The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (19 page)

Earl Perry Jr. is a dandyish sort of fellow who in his spare time takes photographs of car races in places like Monte Carlo, but he is also intimately acquainted with the doings of the New Orleans Criminal Courthouse, and just the man for Antoine. Since, by the time Earl had negotiated Antoine’s release, he had been in lockup for more than two weeks, and since it was now far more crowded and a whole lot hotter (the air conditioning had still not been repaired from the storm), it no longer provided the Betty Ford–like R&R Antoine had earlier not seemed to mind. There was also, said Earl, the fact that “Our local criminal aristocracy is not held in very high esteem by the foreign nationals currently visiting our jails,” or, as he translated, “the Mexicans are beating the shit out of the likes of Antoine” and the petty crackheads he ran around with. Earl was hoping that Antoine might have finally been scared straight.

We all hoped so because in addition to posting bail, Earl had to personally vouch for Antoine in front of the judge, and I had to meet with the court officer who collects the fines so we could work out a payment plan for him, as well as with his probation officer, a Haitian Antoine loathed named Mr. Ernest, who would administer weekly drug tests and make sure he remained employed. Both gentlemen were clearly amazed by the fact that a well-dressed white woman accompanied by a real-live criminal attorney in a good-looking suit and titanium glasses had taken such an interest in Antoine, a fact that was not lost on Antoine either. He vowed, for the millionth time, to stay on the straight and narrow.

I was, of course, glad to see him, and within a week, our house and yard looked like an entirely different clean and organized place. I wanted to keep it that way, and I also hoped that Antoine might at last want a clean and organized place of his own. When I interviewed the doctor for the
Newsweek
story on the dire mental health issues confronting the city, I had also talked to a homeless counselor who told me about a new facility for recovering addicts who could rent subsidized apartments with kitchenettes and private bathrooms in exchange for taking part in counseling programs and submitting to random drug testing. I had seen them and they were nice; when Antoine turned up, I had called her and she told she would help me get on the waiting list. But when I mentioned them to Antoine, he tried his hardest to act interested and said he’d definitely like to go see them—“soon”—but I knew it was a trip we’d never make. As long as the Ozanam Inn was still accepting folks for the night, Antoine had no intention of getting a place of his own.

Still, I was heartened. Sorting out his legal troubles was a definite step in the right direction, but it was trickier than I had thought. Less than a month after he had been released, he was picked up again, on his way back to the house after buying lunch for himself and Lisa, Elizabeth’s efficient maid whose services I was sharing in Rose’s absence. It had been a case of profiling pure and simple—two cops stopped him and asked him what he was up to while he walked down a public sidewalk carrying a paper bag filled with two hot sausage po-boys and couple of cans of Cokes. But when he showed his I.D., the dread attachments popped up again. It was true that the information in the computer had not been amended to include the terms of his current arrangement. But, as I also found out when I called the officer in charge of the fines, Antoine had not made a single payment since we’d been in his office, even though every time I paid him he assured me he was doing so.

At any rate, the two cops handcuffed the “prisoner” and threw him in the backseat and the only reason I even knew anything about it was because Antoine had insisted that they drop off Lisa’s lunch before taking him downtown. Now that is precisely the kind of innate sweetness and utter guilelessness that gets me about Antoine every time, so that when it came time to write another hefty check to Earl so that he could get him out, I didn’t even mind, and thereafter started paying the weekly installments on the fines myself. It took me a while to make Antoine understand that I was paying him a little bit less so that I could send the money he owed to the courthouse and thus keep him from getting picked up again. But after a while, he got over being mad about that and we continued along in the same happy and highly dysfunctional existence together that we had enjoyed, with one longer-than-usual interruption that we never discussed, for the past decade.

