A Stained White Radiance

  Then, just as I was about to drive home for lunch, I got a call from Lyle Sonnier.

  “Sorry to be so late getting back to you, Loot, but it was hard getting everybody together. Anyway, it’s on for tomorrow night,” he said.

  “What’s on?”

  “Dinner. Actually, a crab boil. We’re gonna cook up a mess of ’em in the backyard.”

  “Lyle, that’s nice of you but—”

  “Look, Dave, Drew and Weldon feel the same way I do. You treated our family decent while we sort of stuck thumbtacks in your head.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I know better, Loot. Anyway, can y’all make it or not?”

  “Friday night we always take Batist and Alafair to the drive-in movie in Lafayette.”

  “Bring them along.”

  “I don’t know if your father is anxious to see me again.”

  “Come on, Dave, he operates on about three brain cells, poor old guy. Have a little compassion.”

  “That’s the second time this week somebody has said that to me about the wrong person.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’ll ask Boots and Batist and get back to you. Thanks for the invitation, Lyle.”

  I drove home, and Bootsie and I fixed a pitcher of iced tea and poor-boy sandwiches of shrimp and fried oysters and took them out on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree.

  “You sure you don’t mind going?” I said.

  “No. Why should I mind?”

  “Their father may be there. He’s terribly disfigured, Boots.”

  She smiled. The wind in the mimosa tree made drifting, lacy patterns of shadow on her skin.

  “What you mean is, Drew will be there,” she said.

  “Well, she will be.”

  “I think I can survive the knowledge of your college romances, Dave.” Her brown eyes crinkled at the corners.

  I was late getting back to the department. When I walked through my office door the sheriff was sitting in my chair, one of his half-topped boots propped on the corner of my desk. A videotape cassette rested on his belt buckle. He looked at his watch, then his eyes glanced at my damp hair and shirt.

  “You look like you just got out of the shower,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “You go home to take a shower in the middle of the day?”

  “I had to change a tire.”

  “I’ll be,” he said, clicking his nails on the plastic cassette case.

  “What’s up, sheriff?”

  “An FBI agent dropped this tape by about an hour ago. It was shot last night in front of a home that’s under surveillance out by Lake Pontchartrain. The home is owned by one of the Giacanos, the head greaseballs in New Orleans.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They had a big party there last night. The Vitalis crowd from three states was milling around on the lawn, including Joey the Neck and a couple of his whores. Did you know that he makes his whores carry validated health certificates because he’s terrified of catching AIDS from them? That’s what this FBI agent said.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Anyway, this FBI agent knew we had a vested interest in Joey’s career, and that’s why he dropped off this tape.” The sheriff removed his foot from my desk and swiveled the chair around to face me. “So I watched the tape. It’s quite a show. You don’t want to get up and go for popcorn on this one. And while I was watching it, I kept remembering something you said to me the other day.”

  He sucked on his bottom lip and stared into my face, his rimless glasses low on his nose.

  “Okay, I’ll bite, sheriff. What did I say to you?”

  “You mentioned something about letting events unfold. So when I finished watching the tape, I got to thinking. Is Dave omniscient? Does he have insight into the future that none of the rest of us have? Or does he know about things that I don’t?”

  “I’m not good at being a straight man, sheriff. You want to cut to it?”

  “Let’s take a walk down to my office and stick this in the VCR. These guys do quite a job. It’s even got sound. I sure wish we had their equipment.”

  As we went down the hallway I kept looking into the faces of other people. But there was nothing unusual in their expressions that I could see.

  “I think there should be some screen credits on this,” he said, clicking on his television set and fitting the cassette into the VCR. “Maybe something like ‘Directed by Cletus Purcel and Unnamed Friend.’ ”

  “What about Purcel?”

  He sucked in his cheeks, and his eyes looked into the corners of mine.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m truly lost.”

  “Gouza pulled up to the house and parked. A couple of minutes later Purcel cruised by. It looked like he’d been following Gouza.”

  “How do they know it was Purcel?”

  “A fed made him. Also they ran his tag. Then about twenty minutes later NOPD gets this anonymous phone call that Joey Gouza has got a body in the trunk of his car and his car can be found at this address out on the lake. That’s where our film starts, Dave. Sit down and watch, then tell me what you think.”

  The sheriff closed the blinds, sat on the corner of his desk, and activated the VCR with a remote control in his palm. In the first black-and-white frames the screen showed an enormous Tudor house with lines of Cadillacs, Lincolns, Mercedes, and Porsches parked in the circular driveway and at the curbs. The oak trees in the sideyard were strung with Japanese lanterns, and through the piked fence and myrtle bushes you could see perhaps a hundred people milling around the food and drink tables.

  Then a solitary city patrol car cruised down the street, its emergency lights off, slowed, and stopped. The driver got out with a clipboard and flashlight and walked up and down the line of cars at the curb, shining his light on the tags. He paused by a white Cadillac limo with black-tinted windows just as a dog unit pulled into the camera lens from the opposite end of the block.

