DR08 - Burning Angel

  “Lying, Dave. We've never had that problem between us. I have a hard time dealing with this, podna.”

  “The guy's grandiose, he's a huckster, he's got electrodes in his temples. But he's down on the wrong beef.”

  “I don't give a goddamn what he is. You're violating your oath as a police officer. You're walking on the edges of perjury as well.”

  I looked into the diffused green and yellow light on the rim of the lagoon. “The eye remembers after the fact sometimes,” I said.

  “You saw the cut-down twelve-gauge under the guy's coat? You felt you were in danger?”

  “I'll put my revised statement in your mailbox this afternoon.”

  “You missed your calling over in Vietnam. You remember those monks who used to set themselves on fire? You were born for it, Dave.”

  “Marsallus doesn't belong in prison. At least not for popping the guy in front of my house.”

  The sheriff set his fishing rod across his thighs and pulled up the anchor without my asking him. He stared into the water and the black silt that swirled out of the bottom, then wiped his face with his hand as though he were temporarily erasing an inevitable conclusion from his thoughts.

  Monday morning I was suspended from the department without

  Pay-Monday night I drove out to the Bertrand plantation and returned the spoon Bertie Fontenot had given me. She fanned herself with a ragged magazine in the swing, her breasts hanging like watermelons inside her cotton dress.

  “It's the right time period, but I don't think pirates buried those spoons in your garden,” I said.

  “They growed there with my radish seeds?”

  “The S on those spoons makes me think they're from the Segura plantation on the lake. During the Civil War, a lot of people buried their silverware and coins to keep them from the Yankees, Bertie.”

  “They should have buried themselves while they was at it.”

  I looked at the lights inside the house next door. Two shadows moved across the shades.

  “A lawyer come down from Lafayette and got her out of jail this morning,” she said.

  “Which lawyer?”

  “I ain't ax his name. I seen him out here with Moleen once. The one look like he got grease on his bald head.”

  “Jason Darbonne.”

  “I'm going inside now. The mosquitoes is eating me up.” She paused in the square of light the door made, the white ends of her hair shiny with oil. “They gonna run us off, ain't they?”

  I had a half dozen answers, but all of them would have been self-serving and ultimately demeaning. So I simply said good night and walked to my truck by the grove of gum trees.

  The moon was down, and in the darkness the waving cane looked like a sea of grass on the ocean's floor. In my mind's eye I saw the stubble burning in the late fall, the smoke roiling out of the fire in sulphurous yellow plumes, and I wanted to believe that all those nameless people who may have lain buried in the field-African and West Indian slaves, convicts leased from the penitentiary, Negro laborers whose lives were used up for someone else's profit-would rise with the smoke and force us to acknowledge their humanity and its inextricable involvement and kinship with our own.

  But they were dead, their teeth scattered by plowshares, their bones ground by harrow and dozer blade into detritus, and all the fury and mire that had constricted their hearts and tolled their days were now reduced to a chip of vertebrae tangled in the roots of a sugarcane stalk.

  Chapter 18

  BOY WAS sprung and I was now the full-time operator of a bait shop and boat-rental business that, on a good year, cleared fifteen thousand dollars.

  He found me at Red Lerille's Gym in Lafayette.

  “Jail wasn't that bad on you, Sonny. You look sharp,” I said.

  “Get out of my face with that patronizing attitude, Dave.” He chewed gum and wore a tailored gray suit with zoot slacks and a blue suede belt and a T-shirt.

  “I'm off the case, off the job, out of your problems, Sonny.”

  I'd forgotten my speed bag gloves at home, but I began working the bag anyway, creating a circular motion with each fist, throbbing the bag harder and harder against the circular board it was suspended from.

  “Who appointed you my caretaker?” he asked.

  I skinned my knuckles on the bag, hit it harder, faster. He grabbed it with both hands.

  “Lose the attitude. I'm talking to you. Who the fuck says you got to quit your job because of me?” he said.

  “I didn't quit, I'm suspended. The big problem here is somebody pulled you down from your cross and you can't stand it.”