A
LL SUMMER, WE
had been looking for a dog—the beagle that I had always wanted and never been allowed to have—in earnest. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find a beagle, which is bred for rabbit hunting after all, when the denizens of the parishes of southwest Louisiana are so crazy about the sport that an election was once postponed when it fell on the opening day of the season. Apparently, Hurricane Rita had put the breeders there out of business, so we turned to the newspaper. At one point we’d been on our way to pick up one we’d found in the classifieds, but when I called from the car the kid who answered said the ad had left out the fact that theirs were miniatures, so we turned around. I wanted the same sturdy animals I had seen growing up—one of the cotton farmers near our house leased a fenced corner of one of his fields to a serious rabbit hunter, and every day on the way to and from school I passed the enormous doghouse, with dozens of adorable beagles lounging in the sun atop its roof.

Finally, in August, I was in Chicago visiting Frances, and John emailed me an ad. The guy selling beagle pups for $100 had a house in a little subdivision in River Ridge, right by the airport. John picked me up from my plane and we went right over. I knew we were in the right place when the breeder came out wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and proudly told us in his Cajun accent, “Me, I ain’t had on shoes for three months, me.” He made his barefooted way to a fenced-in side yard, whistled, and two tiny pups came waddling over from their respective mothers. I knew “the one” immediately, and after I reached over the fence and picked up his trembling little boy body the deal was done. The guy assured us the puppy had papers—“I just can’t quite lay my hands on them”—and that he would eat anything, including the powdered eggs he’d been giving him. We had been poring through beagle books, all of which recommended expensive healthy stuff like Science Diet and Eukanuba, but this puppy seemed healthy as could be, so we paid the money and left with him, while the guy apologized profusely that the watermelon wine he’d been fermenting in his garage was not ready yet.

John drove and I held the dog in my lap where he stayed for the next two days, dozing and munching affectionately on my hand. While he chewed I told him the story of the beagle hunt I had embarked on at age seven after I had talked my father into buying me the Styrofoam pith helmet that had been on sale at the local A&P. I have no idea why I wanted it so badly or what in the world it was doing on the shelves of the grocery store, but as soon as we got home, I put it on and rode my bike all through the overgrown pecan grove near our house, looking up in hopes of finding beagles lolling in the branches like leopards. When our neighbor’s teenage son Ephraim, on whom I had an intense crush, asked me what in the world I was doing, I solemnly explained that I was on a beagle safari. I do not have much faith that the puppy understood a word I was saying, but it wouldn’t be the last time I talked to him at length. To me the story was confirmation that the dog was my destiny. At McGee’s suggestion, we named him Henry, because he looks like one, and it is beyond ridiculous how much I love that dog.

To us, Henry’s presence made the house on First Street complete. It wasn’t technically complete of course—my father kept asking me if we had grass yet and I kept telling him no, we didn’t have grass, and the concrete for the new sidewalks hadn’t been poured and the garage door had still not been replaced by the windows and there was no fence around the air-conditioning units and the iron fence had been repaired but not painted. I had a new electrician but he had installed only half the outside lights and I hadn’t seen him since January, and I had yet another plumber but he could not solve the problem of why rusty water was the only kind that poured into my fine and increasingly brown Waterworks bathtub. We’d thrown out the spotted rug in the sunroom, where the roof still leaked and there were not yet any curtains on the windows in the parlors or our bedroom or my office, but we’d gotten a chandelier for the dining room and gotten rid of the dangling bulbs in the parlors in favor of lamps, so that was something.

Joe had taken on so many jobs he was suddenly in short supply, and when I called him to find out where he had been hiding, the first thing he asked me was “You’re not gonna cry are you?” in a tone that let me know he had been listening to a lot of clients cry lately. As Katrina’s anniversary neared a lot of people were getting a tad jumpy. But Joe knew me well enough to know I was not going to cry, I just wanted him to come over, so he did, armed with his brushes and a couple of burritos from Chapparal Patio. Joe and I were family now, in this together, learning to take our silver linings wherever we can find them, including at a taco stand in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.

On the last Saturday night in August, a year and a day since our first dinner party with Byron and Cameron and Egan and the lobster spaghetti, the five of us gathered again. And this time, since neither of them was stuck in evacuation traffic on the way to the Delta, McGee and Elizabeth joined us.

