Gumbo Justice Read online

  Ryan surveyed the apartment, which was lit only by a handful of battery operated halogens. Even without proper lighting, it was apparent that the conditions here had been unlivable for some time. The ceiling panels in the combination living room/kitchen were missing, exposing raw wooden beams, and the sheetrock on the walls was fraught with holes and graffiti. Ryan caught a whiff of a familiar odor, and checked her tennis shoes quickly to make sure she didn’t have a repeat of last month. At least the stink wasn’t from her shoes this time. She carefully watched her step, trying to avoid the needles, syringes, and numerous glass and metal tubes that littered the floor.

  “Find anything?” she asked, directing the question at her father.

  “Just him.” The captain pointed to the body, and then wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. “And what in God’s name are you wearing?”

  “Clothes,” Ryan answered, as she picked up one of the halogens and flashed the light on the body.

  “If you say so,” the captain said, a note of doubt in his voice. He turned as a uniformed officer walked into the room from the hallway.

  “Nothing in the bedroom or bathroom,” the young officer said. “Well, nothing but drug paraphernalia. Oh, and rats. We’re going to have to start shooting them if the coroner doesn’t come for the body soon.” A scuffling sound came from a shadowy corner of the room. The officer pointed in the direction of the noise. “See what I mean? Puddy and Daubert are checking out the other units, but I seriously doubt this guy is waiting around for us to catch him.”

  Ryan finally walked over and aimed the flashlight on the body — a naked black man, with close-cropped hair and a scabbed-over scar on his chest. His hands were bound together in front of him with white rope, and his face was severely bruised, half of his lip split, hanging nearly to his chin. But the tiny hole in his forehead was the fatal wound. When he died, his bowels and bladder had relaxed. A small puddle of urine had spread out underneath him, and the proximate odor of feces was unmistakable.

  “Is this L’Roid Smith?” Ryan asked, even though she already knew the answer. She knelt by the body for a closer look, careful not to touch anything. She almost hadn’t recognized him. She definitely hadn’t recognized the flat, vacant look in his eyes. Ryan had never seen the man without a cocky expression or an ominous warning look on his face. But then, she had never seen him dead before. He certainly wasn’t giving her the evil eye now.

  “You know this clown?” the captain asked, his gray brows furrowed in a deep frown.

  Ryan nodded. “Leader of the Soldiers, street name G-Pimp. He was set for trial this week for the murder of three Warriors.” The St. Thomas Soldiers and the Ninth Ward Warriors were the two most dangerous gangs in the city. “He was out on a 701.”

  The state had 120 days to try a case after the defense filed a 701 motion, and had failed to meet the deadline in Smith’s case. Not that missing the cut-off date was unusual. More than one murderer had found his way back to the streets via a speedy-trial release, often just to end up back in prison when the jury convicted him. While the pre-trial release relieved the defendant of his bond obligation, Article 701 had no effect on the actual charges. Although L’Roid Smith wouldn’t have to worry about either one of those now.

  Ryan stood back up. “I tried to prosecute him for a murder last year, but my witnesses disappeared. I had to dismiss the case after we picked the jury, and after Smith got in my face in the hallway and told me he would never serve a day for the murder. Really pissed me off. The D.A. wasn’t too thrilled either.”

  The captain scowled at Smith’s body. “I can’t believe some stupid judge let this punk out of jail on a 701.”

  Ryan smiled. “Looks like the stupid judge did us all a favor. Smith wouldn’t have served a day on this case either. What are the chances the witnesses would have testified? If they’re even still alive. Some people don’t give murder a second thought.” The casualness of homicide among certain elements of the New Orleans community was something Ryan thought about a lot during the course of murder trials, and now she stared at Smith’s lifeless form as if it somehow held the answer. “Not that anyone will lose sleep over this one. Except maybe Bo Lambert.” Her smile inadvertently widened.

  Bo Lambert was Ryan’s main competition in the office, both of them vying for the same promotion to the elite Strike Force. Ryan thought about calling Bo to deliver the news of L’Roid Smith’s death personally, but decided she would let him wait until he got to the office the next morning to find out he was losing a major homicide trial credit.

