A Thin Dark Line

7

Richard Kudrow was dying. The Crohn's disease that had besieged his intestinal tract for the last five years of his life had been joined in the last few months by a voracious cancer. Despite the efforts of medical science, his body was virtually devouring itself.

He had been told to quit his practice and devote his time to the hopeless task of treatment, but he didn't see the point. He knew his demise was inevitable. Work was all that kept him going. Anger and adrenaline fueled his weakened system. The focus on justice-an attainable goal-gave him a greater sense of purpose than the pursuit of a cure-an unattainable goal. In defying his doctors and his disease, he had already managed to live past all expectations.

His enemies said he was too damned mean to die. He figured the beating of Marcus Renard was going to give him another six or eight months' worth of fury to live on.

"My client was beat to within an inch of his life by your detective, Noblier. What kind of bullshit will you attempt to spread over that plain truth?"

Gus pressed his lips together. His eyes narrowed to the size of beads as he glared at Kudrow sitting across from him, gray and withering like a rotting pecan husk in his wrinkled brown suit.

"You're the bullshit expert, Kudrow. I'm supposed to swallow the rantings of your sociopathic homicidal pervert client?"

"He didn't break his own nose. He didn't break his own jaw. He did not break his own teeth out of his head. Ask your Deputy Broussard. Better yet, I'll ask your Deputy Broussard," Kudrow said, pressing up out of the chair. "I sure as hell don't trust you any farther than I could throw a grown hog."

Gus rose with energy and thrust a finger at the lawyer. "You stay the hell away from my people, Kudrow."

Kudrow waved him off. "Broussard is a material witness and Fourcade is a thug. He was a thug on the NOPD and you knew it when you hired him. That makes you culpable in the civil suit, Noblier, and, by virtue of the fact that you did not suspend Fourcade from the Bichon case after his obvious attempt to plant and manipulate evidence, you may well be guilty of collusion on the assault."

Gus snorted. "Collusion! You give yourself a hernia trying to drag that dead horse into court, you old goat. And you file as many goddamn civil suits as you want. You'll die poor before you get a dime out of my office. As for the rest, I don't remember anybody electing you district attorney."

"Smith Pritchett will bring charges before you can digest the grease you ate for breakfast. He'll be all too happy to see Fourcade's ass in jail."

"We'll see about that," Gus grumbled. "You don't know shit about what happened last night, and I am not obliged to talk with you about it."

"It'll all be a matter of record." Kudrow picked up his old briefcase, and the weight of it tilted him slightly sideways. "It had damn well better be. Your deputy made an arrest last night. She took a statement from my client, asked if he wanted to press charges. If there isn't paperwork to go with those facts, there will be hell to pay, Noblier."

Gus's features twisted as if he had just caught wind of day-old roadkill. "Your client is delusional and a liar, and those are some of his better qualities," he said, cutting past the lawyer to the front door of his office. "Get out of here, Kudrow. I've got better things to do with my time than listen to you pass gas through your mouth all morning."

Kudrow bared the teeth the toxins in his body had turned amber. Energy burned in his veins like rocket fuel and he envisioned it searing the cancer out of him. "It's been a pleasure, as always, Sheriff. But not so much a pleasure as ruining you and your rogue, Fourcade, will be."

"Why don't you just do the world a favor and drop dead," Gus suggested.

"I'd never be that nice to you, Noblier. I plan to outlive your days in this office, if for no other reason than spite."

"God should live that long, but you sure as hell won't, I'm glad to say."

"We'll see who gets the last word."

Gus slammed the door on Kudrow's back. "Me, you rotting old turd," he grumbled. He swung toward the side door to his secretary's office and bellowed, "Get in here, Broussard!"

Annie's heart sank as she rose from the chair she'd been waiting in. She had listened with rapt attention to the angry voices that could be quite plainly heard through the door. The heat of the argument seemed to have physically enveloped her. She could feel sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades and moistening the armpits of her uniform.

Valerie Comb, Noblier's secretary, cut her a sideways look. A bottle blonde, she had been four years ahead of Annie in school, head basketball cheerleader and voted most likely to get pregnant on purpose, which she had done. Now divorced with three kids to feed, she placed her loyalties solidly in Noblier's corner.