  The action was very quick after that. A uniformed cop, with a German shepherd straining at its leash, approached the back of the limo. Then the dog took one sniff and went crazy, leaping against its leash, clacking its nails on the bumper and trunk.

  One of the cops used his radio, and moments later city police cars, with emergency lights flashing, poured into the block. They parked sideways in the street and blocked both driveway entrances; then uniformed cops swarmed across lawns and through hedges, shined their flashlights into cars, wrote down the numbers on every license tag in the neighborhood, arrived with more leashed dogs, and turned a quiet residential lakefront street into a carnival.

  Two plainclothes detectives walked up to the rear of the limo and inserted a crowbar in the jamb of the trunk. By now the guests at the lawn party had started drifting out toward the curb, led by Joey Gouza and, behind him, a bald-headed barrel of a man in a white sports coat with a carnation, dark trousers, and white shoes.

  “How you enjoying it so far?” the sheriff said.

  “It’s great stuff.”

  He paused the VCR.

  “You recognize the guy in the sports coat?” he said.

  “No.”

  “That’s Dominic the Pipe Gabelli. He got his name from bashing a fellow inmate at Lewisburg. He’s also a member of the Chicago commission. What do you think those cops are going to find in the trunk?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It’s not a body,” he said.

  “You asked me down here to watch this, sheriff. If you want to make an implication about my involvement in the events in a surveillance film, then you should go ahead and do that. But you’re going to have to get somebody else to listen to it.”

  “That’s a little strong, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, let’s see what happens.”

  He started the tape again and increased the volume. The two plainclothes cops leaned their weight down on the crowbar, and you cou
ld hear the tip biting into metal, peeling back the lip of the trunk from the latch, snapping bolts loose from a welded surface. Gouza tried to grab one of the plainclothes cops and was shoved backward by a patrolman.

  The audio wasn’t the best; the voices of the crowd, the cops, the squawk of radios, the beating of helicopter blades overhead, a peal of thunder out on the lake, sounded like apples rolling around in a deep barrel. But Joey Gouza’s furious, arm-waving outrage came through the television set with the painful clarity of a rupturing ulcer. “What the fuck you guys think you’re doing?” he said. “You got to have a warrant to do that. You got to have probable cause. You get that fucking dog away from me. Hey, I said get him away!”

  The trunk sprang open, and the faces of the two plainclothes cops blanched and snapped back as though they had been slapped. A woman in an evening dress vomited on the grass.

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it,” somebody said.

  “Get a shovel or a broom or something. I ain’t picking that up with my hands.”

  “What the fuck you guys talking about?” the man in the white sports coat said, pushing his way, along with Gouza, to get a better view of the trunk. Then he pressed his hand over his mouth and nose.

  “Put in a call for the ME,” one of the plainclothes cops said.

  A uniformed sergeant, his hands inside a vinyl evidence bag, reached into the trunk of the car, took out Jewel Fluck’s head, and laid it on the grass. Joey Gouza’s face was stunned; his mouth dropped open; he stared speechless at the man in the white sports coat. He gestured emptily with both hands at the air.

  “I don’t know what it’s doing there, Dom,” he said. “It’s a setup. These fuckheads are working with some pisspot cops over in Iberia Parish. I swear it, Dom. They been trying to put an iron hook through my stomach and tear my insides out.”

  “Shut up, Joey. You’re under arrest,” one of the plainclothes cops said. “Put your hands on the car and spread your legs. You know the drill. The rest of you people go back to your lasagne.”

  The uniformed sergeant shoved Joey face-forward against the side of the Cadillac and hit him under both arms. Joey’s face went livid with rage, and he whirled and drove his elbow into the sergeant’s nose.

  Then NOPD went to work with the subtlety of method for which they’re famous. While the sergeant tried to cup his hands over the blood that fountained from his nose, two other uniformed cops rained their batons down on Joey’s back.

  “We got a perp on dust,” somebody yelled.

  Then as though that one declaration justified any means of restraint, another cop ran from the far side of the street with a Taser gun. The cops flailing with their batons jumped back just as he fired.

  But Joey had seen what was coming, too, and he dove sideways and the dart embedded itself in the thick, fat neck of the man in the white sports coat. He went down as though he had been bludgeoned with an ax, his body convulsing, his arms writhing in the damp grass with the electric shock.

  Then a cop garroted Joey across the throat with his baton and lifted him, strangling, to his feet while two other cops cuffed his wrists behind him. The last frames in the film showed Joey being stuffed behind the wire screen of a patrol car, one foot kicking wildly at the window glass.

  The sheriff put the VCR on rewind.

  “The anonymous call was traced to the Acme Oyster Bar on Iberville,” he said. “When the arresting plainclothes got there, they ran into none other than Cletus Purcel, bombed on boilermakers with seven dozen empty oyster shells piled on his table. The plainclothes don’t think it’s coincidence that Purcel was sitting in the Acme.”

  “But they didn’t take him in, did they?”

  “No.”

  “They won’t, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they don’t care, sheriff. Gouza won’t go down on a murder beef, but they’ll put him away for resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. The court considers him a habitual. That means this time he goes into lockdown with the big stripes at Angola and they weld the door shut on him. Why should they worry about Clete?”

