LD Sledge

DAWN’S REVENGE

Prologue

The people of New Orleans with French, Spanish, Indian, and Black legacies mixed in a tumble of cultures often live cheek by jowl on tight, narrow streets. Their very breath is a living fusion of their history, their blood the blood of pirates, prisoners, pilgrims, adventurers, mercenaries, scoundrels, speculators, royalty and slaves. Within their breasts beats the hearts of all their forebears, the past barely concealed beneath the surface of present memory, and it can be felt in the scorching summer day, the mellow nights and in the cool mists and fogs that hang low on the back ways and hard against the levee at daybreak. It can be heard in the cacophony of the streets, the midnight bark of dogs, the crow of roosters, and the sounds from the river. The people are at one with all this and the tastes and smells of coffee and chicory, spices, sauce piquante and cold beer, crawfish and gumbo. The stilled passion of the ages sleep, sated with the fatness of the present. But it is an uneasy sleep. Everyone there feels it, knows it, and embraces the togetherness of their past and present as a blessing.

Chapter 1

DAY ONE

The tired whore counted out four hundred dollars in tens and twenties and laid them on the desk. She sat back and said, "That’s all I got right now."

Jack Chandler looked at the stack of rumpled bills for a moment and raised his eyes to his client. "You can pay the other hundred later, Queenie," ruefully thinking any other lawyer would charge three times that to defend her on the petty theft charge. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight.

She stood regally and smoothed her dress as she looked down at Jack. "Sorry I bothered you so late. I had a lengthy engagement. I’ll have the rest tomorrow."

"You’re good for it," he said, walking her to the door. She always paid and always came back.

Jack retrieved her umbrella from the hat tree in the hall. "It’s pouring out there. Will you be okay? Let me call a taxi."

Queenie turned fully around and faced Jack. She grasped his hand in her long, cool fingers and looked him straight in the eye. She broke into a smile that Jack knew was the real paycheck for helping people like this.

"Thanks for the thought, honey," she said. “Queenie’s always fine. You know, you don’t charge enough. That’s why you ain’t rich. See you tomorrow."

Shaking his head at the grim truth of her observation, Jack watched her unfurl the umbrella and step into the deluge that made a river out of Royal Street. He returned to his desk, slumped into his chair, and took a deep drag from the cigarette he had left steaming in the ash tray.

The phone rang.

"Not another one," he groaned.

It kept ringing until he wearily answered. He immediately became alert when he heard his housekeeper’s frantic voice.

"Lawyer Jack," she wailed, "they killed her! She didn’t commit suicide. I swear to God she didn’t. They killed her!"

"Hang on, Estelle," Jack interrupted, "Who are you talkin’ about? Who killed who?"

Estelle choked down her racking sobs and gasped, "My baby. Dawn Marie. She’s dead! They killed her! Oh my God! Oh my God!"

"Who killed her, Estelle?"

"I don’t know. They just called and said she was down at Charity Morgue–to come identify her. Oh my lord!"

"What did they say? What happened?"

"They said she was arrested for shopliftin’ down by Holmses Department Store, and they put her into Juvenile Detention and she killed herself. She ain’t done no such thing, lawyer Jack. Oh, Lordy, Lordy!"

Fighting the impulse to be pulled into Estelle’s torrential emotion, Jack asked, "When’re you goin’ to Charity?"

"Me’n Martin, we goin’ right now. I ain’t waitin’ another minute."

"You ain’t goin’ without me. Come by here first," Jack ordered, frowning into the phone. "I’ll go with you, okay?"

"Anything you say, Lawyer Jack. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. She’s my only baby."

"Estelle, listen to me. Pick me up on the way, you hear?"

"Yessir, Lawyer Jack. We’ll be there."

Jack hung up and stubbed out the smoldering butt that had burned too short to hold. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes didn’t relieve the pressure swelling in there. He let out a long sigh. The call from his housekeeper echoed in his head as he stared numbly at the midnight rain beating against the windows of his French Quarter law office.

It was one in the morning and he was going to the morgue.

