Dirty South

42

“Have you talked to Jojo?” Maggie asked, very early and very bright the next morning. I rolled off the mattress I kept on the warehouse floor and cradled the phone closer to my ear.

“No.”

“He seemed pretty pissed,” she said. “You know, like he didn’t have time to talk.”

“He always sounds that way.”

“You doin’ okay?”

“Fine.”

“You know what I did yesterday?”

“No, but I’d like to know,” I said, growing awake thinking about Maggie. I knew she’d been up since dawn. Her skin would be flushed from taking care of her horses, the smell of hay on her sweaty T-shirt and in her dark hair.

“I rode for about two hours up in the north county,” she said. “You know the land that Abby’s parents had?”

“Yeah.”

“Just me,” she said. “I tried to keep in trees but I got all sweaty and my jeans and boots got hot as hell.”

“I like you sweaty.”

“Well, Tony finds this little creek that I hadn’t thought about since when I was a kid. I just kind of kicked out of my boots and clothes and jumped right in. Nick, it was so cool in there. Some nice big rocks to dry yourself in the sun.”

“You lay in the sun without your boots?”

“Nothin’ else.”

“Nothin’?”

I rolled over on my back and stared at the tin-stamp ceiling. Red chili-pepper lights burned in my kitchen. Morning light shot through the cracks in my bookshelves like lasers.

“Nick?”

“I wish I was in Mississippi.”

“Me too.”

“You’re in Mississippi.”

“But not in Mississippi with you.”

“The entire state is better with me?”

“Not really,” she said. “I just need some help shoveling out the shit in my barns.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Shit shoveler first class.”

“Glad you finally found your calling.”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

I showered and shaved. Annie needed a short walk to fertilize a little tree and I grabbed a croissant and cup of chicory coffee down at Louisiana Products. I made some phone calls. Finally I got one back.

High glass walls surrounded Alyce Diamandis in the little fishbowl office where she worked on the third floor of the Times-Picayune. File cabinets filled almost every other inch of the research library, long and thick as coffins, loaded with newspaper clippings going back to the twenties.

Alyce was a tall, thin woman who wore her black hair twisted up into a bun and held in place with chopsticks. She had on cat-shaped glasses with small rhinestones and a red Chinese dress embroidered with gold dragons.

“Somewhere there’s an Asian drag queen running around naked,” I said, walking into the little cube.

“I was feeling a little yin and yang.”

I’d known Alyce for years through my longtime ex, who once worked at the paper as a crime reporter.

Alyce kept on typing and pushed the glasses up her nose. Wall-to-wall books lined her office and reference guides waited crammed between metal bookends of an A and a Z. A Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary sat on her desk. “One minute,” she said. “Al-most.”

I picked up the Rubik’s Cube and began twisting it around. “I used to have one of these.”

“I read this morning that when you turn thirty-five,” she said, still typing, “you are officially no longer in a cool demographic.”

“Already passed that.”

“But soon Rubik’s Cubes, Pac-Man, and Duran Duran will be like our grandparents’ nostalgia over Benny Goodman or Clark Gable,” she said. “You know? When Generation X all passes over thirty-five, it’s all over.”

“All those Corey Feldman movies on American Movie Classics.”

She finished clicking, laughing, and turned to me and crossed her long arms across her chest. A small candle burned by the computer monitor, some kind of chocolate aromatherapy. There was a little Zen sand garden and two open Mountain Dew cans.

“I need you to run a name.”

“Can you leave it and come back later? I’m swamped.”

“I don’t need you to dig around in those old clips,” I said. “It would be recent.”

She turned around, gave a small grunt, and typed away. “Name?”

“Trey Brill.”

“You know you could’ve probably gotten this off the Internet?”

“What’s that?”

I stood watching the screen over her shoulder. Five hits. “Football player?” she asked. “Wait. Sports agent?”

“Yeah.”

She clicked more.

I also asked for her to run the name I’d gotten from Teddy’s secretary, Robert McClendon Brill III.

Twenty seconds later, the printer hummed to life and she handed me a couple of hot sheets of paper.

“Sick,” she said.

METAIRIE – A college student charged with the rape of a Chalmette teen made his first appearance in court Monday.

Christian Chase, 18, a freshman at LSU, pled not guilty to four counts of sexual battery. The charges stem from a March 5 arrest when a 16-year-old girl from Chalmette accused Chase and another young man of finding her passed out at a Bourbon Street bar and taking her to Chase’s family home in Metairie.

The girl – not identified because she is a minor – told deputies the boys fondled and performed sex acts on her with foreign objects before dropping her in a Dumpster behind a nearby shopping mall. The girl’s face and body had been covered in lewd words and pictures written in permanent marker. The girl’s family has filed a civil suit against Cherries, the bar where police say the girl passed out.

Last week, prosecutors dropped charges against Robert McClendon Brill, 18, a freshman at Vanderbilt University, who deputies say was with Chase that night.

“It’s him,” I said, shaking my head.

“You might want to make sure,” she said.

“When did this run?”

“Ninety.”

“It’s him,” I said. “He’s about thirty.”

“Let me run an AutoTrak on him to make sure,” she said. “Can you give me some connections?”

I told her about Brill amp; Associates in the CBD and his connection to Ninth Ward.

While I waited, I flipped back to the first story that ran on the arrest a few months earlier in 1990. About how Brill’s father was a local attorney and member of one of New Orleans’s big Krewes and Chase’s father owned one of the city’s biggest construction companies. Members of the Metairie Country Club. The boys had attended Metairie Country Day School and had academic scholarship rides. Both had been all-stars on the private school’s soccer team.

“You’re right; it’s him,” Alyce yelled to me from her fishtank office. “Same address in Metairie. God, that’s evil.”

I wondered how Christian Chase felt about being left to hang for what happened to this girl. I wondered how much he knew about Trey Brill now.

“You know the guy who covered this?”

Alyce looked over my shoulder at the byline and smiled. “Of course.”

“Still around?”