New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Codrescu

Author:Andrei Codrescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2006-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

DESUETUDE AND PULCHRITUDE. Melancholy, exaltation, dejection. An ex-virgin still holding the plastic cup that held her first Hurricane. A funeral wreath around a mule’s neck. Two tired drag queens hiding from the light in a jasmine-choked portico. A flock of tuxedoed waiters streaming home before dawn. A troop of red ants feeding on dried beer on a rococo manhole. A voodoo shrine still smoking in the backyard. Smells of mud, perfume, chemicals. Cloying scent of something steamy and rotten wafting off a barge on the river. Another body found shot dead on the levee. Stories stacking up everywhere like coins in a street musician’s sax case. Another New Orleans night is done.

But the night of March 4, 1995, was unusual even by our deviant standards. At 1 A.M. on March 4, 1995, policewoman Antoinette Frank ate supper at the Kim Anh restaurant, where she moonlighted as a guard. The two children of the Vietnamese family who owned the restaurant, Cuong Va, seventeen, and Ha Vu, twenty-four, cooked her dinner. Frank’s replacement, Officer Ronnie Williams, arrived to relieve her shift. About an hour later, Antoinette returned to the restaurant and knocked on the locked door. Officer Williams unlocked the door and let her in, thinking that she’d forgotten something. Frank was not alone. An eighteen-year-old named Roger Lacaze was with her.

Frank and Lacaze didn’t waste any time. Ronnie Williams was killed with a bullet to the back of the head at short range and then two more shots were fired into him for insurance. The two children, who had stayed behind to clean up, begged for their lives. Cuong Vu was a junior in high school. He played football and was an altar boy at St. Brigid Church in eastern New Orleans. He wanted to be a priest. His sister wanted to be a nun. Frank told them to kneel and say their prayers. Cuong was pistol-whipped, then shot six times. His sister took three bullets.

Frank and Lacaze robbed the register and left the massacre scene. What happened afterward belongs to a different order of things. Antoinette Frank returned to the Seventh District police station, picked up a police car, and came back to the crime scene in uniform, in response to the 911 emergency call. Perhaps she wanted to make sure that no evidence was left behind. More likely, an insane bravado was at work. She believed that she had gotten away with murder. After all, other New Orleans policemen had. She had already gotten away with armed robbery, dealing drugs, and flaunting her ill-gotten goods. She had already given Lacaze, her partner in crime, a car, a beeper, and a cellular phone. At first it was reported that Lacaze was her cousin, but later it was established that he was her love interest. Lacaze had a girlfriend who complained about Frank’s attention but was afraid to voice her complaints too loudly. Frank and Lacaze smoked and dealt crack and robbed people. In one perverse case, she arrested one of their complaining victims who was still in jail at the time of the Kim Anh massacre.

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