Do you know that feeling when you find yourself in the middle of something you never thought would happen to you?
Something so dangerous your adrenaline storms your body so that your rational mind turns off and your instinct takes over?
That’s how I felt when I found myself in the middle of a high speed criminal chase in New Orleans the other day.
I wasn’t really dressed for a high speed criminal chase in my long leopard print and black tulle skirt with giant pink flowers in my hair, but what would I have worn if I knew what I was getting into?
A cape that billowed behind me as I ran?
A Wonder Woman outfit? (I don’t think a strapless leotard would have been better on me but that lasso of truth would have come in handy.)
In reality, I probably would have worn my pajamas because I would have stayed home with the covers over my head reading about a criminal chase instead of being in the middle of one.
I have dreamed of being a detective since I was a child. I don’t mean the tough-talking-plain-clothes-hard-crime detective we often see these days on tv shows. I mean the Nancy-Drew-Hardy-Boys type of detective, the kind that might wear a cape-and-carry-a-magnifying-glass-Sherlock-Holmes-type of detective; the witty-banter-martini-swilling-Nick-and-Nora-type of detective, or best of all, the bumbling-but-secretly-brilliant-old-lady-living-in-a-quaint-english-village-who-solves-every-murder- kind of detective.
It’s why I love writing my mystery novels-so I can create that world for myself.
But last Wednesday, my little beignets and shopping trip to the French Quarter turned… well you’ll see.
I actually call my trips to the Quarter “Beignets and Adventures” because the French Quarter is always an adventure into sizzling jazz, wild characters, beignets covered in mountains of powdered sugar, but this particular trip there turns into a different kind of adventure.
It started with Sharon and I sitting at the charming Cafe Beignet where I had my necessary beignets because no trip to the Quarter is complete unless I leave with my shirt covered in powdered sugar.
Cafe Beignet is next to the New Orleans police station, which I love because it’s pink and glamorous and used to be a saloon. Then we found ourselves in an art gallery looking at original Salvador Dali paintings, not knowing we were about to step into our own surreal landscape.
Next stop, my favorite shop, Trashy Diva on Royal Street, where I tried on fringe kimonos, bedazzled capes, hot pink furry muppet jackets, and a body-con dress so tight I couldn’t get out of it and stumbled around the dressing room with my arms pinned above my head faintly yelling “help.”
In a stroke of shopping genius, Sharon and I both set our purses down on a bench outside the dressing rooms.
It’s a tiny shop and our purses were never out of our sightline, except we were a bit caught up with me holding pink feathered earrings up to my ears and Sharon trying on different jeweled Cleopatra collars. I don’t carry a wallet, so the only things in my purse were lipstick and reading glasses, and if you know me, my purses are usually a brightly colored Shakespeare theme. This one is bright blue with a Tempest theme and flying cats wearing tutus on the front. I picked it up and put it on my arm and that’s when I heard the door chime and Sharon say, “Where is my purse?”
Exit rational mind stage left, enter inner-detective-adrenaline-kick stage right.
“Who was sitting there?” I asked the shoppers. They said a man in a white shirt.
“Let’s go!” I said to Sharon.
We exited the shop.
“Split up! You go that way, I’ll go this way. He can’t have gotten far.”
I took off running past the street artists behind the St. Louis cathedral, and when I turned around Sharon was right behind me. (Her rational mind was still with her (a bit) because she realized she didn’t have her phone and we wouldn’t be able to find each other if we actually split up.) She took my phone, called her husband Grant, and asked him to locate her phone. He said it was on St. Ann and Rampart and once again, we were off and running, sprinting really, down the cobblestone streets.
In all honesty, I’m not sure I’d call even my fastest run a “sprint,” so I was pumping my arms to try to go faster, the pink flowers on my head bobbing, my leopard print skirt flying behind me, while Sharon “sprinted” beside me calling 911, wearing a floral romper and big star Nita & Zita headdress.
Did we think about what we were going to do when we found the thief? The very real danger we would be in?
No.
We weren’t thinking clearly at all.
I don’t know what was going on in Sharon’s mind, but I was deep in the fantasy of my New Orleans mysteries, my fearless showgirl detective hot on the trail of the criminal.
Now NOPD is not typically known for their swift response time, but by the time we got to Rampart, several police cars were already there and the corner was swarming with cops and flashing lights. We called Grant again and he said the phone was still there.
I glanced in a trash can and spotted Sharon’s purse, empty now, and her sunglasses laying in the bottom of a trash can. One cop told us to have Grant ping the phone again, which he did and the cop heard it in the storm drain. She said they’d call the city to come lift the drain and get the phone out, another unusual New Orleans service I’d never heard of.
On the corner was a pizza place called The Treehouse and the bartender came out and said he didn’t know what was happening but we were welcome to come into the air conditioning and get some water.