John grilled skirt steak on the Weber we’d finally retrieved from the storage unit, and I made salsa verde and squash casserole and Cameron brought her famous pound cake. For the occasion, I’d bought some more Billecart-Salmon. Before we sat down, we went outside and toasted to friendship and love and the city we couldn’t seem to leave and, finally to the house on First Street that was now my one true home. When I looked up, the stars were no longer visible, but that was okay. I knew that they were there.

O
N
J
ANUARY
17, 2007, almost a year and five months after Katrina hit, and five days before the manuscript of this book was due to my already long-suffering editor, there was a robbery at the house on First Street. John had an early business dinner and I had a late one, and there had been maybe an hour during which no one was home. John arrived first and found the kitchen window jimmied open; I was still at Stella!, the upscale sibling of Stanley, where we had enjoyed those first post-Katrina five-dollar hamburgers. When John called me on my cell phone, he told me all my jewelry was gone, and two TVs, but I could tell there was something else, something he was having a hard time coming out with. “Is it Henry?” I shrieked. “Henry’s dead, isn’t he?” When I started to cry, John reassured me that Henry was not only alive and well, the thief had locked him in the laundry room. We both managed to laugh briefly at that, knowing our ever-enthusiastic puppy had probably greeted the bad guy so joyously he had to lock him up in order to get on with the business at hand. (To this day, Henry’s nickname in the neighborhood is “The Burglar’s Assistant.”)

But the chuckle was short-lived. Henry was still with us, thank God, but my laptop was gone. When John finally came out and said it, I’m pretty sure I let out one of those low guttural moans, a sound not unlike that of a wounded cat. The implications of what I was hearing were enormous: I had backed up exactly one chapter of the whole book the old-fashioned way, by printing it out. Everything else was in my hard drive: my daily post-Katrina diary, the timeline I had put together from the hundreds of newspapers I’d kept piled up in my office (and recently thrown away), the other ten chapters of the book.

All I could think was what a total idiot I was, but I’d been spoiled. I’ve had computers melt down, blow up, and simply cease to turn on, but some geek could always retrieve my hard drive and everything was fine. It never occurred to me that somebody might just take the whole thing. I was so blindsided by losing more than a year’s worth of work that I didn’t even think about the stunningly beautiful 1920s diamond cuff that had been my great-grandmother’s, or my grandmother’s yellow diamond ring my mother had given me on the night of the Rebirth New Orleans fundraiser, or the diamond chandelier earrings that were a gift from John when we got engaged. My heart sank to my knees as the valet brought my car around and I drove the seemingly interminable three miles home to the scene of the crime.

When I arrived, it was eleven o’clock; the Garden District Security officers were there along with a couple of officers from the Sixth District police station. In my office I noticed that the huge tote bag containing various notebooks and folders was missing, and the contents dumped on the floor. The deep rectangular tote, bearing the lavender logo of my good friend Mish, a Manhattan jeweler, was an ironic carrying case for a pile of earrings and rings and bracelets and pearls, along with my laptop, and two twenty-six-inch flat screens. A bigger flat screen, far too unwieldy for the Mish bag, had been removed from the sunroom and left in front of the French doors the thief had departed through.

When a man named Dufossat, the lead detective on what was now officially a case, arrived, I excitedly pointed at the abandoned TV, which had already been dusted for fingerprints, along with the window the culprit had pried open and the counter he had climbed over to get inside. Fingerprints and a footprint were clearly visible but Dufossat was not nearly so impressed as I: “This ain’t
CSI
, lady.” Disheartened, I remembered that New Orleans, at this stage of the recovery, was still without a working crime lab. He took down a list of the stolen stuff and left with a promise to be in touch, but not before warning me that the laptop, which has little resale value, was probably already in a Dumpster.

