City of Sins
She dabbed court lotion on her neck and wrists, just as she’d done every day during the trial. She’d made the lotion herself, by mixing together oils of cinnamon, calendula, frankincense and carnation, and adding a piece of devil’s shoestring and a slice of galangal root all mixed together. This was to influence the judge and jury.
Finally, she took a white bowl piled with dirt. The dirt she’d gathered herself, with her right hand, from the graves of nine children in the St Louis Number One cemetery. She placed the bowl on her altar, facing east, between three white candles. Then she added three teaspoons of sugar and three of sulfur, recited the 35th psalm, asked the spirits to come with all their power to help her, and smeared the dust on the inside of her kaftan. This was so the court would do as she wished.
She was ready.
The sidewalk outside the courthouse was packed: crowds four or five deep, pressing against hastily erected barriers and watched by police officers who shifted uneasily from foot to foot in the oppressive heat. The gathering felt more like a street party than a demonstration. People passed food to each other, creased their faces in laughter. Marie wasn’t the only one convinced she’d be acquitted, clearly.
The trial had lasted only a week. Marie’s defense had been simple: Ortiz had killed himself. The ‘problem’ she’d referred to on the surveillance tape was his carrying a gun: she’d seen it on his waistband as he’d shifted position. Then he’d brought the gun out and, before she’d even been able to react, he’d shot himself. As to why he’d done so, she had no idea: but then the burden of that proof wasn’t on her, was it?
She’d brought in witnesses who testified that she funded many amenities in the Lower Ninth. Folks got in trouble with their finances, she helped them out. Folks got beaten up by the police, she helped them out. She pointed out that she’d never been convicted of anything in her life, not so much as a traffic offense, and yet the Bureau were bugging her like she was bin Laden or John Gotti or someone.
She was representing herself, she said, so the jury – most of them people of color like herself, just trying to make their way in a world stacked against them – could see what she was really like. No smart-ass lawyer twisting her words for her. The other side could do that all they liked, but not her, not Marie Laveau, no sir.
It had been pure theater. And now it was time for the curtain call.
The courtroom itself was so full it seemed almost to bulge. People fanned their faces and tried to stay as still as possible: the ageing municipal aircon system was nowhere near up to coping with a couple of hundred excited metabolisms.
An expectant murmur fluttered off the walls as the jury took their seats.
Judge Amos Katash, who looked like the older brother of Michelangelo’s Sistine God and was clearly relishing every moment of this performance, shuffled some papers and cleared his throat. ‘Would the foreman please stand.’
A gray-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain round her neck got to her feet, glancing at Marie as she did so.
In the gallery, Selma closed her eyes. Like every cop, she knew the old adage about the foreman never looking at the defendant if they’re guilty – and as Selma had maintained right from the start, Marie was as guilty as anyone she’d ever come across.
‘Have you reached a decision?’ Katash asked the foreman.
‘Yes.’
‘And is the decision the decision of you all?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Marie Laveau, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Balthazar Ortiz?’
‘Not guilty.’
Pandemonium in the courtroom; a dissonant vortex of triumphant whoops, frantic applause, tears and outraged shouts. Marie smiled and waved daintily, as though she were on the red carpet at the Kodak Theater. Selma pinched her nose between thumb and middle finger as she shook her head in disbelief.
Monday, July 4th
Fourth of July, and New Orleans was hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.
Patrese took a sip of daiquiri and pinched at his shirtfront, trying to peel it away from his skin.
‘Hell, Franco,’ laughed Phelps, ‘you look like a water cannon’s been using you for target practice. Know what it is? Thick blood. All those steeltown winters have given you sludge in your veins. A couple of years down here, the stuff’ll be running through you like water, and one hundred degrees won’t even make you sweat. Till then, my friend, make like us locals. Laissez les bons temps rouler.’ He clinked his glass against Patrese’s and gestured round the party. ‘Quite something, huh?’
It sure was, thought Patrese. White-suited waiters glided between the guests, proffering champagne here, stuffed lobster claws there. Three barmen shook and mixed every cocktail Patrese had ever heard of and plenty he hadn’t. A string quartet floated Haydn under the hubbub of conversation and laughter. Exotic fish glided endlessly round ornamental ponds.
