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G21 FICTION - DEATH TONE (Part 2 of 3): The serialization of the opening chapters of the rough draft for ROD AMIS's new novel, a New Orleans mystery.CONTINUED from Previous Edition
"We need to rotate Beadle out of there," Shaunessy told Har ry on the phone that night. "He's gotten a little too 'acclimated' to the place, as he would say."
"I understand, sir."
"Take what he told you with a grain of salt, Trotter. Everybody has a version of the truth down there right now. If Beadle knew how to spring Bartlett, we wouldn't have needed to assign the case to you. Follow your own instincts on this thing."
"Yes, sir."
"Get some rest, Trotter."
"Yes, sir."
Harry rang off and strolled to the small round table near the window of his room there in the Marriott. He had left a tumbler of Scotch and a smouldering cigarette there. He looked down at the parambulations on Canal Street. Everything looked so normal, people and children just strolling along, a few tourists spilling out of the French Quarter. You would not have guessed, looking down on this scene, that a year ago Canal Street, the main drag of this city, had been in chaos.
What had Beadle called this area? "The sliver by the river." And then, "the aisle of denial." Quirky guy, that Beadle, but sharp, too, Harry sensed. He did seem like he knew these New Orleanians and what they were all about. Even a busted clock is right twice a day, Harry thought.
Algiers
On Tuesday morning, Harry telephoned the District Attorney's office and made an appointment to meet with the Asistant District Attorney who had been assigned Bartlett's case. She sounded cordial enough, let Harry know that the case probably wouldn't make the docket for another month or two, maybe longer, because things were so backed up in Orleans Parish. She would meet with him anyway, though, she said, if he thought it would move things along. Harry said he hoped it would.
After that he contacted Colonel Beadle to arrange to meet with the men on the detail that night. Only two of the four were still in country, the other two had been rotated back to Iraq with the understanding that Blackhart would fly them back to testify once a trial date was established. (If they're still alive, Harry couldn't stop himself from thinking.)
The remaining two men were Bartlett and Murray. Murray was on duty that day, so the Colonel would have to make arrangements and get back to Trotter. Bartlett was off duty on Monday's and Tuesdays. Harry figured that was probably why Shaunessy had had him fly down the previous afternoon. Harry took down Bartlett's phone number and made arrangements to meet the guy at his home out in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, after Harry picked up his rental car.
Bartlett was a tall kid, muscular but lean and very pale, with close-cropped black hair. He was cut from the same mold as Shaunessy, though a little bit less ramrod straight; the guy still knew how to relax. Harry took him for about thirty years of age. The pictures festooned around the living room gave him the impression that the guy's two boys were likely in grade school. Harry wondered how they were adjusting to being dragged down here to Louisiana. Bartlett told him that the family was trying to make the best of the situation.
After the usual small talk to put the guy at ease, Harry asked if he was ready to talk about the night of the incident.
"Yes, sir, of course. I can't get it out of mind. It was crazy! I mean, the only reason we found that guy was because we had heard gunshots from that direction right after I put down that wild dog.
"We race over there, of course, to see if we can help and we find this guy lying on the street bleeding. I rushed down to try to staunch the bleeding while Matt got on the horn to call for medics.
"The next we know, all these people are poppin' out of the darkness like damned mushrooms, crowding around our vehicle, circling in on us like. Billy and Jack are trying to get them to stay back but it's getting ugly. They just assumed that it was us that had capped the guy! By the time the police rolled up, there had to have been forty, fifty people out there and they're screaming and yelling and we're yelling back and Billy and Jack have drawn down on the crowd by then hoping to keep them back so the guy can get some air." Bartlett stopped to take a breath then, realizing that he was started to sound frantic.
"It's okay," Harry said. "Take your time."
"Well, it was just nuts here back then, Mr. Trotter! You wouldn't have believed it if you weren't here. It was Dodge City! You heard gunfire almost every night for a couple of weeks, I swear.
"So there I am smelling of gunpowder, my hands covered in blood and my weapon still warm from shooting that damned dog no more than five minutes before. And I'm in the middle of this mob scene. What were the cops supposed to think?
"I mean I can't really blame those guys. It was a bad situation. On the way to the bus station or train station or whatever - they were using it for holding - one of them told me as much.
"He says to me, 'Listen, mister, we know you probably didn't do it. We appreciate y'all comin' down here to help us out. But did you see that crowd? If we had just shook hands with you and let you walk away we mightah had a riot on our hands and that wouldn't have helped anybody. Your people will get you out on bail and if you didn't shoot the guy, that will be the end of it. No harm, no foul.'"
"But it didn't turn out that way."