It would have been easy to blame the whole damn thing on Eddie. One of the many, many items on his punch list that had never been punched was the installation of a security system. He had “a guy,” he kept telling me, a wireless genius who would hook up everything from the burglar alarm and the doorbell to our sound system and computer network. This was the January before the storm—I was not yet on to the dangerously consistent inadequacies of Eddie’s “guys” and, anyway, who was I to question a wireless genius? By March, when we moved a host of boxes into the finished parlors and there was still no progress on the security front, I started getting a little jittery. “Don’t worry, he’s coming,” Eddie told me, referring to the wireless genius. “He’s just really busy.” Naturally, I assumed that the delay was due to his superior talent—clearly, he was swamped with huge jobs hooking up vital systems for sensitive clients, and we, understandably, were last on his list. Then Eddie told me his genius was a high school math teacher. “But he’s a really smart guy.”

In April, we had three appointments but they were all cancelled at the last minute. In May, I got worried when Elizabeth told me a math teacher at Lizzy’s school, the same one that employed the genius, had recently been fired over some transgression the school refused to name.

In retrospect, of course, I cannot fathom why I didn’t say, “Eddie, every security system under the sun is wireless. We don’t need a genius”—especially not one who, in my imagination, had morphed into a child molester or worse. But I did not say that or anything remotely like it. We’d been at Elizabeth’s for months, there was still no move-in date in sight, and Eddie was increasingly AWOL. At this point an alarm was the least of my problems.

But all that changed on the morning of January 18. John and Vasser and I were each in a frenzy of activity, making appointments with security companies, color-Xeroxing photos of my jewelry (the thing about serious jewelry is that you usually wear it to the kind of parties where your photograph is taken), making lists of pawnshops to visit.

Three days later we had a brand-new wireless security system complete with every conceivable bell and whistle, the installation of which had been almost as simple as writing the check, and an illustrated list of the missing jewelry along with the serial numbers of the TV and laptop. Vasser and I spent an entire day dropping it off, in the rain, at the dozens of pawnshops on our list, an unproductive and wholly depressing enterprise (there is nothing so grim as watching desperate people try to get a pitiful amount of money for everything from wedding rings to chainsaws), but we did deliver several to the sixth district headquarters, where someone, in turn, sent it to Crime Stoppers. A week later, a photo of my wrist sporting a particularly graphic gold bracelet appeared in the newspaper and was flashed on all four local news stations with information about the break-in. I was in New York, meeting with my editor about our now-delayed manuscript, when Dufossat called to tell me he had a tip. Ecstatic, I asked him what it was, but he said the fax from the Crime Stoppers office was too hard to read, he’d have them resend it and call me right back.

This thrilling news was followed by eleven days of radio silence. I called Dufossat ten times a day and emailed him at least as many times. I could not fathom how we’d gone from “I’ll call you in a few minutes” to no communication whatsoever—until I got an email from him explaining he’d had to take time off to rest up for the busy Mardi Gras week ahead. When I called him back I actually managed to contain myself. “What,” I asked, “happened to the tip from Crime Stoppers?” Oh that, he said, and explained that they had never re-faxed it. “GODDAMN IT, DUFOSSAT,” I screamed, silently, to myself, “GO GET THE GODDAMN THING.” Out loud, I asked him to please go get it. He did, but after almost two weeks, the hot tip—a girl in a bar had heard a guy she knew talking about a Garden District “jewelry heist,” she even knew his address—was stone cold. Dusfossat told me when he went to check on the house it had been vacated. “NO KIDDING, YOU EFFING LUNATIC,” I screamed silently again, but at this point I was just entertaining myself. Clearly there was no point in saying anything to Dufossat, out loud or otherwise. My only solace was the note I’d received from the house’s former owner, Phinizy Percy: “I just wanted to let you know of my deep compassion for you. Let us pray that these despicable criminals are apprehended, and soon!”

By this time, I had resigned myself to rewriting the whole book, but now I wanted my jewelry back. We hired a private detective who was very big but mostly bluster. I went to Houston for a family friend’s birthday and spent a day perusing the seemingly endless number of pawnshops there. Nothing, anywhere, turned up, and my perfunctory emails to Dufossat were met with feeble responses or none at all. In late spring the city’s body count was back up, and the loss of my computer and the jewelry I could never afford to replace was hardly of paramount importance.