Jack slugged down the rest of the warm Dixie beer and tossed the empty can into a trash can across the room. His office was a mess. Books and papers were scattered on the chairs and tables. Another late night researching and drafting documents. He wasn’t about to pick up until morning.

After locking the door behind him, his steps echoed in the wide hallway of the Marquis de Mandeville Apartments. He walked toward a long, winding staircase, lighted at the foot by a dim bulb in an elaborate sconce.

On the second floor, a hallway switched back to lead to his apartment directly above his office. The tall sliding doors rumbled open smoothly, revealing a one bedroom apartment with bath, sitting room, fireplace, kitchenette, and balcony with Spanish wrought-iron grillwork overlooking the narrow French Quarter street below.

Jack splashed water in his face at the bathroom sink and looked in the mirror. His cold gray eyes beheld a trim, well-built young man of thirty with a two day stubble and dark hair pulled straight back and tied in a short pony tail.

He went straight to the refrigerator and regarded the extent of his larder. Other than two six-packs of Dixie, there was a well-whittled ham, an almost empty jar of Miracle Whip, wilted lettuce, mustard, peanut butter, apple jelly, eggs and some T.V. dinners in the freezer compartment. Assorted boxes of old Chinese, Italian and Mexican take-outs were scattered throughout in various stages of decomposition. Everything needed for adventures in bachelor dining.

Jack popped the top of a cold Dixie and went through the sliding glass doors onto a wide, vine covered gallery overlooking Royal Street. The roof over the balcony leaked. He pulled a chair from beneath the drip to a dry spot and sat heavily. After taking a sip, he shook out a Picayune cigarette and lit it with an old Zippo.

As he thought of Dawn, he flashed back to having seen her just that morning as he entered his office. He was greeted by two cheery voices. “Hi lawyer jack!”

He remembered smiling when he realized Estelle, his housekeeper and her daughter, Dawn, were cleaning his office this morning.

Dawn was in her jeans and T shirt, and Jack felt his gut tighten at the raw promise of this young girl. He cursed himself for the reaction. Dirty old man, he thought. But great godamighty is that a fine innocent young thing.

“No school today, Dawn?”

“Teacher’s meeting. So I’m helping mama clean.”

“That’s cool. What’s that?” He pointed at some movement in her backpack sitting on a chair.

“Oh,” said Dawn, “that’s Gris Gris.”

A black kitten with bright yellow eyes poked its head out of the opening at its name and mewed at Dawn. When she picked it up she was nuzzled and nibbled energetically by the kitten. Dawn glowed, holding it close.

At that instant, the sun broke through the clouds, with Dawn silhouetted before the tall many paned windows facing the street. The prismed hand blown and beveled glass imparted a halo of rainbowed light that seemed to surround her, and Jack fancied a joyful warmth radiating from her that enveloped him. Wow, he thought, your imagination is working overtime this morning.

He returned to present time and shook his head at the awful thought of that beautiful young girl lying cold in the morgue, and what really had happened.

Traffic had almost slowed to a stop because of the heavy rain. At one in the morning, the Quarter streets would normally be jammed with tourists, drunk conventioneers, whores, pimps, glassy-eyed hippies, queers, and sailors from the merchant ships docked just behind the levee. Tonight it was impossible to go out without getting drenched.

The sky would occasionally crackle in a blaze of sizzling lightning, followed by an ear-splitting blast that rattled an empty Dixie can sitting on the little marble-topped table. The night embraced Jack in a warm, damp caress, possessing a strange expectant feeling; that quiet intimation that something was about to happen. He tried to relax and sucked in the soft, lulling aphrodisia of the New Orleans midnight, glad he was alone.

An old pickup honked beneath his balcony just as he finished the second Dixie. He flipped the cigarette over the railing, grabbed a raincoat and hustled downstairs, dreading what he was about to confront.

Estelle stared bleakly through the rain streaked pickup window. The door swung open and Jack darted through the deluge and slid in alongside of her.

