morning. Before Katrina there would have been three or four times that number. The camera was close enough so Murphy could read the license-plate numbers on twenty-six of the cars. One didn’t have a tag, and one went by so fast he couldn’t read the numbers.
On the way home Murphy stopped at the Star amp; Crescent and had two beers. Then he went home to watch the videotape from Speedy’s tire shop.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thursday, July 26, 9:30 AM
“How was court?” Murphy said as he stepped into the squad room.
Gaudet swiveled his head away from his computer keyboard. “A waste of time.”
Murphy dropped into the chair behind the desk he shared with a detective on another shift. “They didn’t call you to the stand?”
“I sat there all day and they didn’t even finish picking the jury.”
“Couldn’t the assistant DA put you on standby?”
Gaudet shrugged. “He’s some new tight-ass prick, said he needed me there to help with jury selection.”
Murphy looked at the clock on the wall. “What time do you have to be back?”
“He said he wanted me there by nine.”
“So why are you still here?”
“I told him I had to be at the firing range until noon.”
“We’re not going to the range today,” Murphy said. “I can’t even remember the last time we shot.”
“The DA don’t know that.”
“Good point.” Murphy spun around and started thumbing through the stack of pink message slips on the desk.
“How did it go with the surveillance cameras?” Gaudet asked.
Murphy didn’t see any messages he felt like returning. He threw the entire pile in the wastebasket next to his desk. He looked at Gaudet. “I got a bunch of license-plate numbers from one of the courthouse cameras. The other cameras were pretty much a bust. I also got a few tags off of a security camera at a tire shop.”
“Speedy’s?”
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “You know him?”
Gaudet nodded. “I bought some retreads from him once for my nephew’s car. He did some time back in the day, but he’s straight now.”
“I got that impression.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, while you were wasting time in court-”
“Hey, brother, I’m sorry about that. You know I would have been there if I could. I love walking around in the hot sun for hours on end, sweating my balls off.”
“You probably didn’t even have court. I didn’t get a subpoena.”
“It’s an old case,” Gaudet said. “From back when you were off the job, drinking heavily and trysting with barmaids.”
“Did you say trysting?”
“Damn right, I did. What of it?”
“Do you even know what a tryst is?”
“I used the word correctly, didn’t I,” Gaudet said, his voice loaded with feigned indignation. “Just because I’m black and went to Delgado instead of Notre Dame, don’t mean I’m not ed-u-cated.”
“I only went to Notre Dame for a year.”
“Then you went to Loyola.”
“Yeah, for another year.”
“Still, you’re a white boy and you went to two fancy schools. It’s not my fault you weren’t smart enough to graduate from either one.”
Murphy thought about the winter he spent in South Bend, the coldest he had ever known. Despite the freezing temperature, it had been a good year. His first time away from home. Then a king-size guilt trip from his mother-a Catholic boy’s rite of passage-brought him back. The scholarship wasted. Then a year uptown at Jesuit- run Loyola, until the money ran out.
After that, he spent three years working on a tugboat. He was making good money and figured one day he might earn a skipper’s cap. Then he saw a billboard advertisement for the New Orleans Police Department. He could still remember the exact words: BE A PROFESSIONAL AND PROTECT YOUR COMMUNITY. JOIN THE FIGHT. JOIN THE NOPD.
In the mid-1990s, New Orleans was the most violent city in America. A police recruiter told Murphy he could help bring New Orleans back to its former glory as one of America’s great cities. Murphy had bought that bullshit hook, line, and sinker. He signed up despite the huge pay cut. His uncle had been on the job then and tried to talk him out of joining the department. Murphy was hardheaded.
His partner’s mock condescension snapped Murphy back to the present. “While you were wasting time in college trying to be a jock,” Gaudet said, “I was studying recidivism and probated-spiral-compression theory on my way to earning an associate’s degree in criminal justice from a fine institution of higher learning.”
“Delgado Community College.”
“That’s right,” Gaudet said. “But I like to think of it as Delgado University.”
“It took you four years to get a two-year degree.”
“I read slow.”
“At least you learned the word tryst,” Murphy said. “That’s something.”
“Speaking of tryst, what did you decide to do about that thing you were talking about yesterday?”
“That wasn’t a tryst,” Murphy said. “When you move in together, the tryst is over.”
Gaudet laughed. “That ain’t all that’s over.”
Murphy nodded.
“Besides,” Gaudet said, “I just like saying that word, feeling the way it rolls off my tongue.” He stuck his tongue out and flicked it up and down.
Murphy ignored the urge to throw up. “I’m going to do exactly what I said. I’m going to give the rank one more shot. Then I’m going to do whatever it takes to get some resources for this case.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Murphy shrugged. “Me too.”
By midafternoon, Murphy was only halfway through his list of license-plate numbers.
The process was tedious. He had to run each number through the police department’s ponderous, 1980s-era computer system known as MOTION, which stood for Metropolitan Orleans Total Information Online Network. Some MOTION terminals were so antiquated they looked like 1960s vacuum-tube television sets. The program required users to log in with a social-security number and password for each query. For Murphy that meant more than thirty individual log-ins.
The different programs within the system weren’t integrated. When the registered owner of a vehicle popped up, using a program called SLIX, Murphy had to jot down the owner’s name and date of birth, then exit the vehicle subsystem and log in to the criminal-history subsystem, called MONA, to find out if the vehicle owner had ever been arrested or had an active warrant.
And so it went, back and forth between SLIX and MONA, running tags, then checking for criminal histories.
By five o’clock he was done. Of the twenty-six tags from the courthouse camera, twelve of the registered owners had rap sheets. Of the six license-plate numbers he had pulled off the surveillance tape from Speedy’s tire shop, only one had a record, but Murphy put that record at the top of his list.
Sometime between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM -it was impossible to pinpoint the time, because Murphy wasn’t sure exactly when Speedy had started recording-a Chevy Camaro had driven past the tire shop. Because the