  “Nice,” Shep said, rubbing the shadow on his chin. “This ought to be easy to solve. Lots of cooperative witnesses on gang cases.”

  The apartment was too hot, and the stench from the quickly rotting body and its released fluids was overwhelming. Ryan wondered why she bothered with deodorant and perfume when she was going to smell like dead body and human waste by the time she left. She turned toward the door to leave when she noticed a dark tube-like shadow slightly protruding from underneath Smith’s body.

  She started to kneel down, thinking the object might be a crack pipe either Smith or his killer had been smoking, when the tube turned to face her, wriggling antennae and hissing. Ryan jumped and let out a slight shriek, her heart pounding furiously.

  “Just a cockroach,” she said, feeling a shiver run down her spine. The two-inch roach took a step in her direction. She jumped again, and Shep quickly brought his boot down on the offensive insect. Ryan felt another chill when the body of the roach made a crunching sound under Shep’s boot.

  The roach was no longer crawling, now just a crushed brown shell of oozing, snotty-looking guts with still-moving antennae.

  “Could you step on it again?” Ryan asked, stepping behind Shep. “As long as the antennae move, they can come back to life.”

  Shep stepped on the roach one final time, grinding it hopelessly into what used to be cheap carpet, but was now mostly green fibers and strands forever embedded in dirty cement.

  “Just like a female,” she heard a deep voice behind her. “Digging all up in the dead body but scared of a little roach.” She turned to see Detective Monte Carlson standing in the doorway, a grin playing on his lips.

  If Ryan hadn’t known him, she might have mistaken him for a gang member. Monte Carlson was a light-skinned black man, with a bald head and unlikely green eyes. He had a bandanna around his bald head at the moment, and wore a sleeveless white T-shirt. A Cobra tattoo coiled around his well-formed right biceps, and a tarantula clutched his left, offsetting the miscellaneous other artwork running up and down his arms. He had multiple piercings in his ears, and wore a small gold hoop in his eyebrow. There was a rumor his penis was pierced as well, which Ryan didn’t know from personal experience but had come damn near to finding out last Friday night.

  Today, he also had a solid black teardrop drawn on his face under his right eye, a common prison tattoo signifying that the inmate had killed somebody. The outline of a teardrop meant the inmate had shot someone, a filled-in teardrop meant the victim died, although no one with the mark would ever admit that to a prosecutor. Ryan knew that Monte’s teardrop, unlike his other tattoos, was not real, but part of his undercover look.

  “Little? That roach could help the coroner move the body.” She tried to control the heat rising in her face. Monte had given her a ride home from the Hole Friday night, and she had been pretty drunk. She had a vague recollection of climbing on his lap in his police unit. Not that he had complained. “And what brings you to a homicide anyway? I see you’re wearing your wife-beater, so you must be working undercover somewhere.” She pointed to his shirt, knowing Monte’s personal mode of dress didn’t usually include a Stanley Kowalski white tank top.

  Monte was a detective in narcotics, also under her father’s command, and primarily conducted buy-bust operations. He drove through the high crime neighborhoods in an unmarked police unit equipped with a hidden video camera, until somebody flagged him down and so
ld him crack cocaine. Once he was safely out of the area, the take-down team would arrest the dealer, and the drugs, prerecorded money and video would all be used as evidence. The job was dangerous, and Ryan was sure it was part of Monte’s allure. That, and the whole forbidden fruit thing.

  Monte nodded at Smith’s body. “Your homicide might be connected to a drug bust we did a few hours ago. We arrested a Soldier who gave up some information that a hit might be going down in the St. Thomas, but wouldn’t say who. G-Pimp here could be the answer.” Monte shook his head. “Then again, the night’s not over yet. We could find more than one dead banger tonight. I just wanted to check it out. Your buddy Lambert was doing this one, huh?”

  Ryan made a face. “And he’ll probably want the perp to get the death penalty just for messing up his stats.”

  The captain’s voice cut into the conversation. “Ryan, are you finished here?”