Estelle had on her going-to-church clothes. She wore a dress of white satin that emphasized, rather than down-played her rotund figure, a white pillbox hat, white patent leather pumps, and gripped a small beaded purse in a white-gloved hand. Jack hardly recognized her. Her usual attire was the nondescript dress of cleaning women. She was quite pretty after all, done up like that, but her eyes were red, and she was trembling.

Gripping her left hand was a light-skinned man with cold green eyes and a pencil-thin, precisely trimmed moustache. The muscles of this huge man were barely concealed beneath his shiny black suit with its white tie.

Not knowing the proper attire to visit a dead daughter, they did the best they could.

The man was Martin Delacroix, Estelle’s husband and Dawn’s father, a longshoreman who worked the wharves on the New Orleans side of the river. Martin’s cold glare attempted to hide the underlying suppressed grief raging beneath like a torrential subterranean river. Estelle appeared to be wrung dry.

They drove slowly through the downpour, as Martin reiterated what Estelle had briefly explained on the phone earlier, except he went into more detail.

The officer said Dawn Marie hung herself in the cell with a sheet she had torn into strips. Estelle shook her head in disbelief. "She’s my only baby," she said from time to time.

Dawn was the center of their lives. The horror of her death was more than appalling because of where she died and the chosen method. Their suspicions of a darker truth lent an element of outrage crying for an answer. It was all too unlikely. The facts presented were so improbable that Jack knew they were thinking it was all a hideous dream that would surely end soon and they would wake to find Dawn Marie living and laughing with them again.

The image of Dawn Marie sprang into his mind: sixteen, cafe-au-lait complexion and soft almond eyes that would stagger a man. She wasn’t the type to steal anything, or to take her own life–that Jack knew for sure. He had always thought of her as a seductively innocent little girl with the body of a woman. Now she was dead, and he was going to have to see her corpse. That somewhat mysterious womanchild’s untimely death echoed her name: Dawn. She had been snuffed out in the dawn of her life.

Estelle had cleaned Jack’s office and apartment for three years and had come to confide in him. She turned to him and said, "This ain’t happenin’ is it? You know my Dawn Marie, Lawyer Jack, she real special. She ain’t jes my chile. No, sir. You see, she. . ."

Estelle sucked in her next words as Martin gently touched her trembling arm. He seemed to caution her against speaking further. Jack was puzzled at this knowing exchange that lapsed Dawn Marie’s parents into an unknown abyss of secrecy. Jack respected their intimacy, but had that gut level feeling that Estelle had considered revealing some mysterious knowledge to him before Martin intervened. It may have been nothing more than the invisible barrier that existed between black and white, regardless of their closeness, and Jack respected that.

Jack said nothing, but hugged her and watched as she gripped the illusive and tentative edges of sanity. He could see her scouring the outer reaches of her mind for some vestige of hope that all of this was unreal.

Jack fought his impulse to be drawn into their gut wrenching anguish. He wished he wasn’t so damned empathetic, feeling other people’s emotions so strongly. Of all the people in the world, they had chosen him to walk them through the nightmare labyrinth of their despair. And he didn’t know what the hell to do about it.

Since law school, Jack’s last five years scratching out a living handling everything that came through the door gave him nothing to provide counsel for what he was about to face.

He could go with them, they would identify the body, and the ordeal would play itself out in time. Estelle and Martin would somehow adjust to this horrible loss. He could simply do some hand patting and that would be that.

They drove up Rampart to Canal and then over to Tulane Avenue. Charity Hospital, sitting alongside Tulane and L.S.U. medical schools, is a two block long, 16-story mountain of cement and mortar built in the thirties by Huey Long, legendary governor of Louisiana.

They parked on the street near the emergency room entrance.

Martin took an umbrella from behind the seat and held it over Jack and Estelle’s head as the three splashed over the flooded sidewalk to the overhang at the rear door to the hospital.

The grimy halls were filled with patients. Some still bled from knife fights, sitting apathetically beside expectant mothers, accident victims, and every kind of infirmity that needed hurried care. But care didn’t hurry at Charity. No cheer, no smiles, and the mood reeked of fear and death at the best of times.

