Neighborhood Watch

In the land of Hurricane Katrina, the one-armed clerk is king.

 

The clerk - a woman whose age could've been any number between 15 and 45, incandescent with the joie de vivre  legendary among the disabled - scanned each item in deliberative silence; no small talk would distract her from moving a filet, a bottle of wine, a Russet potato, a small package of butter, a cup of sour cream, a pile of green beans, and two pints of ice cream, each pint priced at roughly its weight in silver, through their three-foot journey from conveyer belt to bagging zone.

 

Jason Davidson was in no hurry, he'd have said if asked, though he couldn't help being a little annoyed. He had things to do. Scanning the items had been trial enough - lift, "beep," and transfer took a few seconds for each, the wine presenting additional challenges - and he could only imagine how the Herculean task of bagging the groceries would proceed. He thought about doing it himself only to reverse course because he feared the gesture might attack her feelings with the same savagery that had torn off her arm. After her third attempt at typing the correct code for the green beans, the groceries, courtesy of both his arms, found purchase inside a brown grocery bag. Feelings be damned. Davidson and the woman exchanged wary smiles. Teamwork.

 

The grocery store parking lot was beginning to lose its damp, fetid, post-Katrina stench, though not quickly enough by Davidson's lights; he gagged slightly as he walked to his car. The hurricane, to use the vernacular, had "trashed" Covington, Louisiana - the luckier parts of town brought to mind a Spring break motel bathroom apres le Delta Kappa Epsilon deluge - though not with the same ferocity it had visited elsewhere, elsewhere being everywhere south of Covington. Moisture still oozed from every object, giving the area varying scents of decay and disuse. The asphalt smelled like abandoned Bombay tarmac, all steam and ooze. The grass smelled like a swamp. The cars smelled like over-chlorinated swimming pools, the ones that worked, at least; those destroyed by the elements smelled like corpses. The sodden sheetrock and wood pulled from most homes, now lining every street from here to Mississippi, had their own distinct odors as well, all ghastly. And even when the offending detritus was removed, a trace of their essence remained like a busybody neighbor, never not there when you don't need him.    

 

As for people, they smelled like they'd decided to hit the gym, but forego showering.

 

Davidson went off to his appointed rounds after depositing his groceries in his working, stench-free refigerator. (With the foresight of Edgar Cayce, he had emptied it before the storm. Goodbye, milk. Hello, working fridge undamaged by decaying perishables.) The house suffered minor damage - some missing shingles, some leaks, some cosmetic damage, some dead plants, some of this, some of that - so round one of his duties was a stop at his insurance broker for reassurance this minor damage wouldn't result in the same runaround major damage was getting from insurers.

 

"Mr. Davidson, what can I do you for?" asked the insurance agent, a soft, fat man turned brittle over the course of six weeks.

 

Davidson tried empathy.

 

"Look, I know your under it, Mack. I really do. All I have to do is look at my block. But I checked the policy and I know I'm covered for what happened. I just want to hear a 'yes' from someone. I don't need a hard date or anything like that. Just a 'yes'," he said.

 

"If you're covered, you're covered. Don't worry about it."

 

"I am worried about it, Mack. Not overly, but worried. Johnny Philips had a tree turn his house into a duplex and he's not getting answers."

 

"I just spent 20 minutes on the horn with him and Allstate, so you don't have to tell me nothing about Johnny Philips and his fucking house. I'm on all of it. I'm a salesman, not an adjustor." Every word Mack spoke flowed with the ease of surgery.

 

"I know that, but you're the guy we know. I just need a little assurance."

 

The insurance man rose from his seat and stretched. "This is a tough time and we're in uncharted territory here but, yes, you're going to get paid. They tend to clear picayune stuff like yours quick so they have more time to screw guys like Johnny," he said.

 

"So it's coming?"

 

"Yes, it's coming. Feeling assured?"

 

"Yes," he said, not feeling assured, not in the slightest. Davidson turned to leave, his eyes setting on a dying ficus tree next to the coffee maker in the corner. "You got quite the green thumb, Mack. That's the only plant in the parish dying of thirst."

 

"Uh-huh," Mack said, answering both his phone and Davidson.

 

Davidson emptied the remainder of his water bottle into the ficus pot.

