Doing the Devil's Work (26 page)

“Why does everything that starts out as a favor with you,” Maureen said, “end up sounding like a threat?”

Both of them stepped aside as a dark Town Car rolled up the narrow street, easing to the curb by the valet stand.

“I got no power over how you hear things,” Quinn said. “I don’t. You don’t want to do this, for whatever uppity, Yankee, Puritan, self-righteous reason, that’s fine. Take off. I’ll tell Solomon you got your period. I got a phone full of guys who can be here in three minutes flat, happy for the favor and a go box of finger sandwiches.”

“Fuck you, Quinn. I said I’m doing it, so I’m doing it.” Maureen took a deep breath, released it slowly. “And fuck you again for that crack about my period.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “You’re right. That was outta line.” A shining Porsche SUV rolled past. “The guests are arriving, we should get back. I’m gonna smoke one, take a stroll and secure the perimeter. When I come back, you do the same. Then, whaddaya say we finish the night like professionals? We do our job, take our money, and go home.”

“I can live with that,” Maureen said.

“You’re a tough one to figure, Cogs,” Quinn said, lighting his cigarette. “But you’re okay in the end.” He smiled, backing away from her. “And not bad in the front, either.”

* * *

When Quinn returned, Maureen walked down the gravel pathway alongside the Heaths’ property, weaved through the butterfly boxes, and wandered out into the darkness of the park. From under the boughs of a live oak, invisible frogs by the dozens hiccupping and chirping in the black bayou behind her, Maureen smoked and watched the party from a distance.

White lights had been strung through the low-hanging trees near the house. The guests milled about on the broad wraparound porch, gaslight shadows playing across their bodies. The men wore light, expensive suits. The women wore gowns and clutched thin wraps around their bony shoulders, their necks and ears and wrists dripping with jewelry. Older wealthy white people in formal wear being waited on by black people in cheap tuxedos. From where she stood, the night could’ve been October 1911, or 1811. That was an odd thing Maureen had noticed about New Orleans, the way the city, the way a scene you watched, could flicker from one century to the next and back again before your eyes, the past coalescing out of the shadows and mist like an apparition hovering for a moment over a grave then fading again, dissipating into the night. Anything could trigger the phenomenon: the distant sound of mule hooves on cobblestone, the scent of the river, a warm breeze through the rattling fronds of a dry palm.

She loved the effect, even when it showed her the less lovely reflections of the city. It was to her as if New Orleans lived suspended in a perpetual ephemeral present, a city in amber; nothing ever truly left, and nothing ever truly died. Everything slipped behind the veil until its turn came around again, like your favorite painted wooden horse from the other side of the carousel. Not that she was ever much of a carnival girl, she thought, but New Orleans made you wonder. The city had a way of making you rethink your priorities.

Overhead, Maureen tracked dark fluttering shapes against the indigo sky. Bats. Like leaves of the live oaks come to life and making a break for it.

She felt the presence moving up behind her before she could see who it was approaching. Without turning, her hand on her weapon, she said, “Sneaking up on a cop, in the dark, how smart is that?”

Caleb Heath emerged from the shadows. He kept a respectable distance. He held his hands clutched behind his back, smiled. “Making my way back to the festivities after a walk of my own. Didn’t even see you standing there until the last second. Sorry about that, darlin’.”

Maureen expected him to keep walking. He didn’t. Dressed in pale pleated slacks and a dark silk dress shirt, Heath looked like what he was, a rich man’s underworked and overindulged heir. It took Maureen a moment to realize it, but Heath did not recognize her from Magnolia Street. He had stopped, she worried, to hit on her. From the look and the smell of him, she knew he was stoned. Very stoned. That was what he’d been doing off in the park, smoking much better shit than they got on Magnolia or Frenchmen Streets. He’d had himself some fine bourbon, as well.

“Daddy does throw quite the party,” he said. “So popular I can hardly stand it. He is an expert. You haven’t worked one of his soirees before, have you? I’d remember you.” He offered his hand. “Caleb Heath. The son.”

Maureen let his pale hand hang in the air. Suspended in the dark between them, it reminded her of a white jellyfish adrift in the night sea. Caleb did not have his father’s hands.

