“He’s really good with computers?” I asked, glaring at mine from across the room.
“Brilliant-he’s absolutely brilliant.” She shook her head. “Such a fucking waste-because you know he’s eventually going to have to go back to criminal shit if he wants to eat.”
“Do you have his name and number?” I hooked a thumb at my computer. “That stupid fucking thing is still all fucked up. And I’d rather pay this kid to fix it than those know-nothing assholes at the repair shop.”
Fixing my computer was the first job I’d given Jephtha Carriere. He came over, and did a few things on it. Fifteen minutes later it was working better than it had when I’d first bought it. He tried explaining what the problem had been, but it made no sense to me. I wrote him a check, and then asked, “Could you design a hack-proof system for a computer network?”
“There’s no such thing as hack-proof,” he’d scoffed, shaking his head. “As long as someone wants to get in, they will. Anything I design might work for now, but someone would crack my system soon enough.” He gave me a sunny smile. “You know, for most hackers, it’s not so much about the information they can access or crashing a system-that’s what people don’t understand. It’s the challenge…to see if you can outsmart the original programmer. The harder it is, the harder they’ll try. And when you pull it off, it’s a rush better than any drug.”
“Are you willing to give it a try?” I asked. Paige had been right. He was incredibly bright and likeable. I also liked that he hadn’t assured me he could do something he didn’t think possible. “The pay would be really good, and it could be a regular gig-updating the system, making it even more secure. I’ll tell you what-why don’t you see if you can hack into the system, and give me an analysis of what needs to be done. Like I said, the pay would be really good. And I might need you to do some things for me from time to time-like fix my computer, or things I don’t have the skills to do.”
“I don’t want to do anything illega,.” He replied. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to do anything illegal. I could lose my license.”
“Yeah, sure,” he’d shrugged. “How good is the pay?”
I told him, and his eyes widened. “Are you serious?” When I nodded, he said, “I’ll get right on it.” Two days later, he e-mailed a detailed analysis of the weaknesses in the system-and it went right over my head. But one thing I did understand was
I took the report to my boss at Crown Oil, Barbara Castlemaine, and she immediately authorized me to hire him. He started work that very day.
A week later, we did a test run on his system.
Not a single computer programmer or expert at Crown Oil could break into it.
He’s been working for me ever since.
Over the years, I’d become fond of Jephtha. His jail experience had the effect it should have-he was firmly on the straight and narrow path now. He had no desire to ever go back.
Jephtha lived with his current girlfriend in a single shotgun on Constantinople Street in the Irish Channel. His girlfriends were one of Jephtha’s freely admitted problems. The Bourbon Street strip clubs-and the huge-breasted bleached blondes who danced there, were his biggest weakness. He’d dated a string of them-falling madly in love each time, swearing she was ‘the one’-until she walked out on him or stole from him. Since he’d started working for me, I started doing background checks on every last one of them-not that it made a bit of difference to him. When Jephtha was in love, he didn’t want to hear anything bad about the object of his affection-because she was a goddess of perfection in his eyes.
His current girlfriend’s stage name at the Catbox Club was Tiffani. Her real name was Abby Grosjean, and she was worth all of her predecessors combined. Abby was from Plaquemines Parish, the oldest daughter of a shrimper. She’d left home when she was nineteen, when her father took a second wife she didn’t like, and headed for New Orleans. Her only work experience was waiting tables in a small diner. She did that for a while after she got into town, tired of it quickly, and made a decision to, as she put it, “put my body to work for me instead of the other way around. God gave me big boobs, he must have wanted me to use ‘em, right?” She bleached her dark hair white- blonde and applied for work as a dancer at the Catbox Club. “I was on the drill team in high school,” she’d told me after she’d moved in with Jephtha. “I just use the same moves we learned at drill camp and voila, I became a stripper.” I liked her because she was honest and a hard worker, and unlike her predecessors, she actually cared about Jephtha. She did her best to make sure he ate decent and regular meals, and tried to keep the house as tidy as she could. She was taking a couple of classes at the University of New Orleans, majoring in pre-law, no less.
The house on Constantinople had belonged to his grandmother. She’d died while he was in prison and left it to him. It was a typical New Orleans shotgun house-so-called because if you stood in the front door and fired a shotgun, the bullet would go all the way through the house and out the back door without hitting a wall. Typical of the style, the house was long and narrow. It was badly in need of paint. The yard was also a mess-Jephtha rarely remembered to mow the small patch of lawn, and the roses his grandmother had planted grew wild and out of control. The house also listed slightly to the right. Jephtha’s beat-up old Oldsmobile, with its cracked windshield, leprous-looking paint job, and a screwdriver holding the driver’s window shut sat out in front. Some of the shutters on the windows hung loose-Abby was always nagging at him to do something about them because of the way they banged against the house in the wind. “It’s like talking to a wall,” she’d once told me after haranguing him to no avail.
I parked behind his car, wondering again why no one ever had it towed as abandoned. I opened the gate and winced as it screeched. Inside the house, the dogs started barking. The front door opened before I even made it up the groaning steps onto the porch.
“Hey,” Abby said. She was wearing what looked like a Catholic school uniform-at a school with very lax moral standards. There was no bra under her white shirt, which she’d tied to show her midriff, and I could see the nipples outlined through its tightness. Her feet were bare, showing dark pink polish on her toenails and the scorpion tattoo on her inner calf. She looked like she was about thirteen-except for the massive breasts-and her face was clear of make-up. She never wore make-up unless she was going to work, and she’d tied the bleached hair back in a ponytail that made her look even younger than she usually did. She was smoking an unfiltered Camel. She flicked ash and stood aside. “Go on in-he’s at the computer, where else would he be?” A hint of annoyance crept into her voice.
“Everything okay, Abby?”
She shrugged. “I just get tired of nagging him to mow the damned lawn. I might as well just give up and do it myself.” She took another drag, and winked at me. “Go on in, Chanse. I just made some sweet tea-it’s in the fridge. Help yourself.”
I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks.”
“I just put a strawberry cobbler in the oven. It’ll be ready in about an hour. You want some?”
I winked and patted my stomach. “Not on my diet.”
She made a farting noise with her lips. “You and Jephtha both could use a little more meat on your bones, you ask me.”
I laughed and walked inside. Despite Abby’s best efforts, the house on the inside always looked unkempt. It was probably the dog hair coating the 1950’s style furniture. I greeted Rhett and Greta, the huge matching black labs, with the head rubs and back scratching that sent them in paroxysms of dog ecstasy, and headed back to the ‘computer lab’, as Jeptha called it.
The computer lab always looked like a bomb had gone off recently. Sometimes I thought my need for order in my house bordered on the neurotic-my therapist claimed it was a ‘control issue’-“subconsciously, you have a need for control, and since you cannot control the future or what’s going to happen to you, you exercise that need for control by controlling your home environment.” He’d even said that was part of the reason I worked out regularly-to gain ‘control’ over my body. While going to the therapist was helping me, there were times I thought he was full of shit.
But even my therapist would understand why walking into Jephtha’s computer lab made me cringe inwardly. There was a thick layer of dust on everything-he refused to let Abby clean in there. Piles of newspapers and paper covered every available surface. Empty plastic soda bottles were scattered all over the floor. Jephtha was partial to every conceivable kind of snack that came in a bag-potato chips, pretzels, and corn chips. If Abby didn’t cook, he would probably live on chips. He always kept the curtains closed, and the only light he ever turned on was the one on the desk by whatever computer he was working on.