 

Next was the bank, with the white-knuckle thrills a visit invariably entails. He sat, waiting for a functionary, looking at his gut, which hadn't yet reverted to the mean for a 55-year-old man who'd just spent a month on his ass in a hotel room in Little Rock. Evacuating ahead of Katrina had meant lots of sitting and lots of eating, broken up by the occasional hoof to the hotel bar, where he did lots of sitting and lots of watching, mostly people and sports. The sight of the Saints playing football like the British forces at Gallipoli - in San Antonio, no less, for its "home" games - was almost as nightmarish as watching New Orleans flood. The gut had grown.

 

Davidson did get laid, twice, landing him somewhere in the middle of the hotel's bell curve measuring coital frequency and sexual partners, but for someone 55-years-old with a body more pear- than V-shaped, it was an orgiastic bacchanal, at least to certain hotel scene observers. (Most guests were married, middle-aged, wealthy, and encumbered by children. They lived through guys like Davidson.) The high-water mark was a twice-divorced 35-year-old woman who, on a positive note, thought Davidson was "cute" while also admitting she was "bored." (He tried to comfort himself with the thought that everyone was bored, which made her no more vulnerable to his charms than anyone else.) The sex itself had a certain start-stop-no-yes rhythm that gave it an adventurous, appealing, and appropriately tawdry quality; he came like a Hun despoiling. Alas, the woman left for greener pastures at her cousin's dairy farm in Mississippi. As for the other encounter, it was no letter to *Penthouse*. He found pretending it never happened to be both a comfort and a breeze.

 

The bank clerk, who bore a discomforting resemblance to sexual encounter number two, assured him of the status of his accounts and the eternal promise that the "safe" in "safety deposit box" were priorities the bank would honor no matter the weather. Davidson thanked her, leaving with a hundred bucks and without any of the items in his box.

 

He picked up his prescriptions at the lucky pharmacy he had chosen as his own out of the 782 possible options in Covington and returned home, a red Craftsman number built in the 1930s boasting a spacious 2,000 square feet of *lebensraum*.

 

Getting out of his car, he took a stab at conversing with his neighbor, a most unpleasant man who was repairing the 10-foot fence surrounding his property so he could, once again, give the place the PRIVATE COMPOUND/DO NOT ENTER/DEATH AWAITS THOSE WHO TRESPASS look he so zealously cultivated.

 

"How's the fence coming?" asked Davidson.

 

It'd been several years since Davidson had talked to his neighbor or, more precisely, attempted to talk to his neighbor, but Davidson's memory was sufficiently acute to note nothing had changed in the interval. The response wasn't physical violence or abject hostility or even English, but a mumbling cascade of sub-literarte glossolalia; spelled phonetically, it would've run something along the line of "Grmmmmdnnd;asldkjfaskdjfpFENCEsdkjf;kjdwfASSHOLDhugfiygeobyfgASKING0gqfuvdfbdcocnCARE." It could have been the language of Satan himself, for all Davidson cared. His neighbor's rage had once been louder and more articulate, but the slob wasn't so insentient to expect anyone to care; he'd stopped putting thought into it. Generalized wrath was all he felt necessary to convey.

 

"Well, good luck," said Davidson and walked inside.

 

When Davidson returned from Arkansas a month ago - two weeks after the storm - his initial musings were grim. "Will I be able to live here in remotely the same way as I lived before the storm?" he wondered. It didn't seem possible. The damage overall - though "not as bad as New Orleans" as the new mantra about town described it - was still considerable. It seemed it would take years just to clear the debris; status quo *ante* was the stuff of fantasy.

 

Everything was still and moribund, but thunderous. Generators - contraptions no taller than two-and-a-half feet, but with the roar of a blast furnace - shrieked day and night. And to what end? To keep the few refrigerators that weren't ruined by spoiled food chilly enough to cool milk and a dozen eggs, to keep a few lights on, to keep a radio tuned to WWL-AM and its new call-in format which alternated long soliquies of intense despair with chirpy speeches of cockeyed optimism. People sat and stared and waited and drank.

 

The sunlight was merciless. The trees that had once covered the roads in his neighborhood like the roof of a cathedral had been ripped apart, trunks and limbs lying on the road and on power lines and inside houses. Many homes remained torn open, blue tarp covering the rifts like a band-aid in an emergency room. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, which eventually did, announced by the rumble of trucks.

