Burning Angel

  “You like those songs?” the boy said.

  “Sure, you bet,” I said. “They’re hard to beat.”

  “We bought them over on the corner. It’s great stuff,” he said.

  “I saw those guys. Cookie and the Cupcakes, Lloyd Price, Warren Storm. They used to play around here.”

  They smiled and nodded, as though they were familiar with all those names, too, then tried to return to their own conversation without seeming impolite. I felt suddenly old and foolish.

  I wanted to drive back home, mark off the day, forget all the faces I had looked into, erase the seared voices that could have been those of William Blake’s lost souls on Lower Thames Street.

  But I knew what I had to do. I was no longer a cop. My family was at risk as long as Johnny Carp thought I was a threat to one of his enterprises. I had told Moleen pride was a pile of shit. I wondered how good I would be at accepting my own admonition.

  I walked back toward Esplanade, got in my truck, and headed up the entrance ramp to I-10 and Jefferson Parish. I thought I saw a chartreuse Cadillac convertible in my rearview mirror; then it disappeared in a swirl of rain.

  The Giacano family had successfully controlled New Orleans for many reasons, one of which was the fact that they loved the appearance of normalcy and lived in upper-middle-class homes that didn’t draw attention to their wealth. Johnny’s limo stayed in a garage downtown; when he drove home from work, it was in his Lincoln. Johnny knew if there was one emotion that could overcome fear—which he instilled in his enemies with regularity—it was envy.

  When whites began to flee New Orleans for Jefferson Parish and Metairie, the political base of David Duke, Johnny went with them. He joined any club he could buy his way into, pushed a basket around in the supermarket on Saturday mornings, played softball in the neighborhood park, and on Saturday nights threw huge dinners, where the tables with checkered cloths groaned with platters of pasta, sausage, meatballs, and baked lasagna, at a working-class Italian restaurant by the lake.

  It was a strange evening. The rain was blowing harder now, and the swells in the lake were dark green and dimpled with rain, the causeway haloed with mist and electric lights all the way across the water to Covington, but the late sun had broken free of the clouds on the horizon and filled the western sky with a red glow like flames inside oil smoke.

  It was a happy, crowded place, with wide verandas and high windows, private banquet rooms, a long railed bar, potted palms and plush maroon sofas by the cash register. I took off my seersucker coat in the men’s room, dried my hair and face with paper towels, straightened my tie, tried to brush the powdered sugar from the Cafe du Monde off my charcoal shirt, then combed my hair and looked in the mirror. I didn’t want to go back outside; I didn’t want to say the words I would have to say. I had to look away from my own reflection.

  Johnny was entertaining in a back room, with lacquered pine paneling and windows that gave onto the lake and the lighted sailboats that rocked in the swells. He was at the bar, in fine form, dressed in tailored, pegged gray slacks, tasseled loafers, plum-colored socks, a bright yellow dress shirt with bloodred cuff links as big as cherries. His marcelled hair gleamed like liquid plastic, his teeth were pink with wine. The hood at the door was in a jovial mood, too, and when I said, “I got no piece, I got no shield, Max,” he smiled and answered, “I know that, Mr. Robicheaux. Johnny seen you outside. He wants you come on in and have a good time.”

  I ordered a Dr. Pepper and drank it five feet from where Johnny was holding a conversation with a half dozen people. My presence never registered in his face while he grinned and beamed and told a joke, rocking on the balls of his feet, his lips pursed as he neared the conclusion of his story, a clutch of fifty-dollar bills folded in a fan between his ringed fingers.

  Again, I could hear a peculiar creaking sound in my head, like the weight of a streetcar pinging through steel track. I looked out the rain-streaked side window and thought I saw Clete Purcel staring back at me. When I blinked and widened my eyes, he was gone.

  I finished my Dr. Pepper and ordered another. I kept looking directly into Johnny’s face. Finally I said it, gave recognition to his power, acknowledged my dependence on his mood and the enormous control he had over the lives of others: “Johnny, I need a minute of your time.”

