New Orleans Noir

him, I did the meanest thing I could think of doing.
    The day after commencement at Loyola, I marched down to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office with my law degree and got myself hired. I could just as easily have taken a job as a public defender. Frank never said anything about my spiteful choice, but I know I hurt him.
    The white man who hired me at the D.A.’s office soon thereafter prosecuted my brother and sent him up to Angola, where they eventually put him down like a cat for stealing Miss Malreaux’s money and afterwards splitting her head open with an axe.
    Even though the crime scene investigators never found that axe and had to rely on the coroner’s analysis at trial, the prosecution case against Frank was sufficiently solid. More solid, I admit, than a lot of cases I have prosecuted myself. People go to prison and get the needle for pitifully little evidence, really. All colors of people.
    Frank had long been working handyman jobs at the big Malreaux house—earning money for my tuition at Loyola University School of Law, no less. So Frank had access to the place. The forensics squad came up with a smudged thumbprint they claimed was Frank’s, right there on the dial of a private safe in the brick shed where Miss Eugenia was known to keep large amounts of cash. Add to that, investigators found a considerable number of Miss Eugenia’s jewelry items inside a chifforobe drawer in the pink house.
    They didn’t find the looted cash, though. Frank, of course, denied stealing money or jewelry from Miss Eugenia, just like he denied stealing anything else in his life. He’d wear that bad-dog look on his face when confronted on matters of theft, which was as close as he’d come to admitting his light-fingered predilection—until his last letter, that is.
    Certainly he denied murdering Miss Eugenia. Which flew in the face of jewelry found in the chifforobe. Which Frank’s court-appointed lawyer might have said flew in the face of common logic, therefore constituting reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror. Because why would a murderer keep mementoes of his victim in the same place he kept his socks and boxer shorts?
    At first, I thought it would be no problem to chainsaw the bedroom suit. Maybe in the past it was all worth some serious antique money. But the value was surely gone now—now that all that cherry wood was so nasty and swollen and probably full of termites, too. It was junk and nothing more. No problem.
    But there I was in my dead brother’s house, in the room where he used to sleep as a free man. Sentiment hammered me. The rented chainsaw seemed as disrespectful to Frank’s house as Mother Nature had been.
    Speaking of a hellish vandal woman, I took a long moment to gaze around the bedroom after a knock-down drag-out with Katrina.
    Schaefer Skrip bottles by the dozen had flown around like stones in the hurricane, smashing into walls where splattered ink adhered to glass shards and blue and yellow labels. The floor was a carpet of Budweiser cans, crushed the way Frank crushed them with his big right hand, sodden Camel butts and moldy paperback books with underlined pages. Crime novels mostly. The door to the hallway was cracked in two and the plaster ceiling had gone pulpy like ricotta cheese.
    Then I read the next parts of Frank’s last letter.
Evil and lowdown ain’t my view alone of Miss Eugenia Malreaux. It’s what the old bag son Philip call her. He told me things about his mama make you toss a meal. Told me when he was just a boy she’d come wake him up in his bedroom some nights wearing nothing but a peek-a-boo and she poke where she ain’t got bizness poking. Philip tell on her to his daddy one day. Then soon as daddy leave the house that lowdown Miss Eugenia take a strap to Philip and nearly skin him alive.
    Oh yes, Philip he told me lots of things about the grand life up on St. Charles Avenue where it all look peace and quiet respectable. He said he like it better where we live in Gentilly on account of pain and awfulness can’t be hid away so easy.
    Also Philip said he like talking to me whenever I come by to work for his mama in the garden since I understand the two of us is in the same boat—a couple of mens waiting around for the rest of their life to happen. Philip, he couldn’t get enough of that sad sack talk and start coming by to drink with me at the Star Lounge, my little briar patch by good old St. Bernard.
    I always feel sorry for Philip when he