Pulling in a deep breath, Annie let herself into the inner sanctum, and closed the door behind her. The sheriff stomped toward her with a bulldog glare and hands jammed at his belt line. Annie braced her feet slightly apart and locked her hands together behind her back.

"You took a statement from Marcus Renard last night?" he said in a tight voice.

"Yes, sir."

"I told you to go home, didn't I, Broussard? Am I getting Alzheimer's or something? Did I just imagine I told you to go home?"

"No, sir."

"Then what the hell were you doing down to Our Lady, taking a statement from Marcus Renard?"

"It had to be done, Sheriff," she said. "I was the officer on the scene. I knew Renard would be only too happy to charge the department with negligence, and-"

"Don't you preach procedure to me, Deputy," he snapped. "You don't think I know procedure? You think I don't know what I'm doing?"

"No, sir- I mean, yes, sir- I-"

"When I tell you to do something, I have a reason for it, Deputy Broussard." He leaned toward her, his whole head as red as a radish out to the tips of his ears. "Sometimes a situation needs to be sorted through before we proceed in the usual way. Do you understand what I'm saying here, Deputy?"

Annie held every muscle in her body stiff, too afraid that she knew exactly what he was saying. "I saw Nick Fourcade beating the shit out of Marcus Renard, Sheriff."

"I'm not saying you didn't. I'm saying you don't know the circumstances. I'm saying you didn't hear the call about a prowler in that part of town. I'm saying you weren't there when the offender resisted arrest."

Annie stared at him for a long moment. "You're saying I wasn't in the room last night when everyone was getting their story straight," she said at last, knowing she was inviting Noblier's wrath. "What Fourcade did last night was illegal. It was wrong."

"And what Renard did to that Bichon girl wasn't?"

"Of course it was, but-"

"Let me tell you something here, Annie," he said, suddenly quieter, gentler. He stepped back and sat on the edge of his desk. His expression was serious, frank, absent of the bluster he regularly blew at the world.

"The world isn't black and white, Annie. It's shades of gray. The world don't follow no procedure handbook. The law and justice are not always the same thing. I'm not saying I condone what Fourcade did. I'm saying I understand what Fourcade did. I'm saying we take care of our own in this department. That means you don't go off half-cocked and try to arrest a detective. That means you don't run and take a statement when I tell you to go home."

"I can't change the fact that I was there, Sheriff, or that Renard knows I was there. How would it look if I hadn't taken his statement?"

"It might look like he was confused about the chain of events. It might look like we were giving him the night to recover before we troubled him further. It might look like we were sorting out the jurisdictional questions here."

Or it might have looked like they were ignoring the victim of a brutal beating, turning their heads the other way because the perpetrator was a cop. It might have looked like they were stalling for time until they could come up with a story.

Annie turned toward the wall that held a pictorial essay on the illustrious career of August F. Noblier. The sheriff in his younger, trimmer days grinning and shaking hands with Governor Edwards. An array of photographs through the years with lesser politicians and celebrities who had passed through Partout Parish during the years of Gus's reign. She had always respected him.

"You did what you did, and we'll deal with it, Deputy," he said, as if she was the one who had broken the law. Annie wondered if he had given Fourcade a reprimand or a pat on the back. "The point is, we could have dealt with the situation more cleanly if you'd stayed on the page with me. You know what I'm saying?"

Annie said nothing. It wouldn't have done any good to point out that she hadn't been given the opportunity to stay on the page, that the book had been slammed shut on her last night, that she had been cut loose and excluded from the proceedings like an outsider. She wasn't sure which was worse-being shut out or being included in a conspiracy.

"I don't want you talking to the press," Noblier said, going around behind his desk to settle himself into his big leather executive's chair. "And I don't want you talking to Richard Kudrow under any circumstances. You understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

" 'No comment.' Can you manage that?"

"Yes, sir."

"And, most of all, I don't want you talking to Marcus Renard. You got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"You were off duty, which is why you didn't hear that 10-70 call that went out. You stumbled into a situation and contained it. Is that what happened?"

"Yes, sir," she whispered, the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach swelling like bread dough.