New Orleans held fast to the old ideals of high society. Anybody who was anybody spent their Fourth of July here, at the Brown House, a steep-gabled, Syrian-arched monument to Romanesque Revivalism. No matter if you wanted to go to your beach house or visit with family, when you were invited to the Brown House, you went. It was the largest house in all New Orleans, and it was owned by the city’s richest man.
Who was, as usual, nowhere to be seen.
St John Varden’s Gatsby-like absence from his own parties may have been because he preferred to work, because he found other people tedious company, because he wanted to enhance his mystique, or all of the above. Only he knew for certain, and he wasn’t telling.
Patrese had been in New Orleans only a few months, but that was plenty enough to realize Varden was everywhere and nowhere. The logo of his eponymous company sprouted across the city like mushrooms after rain; his name bubbled up in quotidian conversations, an eternal presence in the ether. But he appeared in public only once a year, at the company’s AGM, and if you wanted a photo of him, it was the corporate brochure or nothing.
In contrast, his son – St John Varden Jnr, universally known as Junior – was working the guests with practiced ease. In another era, he could have been a matinee idol, all brooding hazel eyes, jet-black hair and olive skin. As it was, he’d been a proper war hero. Purple Heart in Desert Storm, Silver Star in Bosnia, and finally the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan; the first living recipient of the award since Vietnam. He’d left the army and announced his intention to go into politics. Eighteen months ago, he’d become Governor of Louisiana at his first attempt. Massachusetts had the Kennedys, Texas the Bushes: Louisiana had the Vardens.
‘Here,’ Phelps said, ‘let me introduce you to a few people.’
Phelps’ wife had filed for divorce earlier in the year and gone to live with her new lover in Mobile, so Patrese was his plus one today. There were plenty of other people Phelps could have brought – hell, half of Patrese’s new colleagues at the FBI’s New Orleans field office would have killed for the chance – but Phelps, lord of that office, had chosen to ask Patrese, the outsider.
There’d been protests; whispered and civilized, perhaps, but protests nonetheless. Patrese wasn’t a southerner. Worse, he hadn’t even been a Bureau man until a few months ago.
All the more reason to show him how we do things down here, Phelps had said; and that had been that.
Patrese shook hands and repeated people’s names back to them when they were introduced, the better to remember who was who. He already recognized Marc Alper, the assistant DA who’d prosecuted Marie Laveau and was now putting a brave face on the verdict: ‘You can never predict juries.’ Here was a chief justice, here someone high up in City Hall, here a golfing store magnate, all full of backslapping bonhomie, safe and smug in the knowledge that, if you were in here, you counted for something.
All men, Patrese noticed, and all white. The absolute top jobs – mayor, DA, police chief, pretty much everyone bar Phelps himself – might have had black incumbents, but to Patrese the dark crust seemed very thin, like a pint of Guinness in negative.
‘And this,’ said Phelps, his voice rising slightly as though in anticipation of a drum roll, ‘is Cindy Rojciewicz.’
Patrese knew she’d be a knockout even before she turned, just from the reactions of everyone around them. It was like something from the Discovery Channel: the males puffing their chests out, the females bristling and snarling with affront.
‘Hiii,’ said Cindy, in a voice which suggested she’d spent more time than was healthy smoking filterless cigarettes and watching Marlene Dietrich films. ‘Wyndham’s told me a whole heap about you.’ She winked. ‘All good, of course.’
Such an obvious lie, Patrese thought. Why then was he so flattered?
Raven hair, cobalt eyes and a dress which straddled demonstrative and slutty might have had something to do with it, he conceded.
With every wife in a five-yard radius practically dragging their husbands away by the hair, and Phelps excusing himself with a pat on Patrese’s shoulder – he could hardly have made it more obvious if he’d winked and given a thumbs-up – Patrese suddenly found himself alone with Cindy.
She nodded toward his shirt. ‘Spill something?’
‘Sort of.’
‘You wanna come inside and freshen up?’
‘Come inside? You live here?’
