Book Preview
Burning Angel by James Lee Burke
FOR Rollie and Loretta McIntosh Commending myself to the God of the oppressed, I bowed my head upon my fettered hands, and wept bitterly.
-From Twelve Years a Slave, an autobiographical account by Solomon Northup
Chapter 1
GIACANO FAMILY had locked up the action in Orleans and Jefferson parishes back in Prohibition. Their sanction and charter came from the Chicago Commission, of course, and no other crime family ever tried to intrude upon their territory. Hence, all prostitution, fence operations, money laundering, gambling, shy locking labor takeovers, drug trafficking, and even game poaching in south Louisiana became forever their special province. No street hustler, grifter, second-story creep, Murphy artist, dip, stall, or low-rent pimp doubted that fact, either, not unless he wanted to hear a cassette of what Tommy Figorelli (also known as Tommy Fig, Tommy Fingers, Tommy Five) had to say above the whine of an electric saw just before he was freeze-dried and hung in parts from the wood fan in his own butcher shop. That’s why Sonny Boy Marsallus, who grew up in the Iberville welfare project when it was all white, was a kind of miracle on Canal back in the seventies and early eighties. He didn’t piece off his action, pimp, or deal in drugs or guns, and he told the old fat boy himself, Didoni Giacano, to join Weight Watchers or the Save the Whales movement. I still remember him out there on the sidewalk, down from the old Jung Hotel, on an electric-blue spring evening, with the palm fronds rattling and streetcars clanging out on the neutral ground, his skin as unblemished as milk, his bronze-red hair lightly oiled and combed back on the sides, always running some kind of game-craps, high-stakes bouree, washing Jersey money out at the track, bailing out mainline recidivists licensed bondsmen wouldn’t pick up by the ears with Q-Tips, lending money with no vig to girls who wanted to leave the life.
Actually Sonny practiced the ethics that the mob falsely claimed for themselves.
But too many girls took a Greyhound out of New Orleans on Sonny’s money for the Giacanos to abide Sonny’s presence much longer. That’s when he went south of the border, where he saw firsthand the opening of the Reagan theme park in El Salvador and Guatemala. Clete Purcel, my old partner from Homicide in the First District, hooked up with him down there, when Clete himself was on the run from a murder beef, but would never talk about what they did together, or what caused Sonny to become a subject of strange rumors: that he’d gone crazy on muta and pulche and psychedelic mushrooms, that he’d joined up with leftist terrorists, had served time in a shithole Nicaraguan jail, was working with Guatemalan refugees in southern Mexico, or was in a monastery in Jalisco. Take your choice, it all sounded unlike a Canal Street fixer with scars in his eyebrows and a coin-jingling re bop in his walk.
That’s why I was surprised to hear he was back in town, fading the action again and putting deals together at the Pearl, where the old green-painted iron streetcar made its turn off St. Charles onto the lovely hard-candy glitter and wind-blown palm-dotted sweep of Canal Street. When I saw him hanging in front of a game room two blocks up, his tropical suit and lavender shirt rippled with neon, he looked like he had never been under a hard sun or humped an M-6o or rucksack in a jungle where at night you burned leeches off your skin with cigarettes and tried not to think about the smell of trench foot that rose from your rotting socks.
Pool-room blacks leaned against parking meters and storefront walls, music blaring from boom boxes.
He snapped and popped his fingers and palms together and winked at me.
“What’s happening’, Streak?” he said.
“No haps, Sonny. You didn’t get enough of free-fire zones?”
“The city? It’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Drink a beer, eat some oysters with me.” His accent was adenoidal, like most blue-collar New Orleans people whose English was influenced by the Irish and Italian immigrations of the late nineteenth century.
He smiled at me, then puffed air out his mouth and cut his eyes up and down the street. He fastened his eyes on me again, still smiling, a man gliding on his own rhythms. “Ouch,” he said, and stuck a stiffened finger in the middle of his forehead. “I forgot, I heard you go to meetings now, hey, I love iced tea. Come on, Streak.”
“Why not?” I said. We stood at the bar in the Pearl and ate raw oysters that were briny and cold, with flecks of ice clinging to the shells. He paid from a cash roll of fifties in his pocket that was wrapped with a thick rubber band. His jaws and the back of his neck gleamed with a fresh haircut and shave.
“You didn’t want to try Houston or Miami?” I said.
“When good people die, they move to New Orleans.” But his affected flamboyance and good humor weren’t convincing. Sonny looked worn around the edges, a bit manic, maybe fried a little by his own velocity, the light in his eyes wary, his attention to the room and front door too pronounced.
“You expecting somebody?” I asked. “You know how it is.”
No. “Sweet Pea Chaisson,” he said.
“i see.”
He looked at my expression. “What, that’s a surprise?” he asked.
“He’s a bucket of shit, Sonny.”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
I was regretting my brief excursion into the illusionary pop and snap of Sonny Boy’s world. “Hey, don’t go,” he said. “I have to get back to New Iberia.”
“Sweet Pea just needs assurances. The guy’s reputation is exaggerated.”
“Tell his girls that.”
“You’re a cop, Dave. You learn about stuff after it’s history.”
“See you around, Sonny.” His eyes looked through the front window onto the street. He fitted his hand over my forearm and watched the barman drawing a pitcher of beer. “Don’t walk out now,” he said. I looked through the front glass. Two women walked by, talking simultaneously. A man in a hat and raincoat stood on the curb, as though waiting for a taxi. A short heavyset man in a sports coat joined him. They both looked out at the street. Sonny bit a hangnail and spit it off the tip of his tongue. “Sweet Pea’s emissaries?” I said. “A little more serious than that. Come into the can with me,” he said. “I’m a police officer, Sonny. No intrigue. You got a beef, we call the locals.”
“Save the rhetoric for Dick Tracy. You got your piece?”
“What do you think?”
“The locals are no help on this one, Streak. You want to give me two minutes or not?” He walked toward the rear of the restaurant. I waited a moment, placed my sunglasses on top of the bar to indicate to anyone watching that I would be back, then followed him. He bolted the rest room door behind us, hung his coat from the stall door, and peeled off his shirt. His skin looked like alabaster, hard and red along the bones. A blue Madonna image, with orange needles of light emanating from it, was tattooed high up on his right shoulder. “You looking at my tattoo?” he said, and grinned.
“Not really.”
“Oh, these scars?” I shrugged. “A couple of ex-Somoza technicians invited me to a sensitivity session,” he said. The scars were purple and as thick as soda straws, crisscrossed on his rib cage and chest. He worked a taped black notebook loose from the small of his back. It popped free with a sucking sound. He held it in his hand, with the tape hanging from the cover, like an excised tumor.
“Keep this for me.”
“Keep it yourself,” I said.
“A lady’s holding a Xerox copy for me. You like poetry, confessional literature, all that kind of jazz. Nothing happens to me, drop it in the mail.”
“What are you doing, Sonny?”
“The world’s a small place today. People watch CNN in grass huts. A guy might as well play it out where the food is right.”
“You’re an intelligent man. You don’t have to be a punching bag for the Giacanos.”
“Check the year on the calendar when you get home. The spaghetti heads were starting to crash and burn back in the seventies.”
“Is your address inside?”
“Sure. You gonna read it?”
“Probably not. But I’ll hold it for you a week.”
“No curiosity?” he said, pulling his shirt back on. His mouth was red, like a woman’s, against his pale skin, and his eyes bright green when he smiled.
“Nope.”
“You should,” he said. He slipped on his coat. “You know what a barracoon is, or was?”
“A place where slaves were kept.”
“Jean Lafitte had one right outside New Iberia. Near Spanish Lake. I bet you didn’t know that.” He stuck me in the stomach with his finger.
“I’m glad I found that out.”
“I’m going out through the kitchen. The guys out front won’t bother you.”
“I think your frame of reference is screwed up, Sonny. You don’t give a pass to a police officer.”
“Those guys out there ask questions in four languages, Dave. The one with the fire hydrant neck, he used to do chores in the basement for Idi Amin. He’d really like to have a chat with me.”
“Why?”
“I capped his brother. Enjoy the spring evening, Streak. It’s great to be home.”
He unlocked the door and disappeared through the back of the restaurant.
As I walked back to the bar, I saw both the hatted man and his short companion staring through the front glass. Their eyes reminded me of buckshot.
Fuck it, I thought, and headed for the door. But a crowd of Japanese tourists had just entered the restaurant, and by the time I got past them the sidewalk was empty except for an elderly black man selling cut flowers out of a cart.
The evening sky was light blue and ribbed with strips of pink cloud, and the breeze off the lake balmy and bitten with salt, redolent with the smells of coffee and roses and the dry electric flash and scorch of the streetcar.
As I headed back toward my pickup truck, I could see heat lightning, out over Lake Pontchartrain, trembling like shook foil inside a storm bank that had just pushed in from the Gulf.
An hour later the rain was blowing in blinding sheets all the way across the Atchafalaya swamp. Sonny Boy’s notebook vibrated on the dashboard with the roar of my engine.
Chapter 2
NEXT MORNING I dropped it in my file cabinet at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department unread and opened my mail while I drank a cup of coffee. There was a telephone message from Sonny Boy Marsallus, but the number was in St. Martinville, not New Orleans. I dialed it and got no answer. I gazed out the window at the fine morning and the fronds on the palm trees lifting against the windswept sky. He was out of my jurisdiction, I told myself, don’t get mixed up in his grief.
Sonny had probably been out of sync with the earth since conception, and it was only a matter of time before someone tore up his ticket. But finally I did pull the jacket on Sweet Pea Chaisson, which stayed updated, one way or another, because he was one of our own and seemed to make a point of coming back to the Breaux Bridge-St. Martinville-New Iberia area to get in trouble. I’ve never quite understood why behaviorists spend so much time and federal funding on the study of sociopaths and recidivists, since none of the research ever teaches us anything about them or makes them any better. I’ve often thought it would be more helpful simply to pull a half dozen like Sweet Pea out of our files, give them supervisory jobs in mainstream society, see how everybody likes it,
then perhaps consider a more draconian means of redress, such as prison colonies in the Aleutians.
He had been born and abandoned in a Southern Pacific boxcar, and raised by a mulatto woman who operated a zydeco bar and brothel on the Breaux Bridge highway called the House of Joy. His face was shaped like an inverted teardrop, with white eyebrows, eyes that resembled slits in bread dough, strands of hair like vermicelli, a button nose, a small mouth that was always wet.
His race was a mystery, his biscuit-colored body almost hairless, his stomach a water-filled balloon, his pudgy arms and hands those of a boy who never grew out of adolescence. But his comic proportions had always been a deception. When he was seventeen a neighbor’s hog rooted up his mother’s vegetable garden. Sweet Pea picked up the hog, carried it squealing to the highway, and threw it headlong into the grille of a semi truck.
Nineteen arrests for procuring; two convictions; total time served, eighteen months in parish prisons. Somebody had been looking out for Sweet Pea Chaisson, and I doubted that it was a higher power.
In my mail was a pink memo slip I had missed. Written in Wally the dispatcher’s childish scrawl were the words Guess who’s back in the waiting room? The time on the slip was 7:55 A.M.
Oh Lord.
Bertha Fontenot’s skin was indeed black, so deep in hue that the scars on her hands from opening oyster shells in New Iberia and Lafayette restaurants looked like pink worms that had eaten and disfigured the tissue. Her arms jiggled with fat, her buttocks swelled like pillows over the sides of the metal chair she sat on. Her pillbox hat and purple suit were too small for her, and her skirt rode up above her white hose and exposed the knots of varicose veins in her thighs.
On her lap was a white paper towel from which she ate cracklings with her fingers.
“You decide to pry yourself out your chair for a few minutes?” she said, still chewing.
“I apologize. I didn’t know you were out here.”
i o
“You gonna help me with Moleen Bertrand?”
“It’s a civil matter, Bertie.”
“That’s what you say before.”
“Then nothing’s changed.”
“I can get a white-trash lawyer to tell me that.”
“Thank you.”
Two uniformed deputies at the water fountain were grinning in my direction.
“Why don’t you come in my office and have some coffee?” I said.
She wheezed as I helped her up, then wiped at the crumbs on her dress and followed me inside my office, her big lacquered straw bag, with plastic flowers on the side, clutched under her arm. I closed the door behind us and waited for her to sit down.
“This is what you have to understand, Bertie. I investigate criminal cases. If you have a title problem with your land, you need a lawyer to represent you in what’s called a civil proceeding.”
“Moleen Bertrand already a lawyer. Some other lawyer gonna give him trouble back ’cause of a bunch of black peoples?”
“I have a friend who owns a title company. I’ll ask him to search the courthouse records for you.”
“It won’t do no good. We’re six black families on one strip that’s in arpents. It don’t show in the survey in the co’rthouse. Everything in the co’rthouse is in acres now.”
“It doesn’t make any difference. If that’s your land, it’s your land.”
“What you mean if? Moleen Bertrand’s grandfather give that land to us ninety-five years ago. Everybody knowed it.”
“Somebody didn’t.”
“So what you gonna do about it?”
“I’ll talk to Moleen.”
“Why don’t you talk to your wastebasket while you’re at it?”
“Give me your phone number.”
“You got to call up at the sto’. You know why Moleen Bertrand want that land, don’t you?”
“No.”
“They’s a bunch of gold buried on it.”
II
“That’s nonsense, Bertie.”
“Then why he want to bulldoze out our li’l houses?”
“I’ll ask him that.”
“When?”
“Today. Is that soon enough?”
“We’ll see what we gonna see.”
My phone rang and I used the call, which I put on hold, as an excuse to walk her to the door and say good-bye. But as I watched her walk with labored dignity toward her car in the parking lot, I wondered if I, too, had yielded to that old white pretense of impatient charity with people of color, as though somehow they were incapable of understanding our efforts on their behalf.
It was two days later, at five in the morning, when a cruiser pulled a man over for speeding on the St. Martinville highway.
On the backseat and floor were a television set, a portable stereo, a box of women’s shoes, bottles of liquor, canned goods, a suitcase full of women’s clothes and purses.
“There’s a drag ball I haven’t been invited to?” the deputy said.
“I’m helping my girlfriend move,” the driver said.
“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“No, sir.”
“You seem a little nervous.”
“You’ve got a gun in your hand.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem. What’s that fragrance in the air?
Is it dark roast coffee? Would you step out of the car, please?”
The deputy had already run the plates. The car belonged to a woman named Delia Landry, whose address was on the St. Martin-Iberia Parish line. The driver’s name was Roland Broussard. At noon the same day he was brought into our interrogation room by Detective Helen Soileau, a dressing taped high up on his forehead.
He wore dark jeans, running shoes, a green pullover smock from the hospital. His black hair was thick and curly, his jaws unshaved, his nails bitten to the quick; a sour smell rose from his armpits. We stared at him without speaking.
The room was windowless and bare except for a wood table and three chairs. He opened and closed his hands on top of the table and kept scuffing his shoes under the chair. I took his left wrist and turned up his forearm. “How often do you fix, Roland?” I asked. “I’ve been selling at the blood bank.”
“I see.”
“You got an aspirin?” He glanced at Helen Soileau. She had a broad face whose expression you never wanted to misread. Her blonde hair looked like a lacquered wig, her figure a sack of potatoes. She wore a pair of blue slacks and a starched short-sleeve white shirt, her badge above her left breast; her handcuffs were stuck through the back of her gunbelt.
“Where’s your shirt?” I said.
“It had blood all over it. Mine.”
“The report says you tried to run,” Helen said.
“Look, I asked for a lawyer. I don’t have to say anything else, right?”
“That’s right,” I said. “But you already told us you boosted the car.
So we can ask you about that, can’t we?”
“Yeah, I boosted it. So what else you want? Big nicking deal.”
“Would you watch your language, please?” I said.
“What is this, a crazy house? You got a clown making fun of me out on the road, then beating the shit out of me, and I’m supposed to worry about my fucking language.”
“Did the owner of the car load all her possessions in it and give you the keys so you wouldn’t have to wire it? That’s a strange story, Roland,” I said.
“It was parked like that in the driveway. I know what you’re trying to do … Why’s she keep staring at me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I took the car. I was smoking dope in it, too. I ain’t saying anything else .. . Hey, look, she’s got some kind of problem?” He held his finger close to his chest when he pointed at Helen, as though she couldn’t see it.
“You want some slack, Roland? Now’s the time,” I said. Before he could answer, Helen Soileau picked up the wastebasket by the rim and swung it with both hands across the side of his face. He crashed sideways to the floor, his mouth open, his eyes out of focus. Then she hit him again, hard, across the back of the head, before I could grab her arms. Her muscles were like rocks. She shook my hands off and hurled the can and its contents of cigarette butts, ashes, and candy wrappers caroming off his shoulders.
“You little pissant,” she said. “You think two homicide detectives are wasting their time with a fart like you over a car theft. Look at me when I talk to you!”
“Helen!” I said softly.
“Go outside and leave us alone,” she said.
