Storm Damage Read online

  “Coach, ya’ll right?”

  “Good to go.” Although it seemed like an eternity, I’d only been down for a few seconds as the memories of the Tiki Hut murder scene flashed through my mind. Maybe Sam’s daughter wanted to sign up for classes. A paying student would be nice, since I no longer had any, so it occurred to me I should demonstrate who the master was here and who the student was.

  I rolled clear, jumped up, and tapped my red leather Hayabusa gloves together.

  I expected Sam’s daughter to step back from the edge of the cage, but she didn’t; she laced her fingers through the mesh and leaned in even closer to see what was going to happen.

  As soon as Kendall resumed his fighting stance, I advanced, expecting him to throw a kick, which he did. I easily intercepted and quickly executed a textbook-clean foot sweep known as o uchi gari, taking out his supporting leg and dropping him like a sack of rocks.

  Now it was I who stood over Kendall.

  “You could be a UFC champion,” I told him, “but you’re screwing up.”

  Kendall squinted guiltily.

  “I hear who you’re running with, taking X every weekend. Vodka and Red Bull all night long. Sound familiar? If I just knocked your ass down in two seconds, what’s gonna happen when you go up against a serious fighter? You want to win this fight coming up in Miami? You want to be a champ, Mister Ten-Thousand-Friends-Who-Want-To-Be-Your-Ho-On-Tumblr? If you do, get serious. No more raves with your Bourbon Street stripper girlfriends or you lose me as a coach and you can kiss K-1 and any chance for the UFC goodbye.”

  I held out my hand and helped him to his feet. He hung his head hangdog, thinking about what I had said.

  “Yeah, you right. I know dat. Can I take a shower, coach?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Kendall opened the small steel mesh door and we stepped down from the raised cage. I feigned nonchalance as I crossed toward the large mirror on the wall, letting Sam’s daughter follow. I thought my speech to Kendall had sounded pretty good: firm, succinct, final. Not too preachy, didn’t beat a dead horse, and left the ball in his court.

  “Officer St. James, do you remember me?”

  I checked out my broken nose in the mirror, and then turned to her. “You’re Sam Siu’s daughter.”

  “Twee Siu.” She held out her hand and gave me a surprisingly firm handshake.

  “Call me Cliff.”

  “Looks like your nose might be broken. Do you need me to take you to a doctor?”

  I firmly grabbed my schnoz and forced it back into the general location it should inhabit. The crunching sound caused her to wince. “Not too many doctors in New Orleans these days, and that just saved me about a hundred bucks.”

  Twee Siu looked a lot better than she had five months ago when she was an emotional wreck. Her cheekbones, framed by an expensive haircut, reminded me how photogenic she was. The pewter Chanel business suit helped project the confidence and intelligence that emanated from within. A single strand of pearls graced her delicate neck. Eye shadow and a pastel lipstick comprised her makeup suite, and I’m not sure she needed that. She sported a Prada bag that I doubted was a fake.

  Her smooth and dainty hands, though primly manicured, incongruously bore old scars; I was curious from what. For someone so petite, she projected a good deal of authority and confidence. Not too many people ran around in the ruins dressed like this, looking this beautiful, so if it was for my benefit, I felt complimented. But I figured she must be a banker, or maybe a greedy real estate agent getting fat on others’ misfortune after all the devastation.

  “Listen, I’m real sorry about your father. I knew Sam. He helped my ex-wife and me quite a bit. He was a decent guy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You called me ‘officer,’ so maybe you haven’t heard. I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “That’s why I think you can help me. I’d like to hire you to find out what happened to Dad.”

  It suddenly dawned on me. Sam’s killing had been completely overshadowed by an epic onslaught of chaos, misery, and upheaval as an American historic metropolis was essentially destroyed. Sam’s murder was ancient history from another epoch that didn’t hold much concern for those of us coping with the New Normal.

  Unless you were Twee Siu.

  “Well, I’m not a private investigator.”

  “I heard the state is waiving the steps and preconditions for most business licenses, due to the State of Emergency. I bet you could get certified in a day, being ex-police and all.”