She laughed. ‘I wish. I’m Mr Varden’s PA. I know my way around.’
‘And he won’t mind?’
‘Jeez, Franco; it’s a house, not a darn museum.’ Houshe, musheum; she was drunk, Patrese realized.
Drunk, sexy as hell, and inviting him inside. A good Catholic boy might have made his excuses. A lapsed Catholic, never.
‘Then let’s go,’ he said.
She walked a pace in front of him. He kept his eyes above her waist for at least a second. A triumph of willpower, in the circumstances.
They dodged a couple of waiters and went in through a pair of French doors. It was much darker now they were out of the sun, and Patrese blinked twice as his eyes adjusted. Cooler, too. He gave a little shiver as the sweat began to dry.
Cindy was holding a door open. ‘Over here.’
He caught a tendril of her scent as he walked past. It was a library, air heavy with leather and walls paneled with wood the color of toast.
She closed the door behind her.
‘You can freshen up in a second, Franco. But first, I want to …’
He was already moving for the kiss as he turned back to her.
‘…say there’s something terrible going on,’ she blurted.
Their lips had almost touched before he realized what she’d said. He pulled back and looked at her, almost too startled to be embarrassed.
‘I need to tell someone about it,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you.’
‘But you’ve never even met me.’
‘Exactly. Exactly. Everyone here knows everyone. Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot. Might as well take out a personal in the Times-Picayune, you know? But not you. You don’t know anyone here, not properly. Not yet. You’re not –’ she grabbed for the word, missed, found it with a snap – ‘tainted.’
Cindy was talking fast but coherently; the strange lucidity of the drunk whose brain can only focus on one thing at a time, but does so with the precision of a laser.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Then tell me. What is it?’
‘Too big to tell you now. Too complicated.’
‘Just give me an idea.’
‘Oh, God … Sacrifice.’
‘Sacrifice?’
‘Sacrificing people.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got documents. Evidence. I need you alone, not with’ – she waved an arm vaguely toward the window – ‘all that boo-yah going on out there. And I need to trust you. Maybe I won’t, next time. Maybe I’ll have got you all wrong.’
‘But you’ve just told me …’
‘I’ve told you nothing. Not yet.’
A shadow fell across the strip of light at the bottom of the door. Patrese and Cindy watched it pause a moment, then disappear.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you interested?’
‘I told you already. Yes.’
‘Good. Can’t meet tomorrow – we’re out of town all day.’
‘We?’
‘Mr Varden and me. Wherever he goes, I go. You free Wednesday? After work?’
‘Sure.’
‘You know Checkpoint Charlie’s?’
‘Esplanade and Decatur, right?’
‘A man who knows his bars. Always a good sign. Eight o’clock? Don’t get out of work much earlier, I’m afraid.’
‘Eight’s fine.’
‘Good. See you then.’
She opened the door, and they stepped out into the corridor.
She studied Patrese’s face. He wondered if she was going to kiss him after all.
‘Noah,’ she said. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Patrese. Noah.
She walked back out into the light.
Tuesday, July 5th
The office had a weekend feel to it. Half the staff had taken an extra day or two round about the holiday itself, and so Patrese found himself with a morning uninterrupted by the usual round of meetings and briefings.
If he was going to go through with this, he wanted to get it right. In the few months he’d been with the Bureau, he’d been struck most of all by the scale on which things were done. Resources were ten times what he’d been used to in the Pittsburgh PD. Cases were larger and more intricate, focusing on serious criminals rather than the lowlife who formed the staple of every Homicide cop’s beat. Hell, even the agents’ suits were better, their shoes shinier.
He pulled from the shelf the Bureau’s Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines – MIOG, as it referred to itself, with the usual inability of any bureaucracy to resist an acronym – and found section 137, ‘The Criminal Informant (CI) Program’.
Worse than having no human sources, the text began, is being seduced by a source who is telling lies.
Typical Bureau, Patrese thought; assume the worst, right from the get-go. But he took the point. He didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, and until he did, his default would have to be that she was yanking his chain unless specifically proven otherwise.