“Nope,” I said, and helped Roland Broussard back into his chair. “Tell Detective Soileau you’re sorry, Roland.”
“For what?”
“For being a wiseass. For treating us like we’re stupid.”
“I apologize.”
“Helen!” I looked at her.
“I’m going to the John. I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said.
“You’re the good guy now?” he said, after she closed the door behind her.
“It’s no act, podna. I don’t get along with Helen. Few people do. She smoked two perps in three years.” His eyes looked up into mine.
“Here’s the lay of the land,” I said. “I believe you creeped that woman’s duplex and stole her car, but you didn’t have anything to do with the rest of it. That’s what believe. That doesn’t mean you won’t take the fall for what happened in there. You get my drift?” He pinched his temples with his fingers, as though a piece of rusty wire were twisting inside his head.
“So?” I opened my palms inquisitively.
“Nobody was home when I went through the window. I cleaned out the place and had it all loaded in her car. That’s when some other broad dropped her off in front, so I hid in the hedge. I’m thinking, What am I gonna do? I start the car, she’ll know I’m stealing it. I wait around, she turns on the light, she knows the place’s been ripped off.
Then two guys roar up out of nowhere, come up the sidewalk real fast, and push her inside. ”What they done, I don’t like remembering it, I closed my eyes, that’s the truth, she was whimpering, I’m not kidding you, man, I wanted to stop it. What was I gonna do?“
”Call for help.“
”I was strung out, I got a serious meth problem, it’s easy to say what you ought to do when you’re not there. Look, what’s-your-name, I’ve been down twice but I never hurt anybody. Those guys, they were tearing her apart, I was scared, I never saw anything like that before.“
”What did they look like, Roland?“
”Gimmie a cigarette.“
”I don’t smoke.“
”I didn’t see their faces. I didn’t want to. Why didn’t her neighbors help?“
”They weren’t home.“
”I felt sorry for her. I wish I’d done something.“
”Detective Soileau is going to take your statement, Roland. I’ll probably be talking to you again.“
”How’d you know I didn’t do it?“
”The ME says her neck was broken in the bathroom. That’s the only room you didn’t track mud all over.“ I passed Helen Soileau on my way out.
Her eyes were hot and focused like BB’s on the apprehensive face of Roland Broussard. ”He’s been cooperative,“ I said. The door clicked shut behind me. I might as well have addressed myself to the drain in the water fountain. Moleen Bertrand lived in an enormous white-columned home on Bayou Teche, just east of City Park, and from his glassed-in back porch you could look down the slope of his lawn, through the widely spaced live oak trees, and see the brown current of the bayou drifting by, the flooded cane brakes on the far side, the gazebos of his neighbors clustered with trumpet and passion vine, and finally the stiff, block like outline of the old drawbridge and tender house off Burke Street. It was March and already warm, but Moleen Bertrand wore a long-sleeve candy-striped shirt with ruby cuff links and a rolled white collar. He was over six feet and could not be called a soft man, but at the same time there was no muscular tone or definition to his body, as though in growing up he had simply bypassed physical labor and conventional sports as a matter of calling. He had been born to an exclusionary world of wealth and private schools, membership in the town’s one country club, and Christmas vacations in places the rest of us knew of only from books, but no one could accuse him of not having improved upon what he had been given. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Springhill and a major in the air force toward the end of the Vietnam War. He made the Law Review at Tulane and became a senior partner at his firm in less than five years. He was also a champion skeet shooter. Any number of demagogic politicians who were famous for their largess sought his endorsement and that of his family name. They didn’t receive it. But he never gave offense or was known to be unkind. We walked under the trees in his backyard. His face was cool and pleasant as he sipped his iced tea and looked at a motorboat and a water-skier hammering down the bayou on pillows of yellow foam.
”Bertie can come to my office if she wants. I don’t know what else to tell you, Dave,“ he said. His short salt-and-pepper hair was wet and freshly combed, the part a razor-straight pink line in his scalp.
”She says your grandfather gave her family the land.“
”The truth is we haven’t charged her any rent. She’s interpreted that to mean she owns the land.“
”Are you selling it?“
”It’s a matter of time until it gets developed by someone.“
”Those black people have lived there a long time, Moleen.“
”Tell me about it.“ Then the brief moment of impatience went out of his face. ”Look, here’s the reality, and I don’t mean it as a complaint. There’re six or seven nigra families in there we’ve taken care of for fifty years. I’m talking about doctor and dentist bills, schooling, extra money for June Teenth, getting people out of jail.
Bertie tends to forget some things.“
”She mentioned something about gold being buried on the property.“
”Good heavens. I don’t want to offend you, but don’t y’all have something better to do?“
”She took care of me when I was little. It’s hard to chase her out of my office.“ He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. His nails were immaculate, his touch as soft as a woman’s. ”Send her back to me,“ he said.
”What’s this stuff about gold?“
”Who knows? I always heard Jean Lafitte buried his treasure right across the bayou there, right over by those two big cypress trees.“
Then his smile became a question mark. ”Why are you frowning?“
”You’re the second person to mention Lafitte to me in the last couple of days.“
”Hmmm,“ he said, blowing air out his nostrils.
”Thanks for your time, Moleen.“
”My pleasure.“ I walked toward my truck, which was parked on the gravel cul-de-sac by his boathouse. I rubbed the back of my neck, as though a half-forgotten thought were trying to burrow its way out of my skin.
”Excuse me, didn’t you represent Bertie’s nephew once?“ I asked.
”That’s right.“
”His name’s Luke, you got him out of the death house?“
”That’s the man.“ I nodded and waved good-bye again. He had mentioned getting people out of jail but nothing as dramatic as saving somebody from the electric chair hours before an electrocution. Why not? Maybe he was just humble, I said in response to my own question.
When I backed out of the drive, he was idly pouring his iced tea into the inverted cone at the top of an anthill.
I drove out on the St. Martinville highway to the lime green duplex set back among pine trees where Delia Landry had suddenly been thrust through a door into an envelope of pain that most of us can imagine only in nightmares. The killers had virtually destroyed the interior.
The mattresses, pillows, and stuffed chairs were slashed open, dishes and books raked off the shelves, dresser drawers dumped on the floors, plaster and lathes stripped out of the walls with either a crowbar or claw hammer; even the top of the toilet tank was broken in half across the bowl.
Her most personal items from the bathroom’s cabinets were strewn across the floor, cracked and ground into the imitation tile by heavy shoes.
The sliding shower glass that extended across the tub had been shattered out of the frame. On the opposite side of the tub was a dried red streak that could have been painted there by a heavily soaked paintbrush.
When a homicide victim’s life can be traced backward to a nether world of pickup bars, pimps, and nickel-and-dime hustlers and street dealers, the search for a likely perpetrator isn’t a long one. But Delia Landry was a social worker who had graduated in political science from LSU only three years ago; she attended a Catholic church in St.
Martinville, came from a middle-class family in Slidell, taught a catechism class to the children of migrant farm workers.
She had a boyfriend in New Orleans who sometimes stayed with her on the weekends, but no one knew his name, and there seemed to be nothing remarkable about the relationship.
What could she have done, owned, or possessed that would invite such a violent intrusion into her young life?
The killers could have made a mistake, I thought, targeted the wrong person, come to the wrong address. Why not? Cops did it.
But the previous tenants in the duplex had been a husband and wife who operated a convenience store. The next-door neighbors were Social Security recipients. The rest of the semirural neighborhood was made up of ordinary lower-middle-income people who would never have enough money to buy a home of their own. A small wire book stand by the television set had been knocked over on the carpet. The titles of the books were unexceptional and indicated nothing other than a general reading interest. But among the splay of pages was a small newspaper, titled The Catholic Worker, with a shoe print crushed across it. Then for some reason my eyes settled not on the telephone, which had been pulled loose from the wall jack, but on the number pasted across the telephone’s base. I inserted the terminal back in the jack and dialed the department.
”Wally, would you go down to my office for me and look at a pink message slip stuck in the corner of my blotter?“
”Sure. Hey, I’m glad you called. The sheriff was looking for you.“
”First things first, okay?“
”Hang on.“
He put me on hold, then picked up the receiver on my desk.
”All right, Dave.“ I asked him to read me the telephone number on the message slip. After he had finished, he said, ”That’s the number Sonny Marsallus left.“
”It’s also the number of the phone I’m using right now, Delia Landry’s.“
”What’s going on? Sonny decide to track his shit into Iberia Parish?“
”I think you’ve got your hand on it.“
”Look, the sheriff wants you to head out by Spanish Lake. Sweet Pea Chaisson and a carload of his broads are causing a little hysteria in front of the convenience store.“
”Then send a cruiser out there.“
”It isn’t a traffic situation.“ He began to laugh in a cigar-choked wheeze. ”Sweet Pea’s got his mother’s body sticking out of the car trunk. See what you can do, Dave.“
Chapter 3
MILES UP the old Lafayette highway that led past Spanish Lake, I saw the lights on emergency vehicles flashing in front of a convenience store and traffic backing up in both directions as people slowed to stare at the uniformed cops and paramedics who themselves seemed incredulous at the situation. I drove on the road’s shoulder and pulled into the parking lot, where Sweet Pea and five of his hookers- three white, one black, one Asian-sat amidst a clutter of dirty shovels in a pink Cadillac convertible, their faces bright with sweat as the heat rose from the leather interior. A group of kids were trying to see through the legs of the adults who were gathered around the trunk of the car. The coffin was oversize, an ax handle across, and had been made of wood and cloth and festooned with what had once been silk roses and angels with a one-foot-square glass viewing window in the lid. The sides were rotted out, the slats held in place by vinyl garbage bags and duct tape. Sweet Pea had wedged a piece of plywood under the bottom to keep it from collapsing and spilling out on the highway, but the head of the coffin protruded out over the bumper. The viewing glass had split cleanly across the middle, exposing the waxen and pinched faces of two corpses and nests of matted hair that had fountained against the coffin’s sides.
2 O
A uniformed deputy grinned at me from behind his sunglasses.
”Sweet Pea said he’s giving bargain rates on the broad in the box,“ he said.
”What’s going on?“ I said.
”Wally didn’t tell you?“
”No, he was in a comic mood, too.“
The smile went out of the deputy’s face. ”He says he’s moving his relatives to another cemetery.“
I walked to the driver’s door. Sweet Pea squinted up at me against the late sun. His eyes were the strangest I had ever seen in a human being. There were webbed with skin in the corners, so that the eyeballs seem to peep out from slits like a baby bird’s.
”I don’t believe it,“ I said.
”Believe it,“ the woman next to him said, disgusted. Her pink shorts were grimed with dirt. She pulled out the top of her shirt and smelled herself.
”You think it’s Mardi Gras?“ I said.
”I don’t got a right to move my stepmother?“ Sweet Pea said. His few strands of hair were glued across his scalp.
”Who’s in the coffin with her?“
His mouth made a wet silent O, as though he were thinking. Then he said, ”Her first husband. They were a tight couple.“
”Can we get out of the car and get something to eat?“ the woman next to him said.
”It’s better you stay where you are for a minute,“ I said.
”Robicheaux, cain’t we talk reasonable here? It’s hot. My ladies are uncomfortable.“
”Don’t call me by my last name.“
”Excuse me, but you’re not understanding the situation. My stepmother was buried on the Bertrand plantation ’cause that’s where she growed up. I hear it’s gonna be sold and I don’t want some cocksucker pouring cement on top of my mother’s grave. So I’m taking them back to Breaux Bridge. I don’t need no permit for that.“
He looked into my eyes and saw something there.
”I don’t get it. I been rude, I did something to insult you?“ he said. ”You’re a pimp. You don’t have a lot of fans around here.“ He bounced the heels of his hands lightly on the steering wheel. He smiled at nothing, his white eyebrows heavy with sweat. He cleaned one ear with his little finger. ”We got to wait for the medical examiner?“
he said. ”That’s right.“
”I don’t want nobody having an accident on my seats. They drunk two cases of beer back at the grave,“ he said. ”Step over to my office with me,“ I said. ”Beg your pardon?“ he said.
”Get out of the car.“ He followed me into the shade on the lee side of the store. He wore white slacks and brown shoes and belt and a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest. His teeth looked small and sharp inside his tiny mouth. ”Why the hard-on?“ he said. ”I don’t like you.“
”That’s your problem.“
”You got a beef with Sonny Boy Marsallus?“
”No. Why should I?“
”Because you think he’s piecing into your action.“
”You’re on a pad for Marsallus?“
”A woman was beaten to death last night, Sweet Pea. How you’d like to spend tonight in the bag, then answer some questions for us in the morning?“
”The broad was Sonny’s punch or something? Why ‘front me about it?“
”Nine years ago I helped pull a girl out of the Industrial Canal. She’d been set on fire with gasoline. I heard that’s how you made your bones with the Giacanos.“ He removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. He shook his head profoundly.
”Nothing around here ever changes. Say, you want a sno’ball?“ he said. ”You’re a clever man, Sweet Pea.“ I pulled my cuffs from my belt and turned him toward the cinder-block wall. He waited calmly while I snipped them on each wrist, his chin tilted upward, his slitted eyes smiling at nothing. ”What’s the charge?“ he asked. ”Hauling trash without a permit. No offense meant.“
”Wait a minute,“ he said. He flexed his knees, grunted, and passed gas softly. ”Boy, that’s better. T’anks a lot, podna.“ That evening my wife, Bootsie, and I boiled crawfish in a big black pot on the kitchen stove and shelled and ate them on the picnic table in the backyard with our adopted daughter, Alafair. Our house had been built of cypress and oak by my father, a trapper and derrick man, during the Depression, each beam and log notched and drilled and pegged, and the wood had hardened and grown dark with rainwater and smoke from stubble burning in the cane fields, and today a ball peen hammer would bounce off its exterior and ring in your palm. Down the tree-dotted slope in front of the house were the bayou and dock and bait shop that I operated with an elderly black man named Batist, and on the far side of the bayou was the swamp, filled with gum and willow trees and dead cypress that turned bloodred in the setting sun. Alafair was almost fourteen now, far removed from the little Salva-doran girl whose bones had seemed as brittle and hollow as a bird’s when I pulled her from a submerged plane out on the salt; nor was she any longer the round, hard-bodied Americanized child who read Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books and wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a Baby Orca T-shirt and red and white tennis shoes embossed with LEFT and RIGHT on each rubber toe. It seemed that one day she had simply stepped across a line, and the baby fat was gone, and her hips and young breasts had taken on the shape of a woman’s. I still remember the morning, with a pang of the heart, when she asked that her father please not call her ”little guy“ and ”Baby Squanto“ anymore. She wore her hair in bangs, but it grew to her shoulders now and was black and thick with a light chestnut shine in it. She snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, and peeled the shell off the meat with her thumbnail. ”What’s that book you were reading on the gallery, Dave?“ she asked. ”A diary of sorts.“
”Whose is it?“
”A guy named Sonny Boy.“
”That’s a grown man’s name?“ she asked. ”Marsallus?“ Bootsie said. She stopped eating. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had brushed it up in swirls and pinned it on her head. ”What are you doing with something of his?“
”I ran into him on Canal.“
”He’s back in New Orleans? Does he have a death wish?“
”If he does, someone else may have paid the price for it.“ I saw the question in her eyes. ”The woman who was killed up on the St. Martin line,“ I said. ”I think she was Sonny’s girlfriend.“ She bit down softly on the corner of her lip. ”He’s trying to involve you in something, isn’t he?“
”Maybe.“
”Not maybe. I knew him before you did, Dave. He’s a manipulator.“
”I never figured him out, I guess. Let’s go into town and get some ice cream,“
I said. ”Don’t let Sonny job you, Streak,“ she said. I didn’t want to argue with Bootsie’s knowledge of the New Orleans mob. After she married her previous husband, she had found out he kept the books for the Giacano family and owned half of a vending machine company with them. She also discovered, when he and his mistress were shot gunned to death in the parking lot of Hialeah race track, that he had mortgaged her home on Camp Street, which she had brought free and clear to the marriage. I didn’t want to talk to Bootsie in front of Alafair about the contents of Sonny’s notebook, either. Much of it made little sense to me-names that I didn’t recognize, mention of a telephone tree, allusions to weapons drops and mules flying dope under U.S. coastal radar. In fact, the concern, the place names, seemed a decade out-of-date, the stuff of congressional inquiry during the mid-Reagan era. But many of the entries were physical descriptions of events that were not characterized by ideology or after-the-fact considerations about legality or illegality: The inside of the jail is cool and dark and smells of stone and stagnant water. The man in the corner says he’s from Texas but speaks no English. He pried the heels off his boots with a fork and gave the guards seventy American dollars. Through the bars I can see the helicopters going in low across the canopy toward the village on the hillside, firing rockets all the way. I think the guards are going to shoot the man in the corner tomorrow morning. He keeps telling anyone who will listen he’s only a marijuanista .. . We found six cane cutters with their thumbs wired behind them in a slough two klicks from the place where we picked up our ammunition. They ‘d had no connection with us. They had been executed with machetes while kneeling. We pulled out as the families were coming from the village .. . Dysentery .. . water goes through me like a wet razor .. . burning with fever last night while the trees shook with rain .. . I wake in the morning to small-arms fire from the other side of an Indian pyramid that’s gray and green and smoking with mist, my blanket crawling with spiders .. . ”What are you thinking about?“ Bootsie said on our way back from the ice cream parlor. ”You’re right about Sonny. He was born to the hustle.“
”Yes?“
”I just never knew a grifter who deliberately turned his life into a living wound.“ She looked at me curiously in the fading light. I didn’t go directly to the department in the morning. Instead, I drove out past Spanish Lake to the little community of Cade, which was made up primarily of dirt roads, the old S.P. rail tracks, the dilapidated, paint less shacks of black people, and the seemingly boundless acreage of the Bertrand family sugar plantation. It had rained earlier that morning, and the new cane was pale green in the fields and egrets were picking insects out of the rows. I drove down a dirt lane past Bertha Fontenot’s weathered cypress home, which had an orange tin roof and a tiny privy in back. A clump of banana trees grew thickly against her south wall, and petunias and impatiens bloomed out of coffee cans and rusted-out buckets all over her gallery. I drove past one more house, one that was painted, and parked by a grove of gum trees, the unofficial cemetery of the Negro families who had worked on the plantation since before the War Between the States. The graves were no more than faint depressions among the drifting leaves, the occasional wooden cross or board marker inscribed with crude lettering and numbers knocked down and cracked apart by tractors and cane wagons, except for one yawning pit whose broken stone tablet lay half buried with fallen dirt at the bottom. But even in the deep shade I could make out the name Chaisson cut into the surface. ”I can hep you with something?“ a black man said behind me. He was tall, with a bladed face, eyes like bluefish scale, hair shaved close to the scalp, his skin the dull gold cast of worn saddle leather. He wore a grass-stained pink golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes without socks. ”Not really,“ I said.
