The Mafia Biker and The Lawyer

Chapter 3

Jo’s organization has been the loudest opposition to the rezoning proposal that would make that corridor viable,” he said. “If she gets arrested on drug charges, her credibility takes a hit. Her organization’s credibility takes a hit and the campaign stalls.”

“She’d still have the petition signatures,” Nicki said.

“Signatures from the organizer who just got arrested for possession with intent aren’t worth the same as signatures from the organizer with a clean record and a cause.” He paused.

“You know that.”

She did know that. She hated that she knew that.

“So someone planted evidence on her to neutralize her advocacy.” She said it flatly, testing the shape of it out loud.

“That’s a serious accusation.”

“I’m not making an accusation. I’m telling you what I know.”

“What you know?. Which you got how?”

He looked at her. “I have people in parts of this city that don’t talk to lawyers or police. When things move through those parts, I hear about them.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer you’re getting right now.”

She studied him. There was something deliberate about the way he held back, not evasive exactly, more like someone who had learned precisely how much to give and had no intention of exceeding that. It was a quality she recognized. She deployed it herself.

“The shell company,” she said. “Do you have a name? Any layer of it?”

“The registered agent firm is Baudoin & Carr. That’s public record, you can find it. But if you go looking into who actually owns the structure above it, you’ll hit walls. I’ve been hitting walls for three months, the person behind it is connected enough that the walls are real, not just legal.”

“Connected how?”

A pause. “I don’t know yet.”

She believed him on that one.“Why are you working on this at all? What’s your interest?”

“The Seventh Ward is my territory.”

She kept her face very still. “Your territory.”

“My people live there. My club has roots there. When someone moves through the neighborhood in a way that hurts the people I’m responsible for” He stopped. He picked up his coffee and put it down and said, “It’s my business.”

“And coming to me is part of that business.”

“You’re the best civil rights attorney working the affected areas. You already have a client directly harmed by this and you have access to legal mechanisms I don’t.” He said it without apparent ego,

“I have information you don’t have access to. It makes sense to share.”

Nicki looked at him for a long moment. She was doing several calculations at once, the risk of being associated with an MC president, the question of what he wanted in return, the possibility that he was wrong or that he had his own agenda that didn’t align with Jo’s interests, the separate and more pressing possibility that he was right and that the information he had was real and that walking away from it was something she couldn’t afford to do for her cousin’s sake.

“I need to be clear about something,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m an officer of the court. I can’t know about illegal activity and ignore it. If you tell me things in this conversation that cross certain lines, I have obligations.”

“I know what you are, I’m not asking you to compromise your license. What I’m offering is what I know about the property acquisition and the people connected to it. What you do with that is your business.”

“And what do you want in return?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I want whoever did this to Jo to face something real. Whether that’s through you or through me or some combination.” He met her eyes. “I want the neighborhood protected. That’s it.”

She didn’t know if she believed the “that’s it” expression he was showing. In her experience, the people who said that’s it with that particular flatness were usually telling the truth about what they wanted and leaving out what they were willing to do to get it but she also knew that didn’t necessarily make them wrong to want it.

She looked down at her notepad.

She’d written three things:

Baudoin & Carr. Corridor.

18 months.

She wrote a fourth: RD: verify.

“I’m not agreeing to anything,” she said. “Not yet. I need to verify what you’ve told me through sources I can document. If it checks out” She paused. “Then we talk again.”

“Fair.”

She stood and gathered her things. He stood too, which she hadn’t quite expected the old courtesy of it, practiced enough to be automatic.

“One more question,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Detective Harlan Pike. Do you know him?”Remy's face changed so fast but he managed to control it but she’d been watching. “Why?”

“He’s the one who arrested Jo.”

Remy Doucet looked at her for a moment and said, “Pike runs errands for people he shouldn’t. He has for a long time. ” A pause. “That’s not a coincidence.”

“No,” Nicki said. “I didn’t think it was.”

She left first. Outside on the street, the afternoon heat wrapped around her like something with weight, and she walked back toward her car with her notes tight in her hand, already thinking three steps ahead.

She didn’t look back.

She didn’t look back but she was already sure in the way she was sure about cases before she could prove them, the instinct that had never cost her yet, that Remy Doucet was telling her the truth.

She just didn’t know all of it yet.

And neither did he, she suspected.

Nicki proceeded to search the firm online after she met with Remy.

The law firm’s website was exactly what she expected, clean, minimal, the kind of professional restraint that cost money to achieve.

There were two named partners, a list of practice areas that included corporate law, estate planning, and registered agent services, and a contact page with a Canal Street address.

Nicki found the shell company in the state registry in under an hour.

It was called Crescent Redevelopment Partners LLC, incorporated fourteen months ago, registered agent listed as Baudoin & Carr with a single-member structure, which meant the actual ownership was buried one more layer down, a Delaware parent entity called CRP Holdings, which was where the public trail stopped cleanly, the way trails stopped when someone knew what they were doing.

She sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

Delaware was a dead end without a subpoena, and she didn’t have grounds for a subpoena yet.

What she had was a client facing fabricated drug charges, a timeline, a law firm that probably had no idea who it was fronting for, and a conversation with a man she still hadn’t fully decided what to make of.

She pulled up Baudoin & Carr’s registered agent filings for the last three years. CRP Holdings wasn’t their only client,there were eleven other LLCs using the same address but it was the only one that had made significant property purchases in the affected wards. She cross-referenced the purchase addresses against the rezoning proposal map that Jo’s organization had published online.

Every single acquisition fell within the proposed corridor.

She wrote that down, circled it twice, and then sat very still with the particular feeling she got when a case stopped being abstract and became something she could hold.

She went to see Jo that evening.

Jo was back in her own apartment, a second-floor place in Tremé with a gallery porch and herb pots in every window that her grandmother had started and she had stubbornly maintained. She answered the door in old clothes with paint on her hands from a project she’d apparently started to keep herself from thinking too hard, which was a very Jo kind of response to a crisis.

Nicki sat at her kitchen table and told her what she’d found but not all of it, not about Remy Doucet, she thought it was not yet time to. Just the property trail, the shell company, and the corridor.

Jo listened without interrupting, which meant she was taking it seriously.

“They did this to me because of the rezoning work,” she said when Nicki finished.