  Ryan watched her father wipe his forehead again, and then search his shirt pocket for a cigarette. She wondered if he had picked up on some vibe from Monte. She knew a relationship with Monte would be unacceptable to the captain, and was thus out of the question for her. Of course, what she had been after Friday didn’t exactly fall into the category of relationship. And they hadn’t done anything, really, although she doubted her father would see it that way.

  “I want to talk to crime lab before I leave.” She glanced over at the body again, struck by its nakedness. “Do you think he was sexually assaulted?”

  The captain pointed at Ryan before anyone had a chance to answer. “I’ll be waiting for you in the car.” He stalked to the door, pausing as Sean walked in.

  “Crime lab and coroner are both rolling up now,” Sean told the captain. “And you’ve got some press out there waiting for a statement.”

  “Make my whole goddamn night complete, why don’t you,” the captain’s voice was a growl over his shoulder as he stomped out.

  Ryan waited until her father was out of the doorway of the apartment to aim a question at Monte. “Just out of curiosity, is that normal for a dead body, or is it true what they say about black men?” She raised her eyebrows at L’Roid Smith’s penis, which was grotesquely large and swollen. Monte might have only been to first base, but she would make sure he remembered.

  “It’s all true, baby.” Monte grinned and gave her a wink.

  “Outside, now!” The captain’s voice was more like an enraged bear than a mere growl this time. Ryan wondered if he had heard the exchange with Monte, knowing she would catch hell in the car on the way home if he had.

  Two crime lab officers walked in before Ryan could get out of the apartment.

  “What a cesspool,” one of them said immediately. “We can’t do anything here until daylight.” Henry Cooper stood with a slouch, his shoulders slightly rounded and his hands in his pockets. His sloppy posture did nothing to detract from his belly, which was straining the laws of physics by the T-shirt tautly stretched over it. The shirt had a picture of a smiling crawfish wearing a bikini and the words, “I love sucking heads and eating tails, New Orleans Jazz Festival. ”

  “Are you going to try to lift prints?” Ryan asked. She knew Cooper as a competent but somewhat lazy criminalist. He was good at his job, when he bothered to do it, and Ryan had enjoyed more than one run-in with him in the past, trying to get him to show up for court when he was supposed to.

  Cooper looked at her dubiously, his deep-set gray eyes clouding over, and waited a second before he spoke. “I don’t see the point. There must be a million prints in here. This place is the equivalent of a crack house. And not too many surfaces in here are going to be suitable for latent prints.” He made a pretense of looking around the room.

  “What about the doorknob?” Ryan pressed. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? I mean, you’re here anyway. You might as well do something.”

  Cooper looked annoyed. “I’ll do the doorknob if you want. But being here gives me the heebie jeebies.”

  “Yo dawg, you not scared of the projects, are you?” Monte asked, slapping Cooper on the back.

  “The projects don’t scare me.” Cooper’s frown transformed into a sly grin. “The people in them, that’s another matter.”

  “Oh, so you just scared of us black folks. Well, you can always go wait in Eulah Mae Simpson’s apartment,” Monte said, and the others snickered. The demographics for each of the city’s housing projects had been released several years ago, and the St. Thomas had noted a single white female, seventy-year-old Eulah Mae Simpson. She had lived in the St. Thomas development since its inception in the early 1940's, when the project was predominantly white, and continued living there today, among the some thirty-four hundred black people.

  Cooper took his hands out his pockets. The slouch remained. “I just don’t see the point in wasting time trying to lift prints that won’t be good anyway.”

  “Do them right and maybe they will be,” Ryan said. “And on the very slight chance that a suspect is developed, a fingerprint just might come in handy. I don’t know why, but for some reason juries like it when we have the defendant’s prints at the scene. So even if you get a million prints off that doorknob, if just one of them matches my defendant, I have a much better chance of winning my case. Can you see that at all? Or maybe I should ask your captain for his opinion.”

