tiffani. Her real name was Abby Grosjean, and she was worth all of her predecessors combined. Abby was from Plaquemines Parish, the oldest daughter of a shrimper. She’d left home when she was nineteen, when her father took a second wife she didn’t like, and headed for New Orleans. Her only work experience was waiting tables in a small diner. She did that for a while after she got into town, tired of it quickly, and made a decision to, as she put it, “put my body to work for me instead of the other way around. God gave me big boobs, he must have wanted me to use ‘em, right?” She bleached her dark hair white-blonde and applied for work as a dancer at the Catbox Club. “I was on the drill team in high school,” she’d told me after she’d moved in with Jephtha. “I just use the same moves we learned at drill camp and voila, I became a stripper.” I liked her because she was honest and a hard worker, and unlike her predecessors, she actually cared about Jephtha. She did her best to make sure he ate decent and regular meals, and tried to keep the house as tidy as she could. She was taking a couple of classes at the University of New Orleans, majoring in pre-law, no less.