“Officer Maureen Coughlin. This is my first Heath party, you’re right about that, but we have met before, as it turns out.” She gave him a moment to remember. He didn’t. She offered a clue. “Magnolia Street.”

Heath shrugged. He finally lowered his hand.

“The man we pulled out of your house the other night,” Maureen said. “Turns out he had quite a history.”

“That means nothing to me,” Heath said. “I have no idea who that person was.”

Maureen wasn’t sure he knew what she meant and wasn’t humoring her.

“He may prove to mean something to the FBI,” she said.

“Then I wish them luck,” Heath said. He had a mystified tone and a confused look, as if he couldn’t believe they were still talking and she was not yet on her knees and blowing him behind the nearest oak tree. “They have a very difficult job. Is this what you want to talk about? It’s a lovely night. All work and no play and all that. Let’s enjoy the dark and the quiet. I don’t have to go back to the party just yet. It’s not like it’s for me.”

“When you met Clayton Gage at Pat O’Brien’s,” Maureen asked, “was Madison Leary with him or did he meet her there?”

That
hit home. The events and people of Magnolia Street, they hadn’t registered, but those three names—they got an instantaneous reaction from Heath as clear as the sound of breaking glass.

“Shame about Mr. Gage,” Heath said, looking away from her. “It’s a dangerous time in New Orleans for out-of-towners.”

“So you heard about him?”

“Quinn and I, we talk. We talk about lots of things. We keep each other well informed.”

“Gage was a friend of yours?” Maureen asked.

“Nonsense,” Heath said. “Never met the man. I only know what Quinn told me about him. He seemed to be a man of questionable decision-making. His end, though sad, seems predictable.”

“What makes you say that?”

Heath chuckled. “Quinn told me y’all met his date for the night. You tell me.”

“So they were a couple, Gage and Leary?”

“You’re asking me questions I couldn’t possibly know the answers to.”

Maureen watched as Heath began the long, slow process of digging a single cigarette from deep within his shirt pocket. He’d brought it with him, she figured, to mask the smell of the marijuana. Good luck with that, she thought. When he finally got the cigarette to his lips, Maureen lit it for him. While Heath smoked, she pondered her approach to him. Here was a chance, she thought, to get something substantial out of this night, to flip Quinn’s subterfuge on its head. She needed to maximize these accidental moments with him, before his head cleared and he realized both that he wasn’t getting in her pants and that he was better served not speaking with her.

Dice’s stories playing on her mind, she wanted to nail down the Gage–Leary connection. She suspected that Gage had tracked Madison to New Orleans, maybe with Cooley’s help, in search of her and the money she’d stolen from the Watchmen. Gage couldn’t alert the authorities to his troubles. He’d have to get the money back himself. Had Gage somehow tracked Madison to Pat O’Brien’s? If he’d known she was a thief, he’d have known her style, and he could have found the target-rich spots she’d work. Or had Leary set a trap? Had she let him find her? Had she worked Pat O’s because she knew Gage would be the one to come after her, and that he’d know where to look for her? How deep into the Watchmen had Leary been hooked, Maureen wondered, before something, maybe her own demons, had driven her away from them?

After the lunch conversation with Dice, Maureen was questioning who had gotten in whose way at Pat O’Brien’s that Sunday night. She had figured Leary for the wild card, and that she had queered the business meeting between Heath and Gage. But had Heath been the monkey wrench in Leary’s plan? How ironic would that be, Maureen thought, if both Heath and Leary had picked Pat O’Brien’s because it was full of drunk college girls, making a decision that would get Gage killed. Whose life was in danger in that truck? Maureen wondered. After Maureen had messed up Leary’s chance to kill Gage that night, after Leary had managed to escape both the jail and the emergency room, she’d arranged another meeting with Gage.

Making an offer of surrender and a shoe box full of money would be how Leary had lured Gage into meeting her alone outside F and M’s—another bar popular with drunk and oblivious college-age kids, another spot rich with, what had Dice called them? Soft targets. Madison might have known it and picked it herself. Her range might extend far beyond downtown.

