DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

  When he passed out, they poured a bucket of water over his head. Then they wrapped his face in a towel, stretched his head back, and poured water in his nose and mouth.

  After dark, he heard them drive away on the shale road atop the levee. When they returned, they smelled of hamburger and onions and coffee. Then they did things to him they had not done before. When he wept, they went outside and talked among themselves. Their voices were devoid of emotion, like football coaches discussing a game plan. Finally one of them said, “It can’t hurt. We put too much time into this guy just to throw him away.”

  What did they mean? He had already told them everything he knew about Bertrand and the shooting and the looting at Kovick’s house. He had even told them he was a rapist and a meth dealer and a strong-arm robber, that he had too much on his own sheet to ever turn his abductors in. Maybe they were going to keep him around, use him in some way, give him a job as an inside man. Yeah, that was it. Just stay cool, he told himself. They’d send him after Bertrand, find the motherfucker who’d started all this, fix his black ass for bringing all this grief down on everybody.

  They allowed him to use the privy in back, then taped him to the chair again. One of them tied the wet towel around his eyes. “Take it easy, kid,” he said. “We’ll be done pretty soon.”

  Done with what?

  Through the screen windows he could hear the wind in the sawgrass and fish flopping in the lagoons and the drone of a workboat out on the bay. Then car doors slammed and he heard the muffled voice of a woman as she was dragged into the room and thrown into a chair.

  “Lady, we got no beef with you,” one of the men said. “But you found some money that wasn’t yours and didn’t return it. So we want to know what else you found. Don’t lie. That’s the worst thing you can do, worse than anything you’ve ever done. You hearing me on this, Ms. Degravelle? Just nod your head. Okay, we got that out of the way.

  “You see this black kid here? By his own admission, he’s a rapist and a seller of narcotics to his own people. But worse than that, he lied to us after he promised to tell us the truth. So he’s got to pay the price. If he don’t, he’s making liars out of us, too. What’s about to happen isn’t cruel, it’s not undeserved. It’s just part of the deal. Don’t look away, Ms. Degravelle. You keep your eyes on him.”

  There was a pause and a silence of no more than three seconds, but those three seconds were the longest in Andre Rochon’s life.

  The pistol shots were loud and sharp inside the room, like shots fired from a .22 revolver. Andre took one round in the neck and two in the head, both of them as hot as wasp strings.

  Later that night, his body roped to another person’s and a chain of cinder blocks, he awoke to starlight just as someone rolled him over a gunwale into water that smelled of diesel fuel and fish spawn. When he rose from the darkness of the water and walked up the slope of the sandbar, dragging the cinder blocks and the body of the woman with him, he remembered a priest chopping a hole in a church roof and he wondered why he would recall such a bizarre image at this particular moment in his life.

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON betsy Mossbacher finished her account about Andre Rochon in my office. “He lived about six hours,” she said. “The woman was dead when she went into the water. She still had the plastic bag over her head. Our pathologist says she died of a coronary probably brought on by near suffocation.”

  “Clete knows all this?”

  “Yes. But he dummied up on us. How close were he and the woman?”

  “They were seeing each other.”

  “Too bad. Ronald Bledsoe is using Purcel as his alibi. That must be hard to take. Can you explain to me how Purcel can insert himself into every problem in this area?”

  “Lay off him, Betsy.”

  “That woman went through hell before she died. Save your brother-in-arms stuff for somebody else,” she replied.

  I could hear the traffic out on the street. Betsy formed a pocket of air in one jaw, then got up from her chair and walked to the window. She was wearing jeans, a cotton shirt, cowboy boots, and a wide belt. One of the qualities I admired most in Betsy was the fact her eyes were always clear and she focused them on yours when she spoke. She turned around and looked at me. “Interpol thinks Sidney Kovick may have taken both the blood stones and the counterfeit currency off some al Qaeda operatives in South America. The fact is we’re not that interested in the blood stones. But we are interested in how Sidney Kovick got inside al Qaeda.”

