Excerpt:  Outside Child

Chapter Three

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Argus Travers stepped from his Crown Vic and slammed the door.  The humidity smacked the New Orleans homicide detective across the face.  Reality hit him too, in the gut, every time he came to work.  His dad, God rest his soul, had been right.  The Civil Rights Bill had changed not only the leadership at NOPD, but how things were done.

“Damn,” he grumbled.

If only that dispatcher had known why the captain had sent for him.  He hated walking into the unknown.  Especially since that new black mayor had promised to clean up the corrupt force.  How many of his fellow white officers had quit or had been discharged?  Too many.  But why was he fretting?  He’d probably been called to handle another drug-related, turf-war murder.  Civil Rights or not, blacks around here still feared white cops.  The kind of fear that solved cases, one way or another.

Travers had parked in the McDonald’s on the corner of Tulane and Broad.  He walked past a row of bail bond storefront offices towards the Broad Street Overpass, under which was the police parking lot.  He told everyone the short walk a few times a day was good exercise.  The truth was it gave him time to gear up for the changes he had to face inside headquarters.

He crossed Broad at Dupre Street.  Police headquarters was one side of the intersection and the city jail, a three-story gray stone building, was the other.  He made his way up the steps to the glass-door entrance of the police department, listening for sounds from the jail.  Usually he could hear the inmates calling out through the tiny barred windows to pedestrians, but today he heard nothing.

“Hello, Laundry,” a brown co-worker said, walking up to Travers.  “I thought you were off this weekend.”

Travers faked a smile.  It ticked him off that the black guys called him “Laundry” or “Laundry Man.”  That they felt comfortable enough to joke about his clothes.  The fabric of his wool-blend jacket shone from wear.  His no-wrinkle Docker slacks wrinkled like linen and his thread-bare white shirt was the same shade of dingy as the dirty beige walls of the building.  The black guys teased that his outfit looked as if it belonged in the to-do laundry pile instead of on his tall, two-hundred and fifty pound, beer-belly body.

“I was,” Travers said.  “Until I was paged.  You know how it is.”

“Yeah,” the detective said, coursing past Travers.  “It sucks.”

Travers headed for the coffee station, a card table set up under a window that looked out at the parish prison.  He poured himself a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee.  Chicory coffee, New Orleans-style.  Thank goodness some things never changed.

He started the trek across the room to the captain’s office, acknowledging every greeting he received with a nod and a closed-mouth smile designed to show that he was police-tough, all business.  The bare walls, rows of packed boxes and floors covered with drop cloths indicated a physical change in the old parish precinct house.  Nothing to remind him of the times he’d spent in here as a child visiting his dad, or as an eager cadet recruit, or a young officer trying to reassure his father that policing rather than lawyering was his calling.  The truth was the Cajun was as uncomfortable as a grain of salt in a pepper shaker.

He looked for his new partner, LeBron Wellsburg, a “brotha” transferred from Algiers, the town just across the Mississippi River Bridge.  Wellsburg.  How did an uppity Pontchartrain Park brat get a name like Wellsburg?  One guess.

His own family’s name had been changed twice.  First when President Roosevelt’s battle cry “one nation, one language” thundered across the country.  In their hometown, that meant Cajuns, French-speaking Louisiana natives living along the bayous.  Descendants of French Arcadia immigrants mixed with every other European bloodline.  The French language was discouraged.  Considered a sign of illiteracy.  Forced Travers’ French granddaddy, married to Mary Argus, a Dane, to change his name from Travers to Argus to fit in.  And to get work.

But, before the old Frenchman had died, he had begged his son, the detective’s dad, to change it back.  Travers’ dad did just that and named his first born Argus Travers.  He said that gesture was to remind Travers and his brother how their granddaddy had survived the French fallout in this country with his dignity intact.

Travers sipped his chicory.  Where was Wellsburg?  Surely he’d been commanded to come in too.  Travers wished he hadn’t.  He liked policing the old way, the by-any-means-necessary technique he’d employed with his old partner, Gary Bootfel.  But Gary had gotten caught on tape extorting cash from Vietnamese merchants on Canal Street.  He had had to either quit or be charged.  Gary had quit.  And Travers had gotten saddled with LeBron Wellsburg, a college graduate who was into that understanding, compassionate cop malarkey.

Travers spotted Detective Wellsburg strutting into the captain’s office.  Who could miss that pressed-to-perfection suit on that gym-sculpted dark-brown body of his?  But Travers was the veteran detective.  He knew he belonged in cop land.  Everybody knew.  But was he welcome?  Was he one of them?  Did he want to be?  He fretted over the answers every day.  Him, a white guy.  A Cajun.  His father was a past captain of detectives.  Who belonged in New Orleans—in this precinct—more than this Cajun?  Now, he, Travers, was being treated like he was some outside child born with the right genes, but without the pedigree.

Twyla Toussaint rolled in after Wellsburg.  Even though it was Saturday, and she was officially off duty, NOPD’s first female homicide detective wore her navy police uniform, the skirt version, and her curly brown hair in her trademark French twist.

“Captain Toussaint,” Travers greeted her, noting the address she insisted upon.  He acknowledged his partner, Detective Wellsburg, with a nod.

Captain Toussaint made her way to her chair.  Wellsburg found a seat facing her.  Travers lingered at the door.  Here he was, in the captain’s office, his dad’s old office, watching a not-so-good-looking Creole woman walk behind his dad’s desk.

“Tim Ganen,” she said, sitting in his dad’s seat.  “A corporate VP at that Floating Palace Steamboat Company went through a paddle wheel into the Mississippi this morning.”