 

Not since his last orgasm had a dreadful noise sounded so good. Debris began to disappear. Chainsaws buzzed. Hammers clattered. Then, one morning, the lights came back on. The generators stopped within minutes. It was the first time in weeks Davidson felt like he could breathe without it being a deliberate act. Behind all the purposelessness and ennui were those fucking generators; the noise had sapped the will out of people, got into them body and soul, a clamor from which there was no escape, deranging them almost as terribly as the storm itself. Now it was gone. Davidson was so grateful he almost cried.

 

Now he prepared his victuals from the store, sipping wine as he grilled and baked; gas and water, for reasons beyond his understanding, had not been affected, so his culinary skills had not atrophied, not even in Arkansas, where someone had been kind enough to loan the hotel a few grills for communal use.

 

He ate on his back porch. The food tasted good to him. The wine, of course, as well. He didn't feel the near-orgasmic rush some of his neighbors had told him they'd felt when they ate their first relatively normal meal - he was an even-keel guy about stuff people had to do one way or the other, not a writer for Gourmet; a "foodie" was no more interesting to him than a "breathie" or a "sleepie" - but it did the trick nonetheless. The Miles Davis on his iPod didn't hurt, either. He felt, for the first time in a long time, he would be able to rest. His life was in order, as much as it could be. This sated him.

 

That night, after the steak had been eaten, the wine drunk, and the dishes cleaned, Davidson died of a gunshot wound to his head. The method of delivery was to be the subject of much contention.

 

*Sic transit gloria Louisiana* 

 

Carrigan went over his checklist: pretty, fit, blonde, smart, proper, well-dressed, reasonably secure, pillar of the community, good mother (of four kids), rich enough for people to know it (though not enough for people to resent it), and north of 40. Which meant it was a lead-pipe cinch her husband was banging a girl from Carrigan's other checklist: pretty, fit, blonde, dumb, improper, tart-dressed, totally insecure, despoiler of the community, bad mother (of several kids), poor enough for people to know it (though not enough for people to resent it), and south of 30. Carrigan felt bad for the wife, slightly less so for the girlfriend, and grateful to the husband.

 

"First," said Carrigan, "while I understand this and a buck-fifty buys you a cup of coffee, I'm sorry about all this."

 

"Thank you," said the wife. She meant it. Beyond the checklist, she presented a shifting amalgam of intense betrayal, resignation, self-pity, wrath, and the sadness that comes with the relentless personal inventory-ing Carrigan had found women dive into in "these sort of situations," his preferred euphemism for infidelity, though he was comfortable with dropping the A-word if he detected a potential client slipping back into denial. His policy was circumlocution for those in the circle, directness for those on the fence.

 

"There's two ways to do this, Mrs. Deal - the slow, traditional method and the fast method," Carrigan said. He spoke deliberately, like a 50-year-old professional male should. "The traditional way is for me to follow Mr. Deal around until I have evidence that he's, you know…"

 

"Please don't treat me like a child," Mrs. Deal said. She spoke without rancor.

 

"Apologies. I follow him around until I have evidence he's having an affair. Photos, proof that business dinners aren't the kind of business he's paid for, etcetera. This takes time and time means money. You know the drill."

 

"And the other way?"

 

"Is this: you tell Mr. Deal your mother is ill or your sister's visiting Mom with her kids or any ruse you can dream up. Try to keep it simple. You tell your husband you and the kids are going to see Mom for the weekend, he says yes, and within 30 minutes of you leaving I'll know whether your husband's stepping out and with whom. I've found it to be a remarkably effective and economical tactic."

 

"To play Devil's advocate, if I may," said Mrs. Deal, straightening her already remarkable posture. "Doesn't that make me duplicitous as well?"

 

Carrigan massaged the arms of his leather office chair, a swiveling number that wouldn't be out of place in a rapacious, Gilded Age banker's office; he thought it looked classy as shit. "In a word, not really. You're just telling him you want to take the kids to Mom's. That's what you're doing. If he's a regular husband, he won't shave for two days and drink beer and watch the game. If not he'll be running stoplights to his lady friend. Do you wanna know or do you wanna know?"

 

"I want to know."

 

"Then take the kids to Mom's."

