Burning Angel

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.”

  “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

  SHE 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, Muffy. “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.