  “Sure, Dave,” he said, and moved toward me along the bar, pointed toward his Manhattan glass for the bartender. “How you doin’? You didn’t bring that Irish ape, did you? Hey, just kidding. Purcel don’t bother me. You ever know his mother? She was a wet-brain, used to sell out of her pants when her old man run off. Ask anybody in the Channel.”

  “Can we talk somewhere?” I said.

  “This is good.” Two of his hoods stood behind him, eating out of paper plates, salami and salad hanging off their lips. Their steroid-pumped upper arms had the diameter and symmetry of telephone poles inside their sports coats. “Don’t be shy. What’s the problem?”

  “No problem. That’s what I’m saying, Johnny. I’m no threat to you guys.”

  “What am I listening to here? I ever said you were a problem?” He turned to his men, a mock incredulous look on his face.

  “My daughter saw a guy hanging around our house, Johnny. You think I have information, which I don’t. They pulled my shield, I’m out of the game, I don’t care what you guys do. I’m asking you to stay away from me and my family.”

  “You hear this crazy guy?” he said to his hoods. Then to me, “Eat some dinner, drink some wine, you got my word, anybody bother you with anything, you bring it to me.”

  “I appreciate your attitude, Johnny,” I said.

  My palms felt damp, thick, hard to fold at my sides. I was sweating inside my shirt. I swallowed and looked away from the smile on his face. “I accused you of something that was in the imagination. I’m sorry about that,” he said. His men were grinning now.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “A redheaded guy, looked like Sonny Boy Marsallus, out at my house, walking around downtown, I asked you and Purcel if you’d hired an actor, remember?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “There he is,” he said, and pointed to a man in a white jacket busing a table. “He’s Sonny’s cousin, a retard or something, I got him a job here. He looks just like him, except his brains probably run out his nose.”

  “He looks like a stuffed head,” one of Johnny’s men said.

  “He’d make a great doorstop,” the other man said.

  “Why was he at your house?” I said. The skin of my face burned and my voice felt weak in my throat.

  “He was looking for a job. He’d been out there with Sonny once. Now he’s making six bucks an hour and tips cleaning slops. So I done a good one for Sonny.”

  One of the men behind Johnny gargled with his drink.

  “Salt water’s good for the throat,” he said to me. “Take a glass-bottom boat ride, Robicheaux, ask Sonny if that ain’t true.”

  Johnny stripped a folded fifty out of the fan in his hand and dropped it on my forearm.

  “Get something nice for your daughter,” he said. “You done the right thing here tonight.” He reached out with one hand and adjusted the knot in my tie.

  I saw the balloon of red-black color well up behind my eyes, heard a sound like wet newspaper ripping in my head, saw the startled and fearful look in his face just before I hooked him above the mouth, hard, snapping my shoulder into it, his nose flattening, his upper lip splitting against his teeth. I caught him again on the way down, behind the ear, then brought my knee into his face and knocked his head into the bar.

  I kept waiting for his men to reach inside their coats, to pinion my arms, but they didn’t move. My breath was heaving in my chest, my hands were locked on the lip of the bar, like a man aboard ship during a gale, and I was doing something that seemed to have no connection with me. He fought to get up, and I saw my shoe bite into his chin, his ear, his raised forearm, his rib cage, I felt Johnny Carp cracking apa
rt like eggshell under my feet.

  “Mother of God, that’s enough, Dave!” I heard Clete shout behind me.

  Then I felt his huge arm knock me backward, away from Johnny’s body, which was curled in an embryonic position next to the brass bar rail, his yellow shirt streaked with saliva and blood, his fists clenched on his head.

  Then Clete laced his fingers under my arm, a paper bag crushed against the contour of his palm, and drew me back toward the door with him, a pistol-grip, sawed-down double-barrel twelve-gauge pointed at Johnny’s men. The only sound in the room was the service door to the kitchen flipping back and forth on its hinges. The faces of the diners were as expressionless as candle wax, as though any movement of their own would propel them into a terrible flame. I felt Clete push me out into the darkness and the cold odor of an impending electric storm that invaded the trees like a fog. He shoved the sawed-down twelve-gauge into the paper bag and threw it on the seat of his convertible.