”You ax Mr. Moleen you can come on the property?“ he said. ”I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff’s department,“ I said, and opened my badge holder in my palm. He nodded without replying, his face deliberately simple and empty of any emotion he thought I might read there. ”Aren’t you Bertie’s nephew?“
”Yes, suh, that’s right.“
”Your name’s Luke, you run the juke joint south of the highway?“
”Sometimes. I don’t own it, though. You know lots of things.“ When he smiled his eyes became veiled. Behind him, I saw a young black woman watching us from the gallery. She wore white shorts and a flowered blouse, and her skin had the same gold cast as his. She walked with a cane, although I could see no infirmity in her legs. ”How many people do you think are buried in this grove?“ I asked. ”They ain’t been burying round here for a long time. I ain’t sure it was even in here.“
”Is that an armadillo hole we’re looking at?“
”Miz Chaisson and her husband buried there. But that’s the only marker I ever seen here.“
”Maybe those depressions are all Indian graves. What do you think?“
”I grew up in town, suh. I wouldn’t know nothing about it.“
”You don’t have to call me sir.“ He nodded again, his eyes looking at nothing. ”You own your house, podna?“ I said. ”Aint Bertie say she own it since her mother died. She let me and my sister stay there.“
”She says she owns it, huh?“
”Mr. Moleen say different.“
”Who do you believe?“ I said, and smiled. ”It’s what the people at the co’rthouse say. You want anything else, suh? I got to be about my work.“
”Thanks for your time.“ He walked off through the dappled light, his face turned innocuously into the breeze blowing across the cane field. Had I been a cop too long? I asked myself. Had I come to dislike someone simply because he’d been up the road?
No, it was the disingenuousness, the hostility that had no handles on it, the use of one’s race like the edge of an ax.
But why expect otherwise, I thought. We’d been good teachers.
Five minutes after I walked into my office, Helen Soileau came through the door with a file folder in her hand and sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, her wide-set, unblinking pale eyes staring at my face.
”What is it?“ I said.
”Guess who bailed out Sweet Pea Chaisson?“
I raised my eyebrows.
”Jason Darbonne, over in Lafayette. When did he start representing pimps?“
”Darbonne would hitch his mother to a dogsled if the price was right.“
”Get this. The health officer wouldn’t let Sweet Pea transport the coffin back to Breaux Bridge, so he got a guy to haul it for ten bucks in a garbage truck.“
”What’s the file folder?“
”You wanted to question Pissant again? Too bad. The Feds picked him up this morning .. . Hey, I thought that’d give your peaches a tug.“
”Helen, could you give a little thought as to how you speak to people sometimes?“
”I’m not the problem. The problem is that black four-eyed fuck at the jail who turned our man over to the FBI.“
”What does the FBI want with a house creep?“
”Here’s the paperwork,“ she said, and threw the folder on my desk. ”If you go over to the lockup, tell that stack of whale shit to get his mind off copping somebody’ spud at least long enough to give us a phone call before he screws up an investigation.“
”I’m serious, Helen .. . Why not cut people a little .. . Never mind ..
. I’ll take care of it.“
After she left my office I went over to see the parish jailer. He was a three-hundred-pound bisexual with glasses as thick as Coke bottles and moles all over his neck.
”I didn’t release him. The night man did,“ he said.
”This paperwork is shit, Kelso.“
”Don’t hurt my night man’s feelings. He didn’t get out of the eighth grade for nothing.“
”You have a peculiar sense of humor. Roland Broussard was witness to a murder.“
”So talk to the Feds. Maybe that’s why they picked him up. Anyway, they just took him out on loan.“
”Where’s it say that? This handwriting looks like a drunk chicken walked across the page.“
”You want anything else?“ he asked, taking a wax paper-wrapped sandwich out of his desk drawer.
”Yeah, the prisoner back in our custody.“
He nodded, bit into his sandwich, and opened the newspaper on his desk blotter.
”I promise you, my man, you’ll be the first to know,“ he said, his eyes already deep in a sports story.
Chapter 4
YOU’RE A police officer for a while, you encounter certain temptations.
They come to you as all seductions do, in increments, a teaspoon at a time, until you discover you made an irrevocable hard left turn down the road someplace and you wake up one morning in a moral wasteland’
with no idea who you are. I’m not talking about going on a pad, ripping off dope from an evidence locker, or taking juice from dealers, either. Those temptations are not inherent in the job; they’re in the person. The big trade-off is in one’s humanity. The discretionary power of a police officer is enormous, at least in the lower strata of society, where you spend most of your time. You start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You’re not welcome in their part of town; you’re lied to with regularity, excoriated, your cruiser Molotoved. The most venal bail bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you’ll be shot at by snipers. You begin to believe there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman, morally diseased, or, at best, as caricatures whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals. Then maybe you’re the first to arrive on the scene after another cop has shot and killed a fleeing suspect. The summer night is hot and boiling with insects, the air already charged with a knowledge you don’t want to accept. It was a simple BE, a slashed screen in the back of a house; the dead man is a full-time bumbling loser known to every cop on the beat; the two wounds are three inches apart. ”He was running?“ you say to the other cop, who’s wired to the eyes. ”You goddamn right he was. He stopped and turned on me. Look, he had a piece.“ The gun is in the weeds; it’s blue-black, the grips wrapped with electrician’s tape. The moon is down, the night so dark you wonder how anyone could see the weapon in the hand of a black suspect. ”I’m counting on you, kid,“ the other cop says. ”Just tell people what you saw. There’s the fucking gun. Right? It ain’t a mushroom.“ And you step across a line. Don’t sweat it, a sergeant and drinking buddy tells you later. It’s just one more lowlife off the board. Most of these guys wouldn’t make good bars of soap. Then something happens that reminds you we all fell out of the same tree. Imagine a man locked in a car trunk, his wrists bound behind him, his nose running from the dust and the thick oily smell of the spare tire. The car’s brake lights go on, illuminating the interior of the trunk briefly, then the car turns on a rural road and gravel pings like rifle shot under the fenders. But something changes, a stroke of luck the bound man can’t believe-the car bangs over a rut and the latch on the trunk springs loose from the lock, hooking just enough so that the trunk lid doesn’t fly up in the driver’s rearview mirror. The air that blows through the opening smells of rain and wet trees and flowers; the man can hear hundreds of frogs croaking in unison. He readies himself, presses the sole of his tennis shoe against the latch, eases it free, then rolls over the trunk’s lip, tumbles off the bumper, and bounces like a tire in the middle of the road. The breath goes out of his chest in a long wheeze, as though he had been dropped from a great height; rocks scour divots out of his face and grind red circles the size of silver dollars on his elbows. Thirty yards up the car has skidded to a stop, the lid of the trunk flopping in the air. And the bound man splashes through the cattails into a slough by the side of the road, his legs tangling in dead hyacinth vines below the surface, the silt locking around his ankles like soft cement. Ahead he can see the flooded stands of cypress and willow trees, the green layer of algae on the dead water, the shadows that envelop and protect him like a cloak. The hyacinth vines are like wire around his legs; he trips, falls on one knee. A brown cloud of mud mushrooms around him. He stumbles forward again, jerking at the clothesline that binds his wrists, his heart exploding in his chest. His pursuers are directly behind him now; his back twitches as though the skin has been stripped off with pliers. Then he wonders if the scream he hears is his own or that of a nutria out on the lake. They fire only one round. It passes through him like a shaft of ice, right above the kidney. When he opens his eyes, he’s on his back, stretched across a cushion of crushed willows on top of a sand spit, his legs in the water. The sound of the pistol report is still ringing in his ears. The man who wades toward him in silhouette is smoking a cigarette. Not twice. It’s not fair, Roland Broussard wants to say. I got a meth problem. That’s the only reason I was there. I’m a nobody guy, man. You don’t need to do this.
The man in silhouette takes another puff off his cigarette, pitches it out into the trees, perhaps moves out of the moon’s glow so Roland’s face will be better illuminated. Then he sights along the barrel and puts another round from the .357 Magnum right through Roland’s eyebrow.
He walks with a heavy step back up the embankment, where a companion has waited for him as though he were watching the rerun of an old film.
Chapter 5
LISTENED, HIS powder blue porkpie hat slanted down on his forehead, his eyes roving out into the hall while I talked. He wore an immaculate pair of white tennis shorts and a print shirt covered with parakeets.
The back of his neck and the tops of his immense arms were flaking with sunburn. ”Kidnapping a guy already in custody is pretty slick. Who do you figure these characters were?“ he said, his eyes leaving two uniformed deputies on the other side of the glass. ”Guys who knew the drill, at least well enough to convince a night jailer they were FBI.“
”The grease balls “Maybe.”
“It’s not their normal style. They don’t like to stray into federal jurisdiction.” He glanced through the glass partition into the hall again. “Why do I get the feeling I’m some kind of zoo exhibit?”
“It’s your imagination,” I said, my face flat. “I bet.” Then he winked and pointed at a deputy with one finger. The deputy looked down at some papers in his hand. “Knock it off, Clete.”
“Why’d you ask me down here?”
“I thought you’d like to go fishing.”
He smiled. His face was round and pink, his green eyes lighted with a private sense of humor. A scar ran through part of his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel.
“Dave, I know what my old Homicide podjo is going to think before he thinks it.”
“I’ve got two open murder cases. One of the victims may have been Sonny Boy Marsallus’s girlfriend.”
“Marsallus, huh?” he said, his face sobering.
“I tried to have him picked up by NOPD, but he went off the screen.”
He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.
“Leave him off the screen,” he said.
“What was he into down in the tropics?” I asked.
“A lot of grief.”
Helen Soileau came through the door, without knocking, and dropped the crime scene report on my desk.
“You want to look it over and sign it?” she said. Her eyes went up and down Clete’s body.
“Do y’all know each other?” I said.
“Only by reputation. Didn’t he work for Sally Dio?” she said.
Clete fed a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at me.
“I’ll go over the report in a few minutes, Helen,” I said.
“We couldn’t get a print off the cigarette butt, but the casts on the footprints and tire tracks look good,” she said. “By the way, the .357 rounds were hollow-points.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Clete swiveled around in his chair and watched her go back out the door.
“Who’s the muff-driver?” he said.
“Come on, Clete.”
“One look at that broad is enough to drive you to a monastery.”
It was a quarter to five.
“Do you want to pull your car around front and I’ll meet you there?” I said. He followed me in his old Cadillac convertible to the Henderson levee outside Breaux Bridge. We put my boat and outboard in the water and fished on the far side of a bay dotted with abandoned oil platforms and dead cypress trees. The rain was falling through shafts of sunlight in the west, and the rain looked like tunnels of spun glass and smoke rising into the sky. Clete took a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer from the cooler and snapped off the top with his pocketknife. The foam slid down the inside of the neck when he removed the bottle from his mouth. Then he drank again, his throat working a long time. His face looked tired, vaguely morose. “Were you bothered by that crack Helen made about Sally Dio?”
“So I ran security for a grease ball I also had two of his goons slam my hand in a car door. Sometime when you have a chance, tell the bride of Frankenstein what happened when Sal and his hired gum balls were flying friendly skies.”
The plane had crashed and exploded in a fireball on a mountainside in western Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said someone had poured sand in the gas tanks. Clete finished his beer and blew out his breath. He pushed his hand down in the ice for another bottle. “You okay, partner?” I said. “I’ve never dealt real well with that bullshit I got involved with in Central America. Sometimes it comes back in the middle of the night, I mean worse than when I got back from Vietnam. It’s like somebody striking a match on my stomach lining.”
There were white lines at the corners of his eyes. He watched his red-and-white bobber move across the water in the shade of an oil platform, dip below the surface and rise quivering again; but he didn’t pick up his rod.
“Maybe it’s time for the short version of the Serenity Prayer.
Sometimes you just have to say fuck it,” I said. “What’s the worst day you had in ”Nam, I mean besides getting nailed by that Bouncing Betty?“
, ”A village chieftain called in the 1055 on his own people.“
”Sonny Boy and I hooked up with the same bunch of gun runners It was like an outdoor mental asylum down there. Half the time I ‘ didn’t know if we were selling to the rebels or the government. I was so strung out on rum and dope and my own troubles I didn’t care, either. Then one night we got to see what the government did when they wanted to put the fear of God in the Indians.“ He pinched his mouth with his hand. His calluses made a dry sound like sandpaper against his whiskers. He took a breath and widened his eyes. I ”They went into this one ville and killed everything in sight. Maybe four hundred people. There was an orphanage there, run by some Mennonites. They didn’t spare anybody …
all those kids .. . man.“ He watched my face. ;, ”You saw this?“ I asked. ”I heard it, from maybe a half mile away. I’ll never forget the sound of those people screaming. Then this captain walked us through the ville. The sonofabitch didn’t give it a second thought.“
He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and tried to light it with a Zippo cupped in his hands. The flint scratched dryly and he took the cigarette back out of his mouth and closed his big hand on it. ”Let the past go, Cletus. Haven’t you paid enough dues?“ I said. ”You wanted to hear about Sonny Boy? Three weeks later we were with a different bunch of guys, I was so wiped out I still don’t know who they were, Cubans maybe and some Belgians working both sides of the street. Anyway, we were on a trail and we walked right into an L-shaped ambush, M-6o’s, blookers, serious shit, they must have shredded twelve guys in the first ten seconds. “Sonny was on point … I saw this … I wasn’t hallucinating … Two guys next to me saw it, too .. .”
“What are you talking about?”
“He got nailed with an M-6o. I saw dust jumping all over his clothes.
I didn’t imagine it. When he went down his shirt was soaked with blood. Three weeks later he shows up in a bar in Guatemala City. The rebels starting calling him the red angel. They said he couldn’t die.”
He took a long drink off the beer. The sunlight looked like a yellow flame inside the bottle.
“Okay, mon, maybe I fried my head down there,” he said. “But I stay away from Sonny. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like he’s got death painted on his skin.”
“It sounds like another one of Sonny’s cons.”
“There’s nothing like somebody else telling you what you saw. You remember what an M-6o bouncing on a bungee cord could do to an entire ville? How about a guy who gets it from ten yards away? No, don’t answer that, Dave. I don’t think I can handle it.”
In the silence I could hear the whir of automobile tires on the elevated highway that spanned the swamp. The setting sun looked like lakes of fire in the clouds, then a shower began to march across the bays and willow islands and dance in a yellow mist on the water around us. I pulled up the sash weight I used for an anchor, cranked the engine, and headed back for the levee. Clete opened another bottle of Dixie, then reached deep down in the crushed ice, found a can of Dr.
Pepper, and tossed it to me. “Sorry, Streak,” he said, and smiled with his eyes.
But the apology would be mine to make.