  “What does Sidney say?”

  “Nothing. I tried to appeal to his patriotism. You knew he was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade?”

  “John Ehrlichman was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying cross. Who cares?”

  “You haven’t talked to Purcel?”

  “No.”

  “He was handling it okay.”

  “You don’t know Clete. He doesn’t handle anything okay.”

  “Regardless, he needs to stay out of this investigation. Your friend has a serious problem about minding his own business.”

  “His neighbor is Ronald Bledsoe. His girlfriend was tortured to death. His City drowned while the most powerful politicians in the country sat on their asses. If these things aren’t his business, what is?”

  On her way out of the office, she trailed a finger across the back of my neck. “People use me for a dartboard only once, Dave.”

  THAT EVENING I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court, but he was not there and he didn’t return my calls to his cell phone. I stopped in the bar at Clementine’s and at an outdoor place on Bayou Teche where he sometimes drank, but no one had seen him.

  Perhaps I had been rude to Betsy Mossbacher. But few people understood the complexity of Clete Purcel. He didn’t show pain or injury; he absorbed it in the way I imagine an elephant absorbs a rock splinter in its foot. While the wound heals and scars over on the surface, the splinter works its way deeper into the tissue, until infection forms and the inflammation swells upward through the joints into the chest and shoulders and spine, until the elephant’s entire connective system throbs with the lightest of burdens placed on its back. Perhaps the latter was not true of an elephant. But it was of Clete.

  I stood on the drawbridge overlooking the bayou at Burke Street and thought about the account Betsy had given me of Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle’s ordeal. I suppose a person could say Rochon had invited his fate, but certainly Ms. Degravelle had not. I thought about the kind of men who would bind and torture their fellow human beings for money or for any other reason. Over the years I had known a few. Some hid in a uniform, some did not. But all of them sought causes and all of them needed banners over their heads. None of them, except those who were obviously psychopathic, ever acted alone or without sanction.

  In the twilight Bayou Teche was swollen and wide between its tree-shrouded banks, the backs of garfish roiling the surface next to the lily pads. The sun had burned into a tiny red cinder. The air was suddenly cool, the lawns along the bayou lit by gas-fed lanterns and sometimes by chains of white lights in the oak trees. William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, its slat-tern breath and the quickness of its step only seconds away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.

  I walked home and began baking an apple pie in the kitchen oven, insisting that Molly and Alafair sit with me and talk while I did. Chapter 20

  B Y SUNDAY MORNING Clete had still not shown up. I heard the pet flap on the door swing back and forth, then saw Snuggs walk into the kitchen, jump up on the windowsill, and look back outside. I walked out on the porch. Bo Diddley Wiggins was in my backyard, admiring the bayou, wearing a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved print shirt unbuttoned at the top, the lapels ironed out on his shoulders.

  “Didn’t know if y’all were still sleeping,” he said. “How old is that coo
n?”

  “He’s old. Like me,” I said.

  “He took a wet dump all over his papers. That’s what I fear most in life. Sitting in a wheelchair, my pecker shriveled up, downloading in adult Pampers while a nigra woman sticks gruel in my mouth.”

  I heard Molly close the kitchen window. Bo looked at the trees overhead, the sunlight breaking through the branches, a squirrel swinging on a bird feeder. He waited for me to invite him in.

  “We’re about to head out to Lafayette, Bo. Otherwise I’d offer you coffee,” I said.

  “I don’t have time, anyway. Look, I don’t like to meddle. But we go back and I couldn’t just blow off your friend’s situation. What’s his-name, the rhino who’s always getting into trouble around here?”

  “Clete Purcel?”

  “A couple of my employees are taking care of him right now. They don’t want to see him hurt. But the guy went ape-shit out by an old oil platform on my lease and shot at somebody. If it hadn’t been for my superintendent, your friend would be in the Lafourche Parish Jail.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Shit-faced in a bar, with a thirty-eight in a holster strapped on his chest. Why you looking at me like that?”

