Doing the Devil's Work (23 page)

Dice scoffed at the compliment, catching a scrap of quiche in her palm as it bounced off her chin. “Yeah, that’s why you didn’t recognize me the last time you saw me, ’cause I look so healthy these days.”

“You do look better,” Maureen said. “You do.”

“Officer, if this is gonna get weird,” Dice said, “I don’t roll that way. Pickin’s are slim around here, a clean working dick is hard to find, but I do prefer boys nonetheless. Pretty much exclusively. And I don’t do the gay-for-pay thing.”

“There’s something we can agree on,” Maureen said.

“As long as we’ve got that straight,” Dice said, with a wry smile. “So to speak.” She studied her fork. “Tell you what else I haven’t done in a long while, eat with real utensils. The metal feels weird in my mouth.”

Maureen resisted the urge to crack wise about Dice’s multiple lip piercings. “What is that tattoo on your head?”

“Smaug,” Dice said, shoveling food into her mouth. She wasn’t letting a crumb escape. “From
The Hobbit
.”

“I know it,” Maureen said. “The greedy dragon with the mountain of stolen treasure. Very nice.” She’d eat half her sandwich, she decided, and send Dice back to the park with the other half.

“So you saw the movie,” Dice said.

“I read the book,” Maureen said. “In junior high. And again in high school.”

“A cop who reads,” Dice said. “I’m about to fall out of my chair.”

Maureen smiled. “Smaug. Huh. So you’re the girl with—”

“Don’t even,” Dice said, raising her hand. “Don’t go there. I’m so sick of hearing about that. I didn’t know when I got the tattoo, okay? I was fucking high. Like for months. It’s not my fault. You’d think living on the streets I’d get some kind of break from that kind of pop culture shit. But the fucking tourists…” She shook her head. “I’m gonna start telling people it’s a dragonfly, or a magic eel or something. It’s almost enough for me to grow my hair back.” She rubbed her buzz cut. “Almost. I make decent dosh having my picture taken because of it. It’s hard to reject a good revenue stream in a down economy.”

“You ever get off the streets?” Maureen asked. “Like, what happens when the cold comes?”

“Depends,” Dice said, rubbing her fingertip over the glass plate. When she noticed Maureen watching, she slid the plate aside. Maureen knew better than to offer her leftovers right then. Dice would throw them in the gutter. Dice lifted the lid from her coffee cup, sniffing the contents. “Some people go home. Not everyone out here has nowhere to go. For some kids it’s an adventure out here, like backpacking across Europe.

“Those of us who stay, sometimes we try to move indoors. In the winter, there’s plenty of vacants left, especially deep in the Bywater and into the Nine. Hard to keep warm, though, and not burn the place down, or strangle ourselves on carbon monoxide. And Deep South or not, it does get fucking cold down here some nights. And wet. For days. It gets in your bones. High summertime we go inside, too. This place stays fucking hot at night, and the bugs, and the rats. I’m not about to get rabies or that West Nile bullshit. And you know when late August comes people get cranky and start shooting. It’s worse than the winter sometimes.

“We don’t do shelters much. The older people don’t like us, and straight couples have to split up. None of them take dogs. And the shelters can be more anal about wine and weed than you guys.” She shrugged. “Some of those places, the staff are grimier than we are. And shady, quick with their hands. A couple of the hostels cut us a break sometimes, if tourism is slow and if we can scrape together a couple of bucks and do some work in the kitchen and shit.”

“You ever do that? You ever stay in the hostels?”

“I can wash a dish,” Dice said. “I’m not helpless. I can fold sheets and hot mop a floor if I have to.”

Maureen sat back in her chair. “You talk like it’s embarrassing to want to be warm when you’re cold, or cool when you’re hot. It’s human nature to protect yourself.”

“It’s not that,” Dice said, bristling. “It’s getting warm yourself and leaving others in the cold while you do it. Sometimes we pool the money, try to work it so we each can get a night inside. A shower. A real bed with heat or air-conditioning. But those arrangements never last. They degrade with a quickness. People bitch, they jump the line. That’s the problem with any larger money-based system, it condones that ‘fuck everyone else, I’m getting mine’ mentality.”