Failure to control informants has undermined costly long-term investigations, destroyed the careers of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, and caused death and serious injuries to innocent citizens and police.
This, too, Patrese knew full well. He’d run informants in his days on the Pittsburgh Homicide beat, usually gangbangers in between prison sentences who’d have sold their grandma for a hit of crack and lied as easily as they breathed. Smart lawyers picked government cases apart on technicalities, the perps walked free, and heads rolled; sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.
Cindy was, potentially at least, a different kettle of fish altogether. Whether that would make her easier or harder to control, Patrese had no idea.
Informants must be classified according to one of the following 12 categories: Organized Crime (OC); General Criminal (C); Domestic Terrorism (DT); White-Collar Crime (WC); Drugs (D); International Terrorism (IT); Civil Rights (CR); National Infrastructure Protection/Computer Intrusion Program (NI); Cyber Crime (CC); Major Theft (MT); Violent Gangs (VG); Confidential Sources (CS).
White-collar crime, Patrese presumed, given Cindy’s position, though he couldn’t help but feel the categories were pretty arbitrary. Where did violent gangs end and drugs begin? Couldn’t major theft also be organized crime?
The FBI considers the following factors in determining an individual’s suitability to be an informant:
1. Whether the person appears to be in a position to provide information concerning violations of law that are within the scope of authorized FBI investigative activity.
He had to presume that Cindy was in such a position, else she wouldn’t have come to him in the first place. As Varden’s PA, she must be privy to vast swathes of information, much of it private and sensitive. Tick that.
2. Whether the individual is willing to voluntarily furnish information to the FBI.
She’d approached him, hadn’t she? Not the other way round. Another tick.
3. Whether the individual appears to be directed by others to obtain information from the FBI.
Unlikely. If Varden wanted to find out something from the FBI, all he had to do was ask Phelps. In any case, Patrese had been a cop, if not an agent, long enough to recognize the moment in an investigation when a suspect, snitch, witness, whoever, started asking questions rather than answering them.
4. Whether there is anything in the individual’s background that would make him/her unfit for use as an informant.
Patrese didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, of course; not even her surname. Something Polish, it had sounded like when Phelps had introduced them, but he couldn’t have repeated it, let alone spelled it.
He Googled ‘Varden’, found the company website, and dialed the main switchboard. Best not to announce his interest too clearly, he thought.
‘Good morning, Varden Industries.’
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m calling from FedEx. We have a package for someone in Mr Varden’s office, but I’m afraid the surname’s illegible. It’s a Cindy someone.’
‘That’ll be Mr Varden’s PA, sir. Cindy Rojciewicz.’
‘Spell that for me, please.’
‘Certainly, sir. R-O-J-C-I-E-W-I-C-Z.’
‘Thank you. The courier will be round later.’
Patrese hung up, logged into the National Instant Criminal Background Check database, and entered Cindy’s name.
No matches.
Then he Googled her.
Turned out her father was a congressman. Roger Rojciewicz, Republican, and therefore known in Washington as 3R. He represented Louisiana’s first congressional district, which comprised land both north and south of Lake Pontchartrain, including most of New Orleans’ western suburbs and a small portion of the city proper. And he seemed quite the bigshot: chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and a member both of the Homeland Security Subcommittee and the Committee of Appropriations too.
No surprise how Cindy had got her job with Varden, then.
About her personally, Patrese found much less. She was pictured on a high school reunion website, and she’d written condolences on a tribute board to a teenager who’d committed suicide. Every other appearance she made on the web was Varden-related, and pretty anodyne at that: job applications, media inquiries.
He wondered if he’d have been so keen to find out more about her without an official excuse, and realized that he already knew the answer.
5. Whether the nature of the matter under investigation and the importance of the information being furnished to the FBI outweigh the seriousness of any past or contemporaneous criminal activity of which the informant may be suspected.
See above, Patrese guessed.
6. Whether the motives of the informant in volunteering to assist the FBI appear to be reasonable and proper.
This was key. Informants tend to be motivated by one or more of MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego. Cindy’s behavior the previous day had suggested ideology more than anything else. She’d used the words ‘terrible’ and ‘tainted’, as though whatever she wanted to tell him was some great moral wrong which needed righting.