"Naw. It didn't. There was a big stink from community activists in Algiers and a big write up in the local paper. Suddenly I was some kind of cowboy gunslinger vigilante out to shoot Black people in Algiers. There were a lot of folks turning up dead - and not from Katrina - back then. You wouldn't have believed it."
"Why'd you shoot the dog?"
"What?"
"The dog. Why'd you put it down?"
"Listen, Mr. Trotter, you don't know what it was like down here back then. There were packs of wild dogs, hungry, mean, just roaming the streets. Some of 'em started feasting on the damned corpses. I seen it myself! So I had this thing about them, I guess you'd say. I mean, I was thinking what if it was my brother or my cousin and when I got his remains back he was all chewed up like that? I'd be pissed off. So I put them down whenever they looked like they were rabid or just plain scavengers.
"I know it sounds crazy but that was where my head was at back then."
"I just needed to know. And the victim, Washington, you're sure he didn't have a weapon? There wasn't one anywhere around the scene?"
"No. We checked. We're trained to look for stuff like that."
"I figured. Still had to ask. What was your take on the crime scene?"
"Who the hell knows? There was a lot of that going on back then in New Orleans. That's why we were brought in, along with the National Guard. Could have been drug-related, could have been a revenge killing, could have even been real vigilantes or a hate crime, like a lot of people thought. We'll never know."
"Okay. So suddenly you're the cause of the month and the D.A.'s office is taking a lot of heat, right?"
"Exactly! You gottah believe me, Mr. Trotter, sir, I didn't kill Jerome Washington."
"I believe you, guy. You just caught a bad card on a bad night."
"It's crazy! I might as well be locked up because I can't leave Louisiana. And it's been what? Like eight or nine months? How can this be happening? That's what we keep asking ourselves, Angie, my wife and me."
"It's still a crazy time down here from what I've heard, Steve. Don't beat yourself up. Where I come from, we say you're not licked until you can't get up. You're still on your feet, Slugger, and you've got some good people in your corner. I'm sure we can beat this thing."
"That's what the last C.I.D. guy assigned to my case said and my lawyer, but I'm still here."
"Listen, I'm not that last guy. I've been around the block a couple of times. That's how I got these grey hairs. Give me a couple of weeks and then pass judgment, okay?"
"I didn't mean no disrespect, Mr. Trotter, it's just I'm so frustrated! You know what this is costing me? My family? Kids torn outtah their old neighborhood, their schools, away from their friends. I'm lucky Angie didn't decide to divorce me."
"Believe me, Steve, I know it must be tough, But we'll get you out of this. I promise."
Bartlett heaved a heavy sigh. "I hope you're right, Mr. Trotter, sir. I really do."
Harry's meeting with the other guy, Murray, wasn't until 8;00 p.m. so he asked Bartlett if he'd mind driving out to Algiers with him and show him where the incident took place. The guy was fine with that. He grabbed his sunglasses and they took off for the other side of the river.
It was another scorcher of a day, heavy and humid, something Harry just couldn't get used to right away. Thank God for air conditioning, was his feeling. He couldn't imagine what it was like living down here before they had invented AC and, frankly, he didn't ever want to know.
Bartlett told him you can adjust to just about anything. He said he had felt that same way when he came down after Katrina but it cooled off by November and you got used to the humidity and the daily summer showers after a while. A long while, he cracked. That was the first time Harry had heard the guy laugh all day.
On the ride across town to where they'd catch the ferry to Algiers, Harry kept making small talk with the guy to get his mind off the case. He wanted to size this guy, Bartlett up and figure out if he was a killer or the kind who would cover up for someone who was. After all, Harry reasoned, even if Bartlett wasn't the killer himself that didn't mean that he might not be covering for a guy on that detail that night who was. It was part of the code not to give up a brother, Harry knew all-too-well. It happened that way a lot. More than most cops or most soldiers are willing to admit.
Maybe Murray or Hardesty or Jones. He couldn't afford to rule any of those guys out just yet. He couldn't rule Bartlett out, either, until he knew more about the guy than shows up in an investigator's statement, a police report or his personnel file. Not yet.
The guy was pretty open in answering most of Harry's questions, considering that he knew Harry was C.I.D. He talked about his assignment in Afghanistan in general terms, though, never really mentioning names and places. He was a lot more open about why he volunteered to come to New Orleans.
"You see, Mr. Trotter," he explained, "I know what we're trying to do overseas, the war on terrorists and all but this was different. These were our own people, Americans. They spoke our own language and shared our history and they were hurting. I knew right away I had to come back, even though did meant a cut in pay. I had to. You understand?"
"Yeah, I do."