She lifted her chin at Maureen. “Like y’all, doin’ that devil’s work, using people against each other, to rat each other out. Using their pasts and their addictions and troubles against them. You’d let us all kill each other with sticks if you could get away with it.”

Maureen knew the credit she’d earned with her charm offensive and her ten-dollar lunch was maxing out. “I’m looking for someone. I thought you could help me find her. No ratting, no snitching. It’s not like that. You’d be doing a good thing.” The feminine pronoun snagged Dice’s attention, as Maureen had hoped it would. She took Dice’s silence as encouragement to continue. Thievery was the connection between Dice and Madison, that was Maureen’s best guess. Like the cops who halfheartedly pursued them, the downtown pickpockets and petty thieves, which was most of the kids on the streets, knew and kept track of one another—who was in jail or rehab, who was on the run, who had left town, who had returned. They had a threadbare camaraderie that sustained them, a target-rich environment, places to get out of the heat and the cold, as Dice had said. It might have been Dice who turned Madison on to Pat O’s in the first place.

Maureen knew she needed to be gentle with the question. Going right to the accusation would backfire. “In your travels, have you ever met a woman named Madison Leary? She’s older than y’all, but I think she’s spent some time on the streets. She’s hard to miss. Her eyes are two different colors.”

To Maureen’s surprise, Dice broke out into a huge smile. “Madison? The singer? With the long brown hair? Yeah, I know her. She’s cool as shit.” Dice’s smile crumbled. She’d remembered, Maureen figured, that she was talking to a cop. “Did something happen to her?”

“You could say that.”

Dice bounced her palm off her forehead several times. Tears welled in her eyes. “This fucking city, I swear.” She picked up her fork, dug the tines into the denim over her knee.

“It’s not that,” Maureen said, resisting the urge to reach across the table and snatch away the fork. “Not yet. She’s lost. And I’m trying to find her,
before
something terrible happens. She reached out to me. She called me. It was a strange call. Upsetting.” She paused, giving Dice a window to speak. “Not a lot of people have my number, Dice. I can’t remember the last person I gave it to, other than you.”

“She said she knew you,” Dice said. “That she was part of a case you were working.”

“If that were true,” Maureen said, “why would she need to get my number from you?”

Dice sat up in her chair. “I know, right? That’s what I said. So
she
said that she had your number, but lost it, and that you were expecting to hear from her. She made it sound like a real crisis.” She shrugged. “I mean, you’re a bitch. I wouldn’t be on your bad side. She said she didn’t want the others knowing she was working for the cops, which was why she hid from you that night.”

“What night?”

“The night you came for Marques’s drum. She hid down the street, in the dark, mixed in with the other kids, but she was here. She saw us talking, watched us. That’s how she knew to ask me for your number. She saw you give me your card. I used her red bike to take Marques home to his grandmother.”

Maureen frowned. There was a piece of the story missing. “So she just walked up to you, this complete stranger, and offered the use of her bike?”

“She’s not a stranger,” Dice said. “That’s why she was on the corner with me when you showed up. We met in the spring, panhandling, working the St. Claude traffic lights with cardboard signs. Hers said something about sick kids. Bullshit, natch. She was clever. She could work it. You could tell she’d been hard done by. It was us and a bunch of guys, so we stuck close, looked out for each other. And we hit it off. Musical backgrounds and shit. For a while we split a room at the Bend in the River hostel, over on Esplanade in the Treme? They reach out to people on the street. Not everyone in the charity business is a scumbag.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

“She came to New Orleans from outside LaPlace,” Dice said. She looked at the fork like she’d just found it, put it back on the table. “She’d been there a few months, but that wasn’t where she was from originally. I think that was like North Carolina, or Virginia, someplace like that. One trailer park’s the same as the next, she used to tell me.” Dice smiled at the recollection. “Like the suburbs, she said. She was funny.”

“She came to New Orleans to be a singer?” Maureen asked. “Is that what she told you?”

“I don’t know if she told me that,” Dice said, “or if I guessed it because she had such an awesome voice. She liked that dark Appalachian shit we’re always pretending to play on Frenchmen, but she knew it for real, you know? But she had no instrument, which I always thought was odd. Showed up without one, far as I know. If I could get a banjo, I figured she could manage some old guitar or something.”

“She ever get any gigs?”