 

The wheels turned in Mrs. Deal's head. Carrigan knew the answer would be yes, but he didn't mind taking a few seconds to size her up. She really was a dish, gifted with an aristocratic symmetry in her featues that suggested she once had the whole Helen of Troy thing going, only without the spontaneity. She never did anything without thinking it over, not one fucking thing. And in fairness to Mr. Deal, he could see how that might grow tiresome after a long day in the oil services industry, what with all the guys from Houston telling Mr. Deal what a Baton Rouge hillbilly he was. (Carrigan was a sufficiently detached professional not to worry whether this was an explanation or an excuse.)

 

"I'll do it the fast way," said Mrs. Deal "When can it be arranged?"

 

"When can you go to Mom's?"

 

"When is it convenient for you?"

 

"No time like the present. I mean, this weekend's fine."

 

"I'll arrange it this afternoon."

 

Carrigan's beeper sounded; nothing baroque, just a triplet of beeps. Mrs. Deal looked at him like he were a caveman who'd been kicked out of a subterrane for being deficiently tech savvy to start a fire even with Ung-Gorock spotting him the flint and tinder.

 

"A client of mine," explained Carrigan, "who isn't particularly fond of phones, particularly those of the cellular variety."

 

Carrigan politely bum-rushed the wife out so he could meet with Jim the attorney.

 

Carrigan wouldn't call Jim the attorney "ruthless." That's how Jim the attorney's adversaries described him. Carrigan would call Jim the attorney "thorough" and Jim the attorney's adversaries "losers," though the latter term didn't come from animus so much as accuracy. Challenging Jim the attorney's legal prowess was more of a losing proposition than excessive devotion to science fiction arcana is.

 

The epic sweep of his victories notwithstanding, Jim the attorney's tastes were understated out of a Yasir Arafat-esque sense you don't invest money where everyone could see it. His office was in a standalone brick building, formerly a small grocery, in an unfashionable industrial district in the unfashionably industrial town of Baton Rouge. (Carrigan worked out of his house, a quality Jim the attorney respected.) Though Jim the attorney's spartan quarters had the salutary effect of keeping overhead down, the principal reason was to keep high-maintenance clients from darkening Jim the attorney's door.

 

Jim the attorney didn't care how much money a client had - being a contingency-based operator, he'd get his on the back end - but he did care about appearances, as in if a client put a tremendous amount of stock in paintings on the wall and a toney address and the right kind of wood for a conference room table, the client cared too much about appearances. He didn't want those guys. Jim the attorney wanted desperate clients, people who needed to win, which meant he happened to have a lot of rich clients. What he didn't have were foppish clients who cared about looking good for their foppish friends; he'd be damned if he was going to be some rich prick's chihuahua, carried along in a handbag.

 

Jim the attorney's business was referral-based. Jim the attorney worked by appointment only. Walk-ins could walk right the fuck out.

 

He'd left the front door unlocked for Carrigan, and Carrigan made his way through the "lobby" - a furniture-free room with one remarkably healthy potted ficus tree in the corner but none of this chairs shit - and into Jim the attorney's office, which sported the usual desk/books/diplomas/photos/plants/chairs thing you'd find with any reasonably successful independent practitioner of the law.

 

They greeted each other warmly because they were friends, and they were friends because they had much in common: similar age (middle), similar lines of work (law and "law"), similar hobbies (none sufficiently interesting to speak of), and similar other stuff. They caught up on the latest and got down to business.

 

"Looks like I got a Katrina case," Jim the attorney said.

 

"That's topical," said Carrigan.

 

"I gotta tell you, Willis, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense even though it could be lucrative. It's a probate case. Dead guy in Covington, lived by himself, gunshot wound to the head."

 

"Handgun or long?"

 

"Handgun."

 

"Suicide, right?"

 

"That's the rub, and a rubbier rub than usual. Fact is we don't know. St. Tammany coroner hasn't made a ruling on whether it's self-inflicted or homicide or accident. The facts are fuzzy, meaning it could go any way."

 

"I'm sure Covington's finest will get to the bottom of it. What's the real rub?"

 

"Well, the dead guy's will had an unusual codicil. If he just flat-out dies, the daughter gets what appears to be a substantial inheritance. But if he commits suicide, she don't get shit."

 

"Who gets it if he killed himself?"

 

Jim the attorney turned his head and covered his mouth by pretending to wipe an invisible substance off his nose. "His neighbors," he said, through his fingers.

 

Carrigan hadn't laughed as hard in months as he was laughing now; he pounded Jim the attorney's desk with his palm. Jim the attorney joined the merriment.

 

"Dear old Dad," said Jim the attorney.

