New Orleans Noir

will tell me what this is all about.
    In the manila envelope is one of my father’s mother’s letters. It’s the one I read at my party, but that doesn’t mean anything because it was the one on top. Scotch-taped to it is a note. The note says, Hitler didn’t kill your mother. You killed your mother.
    I go over to the bottom drawer of the desk. Everyone follows me. I can’t believe no one has looked. My mother knows about the letters. I pull the drawer open. Slowly, while my mother explains rapid-fire that this is where the letter came from, that it was in a packet, that she should have thought of this before. The packet of letters is gone. Well, the letters are gone, but the ribbon is lying on the bottom of the drawer, swirled around. And under it is a scrap of paper. I recognize it. It’s torn from the pad we keep by the telephone in the kitchen. In the same handwriting as on the note attached to the letter, it says, You’re not so smart .

SCARED RABBIT
    BY TIM MCLOUGHLIN
    Irish Channel
    O kay, okay, so the mayor is looking to start a new antiterrorist task force and he only wants the cream of the crop from law enforcement.”
    Tommy Mulligan had settled into his joke-telling stance, his back to the bar, elbows resting on the hammered copper surface. He faced his audience, seven or eight other cops and a few nurses, standing in a loose semicircle at the back of the crowded room. Thursday was nurses’ night at the Swamp Room, and the place was packed. Nurses’ night at a cop bar was always busy. Nurses’ night at a cop bar in the Irish Channel was very busy. Nurses’ night at the Swamp Room was a zoo.
    “Which mayor?” someone asked.
    “What?” Tommy said.
    “Which mayor?”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “Not this bald prick.”
    “Better than Barthelemy,” another said.
    “So’s bin Laden.”
    “Could it be Morial?” a nurse from Touro suggested.
    “Screw him too. All the money in heaven for Comstat, but splits hairs about the goddamn raises.”
    “It don’t matter which mayor,” Tommy said, sensing he was losing his audience. “It’s a joke. Let me tell the fuckin’ joke.”
    Tommy had been hitting it heavy for the last hour, and his face was already flushed and sweaty. He’d reached that point in the evening where he thought he was the wittiest son of a bitch on God’s green earth, and that was usually Lew Haman’s cue to leave. But Lew wasn’t going anywhere quite yet tonight. He sat silently next to Tommy, his back to the others, facing the bar in the rear, its rows of bottles decorated with casually tossed toy stethoscopes and white garters.
    The Swamp Room had been a real bucket of blood when Lew was a kid, with a large scratched and smoke-yellowed Plexiglas panel in the floor. Beneath it two alligators were kept in a tank that, as he thought about it now as an adult for the first time, had to have been woefully small for them. His father would let him come in to watch them be fed, and more than the feeding itself he remembered the horrendous stench when the panel was lifted.
    The space where the Plexiglas had been was covered with stone tile now, and sometimes used as an impromptu tiny dance floor. The whole bar had been rehabbed about twenty years ago, just long enough that it was beginning to look shabby again.
    “So he calls in two state troopers,” Tommy continued, “two FBI agents, and two New Orleans detectives.”
    It was the awful end to an awful night, and Haman was not in the mood to indulge his partner’s humor. He drained his Jameson on the rocks and signaled the bartender silently to bring another. Seventeen years, he thought. Three to go. For the thousandth time lately he lamented joining the force so late in life. He’d come on an old man of thirty, and now he felt like a dinosaur at forty-seven, old even for a detective; and fuck that television Law and Order bullshit with fifty-five-year-olds running down gang-bangers in an alley. Everybody knew that if you hadn’t secured a desk job, you were an asshole to stay on past your early-, or at most mid-forties. You were an asshole or you were Lew Haman, with three years to go. Same thing, he decided.
    “So the mayor takes all six guys, and he drives them upstate, somewhere in the woods, middle of fuckin’ nowhere. He tells them ‘Here’s your first test. Go into the woods and find a rabbit. Bring it back out here.’”
    They had been only fifteen minutes from going off-duty when they got the call. Lew