  I had heard the same thing. Two Bourbon Street strip-club managers who’d been getting FEMA execs laid after the Storm had launched a security company in a matter of days and were now on their way to becoming millionaires, thanks to those grateful FEMA boys steering lucrative contracts their way. Hell, Louisiana was so desperate for expertise and workers in dozens of fields, it had been handing out temporary licenses to roofers, plumbers, electricians—anyone who needed a license to do something—like Tootsie Rolls at Halloween.

  I’d developed a good poker face while working as a police officer, to the point where it ranked as one of my most effective tools. I used it now to conceal my interest in her proposition, giving her just a shrug. “I suppose that might be true.”

  “I’ll pay you five hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. If you find out what happened to my father, you get a bonus of thirty thousand dollars.”

  Now she had my attention. I was broke and going deep into debt. The first thing I had done after I stopped volunteering in the initial post-hurricane search-and-rescue effort was to sublet my undamaged condo in the French Quarter to a Shaw Group executive for $2500 a month. I soon realized I could have gotten much more due to the acute lack of housing in a city flooded with out-of-town relief workers. That $2500 covered my monthly nut, but it had left me homeless.

  Mother Nature and the looters had destroyed my place of business; my students fled to points unknown around the country. I had no job, no income. Me and a couple hundred thousand other people.

  With business insurance and FEMA money not forthcoming anytime soon, I had quickly maxed out my credit cards to start repairs to the dojo, where I had moved some personal belongings and slept on an extra mattress. Six NOPD buddies who had lost everything had crashed with me for the first few months, helping me rip out the drywall and wiring and to gut the place. Now it was just me on a dirty mattress, a badly damaged roof, and a partially collapsed wall you could drive a forklift through, which is exactly what the looters had done to gain access. Demand far outstripped supply sending prices for Sheetrock, lumber, and other building materials—if you could find any—skyrocketing. All of this made the money that Twee dangled look like manna from Heaven.

  “You’ll need to deposit the thirty thousand into an escrow account, with stipulations we agree upon given to the bank, so there’s no question I’ll get paid if I find out who killed your dad.”

  She clearly hadn’t anticipated this condition. She thought about it for a second. “Okay, sounds reasonable. If you drive to Baton Rouge today and get your license, we can meet at my beauty salon first thing tomorrow, then go to the bank. I want you to start right away.”

  She handed me a business card. Now I remembered Sam had told me that his daughter owned hair salons and a beauty school out in Metairie. It was one of those facts that you just don’t hold onto, but it explained why she looked so great: a walking advertisement for her business.

  “No problem,” I told her. “Can I ask you something? Why’d you come to me?”

  “Because my father trusted you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He told me about you a long time ago, said that if something ever happened to me, I should ask you for help. He said I could count on you, that you were an honest cop. The night I found the body, I didn’t realize you were the officer Dad had told me about.”

  It took me by surprise that Sam thought that way about me, and more so that he would have said all
that to his daughter. I hadn’t even seen Sam all that much in the year or so before the Storm.

  “I heard what you said to the detective that night,” she said, looking down. “You said you couldn’t be sure that the body was my father. Neither could I, although I assumed it was Dad at the time.”

  “What do you mean? Haven’t they ID’d the body by now?”

  “Oh.” She looked genuinely surprised. “You didn’t hear? The body in my father’s office was never recovered. It disappeared. And the Tiki Hut got looted and flooded out. See, maybe you’re looking for my father’s killer. Or maybe you’re looking for my father.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I made it to the offices of the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners in Baton Rouge by one-thirty. The fact that I already had business insurance greatly expedited the process. After filling out forms, taking a test that was easy for me after eight years as a cop, and after schmoozing and flirting like hell with the all-female staff, I got my temporary PI license. The bag of pastries I brought from the Winn-Dixie didn’t hurt, either. The ladies were hungry for Danish and juicy tidbits of what it had been like during those first days after the Storm in the Big Easy, and I wasn’t beyond sharing in order to win their confidence and sympathy. I wanted that license today. So I told them true stories of boat rescues, body retrievals, and waxing a few dirtbags in gunfights. They were the stories I was comfortable telling to strangers, the ones I had become dispassionate about. The memories that still got to me, the ones that made me wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night, I didn’t share with anyone except my buddies-in-arms who were there and who understood completely. And I certainly didn’t tell the ladies about the psycho gangmember who had made it his mission to kill me in the middle of the madness in order to make his bones with his gang; I’d finally been able to hunt down that particular piece of human garbage and shoot his ass dead.