  “Why are your employees going out of their way for Clete Purcel?”

  “Because he fishes down there and they know him. Because one of my employees was in Vietnam, just like your friend. Excuse me, Dave, but did I do something wrong in coming here, because I’m definitely getting that feeling.”

  “No, you didn’t, Bo. I appreciate it. If you’ll give me directions, I’ll go get him.”

  “I’ll take you. Get in my truck. Wait till you see what this baby can do in four-wheel drive on a board road.”

  Bo drove his vehicle just like he did everything else—full-throttle, not taking prisoners, as though the rest of the world had become his enemy simply because it was on the other side of his windshield. We passed through miles of sawgrass, all of it yellowed by submersion, water and mud splashing above the hood, Bo driving with one hand on a road that was hardly a road, the frame bouncing on the springs.

  The bar was at a rural intersection where the stoplight and the cable it hung on had been wrapped by storm winds around a telephone pole. Most of the bar’s metal roof was gone and had been replaced with plywood and canvas and blue felt. The rain ditches along the two intersecting roads were compacted with dead trees and detritus from a tidal surge that had wiped the coastal end of the parish off the map.

  The inside of the club was dark, creaking with heat, the only power from a gas-operated generator chugging in back. Clete sat at a round table in the corner, his shoulder-holstered .38 strapped in plain sight across a Hawaiian shirt that stuck to his skin like wet Kleenex. A bottle of tequila, a salt shaker, a shot glass, and a saucer of sliced limes were on the table. So was a sweating can of Bud, which he picked up and sipped from without expression when he saw me and Bo Diddley enter the club.

  Two sun-browned men in khaki clothes were drinking coffee at the bar. They nodded at Bo, then returned to their conversation.

  “Trying to stoke up the locals?” I said to Clete.

  “Who’s he?” he said, indicating Bo.

  “Bo Wiggins,” Bo said, extending his hand.

  “Those guys at the bar work for you?” Clete replied, either ignoring or not seeing Bo’s hand.

  “They said you had some trouble at an old drill location on my lease. They said they heard a couple of pops in the wind and saw a guy roaring down the canal in a boat. They thought maybe this guy tried to rob you. So I called Dave and we drove out.”

  Clete’s face was oily and dilated, his eyes bleary with fatigue and early-morning booze. “See, that’s not what happened. The guy in the boat is a guy I’ve been chasing through three parishes. See, he’s a guy who maybe tortured a lady friend of mine to death. They tortured her for a long time, and they put a plastic bag over her head and dumped her over the gunnels down by the salt. They did this because that’s the kind of guys they are, guys who get off working out their fantasies on a woman who can’t fight back.

  “But right now the problem I got is your friends moved my Caddy somewhere and they don’t want to tell me where it is. So it would be really good if you would ask them to bring my Caddy around and to put the keys in my hand. Because if they don’t, it’s really going to mess up my day.” Clete held up the face of his watch for Bo to look at. “See, I’m already late for church.”

  Bo listened with a half-smile on his face, his forearm on the table, his buzz haircut and jug ears silhouetted against a window. The back of his neck was red and pocked with acne scars and greasy with sweat. “No problem, Mr. Purcel. Your car will be here in five minutes,” he said.

  Bo went to the bar and spoke to his employees, who kept their attention on him and did not look again in Clete’s direction.

  “You don’t know those two guys?” I said.

  “No, why?”

  “You didn’t know one of them served in Vietnam?”

  “No, I never saw either one of them. Who’s that guy with you?”

  “Forget about him. You actually shot at somebody?”

  “It’s a long story, but three separate people told me they saw that boat in the bay where Courtney’s body was found. I hired an airboat and chased the guy all along the coastline. I gave up, then a guy at a dock told me he’d seen the boat down by an oil platform. I drove my car down the levee and almost had him. When he took off, I figured he had to be dirty. I let off two rounds at the waterline. Then those two dudes at the bar showed up and said I was trespassing.”