Noblier stared at her in silence for a moment. "How did Kudrow know you tried to arrest Fourcade? Has he already talked to you?"

"He left a message on my answering machine this morning while I was out running."

"But you didn't talk to him?"

"No."

"Did you tell Renard you arrested Fourcade?"

"No."

"Did you Mirandize Fourcade in front of him?"

"Renard was unconscious."

"Then Kudrow was bluffing, that ugly son of a bitch," Gus muttered to himself. "I hate that man. I don't care that he's dying. I wish he'd hurry up and get it over with. Have you filed an arrest report?"

"Not yet."

"Nor will you. If you've started that paperwork, I want it shredded. Not thrown away. Shredded."

"But Renard is going to press charges-"

"That doesn't mean we have to make it easy for him. Go ahead and write up his complaint, write up your preliminary report, but you did not arrest Fourcade. Get your sergeant's initials on the paperwork, then bring the file straight to me.

"I'm personally taking charge of the case," he said, as if he were trying out the phrase for a future official statement. "It's an unusual situation-allegations being made against one of my men. Requires my undivided attention to see to it justice is served.

"And don't look at me like that, Deputy," he said, pointing an accusatory finger. "We're not doing anything Richard Kudrow hasn't done time and again for the scum he represents."

"Then we're no better than they are," Annie murmured.

"The hell we're not," Noblier growled, reaching for the telephone. "We're the good guys, Annie. We work for Lady Justice. It's just that she can't always see what's what with that damned blindfold on. You're dismissed, Deputy."

The women's locker room in the Partout Parish Sheriff's Department had originally been a janitor's closet. There had been no women on the job when the building was designed in the late sixties, and the blissful chauvinists on the planning committee hadn't foreseen the possibility. Their shortsightedness meant male officers had a locker room with showers and their own rest room, while female personnel got a broom closet that had been converted during the 1993 remodeling.

The only light was a bare bulb in the ceiling. Four battered metal lockers had been salvaged out of the old junior high school and transplanted along one wall. A cheap frame-less mirror hung on the opposite wall above a tiny porcelain sink. When Annie had first come on the job, someone had drilled a peephole half a foot to the left of the mirror from the men's room on the other side. She now checked the wall periodically for new breaches of privacy, filling the holes with spackling compound she kept in her locker alongside her stash of candy bars.

She was the only female deputy who used the room with any regularity, and currently the only female patrol officer. There were two women who worked in the jail, and one female plainclothes juvenile officer, all of whom had come on before the broom closet had been converted and had adjusted to life without it. Annie thought of the room as her own and had tried to spruce it up a little by bringing in a plastic potted palm and a carpet remnant for the concrete floor. A poster from the International Association of Women Police brightened one wall.

Annie sat on her folding chair and faced the door. She couldn't bring herself to face the women in the poster. She was late for patrol, had missed the morning briefing. There was no doubt in her mind that every uniform in the place knew Noblier had called her into his office, and why. Sergeant Hooker had announced the first the minute she stepped into the building. The looks she had drawn from the rest of the men had hinted strongly at the second.

She looked at the file folder on her lap. She had gone so far as to type out the arrest report on Fourcade last night. It had given her a small sense of control to sit at her typewriter at home and put down in black and white what she had seen, what she had done. She had felt a sense of validation for just a little while there in the dead of night. Sheriff Noblier had smashed it flat beneath the weight of his authority this morning.

He wanted her to file a false report. She was supposed to lie, justify brutality, violate God knew how many laws.

"And no one sees anything wrong with that picture but me," she muttered.

Anxiety simmered like acid in her stomach as she left the locker room and headed down the hall.

Hooker rolled an eye at her as she passed the sergeant's desk. "See if you can't contain yourself to arresting criminals today, Broussard."

Annie reserved comment as she signed herself out. "I have to be in court at three o'clock."

"Oh really? You testifying for us or against us?"

"Hypolite Grangnon-burglary," she said flatly.

Hooker narrowed his little pig eyes at her. "Sheriff wants those reports on his desk by noon."

"Yes, sir."

She should have gone straight to the report room and gotten it over with, but she needed air and space, some time on the road to clear her head, and a cup of coffee that didn't taste like boiled sweat socks. She let herself out of the building and sucked in air that smelled of damp earth and green grass.