That night I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt, and drove out toward Spanish Lake and the little community of Cade. I can’t explain why I decided to jog there rather than along the bayou, by my house, south of town. Maybe it was because the only common denominator in the case, so far, was a geographical one. For no reason I understood, Sonny Boy had mentioned a barra-coon, built near the lake by Jean Lafitte, then Sweet Pea Chaisson,
who could never be accused of familial sentiment, other than a violent one, had decided to exhume his adoptive mother’s remains from the Bertrand plantation and transport them in a garbage truck back to Breaux Bridge. Both men operated in a neon and concrete world where people bought and sold each other daily and lived by the rules that govern piranha fish. What was their interest or involvement in a rural community of poor black people? I parked my truck and jogged along a dirt road between sugarcane acreage, over the railroad tracks, past a dilapidated clapboard store and a row of shacks. Behind me, a compact white automobile turned off the highway, slowed so as not to blow dust in my face, and drove toward the lighted houses on the lake. I could see the silhouettes of two people talking to each other. The breeze was warm and smelled of horses and night-blooming flowers, freshly turned soil, and smoke blowing off a stump fire hard by a pecan orchard. The tree trunks seemed alive with shadows and protean shapes in the firelight, as though, if you let imagination have its way, the residents from an earlier time had not yet accepted the inevitability of their departure. I’ve often subscribed to the notion that perhaps history is not sequential; that all people, from all of history, live out their lives simultaneously, in different dimensions perhaps, occupying the same pieces of geography, unseen by one another, as if we are all part of one spiritual conception. Attakapas Indians, Spanish colonists, slaves who dredged mud from the lake to make bricks for the homes of their masters, Louisiana’s boys in butternut brown who refused to surrender after Appomattox, federal soldiers who blackened the sky with smoke from horizon to horizon—maybe they were all still out there, living just a breath away, like indistinct figures hiding inside an iridescent glare on the edge of our vision. But the lights I saw in a distant grove of gum trees were not part of a metaphysical speculation. I could see them bouncing off tree trunks and hear the roar and grind of a large machine at the end of the dirt lane that ran past Bertie Fontenot’s house.
I slowed to a walk, breathing deep in my chest, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes at the cattle guard and wisteria-grown arched gate that marked the entrance to the Bertrand property. The dirt lane was faintly haloed with humidity in the moonlight, the rain ditches boiling with insects. I began jogging toward the lights in the trees, the steady thud of my shoes like an intrusion on a nocturnal plantation landscape that had eluded the influences of the twentieth century.
Then I had the peculiar realization that I felt naked. I had neither badge nor gun, and hence no identity other than that of jogger. It was a strange feeling to have, as well as to be forced into acknowledging simultaneously the ease with which my everyday official capacity allowed me to enter and exit any number of worlds where other people lived with an abiding trepidation.
The grinding sounds of the machine ceased and the headlights dimmed and then went off. I strained my eyes to see into the gum trees, then realized that the machine, a large oblong one with a cab and giant steel tracks, was parked beyond the trees in a field, its dozer blade glinting in the moonlight.
Bertie’s house and the nephew’s were dark. When I walked toward the grove I could see where the dozer blade had graded whole roadways through the trees, ripping up root systems, snapping off limbs, slashing pulpy divots out of the trunks, scooping out trenches and spreading the fill out into the cane field, churning and flattening and re grinding the soil and everything in it, until the entire ground area in and around the grove looked like it had been poured into an enormous bag and shaken out at a great height.
There was no one in sight.
I walked out onto the edge of the field by the earth mover. The moon was bright above the treetops and the new cane ruffled in the breeze. I picked up handfuls of dirt and sifted them through my fingers, touched the pieces of fractured bone, as tiny and brown as awcient teeth; strips of wood porous with rot and as weightless as balsa; the remains of a high button shoe, mashed flat by the machine’s track.
The wind dropped and the air suddenly smelled of sour mud and humus and dead water beetles. The sky was a dirty black, the clouds like curds of smoke from an oil fire; sweat ran down my face and sides like angry insects. Who had done this, ripped a burial area apart, as though it had no more worth than a subterranean rat’s nest?
I walked back down the dirt lane toward my truck. I saw the white compact car returning down the access road, slowing gradually.
Suddenly, from a distance of perhaps forty yards, the person in the passenger’s seat shined a handheld spotlight at me. The glare was blinding; I could see nothing except a circle of white red-rimmed heat aimed into my eyes. ;
No gun, no badge, I thought, a sweating late-middle-aged man \
trapped on a rural road like a deer caught in an automobile’s head- i lights.
“I don’t know who you are, but you take that light out of my eyes!” I shouted.
The car was completely stopped now, the engine idling. I could hear two people, men, talking to each other. Then I realized their concern had shifted from me to someone else. The spotlight went out, leaving my eyes filled with whorls of color, and the car shot forward toward my parked truck, where a man on foot was leaning through the driver’s window.
He bolted down the far side of the railway, his body disappearing like a shadow into weeds and cattails. The white compact bounced over the train embankment, stopped momentarily, and the man in the passenger seat shined the spotlight out into the darkness. I used my T-shirt to wipe my eyes clear and tried to read the license plate, but someone had rubbed mud over the numbers.
Then the driver scorched a plume of oily dust out of the road and floored the compact back onto the highway.
I opened the driver’s door to my truck. When the interior light flicked on, I saw curled on the seat, like a serpent whose back has been crushed with a car tire, a twisted length of rust-sheathed chain the color of dried blood. I picked it up, felt the delicate shell flake with its own weight against my palms. Attached to one end was a cylindrical iron cuff, hinged open like a mouth gaping in death. I had seen one like it only in a museum. It was a leg iron, the kind used in the transportation and sale of African slaves.
Chapter 6
NEXT MORNING was Saturday. The dawn was gray and there were strips of mist in the oak and pecan trees when I walked down the slope to help Batist open up the dock and bait shop. The sun was still below the treeline in the swamp, and the trunks on the far side of the bayou were wet and black in the gloom. You could smell the fecund odor of bluegill and sun perch spawning back in the bays.
Batist was outside the bait shop, poking a broom handle into the pockets of rainwater that had collected in the canvas awning that extended on guy wires over the dock. I had never known his age, but he was an adult when I was a child, as black and solid as a woodstove, and today his stomach and chest were still as flat as boilerplate. He had farmed and trapped and fished commercially and worked on oyster boats all his life, and could carry an outboard motor down to the ramp in each hand as though they were stamped from plastic. He was illiterate and knew almost nothing of the world outside of Iberia Parish, but he was one of the bravest and most loyal men I ever knew.
He began wiping the dew off the spool tables, which we had inset with Cinzano umbrellas for the fishermen who came in at midday for the barbecue lunches that we sold for $5.95.
“You know why a nigger’d be setting in one of our boats this morning?”
he asked.
“Batist, you need to forget that word.”
“This is a nigger carry a razor and a gun. He ain’t here to rent boats.”
“Could you start over?”
“There’s a high-yellow nigger wit’ slacks on and shiny, pointy shoes,”
he said, tapping his finger in the air with each word as though I were obtuse. “He’s setting out yonder in our boat, eating boudin out of a paper towel wit’ his fingers. This is a nigger been in jail, carry a razor on a string round his neck. I ax what he t’inks he’s doing. He look up at me and say, ”You clean up round here?“
”I say, “Yeah, I clean trash out of the boat, and that mean you better get yo’ worthless black ass down that road.”
“He say, ”I ain’t come here to argue wit’ you. Where Robicheaux at?“
”I say, “He ain’t here and that’s all you got to know.” I say, “Vas ten, neg. ”That’s it. We don’t need them kind, Dave.“
He used a half-mooned Clorox bottle to scoop the ashes out of the split oil barrel that we used for a barbecue pit. I waited for him to continue.
”What was his name?“ I said. ”What kind of car did he drive?“
”He didn’t have no car, and I ain’t ax him his name.“
”Where’d he go?“
”Wherever people go when you run them down the road with a two-by-fo’.“
”Batist, I don’t think it’s a good idea to treat people like that.“
”One like that always work for the white man, Dave.“
”I beg your pardon?“
”Everyting he do make white people believe the rest of us ain’t got the right to ax for mo’ than we got.“
It was one of those moments when I knew better than to contend with Batist’s reasoning or experience.
”Someting else I want to talk wit’ you about,“ he said. ”Look in yonder my shelves, my pig feet, my graton, tell me what you t’ink of that.“
I opened the screen door to the shop but hated to look. The jar of pickled hogs’ feet was smashed on the floor; half-eaten candy bars, hard-boiled eggs, and cracklings, called graton in Cajun French, were scattered on the counter. In the midst of it all, locked in a wire crab trap, Tripod, Alafair’s three-legged coon, stared back at me.
I picked him up in my arms and carried him outside. He was a beautiful coon, with silver-tipped fur and black rings on his tail, a fat stomach and big paws that could turn doorknobs and twist tops off of jars.
”I’ll send Alf down to clean it up,“ I said.
”It ain’t right that coon keep messing up the shop, Dave.“
”It looks to me like somebody left a window open.“
”That’s right. Somebody. “Cause I closed every one of them.”
I stopped.
“I didn’t come down here last night, partner, if that’s what you’re saying.”
He straightened up from a table, with the wiping rag in his hand. His face seemed to gather with a private concern. Two fishermen with a minnow bucket and a beer cooler stood by the door of the shop and looked at us impatiently.
“You wasn’t down here last night, Dave?” he asked.
“No. What is it?”
He inserted his thumb and forefinger in the watch pocket of the bell-bottom dungarees he wore.
“This was on the windowsill this morning. I t’ought it was some-ting you found on the flo’,” he said, and placed the oblong piece of stamped metal in my hand. “What you call them tings?”
“A dog tag.” I read the name on it, then read it again.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
I felt my hand close on the tag, felt the edges bite into my palm.
“You know I cain’t read, me. I didn’t want to give you so meting bad, no.”
“It’s all right. Help those gentlemen there, will you? I’ll be back down in a minute,” I said.
“It ain’t good you not tell me.”
“It’s the name of a man I was in the army with. It’s some kind of coincidence. Don’t worry about it.”
But in his eyes I could see the self-imposed conviction that somehow his own ineptitude or lack of education had caused me injury.
“I ain’t mad about that coon, Dave,” he said. “Coon gonna be a coon.
Tell Alafair it ain’t nobody’s fault.”
I sat at the redwood table with a cup of coffee under the mimosa tree in the backyard, which was still cool and blue with shadow. The breeze ruffled the periwinkles and willows along the edge of the coulee, and two greenhead mallards, who stayed with us year-round, were skittering across the surface of the pond at the back of our property.
The stainless steel dog tag contained the name of Roy J. Bumgartner, his serial number, blood type, religion, and branch of service, the simple and pragmatic encapsulation of a human life that can be vertically inserted as neatly as a safety razor between the teeth and locked in place with one sharp blow to the chin.
I remembered him well, a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston, Texas, who had brought the slick in low out of the molten sun, the canopy and elephant grass flattening under the down draft while AK-47 rounds whanged off the ship’s air-frame like tack hammers.
Ten minutes later, the floor piled with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochromed Ms to indicate the morphine that laced their hearts, we lifted off from the LZ and flew back through the same curtain of automatic weapons fire, the helicopter blades thropping, the windows pocking with holes like skin blisters snapping.
My body was as dry and dehydrated as a lizard’s skin, all the moisture used up by the blood-expander the medic had given me during the night, the way spilled water evaporates off a hot stove. The same medic, a sweaty Italian kid from Staten Island, naked to the waist, held me in his arms now, and kept saying, as much to convince himself as me, You ‘re gonna make it, Loot.. . Say good-bye to Shitsville .. . You ‘re going home alive in sixty-five .. . Bum’s chauffeuring this baby right into Battalion Aid .. . They got refrigeration, Loot .. . Plasma .. .
Don’t put your hands down there … I mean it.. . Hey, somebody hold his goddamn hands.
With the ship yawing and grooves shearing out of the rotary and black smoke from an electrical fire spiraling back through the interior, the rice paddies and earthen dikes and burned-out hooches streaking by below us, I stared at the back of the pilot’s head as though my thoughts, which were like a scream inside my skull, could penetrate his: You can do it, pappy, you can do it, pappy, you can do it, pappy.
Then he turned and looked behind him, and I saw his thin blond face inside his helmet, the dry lump of chewing tobacco in his cheek, the red field dressing across one eye, the bloodshot and desperate energies in the other, and I knew, even before I saw the waves sliding onto the beach from the South China Sea, that we were going to make it, that no one this brave could perish.
But that conclusion was born out of political innocence and a soldier’s naive belief that he would never be abandoned by his own government.
Bootsie brought me another cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts with milk and blackberries in it. She wore a pair of faded jeans and a beige sleeveless shirt, and her face looked cool and fresh in the soft light.
“What’s that?” she said.
“A dog tag that’s thirty years old.”
She touched the tag with the balls of her fingers, then turned it over.
“It belonged to a guy who disappeared into Laos,” I said. “He never came back home. I think he’s one of those who got written off by Nixon and Kissinger.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Batist found it on the windowsill in the bait shop this morning.
It’s thespian bullshit of some kind. Last night somebody put a rusted leg iron on the seat of my truck.”
“Did you tell the sheriff?”
“I’ll talk to him Monday.”
I chewed a mouthful of Grape-Nuts and kept my face empty.
“Alafair’s still asleep. You want to go back inside for a little while?”
“You bet.”
A few minutes later we lay on top of the sheets in our bedroom. The curtains were gauzy and white with small roses printed on them, and they puffed in the breeze that blew through the azaleas and pecan trees in the side yard. Bootsie kissed like no woman I ever knew. Her face would come close to mine, her mouth parting, then she would angle her head slightly and touch her lips dryly against mine, remove them, her eyes never leaving mine; then she’d brush my lips with hers one more time, her fingernails making a slow circle in the back of my hair, her right hand moving down my stomach while her tongue slid across my teeth.
She made love without inhibition or self-consciousness, and never with stint or a harbored resentment. She sat on top of me, took me in her hand, and placed me deep inside her, her thighs widening, a wet murmur breaking from her throat. Then she propped herself on both arms so that her breasts hung close to my face, her breath coming faster now, her skin bright with a thin sheen of sweat. I felt her heat spreading into my loins, as though it were she who was controlling the moment for both of us. She leaned closer, gathering herself around me, her feet under my thighs, her face flushed and growing smaller and turning inward now, her hair damp against her skin like swirls of honey. In my mind’s eye I saw a great hard-bodied tarpon, thick and stiff with life, glide through tunnels of pink coral and waving sea fans, then burst through a wave in strings of foam and light.
Afterward, she lay inside my arm and touched what seemed to me all the marks of my mortality and growing age-the white patch of hair on the side of my head, my mustache, now flecked with silver,
the puckered indentation from a .38 round below my left collarbone, the gray scar, like a flattened earthworm, from a pun gi stick, on my stomach, and the spray of arrow-shaped welts on my thigh where steel shards from a Bouncing Betty still lay embedded. Then she rolled against me and kissed me on the cheek.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“Because you’re the best, cher”
“You, too, Boots.”
“But you’re not telling me something.”
“I have a bad feeling about this one.”
She raised up on one elbow and looked into my face. Her bare hip looked sculpted, like pink marble, against the light outside.
“These two murders,” I said. “We’re not dealing with local dimwits.”
“So?”
“It’s an old problem, Boots. They come from places they’ve already ruined, and then it’s our turn. By the time we figure out we’re dealing with major leaguers, they’ve been through the clock shop with baseball bats.”
“That’s why we hire cops like you,” she said, and tried to smile. When I didn’t answer, she said, “We can’t remove south Louisiana from the rest of the world, Dave.”
“Maybe we should give it a try.”
She lay against me and placed her hand on my heart. She smelled of shampoo and flowers and the milky heat in her skin. Outside, I could hear crows cawing angrily in a tree as the sun broke out of the clouds like a heliograph.
Chapter 7
PROBABLY SAFE to say the majority of them are self-deluded, uneducated, fearful of women, and defective physically. Their political knowledge, usually gathered from paramilitary magazines, has the moral dimensions of comic books. Some of them- have been kicked out of the service on bad conduct and dishonorable discharges; others have neither the physical nor mental capacity to successfully complete traditional basic training in the U.S. Army. After they pay large sums of money to slap mosquitoes at a mere training camp in the piney woods of north Florida, they have themselves tattooed with death heads and grandiloquently toast one another, usually in pecker wood accents, with the classic Legionnaire’s paean to spiritual nihilism, “Vive la guerre, vive la mart. ”
Miami is full of them.
If you want to connect with them in the New Orleans area, you cross the river over to Algiers into a neighborhood of pawnshops and Vietnamese-owned grocery stores and low-rent bars, and visit Tommy Carrol’s Gun & Surplus.