The emergency room at Charity was a crucible of experience for new interns and resident physicians who wanted to see, in one large dose of hands on, every conceivable kind of physical problem man could have.

Jack steeled himself and led the miserable pair through the lines of pathetic, ailing humanity.

An orderly pointed down a dim hallway to a large smudged and scarred elevator door. The slow descent took them to the basement and an even more dimly lit corridor.

Estelle went rigid, and began to mumble incoherently. Martin, tall and massive alongside the diminutive but rotund Estelle, seemed to try to cover her, to block the horror tearing at her, whispering words of assurance that she didn’t hear. Their steps rang hollow against the dead gray walls as they walked slowly toward what waited beyond the large metal door at the end of the hall.

A morose, sallow-faced orderly in a gray smock turned to face them. The little man raised his thin eyebrows questioningly at the three who had the temerity to, unbidden, trespass into his silent world of formaldehyde, chrome and cold clay.

"Estelle Delacroix to make an identification," Jack said, assuming a voice and stern expression that worked on people like this. Jack pulled himself up to his nearly six feet and looked the little gnome of a man straight into his watery eyes and added coldly, "now!"

The orderly stooped slightly and lowered his head, looking sidelong at Jack as if he was about to be struck. Jack thought of Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, the hunchback with the bulging eye.

"Well?" Jack said impatiently.

"Dr. Sanchez," the gnome said quietly, pointing to an open door just a few feet from where they stood.

Jack led his little group through the door to a small windowless office. An immense, florid-faced man sat behind a desk. The man’s small black eyes lifted from a magazine and beheld his midnight visitors. The little plastic plate on his desk read, "Ramon Sanchez, M.D., Deputy Coroner."

"Dr. Sanchez?" Jack asked. "Estelle Delacroix was called to make identification?"

The man peered at a stained appointment calendar and nodded. He rose from his chair and, saying nothing, walked toward the trio standing in the door as if he were going to walk through them. He was as tall as Martin and owned the kind of gut that bulged below the belt.

Sanchez brushed past them and opened the large metal door into a refrigerated room with banks of pull out drawer compartments. They all knew what was in those drawers.

Estelle began to shake and moan, and Martin tried to soothe her. He spoke in low tones saying, "Now, it’s okay, baby. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll be through all this here in jus’ a minute, Mama."

Dr. Sanchez headed straight to a drawer and pulled it open with no hesitation or fanfare. His little pig eyes turned coldly to Estelle as she viewed the sheet-covered form lying on the cold tray before her.

Sanchez pulled the cover back and Estelle shrieked and fainted dead away in Martin’s arms. Martin’s eyes protruded at the sight of his daughter lying there, her creamy complexion now a waxy yellow, long ebony hair resting on her naked shoulder.

Dawn Marie’s death and the sight of her mortal remains were enough to paralyze a parent into stupefaction, but the thing of alarm was the expression frozen on her delicate features. And her once beautiful full lips were swollen and cracked–like they had been bruised.

Martin struggled to hold Estelle’s dead weight up while he and Jack stared at the body.

The deputy coroner’s eyes never left the faces of the two men who gaped in revulsion at what the little body before them suggested. Sanchez had a hooded look, watching revelations develop on Jack’s face.

"As you can gather, this is Dawn Marie Delacroix, and Martin here is her father," Jack said.

Martin nodded slowly, deadpan as tears washed his cheeks.

"How did she die?" Jack asked.

"Suicide."

"How?"

"Hanging. Used a sheet."

"Is that your conclusion or the medical examiner?"

Sanchez recoiled at Jack’s suggestion that the head coroner’s opinion of the cause of death may possess a flaw. "It is the opinion of Dr. Marriot, Orleans Parish Coroner."

Jack fumbled with his next decision and, gritting his teeth, said, "Okay, let’s see the rest."

"What do you mean?" Sanchez snarled.

"I want to see the rest of the body," Jack ordered, staring Sanchez directly in the eye.

Sanchez began pushing the drawer shut, saying, "You’ve seen enough."

