A New Orleans Detective Mystery

By Ken Mask

New Orleans' private detective Luke Jacobs doesn't take too well to murders happening around him. He's been on a solid run of assisting local police with cases and maintains a strong reputation of doing good work. However, when a few bodies turn up in an area adjacent to his office and the post Katrina setting is still a disrupted mess, things get personal.

Luke is juggling a mixture of activities and has a recurrent dream of 19th century Southern struggles which keep playing in his consciousness. With all that's going on in the Crescent City, he has to cross a high wire and do a balancing act. On board is the motley crew of associates: Matt Harris, street wise rough cat of questionable integrity, Jan Martinez, college student beauty with a handle on things most folk ignore and Joe "Fingerprints" Sway, Luke's college buddy who has just moved to the area from New York and can't quite figure out the crazed maze of New Orleans' sociopolitical climate.

When the crimes are dropped onto the PI's lap, the city takes a pause from all of the standard activities, like Mardi Gras madness, to pay attention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456604196

Book preview

Orleans

Chapter 0

Friday evening, setting sun ...

Oh, what a magnificent day!

Hold still and let me look deep into those liquid pools! His eyes lovingly marched along her face and followed the contours of each angle as a sculptor would in order to inspect his/her work. He smiled the deep kind of silent smile that speaks volumes.

Their quiet moments seemed like hours. The comfortable stillness of their session was as tender as a moonlit dusk — calm and motion free.

The two lovers rolled over in the dry, brown, crackly leaves now quite some distance from their picnic blanket. They had wrestled over the past few hours and hadn’t paid any real attention to decorum. His sticky fingers combed the long locks of her matted, blackish-blond silky hair. Her breath, blowing past those ivory-white teeth contrasting against the warm mocha-brown always seemed so minty, even in the deep recesses of the wooded park. Rosalind reached to grab a hunk of his lean waist and rotated his head onto the midsection of her chest. He reflexively reached around and buried his face into her bosom. Moments later, he turned, sitting with her back between his legs, he massaged her shoulders with the care that a baker takes when kneading bread.

Like the poet I.B. Horton’s phrase: ‘… we have forsaken the mysticism of the full moon’s light and the romanticism of the surprise of reservations, say midweek, on a Wednesday night.’

That’s nice. I love it when you quote poetry, responded the Tulane chemistry graduate student, sweet darling. The sunlight glanced against the green ferns nearby and shone through her dark hair. Where is that from?

A student that I know. He’s a descendent of George Moses Horton, one of our nation’s great poets. The great-great-great relative lived in the 1800s. I’ve been doing some wood shedding — reading samples of the world’s great thinkers. Had to step up my game for you and your sister. Luke smiled. His pieces are particularly romantic.

Rosalind Alonso was a descendant of Cuban immigrants. A Cuban-American, naturalized or illegal, she’s getting things done no matter the designation. Her parents had come to the States in the 70s. The paternal grandparents of famed ballet group, the Cuban National Company, stayed in the old country’s main city, Havana. The maternal grands are in the countryside, little heard from or talked about, but surely loved and respected. The texture of her homeland is said to have a similar feel like the Crescent City: populated with warm and sensitive people steeped with the kind of soul and depth of understanding that family and home matter more than anything. The old country is said by the folk now here to have a blanket of style which is unparalleled in the new land. The Alonsos were and are a force, a part of the desire to have the arts remain vital to people’s lives and thus, the decision of the grands to remain in Cuba. The politics are a bit too complicated for our current yarn.

Havana, Cuba. Havana: a city and a pulse, a beat and a rhythm. It’s a place with the wonderful mixture of old and new: well-kept homes set against a backdrop of old, modest, yet wonderfully crafted buildings. The photos that Rosalind shares with all who prove deserving of friendship show that compassion and nobility of Cuba: its people whose chins and heads are held high with dignity in settings that are reminiscent of old movies. The best way to transfer the essence of the place is to have building scopes. Black-and-white grainy film proves best. Stark contrasting hues, white, grey, black, and shadowed images let you feel the city, let you feel the textures, and let you know the terrain. Viejo! Sea meets land just as all over the world. It’s a constant reminder of a place with homes, families, and desires, just like all over the world ... Libra Cuba, por favor!!!

The Alonso family had traveled a hard road over a tough period of time. During those times, many actions could have cost them their lives and the lives of those helping them, and the lives of those left behind, and the lives of those yet born. The family had settled in the outlying Louisianan parishes for decades and then moved to New Orleans when the children started college in the 1980s. Rosalind was a pleasant, personable, fun-loving, and demure graduate student who split her time between study and Luke. She also split something else.