“Fucking executives,” Travers said.  “Probably got caught ripping the company off.”

“Is that cop intuition?” Wellsburg asked.

“I call it like I see it.”  Travers glanced over at his partner, his grin slow and menacing.  “I know these guys.  My brother . . .”  Travers felt heat on his face.  “They steal and then apologize.  They cheat and working stiffs bleed.  Blood for green.  That’s how they jerk off.”

Why did he have to bring his younger brother into this?  No wonder everyone thought he hated his big shot, younger sibling who ran a big insurance outfit in Dallas.  What he hated was that his brother never even called unless he had some bonus to report.  Like the time he bragged about his $200,000 freebie the same day his company announced that 220 workers had to lose their jobs.

“Seems to me your attitude—” Wellsburg began.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Twyla Toussaint interrupted Wellsburg.  “I want the two of you to get over to the Floating Palace Steamboat Company and find out as much as you can about this Tim Ganen.  The Coast Guard just released the boat, and it’s on its way upriver.”  She checked her watch.  “I want a handle on this guy’s life and his . . . his motivation before it gets here.”

Motivation?  Anybody with half a cop’s brain knew his motivation.  Travers gulped down more chicory.

“So far,” the captain said.  “We’ve got the drop on the press.  Let’s keep it that way.”

“Big deal, huh, Captain Toussaint?” Travers said.  “Or should I say high profile?”

He hated the hoops they had to jump through when some mucky-muck got into trouble.  Meant that somebody with money and influence had to have a hand in the investigation.

“I’ll say,” the captain replied.  “The Coast Guard woke me up.  Then the chief and the DA called.  I suspect the Mayor will be next.”

Her testiness bemused Detective Travers.  He’d long thought women didn’t have the balls to be NOPD.  And that all the new sissy rules of conduct were implemented to accommodate them.  But could the lady captain be a cop with the old-school mentality?

“By the book, gentlemen,” Captain Toussaint ordered.  “I have a feeling about this one.”

“Who’s in charge over there?” Wellsburg asked.

“The CEO’s name is Bret Collins,” Captain Toussaint said.  “Looks like he and the dead guy go way back.”

The lady captain looked away.  What was she thinking?  She checked her notepad.

“And a Lamar Kasdan,” she said, “heads the PR department.  An Ohio transplant, I believe, considering how long he’s been with the company.  The dead man and the CEO came here from New York, Chicago, I don’t remember which.”  She lowered her voice.  “But I hear we have a home girl, Ladonis Washington, working in PR alongside this Kasdan fellow.”

Travers tuned in to the animosity he heard in her voice.  Looked up and saw her pick up a pencil and tap it nervously on the desk.  Her jaw muscles clinched.

“According to the Mayor,” the captain said, “she can act as a go-between.  He said it’s always good to have someone in the thick of things who understands our ways when ‘foreigners’ are involved in situations like this.”

“Does the mayor know this Washington woman?” Travers asked.

“I’m sure,” the captain said.  “She grew up in the Magnolia Project.  Graduated at the head of her class at LSU.  Got some press.  A real go-getter, I understand.  And as connected as a sister can be around here.”

More connected than the captain?  The daughter of a professor who grew up in that well-to-do, black-folk Ponchartrain Park suburb?  Travers couldn’t hold back a grin.  He knew what it meant to be Creole in New Orleans.  French mixed with African.  He knew that when the Creoles started marrying whites and Native Americans, the mixture created a caste system among blacks based on skin tone, dialect and family history.  Ladonis Washington evidently didn’t have the light-skinned Creole pedigree like the captain.  But she sure as hell had something going for her.

“Friend of yours, Captain Toussaint?” Travers asked.

“No, not really,” the captain said, hanging her head.  “We went to the same high school is all.  I believe she finished a couple of years after I did.”
Travers smiled.  A them-against-them-feud.  Would it hamper the investigation and prove once and for all that he should have been head detective like his dad?  Or just fuel the fire of discontent burning inside of him?  He’d better watch his step.

“I take it,” Wellsburg said, “the Coast Guard is calling Ganen’s plunge murder?”

“Not necessarily,” Travers said.  “They always call on us when someone ends it in the river.”

“That’s not all,” Captain Toussaint said.  “I expect a lot of heat from our noble elected officials because of the gaming lobby.  So get to the bottom of this quickly and quietly.  If it becomes national news and fodder for late night commentary, we’re all screwed.  It is an election year, you know.”

The captain, skin as white as his, didn’t have an exquisite face, making a fallacy of the myth about the beauty of mix-breed blacks.  But had her expression been the least bit agreeable, she might’ve appeared less unattractive.  Less black.

“That goddamn CEO had something to hide and I’m gonna find out what,” Travers said, an assurance that struck something in the captain.  What was that look she gave him?  Aggravated?  Accusing?  What?

“Wellsburg,” she said.  “You’re the primary.  And you . . .” 

She stared Travers square into his shocked blue eyes.  He held back a chuckle.  What do you call putting a home boy in charge?  Funny as that was to Travers, the wrongness of it was more overwhelming.

“Keep your cool,” she continued.  “Don’t go mouthing off about thieving CEO’s and get the press all worked up.  I don’t want the media second guessing us on this.  Before I deal with them, I want to know this guy and what happened.  Any speculation or—or how they say?—rush to judgment on our part, could backfire.”

“Cap, I mean Captain Toussaint.”  Travers’ tone was not respectful.  “I think—”

“I’m the thinker here, Detective Travers.”

Captain Toussaint stonewalled him with a stare so glaring, his Klan wizard father would’ve shut up.  She was from the old school all right.

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© 2007 Alice Wilson-Fried, All Rights Reserved