Jack grasped the sheet and swept it back before Sanchez could stop him.

The trim, naked body of Dawn Marie lay before them. Martin and Jack sucked in their breath at what they saw. The skin between her thighs and her groin was raw and bruised. There were scrapes and scratches on her abdomen and dried blood caked and smeared her belly and mons pubis. Abrasions on her wrists and ankles suggested that they had been bound. A thick blackish smear of dried blood

had collected around an inch long penetrating wound directly between her breasts.

Jack suppressed his rage. If Martin had not been holding Estelle’s heavy body, he probably would have attacked Sanchez just to vent his rage at anyone near.

She was murdered, Jack thought, and what can I do about it?

Jack tried to keep the mounting fury from his voice. "Well, let me tell you, Dr. Sanchez, what I see here demands an inquest and autopsy. I’m going to petition for an inquest, a thorough autopsy with retained pathologists when it’s conducted. I’m officially asking that this body not be touched until every test known to modern pathology be conducted, fairly, and in keeping with accepted standards."

Sanchez snapped the cover back over Dawn’s body then slammed the drawer back into the wall. He said nothing and stormed back through the morgue. Martin struggled with Estelle, who was reviving in his arms.

Sanchez was talking to someone on the phone when Jack opened the closed door. Putting his hand over the mouthpiece Sanchez snarled, "Do you know how to knock?"

"Sanchez," Jack glared back, "I’m goin’ to the district judge when I leave here and get a court order to keep anyone from doing anything with her until we can get some independent people to double check. I’m gonna get a restraining order to stop you from doing anything with her. If you so much as open that drawer again before we get some people over here I’ll call the D.A. and the U.S. Attorney so fast it’ll make your fat head swim. I guarantee the Sheriff and the TV boys are gonna find it damn interesting."

Sanchez watched Jacks agitation indifferently, all the while holding the phone open Jack so the party at the other end could hear everything Jack said.

Jack spun out of the room and caught up with Martin and Estelle. His head reeled with what he had seen and what he had to do. Martin’s face was drawn into a pinched mask of despair and Estelle clung to him as they stumbled blindly away from the unacceptable truth lying cold in the box behind them.

"I’m gonna do something about this," Jack said quietly with grim determination. "Too late tonight. Gotta stop ‘em from doin’ anything more."

* * * * *

Jack removed his shirt and pants and threw them on the furniture as he walked through the apartment.

In the bedroom, bookshelves reaching toward the high ceiling sagged with a wild variety of books ranging from music, art, history and science fiction to calculus, poker, whisky distilling and street fighting. Several landscape oils Jack had painted hung about the room in a haphazard fashion, and a guitar leaned against a table on which were scattered attempts at writing poetry and short stories. A set of well-used barbells and dumbbells were in the corner.

As tired as he was, Jack’s eyes narrowed in a satisfied smile as he briefly took inventory of his small arsenal. A sawed off pump shotgun leaned against the wall by the bed, a snub-nosed .38 revolver hung from the bedpost in a shoulder holster, and a .32 automatic was tucked in a backpack hanging over the chair. Three rifles of varying calibers stood behind his hanging clothes in the closet, with a secret hidden closet withn that hid his prize weapons. To round out his edged weapons armory, a razor sharp bowie knife in a scabbard hung from the closet doorknob; an epee’, a civil war sabre, and a pirate cutlass lay in a gun rack hanging on the wall.

Jack was ready. As a matter of fact, he secretly wished an opportunity would present itself to use what these weapons were created for.

Deep in the core of Jack’s psyche slumbered an artist without an art, a diamond that probably would never get polished. His fires were well banked, but were easily kindled, depending on the stimuli. Once, a lady visitor beheld the jumble of art, books, and weapons. She asked him what he thought himself to be. He said, after a moments consideration, "Poet, lover, swordsman–barbarian."

He pressed a button on the air conditioner and the wall shook for a moment before the old unit settled into its job of pumping out cool air into the stuffy bedroom. The sheets were cool; he tried to read but his eyes kept closing.