“We’d talked about gigging together, playing on the corner for change, like a duo, that kind of shit. It was another way to make a little money. Her voice, it woulda stopped people in their tracks. We know a lot of the same songs. I can play some guitar, too.” She shrugged. “Never happened. After a few weeks at the hostel, we lost touch. I was getting into the shit again at the time. I don’t hide it real well. Bend in the River put me out. She might have tried looking for me over the summer, not that I would’ve known it.”

“You think she stayed in the hostel without you?”

“She left, too,” Dice said. “Not long after me. When I kicked again, I went to see her, but she was gone. No one knew where. She could have stayed as long as she wanted. She didn’t need my income. That’s another reason it was weird to me that she had no instrument. I didn’t know it until we were living together, but she had cash. A good bit of it.”

“This cash,” Maureen said. “She made it how?”

“Brought it with her from LaPlace,” Dice said. “She didn’t have a job, unless you count the panhandling and the stealing, which can be more tiring than you would think. She had thousands, it wasn’t St. Claude Avenue toll money.”

Maureen said nothing. She let the silence hang.

“She gave me some from out of the box she kept it in.” She looked away from Maureen. “I stole some. Not much. I think she knew. That was a reason I went back to see her.”

“To pay her back?”

Dice laughed. “Yeah, from the pile of extra money I have. I went back to apologize for flaking on her.”

“So she came to New Orleans,” Maureen said, “to make it as a singer, but never had an instrument and never played anywhere.”

“Happens more often than you’d think,” Dice said. “I heard her sing around the hostel. I don’t know why she never used it for more, but she had the voice.”

“I believe it.” Maureen took out her fresh pack of cigarettes, offered one to Dice, and lit them both. “She ever tell you why she left LaPlace, ever give you a reason? She ever tell you anything about her life there?”

“I don’t know how much more I can tell you.”

“Because I’m a cop?”

“Because I don’t know anything.”

Maureen knew Dice was lying to her, but she didn’t push. She let the silence have its way. Dice looked away from her, running her eyes over the underside of the awning, over the motionless blades of the ceiling fans and the dead and empty wasp nests in the crossbeams. She studied the parked cars on the street, the clownish faces drawn on the sidewalk, putting her eyes anywhere but on Maureen. Dice smiled crooked, her eyes teary again. She’d lost people before out here, Maureen thought. She’d lost more than people.

“His grandmother doesn’t like you,” Dice finally said, “but Marques thinks you’re the shit. He said you got in some trouble on his behalf. He talked my ear off about you. All the way to Grandma’s house.” A pause. “So what do you really want?”

“Here’s the thing,” Maureen said, leaning across the table. “The Madison you describe is not the person I’m looking for. That person and the person I’m looking for sound like two different people. Something happened to her. And now she’s vanished. Is there anything you can think of that might help explain her disappearing?”

“Disappearing from where?” Dice asked, skeptical again. “No one gave a shit about her to begin with. Same as me, same as you without that uniform. How does someone who’s already invisible vanish?”

“My heart bleeds for you and yours, it does,” Maureen said. “You’re getting defensive. You’re hiding something. What are you not telling me?” She waited. “I’m looking for her now. She matters to me. Now. I can help her. Tell me about her.”

“She had these orange medicine bottles,” Dice said, “a bunch of them, a pill stash.” She corrected herself, “No, it was not a
stash
. What I carried was a stash. She was on medication. I went through them when she wasn’t around.” Dice, for a fleeting instant, was embarrassed at her behavior. “Like I said, I was getting back into the shit around that time.”

“What were the pills?”

“Not what I’d hoped for,” Dice said. “That was for fucking sure. Clozaril was one. There were a couple of other kinds. I forget the other names. I asked around. Turns out it was scary shit. Antipsychotics. No use to a junkie. Not to take, not to sell. I left it alone. I wasn’t that cruel or desperate. Not yet. She was rationing, anyway, by the time we moved into the Bend in the River. She was cutting the pills in half. I don’t know if she ever tried for a new ’scrip.” Dice shrugged. “Like there’s anywhere for someone like us to go for that shit.”

“And how did you feel about that?” Maureen asked. “When you learned your new friend from LaPlace with the pretty voice had a mysterious wad of cash and a collection of antipsychotics under the bed?”