The Mafia Biker and The Lawyer

The Ninth Ward Legal Aid office smelled like old coffee and dry paper, which Nicki Arceneaux had decided long ago was the smell of justice, unglamorous, slightly bitter, and always running low. She had a stack of case files on her left, an empty mug on her right, and a landlord-tenant dispute open on her screen that had already consumed six hours of a Tuesday she hadn’t had to spare. The landlord in question owned fourteen properties in the Lower Ninth, all of them structurally questionable, all of them full. He also had a cousin on the city council and a lawyer from a firm whose lobby probably cost more than this entire building. None of that mattered to Nicki in the way he seemed to think it would. It mostly just made her sharper. She was annotating the lease violation clause when her phone buzzed. She ignored it but it buzzed again. Then, a third time, rapid and insistent, in the way that meant someone was calling, not messaging, and the only person who called her like that, back-to-back, relentlessly, was Jo. She picked up. “Jo, I’m in the middle of…” “They arrested me.” Jo’s voice was flat. It was the voice register Jo used when she was holding herself together with both hands and couldn’t afford to let go. “Nicki. They arrested me.” Nicki was already standing. “Where are you?” “Eighth District. They brought me in about an hour ago. I didn’t call right away because I thought..” A breath. “I thought it was a mistake, that someone would figure it out, but they’re not figuring it out, Nicki. They’ve got paperwork.” “What kind of paperwork?” “I don’t know. They haven’t shown me anything. They keep saying possession with intent. Nicki, I don’t…you know I don’t...“ “I know.” Nicki was already moving, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, pulling her jacket off the back of her chair. “Don’t say anything else, not even to them, not to anyone in that room with you. Do you hear me? Not one word.” “I haven’t.” “Good. Keep it that way. I’m coming.” She hung up, grabbed her bag, and told Marcus at the front desk she had a family emergency. He started to ask something but she was already out the door. The drive to the Eighth District took eleven minutes. Nicki made it in eight, which she attributed to the fact that she knew every shortcut between Bywater and the Garden District by heart, and also to the fact that when her family needed her, she did not believe in traffic laws as a binding moral framework. She’d grown up in the Ninth Ward, same as Jo. They were cousins technically. Nicki’s mother and Jo’s father were siblings but they’d been raised more like sisters. Same block for the first twelve years of their lives, same school until Jo moved in with her grandmother in Tremé. Close enough that when Jo called, Nicki didn’t think. She moved. Jo was twenty-four and worked as a community liaison for a non-profit housing advocacy organization. She organized, attended city meetings, and knocked on doors in neighborhoods that developers had been circling for the last three years like something patient and very hungry. She did not deal drugs. She did not know people who dealt drugs, not that she ran with. Nicki knew Jo’s life the way she knew her own, not perfectly, but well enough to recognize when something was wrong with the picture. The Eighth District station was a beige building that managed to look both bureaucratic and vaguely threatening, which Nicki had always thought was an intentional architectural choice. She pushed through the front door, identified herself at the desk, and asked to speak with whoever had booked Josephine Arceneaux. The officer who eventually came out to meet her had the look of a man who found attorneys professionally irritating but was experienced enough not to show it openly. His name tag said PIKE. Detective, not patrol. She filed that away. “Ms. Arceneaux,” he said. “Attorney Arceneaux,” she said pleasantly. “I’m here for my client. I’d like to see the arrest report and the charging documents, and I’d like to speak with her privately before any further questioning.” “She hasn’t been questioned yet.” “Then we’d like to keep it that way until I’ve had a chance to confer with her.” She held his gaze. “That’s not a request, Detective.” Something moved behind his eyes. Not quite irritation. He held it for a second, then nodded and gestured for her to follow. Jo looked like she hadn’t slept, which made sense given that it was barely past nine in the evening and she’d presumably been sitting in this room for over an hour running every version of this scenario and whatever might have happened through her head. She looked up when Nicki came in, and the relief on her face was the kind that comes from being alone with something frightening and then suddenly not being alone anymore. Nicki sat down across from her and kept her