  “You misunderstand me, Dave. I don’t care about Purcel. I’m bothered by the possibility that one of my men shaved the dice. You know that was Jewel Fluck’s head, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to tell me what really happened with you and Jack Gates?”

  I rubbed my palms together between my legs. The sunlight outside was white and hot through the cracks in the blinds.

  “The evidence was found on the right person, sheriff. There’s no way around that conclusion. You have my word on it.”

  He picked at his thumbnail, then raised his eyes to mine.

  “That’s about all I’m going to get from you, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s about it.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time I talk to Garrett’s family again over in Houston.”

  I studied his face and waited.

  “I think you wrote your signature on this case with a baseball bat, Dave. But anyway we’re closing the file on it. The three men who killed Garrett are dead. The man they worked for is in the New Orleans city prison under a two-million-dollar bond. I think the slate’s wiped clean.” He gave me a measured look. “For everybody, you got my drift?”

  “That’s for other people to decide.”

  “I figured you might say that. Pride can be a sonofabitch sometimes, can’t it?”

  He pulled up the blinds. The hot, white radiance off the cement outside and the violent green of the trees and shrubs and grass made my eyes water. As I walked out of the office, I heard him pull the cassette from the VCR and drop it carelessly into a metal file drawer, then slam the drawer shut.

  CHAPTER 16

  I TOOK A VACATION DAY from work the next day. Alafair and I packed a lunch, iced down some soft drinks, paddled a pirogue deep into the green light of the marsh, and fished with red worms and spinners for bluegill and goggle-eye. The morning air was moist and cool among the flooded trees, and in the shadows and mist rising off the water you could hear big-mouth bass flopping on the edge of the lily pads, hear a heron lift and flap his wings as he flew down a canal through a long corridor of trees and disappeared like a black cipher in a cone of sunlight at the end.

  But as I pulled the paddle through dark water, heard it knock against a wet cypress knee, watched the earnestness in Alafair’s face as she cast her baited spinner next to the water lilies and slowly retrieved it through a nest of bream, I knew that something else was taking hold of me, too. Age had finally taught me that there was a time to go with the season, to let go of the world’s seriousness, to leave the terrible obligation of defining both yourself and the world to others.

  Yesterday at the dock I had told Batist that Lyle Sonnier had invited him to the crab boil in Baton Rouge.

  “What for he ax a black man?” he said.

  “Because he likes you, because he’d like us all to come over.”

  He cocked one eye at me.

  “You sure he want me there, Dave?”

  “Yeah, or I wouldn’t ask you, Batist.”

  He looked at me and reflected a moment.

  “All right, that sounds nice. I’d like to go wit’ y’all,” he said.

  Then, when I turned to go back up to the house, he added, “Dave, why you want to go? I had the feeling for a while you might want to put all them Sonniers in a tote sack with some bricks and t’row it in the bayou.”

  I smiled at his joke and didn’t reply.

  Did I indeed still feel guilt for letting Lyle go down a VC tunnel when we could have blown it and passed it by? Or did I feel obligated to Drew because of our young impetuosity in the backseat of my convertible on a summer night years ago? Was I so self-destructively flawed that I had taken on Weldon’s problems only because I saw myself mirrored in him?

  No, that wasn’t it.

  A therapist once told me that we’re born alone and
we die alone.

  It’s not true.

  We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup. They’re the walking wounded, the ones to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to define, the ones with the messianic glaze in their eyes, or the oblique glance, as though an M-1 tank is about to burst through their mental fortifications. They drive their convertibles into automatic carwashes with the tops down, cause psychiatrists and priests to sigh helplessly, leave IRS auditors speechless, turn town meetings into free-fire zones, and even frighten themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night and think they’ve left the light on, and then realize that perhaps their heads simply glow in the dark.

  But they save us from ourselves. Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. Then I realize that the rhetoric would have no effect on them, because for those who were most deeply injured as children, words of moral purpose too often masked acts of cruelty.

  So that’s when you let go of reason and slip deep into the wobbling, refracted green light of a marsh, with a child as your guide, and let the season have its way with your heart.

  ALAFAIR DECIDED TO go to a movie with the neighbor’s children that evening and spend the night at their house. So Bootsie fixed her an early supper, and just as the heat began to go out of the day, Bootsie, Batist, and I got in her car and, in the lengthening shadows, took the back road along the Teche, through St. Martinville, to the interstate and Baton Rouge.

  We went over the wide sweep of the Mississippi at Port Allen, looked out over the crimson-yellow wash of sunlight on the capitol building and the parks and green trees in the center of Baton Rouge, and passed the old brick warehouses on the river that had been refurbished into restaurants and shops and named Catfish Town by the Chamber of Commerce (one block away from a black neighborhood of paintless cypress shacks, with sagging galleries and dirt yards, where emancipated slaves had lived during Reconstruction). Then we turned out onto Highland, toward the LSU campus, and began to see more and more posters advertising Bobby Earl’s barbecue and political rally.