It was Sunday evening, and Helen Soileau and I were off the clock and out of our jurisdiction. Tommy Carrol, whom I had never met, was locking up his glass gun cases and about to close. He wojje baggy camouflage trousers, polished combat boots, and a wide-necked bright yellow T-shirt, like body builders wear. His shaved head reminded me of an alabaster bowling ball. He chewed and snapped his gum maniacally, his eyes flicking back and forth from his work to Helen and me as we walked in file between the stacks of survival gear, ammunition, inflatable rafts, knife display cases, and chained racks of bolt-action military rifles. “So I’m stuck again with me goddamn kids, that’s what you’re saying?” Helen said over her shoulder to me. She wore tan slacks, lacquered straw sandals, and a flowered shirt hanging outside her belt. She sipped from a can of beer that was wrapped in a brown bag. “Did I say that? Did I say that?” I said at her back. “You need something?” Tommy Carrol said. “Yeah, a couple of Excedrin,” I said. “Is there a problem here?” Tommy Carrol asked. “I’m looking for Sonny Boy MarsaJlus,” I said. “Don’t tell us the herpes outpatient clinic, either. We already been there,” Helen said. “Shut up, Helen,” I said. “Did I marry Mr. Goodwrench or not?” she said. “What’s going on?” Tommy asked, his gum snapping in his jaw. “Doesn’t Sonny hang in here?” I said. “Sometimes. I mean he used to. Not anymore.”
“Helen, why don’t you go sit in the car?” I said. “Because I don’t feel like changing diapers on your goddamn kids.”
“I’ve been out of the loop,” I said to Tommy. “I’d like to get back to work.”
“Doing what?”
“Peace Corps. Isn’t this the sign-up place?” I said. He arched his eyebrows and looked sideways. Then he made a tent on “his chest with the fingers of one hand. His eyes were like blue marbles. ”It makes you feel better to jerk my Johnson, be my guest,“
he said. ”But I’m closing up, I don’t have any contact with Sonny, and
I got nothing to do with other people’s family troubles.“ He widened his eyes for emphasis. ”This is the guy knows all the meres?“ Helen said, and brayed at her own irony. She upended her beer can until it was empty. ”I’m driving down to the store on the corner. If you’re not there in five minutes, you can ride the goddamn bus home.“ She let the glass door slam behind her. Tommy stared after her. ”For real, that’s your wife?“ he said, chewing his gum. ”Yeah.“
”What’s your experience? Maybe I can help.“
”One tour in “Nam. Some diddle-shit stuff with the tomato pickers.” He pushed a pencil and pad across the glass countertop. “Write your name and number down there. I’ll see what I can come up with.”
“You can’t hook me up with Sonny?”
“Like I say, I don’t see him around, you know what I mean?” His eyes were as bright as blue silk, locked on mine, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw. “He’s out of town and nobody’s missing him?” I smiled at him.
“You summed it up.”
“How about two guys who look like Mutt and Jeff?”
He began shaking his head noncommittally. “The short guy’s got a fire hydrant for a neck. Maybe he did some work for Idi Amin. Maybe Sonny Boy popped a cap on his brother,” I said. His eyes stayed fixed on mine, but I saw his hand tic on the countertop, heard his heavy ring click on the glass. He picked up the notepad from the countertop and tossed it on a littered desk behind him. “You shouldn’t job me, man,”
he said. His eyes were unblinking, his gum rolling on his teeth. “You think I’m a cop?”
“You got it, Jack.”
“You’re right.” I opened my badge holder on the countertop. “You know who the guy with the sawed-off neck is, don’t you?” He dropped his ring of keys in his pocket and called out to a man sweeping the wood floors in front, “Lock it up, Mack. I’m gonna see what the old woman’s got for supper. The fun guy here is a cop. But you don’t have to talk to him, you don’t want.” Then he spat his chewing gum neatly into a trash bag and clanged through a metal door into the back alley. I went through the door after him. He began to walk rapidly toward his car, his keys ringing in the pocket of his camouflage trousers. “Hold on, Tommy,” I said. Helen had parked her car by the end of the alley, next to a Dumpster and a stand of banana trees that grew along a brick wall.
She got out of her car with her baton in her hand. “Right there, motherfucker!” she said, breaking into a run. “Freeze! Did you hear me? I said freeze, goddamn it!” But Tommy Carrol was not a good listener and tried to make his automobile. She whipped the baton behind his knee, and his leg folded under him as though she had severed a tendon. He crashed into the side of his car door, his knee held up before him with both hands, his mouth open as though he were trying to blow the fire out of a burn. “Damn it, Helen,” I said between my teeth. “He shouldn’t have run,” she said. “Right, Tommy? You got nothing to hide, you don’t need to run. Tell me I’m right, Tommy.”
“Lay off him, Helen. I mean it.” I helped him up by one arm, opened his car door, and sat him down in the seat. An elderly black woman, pulling a child’s wagon, with a blue rag tired around her head, came off the side street and began rooting in the Dumpster. “I’m going to file charges on you people,” Tommy said. “That’s your right. Who’s the short guy, Tommy?” I said. “You know what? I’m gonna tell you. It’s Emile Pogue. Send the mutt here after him. She’ll make a great stuffed head.” I heard Helen move behind me, gravel scrape under her shoes. “No,” I said, and held up my hand in front of her.
Tommy kneaded the back of his leg with both hands. A thick blue vein pulsed in his shaved scalp.
“Here’s something else to take with you, too,” he said. “Emile didn’t work for Idi Amin. Emile trained him at an Israeli jump school. You jack-offs don’t have any idea of what you’re fooling with, do you?”
Monday morning I went to the Iberia Parish Court House and began researching the records on the Bertrand plantation out by Cade. Bertie Fontenot maintained that Moleen Bertrand’s grandfather had given a strip of land to several black tenants, her ancestors included, ninety-five years ago, but I could find no record of the transfer.
Neither could the clerk of court. The early surveys of the Bertrand property were crude, in French arpents, and made use of coulees and dirt roads as boundaries; the last survey had been done ten years ago for an oil company, and the legal descriptions were clear and the unit designations now in acres. But no matter-there had been no apparent subdivision of the plantation granting Bertie and her neighbors title to the land on which they lived.
The secretary at Moleen’s law office told me he had gone out to the country club to join his wife for lunch. I found them by the putting green, he on a wood bench, only enough bourbon in his glass to stain the water the color of oak, she in a short white pleated skirt and magenta blouse that crinkled with light, her bleached hair and deeply tanned and lined face a deceptive and electric illusion of middle-aged health down in the Sunbelt.
For Julia Bertrand was at the club every day, played a mean eighteen as well as game of bridge, was always charming, and was often the only woman remaining among the male crowd who stayed at the bar through supper time. Her capacity was awesome; she never slurred her words or used profane or coarse language; but her driver’s license had been suspended twice, and years ago, before I was with the sheriff’s department, a Negro child had been killed in a hit-and-run accident out in the parish. Julia Bertrand had been held briefly in custody. But later a witness changed his story, and the parents dropped charges and moved out of state.
She bent over the ball, the breeze ruffling her pleated skirt against her muscular thighs, and putted a ten-footer, plunk, neatly into the cup. From the wood bench she picked up her drink, which was filled with fruit and shaved ice and wrapped with a paper napkin and rubber band, and walked toward me with her hand extended. Her smile was dazzling, her tinted contacts a chemical blue-green.
“How are you, Dave? I hope we’re not in trouble,” she said. Her voice was husky and playful, her breath heavy with nicotine.
“Not with me. How you doing, Julia?”
“I’m afraid Dave’s doing pro bono for Bertie Fontenot,” Moleen said.
“Dave, not really?” she said.
“It’s gone a little bit beyond that,” I said. “Some peculiar things seem to be happening out at your plantation, Moleen.”
“Oh?” he said.
“I went jogging on your place Friday night. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Anytime,” he said.
“Somebody dropped a rusted leg iron on my truck seat.”
“A leg iron? Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Moleen said, and drank from his glass. His long legs were crossed, his eyes impossible to read behind his sunglasses.
“Somebody was running a dozer blade through that grove of gum trees at the end of Bertie Fontenot’s lane. It looks to me like there might have been some old graves in there.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re telling me or why, but I can tell you, with some degree of certainty, what was in there. My great grandfather leased convicts as laborers after the Civil War. Supposedly there was a prison stockade right where those gum trees are today.”
“No kidding?” I said.
“A bad chapter in the family history, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, it was not. You liberals love collective guilt,” Julia said.
“Why would somebody want to put a leg iron in my truck?”
“Search me.” He took off his sunglasses, folded them on his knee, yawned, and looked at a distant, moss-hung oak by the fairway. “It was probably just my night for strange memorabilia. Somebody left a dog tag on the windowsill of my bait shop. It belonged to a guy who flew a slick into a hot LZ when I was wounded.”
“That’s quite a story,” he said. He gazed down the fairway, seemingly uninterested in my conversation, but for just a moment there had been a brightening of color in his hazel eyes, a hidden thought working behind the iris like a busy insect. “This guy got left behind in Laos,” I said. “You know what, Dave?” he said. “I wish I’d behaved badly toward people of color. Been a member of the Klan or a white citizens council, something like that. Then somehow this conversation would seem more warranted.”
“Dave’s not out here for any personal reason, Moleen,” his wife said, smiling. “Are you, Dave?”
“Dave’s a serious man. He doesn’t expend his workday casually with the idle rich,” Moleen said.
He put a cigar in his mouth and picked a match out of a thin box from the Pontchartrain Hotel. “Police officers ask questions, Moleen,” I said. “I’m sorry we have no answers for you.”
“Thanks for your time.
Say, your man Luke is stand-up, isn’t he?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bertie Fontenot’s nephew. He’s loyal. I’d swear he was willing to see his sister and aunt and himself evicted rather than have you lose title to a strip of disputed land.” The skin of Moleen’s forehead stretched against the bone. The humor and goodwill had gone out of his wife’s face. “What’s he talking about, Moleen?” she said. “I haven’t any idea.”
“What does that black man have to do with this?” she asked. “Who knows? I believe Dave has a talent for manufacturing his own frame of reference.”
“My, you certainly have managed to leave your mark on our morning,” she said to me. “A police investigation isn’t preempted by a ‘members only’ sign at a country club,” I said. “Ah, now we get to it,” Moleen said. “You know a dude named Emile Pogue?” I said. He took his cigar out of his mouth and laughed to himself. “No, I don’t,” he said. “Good-bye, Dave. The matinee’s over. Give our best to your wife. Let’s bust some skeet before duck season.” He put his arm around his wife’s waist and walked her toward the club dining room. She waved good-bye over her shoulder with her fingers, smiling like a little girl who did not want to offend. Later that afternoon I went into Helen Soileau’s office and sat down while she finished typing a page that was in her typewriter. Outside, the sky was blue, the azaleas and myrtle bushes in full bloom. Finally, she turned and stared at me, waiting for me to speak first. Her pale adversarial eyes, as always, seemed to be weighing the choice between a momentary suspension of her ongoing anger with the world and verbal attack. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday, you’d make a great actress,” I said. She was silent, her expression flat and in abeyance, as though my meaning had not quite swum into her ken. “You had me convinced we were married,” I said.
“What’s on your mind?”
“I talked with a couple of guys I know at NOPD.
Tommy Carrol isn’t pressing charges. He’s got a beef pending on an automatic weapons violation.”
“That’s the flash?”
“That’s it.” She began leafing through some pages in a file folder as though I were not there. “But I’ve got a personal problem about yesterday’s events,” I said. “What might that be?” she said, not looking up from the folder.
“We need to take it out of overdrive, Helen.”
She swiveled her chair toward me, her eyes as intense and certain as a drill instructor’s.
“I’ve got two rules,” she said. “Shitbags don’t get treated like churchgoers, and somebody tries to take me, a civilian, or another cop down, he gets neutralized on the spot.”
“Sometimes people get caught in their own syllogism.”
“What?”
“Why let your own rules lock you in a corner?”
“You don’t like working with me, Dave, take it to the old man.”
“You’re a good cop. But you’re unrelenting. It’s a mistake.”
“You got anything else on your mind?”
“Nope.”
“I ran this guy Emile Pogue all kinds of ways,” she said, the door already closed on the previous’ subject “There’s no record on him.”
“Hang on a minute.” I went down to my office and came back. “Here’s the diary and notebook Sonny Boy Marsallus gave me. If this is what Delia Landry’s killers were after, its importance is lost on me.”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Read it or give it back, Helen, I don’t care.”
She dropped it in her desk drawer.
“You really got your nose out of joint because I took down that gun dealer?” she said.
“I was probably talking about myself.”
“How about getting the corn fritters out of your mouth?”
“I’ve put down five guys in my career. They all dealt the play. But I still see them in my dreams. I wish I didn’t.”
“Try seeing their victims’ faces for a change,” she said, and bent back over the file folder on her desk.
The juke joint run by Luke Fontenot was across the railway tracks and down a dirt road that traversed green fields of sugarcane and eventually ended in a shell cul-de-sac by a coulee and a scattered stand of hackberry and oak trees. The juke joint was a rambling wood shell of a building on top of cinder blocks, the walls layered with a combination of Montgomery Ward brick and clapboard; the cracked and oxidized windows held together with pipe tape, still strung with Christmas lights and red and green crepe paper bells. A rusted JAX sign, with stubs of broken neon tubing on it, hung above the front screen door. In back were two small dented tin trailers with windows and doors that were both curtained. Inside, the bar was made of wood planks that had been wrapped and thumbtacked with oilcloth. The air smelled of the cigarette smoke that drifted toward the huge window fan inset in the back wall, spilled beer, okra and shrimp boiling on a butane stove, rum and bourbon, and melted ice and collins mix congealing in the bottom of a drain bin. All of the women in the bar were black or mulatto, but some of the men were white, unshaved, blue-collar, their expressions between a leer and a smile directed at one another, as though somehow their presence there was part of a collective and private joke, not to be taken seriously or held against them. Luke Fontenot was loading long-necked bottles of beer in the cooler and didn’t acknowledge me, although I was sure he saw me out of the corner of his eye. Instead, it was his sister, who had the same gold coloring as he, who walked on her cane across the duckboards and asked if she could help me. Her eyes were turquoise, her shiny black hair cut in a pageboy, except it was shaped and curled high up on the cheek, the way a 19205 Hollywood actress might have worn it. “I think Luke wanted to see me,” I said. “He’s tied up right now,” she said.
“Tell him to untie himself.”
“Why you want to be bothering him, Mr.
Robicheaux? He cain’t do anything about Aim Bertie’s land problems.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Ruthie Jean.”
“Maybe you’ve got things turned around, Ruthie Jean. I think Luke was out at my house at sunrise Saturday morning. Why don’t you ask him?”
She walked with her cane toward the rear of the bar, and spoke to him while he kept lowering the bottles into the cooler, his face turning from side to side in case a hot bottle exploded in his face, her back turned toward me.
He wiped his hands on a towel and picked up an opened soft drink. When he drank from it he kept the left side of his face turned out of the light.
“I’m sorry Batist gave you a bad time out at my dock,” I said.
“Everybody get cranky with age,” he said.
“What’s up, podna?”
“I need me a part-time job. I thought you might could use somebody at your shop.”
“I should have known that. You walked fifteen miles from town, at dawn, to ask me about a job.”
“I got a ride partway.”
A white man in an oil field delivery uniform went out the back screen door with a black woman who wore cutoff Levi’s and a T-shirt without a bra. She took his hand in hers before they went into one of the tin trailers. Luke’s sister glanced at my face, then closed the wood door on the screen and began sweeping behind where the door had been.
“What happened to your face?” I asked Luke.
“It get rough in here sometime. I had to settle a couple of men down.”
“One of them must have had a brick in his hand.”
He leaned on his arms and took a breath through his nostrils. “What you want?” he said.
“Who doze red the cemetery by your house Friday night?”
“I done tole you, I don’t know about no graves on that plantation. I grew up in town.”
“Okay, partner. Here’s my business card. I’ll see you around.”
He slipped it in his shirt pocket and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink.
“I ain’t meant to be un polite he said. ”Tell that to that old man work for you, too. I just ain’t no hep in solving nobody’s problems.“
”I pulled your jacket, Luke. You’re a hard man to read.“ He raised his hand, palm outward, toward me. ”No more, suh,“ he said. ”You want to ax me questions, come back with a warrant and carry me down to the jail.“ When I got into my pickup the sky was steel gray, the air humid and close as a cotton glove. Raindrops were hitting in flat drops on the cane in the fields. Ruthie Jean came through the side door and limped toward me. She rested one hand on my window jamb. She had full cheeks and a mole by her mouth; her teeth were white against her bright lipstick. ”You saw something out here you gonna use against him?“ she said. The curtains were blowing in the windows and doors of the tin trailers in back.
”I was never a vice cop,“ I said.
”Then why you out here giving him a bunch of truck?“
”Your brother’s got a ten-year sheet for everything from concealed weapons to first-degree murder.“
”You saw on there he stole something?“
”No.“
”He hurt somebody didn’t bother him first, didn’t try cheat him out of his pay, didn’t take out a gun on him at a bouree table?“
”Not to my knowledge.“
”But y’all make it come out like you want.“
”I’d say your brother’s ahead of the game. If Moleen Bertrand hadn’t pulled him out of the death house, with about three hours to spare, Luke would have been yesterday’s toast.“ I felt myself blink inside with the severity of my own words.
