Shake the Devil Off By ETHAN BROWN

Shake the Devil Off By ETHAN BROWN

August 27, 2009
Excerpt

Zack headed out into the cool, crisp mid-October air of that afternoon, from Squirrel's apartment on Burgundy Street and over to the Omni Royal Orleans hotel on St. Louis Street between Royal and Chartres streets. He strode through the hotel's tacky red-carpet-and-white-marble lobby, rode the elevator to the seventh floor, and made his way past the hotel's sole penthouse suite and to the observation deck alongside La Riviera's rooftop pool bar. When Zack arrived, a popular local Latin dance band — Fredy Omar con su Banda — was setting up its instruments for a three-hour gig to start at 5:00 p.m. Zack then opened up a tab at the bar, sat by the pool smoking, and calmly enjoyed several shots of Jameson's. As Fredy performed the sound check, he couldn't help but notice the tall, blond, and handsome Zack, particularly because it was so early and the La Riviera was nearly empty. "He was smoking and drinking, sitting by the pool, and looking to the sky," Fredy remembers. "Even though he was dressed in just jeans and boots, he looked very elegant, like a rock star." When Fredy started playing, however, Zack began to pace nervously by the pool, arousing the suspicions of a La Riviera bartender, who worried that he was going to walk out on the substantial bill: Zack had been drinking since about four o'clock. Zack, meanwhile, took in La Riviera's expansive view of the French Quarter — the steamboats pushing down the Mississippi, and the iconic, soaring, triple steeples of St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. Zack had been married right in front of the church in 1998 and though the couple had two young children, they separated soon after Zack had returned from Iraq. Zack tried to remember the good times in Jackson Square — the beautiful wedding that attracted so many tourists that they outnumbered invited guests, and the afternoons when he and Lana would hang out on the park benches and feast on shrimp po'boys — but then his thoughts drifted to his failed marriage and, more recently, his turbulent relationship with Addie. To Zack, his twenty-eight years of life had amounted to little more than a successive string of personal and professional failures — from marriage to the military — from which he never seemed to recover.
It was nearly eight o'clock on a Tuesday night and the bar wasn't very crowded. So Fredy ended the band's set. And as they began packing up their instruments, they were approached by the La Riviera bartender, who was angry and anxious. A customer — Zack — had been drinking all afternoon and skipped out on the bill. Even though Fredy didn't know Zack, he remembered his physical description precisely. "I told my guitar player, 'Let's go look for that dude,'" Fredy recalls. The band took the elevator down to the Omni Royal's garage, packed the remainder of their equipment into their car, and took off into the French Quarter looking for Zack.
Unbeknownst to Fredy, just before eight thirty, Zack had put his final drink down and walked slowly up to the La Riviera's roof railing and back again. Zack then paced from the pool to the edge of the roof, back and forth, two more times. Finally, at eight thirty sharp, all of this according to hotel security tapes, he leapt over the side.
Zack landed with a heavy thud about five stories down, on the roof of the Omni Royal's adjacent parking garage. He died instantly. Just moments later, a frantic hotel guest who saw Zack's body sprawled on the parking garage called down to the front desk and then a panicked hotel manager dialed 911.
"29S, 29S, 29S" — NOPD code for suicide — came the call over the NOPD radios. "A white male has jumped off the upper deck of the Omni Royal hotel."
"This should be interesting," said Detective Tom Morovich, then of the NOPD's Person Crimes division, which handles robberies, stabbings, and shootings. That evening, Tom and his fellow Person Crimes detectives were sitting at the Eighth District police station at 334 Royal Street, just a few blocks away from the Omni Royal, preparing for dinner when the report of the 29S came over the radio. Suicides are common in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the news that someone had leapt off the roof of a four-star hotel seemed bizarre to Tom; a 29S call would have been more likely in a flooded neighborhood like Lakeview that was struggling to rebuild after the levees broke a little more than one year earlier. So he and a small group of detectives headed over to the scene of the suicide.
Tom, a muscular, dark-haired, broad-shouldered native of Empire, Louisiana, who at over six foot five resembled a nightclub bouncer, had weathered Katrina at a makeshift police outpost at the Omni Royal, so he knew the layout of the hotel well. When Tom arrived there, the hotel manager directed him to the parking garage's roof, where they found Zack's gangly body lying faceup, with blood pouring from his mouth and head. A thick trail of Zack's blood mingled with dirty rainwater that had gathered on the hotel's roof from a thunderstorm earlier that week. "I'd seen much worse," Tom remembered later. "This wasn't at all like a suicide where someone hits the cement. Zack's hips were twisted around, but other than that there was little visible damage to his body."
As an investigator from the coroner's office rifled through Zack's pockets, an NOPD homicide detective needled Tom about the case. "No question about it," he said to Tom with a gruff, sarcastic laugh, "this one's gonna be yours."
But then the investigator made a strange discovery: a Ziploc bag in Zack's right front pocket contained army dog tags bearing Zack's full name and a tightly folded sheet of notebook paper that read "FOR POLICE ONLY" on the outside fold. When the coroner's office investigator unfolded the paper, he found that Zack had written a long note. "Here we go," he announced to the cops. "We got ourselves a suicide note." The homicide detective, unsurprisingly, was sure that Tom was going to have to take the case that was suddenly — and most certainly — a suicide. "Whoo-hoo!" he said. "It's definitely yours now."

From the Book SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans by Ethan Brown. Copyright © 2009 by Ethan Brown. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

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