  “I got certain beliefs and I don't like that kind of talk, Dave.” I opened and closed my palms at my sides. My knuckles stung, my wrists pounded with blood. The gym echoed with the smack of gloves on leather, the ring of basketballs against the hardwood floor. Sonny's face was inches from mine, his breath hot on my skin. “Would you step back, please? I don't want to hit you with the bag,” I said. “I don't let anybody take my bounce, Dave.”

  “That's copacetic, Sonny. I can relate to it. Hey, I don't want to offend you, but you're not supposed to be in here with street shoes on. They mark up the floors.”

  “You can be a wiseass all you want, Dave. Emile Pogue is a guy who once put a flamethrower down a spider hole full of civilians. You think you're on suspension? In whose world?” He walked across the gym floor, through a group of sweating basketball players who looked like their muscles were pumped full of hardening concrete. I hit the speed bag one more time and felt a strip of skin flay back off my knuckle. It rained hard the next morning. Lightning struck in the field behind my house and my neighbor's cows had bunched in the coulee and were lowing inside the sound of the rain. I read the paper on the gallery, then went back inside to answer the phone. “You got to hear me, Dave,”

  Sonny said. “Once they take me out, it'll be your turn, then the woman cop, what's-her-name, Helen Soileau, then maybe Purcel, then maybe your wife. They don't leave loose ends.”

  “All right, Sonny, you made your point.”

  “Another thing, this is personal, I'm no guy on a cross. In medieval times, I would have been one of those guys selling pigs' bones for saints' relics. The reality is I got innocent people's blood on my hands.”

  “I don't know what to tell you, partner.”

  “I'm not going away, Dave. You'll see me around.”

  “That's what I'm afraid of,” I said. He didn't answer. For some reason I imagined him on a long, empty beach where the waves were lashed by wind but made no sound. “Good-bye, Sonny,” I said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  An hour later the thunder had stopped and the rain was falling steadily on the gallery's tin roof. Clete's chartreuse Cadillac convertible, with fins and grillwork like a torn mouth, bounced through the chuckholes in the road and turned into my drive. He ran through the puddles under the trees, his keys and change jingling in his slacks, one hand pressed on top of his porkpie hat.

  “They gave you the deep six, huh, big mon?” he said. He sat in the swing and wiped his face on his sleeve.

  “Who told you?”

  “Helen.”

  “You're on a first-name basis now?”

  “She met me at my office last night. She doesn't like seeing her partner get reamed. I don't either.” He looked at his watch.

  “Don't put your hand in it, Clete.”

  “You afraid your ole podjo's going to leave gorilla shit on the furniture?”

  I made a pocket of air in my cheek.

  “You want to go partners in my agency?” he said. “Hey, I need the company. I'm a grunt for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. My temp's an ex-nun. My best friends are mutts in the city prison. The desk sergeant at First District wouldn't spit in my mouth.”

  “Thanks, anyway, Cletus. I don't want to move back to New Orleans.”

  “We'll open a branch here in New Iberia. Leave it to me, I'll set it up.”

  Several nightm
arish visions floated before my eyes. Clete looked at his watch. “You got anything to eat?” he said.

  “Help yourself.”

  He walked through the house to the kitchen and came back on the gallery with a bowl of Grape-Nuts and a tall glass of coffee and hot milk. His teeth made a grinding sound while he ate. His eyes glanced at his watch again.

  “Who you expecting?” I said.

  “I'm meeting Helen in town. She's photocopying Sonny's diary for me.”

  “Bad idea.”

  He stopped chewing and his face stretched as tight as pig hide. He raised his spoon at me.

  “Nobody fucks my podjo, pardon the word in your house,” he said.

  I felt like the soldier who enlists at the outset of a war, then discovers, after his energies and blood lust have waned, that there is no separate peace, that he's a participant until the last worthless shot is fired on the last worthless day. Sonny was right. There are no administrative suspensions, no more so than when pistol flares burst overhead and flood the world with a ghostly white light and you turn into the skeletal, barkless shape of a tree.

  When the rain stopped and the sky began to clear and gradually turn blue again, I took Alafair's pirogue and rowed it into the swamp. The stands of cypress were bright green and dripping with rainwater, and under the overhang every dead log and gray sand spit was covered with nutrias.

  I slid the pirogue into a cove and ate a ham and onion sandwich and drank from a cold jar of sun tea.