In the middle of the night, Jack sat up in bed, trembling, drenched in sweat. After a few moments, he gained control of his quaking body and realized where he was.

He had survived it again. The interminable chase had haunted his dreams since he was a child. The same vast glacial spaces, the same icy rivers cutting through deep evergreen forests emptying into turquoise lakes, and the same faceless pursuer. Why was he running? What was it about whatever, or whoever, it was behind him that challenged his very soul? He could never escape, nor could he turn to confront whatever followed just beyond the last turn. Yet he felt the distance narrowing between them. What could that mean? Probably nothing. Nothing at all.

Jack laid back down and allowed his pulse to calm, trying to convince himself for the umpteenth time that the dream was not real. It was always so real. Is this real–this life–this room? Could it all be illusion? What was real? The damned dream seemed real enough, he thought as he dozed back off to sleep.

Just before daybreak, the great bells of the St. Louis Cathedral tolled the hour. He awoke, fuzzily remembered what he had to do, and frowned.

The bathroom mirror was unkind. His hair fell over his face and his eyes were bloodshot. Jack scowled at the image, feeling just like he looked. Then he went out on the balcony and looked at the gray light of dawn laboring to illuminate the Quarter. The rain had stopped. There was no wind, only the steady movement of dead gray clouds scudding from the south. The air felt odd. Barometric pressure is dropping, he thought.

A strange dread seemed to fill the morning. "Must be the storm," he said aloud.

Jack turned on the T.V. Overnight the tropical depression had developed into a hurricane named Aurora and was headed north. Spawned in the Atlantic, it moved westward and gained momentum, chewing its way up the Florida Gulf Coast. The storm was predicted to move inland somewhere along the Florida panhandle.

Jump-started by two large mugs of scalding coffee and chicory, followed by thirty minutes of calisthenics, weights, and a cold shower, Jack felt that he could face what the day had to offer.

The strange feeling didn’t leave. Hum, Jack thought, it must be this Aurora. What the hell! Hurricane time is party time around here. Everybody takes off and has a good time. Jack wrinkled his brow and waited for the conclusion to allay his uneasy feeling.

It didn’t.

Chapter 2

DAY TWO

Knowing it was too early to reach anybody, Jack decided a walk might shake the strange feeling he was experiencing. He pulled on a pair of jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, then headed down Royal Street.

The streets were wet and the Quarter slowly woke to an overcast, muggy day. The air was oppressively still. There was little movement so early in the day, and Jack’s spirits lifted as he briskly walked over the uneven, broken sidewalks, allowing the streets to work their spell.

All day the rays of the swollen summer sun licks the Quarter like a mother dog licks her puppies, and the steamy breath of the river fuses with the flatulence of the primeval ooze snoring just below the broken pavements. In the evening, after these elementals punch out following a hard day’s work at suffocating the city, the residents sit on their stoops or balconies and talk, laugh, drink, and fan the steeping day into steeping night.

Behind those closed, cypress casement shutters, denizens of the Quarter live their lives as private as hermits in the north woods. Jack never considered living anywhere else, where everyone’s conduct had to meet certain "normal" standards. He was as normal as any man, but he wouldn’t abide anyone telling him how he should live. Yet he didn’t have the thoroughbred New Orleanean viewpoint that there were only two places in the world: New Orleans and some place totally ridiculous.

He smiled at the Quarter’s pungent fragrance, feeling a deep affinity for its deliberate refusal to join the twentieth century and move in the stream of time. It’s probably as close to Paris as I’m gonna get, he thought.

Jack stopped at the French Market along Decatur, where the vendors were restocking their stalls with exotic fruits and vegetables. A bouquet of bananas, turnips, potatoes, mangoes, huge garlands of garlic, pineapples and cantaloupes blended with the smells of the river just behind the levee.

The big ferry, carrying automobile traffic across the river, blew its sonorous steam whistle, and the ponderous bells of the Saint Louis Cathedral chimed the hour.

Jack realized he was smiling, and the pictures etched in his mind from the night before seemed less horrible.