”Y’all always know, always got the smart word,“ she said.
”You’re angry at the wrong person.“
”When y’all cain’t get at the people who really did something, y’all go down into the quarters, find the little people to get your hands on, put inside your reports and send up to Angola.“
I started my truck engine. Her hand didn’t move from the window jamb.
”I’m not telling the troot, no?“ she said.
Her gold skin was smooth and damp in the blowing mist, her hair thick and jet black and full of little lights.
”Who supplies your girls?“ I said.
Her eyes roved over my face. ”You’re not very good at this, if you ax me,“ she said, and limped back toward the front door of the juke.
That afternoon, just before five, I received a call from Clete Purcel.
I could hear seagulls squeaking in the background.
”Where are you?“ I said.
”By the shrimp docks in Morgan City. You know where a cop’s best information is, Streak? The lowly bail bondsman. In this case, with a fat little guy named Butterbean Reaux.“
”Yeah, I know him.“
”Good. Drive on down, noble mon. We’ll drink some mash and talk some trash. Or I’ll drink the mash while you talk to your buddy Sonny Boy Marsallus.“
”You know where he is?“
”Right now, handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat of my automobile. So much for all that brother-in-arms bullshit.“
Chapter 8
GAVE ME directions in Morgan City, and an hour later I saw his battered Cadillac convertible parked under a solitary palm tree by an outdoor beer and hot dog stand not far from the docks. The sky was sealed with gray clouds, and the wind was blowing hard off the Gulf, capping the water all the way across the bay. Sonny sat in the backseat of the Cadillac, shirtless, a pair of blue suspenders notched into his white shoulders. His right wrist was extended downward, where it was cuffed to a D-shaped steel ring inset in the floor.
Clete was drinking a beer on a wood bench under the palm tree, his porkpie hat slanted over his forehead.
”You ought to try the hot dogs here,“ Clete said.
”You want to be up on a kidnapping charge?“ I said.
”Hey, Sonny! You gonna dime me?“ Clete yelled at the car. Then he looked back at me. ”See, Sonny’s stand-up. He’s not complaining.“
He brushed at a fleck of dried blood in one nostril.
”What happened?“ I said.
”He’d rat-holed himself in a room over a pool hall, actually more like a pool hall and hot pillow joint. He said he wasn’t coming with me. I started to hook him up and he unloaded on me. So I had to throw him down the stairs.“
He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand unconsciously. ”Why do you have it in for him, Clete?“
”Because he was down in Bongo-Bongo Land for the same reasons as the rest of us. Except he pretends he’s got some kind of blue fire radiating around his head or something.“ I walked over to the car. Sonny’s left eye was swollen almost shut. He grinned up at me. His sharkskin slacks were torn at the knee. ”How’s the man, Streak?“ he said. ”I wish you had come in on your own.“
”Long story.“
”It always is.“
”You going to hold me?“
”Maybe.“ I turned toward Clete. ”Give me your key,“ I called. ”Ask Sonny if I need rabies shots,“ he said, and pitched it at me. ”You’re not going to get clever, are you?“ I said to Sonny. ”With you guys? Are you kidding?“
”You’re the consummate grifter, Sonny,“ I said, opened the door, and unlocked his wrist. Then I leveled my finger at his face. ”Who were the guys who killed Delia Landry?“
”I’m not sure.“
”Don’t you lie to me, Sonny.“
”It could be any number of guys. It depends who they send in. You didn’t lift any prints?“
”Don’t worry about what we do or don’t do. You just answer my questions. Who’s theyT “Dave, you’re not going to understand this stuff.”
“You’re starting to piss me off, Sonny.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Get out of the car.” I patted him down against the fender, then slipped my hand under his arm and turned him toward my truck. “Where we going?” he said. “You’re a material witness. You’re also an uncooperative material witness. That means we’ll be keeping you for a while.”
“Mistake.”
“I’ll live with it.”
“Don’t count on it, Dave. I’m not being cute, either.”
“He’s a sweetheart,” Clete said from the bench. Then he rubbed the knuckles on his right hand and looked at them.
“Sorry I popped you, Cletus,” Sonny said.
“In your ear, Sonny,” Clete said.
We drove past boatyards then some shrimp boats that were knocking against the pilings in their berths. The air was warm and smelled like brass and dead fish.
“Can I stop by my room and pick up some things?” Sonny asked.
“No.”
“Just a shirt.”
“Nope.”
“You’re a hard man, Streak.”
“That girl took your fall, Sonny. You want to look at her morgue pictures?”
He was quiet a long time, his face looking straight ahead at the rain striking the windshield.
“Did she suffer?” he said.
“They tore her apart. What do you think?”
His mouth was red against his white skin.
“They were after me, or maybe the notebook I gave you,” he said.
“I’ve got it. You’ve written a potential best-seller and people are getting killed over it.”
“Dave, you lock me up, those guys are going to get to me.”
“That’s the breaks, partner.”
He was quiet again, his eyes focused inward.
“Are we talking about some kind of CIA involvement?” I said.
“Not directly. But you start sending the wrong stuff through the computer, through your fax machines, these guys will step right into the middle of your life. I guarantee it, Dave.”
“How’s the name Emile Pogue sit with you?” I said.
He let out his breath quietly. Under his suspenders his stomach was flat and corded with muscle.
“Another officer ran him all kinds of ways and came up empty,” I said.
He rubbed the ball of his thumb across his lips. Then he said, “I didn’t eat yet. What time they serve at the lockup?” Try to read that. Two hours later Clete called me at home. It was raining hard, the water sluicing off the gutters, and the back lawn was full of floating leaves. “What’d you get out of him?” Clete said. “Nothing.”
I could hear country music and people’s voices in the background.
“Where are you?”
“In a slop chute outside Morgan City. Dave, this guy bothers me. There’s something not natural about him.”
“He’s a hustler. He’s outrageous by nature.”
“He doesn’t get any older. He always looks the same.” I tried to remember Sonny’s approximate age. I couldn’t. “There’s something else,” Clete said. “Where I hit him.
There’s a strawberry mark across the backs of my fingers. It’s throbbing like I’ve got blood poisoning or something.”
“Get out of the bar, Clete.”
“You always knoW how to say it.” I couldn’t sleep that night. The rain stopped and a heavy mist settled in the trees outside our bedroom window, and I could hear night-feeding bass flopping back in the swamp. I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the curtains puffing in the breeze. “What is it, Dave?” Bootsie said behind me in the dark. “I had a bad dream, that’s all.”
“About what?” She put her hand on my spine. “A captain I knew in Vietnam. He was a stubborn and inflexible man. He sent a bunch of guys across a rice field under a full moon. They didn’t come back.”
“It’s been thirty years, Dave.”
“The dream was about myself. I’m going into town. I’ll call you later,” I said. I took two paper bags from the kitchen pantry, put a clean shirt in one of them, stopped by the bait shop, then drove up the dirt road through the tunnel of oak trees and over the drawbridge toward New Iberia.
It was still dark when I reached the parish jail. Kelso was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a comic book behind his desk. His face looked like a walrus’s in the shadows from his desk lamp, the moles on his neck as big as raisins.
“I want to check Marsallus out,” I said.
“Check him out? Like a book from the library, you’re saying?”
“It’s the middle of the night. Why make an issue out of everything?”
He stretched and yawned. His thick glasses were full of light. “The guy’s a twenty-four kick-out, anyway, isn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“I think you ought to take him to a shrink.”
“What’d he do?”
“He’s been having a conversation in his cell.”
((C V
So?
“There ain’t anybody else in it, Robicheaux.”
“How about bringing him out, Kelso, then you can get back to your reading.”
“Hey, Robicheaux, you take him to the wig mechanic, make an appointment for yourself, too.”
A few minutes later Sonny and I got in my truck and drove down East Main. He was dressed in his sharkskin slacks and a jailhouse denim shirt. There were low pink clouds in the east now and the live oaks along the street were gray and hazy with mist.
“There’s a shirt in that bag by the door,” I said.
“What’s this in the other one? You carrying around a junkyard, Dave?”
He lifted the rusted chain and ankle cuff out of the bag.
I didn’t answer his question. “I thought you might enjoy some takeout from Victor’s rather than eat at the slam,” I said, parking in front of a small cafeteria on Main across from the bayou. “You want to go get it?”
“You’re not afraid I’ll go out the back door?”
“There isn’t one.” I put eight one-dollar bills in his hand. “Make mine scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, and coffee.”
I watched him walk inside, tucking my borrowed tropical shirt inside his rumpled slacks. He was grinning when he came back out and got in the truck.
“There is a back door, Streak. You didn’t know that?” he said.
“Huh,” I said, and drove us across the drawbridge, over the Teche, into City Park. The bayou was high and yellow with mud, and the wake from a tug with green and red running lights washed over the banks into the grass. We ate at a picnic table under a tree that was alive with mockingbirds.
“You ever see a leg iron like that before, Sonny?”
“Yeah, in the museum at Jackson Square.”
“Why would you make it your business to know that Jean Lafitte operated a barracoon outside New Iberia?”
“Delia told me. She was into stuff like that.” Then he wiped his face with his hand. “It’s already getting hot.”
“I read your notebook. It doesn’t seem to have any great illumination in it, Sonny.”
“Maybe I’m a lousy writer.”
“Why do these bozos want to kill people over your notebook?”
“They’re called cleanup guys. They hose a guy and everything around him right off the planet.”
“I’ll put it to you, partner, that girl died a miserable death. You want to help me nail them or not?”
A pinched light came into his face. His hand tightened on the edge of the table. He looked out toward the bayou.
“I don’t know who they were,” he said. “Look, what I can tell you won’t help. But you’re a cop and you’ll end up putting it in a federal computer. You might as well swallow a piece of broken glass.”
I took Roy Bumgartner’s dog tag out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the table beside Sonny’s Styrofoam coffee cup.
“What’s that mean to you?” I asked. He stared at the name. “Nothing,”
he said.
“He flew a slick in Vietnam and disappeared in Laos. Somebody left this in my bait shop for me to find.”
“The guy was an MIA or POW?”
“Yeah, and a friend of mine.”
“There’s a network, Dave, old-time intelligence guys, meres, cowboys, shitheads, whatever you want to call them. They were mixed up with opium growers in the Golden Triangle.
Some people believe that’s why our guys were left behind over there.
They knew too much about ties between narcotics and the American government.” I looked at him for a long time. “What?” he said. “You remind me of myself when I was on the grog, Sonny. I didn’t trust anyone. So I seriously fucked up my life as well as other people’s.”
“Yeah, well, this breakfast has started to get expensive.”
“I’ve got a few things to do in town. Can you take yourself back to the jail?”
“Take myself back to-”
“Yeah, check yourself in. Kelso’s got a sense of humor. Tell him you heard the Iberia Parish lockup is run like the public library.” I stuck my business card in his shirt pocket. “When you get tired of grandiose dog shit, give me a call.” I picked up my coffee cup and walked back toward my truck. “Hey, Dave, this isn’t right,” he said behind me. “You want to hang from a cross. Do it without me, partner,” I said. At one that afternoon I called Kelso at the lockup. “Did Marsallus make it back there?” I asked. “Yeah, we’re putting in a special cell with a turnstile for him. You’re a laugh a minute,” he said. “Kick him loose.”
“You know what kind of paperwork you make for me?”
“You were right, Kelso, the prosecutor says we can’t hold him. He wasn’t a witness to anything. Sorry to inconvenience you.”
“You know your problem, Robicheaux? You don’t like doing the peon work like everybody else-filling out forms, punching clocks, going to coffee at ten A.M. instead of when you feel like it. So you’re always figuring out ways to work a finger in somebody’s crack.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, keep that punk out of here.”
“What’s he done now?”
“Giving speeches to the wet-brains in the tank. I don’t need that kind of shit in my jail. Wait a minute, I wrote the names down he was talking about to these guys. Who’s Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie?”
“Guys from another era, Kelso.”
“Yeah, well, two or three like your redheaded friend could have this town in flames. The wet-brains and stew-bums are all trying to talk and walk like him now, like they’re all hipsters who grew up on Canal Street. It’s fucking pathetic.”
Two days later Helen Soileau called in sick. An hour later, the phone on my desk rang.
“Can you come out to my house?” she said.
“What is it?”
“Can you come out?”
“Yeah, if you want me to. Are you all right?”
“Hurry up, Dave.”
I could hear her breath against the receiver, heated, dry, suddenly jerking in the back of her throat.
Chapter 9
LIVED ALONE in a racially mixed neighborhood in a one-story frame house with a screened-in gallery that she had inherited from her mother. The house was Spartan and neat, with a new tin roof and a fresh coat of metallic gray paint, the cement steps and pilings whitewashed, the flower beds bursting with pink and blue hydrangeas in the shade of a chinaberry tree.
To my knowledge, she never entertained, joined a club, or attended a church. Once a year she left the area on a vacation; except for the sheriff, she never told anyone where she was going, and no one ever asked. Her only interest, other than law enforcement, seemed to lie in the care of animals.
She wore no makeup when she opened the door. Her eyes went past me, out to the street. Her face looked as hard and shiny as ceramic.
“Come inside,” she said.
Her nine-millimeter automatic was in a checkered leather holster on the couch next to an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. The interior of the house was immaculate, slatted with sunlight, and smelled of burnt toast and coffee that had boiled over on the stove.
“You had me worried a little bit, Helen,” I said.
“I had visitors during the night,” she said. “You mean a break-in?”
“They didn’t come inside.” Then her mouth twitched. She turned her face away and curled one finger at me. I followed her through the kitchen and into the backyard, which was shaded by a neighbor’s oak whose limbs grew across her fence. At the back of the lawn was a row of elevated screened pens where Helen kept rabbits, possums, armadillos, fighting cocks, or any kind of wounded or sick animal or bird that the humane society or neighborhood children brought her. The tarps were pulled back on top of all the pens. “It was warm with no rain in the forecast last night, so I left them uncovered,” she said.
“When I went out this morning, the tarps were down. That’s when I saw that bucket on the ground.” I picked it up and smelled it. The inside was coated with a white powder. My head jerked back involuntarily from the odor, my nasal passages burning, as though a rubber band had snapped behind my eyes. “They sprinkled it through the wire, then pulled the canvas down,” she said. The birds lay in lumps in the bottom of the pens, the way birds look after they’ve been shot in flight, their feathers puffing in the breeze. But the type of death the birds and animals died alike was more obvious in the stiffened bodies of the possums and coons. Their mouths were wide, their necks and spines twisted from convulsions, their claws extended as though they were defending themselves against invisible enemies. “I’m sorry, Helen. It took a real sonofabitch to do something like this,” I said. “Two of them. Look at the footprints. One of them must wear lead shoes.”
“Why didn’t you call this in?” Then once again I saw in her face the adversarial light and lack of faith in people that always characterized her dealings with others. “I need some serious advice,”
she said. I could hear her breathing.
Her right hand opened and closed at her side. There were drops of perspiration on her upper lip. “Go ahead, Helen.”
“I’ll show you something that was under my door this morning,” she said, and led the way back into her living room. She sat on her rattan couch and picked up the manila folder. The sunlight through the blinds made bright yellow stripes across her face. “Would you work with a queer?” she asked. “What kind of question is that?”
“Answer it.”
“What other people do in their private lives is none of my business.”
“How about a bull or a switch-hitter?”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this, but it’s not necessary.” Her hand was inserted in the envelope, her teeth biting on the corner of her lip. She pulled a large glossy black-and-white photograph out and handed it to me. “It was taken two nights ago. The grain’s bad because he didn’t use a flash. From the angle, I’d say it was shot through that side window.” I looked down at the photo and felt my throat color. She kept her eyes on the far wall.
“I don’t think that’s any big deal,” I said. “Women kiss each other. It’s how people show affection.”
“You want to see the others?”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Somebody already has.”
“I’m not going to be party to an invasion of your private life, Helen. I respect you for what you are. These photographs don’t change anything.”
“You recognize the other woman?”
“No.”
“She used to be a chicken for Sweet Pea Chaisson. I tried to help her get out of the life. Except we went a little bit beyond that.”
“Who cares?”
“I’ve got to turn this stuff in, Dave.”
“The hell you do.”
She was silent, waiting. “Do you have to prove you’re an honest person?” I said. “And by doing so, cooperate with evil people in injuring yourself. That’s not integrity, Helen, it’s pride.” She returned the photo to the envelope, then studied the backs of her hands. Her fingers were thick and ring less square on the ends. “The only guy who comes to mind is that paramilitary fuck, what’s his name, Tommy Carrol,” she said. “Maybe,” I said. But I was already remembering Sonny Boy’s warning. “But why would he put this note on the envelope?” She turned it over so I could read the line someone had written with a felt pen- Keep your mind on parking tickets, Mujfy. “Why the look?”