  Oftentimes when you work a case and the players and events seem larger than life, you leapfrog across what at first seems the minuscule stuff of police procedural novels. Details at a crime scene seldom solve crimes. The army of miscreants whose detritus we constantly process through computers and forensic laboratories usually close their own files by shooting themselves and one another, OD-ing on contaminated drugs, getting dosed with AIDS or busted in the commission of another crime, or perhaps turning over a liquor store where the owner had tired of being cleaned out and introduces the robber to Messieurs Smith & Wesson.

  Several years ago the wire services reported rumors that Jimmy Hoffa's body had been entombed in concrete under the goal posts of a football stadium. Each time someone kicked the extra point, Hoffa's old colleagues would shout, “This one's for you, Jimmy!”

  It makes a good story. I doubt that it's true. The mob isn't given to poetics.

  A New Orleans hit man, who admitted to murdering people for as little as three hundred dollars, told me Hoffa was ground up into fish churn and thrown by the bucket-load off the stern of a cabin cruiser, then the deck and gunnels hosed and wiped down a pristine white, all within sight of Miami Beach.

  I believed him.

  The body of the man named Jack had probably been mutilated by a professional, or at least the directions to do so had been given by one. But sinking the body with a tangle of fish line and scrap iron on the edge of a navigable channel had all the marks of an amateur, and probably a lazy one at that, or we would have never found it.

  I called Helen at the department.

  “What's ruthless, lazy, and stupid all over?” I asked.

  “The guy taking your calls?”

  “What?” I said.

  “The old man assigned your open cases to Rufus Arceneaux.”

  “Forget Rufus. We missed something when we pulled the floater out. He was tied up with scrap iron and fish line.”

  “I'm not following you.”

  “Let me try again. What's perverse, is not above anything, looks like a ghoul anyway, and would screw up a wet dream?”

  “Sweet Pea Chaisson,” she said.

  “Clete and I went to his house on the Breaux Bridge road before we had that run-in with him and Patsy Dap in Lafayette. I remember a bunch of building materials in the lot next door-building materials or maybe junk from a pipe yard.”

  “Pretty good, Streak.”

  “It's enough for a warrant,” I said.

  “Then we toss his Caddy and maybe match the blood on the rug to the scraping you took from the trailer behind the juke. Dave, square your beef with the old man. I can't partner with Rufus.”

  “It's not my call.”

  “You heard Patsy Dap's in town?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody told you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “He got stopped for speeding on East Main yesterday. The city cop made him and called us. I'm sorry, I thought somebody told you.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Who knows? Wherever disfigured paranoids hang out.”

  “Keep me informed on the warrant, will you?” I said.

  “You're a good cop, Dave. You get your butt back here.”

  “You're the best, Helen.” I walked down to the dock. The air was hot and still and down the road someone was running a Weed Eater that had the nerve-searing pitch of a dentist's instrument. So Patsy Dapolito was in New Iberia and no one had bothered to tell me, I thought. But why not? We did it all the time. We cut loose rapists, pedophiles, and murderers on minimum bail, even on their own recognizance, and seldom notified the victims or the witnesses to their crimes. Ask anyone who's been there. Or, better yet, ask the victims or survivors about the feelings they have when they encounter the source of their misery on the street, in the fresh air, in the flow of everyday traffic and normal life, and they realize the degree of seriousness with which society treats the nature of their injury. It's a moment no one forgets easily. My thoughts were bitter and useless.

  I knew the origins of my self-indulgence, too. I couldn't get the word disfigured out of my mind. I tried to imagine the images that flashed through Patsy Dap's brain when he saw his face reflected in the mirror.

  I helped Batist fill the coolers with beer and soda and scoop the ashes out of the barbecue pit, then I sat in the warm shade at one of the spool tables with a glass of iced tea and thought about Clete's offer.