  “Oh Dave,” he said. “Noble mon ...” He shook his head and started his car without finishing his sentence, his eyes hollow and lustrous with a dark knowledge, as though he had just seen the future.

  Chapter 25

  BY MONDAY MORNING nothing had happened. No knock at the door from New Orleans plainclothes, no warrant cut. To my knowledge, not even an investigation in progress.

  The sky was clear and blue, windless, the day warm, the sun as bright as a shattered mirror on the bayou’s surface. After the early fishermen had left the dock and I had started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunches Batist and I would sell later, I called Clete at the office on Main.

  “You need me for anything?” I said.

  “Not really. It’s pretty quiet.”

  “I’m going to work at the dock today.”

  “He s coming, Dave.”

  “I know.”

  The priest sits next to me on the weathered planks of the bleachers by the baseball diamond at New Iberia High. The school building is abandoned, the windows broken by rocks, pocked with BB holes. The priest is a tall, gray, crewcut man who used to be a submarine pitcher for the Pelicans back in the days of the Evangeline League and later became an early member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Today he belongs to the same AA group I do.

  “Did you go to the restaurant with that purpose in mind?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Then it wasn’t done with forethought. It was an impetuous act. That’s the nature of anger.”

  It’s dusk and the owner of the pawn and gun shop on the corner rattles the glass in his door when he slams and locks it. Two black kids in ball caps gaze through the barred window at the pistols on display.

  “Dave?”

  “I tried to kill him.”

  “That’s a bit more serious,” he says.

  The black kids cross the street against the red light and pass close to the bleachers, in the shadows, oblivious to our presence. One picks up a rock, sails it clattering through a tree next to the school building.

  I hear a faint tinkle of glass inside.

  “Because of your friend, what was his name, Sonny Boy?” the priest says.

  “I think he put the hit on Sonny. I can’t prove it, though.”

  His hands are long and slender, with liver spots on the backs. His skin makes a dry sound when he rubs one hand on top of the other.

  “What bothers you more than anything else in the world, Dave?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Vietnam? The death of your wife Annie? Revisiting the booze in your dreams?”

  When I don’t reply, he lifts one hand, gestures at the diamond, the ruined school building that’s become softly molded inside the fading twilight. A torn kite, caught by its string on an iron fire escape, flaps impotently against a wall.

  “It’s all this, isn’t it?” he says. “We’re still standing in the same space where we grew up but we don’t recognize it anymore. It’s like other people own it now.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You want absolution for what you did to this guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dave, when we say the Serenity Prayer about acceptance, we have to mean it. I can absolve sins but I can’t set either one of us free from the nature of time.”

  “It has nothing to do with time. It’s what we’ve allowed them to do—all of them, the dope traffickers, the industrialists, the politicians. We gave it up without even a fight.”

  “I’m all out of words,” he says, and lays his hand on my shoulder. It has the weightlessness of an old man’s. He looks at the empty diamond with a private thought in his eyes, one that he knows his listener is not ready to hear.

  “Come on down to the office and talk to somebody for me, will you?” Clete said when I answered the phone early the next morning. Then he told me who.

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” I said.

  “You’re going to enjoy this. I guarantee it.”

  Twenty minutes later I parked my truck in front of the office. Through the window I could see Patsy Dapolito sitting in a wood chair next to my desk, his brow furrowed as he stared down at the BB game that he tilted back and forth in his hands. His face looked like stitched pink rubber molded against bone.

  I walked inside and sat behind my desk. The new secretary looked up and smiled, then went back to typing a letter.

  “Tell Dave what’s on your mind, get his thoughts on it,” Clete said to the back of Patsy’s head.

  “You guys hire operatives. Maybe we can work something out,” Patsy said.

  “Like work for us, you mean?” I asked.

  “Nobody catches any flies on you. I can see that,” he answered, and tilted more BB’s into the tiny holes of his game.

  Clete widened his eyes and puffed air in his cheeks to suppress the humor in his face.