  “When’s the last time you slept?”

  “I think sleep is highly overrated.”

  “You never saw those guys at the bar?”

  He blew out his breath. “I melted my head. I identified Courtney’s body from a photograph. The facial shot was taken close up. The plastic bag was only part of it. I’m going to cool those guys out, Dave. Don’t try to stop me. It’s a done deal.”

  He picked up his jigger of tequila and drank it half empty, his eyes never leaving mine.

  THAT EVENING I put Clete to bed in his cottage at the motor court, and in the morning I brought him a boxed breakfast from Victor’s.

  “Is there any chance you hit the guy you shot at?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see any feathers fly, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What’d the guy look like?”

  “He looked guilty.”

  He got into the shower, the water drumming on the tin walls. I couldn’t take any more of his booze-soaked craziness.

  I went to the office and told Helen what had happened, her face clouding as she listened, her hand opening and closing on a wadded-up piece of paper. “You give this to the FBI,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

  “You do it and you do it now, Dave. Now, get out of here.” I couldn’t blame her.

  space

  OTIS BAYLOR got out of jail on bond and was promptly fired by his insurance company. On the same day he was fired, he became a self-appointed peripatetic counselor to anyone filing a storm-damage claim against his former employer or, for that matter, against any insurance company. He held meetings with home owners in a coffee shop and taught them how to phrase the language in their claims and how to file suit when their claims were unfairly denied. Trees were blown down by wind, not floated against a house by a tidal surge. Structural collapse was caused by twisters, not by flooding. Mold was caused by driving rain after wind had blown out the windows. Lightning exploded the electrical system and curled the walls and split the foundation, not water.

  The words “water,” “flood,” “tidal,” and “surge” did not exist.

  On Wednesday I saw him on the street, down by Clete’s office, his manner strangely composed for a man whose life was hanging in shreds. His shirt pocket was full of ballpoint pens, his upper torso broad and solid inside his clothes. “You find what you were lo
oking for at my house?” he asked.

  We were in the shade of a live oak that grew out of the sidewalk, and the wind was blowing leaves along the concrete. “No, we didn’t, but other people may give it a try,” I said.

  “They can have at it,” he said.

  “Courtney Degravelle probably had the same kind of casual attitude.”

  “The lady down the street?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “She was murdered. So was Andre Rochon. They were both abducted, tortured, and murdered.”

  He was absolutely still, his tie fluttering slightly against the pin that held it to his shirt.

  “Who did it?”

  “Maybe Sidney Kovick’s people. Maybe some international guys. Whoever they are, they’re well organized.”

  He looked ashen. “I knew Ms. Degravelle. She was a nice lady. She was tortured to death?”

  “She died of a coronary. But, yes, she was tortured terribly.”

  “My family is at risk, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t say that for sure.”

  “I’ve seen this man Bledsoe, the private investigator, around town. He’s involved in this, isn’t he?”

  “You’ve seen him in the last few days?”

  “I saw him on the street before I was arrested. You think he’s involved in Ms. Degravelle’s death?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “This never ends, does it?”

  “I’m going to say something of a personal nature to you, Mr. Baylor. You’re a believer. As such, you know it’s us against them. The contest is never over, the field never quite ours.”

  I guess my statement was grandiloquent, perhaps foolish. He looked at me with an expression that was as flat as a painting on a signboard. Then he walked away without saying good-bye, crossing the street through traffic that had to swerve around him.

  But unbeknown to Otis, he had just done something that convinced me he was not a killer. He had shown no interest in the death of Andre Rochon, a man who had probably raped his daughter. Those who seek vengeance will accept the state’s invitation to witness the execution of their tormentors, in the old days by electrocution, today by lethal injection, but they get no rest and to the end of their days are haunted by the specter of an enemy who is ironically now safe and beyond their grasp.