The Halo Effect

9

Saturday night Detective Noah Jordain had played piano till almost 12:00 a.m. in the same restaurant in Greenwich Village he had first found when he moved to New York City four years before.

He’d been homesick for New Orleans that night. And that led to him thinking about his father: a good cop whose name had been sullied and who’d died before he could clear it. Whoever had set up André Jordain, a thirty-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, might have thought he had gotten away with it, but Noah was still working on the case.

André and his partner, Pat Nagley, had busted a cocaine ring. It was cut-and-dried. Or so everyone thought. Until the defense attorney got the evidence thrown out of court by proving that André and Pat had been on the take, accepting payoffs from the dealer for five years until finally turning on the dealer when he refused to increase the payoffs.

There was a string of evidence presented that, on the surface, damned the two New Orleans detectives. But Noah knew, just as his mother and his brothers and sisters knew, it had all been fabricated. His father had upheld the law every day of his life. He’d been a devout Catholic and faithful husband. Yes, he drank too much sometimes, he could let his temper get the better of him, and he was a big flirt. But a bad cop? No way. The documents and evidence had to have been manufactured after the fact.

There was no question of collusion, and there was some connection between the drug dealer and someone higher up with more power than André Jordain. One day Noah would find out who’d been involved and clear his father’s name. He owed him that.

A year after the indictment, his father had died. A few months after that, Noah had broken up with his live-in girlfriend. His mother had three other sons and two daughters and six grandchildren around her. That left him free.

Noah had come to New York to get away from a police department that was as corrupt as often as it upheld the law, and so that he might see things more clearly from a distance. No, that was bullshit. At least he could be honest with himself. He had come to Manhattan to work the case from the New York angle, since there was evidence that the drug ring was tied to someone in the NYPD. And he’d also left home because he hated walking down the streets and smelling the river and doing all the things that made him remember.

The restaurant that had become his regular haunt was two blocks away from Noah’s apartment. Caroline’s had a long mahogany bar, a fireplace in the dining area and a beat-up old upright Steinway in the front that no one had touched since the previous owner had died twenty years before. After a few months of getting to know the current owner, having drinks or dinner there at least three times a week, occasionally bringing a date-never the same woman twice-Noah asked if he could play.

His soulful jazz was like New York. Moody and energetic, dark, then bright. He played the way they played in the twenties and it fit the restaurant. Caroline’s had had a musical history; it had been a popular jazz club and speakeasy during prohibition, catering to a crowd that sat and sipped their illegal gin, listening to music just like Noah’s.

Now he had a regular gig. Friday and Saturday nights. On Sundays he slept off the homesickness and the nightmares that followed the purging music. Usually he slept late. Till at least noon. His one sin of the week. Well, maybe not his one sin, but the one he felt the guiltiest about because he’d been brought up to be in church on Sunday mornings. Not in bed.

It had been four years since he’d walked into any house of God. The day of his father’s funeral. It wasn’t a loss of faith so much as a break of faith. A jagged cut that bled and bled and wouldn’t heal, and until it did, he’d rather sleep.

But that Sunday morning the phone call had woken him up at 9:00 a.m. It was the second Sunday in a row that he’d been woken this way.

“Were you sleeping?” Mark Perez asked.

“Umm.”

“Having a nightmare?”

“No.”

“Wrong answer,” his partner said.

“Oh, no,” Jordain said, anticipating the next sentence.

“Looks like we might have a serial killer, after all. You were right.”

“Damn, this is one time I wish to God I’d been wrong.”

“You have no idea.” Perez then gave Jordain the address of the hotel where the woman’s body had been found fifteen minutes earlier.