We told the cops that a thief in a white shirt had taken her purse–not a very specific description but in the time it took to give a statement, the cops said, “We think we found him. Do you want to take a ride in the back of a police car and tell us if we got the right guy?”
I said “Hell yes!” but Sharon said “No thank you.” She didn’t want the thief to know what she looked like and she felt bad sending someone to possible jail, even someone who had stolen her purse.
(Did I mention Sharon is one of the kindest people you will ever meet and she had just returned from a 10-day silent meditation retreat where gentleness reigned and the attendees were so devoted to “not causing harm to any living being” that even mosquitoes were allowed to roam freely without fear of being squashed. I don’t like to harm creatures either, but I make exceptions for mosquitos and spiders–neither will live to tell the tale of biting me if I can catch them.)
The cops said the criminal wouldn’t see her with the tinted windows. I said I’d go with her, and while I also felt bad for the guy, I thought it was important to do our part to prevent future crimes, maybe worse crimes. People can’t go around robbing other people. They do the crime, they need to do the time so maybe next time they will make a different choice.
The back of a police car was not the cool glamorous vibe I expected. It was similar to sitting in a steam room set at 1,000 degrees with 1,000 cigarette smoker and as we pulled down the street into another neighborhood we saw more cops. A plain-clothes detective with a badge hanging around his neck rolled our window down an inch and pointed to the suspect standing down the street in a white shirt.
Sharon told the detective she didn’t really want to identify him and felt bad getting someone into trouble. The detective said just drive by slowly, and don’t worry if it’s him or not him. Just see what we see and let them know. We drove slowly in front of him and I instantly recognized the facial tattoo. Sharon said she was only 99.9% sure and didn’t want to identify him if there was any chance it wasn’t him. I said I was 100% sure. That’s when the detective told us Sharon’s credit card had fallen out of his pocket while he was running, so we could safely conclude this was the culprit.
Also, the guy had robbed other people before us which is why the cops were already looking for him.
They drove us back to The Treehouse so we could wait for the city to come retrieve the phone and we stood on the corner talking to one of the amazing heroes/cops, asking about crime in the Quarter. He told us he lived near the Vampire Cafe and works to keep that area safe. I said oh, the Vampire place above Fritzels jazz bar, where Nita & Zita once lived? He said no, that was the Vampire Speakeasy and you needed a secret code word to get in. He meant a different Vampire Cafe right down the street.
In the meantime, my friend Wendi had texted, asking if I wanted to come over for champagne. I texted back that I was in the middle of a high speed criminal chase on Rampart and St. Ann and she said, “We are right around the corner! We will come over!”
The city workers showed up, lifted the drain, handed Sharon her old cell phone, and in the middle of all this hard crime drama, Wendi showed up with her husband, walking down the street carrying champagne over her head. She immediately stepped up to help, giving out cold water and buying pizza and cokes for the NOPD and city workers and asking what else she could do.
One cop approached me saying they needed my statement too as they had viewed the store cameras and found the thief had rummaged through my purse first, apparently finding it not worth stealing.
Or maybe he thought the Shakespeare theme and flying cats in tutus on the front would be too obvious to carry on his crime spree.
The last thing we were missing were Sharon’s car keys, which we needed to get home, so we took a quick walk down Rampart towards the haunted toy museum to see if they might have been dropped.
We didn’t find them, but we needed a minute (or a couple hours) to collect ourselves, so we all sat down at The Treehouse and talked (and drank champagne… well I did) trading stories about local ghosts, Storyville, and Armstrong Park across the street, which used to be Congo Square, where legendary voodoo queen Marie Laveau led voodoo dances in the 1830’s.
The sun started to set and the streets turned golden, and we decided to make one last effort to find the car keys by returning to the scene of the crime, Trashy Diva, to see if they may have been dropped there.
As we walked down St. Ann, I noticed some window bars covered in black hair elastics, giving the windows a haunted look. Wendi said those windows had once belonged to voodoo queen Marie Laveau, and because she was a hairdresser back in the 1800’s, people left hair elastics as tribute to her. Wendi pulled out a dollar and tucked it into an elastic, asking Marie Laveau to help us find the keys. We looked on the sidewalk as we walked, in case they had dropped in the chase.
We didn’t find them, but we parted ways with Wendi and her husband outside Trashy Diva.
By now, Grant had come to meet us with spare keys, and because he was born and raised in New Orleans, he said he was going to take one last look for the keys and asked us for the names of all the streets where this had taken place. He called us a few minutes later saying he had walked on the edge of the old Congo Square where he guessed the thief had run, and the first trash can he looked in, he found the keys.
It took us a while to “come down” from our “Beignets and Adventures” trip to the French Quarter, and in hindsight, this one maybe had a little too much adventure for me.
As I returned home, still brushing the powdered sugar from my black shirt, I laid my head back in the car and thought about the Storyville in my head–the one where I create my own tales.
As much as I dream of being a detective, I think I will leave real detective work to the professionals and keep my detectives in my own inner Storyville.