An ancient bearded man of obvious Latino descent sat intently on a crate, watching Jack poke among the ripe fruit.

Jack looked up as the man muttered, "Rompe la Aurora."

"What’s that you say?" he asked.

"Rompe la Aurora," the man repeated.

"I don’t understand. What does that mean?"

"De Dawn, she breaks," the little man explained, as if he was an oracle uttering some implacable truth.

They looked at each other for a moment and Jack felt a faint chill. Dawn. Aurora. Drawing on his vague recollection of college Spanish, Jack remembered that aurora is the Spanish word for dawn.

Hurricane Aurora. Hurricane Dawn. Somehow he felt as though the old man was trying to make a connection between the hurricane and his case breaking wide open.

"Yeah, she’s comin’ alright," Jack muttered back. The strange feeling clung on as he confirmed to himself that it was just coincidence.

He bought a ripe mango, a half pound of fat figs, and two plantains he planned to fry in butter. After poking around for nearly an hour, he returned to his apartment. He walked out onto his balcony and peeled and ate the mango as he fretted about the challenge he faced. It was just after eight.

Maybe I can catch Fred Campbell at home in Baton Rouge. He’ll call the D.A. or the Attorney General and put a freeze on this ’till I get an investigation started, he thought.

Campbell, a family friend from home, had served as executive counsel for the last governor and was a political animal who not only knew every politician of any consequence in the state, he also knew something "on" them as well. He understood, lived and breathed politics. He was one of the good-old-boy crowd who could do wonders with a phone call. But he measured his every act by how many "green stamps," as he put it, that it would cost him to do something. He had lots of green stamps, but he hoarded them and made sure he got mileage out of everything he did for someone before he did it.

A consummate networker, Campbell was a local power broker. He wouldn’t take a client unless it was a referral, and then he wouldn’t charge a fee, but simply did his job and billed a favor. It paid off, for Campbell lived better than anyone Jack knew.

In a moment, Jack had Campbell on the phone. He explained the situation–that he needed the coroner to hold up any autopsy or tests until he had secured independent testing.

Campbell heard Jack out, and said in his exaggerated country drawl used to disarm the unwary, "What the hell is it to yew, Jack? Do these people have money? What can yew git out of it?"

"Damfino, Fred," Jack protested. It’s one of those things, you know, that you gotta do. I may not get a damned thing, but something’s gotta be done."

"W’aal, Jack, yew know how it is, old buddy. Yew ain’t got nothin’ to trade and ah can’t use up that many green stamps fer free. Ah could call Delahoussie, the D.A., an’ ah don’t know fer shore, but don’t s’pect he’d do nothin’ for nothin’ neither, if yew ketch mah drift."

"You mean you ain’t gonna help me?" Jack asked, his eyes wide in disbelief.

"Jack, yew been around. Fer them to set up an inquiry like that, there must be some kind of a serious thang."

"It is serious, Fred. I know this: she was murdered, and they can cover it up by not conducting an autopsy with proper tests. They could mess it all up and that’d be the end of it."

"Ah can’t hep yew, Jack. Sorry."

Jack heard the click at the other end of the line, and then a dial tone as he stared at the phone in his hand.

"That son-of-a-bitch," Jack said between his teeth. "Merdido! Squeeze! Always squeeze! You’d think we were in Mexico, or Morocco the way things get done around here with payola!"

Jack slumped in his chair. He already had his Picayune going. After staring intently at the computer monitor for a full minute, he attacked the keyboard in a frenzy of typing and didn’t stop until the screen was filled. He pulled some books down and copied some phrases and paragraphs, and when it was done, the printer fed out a copy on a legal sized page. He grunted approvingly at the product.

"Temporary Restraining Order, Injunction, Protective Order." "Gotta show immediate irreparable harm or it won’t be issued," Jack murmured, nodding as he re-read the words.

He found Judge Joseph Mahoney’s home phone in the directory and dialed the number.

"Mahoney," came a voice at the other end of the line.

"Judge. Jack Chandler here. I hate to bother you so early, but I have a serious situation and it can’t wait."