"But nothing I seen on CNN could have prepared me for what it was like here. The people had gone damned crazy, Mr. Trotter."
"I keep hearing that."
"Seriously. It was like Hiroshima or Baghdad down here. Everybody just about was carrying a weapon. People you'd never expect in a million years - old ladies, professional people, even the damned cops! - they all thought it was okay to loot the businesses in order to get by.
"Sure, some folks were just scavenging for food, Pampers or batteries or whatever to get by but a lot more folks were just taking advantage of the situation. There weren't no law down here when we arrived, Mr. Trotter, except the law of the damned jungle. You were lucky if you could find a cop."
"Sounds pretty horrendous."
"You don't know the half of it. This was not America."
Harry noticed that whenever the guy talked about New Orleans right after Katrina his voice eventually rose an octave or two. He got more excited. He wasn't over what had happened down here and what he had seen.
Driving out to Metairie, Harry had taken Clayborne Avenue to get onto the freeway. He had seen wrecked and abandoned cars collected under the highrise part of the road over Clayborne, even a couple of rotted out boats. Some of them still bore the high water marks of the flooding that had deposited them there. It was eery, especially considering that in parts of town he had driven through on the way out there were so few people, so few occupied houses. Too many places were marked by the spray painted words on their doors indicating a need for the ASPCA to come out and rescue some abandoned animal or how many bodies had been found inside. These markers of the devastation that had happened here less than a year ago gave Harry the chills.
He had seen a lot of death in his time but not the remnants of the death of a whole city. He wasn't prepared for a death tone this pervasive. It was no wonder the people had gone a little crazy, he figured.
"You guys work other details besides in Algiers?" Harry asked Bartlett.
"Yep, Blackhart rotated our crews. A couple nights in Algiers, a couple in the Garden District, a couple in the French Quarter. MidCity was one of the tougher gigs, they got very hard hit. They're still just coming back."
"You ever pull the Ninth Ward?"
"Only the Upper Ninth, the Marigny and some of the Bywater districts. They had a special team going down to the Lower Ninth Ward because of the locals. They figured it best to send an all Black team down there so as not to get anybody too riled up. It was bad enough most of the people who lived there couldn't get in unless they managed to sneak past the checkpoints."
"That bad?"
"Still bad now. Lots of angry people. You should drive down there if you want to see how really bad it is here now. I learned most of those folks was home owners, too. Families go back generations. When that barge tore through the levy, they lost it all. You see houses down there parked where the flooding left them in the front yards of other houses, refrigerators up on folks' roofs, lots of places marked to show how many bodies was found in an attic. It's horrible."
"You must have run into a few other situations then, besides the one in Algiers?"
"No lie, Mr, Trotter. Seemed like every damned day, in the beginning, we'd run up on something. Something completely off the hook!
"And you know what? They had told us in the briefing, before we deployed here, that the illiteracy rate in New Orleans was one of the highest in the country. I mean a lot of stupid damned people. But we didn't get it.
"We got here and, for a lot of these folks, it was open game on our asses. They didn't hesitate to try to cap one of us. It was like we had entered a damned war zone. I mean, for a while there, it wasn't safe even for us, let alone your average civilian."
"How'd you take that?" Harry asked.
"I took it for what it was. Ignorant people. We had come down here to offer them some help and they acted like we're some invading army or something.
"Gee, New Orleans, you're welcome!" he spat out.
"So you guys were on edge, too?"
"Yeah. But don't get me wrong, Mr. Trotter. We're trained to deal in high stress environments. None of our guys would have made it out of training if they showed any signs of taking out their frustrations on the locals. No way."
"I hear you.
"Still it must've been tough. How long was your team down here when the Jerome Washington incident occurred?"
"I don't know. Maybe three weeks, maybe a month. Look, Mr. Trotter, I know where youj're going with this and I can swear on a stack of Bibles that none of us, nobody on our team did that shooting. We heard the fire and we followed it, that was all."
"You're a sharp cookie, Bartlett. Most people wouldn't have noticed my train of thought there."
"We get lots of training abou t interrogators, too," Steve said coolly.
Algiers still looked pretty much the way Steve Bartlett had described it on their way over. It was down in the mouth, with lots of drunks just wandering the streets or sitting on the stoops out in front of their places looking hopeless. The houses in the neighborhood that Steve's detail had been patrolling would have been called ramshackle anywhere else in America but for New Orleans they were passable. Once you left the gentrified parts of the sliver by the river, the Marigny, or along St. Charles Avenue and those environs, there was a lot of ramshackle to be seen in New Orleans, Harry had noticed. He was wondering when he would run into the city's much-vaunted charms.
[CONTINUES Next Edition]
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