Then, six months later, I got an email from my friend Mish with a link to an eBay page featuring the earrings he’d made for me as a wedding present. He wouldn’t be offended if I were selling them, he said politely, but he’d heard I’d been robbed and he thought perhaps someone else might have put them up for sale. I was amazed at the kismet: his boyfriend had been browsing the site and happened to see them almost the second they were offered by a dealer in Metairie, ten minutes away on the interstate. The dealer’s name was Anton Feine, from Anton’s Fine Jewelry, an establishment that had not come up in Vasser’s and my pawnshop search, but when I pulled up outside the building it was clear what kind of operation Anton was running—there were more bars on the windows and doors than in most jails and two doors to be buzzed through before being allowed inside. Stupidly, I had called first. When I walked in, the prissy Anton, heavily bedecked in gold with a head of very badly dyed brown hair, was nervously flitting around while his sister, who looked like a gangster’s moll, did all the talking. I couldn’t see the earrings unless I paid for them, she said; further I’d have to leave the store until the police, whom I had called, arrived. I had no intention of doing any such thing and noted several conspicuous gaps in Anton’s many display cases where items had been sold—or hidden—recently enough that they hadn’t yet been replaced. When the Jefferson Parish deputy arrived, he took the earrings as “evidence” and gave me the number of a detective, Sergeant Martin Dunn, in the “pawnshop department.” When I called Dunn from the car, he explained that the law required all pawnshop owners to take down the driver’s license information of everybody they purchased items from and to provide a complete inventory of the stuff. Anton had reported the earrings, along with: a platinum and diamond circle pin that had been my mother’s; a platinum and sapphire straight line bracelet that had been my grandmother’s—and my thirtieth birthday present; the antique gold cuff bracelet, the one circulated on the news that had been a gift from John after a particularly festive Rib Room lunch together; a sapphire, diamond, and ruby brooch in the shape of a butterfly; two pairs of gold hoops, and, finally, the diamond engagement earrings. It wasn’t everything but it was a lot, and I was thrilled at the prospect of getting it back. But then Detective Dunn gave me the bad news: the law also states that pawnshop owners are not required to report who they sell their wares to or even keep track—they were only required to return the stuff they still possessed. Anton, of course, was already claiming that he’d sold every other piece and had no idea to whom. Further, even if I managed to find some of the pieces myself, the new owners were not required to give them back, unlike what happens when you buy, say, a stolen car. All I could figure was that there must be one hell of a pawnshop lobby in Baton Rouge.

Compared to Orleans Parish, Jefferson Parish, which for years was run by the iron hand of the late Sheriff Harry Lee, a Chinese-American country music singer with a penchant for straight talk and a merciless attitude toward the criminal element, was a model of efficiency. Within the week, Detective Dunn had called me to say the earrings had been photographed and logged and that I could come pick them up. He was on Anton’s case, he said, but there was nothing he could really force him to do. Then he showed me the black-and-white Xeroxed copy of the driver’s license belonging to Anton’s seller, a twenty-year-old black male with dreadlocks, a tattoo of a cross on the bridge of his nose, and indecipherable words tattooed on each cheek. The likelihood of his having legal access to almost a hundred thousand dollars worth of estate jewelry was nil and Anton surely would have known that the second he laid eyes on him. Even more disturbingly, I came to find out he has a handful of steady clients, including some “nice” Garden District ladies I know—and who also have to know perfectly well that they’re buying hot goods.

Under prodding from the good Detective Dunn, Anton finally coughed up the butterfly brooch to keep me at bay, and because there is no recourse against him in the criminal courts, John filed a civil suit against him, though he was so cagy it took weeks to serve the papers. The seller (who may or not be the actual thief) is currently in jail for another crime and 1 am trying to figure out how to get to him to ask him where he might have sold the remaining stuff. I still haven’t gotten around to replacing the TV in the kitchen, but as you can see, I did buy a new computer—on which I rewrote the manuscript—along with a backup hard drive, which I now use daily. Henry, who has grown into a fine, fine dog, continues to lick the face of everyone who comes in the door, though happily no one else has arrived through the kitchen window.