There was a pause, and the voice asked, "What’s da problem?"

Jack had been holding his breath, waiting for the judge to scold him for calling on his day off. He suppressed a sigh of relief that there was no resentment in the question. Most judges didn’t like to be called at home and usually let you know quickly that anything can wait.

Jack related the situation and again there was a thoughtful pause while the judge thought about it. The clear New Orleans-cum-Bronx accent said: "Alright, c’mon over. You know wheah my house is at?"

"I can find it, Judge; it’s in the Garden District somewhere off St. Charles, I believe?"

"Yeah, Peniston. You’ll know it by my garden inna front. I was supposed to meet Al Hirt at his camp on the Northshore this afternoon–specks been runnin’ good in the Rigolets–but looks like da goddam storm gonna screw it up. I ain’t goin’ nowheah. Bring ya papers and let’s see what ya got.

"You got it Judge," Jack nearly shouted. "I’m goin’ by their place for their signatures. I’m leavin’ now."

Jack called Estelle and Martin and asked them to meet him outside their house to sign the papers. In fifteen minutes, he found them waiting in the front of a well-kept little shotgun house with shuttered windows. He explained what he was trying to do and they signed. He left them standing on the sidewalk with hopelessness stamped on their faces as he drove away.

Damn! Jack said to himself. I just gotta help ‘em.

Jack admired this judge. Mahoney was the courthouse maverick. He had been elected to the criminal court bench over heavy opposition from the old line courthouse gang, which usually called the shots in politics in the parish. Mahoney waved the bloody flag of individual rights, showing a vast T.V. audience the corporate and moneyed hegemony had always run roughshod over the worker and individual. For the first time in the area’s history, the people anointed a judge who flung himself wildly into the election melee and didn’t give a damn about personal or financial consequences. And he had won.

Jack hoped maybe, just maybe, he could get the restraining order to stop any further interference with an investigation he would initiate. This was Mahoney’s cup of tea: to create effects on the power structure for the working classes.

Jack unfolded his wrinkled city map. The judge lived in the Garden district, an area beyond Canal and south of the Quarter.

He drove into the Garden District. Street cars clanged and rattled down the middle of St. Charles Avenue through a tunnel of live oaks. Mammoth, elaborate, turn of the century homes stood haughtily side-by-side, bordering the boulevard for miles.

Traffic was light, and drivers didn’t seem to be going places in such a hurry. The electric trolley car rattled down the median, clanging its bell. The windows were open, and passengers rocked back and forth in the rolling rhythm with their elbows on the windows-sills, hair blowing in the damp wind.

Jack turned south on Peniston and drove toward the river. He found the address and pulled over at a white frame, gingerbread house built on high piers with room for parking beneath.

As soon as the latch clicked on the white picket gate, he felt he had stepped through a time warp into a garden wonderland. Ever-ready to be swept away on the gossamer wings of sensation, Jack came to a rapt standstill, absorbing the hushed essence of the garden. He smiled. This is my bonus for puttin’ up with the rest of the crap life dishes out.

The air was candied with the spicy aromas of jessamine and sweet olive. The trellised path to the front door dripped with clusters of violet bougainvillea. Radiant hibiscus blossoms, ginger lily, lantana, and cascading blue plumbago flowers set among thick ferns nearly overloaded Jack’s senses. He felt muscles and nerves, that he didn’t even know were tense, relax. He floated through the raised planters overflowing with fragrant herbs, mint and sweet basil.

Iridescent hummingbirds darted among the flowers. To fill out the sensual little space was the warbling of a mockingbird, the chirping of many bright red cardinals and the screeching of blue jays. Somewhere a mourning dove cooed. Jack wanted to sit down beneath an arbor and not think of anything.

He walked up the wooden steps to a high veranda that encircled the entire house. Hanging baskets of dripping ferns and blooming bougainvillea of all colors swung from the top edge of the porch.

Jack punched the door bell alongside an ornate stained glass door and, in a moment, steps could be heard from the other side. The door swung open and a small, bright-eyed man thrust his face forward.

"Yeah?"