  “We’re not hiring right now, Patsy. Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  “Who tried to peel your box?” he said.

  Clete and I looked at each other.

  “You didn’t know your place got creeped?” He laughed, then pointed with his thumb to the safe. “You can punch ‘em, peel ‘em, or burn ‘em. The guy tried to do this one was a fish. He should have gone through the dial.”

  Clete got up from his desk and rubbed his fingers along the prised edge of the safe, then went to the front and back doors. “How’d the guy get in?” he said to me, his face blank.

  “It’s called a lock pick, Purcel,” Patsy said.

  “There’re no scratches,” Clete said to me.

  “Maybe the safe was already damaged when you got it from Nig,” I said. But Clete was already shaking his head.

  Patsy lit a cigarette, held it upward in the cone of his fingers, blew smoke around it as though he were creating an artwork in the air.

  “There’s a hit on me. I got a proposition,” he said.

  “Tell me who Charlie is,” I said.

  “Charlie? What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Would you watch your language, please,” I said.

  “Language? That’s what’s you guys got on your mind, I use bad language?” he said.

  “You’re a beaut, Patsy,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, fuck you. The hit’s coming from Johnny Carp. You stomped the shit out of him, Robicheaux; Purcel bounced money off his face. That gives all of us a mutual interest, you get my drift?”

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said.

  He stood up, ground his cigarette out in an ashtray, stabbing it into the ceramic as though he were working an angry thought out of his mind. “Marsallus ever wash up on the shore?” he said.

  “No, why?” I said.

  “No reason. I wish I’d been there for it. It was time somebody broke that mutt’s legs.”

  “Get out,” I said.

  When he walked past the secretary, he drew his finger, like a line of ice water, across the back of her neck.

  When I closed the bait shop that ni
ght and walked up the dock toward the house, I saw Luke Fontenot waiting for me in the shadows of the oaks that overhung the road. He wore a pair of pink slacks, a braided cloth belt, a black shirt with the collar turned up on the neck. He flipped a toothpick out onto the road.

  “What’s up, partner?” I said.

  “Come out to the plantation wit’ me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Ruthie Jean and me want to bring all this to an end.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Moleen Bertrand gonna fix it so it come out right for everybody.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not one of his fans, Luke.”

  “Talk to my Aint Bertie. If it come from you, she gonna listen.” I could hear the strain, like twisted wire, in his throat.

  “To what? No, don’t tell me. Somebody’s going to give y’all a lot of money. Sounds great. Except Bertie’s one of those rare people who’s not for sale and just wants her little house and garden and the strip Moleen’s grandfather gave y’all’s family.”

  “You ain’t got to the part that counts most.”

  He rubbed a mosquito bite on his neck, looked hotly into my face.

  “Moleen and Ruthie Jean?” I said.

  “That’s what it always been about, Mr. Dave. But if it don’t go right, if Aint Bertie gonna act old and stubborn ... There’s some bad white people gonna be out there. I’m between Ruthie Jean and that old woman. What I’m gonna do?”

  I followed him in my truck out to the Bertrand plantation. The sky was freckled with birds, the air heavy with smoke from a trash fire, full of dust blowing out of the fields. The grove of gum trees at the end of the road thrashed in black-green silhouette against the dying sun. While he told me a story of reconciliation and promise I sat with Luke on the tiny gallery of the house from which he and Ruthie Jean had been evicted, and I wondered if our most redeeming quality, our willingness to forgive, was not also the instrument most often used to lay bare and destroy the heart.

  Moleen had found Luke first, then Ruthie Jean, the latter in a motel in a peculiar area of north Lafayette where Creoles and blacks and white people seemed to traverse one another’s worlds without ever identifying with any one of them. He spent the first night with her in the motel, a low-rent 19405 cluster of stucco boxes that had once been called the Truman Courts. While he made love to her, she lay with her head propped up on pillows, her hands lightly touching his shoulders, her gaze pointed at the wall, neither encouraging nor dissuading his passion, which seemed as insatiable as it was unrequited.