voice even. “Tell me everything. From the beginning.” Jo told her. She’d been at a community meeting in the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood watch thing, trying to get signatures for a petition against a proposed rezoning. When she left around seven, still light out, two patrol cars were waiting. They told her she matched a description. She’d asked what description. They’d told her to put her hands on the car. They found a package in her bag. Sealed plastic, powder. She said she’d never seen it before. She said it wasn’t hers. She said it couldn’t be hers. Nicki listened to all of it without interrupting. When Jo finished, she asked her, “The bag. Had it been out of your sight at any point during the meeting?” Jo thought. “I set it down in the corner when I was collecting signatures. Maybe twenty minutes? There were a lot of people moving around.” “Okay.” Nicki kept her expression neutral. “And the people at the meeting, do you know most of them?” “Most. There were a few new faces. A couple of guys I didn’t recognize. They said they’d heard about the rezoning from a flyer.” She paused. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” Nicki nodded slowly. She was already building the shape of it in her head, the outline of something that wasn’t an accident. The planted evidence, the convenient description, the timing, right after a meeting about a zoning change. A rezoning that certain people in this city wanted to go through very badly, and that Jo’s organization had been actively working to oppose. She didn’t say any of that yet. She filed it. “You’re not saying anything,” Jo said. “I’m thinking.” “That’s usually worse.” “Not always.” Nicki folded her hands on the table. “Here’s what happens now. I’m going to look at what they’ve actually got, because possession with intent is a serious charge and if they’re moving forward with it, they have something, even if that something was manufactured. Then I’m going to get you out of here. Tonight, if I can manage bail. Tomorrow at the latest.” “And after that?” “After that, we figure out who did this and why.” She met Jo’s eyes. “I need you to think hard about anyone who might want you specifically stopped from doing what you’ve been doing. The rezoning work, the advocacy, anyone who’s pushed back. Any pressure you’ve felt. Anything that felt off in the last few weeks.” Jo was quiet for a moment, then, she said, “There was a letter. About three weeks ago. To the office. It wasn’t signed, but it said we should think carefully about which battles we chose to fight.” She exhaled. “I thought it was just noise. We get stuff like that sometimes.” “Did you keep it?” “I think it’s still in my desk drawer.” “I’ll be back,” Nicki said. She was in the hallway, pulling up the contact for the on-call magistrate judge she sometimes dealt with for after-hours bail hearings, when she heard voices from the far end of the corridor. The station had a secondary entrance, delivery, prisoner transfer and through the reinforced window in the door, she could see the parking lot. Two men stood beside a truck. One of them she didn’t recognize, had a big, shaved head, arms folded like a structure built for the purpose. The other one was speaking to the uniformed officer who’d opened the side door, easy and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and no particular concern about where he was standing. He was tall. Dark jacket, worn-in jeans, boots that had seen actual use. He had the kind of face that looked like it had been arranged by someone who understood proportion but didn’t care much about softness, strong jaw, straight nose. His hair was dark and slightly too long, like he’d just stopped scheduling haircuts at some point and not started again. He said something to the officer and the officer nodded and went back inside. The two men moved back toward the truck. Nicki clocked the jacket properly as he turned. The back had a full cut, like the kind MC members wore. She was too far away to read the name of the club. She went back to her phone because she had enough to deal with already. A biker, comfortable outside a police station, on easy enough terms with a patrol officer to have a casual conversation in a parking lot. She filed it in the back of her mind where she kept things she didn’t understand yet. She got Jo a bail hearing scheduled for the following morning and a commitment from the intake officer that she wouldn’t be moved or questioned before then. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough for tonight. She was walking back to her car, the night warm and heavy with the kind of humidity New Orleans wore like a second skin, when she heard boots on pavement behind her. She didn’t turn immediately she was in a police station parking lot, she was fine but she did count the steps. They stopped. “You the lawyer?”