  Chapter 19

  NEXT MORNING I drove out to the Bertrand plantation to talk to Ruthie Jean, but no one was at home. I walked next door to Bertie's and knocked on the screen. When she didn't answer, I went around the side and saw her get up heavily from where she had been sitting on the edge of the porch. Her stomach swelled out between her purple stretch pants and oversize white T-shirt. She unhooked a sickle from the dirt and began slicing away the dead leaves from the banana trees that grew in an impacted clump against the side wall of the house. I had the impression, however, she had been doing something else before she saw me. “I'm worried about Ruthie Jean, Bertie,” I said. “I think she nursed a man named Jack who died in the trailer behind the juke. She probably heard and saw things other people don't want her to talk about.”

  “You done already tole her that.”

  “She's not a good listener.”

  “There's two kinds of trouble. What might happen, and what done already happen. White folks worry about might. It ain't the same for everybody, no.”

  “You lost me.”

  “It ain't hard to do,” she said. She ripped a tangle of brown leaves onto the ground, then lopped a stalk cleanly across the middle. The cut oozed with green water. On the planks of the porch I saw a square of red flannel cloth, with a torn root and a tablespoon of dirt in the middle. I saw Bertie watch me out of the corner of her eye as I walked closer to the piece of flannel. Among the grains of dirt were strands of hair, what looked like a shirt button, and a bright needle with blood on it. “I'm going to take a guess-dirt from a grave, root of a poison oak, and a needle for a mess of grief,” I said. She whacked and lopped the dead stalks and flung the debris behind her. “Did you get Moleen's hair and shirt button out of the shack by the treeline?” I asked. “I ain't in this world to criticize. But you come out here and you don't do no good. You pretend like you know, but you playing games. It ain't no fun for us.”

  “You think putting a gris-gris on Moleen is going to solve your problems?”

  “The reason I put it on him is 'cause she ain't
left nothing out here so I can put it on her.”

  “Who?”

  “Julia Bertrand.”

  She almost spit out the words. “She already been out here once this morning. With that man work down the hall from you. Ruthie Jean ain't got her house no more. How you like that?” I blew out my breath. “I didn't know,” I said. She tossed the sickle in the flower bed. “That's my point,” she said, and went in her house. A few minutes later, almost as though Bertie had planned Julia appearance's as part of my ongoing education about the realities of life on a corporate plantation, I saw Julia's red Porsche turn off the highway and drive down the dirt road toward me. Rufus Arceneaux sat next to her in a navy blue suit that looked like pressed cardboard on his body. When she stopped next to me, her window down, her face cheerful, I tried to be pleasant and seem unknowing, to mask the embarrassment I felt for her and the level of vindictiveness to which she had devoted herself. “Bertie doesn't have you digging holes after pirate's treasure, does she, Dave?” she said. “She told me something disturbing,” I said, my voice bland, as though she and I were both concerned about the ill fortune of a third party. “It looks like Ruthie Jean and Luke are being evicted.”

  “We need the house for a tenant family. Ruthie Jean and Luke don't work on the plantation, nor do they pay rent. I'm sorry, but they'll have to find a new situation.” I nodded, my face blank. I felt my fingers tapping on the steering wheel. I cut my engine. “You already dropped the dime on her and had her locked up. Isn't that enough?” I said. “Whatever do you mean?” she said. I opened my door partway to let the breeze into the truck's cab. I felt my pulse beating in my neck, words forming that I knew I shouldn't speak. “With y'all's background and education, with all Moleen's money, can't you be a little forgiving, a little generous with people who have virtually nothing?” I said. Rufus bent down in the passenger's seat so I could see his face through the window. He had taken off his pilot's sunglasses, and his eyes looked pale green and lidless, the pupils as black and small as a lizard's, the narrow bridge of his nose pinched with two pink indentations. “You're operating without your shield, Dave. That's something IA doesn't need to hear about,” he said. She placed her hand on his arm without looking at him. “Dave, just so you understand something, my husband is a charming man and a wonderful litigator who also happens to be a financial idiot,” she said. “He has no money. If he did, he'd invest it in ski resorts in Bangladesh. Is Ruthie Jean home now?” Her eyes fixed pleasantly on mine with her question. Her lips ticked smile looked like crooked red lines drawn on parchment. I dropped the truck into low and drove under the wisteria-hung iron trellis of the Bertrand plantation, wondering, almost in awe, at the potential of the human family. That afternoon Batist called me from the phone in the bait shop. “Dave, there's a man out on the dock don't belong here,” he said. “What's wrong with him?”