Luke and Rosalind Alsonso danced their dance and left before midnight. It was a hot Latin number and the soul brother handled things quite nicely, representing the brotherhood as he had done on occasions before. She laid the tunes down with the flare of her heritage, and he picked them up with his.

City Park in New Orleans’ Lakeview section of town is a wonderful mixture of where nature meets man. Clusters of oak, fern, pine, cypress, dogwood, birch, magnolia, and maple trees grow along beside meandering bayous that are intertwined among golf courses, tennis courts, a kiddy playground studded with rides, including a circular train track for children, a stadium for sporting events and concerts, a world-class museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Dotted throughout the fantastically tropical area is the kind of wildlife that Louisiana is famous for: ducks, geese, pelicans, raccoons, squirrels, nutria rats, beavers, an occasional alligator, and numerous other bird types, as well as a spectrum of various plants.

Typically, one thinks of the buildings and social aspects of New Orleans, like the music, the food, the places, the feel, and the texture of its architecture borrowed from 17th century Europe, and the people whose evolution produced descendants of pirates, pimps, prostitutes, deadbeats, derelicts, deadheads, hoo-has, hoes, heifers, scuttle bucks, and scalawags, and these descendants provide the wonderful flavor and unique blend of entertainers for which the place is known.

This display of nature may be found only a few blocks from the center of town. Think of humidity and greenery! The park is a haven for the keen photographer wanting to capture unique Southern posturing, for lovers wanting to court, for gamesmen wanting to be teased, for golfers wanting a back nine close to the front 19 holes (the French Quarter), and for cultural addicts wanting to get a glimpse of famous art.

The place is a 300-acre-wide area of south-southeastern Louisiana encased in the central part of town. Luscious green landscapes which sport the kind of yearlong beauty usually thought of as being found in the Caribbean islands coat the space. It is comfortable and friendly feeling, just the place for relaxation and rest. It has not been known as a place for murder or serial killings ... until now.

Chapter 1

Friday, late afternoon ...

I like what you’ve done here.

Thanks to Rosalind and Celia, they put nice touches on the place. Just like back at the apartment. But most of the tasteful art and stylish layout are all me. All these selected pieces from around the world, Luke gestured with false humility.

A ham, huh?

Yea. Like my old man used to say, ‘Yes, a ham, a country ham!’

Matt ‘Smooth’ Harris exited the front secretarial area and headed down the three concrete stairwells of the building. As always, he moved with little effort and insisted that anyone who knew him for longer than a day call him ‘Smooth.’ He had been onboard to assist the new private investigator and had stayed on course and out of real trouble for the past six months.

Their badinage lasted through any given day until some work was placed on the desk. It was the typical type of interaction among friends who had gotten from the point of solid commitment to steady resolve to be cut buddies after only a few weeks together. The teacher-preacher-pupil-church member relationship blossomed and brought the two in sync at a time that both needed it.

Luke Jacobs’ character is best described as a mixture of a tamed, less extravagant James Bond and a not so ‘academically’ intelligent, pipe-smoking, chin-stroking Sherlock Holmes. He’s smart, clever, book wise, street wise and in shape. The qualities that he borrows from those famous sleuths are nicely balanced in a ‘fella’ with the warmth and sensitivity of a Southerner trapped in a keenly fit, sculptured body with the agility of a cat, given that he practices the modern-day Brazilian martial art, Capoeira.

Luke’s office is in New Orleans’ very busy Mid-City section, adjacent to Bayou St. John. His office building is on the corner of Moss and Orleans, across the street on a diagonal from the American Can Company building, which was just bought and remodeled into condos. The neighborhood is in the central section, a mere ten minutes from the French Quarter, ten minutes from the airport, and fifteen minutes from the eastern section of New Orleans. It’s a mixture of homes, businesses, grassy neutral grounds, and waterways consisting of bayous and canals.

Old ‘shot-gun’ double houses dot the major part of the landscape with the character of old-country, European influence. Luke converted one of those homes into his office, using one side of a double along its entire length, with the front areas devoted to secretarial space and the back two as his private eye area. The style is hard-nosed detective inlayed with high-tech modern posturing; i.e., computers, monitors, police scanners, large screen televisions, and video equipment. A 1930s Remington typewriter sits in the middle of his large oak desk, something he uses for reports with the taste of standard, hard-boiled investigations. He places the data on the desks of clients, police officers, newspaper editors, and television producers, as needed and required.

"Got some work to do on that bayou