The rain had subsided around five A.M. Annie had lain awake all night listening to it assault the roof over her head. Finally giving up on the idea of rest, she had forced herself to get out of bed and work out with the free weights and pull-up bar that gave her second bedroom such a decorative flair.

As she worked her aching muscles, she watched for dawn to break over the Atchafalaya basin. There were mornings when the sunrise boiled up over the swamp like a ball of flame and the sky turned shades of orange and pink so intense they seemed liquid. This morning had come in with rolling, angry slate-colored clouds that carried the threat of a storm with a bully's arrogance.

A storm would have suited her, she thought, except that a spring rainstorm would blow over and be forgotten, while the metaphorical storm in which she had landed herself would do neither.

"Deputy Broussard, might I have a moment of your time?"

Annie jerked around toward the source of the low, smooth voice. Richard Kudrow stood propped against the side of the building, holding the front of his old trench coat together like a flasher.

"I'm sorry. No. I don't have time," she said quickly, stepping off the sidewalk and heading across the parking lot toward her cruiser. She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the building.

"You'll have to talk to me sooner or later," the lawyer said, falling in step beside her.

"Then it'll have to be later, Mr. Kudrow. I'm on duty."

"Taxpayer time. Need I point out to you, Miss Broussard, that I myself pay mightily into August Noblier's fat coffers and am, therefore, technically, one of your employers?"

"I'm not interested in your technicalities." She unlocked the car door with one hand while balancing her clipboard, files, and ticket books in the other arm. "It's my sergeant who's gonna kick my butt if I don't get to work."

"Your sergeant? Or Gus Noblier-for talking to me?"

"I don't know what you mean," she lied. She added the car keys to the pile on her arm and started to pull the cruiser's door open.

"Can I hold something for you?" Kudrow offered gallantly, reaching toward her.

"No," Annie snapped, twisting away.

The sudden movement sent the pile sliding off the clipboard. The keys, the ticket books, the files tumbled to the ground, the Renard file spilling its contents. Panicking, Annie dropped the clipboard and fell to the blacktop on her hands and knees, chanting expletives, scrambling to scrape the papers back into the folder before the wind could take them. Kudrow crouched down, reaching for the notebook that had blown open, its pages of details and observations and interview notes fluttering, as tantalizing to a lawyer as a glimpse of lacy underwear. Annie snatched it out of his hand, then saw his liver-spotted hand reach next for the arrest form she hadn't filed and hadn't shredded.

She lunged for it, cracking her elbow hard on the blacktop, crumpling the form in her fist as she grabbed it.

"I've got it. I've got it," she stammered. Turning her face away from Kudrow, she closed her eyes and mouthed a silent thank-you to God. She clutched the mess of papers and folders and clipboard to her chest, rose awkwardly, and backed around the open door of the squad car.

Kudrow watched her with interest. "Something I shouldn't see, Miss Broussard?"

Annie's fingers tightened on the crumpled arrest form. "I have to go."

"You were the officer on the scene last night. My client claims you saved his life. It took courage for you to stop Fourcade," he said, bracing the car door open as Annie slid behind the wheel. "It takes courage to do the right thing."

"How would you know?" Annie grumbled. "You're a lawyer."

The gibe bounced off his jaundiced hide. She could feel the heat of his gaze on her face, though she refused to look at him. A faint, fetid scent of decay touched her nose, and she wondered if it was the bayou or Kudrow.

"The abuse of power, the abuse of office, the abuse of public trust-those are terrible things, Miss Broussard."

"So are stalking and murder. It's Deputy Broussard." She turned the key in the ignition and slammed the door shut.

Kudrow stepped back as the car rolled forward. He pulled his coat closed around him as the spring breeze swept across the parking lot. Disease had skewed his internal thermometer to where he was always either freezing or on fire. Today he was cold to the marrow, but his soul was burning up with purpose. If he could have been half a step quicker, he would have been holding an arrest report in his hand. An arrest report on Nick Fourcade, the thug who was not sitting in a jail cell this morning, thanks to August F. Noblier.

"I'll ruin you both," he murmured as he watched the squad car turn onto the street. "And there's the lady who's going to help me do it."