 

Carrigan, whose profession had ingrained in him the romantic notion that the dick wants what the dick wants, followed up: "So who gets it really? A Bourbon Street stripper? Some open-minded fellow no one knew about?"

 

"I'm not shitting you, Willis. His fucking neighbors. The codicil even spells out who gets how much…"

 

More laughing.

 

"…and I called the guy's attorney and he confirmed it. Said it was added a couple of years ago, not last week. I'll continue my due diligence, but so far it checks out."

 

"I take it your client is the daughter."

 

"You take it correctly."

 

Jim the attorney showed Carrigan the codicil in question. In his years as a pro, which had delivered him his fair share of probate cases - nasty work, those - Carrigan had never once heard of a person giving money to any neighbor, never mind all of his neighbors. Local organizations? Sure. But locals? Nah. Most folks wouldn't *loan* the people who lived in the two-block rectangle around them anything over 20 bucks without 10 points a week on it. Who wants the trouble? There's plenty of reason to tune up a neighbor - noise or unmown grass or rotten kids or who gets to park where - without adding capital to the mix.

 

"As funny as this is," Carrigan said, "I don't see how I can be of any help without spending a fair amount of time in Covington. I can't say the prospect thrills me."

 

It was an asshole move by Jim the attorney to jujutsu Carrigan's litany of complaints about Baton Rouge leveled over the years into rhetorical leverage towards taking the dead guy case.

 

"What's wrong with a little time in Covington? It's a nice place. You'll be there rent-free. What gives? It ain't like you'd be leaving a harem behind," said Jim the attorney. "Lord knows Baton Rouge ain't treating you with the civility you deserve. All you do is bitch, bitch, bitch."

 

Carrigan bitched, bitched, bitched because Baton Rouge sucked, sucked, sucked. Couldn't a fellow just whine without consequences anymore? One of the reasons people pick a place to live is residency grants carte blanche to complain about it non-stop. Baton Rouge had its charms - one, its melange of Louisiana's diverse cultures; two… was on the tip of his tongue - even if both weren't readily apparent among the poverty, crime, traffic, decay, chemical stench, political corruption, and 47 other flaws Carrigan could enumerate. He knew these imperfections created a comfortable living for the both of them, but Jim the attorney's point that Louisiana's capital was an unindicted co-conspirator in the wreckage of Carrigan's personal life was a gratuitous, Tierra del Fuego-low kind of low blow.

 

Like most Louisiana burgs, Carrigan could take or leave Covington. Every Lousiana town other than New Orleans seemed to him a smaller version of Baton Rouge, so the best that could be said of Covington - with its minimal poverty and its quaint small town-ishness - is it's sno-globe version of Baton Rouge. A nice place to visit, but he wouldn't want to live there unless he wanted to wind up like this gent, Davidson. Not enough chaos.

 

More germane to Carrigan's assignment were the residents. People who lived in villages were either aggressively inquisitive or comprehensively indifferent towards their neighbors, though Carrigan imagined there was one neighborhood in Covington where a tectonic attitudinal shift was about to occur. Be that as it may, the two extremes wouldn't help him do what he was needed to do, which was find out what the fuck was really going on. If everyone were busybodies, all he'd ever hear is bullshit rumor, distored and amplified by repitition. The flipside meant it would be like interrogating cats. If he wanted reliable information, he didn't want people hot or cold or oscillating between the two. He needed a steady stream of lukewarm informants, folks who could be manipulated like dogs into giving him shit he could work with. This situation failed to hold such promise. What would be in it for them to talk to him?

 

"Excuse me if I assume that money might affect your urban scruples," Jim the attorney said.

 

"How much money are we talking about?"

 

"We're in TBD mode on that. I got a chick in the process of determining actual amounts, but so far she's given no indication the figures in the will don't comport with reality."

 

"So how much?"

 

"Let's put it this way - at worst, you'll get twice your usual rate if things don't work out for the client. At best, you'll get our agreed-upon percentage of the seven-figure sum in question."

 

"So how much?"

 

"TBD, but let's just say we're not talking a one- or two- or a three- or four-figure deal. At minimum, high five- or low six-figures. Maybe more," said Jim the attorney. "Can you dig?"

 

Carrigan bobbed his head up and down, but stopped when he heard what Jim the attorney's plan was to secrete him into the neighborhood on an indefinite timeline.