“Sonny Marsallus. He told me not to send anything on this guy Emile Pogue through the federal computer. All those informational requests had your name on them, Helen.” She nodded, then I saw her face cloud with an expression that I had seen too often, on too many people, over the years. Suddenly they realize they have been arbitrarily selected as the victim of an individual or a group about whom they have no knowledge and against whom they’ve committed no personal offense. It’s a solitary moment, and it’s never a good one. I worked the envelope out from under her hands. “We could do all kinds of doo-dah with these photos, and in all probability none of it would lead anywhere,” I said. I slipped the photos facedown out of the envelope and walked with them into the kitchen. “So I’m making use of a Clete Purcel procedure here, which is, when the rules start working for the lowlifes, get a new set of rules.” I took a lucifer match from a box on the windowsill above the sink, scratched it on the striker, and held the flame to the corner of the photographs. The fire rippled and curled across the paper like water; I separated each sheet from the others to let the air and heat gather on the underside, the images, whatever they were, shrinking and disappearing into blackened cones while dirty strings of smoke drifted out the screen. Then I turned on the faucet and washed the ashes down the drain, wiped the sink clean with a paper towel and dropped it in the trash.
“You want to have some early lunch, then go to the office?” I said.
“Give me a minute to change.” Then she said, “Thanks for what you did.”
“forget it.”
“I’ll say this only once,” she said. “Men are kind to women for one of two reasons. Either they want inside the squeeze box or they have-genuine balls and don’t have to prove anything. When I said thank you, I meant it.”
There are compliments you don’t forget.
Before I drove away I put the stiffened body of one of the dead coons in a vinyl garbage sack and placed it in the bed of my truck.
The investigation had gone nowhere since the night of Delia Landry’s murder. I had made a mistake and listened to Sonny Boy’s deprecation of the mob and his involvement with them. Sweet Pea Chaisson’s name had surfaced again, and Sweet Pea didn’t change toilet paper rolls without first seeking permission of the Giacano family. If the spaghetti heads had started to crash and burn back in the seventies, it was a secret to everyone except Sonny.
The heir to the old fat boy, Didoni Giacano, also known as Didi Gee, whose logo had been the bloodstained baseball bat that rode in the backseat of his Caddy convertible when he was a loan collector and who sometimes held down the hand of an adversary in an aquarium filled with piranhas, was his nephew, a businessman first, a gangster second, but with a bizarre talent for clicking psychotic episodes on and off at will-John Polycarp Giacano, also known as Johnny Carp and Polly Gee.
Friday morning I found him in his office out by a trash dump in Jefferson Parish. His eyes, nose, and guppy mouth were set unnaturally in the center of his face, compressed into an area the size of your palm. His high forehead was ridged and knurled even though he wasn’t frowning. His hair was liquid black, waved on the top and sides, like plastic that had been melted, molded, and then cooled again.
When I knew him in the First District, he had been a minor soldier in the organization, a fight fixer, and a Shylock with jockies out at Jefferson Downs and the Fairgrounds. Supposedly, as a kid, he had been the wheel man on a couple of hundred-dollar hits with the Calucci brothers; but for all his criminal history, he’d only been down once, a one-year bit for possession of stolen food stamps in the late sixties, and he did the time in a minimum security federal facility, where he had weekend furloughs and golf and tennis privileges.
Johnny Carp was smart; he went with the flow and gave people what they wanted, didn’t contend with the world or argue with the way things were. Celebrities had their picture taken with him. He lent money to cops with no vig and was never known to be rude. Those who saw his other side, his apologists maintained, had broken rules and earned their fate.
“You look great,” he said, tilting back in his swivel chair. Through the window behind him, seagulls were wheeling and dipping over mountains of garbage that were being systematically spread and buried and packed down in the landfill by bulldozers.
“When did you get into the trash business, Johnny?”
“Oh, I’m just out here a couple of days a week to make sure the Johns flush,” he said. He wore a beige suit with thin brown stripes in it, a purple shirt and brown knit tie, and a small rose in his lapel. He winked. “Hey, I know you don’t drink no more. Me, neither. I found a way around the problem. I ain’t putting you on: Watch.”
He opened a small icebox by the wall and took out an unopened quart bottle of milk. There were two inches of cream in the neck. Then he lifted a heavy black bottle of Scotch, with a red wax seal on it, from his bottom desk drawer. He poured four fingers into a thick water glass and added milk to it, smiling all the while. The Scotch ballooned and turned inside the milk and cream like soft licorice.
“I don’t get drunk, I don’t get ulcers, I don’t get hangovers, it’s great, Dave. You want a hit?”
“No thanks. You know why anybody would want to take down Sonny Boy Marsallus?”
“Maybe it’s mental health week. You know, help out your neighborhood, kill your local lunatic. The guy’s head glows in the dark.”
“How about Sweet Pea Chaisson?”
“Clip Sonny? Sweet Pea’s a marshmallow. Why you asking me this stuff, anyway?”
“You’re the man, Johnny.”
“Uncle Didi was the man. That’s the old days we’re talking about.”
“You have a lot of people’s respect, Johnny.”
“Yeah? The day I go broke I start being toe jam again. You want to know about Marsallus? He came out of the womb with a hard-on.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s read enough books to sound like he’s somebody he ain’t, but he’s got sperm on the brain. He uses broads like Kleenex. Don’t let that punk take you over the hurdles. He’d stand in line to fuck his mother … I say something wrong?”
“No,” I said, my face blank.
He folded his hands, his elbows splayed, and leaned forward. “Serious,”
he said, “somebody’s trying to whack out Sonny?”
“Maybe.”
He looked sideways out the window, thinking, his coat bunched up on his neck. “It ain’t anybody in the city. Look, Sonny wasn’t never a threat to anybody’s action, you understand what I’m saying? His problem is he thinks his shit don’t stink. He floats above the ground the rest of us got to walk on.”
“Well, it was good seeing you, Johnny.”
“Yeah, always a pleasure.”
I pulled on my earlobe as I got up to go.
“It’s funny you’d tell me Sonny uses women badly. That was never his reputation,” I said.
“People in the projects don’t work. What do you think they do all day, why you think they have all them kids? He’s a nickel-and-dime street mutt. The head he thinks with ain’t on his shoulders. I’m getting through here?”
“See you around, Johnny.”
He cocked one finger at me, drank from his glass of milk and Scotch, his compressed features almost disappearing behind his hand and wrist.
I don’t remember the psychological term for it, but cops and prosecutors know the mechanism well. It involves unintended acknowledgment of guilt through the expression of denial. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody after the assassination of President Kennedy, he seemed to answer truthfully many of the questions asked him by cops and newsmen. But he consistently denied ownership of the 6.5 millimeter rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the one piece of physical evidence to which he was unquestionably and inextricably linked.
Delia Landry had been murdered, in all probability, because of her association with Sonny. The first remark out of Johnny’s mouth had been a slur about Sonny’s misuse of women, as if to say, perhaps, that the fate of those who involved themselves with him was Sonny’s responsibility and not anyone else’s.
But maybe I was simply in another cul-de-sac, looking for meaning where there was none.
As I got into my truck three of Johnny Carp’s hoods were standing by the back of his Lincoln. They wore slacks with knife creases, tasseled loafers, short-sleeve tropical shirts, gold chains on their necks, and lightly oiled boxed haircuts. But steroids had become fashionable with the mob, too, and their torsos and arms were thick with muscle like gnarled oak about to split the skin.
They were taking turns firing a .22 revolver at tin cans and the birds feeding along the dirt road that led between the trash heaps. They glanced at me briefly, then continued shooting.
“I’d like to drive out of here without getting shot,” I said. There was no response. One man broke open the revolver, shucked out the hulls, and began reloading. He looked at me meaningfully. “Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said. I drove down the road, tapping my horn as cattle egrets on each side of me lifted into the air. In my rearview mirror I saw Johnny Carp walk out of his office and join his men, all of them looking at me now, I was sure, with the quiet and patient energies of creatures whose thoughts you never truly wish to know.
Friday night I went to the parish library and began to read about Jean Lafitte. Most of the material repeated in one form or another the traditional stories about the pirate who joined forces with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the ships he “robbed on the high seas, the gangs of cutthroats he lived with in Barataria and Galveston, his death somewhere in the Yucatan. He had been considered a romantic and intriguing figure by New Orleans society, probably because none of them had been his victims. But also in the library was an article written by a local historian at the turn of the century that did not treat Lafitte as kindly. His crimes did not stop with piracy and murder. He had been a blackbirder and was transporting African slaves into the country after the prohibition of 1809. He sold his stolen goods as well as human cargo on the banks of the Teche. Milton and Shakespeare both said lucidity and power lay in the world of dreams. For me, that has always meant that sleep and the unconscious can define what daylight and rationality cannot. That night, as a wind smelling of salt and wet sand and humus blew across the swamp, I dreamed of what Bayou Teche must have been like when the country was new, when the most severe tool or weapon was shaped from a stone, the forest floor covered with palmettos, the moss-hung canopy so thick and tall that in the suffused sunlight the trunks looked like towering gray columns in a Gothic cathedral. In the dream the air was breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, an autumnal yellow moon dissected with a single strip of black cloud overhead, and then I saw a long wood ship with furled masts being pulled up the bayou on ropes by Negroes who stumbled along the banks through the reeds and mud, their bodies rippling with sweat in the firelight. On the deck of the ship were their women and children, their cloth bundles gathered among them, their eyes peering ahead into the bayou’s darkness, as though an explanation for their fear and misery were somehow at hand.
The auction was held under the oaks at the foot of the old Voorhies property. The Negroes did not speak English, French, or Spanish, so indigenous histories were created for them. The other property did not offer as great a problem. The gold and silver plate, the trunks filled with European fashions, the bejeweled necklaces and swords and scrolled flintlocks, all had belonged to people whose final histories were written in water somewhere in the Caribbean.
In a generation or two the banks of Spanish Lake and Bayou Teche would be lined with plantations, and people would eat off gold plate whose origins were only an interesting curiosity. The slaves who worked the sawmills, cane fields, and the salt domes out in the wetlands would speak the language and use the names of their owners, and the day when a large sailing ship appeared innocuously on a river in western Africa, amidst a green world of birds and hummocks, would become the stuff of oral legend, confused with biblical history and allegory, and finally forgotten.
I believed the dream. I remembered the oak trees at the foot of the Voorhies property, when lengths of mooring chain, driven with huge spikes into the trunks, grew in and out of the bark like calcified rust-sheathed serpents. Over the years, the chains had been drawn deeper into the heart of the tree, like orange-encrusted iron cysts in the midst of living tissue or perhaps unacknowledged and unforgiven sins.
At breakfast Saturday morning Bootsie said, ”Oh, I forgot, Dave, Julia Bertrand called last night. She invited us out to their camp at Pecan Island next Saturday.“
The kitchen window was open, and the sky was full of white clouds.
”What’d you tell her?“ I said. ”I thought it was a nice idea. We don’t see them often.“
”You told her we’d come?“
”No, I didn’t. I said I’d check to see if you had anything planned.“
”How about we let this one slide?“
”They’re nice people, Dave.“
”There’s something off-center out at Moleen’s plantation.“
”All right, I’ll call her back.“ She tried to keep the disappointment out of her face. ”Maybe it’s just me, Bootsie. I never got along well in that world.“
” That world?“
”They think they’re not accountable. Moleen always gives me the impression he lives in rarefied air.“
”What are you talking about?“
”Nothing. Call Julia up and tell her we’ll be out there.“
”Dave“ she said, the exasperation climbing in her voice. ”Believe me, it’s part of a game. So we’ll check it out.“
”I think this is a good morning to work in the garden,“ she said. It rained hard that night, and when I fell asleep I thought I heard a motorboat pass by the dock. After the rain stopped, the air was damp and close and a layer of mist floated on the bayou as thick as cotton. Just after midnight the phone rang. I closed the bedroom door behind me and answered it in the living room. The house was dark and cool and water was dripping off the tin roof of the gallery. ”Mr. Robicheaux?“ a man’s voice said. ”Yeah. Who is this?“
”Jack.“
”Jack?“
”You found a dog tag. We tried to get your friend out. You want to hear about it?“ There was no accent, no emotional tone in the voice. ”What do you want, partner?“
”To explain some things you probably don’t understand.“
”Come to the office Monday. Don’t call my house again, either.“
”Look out your front window.“ I pulled aside the curtain and stared out into the darkness. I could see nothing except the mist floating on the bayou and a smudged red glow from a gas flare on an oil rig out in the swamp. Then, out on the dock, a tall, angular man in raincoat and hat flicked on a flashlight and shined it upward into his face. He held a cellular phone to his ear and the skin of his face was white and deeply lined, like papier-mache that has started to crack. Then the light clicked off again. I picked the phone back up. ”You’re trespassing on my property. I want you off of it,“ I said. ”Walk down to the dock.“ Don’t fall into it, I thought. ”Put the light back on your face and keep your hands away from your sides,“ I said. ”That’s acceptable.“
”I’m going to hang up now. Then I’ll be down in about two minutes.“
”No. You don’t break the connection.“ I let the receiver clatter on the table and went back into the bedroom. I slipped on my khakis and loafers, and removed my holstered .45 automatic from the dresser drawer. Bootsie was sleeping with the pillow partially over her head. I closed the door quietly behind me, pulled back the slide on the .45 and chambered a round, eased the hammer back down, set the safety, then stuck the barrel inside the back of my belt. I picked up the receiver. ”You still there, partner?“ I said. ”Yes.“
”Turn on your flashlight.“
”What an excellent idea.“ I went out the front door and down the slope through the trees. He had moved out on the dirt road now and I could see him more clearly. He was well over six feet, with arms that seemed too thin for the sleeves of his raincoat, wide shoulders, a face as grooved and webbed with lines as dried putty. His left coat pocket sagged with the weight of the cellular phone and his left hand now held the flashlight. His lips were purple in the beam of the flashlight, like the skin of a plum. His eyes watched me with the squinted focus of someone staring through smoke. ”Put your right hand behind your neck,“ I said. ”That’s not dignified.“
”Neither are jerk-off games involving the death of a brave soldier.“
”Your friend could still be alive.“ He raised his right hand, hooked it above his lapel, and let it rest there. I watched him and didn’t answer. ”Sonny Marsallus is a traitor,“ he said. ”I think it’s time we look at your identification.“
”You don’t listen well.“
”You made a mistake coming here tonight.“
”I don’t think so. You have a distinguished war record. Marsallus doesn’t. He’s for sale.“
”I want you to turn around, walk back to the dock, and place your hands on the rail .. .
Just do it, partner. It’s not up for debate.“ But he didn’t move. I could feel sweat running down my sides like ants, but the face of the man named Jack, who wore a hat and coat, was as dry as parchment. His eyes remained riveted on mine, like brown agate with threads of gold in them. Then I heard a sound out in the shadows. ”Hey, Jack, what’s shakin’?“ a voice said. Jack twisted his head sideways and stared out into the darkness. ”It’s Sonny,“ the voice said. ”Hey, Dave, watch out for ole Jack there. He carries a sawed-down twelve-gauge on a bungee rope in his right armpit. Peel back your raincoat, Jack, and let Dave have a peek.“ But that was not in Jack’s plan. He dropped the flashlight to the ground and bolted past me up the road. Then I saw Sonny move out from under the overhang of a live oak, a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter gripped at an upward angle with both hands. ”Get out of the way, Dave!“ he shouted. ”Are you crazy? Put that down!“
But Sonny swung wide of me and aimed with both arms stretched straight out in front of him. Then he began firing, crack, crack, crack, crack, fire leaping out of the barrel, the empty brass cartridges clinking on the road. He picked up the flashlight the man named Jack had dropped and shined it down the road. ”Look at the ground, Dave, right by that hole in the bushes,“ he said. ”I think Jack just sprung a leak.“ Then he called out into the darkness, ”Hey, Jack, how’s it feel?“
”Give me the gun, Sonny.“
”Sorry, Streak .. . I’m sorry to do this to you, too .. . No, no, don’t move. I’m just going to take your piece. Now, let’s walk over here to the dock and hook up.“
”You’re going across the line, Sonny.“
”There’s just one line that counts, Dave, the one between the good guys and the shit bags He worked a pair of open handcuffs from the back pocket of his blue jeans. “Put your hands on each side of the rail. You worried about procedure? That guy I just punched a drain hole in, dig this, you heard the Falangist joke down in Taco Tico country about the Flying Nun? This isn’t a shuck, either. Some of the junta fucks in Argentina wanted a couple of nuns, human rights types, turned into object lessons. The guy who threw them out of a Huey at a thousand feet was our man Jack. ”See you around, Streak. I’ll make sure you get your piece back.“ Then he disappeared through the broken bushes where the wounded man had fled. I raked the chain on the cuffs against the dock railing while mosquitoes droned around my head and my eyes stung with sweat and humiliation at my own failure and ineptitude.
