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 h
ave 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 impatien
t 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.