  The biggest hurdle was my background check, which I eventually got the Director to do over the phone with the local FBI office. No matter how much the ladies liked me, the reputation of NOPD being what it is, they really needed to confirm that I didn’t have a rap sheet.

  Setting up the escrow account with Twee at her bank in Metairie, the somewhat upscale suburb adjacent to Orleans Parish, went smoothly. Portions of Metairie got hammered hard and flooded, but being in Jefferson Parish, Metairie seemed light years ahead in terms of recovery. Sure, the parish was more affluent and suffered less damage, but they also had a tough Sheriff–one of the most powerful politicians in the state–and the political will to get things done and make the hard decisions, devil-be-damned. On the other hand, in Orleans Parish it was always the “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” scenario.

  So a good deal of Jefferson Parish was coming back, as it were, at least compared to their neighbors in New Orleans. Thousands of FEMA trailers sat on the front lawns or driveways of middle and upper-middle class homes that had been flooded or damaged, signaling that residents had returned. Restaurants on the main drag, Veterans Boulevard, reopened if they could find staff. The blue tarps disappeared as new roofs were installed. Debris got picked up at a pretty good clip. Oh, and there was power. Jefferson Parish had that thing called electricity. In New Orleans five months after the Storm, if you weren’t in the Quarter, the CBD or Uptown, there was no guarantee you had juice.

  “So what work have you had done to the Tiki Hut since the Storm?” I asked Twee, as we stepped outside of her bank into the humid, chilly morning. I glanced across the street and noticed that one of my favorite martini bars had no less than three huge dumpsters brimming with rubble in their parking lot.

  “Nothing. The front and back doors were broken open so I had them padlocked shut. That’s it.”

  “And the police CSI team, what did they say?”

  “What CSI?” she carped. “They barely looked around. The body was gone, the crime scene trashed. The detectives said it was pointless. Seemed to me like they were just lazy and didn’t want to get dirty.”

  “They’re not lazy, but they tend to think in terms of a conviction. So from their point of view, they were right. It’s like triage, but for dead people. They’re overwhelmed with murders in this town. They tend to focus on the cases they think they can solve. From our point of view, this is good news. Clues might be preserved. I need to get into the Tiki Hut right away to nose around. But first we’ll need to make a pit stop.”

  Having helped gut a few homes and even my own dojo, I knew what Twee and I needed to outfit ourselves with. A two-hour shopping ordeal at a swamped Home Depot in Kenner had netted us lightweight disposable bio-hazard suits, knee-high mud boots, latex gloves, and high-end respirators. For tools we got a couple of battery-powered lanterns, flashlights, a pry bar and a shovel.

  Shopping spree finished, I followed Twee in her new black Honda Accord with deeply tinted windows. Crossing the parish line into Orleans was instructive. Far fewer FEMA trailers sat anchored in the moonscape of Lakeview, one of the neighborhoods that took the brunt of the flooding from Lake Pontchartrain. Abandoned cars, trucks and boats still littered what looked like a battlefield in oblique and illogical positions. Houses teetered off foundations. Clutter and wreckage of every stripe lay strewn everywhere. White goods outside of a home—ruined stoves and refrigerators—signaled a determined owner making the statement that they intended to come back. But few homes in Lakeview were being gutted or sending such signals. The whole muck-encrusted neighborhood looked like it had been wiped out by some kind of angry force, a plague that killed all living things.

  In an era of the fifteen-minute news cycle, the Storm had dominated the nation’s airwaves for months. The magnitude of the catastrophe staggered the imagination. The mantra I had repeated to friends around the country always rang the same: TV usually makes something seem worse than it is; this time, TV doesn’t do justice in representing the scope of the tragedy.

