New Orleans Noir

and I promised her I wouldn’t become a child tethered to his ankle.”
    “Well, if you’re not going to Baton Rouge, I will stay with you until this situation is resolved. Murphy holds sway with those drunken countrymen of his. Those Irish thugs drove the colored off the docks. They want to chase us out of town and they will certainly hurt you if given a chance.”
    I always listened to Aunt Odie, but of course she didn’t necessarily feel the same sort of obligation to listen to me. If she thought I needed watching, I would be watched. I was a woman with some means and I did have a mind equal to a man’s, and though I loved my father, sometimes it seemed I was still that child wrapped around his ankle.
    I was preparing to stew a rabbit that evening and my hands were bloody with it, when I heard someone rattling the screen. I supposed it might have been Aunt Odie, who had gone to the market for lemons. I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. I turned to the door and saw a redhaired white man standing there, rubbing his hands together with a brutal look on his face.
    “You know why I’m here,” he said with vicious pleasure.
    “Get out of my house!” I shouted at him.
    “I will teach you a lesson.”
    “Damnit, I said get out of here!”
    He ignored me and took a step forward, pulling at his belt. I retreated to the kitchen, hoping to get my hands on a knife before he reached me.
    Then I heard Aunt Odie’s voice.
    “Stop!” She had a knife in one hand and an open jar in the other filled with what looked to be water.
    The big redhaired man didn’t seem impressed. He pulled a blackjack from his pocket and started toward her while keeping an eye on me.
    “Run home now, before something bad happens to you,” Odie said, as if she were talking to a child.
    “Nigger woman, don’t order me.”
    Aunt Odie tossed the contents of the jar into his face and he screamed and smashed against the wall and the door before stumbling outside, begging for water for his eyes.
    “Lye,” she said as she locked the door. “It’s as good as a bullet or a knife.”
    I was in Baton Rouge when I heard about Father Fitzpatrick; that he never made it home the night before from the Napoleon House, the bar he frequented in the French Quarter.
    We were sure that he was dead, beaten to death by one of Murphy’s hooligans and tossed into the river. I wasn’t surprised, though I was grief-stricken. My father insisted that I stay in Baton Rouge, but I was nearly losing my mind with my relatives.
    I spent weeks at my aunt’s bakery, sweat blinding my eyes, roasting while the bread baked. My unhappiness was too much for words; I didn’t want to drown in my sweat in a town without culture, without my friends and loved ones. I was finished with Baton Rouge; my time in exile was done. I had to return to New Orleans with or without my father’s permission. My mother hadn’t raised me to be a coward, living in fear, in seclusion. I had to know what happened to Father Fitzpatrick.
    Rumors continued to roil that the colored would be attacked if they tried to enter Sacred Heart, and worse. I wanted one last conversation with Father Murphy, one that he wouldn’t recover from, but that wasn’t to happen. I can’t say I was unhappy when I heard that Murphy was found beaten to death in the rectory, but the bitterness in my heart would last as long as my memory of Father Fitzpatrick.

OPEN MIKE
    BY JAMES NOLAN
    French Quarter
    T here must be hundreds of kids who have wound up dead in the French Quarter. Eva Pierce was just one of them. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood you see fliers about them taped to lampposts: Information Wanted or $5,000 Reward . And below is a blurry snapshot of some scruffy young person. After Eva’s body was discovered, bundled inside a blue Tommy Hilfiger comforter floating in Bayou St. John, the girl’s mother moved down here from Idaho or Iowa or Ohio—however you pronounce it—and blanketed the Quarter with those signs. She even printed her daughter’s last poem on the flier, but no dice. The fifteen hours between when Eva was last seen and when her body was found in the bayou remained a blank.
    That’s when the mother rang me. I’m listed in the Yellow Pages: Off-Duty Homicide Detective: Dead or Alive, Inc.
    Mrs. Pierce met me under the bingo board at Fiorella’s restaurant at the French Market. It wasn’t my suggestion. I hadn’t been to the market since I was a kid, when my daddy