But there could be – in Patrese’s experience, there usually was – more to it than that. Informants never had just one reason for snitching, and the reasons they did have were rarely static, waxing and waning in importance as an investigation progressed.
Points seven through ten were all things Patrese would find out only once the investigation had begun: whether they could get the information in a better way; whether the informant was reliable and trustworthy; whether the informant was willing to conform to FBI guidelines; and whether the FBI would be able to adequately monitor the informant’s activities.
Point eleven concerned legalities of privileged communications, lawful association and freedom of speech. One for the lawyers to argue over. All billable, of course.
12. Whether the use of the informant could compromise an investigation or subsequent prosecution that may require the government to move for a dismissal of the case.
Patrese thought for a moment. He wasn’t aware of any current investigation which this could compromise, but that meant nothing. He was still the new kid here, and if he knew anything, it was that what he didn’t know far outweighed what he did.
Perhaps he should ask Phelps about this.
Perhaps he should talk to Phelps anyway.
Cindy had told Patrese not to tell anyone, hadn’t she?
Actually, he remembered, she hadn’t. She’d said: ‘Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot,’ but that wasn’t the same thing, not at all.
And she must have known that, if she involved Patrese, she’d be involving Phelps too, sooner or later. She’d hardly expect Patrese to run something like this without the knowledge of his own boss; and if she did, she was clearly deranged, and therefore by definition not worth bothering with.
Patrese dialed Phelps’ extension.
‘Hi, Franco.’
‘Hey, Sondra.’ Sondra, Phelps’ secretary, was the longest-serving employee in the entire New Orleans field office. Phelps was the tenth Special Agent-in-Charge for whom she’d worked. She liked to joke that she was the Crescent City’s own version of the Queen of England; her prime ministers might come and go, but she was always there, though admittedly a little older and grayer each time around.
‘Is the gran queso there?’ Patrese asked.
‘Franco, I keep telling you, you’re in a French city now. Grande fromage. And no, he’s not around. He’s out of town today.’
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow he’s here, in the city, but not here, in the office. Conference down at the Convention Center. You wanna call him, you want me to put you in the diary for Thursday, or is it anything I can help with?’
Patrese toyed for a moment with the idea of telling her about Cindy. Sondra might not have been an agent, but she’d probably give better advice than the rest of them put together.
But Cindy was Varden’s PA, and when it came to Varden, Patrese already knew, treading carefully was the order of the day. He didn’t want to involve Sondra with something that wasn’t her problem; nor did he want to ring Phelps and get a snatched few minutes on the phone. He wanted to ask Phelps his advice face-to-face, talk through the options with him one by one.
But he couldn’t do that before he’d seen Cindy.
The hell with it, Patrese thought. He’d keep the rendezvous, commit himself to nothing, and brief Phelps when it was done. If Phelps chewed him out, so be it.
‘Thursday morning’s fine,’ Patrese said.
‘Great. He’s got fifteen minutes at ten. That do?’
‘That does nicely. Thanks.’
Patrese hung up and stared out of the window. The view was hardly National Geographic: the parking lot out the front of the building, and the traffic rumbling along Leon C. Simon. He needed another couple of pay grades to get one of the higher floors looking out the back over Lake Pontchartrain.
He turned his attention back to the manual.
The single biggest mistake an agent can make in his relationship with the confidential informant is to become romantically involved.
Spoilsports.
Wednesday, July 6th
Patrese was there quarter of an hour early. The moment he walked in, he was glad he’d changed between leaving work and coming here. Collar shirt and flannel pants would have marked him out a mile off as a stiff trying to unwind, but with a faded Pitt T-shirt and battered jeans, he blended right in.
Checkpoint Charlie’s is located pretty much right on the spot where the French Quarter fades into Faubourg-Marigny; which was to say, right on the spot where most tourists turn on their heels, because their guidebooks mark the edge of the Quarter as the edge of the known world, with bohemian Faubourg one of those uncharted territories on medieval maps emblazoned with the warning Here Be Monsters.