  We turned off Brooks onto Canal Street, going south toward Mid-City. There was still no power for the traffic lights, but FEMA-funded debris removal crews traversed Canal. These crews were mostly out-of-town workers, motley groups who encamped in City Park or deserted shopping center parking lots, sleeping in tents pitched on concrete or in battered old RVs. They worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day, hauling debris to temporary dump sites in the parish. The men, and sometimes women, usually operated one or two small Bobcats that scooped debris into dump trailers towed by pick-up trucks. The crews looked sickly, tired, and dirty, but the lucrative FEMA money spurred them on.

  Mid-City looked bad, but a lot better than Lakeview. The thousands of homes with blue tarps covering roof damage provided the only splashes of color to otherwise colorless streets. On City Park Avenue, Twee got tangled in a convoy of out-of-state power company repair trucks and tree-trimming truck crews from Ohio. We waited patiently till we could shoot the gap, and then headed south into a residential no-man’s-land toward the Tiki Hut.

  As we stood in front of the Tiki Hut getting into our gear, I scanned the residential neighborhood that reminded me of one large panoramic sepia-toned photo, everything either dead or encrusted with shades of mud brown, devoid of color and life. Cars and trucks sat overturned up and down the street, deposited arbitrarily where the murky waters had left them. Huge uprooted trees, like fallen soldiers, rested everywhere in awkward moments of death, awaiting a burial detail. The streets and sidewalks were caked with a sludge now dried and disintegrating into noxious dust, lifted on every gentle breeze. Brown water lines on the homes across the street suggested the water had settled at about eight feet on this street. The initial depth of the killer surge had been much higher.

  Children’s toys, a single sneaker, a broken chair, a grungy pillow, a couple of CDs, a rusty can of hairspray, and a strangely intact perfume bottle created an impromptu mosaic in the mire near the Tiki Hut’s front door, now padlocked shut.

  A sour stench of rot and decay, garbage and waste hung unpleasantly like it did in so ma
ny parts of the city, pervasively invading the nostrils, an insistent reminder that something wasn’t right. Shit, nothing in this town is right. One could become inured to the endless images of destruction, as an emotionally charged visceral reaction simply couldn’t be maintained if you spent much time in the ruins, but it was tough to get used to the invasive stink that could seize up your esophagus with an involuntary urge to retch.

  The tableau here resembled thousands of others I had seen over the last five months and it deadened my soul. It was part of the New Normal. No doubt an odd beauty could be found in the unusual juxtaposition of material goods at my feet whose functions were now rendered meaningless, but I remained too closely connected emotionally to my personal losses to look for such artistic imagery. I preferred to stay slightly out of focus to keep my sharper memories at bay.

  “So where are you living now, Twee?”

  “My condo in the Warehouse District wasn’t damaged. Nothing. Sometimes I feel a little guilty.”

  “Don’t feel guilty,” I said. “Feel lucky.”

  “I don’t like coming into these neighborhoods. All the destruction… it makes me depressed. It’s so ugly now, and sad to think of the people who lost everything.”

  “If you want to keep your sanity, allow me to suggest disassociation. Works wonders.”

  “It’s amazing that five months after the Storm, this block, this neighborhood still looks like this,” she said frowning.

  “Yeah, I think the only cleanup being done around here is from looters and scavengers.”

  “But everything is ruined, what can they steal?”

  “Copper pipes and wire, aluminum to sell at the scrap yards. More sophisticated thieves go after the classic architectural details of these Creole cottages, the shotgun homes, the fine Southern mansions. A four-panel cypress door is worth seven hundred dollars or more. Old-growth hardwood windows, the decorative brackets under the eaves, Victorian shutters and cornices, ornate mantels. Those things are like gold to collectors or dealers around the country.” I scanned the homes across the street. “Look at the double shotgun house on the corner. The wrought-iron fence is partially dismantled, and the cast-iron grates that covered the crawlspaces are gone. They strip the outside, then work their way inside.”