Chapter 10
I HAD gone down to the office Sunday morning and made my report, a mail clerk at the post office called the dispatcher and said that during the night someone had dropped an army-issue .45 automatic through a post office mail slot. The .45 had been wrapped in a paper bag with my name written on the outside. It was hot and bright at noon, with a breeze blowing out of the south, and Clete Purcel walked with me along the dirt road to the spot where Sonny and the man named Jack had entered the brush and run down the bayou’s bank toward the four corners. The blood on the leaves was coated with dust from the road. ”It looks like Sonny really cored a hole in the guy. He didn’t show up at a hospital?“
”Not yet.“ We walked through the brush and down to the bank. The deep imprints in the mud left by Sonny and the man named Jack were now crisscrossed with the shoe prints of the deputies who had followed Jack’s blood trail to a break in the cattails where the bow of a flat-bottomed boat had been dragged onto the sand. Clete squatted down heavily, slipped a piece of cardboard under one knee, and looked back up the bank toward the dock. He wore a pair of baggy, elastic-wasted shorts with dancing zebras printed on them. He took off his porkpie hat and twirled it on his index finger. ”Did you ever see the sawed-down twelve?“ he asked. ”No.“
”You think he was carrying one?“
”I don’t know, Clete.“
”But you know a guy like that was carrying a piece of some kind? Right?“ We looked at each other. ”So the question is, why didn’t he try to pop Sonny with it? He could have waited for him in the dark and parked one in his brisket,“ he said. ”Because he dropped it,“ I said. Then I said, ”And why didn’t anyone find it last night?“ He was spinning his hat on his finger now. His eyes were green and full of light. ”Because it fell in the water,“ he said, and lumbered to his feet. It didn’t take long. Seventy feet back down the bank, where the water eddied around a sunken and rotted pirogue that was green and fuzzy with moss, we saw the barrel of the twelve-gauge glinting wetly among the reeds and the wake from a passing boat. The barrel was sawed off at the pump and impacted with sand. The stock had been shaved and shaped with a wood rasp and honed into a pistol grip. A two-foot length of bungee cord, the kind you use to strap down luggage, was looped and screwed into the butt. Clete shook the sand out of the barrel and jacked open the breech. Yellow water gushed out of the mechanism with the unfired shell. Then he jacked four more rounds out on the ground. I picked them up and they felt heavy and wet and filmed with grit in my palm. ”Our man doesn’t use a sportsman’s plug,“ Clete said. He looked at the shells in my hand. ”Are those pumpkin balls?“
”Yeah, you don’t see them anymore.“
”He probably loads his own rounds. This guy’s got the smell of a mechanic, Streak.“ He peeled a stick of gum with one hand and put it in his mouth, his eyes thoughtful. ”I hate to say this, but maybe dick-brain saved your life.“ Down by the dock a teenage kid was holding up a stringer of perch for a friend to see. He wore a bright-chrome-plated watchband on his wrist. ”You don’t think this guy’s a button man, he’s mobbed-up?“ Clete asked. ”I was thinking about Sonny .. . the handcuffs .. . the way he took me down.“ Clete blew into the open breech of the shotgun, closed it, and snapped the firing pin on the empty chamber. He studied my face. ”Listen, Sonny’s a walking hand-job. Stop thinking what you’re thinking,“ he said. ”Then why are you thinking the same thing?“
”I’m not. A guy like Sonny isn’t born, he’s defecated into the world. I should have stuffed him down a toilet with a plumber’s helper a long time ago.“
”I’ve seen federal agents with the same kind of cuffs.“
”This guy’s no cop. You buy into his re bop and he’ll piss in your shoe,“ he said, and put the shotgun hard into my hands. Clete ate lunch with us, then I went down to the bait shop and picked up a Styrofoam cooler that I had filled with ice Friday afternoon. The corner of a black garbage bag protruded from under the lid. I walked back up the incline through the shade and set the cooler in the bed of my truck. Clete was picking up pecans from under the trees and cracking them in his hands. ”You want to take a ride to Breaux Bridge?“ I asked. ”I thought we were going fishing,“ he said. ”I hear Sweet Pea Chaisson has rented a place out by the old seminary.“
He smiled broadly. We took the four-lane into Lafayette, then drove down the road toward Breaux Bridge, past Holy Rosary, the old Negro Catholic school, a graveyard with tombs above the ground, the Carmelite convent, and the seminary. Sweet Pea’s rented house was a flat-roofed yellow brick building shielded by a hedge of dying azalea bushes. The lot next door was filled with old building materials and pieces of iron that were threaded with weeds and crisscrossed with morning glory vines. No one was home. An elderly black man was cleaning up dog feces in the yard with a shovel. ”He taken the ladies to the restaurant down on Cameron in Lafayette, down by the fo’ corners,“ he said. ”Which restaurant?“ I said. ”The one got smoke comin’ out the back.“
”It’s a barbecue place?“ I said. ”The man own it always burning garbage out there. You’ll smell it befo’ you see it.“ We drove down Cameron through the black district in Lafayette. Up ahead was an area known as Four Corners, where no number of vice arrests ever seemed to get the hookers off of the sidewalks and out of the motels. ”There’s his Caddy,“ Clete said, and pointed out the window. ”Check this place, will you? His broads must have rubber stomach liners.“ I parked in a dirt lot next to a wood frame building with paint that had blistered and curled into shapes like blown chicken feathers and with a desiccated privy and smoking incinerator in back. ”We’re not only off your turf, big mon, we’re in the heart of black town. You feel comfortable with this?“ Clete said when we were outside the truck. ”The locals don’t mind,“ I said. ”You checked in with them?“
”Not really.“ He looked at me. ”Sweet Pea’s a pro. It’s not a big deal,“
I said. I reached inside the Styrofoam cooler and pulled the vinyl garbage bag out. It swung heavily from my hand, dripping ice and water. ”What are you doing?“ Clete said.
”I think Sweet Pea helped set up Helen Soileau.“
”The muff-diver? That’s the one who had her animals killed?“
”Give her a break, Clete.“
”Excuse me. I mean the lady who thinks I’m spit on the sidewalk.
What’s in the bag?“
”Don’t worry about it.“
”I guess I asked for this.“ He spit his gum out with a thropping sound.
We went through the door. It was a cheerless place where you could stay on the downside of a drunk without making comparisons. The interior was dark, the floor covered with linoleum, the green walls lined with pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. People whose race would be hard to define were at the bar, in the booths, and at the pool table. They all looked expectantly at the glare of light from the opening front door, as though an interesting moment might be imminent in their lives.
”Man, that Sweet Pea can pick ’em, can’t he? I wonder if they charge extra for the roaches in the mashed potatoes,“ Clete said.
In the light from the kitchen we could see Sweet Pea and another man sitting at a large table with four women. The other man was explaining something, his forearms propped on the edge of the table, his fingers moving in the air. The women looked bored, hungover, wrapped in their own skin.
”Do you make the dude with him?“ Clete said close to my ear.
”No.“
”That’s Patsy Dapolito, they call him Patsy Dap, Patsy Bones, Patsy the Baker. He’s a button guy for Johnny Carp.“
The man named Patsy Dapolito wore a tie and a starched collar buttoned tightly around his neck. His face was pinched-looking, the nose thin, sharp-edged, the mouth down-turned, the teeth showing as though he were breathing through them.
”Stay out of overdrive, Dave. Dapolito’s a head case Clete said quietly.
“They all are.”
“He baked another hood’s bones in a wedding cake and sent it to a Teamster birthday party.”
Sweet Pea sat at the head of the table, a bib tied around his neck. The table was covered with trays of boiled crawfish and beaded pitchers of draft beer. Sweet Pea snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, then peeled the shell off the tail. He dipped the meat into a red sauce, put it in his mouth, and never looked up.
“Y’all get yourself some plates, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He wore cream-colored slacks and a bolo tie and a gray silk shirt that rippled with a metallic sheen. His mouth glistened as though it were painted with lip gloss.
I took the dead coon out of the bag by its hind feet. The body was leathery and stiff, the fur wet from the ice in the cooler. I swung it across the table right into Sweet Pea’s tray. Crawfish shells and juice, beer, and coleslaw exploded all over his shirt and slacks.
He stared down at his clothes, the twisted body of the coon in the middle of his tray, then at me. But Sweet Pea Chaisson didn’t rattle easily. He wiped his cheek with the back of his wrist and started to speak.
“Shut up, Sweet Pea,” Clete said.
Sweet Pea smiled, his webbed eyes squeezing shut.
“What I done to deserve this?” he said. “You ruin my dinner, you trow dead animals at me, now I ain’t even suppose to talk?”
I could hear the air-conditioning units humming in the windows, a solitary pool ball rolling across the linoleum floor.
“Your buddies tried to hurt a friend of mine, Sweet Pea,” I said.
He wrapped a napkin around the coon’s tail, then held the coon out at arm’s length and dropped it.
“You don’t want nothing to eat?” he asked.
“Fuck it,” Clete said beside me, his voice low.
Then I saw the expression on the face of the man called Patsy Dap. It was a grin, as though he both appreciated and was bemused by the moment that was being created for all of us. I felt Clete’s shoe nudge against mine, his fingers pull lightly on my arm.
But it was moving too fast now. “What d’ we got here, the crazy person hour, flicking clowns abusing people at Sunday dinner?” Dapolito said.
“Nobody’s got a beef with you, Patsy,” Clete said. “What d’ you call this, creating a fucking scene, slopping food on people, who the fuck is this guy?”
“We got no problem with you, Patsy. Accept my word on that,” Clete said. “Why’s he looking at me like that?” Dapolito said.
“Hey, I don’t like that. Why you pinning me, man? .. . Hey .. .” My gaze drifted back to Sweet Pea. “Tell those two guys, you know who I’m talking about, not to bother my friend again. That’s all I wanted to say,” I said. “Hey, I said why you fucking pinning me. You answer my ques-tidn,” Dapolito said Then his hand shot up from under the table and bit like a vise into my scrotum. I vaguely recall the screams of the women at the table and Clete locking his big arms around me and dragging me backward through a tangle of chairs. But I remember my palm curving around the handle of the pitcher, the heavy weight of it swinging in an arc, the glass exploding in strings of wet light; I remember it like red shards of memory that can rise from a drunken dream. Then Dapolito was on his knees, his face gathered in his hands, his scarlet fingers trembling as though he were weeping or hiding a shameful secret in the stunned silence of the room.
Chapter 11
YOU DO it, mon?“ Clete said outside. We were standing between my truck and Sweet Pea’s Cadillac convertible. ”He dealt it.“ I wiped the sweat off my face on my sleeve and tried to breathe evenly. My heart was beating against my rib cage. So far we had heard no sirens. Some of the restaurant’s customers had come out the front door but none of them wanted to enter the parking lot. ”Okay.. . this is the way I see it,“ Clete said. ”You had provocation, so you’ll probably skate with the locals. Patsy Dap’s another matter. We’ll have to do a sit-down with Johnny Carp.“
”Forget it.“
”You just left monkey shit all over the ceiling. We’re doing this one my way, Streak.“
”It’s not going to happen, Clete.“
”Trust me, big mon,“ he said, lighting a cigarette. ”What’s keeping the locals?“
”It probably got called in as barroom bullshit in the black district,“ I said. There was a whirring sound in my ears like wind blowing in seashells. I couldn’t stop sweating. Clete propped his arm against the cloth top of Sweet Pea’s car and glanced down into the backseat. ”Dave, look at this,“ he said.
”What?“
”On the floor. Under those newspapers. There’s something on the carpet.“ The exposed areas of the carpet, where people’s feet had crumpled and bunched the newspaper, looked brushed and vacuumed, but there were stains like melted chocolate in the gray fabric that someone had not been able to remove. ”We took it this far. You got a slim-jim in your tool box?“ Clete said. ”No.“
”So he needs a new top anyway,“
he said, and snapped open a switchblade knife, plunged it into the cloth, and sawed a slit down the edge of the back window. He worked his arm deep inside the hole and popped open the door. ”Feel it,“ he said a moment later, stepping aside so I could place my hand on the back floor. The stain had become sticky in the enclosed heat of the automobile. Hovering like a fog just above the rug was a thick, sweet smell that reminded me in a vague way of an odor in a battalion aid station. ”Somebody did some major bleeding back there,“ Clete said.
”Lock it up again.“
”Wait a minute.“ He picked up a crumpled piece of paper that was stuck down in the crack of the leather seat and read the carbon writing on it. ”It looks like Sweet Pea’s got lead in his foot as well as his twanger. Ninety in a forty-five.“
”Let’s see it,“ I said. He handed it to me. Then he looked at my face again. ”It means something?“ he said. ”He got the ticket yesterday on a dirt road out by Cade. Why’s he hanging around Cade?“ In the distance I could hear a siren on an emergency vehicle, as though it were trying to find a hole through traffic at an intersection.
”Wait here. Everything’s going to be copacetic,“ Clete said. ”Don’t go back in there.“ He walked fast across the lot, entered the side door of the restaurant, then came back out with his hand in one pocket.
”Why is it these dumb bastards always use the John to score? The owner’s even got sandpaper glued on top of the toilet tank to keep the rag-noses from chopping up lines on it,“ he Said. He stood between my truck and the Cadillac and began working open a small rectangular cellophane-sealed container with two silhouetted lovers on it. ”You’re one in a million, Cletus,“ I said. He unrolled a condom, then removed a piece of broken talc from his pocket, crushed it into fragments and powder, poured it with his palm into the condom, and tied a knot in the latex at the top. ”There’s nothing like keeping everybody’s eye on the shit bags By the way, they wrapped one of those roller towels from the towel machine around Patsy’s head. Think of a dirty Q-Tip sitting in a chair,“ he said. He dropped the condom on the floor of the Cadillac with two empty crack vials and locked the door, just before an Acadian ambulance, followed by a Lafayette city police car, turned into the parking lot. ”Party time,“ he said. He crinkled his eyes at me and brushed his palms softly. The sheriff had never been a police officer before his election to office, but he was a good administrator and his general decency and sense of fairness had gotten him through most of his early problems in handling both criminals and his own personnel. He had been a combat marine, an enlisted man, during the Korean War, which he would not discuss under any circumstances, and I always suspected his military experience was related to his sincere desire not to abuse the authority of his position. When I sat down in his office the sun was yellow and bright outside the window, and an array of potted plants on his windowsill stood out in dark silhouette against the light. His cheeks were red and grained and woven with tiny blue veins, and he had the small round chin of the French with a cleft in it.
He reread my report with his elbows on the desk blotter and his knuckles propped against his brow.
”I don’t need this on Monday morning,“ he said.
”It got out of hand.“
”Out of hand? Let me make an observation, my friend. Clete Purcel has no business here. He causes trouble everywhere he goes.“
”He tried to stop it, Sheriff. Besides, he knows Sonny Marsallus better than anyone in New Orleans.“
”That’s not an acceptable trade-off. What’s this stuff about a dead coon?“
I cleared a tic out of my throat. ”That’s not in my report,“ I said.
”Last night I got a call at home from the Lafayette chief of police.
Let’s see, how did he put it? “Would you tell your traveling clown to keep his circus act in his own parish?” You want to hear the rest of it?“
”Not really.“ Because I knew my straying into another jurisdiction, or even the beer pitcher smashed into Patsy Dapolito’s face, was not what was on the sheriff’s mind.
”What have you held back from me?“ he said.
I looked at him blankly and didn’t answer.
”You’re not the only one who chooses what to file a report on and what not to, are you?“ he asked.
”Excuse me?“
”Saturday I ran into a friend of mine with the humane society. He’s a friend of Helen Soileau’s. He mentioned a certain event he thought I already knew about.“
The sheriff waited.
”I don’t believe in using the truth to injure good people,“ I said.
”What gives you the right to make that kind of decision?“
My palms felt damp on the arms of the chair. I could feel a balloon of heat rising from my stomach into my throat.
”I never enjoyed the role of pin cushion,“ I said.
”You’re being treated unfairly?“
I wiped my palms on my thighs and folded them in my lap. I looked out the window at the fronds on a palm tree lifting in the breeze.
”Somebody killed all her animals. You knew about it but you didn’t report it and you went after Sweet Pea Chaisson on your own,“ he said.
”Yes, sir, that’s correct.“
”Why?“
”Because some shitheads set her up for blackmail purposes.“
He brushed at the corner of his eye with his fingertip.
”I have a feeling they didn’t catch her in the sack with a boyfriend,“
he said.
”The subject’s closed for me, Sheriff.“
”Closed? Interesting. No, amazing.“ He swiveled his chair sideways, rocked back in it, pushing against his paunch with his stiffened fingers. ”Maybe you ought to have a little more faith in the people you work for.“
”She sent some inquiries through the federal computer. Somebody doesn’t want her to pursue it,“ I said.
His eyes rested on the flowered teapot he used to water his plants, then they seemed to refocus on another concern. ”I’ve got the FBI bugging me about Sonny Marsallus. What’s their interest in a Canal Street gum ball
“I don’t know.”
Read the full book by downloading it below.