  Ryan could feel the officers’ eyes on her as she walked away, and she knew they thought she was being a bitch. Why couldn’t everyone just do what they were supposed to do? Then she wouldn’t have to be so mean. And why hadn’t Sean or Shep ordered Cooper to lift the prints? Obviously because they didn’t think printing the apartment was worth the bother either. Once somebody was arrested, the police officers didn’t care about the difficulty Ryan would have convincing the jury. Losing the case would be her fault, not theirs.

  She turned back once and caught Monte’s eye. He winked at her again, making her feel a little bit better. She smiled back, and kept her hands balled in fists at her sides to avoid the temptation to chew her thumbnail.

  Halfway to the captain’s car she had an uneasy feeling that someone was watching her. She stopped and whirled around, half-expecting a confrontation with Henry Cooper, half-expecting Monte to stop her. Nobody was there. She looked at the abandoned apartment buildings surrounding her, wondering if someone could be inside one of them. Then she felt goose bumps rise on her arms and laughed at herself. Cooper just had her spooked. Plenty of bums lived in the empty buildings, and they were probably just watching the action. She started walking again, glancing back once more, still seeing no one.

  Two press cars were parked near the captain’s Crown Vic. Ryan threw a big smile and wave to Chance Halley, a blonde-hair, blue-eyed babe of a reporter from WDSU, the feeling of unknown eyes watching her temporarily forgotten. Chance was young and good looking, even by TV reporter standards, and Ryan thought his lack of air time was a tragedy. Chance waved back, and made a motion with his hand to his ear like a phone, as if he was going to call her. The captain made a rude noise. Ryan smiled, knowing Chance Halley had no idea who she was, but figured he would try to find out. Reporters were whores for inside information.

  She got into her father’s car, sat back and waited for the lecture du jour. She didn’t know which one this would be, about her clothes, about the way she talked to the guys, about being a prosecutor. She always managed to do something that didn’t quite measure up to the Murphy standards. And the captain was never shy about letting her know it.

  Not that her father didn’t love her — Ryan knew he did. As a matter of fact, of the five Murphy children, she was his favorite, being the youngest and the only girl, even if she wasn’t his biological child. But she knew her father would never make that the topic of conversation.

  She wondered if she should tell the captain about her feeling of being watched, but then vetoed the idea. He would undoubtedly tell her she wouldn’t have to worry about people watching her if she would wear more clothes. She put the thought out of
her mind once again as her father backed onto Felicity.

  The captain made a right on Tchoupitoulas, and then drove along the great wall that separated the street from the housing development, finally taking another right on Jackson. He could have driven the direct route straight through the project on St. Thomas to get to Jackson, but Ryan knew that he wouldn’t with her in the car, as if he was protecting her by not letting her see any more of the project’s ugliness. The streets outside of the St. Thomas were empty at this time of the morning, even the drug dealers in their beds.

  She waited for her father to say something, hoping he would ease into the issue of the day so she would have a few seconds to build a defense. Instead, he silently cranked the air up to high, and headed in the direction of Ryan’s apartment, taking a left on Magazine Street.

  The bead lady, a homeless woman famous for the dozens of Mardi Gras beads she wore around her neck, had parked her shopping cart at the corner. She was staring at herself in the plate glass window of an antique shop, adjusting a feather on her hat. Ryan almost wished she could trade places with the old woman, at least for the duration of the ride home. Her father’s silence was somehow more unnerving than his usual ranting.

  Ryan decided to get the jump on him. “You know daddy, that crime lab tech Henry Cooper is a lazy slob.”

  A beer truck ran over the curb, cutting in front of the captain’s Crown Vic.

  “Asshole,” the captain muttered and leaned on the horn. He turned his attention back to Ryan. “I really don’t want to talk about Henry Cooper.” He paused. The silence pounded in her ears until he spoke again. “Lawyers got no business at the scenes of crimes. If the D.A. wants to take a chance with those other idiots that work for him, that’s on him. I’m not taking a chance with you. You’re not doing it anymore.”

  Anger flooded Ryan’s pores.

  “I am an adult. You can’t tell me what to do. And it’s not up to you whether I go to the crime scenes or not. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s part of my job.”