Cooley had come first, Maureen decided. And after he had fallen down the rabbit hole, Gage had been dispatched by the Watchmen to find Leary. Madison had killed Cooley, too. Maureen was sure of it. If she went back to Magnolia Street, and asked the right people the right way, she could find someone who saw a red bike parked outside that empty house. One question remained. How had Leary and Cooley found that property in Central City?

Maureen wondered if she wasn’t looking right at the answer.

“And you’ve got nothing,” Maureen said, “that you want to inform
me
about while we have the chance to keep this conversation casual and off the record? Such as
your
whereabouts the night Gage was killed. I can protect you with that information. I know your father does a lot for the city, if I can help him out, or you, I guess, the more I know, the better.”

Heath narrowed his eyes at her. “What makes you think I need protection?”

Maureen could tell she unbalanced him. He was like his father that way. The rich, she thought, who could figure them? They toughed it out through city-swallowing hurricanes then came undone over the smallest of things, like people underwhelmed by their big money and minor depravities. Right now, she was a buzzkill to him, nothing more. He wasn’t sure what to do with a woman if she wasn’t tugging at his wallet, his zipper, or both. His name alone should have done it for him. Her calm irked him. She thought of Preacher and of Atkinson, of their reliance on the patient, steady, almost gentle approach. Something to be said, Maureen thought, for underplaying the role sometimes. And she knew that because she stood there with tits and without a dick, Heath would never suspect she’d figured him out.

She decided to push only a little.

“What if I told you,” she said, “that the police have material evidence of a prior relationship between you and Gage? That we have hard evidence of a planned meeting. A meeting about guns and money.”

“I’d think you were a liar,” Heath said, sniffling. Maureen could see him struggling to navigate the fog in his head. “In fact, I’d know you were lying, because if you had a sliver of a scrap of anything that could put me in danger, like maybe a Post-it note with my name on it from someone’s wallet, I’d be in an interview room right now, having this conversation with a real detective. I sure as hell wouldn’t be standing in the park with a glorified security guard who was
playing
detective while waiting on the crumbs that fall from my father’s table. That’s what I would say.”

She hadn’t expected a flinch from Heath over her revelation of the note. She hadn’t expected him to own up to anything, even in his addled state. The test, the trap she was setting, it was for Quinn, to ascertain once and for all whether she could trust him with anything that she’d learned from Preacher or Dice. Destroying the note was one thing. Telling Heath about it was another thing entirely, a worse thing. Quinn had failed the test, and his supposed friend had betrayed him. The sad thing was that she couldn’t even tell him.

“Quinn and I,” Heath said. “We’ve talked about you.”

“Nothing but nice things, I’m sure.”

He shrugged. “He’s impressed with you, but you make him nervous.”

“We’re working some things out, the two of us,” Maureen said. “But he’s got nothing to worry about. Tell him that, the next time you two talk. What was the real nature of your relationship with Clayton Gage?”

“You have a temper, Quinn says, and a propensity for violence. For snap judgments, too. You’re quick not to like people. I can vouch for that. He wonders how long your career will last. You’re a bit of a hazard. To others. To yourself.”

“Not a lot of people to like, the business I’m in,” Maureen said. “And my career will last at least as long as Quinn’s does, if not longer. I can promise you that.”

“Violence,” Heath said. “Is that why you left New York?”

“Excuse me?”

“Like I said, Quinn and I talk. He says you’re a native New Yorker. Long Island, is it?”

“Staten. Staten Island. Two totally different places.”

“Don’t meet many people around here from that particular place,” Heath said, kicking at a thick tree root bursting up through the soil. His wits were returning. “Not sure I could find it on a map, which says more about the place you’re from than it does me. You’re a long way from home. I’m curious about how you got from there to here. I’m interested in people’s stories. Actually, no, I’m not. That’s bullshit. I couldn’t give a flying fuck about other people’s stories, but I do like useful information. It’s always surprising how much of someone’s story you can find out with a last name, birthplace, and a few other basic facts.”

“I got here by car,” Maureen said. “Like plenty of other people.” And like hell, she thought, are you doing your own research. Had Quinn done it for him? Would he do that, Maureen wondered, plot against her, a fellow officer, with a civilian? “I got what I needed from you. You’ve told me plenty. I’m sure it’s time for you to get back to the party. Your daddy is calling you.”