DR08 - Burning Angel, Page 3

  ”Whose is it?“

  ”A guy named Sonny Boy.“

  ”That's a grown man's name?“ she asked. ”Marsallus?“ Bootsie said. She stopped eating. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had brushed it up in swirls and pinned it on her head. ”What are you doing with something of his?“

  ”I ran into him on Canal.“

  ”He's back in New Orleans? Does he have a death wish?“

  ”If he does, someone else may have paid the price for it.“ I saw the question in her eyes. ”The woman who was killed up on the St. Martin line,“ I said. ”I think she was Sonny's girlfriend.“ She bit down softly on the corner of her lip. ”He's trying to involve you in something, isn't he?“

  ”Maybe.“

  ”Not maybe. I knew him before you did, Dave. He's a manipulator.“

  ”I never figured him out, I guess. Let's go into town and get some ice cream,“

  I said. ”Don't let Sonny job you, Streak,“ she said. I didn't want to argue with Bootsie's knowledge of the New Orleans mob. After she married her previous husband, she had found out he kept the books for the Giacano family and owned half of a vending machine company with them. She also discovered, when he and his mistress were shot gunned to death in the parking lot of Hialeah race track, that he had mortgaged her home on Camp Street, which she had brought free and clear to the marriage. I didn't want to talk to Bootsie in front of Alafair about the contents of Sonny's notebook, either. Much of it made little sense to me-names that I didn't recognize, mention of a telephone tree, allusions to weapons drops and mules flying dope under U.S. coastal radar. In fact, the concern, the place names, seemed a decade out-of-date, the stuff of congressional inquiry during the mid-Reagan era. But many of the entries were physical descriptions of events that were not characterized by ideology or after-the-fact considerations about legality or illegality: The inside of the jail is cool and dark and smells of stone and stagnant water. The man in the corner says he's from Texas but speaks no English. He pried the heels off his boots with a fork and gave the guards seventy American dollars. Through the bars I can see the helicopters going in low across the canopy toward the village on the hillside, firing rockets all the way. I think the guards are going to shoot the man in the corner tomorrow morning. He keeps telling anyone who will listen he's only a marijuanista .. . We found six cane cutters with their thumbs wired behind them in a slough two klicks from the place where we picked up our ammunition. They 'd had no connection with us. They had been executed with machetes while kneeling. We pulled out as the families were coming from the village .. . Dysentery .. . water goes through me like a wet razor .. . burning with fever last night while the trees shook with rain .. . I wake in the morning to small-arms fire from the other side of an Indian pyramid that's gray and green and smoking with mist, my blanket crawling with spiders .. . ”What are you thinking about?“ Bootsie said on our way back from the ice cream parlor. ”You're right about Sonny. He was born to the hustle.“

  ”Yes?“

  ”I just never knew a grifter who deliberately turned his life into a living wound.“ She looked at me curiously in the fading light. I didn't go directly to the department in the morning. Instead, I drove out past Spanish Lake to the little community of Cade, which was made up primarily of dirt roads, the old S.P. rail tracks, the dilapidated, paint less shacks of black people, and the seemingly boundless acreage of the Bertrand family sugar plantation. It had rained earlier that morning, and the new cane was pale green in the fields and egrets were picking insects out of the rows. I drove down a dirt lane past Bertha Fontenot's weathered cypress home, which had an orange tin roof and a tiny privy in back. A clump of banana trees grew thickly against her south wall, and petunias and impatiens bloomed out of coffee cans and rusted-out buckets all over her gallery. I drove past one more house, one that was painted, and parked by a grove of gum trees, the unofficial cemetery of the Negro families who had worked on the plantation since before the War Between the States. The graves were no more than faint depressions among the drifting leaves, the occasional wooden cross or board marker inscribed with crude lettering and numbers knocked down and cracked apart by tractors and cane wagons, except for one yawning pit whose broken stone tablet lay half buried with fallen dirt at the bottom. But even in the deep shade I could make out the name Chaisson cut into the surface. ”I can hep you with something?“ a black man said behind me. He was tall, with a bladed face, eyes like bluefish scale, hair shaved close to the scalp, his skin the dull gold cast of worn saddle leather. He wore a grass-stained pink golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes without socks. ”Not really,“ I said.

  ”You ax Mr. Moleen you can come on the property?“ he said. ”I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff's department,“ I said, and opened my badge holder in my palm. He nodded without replying, his face deliberately simple and empty of any emotion he thought I might read there. ”Aren't you Bertie's nephew?“

  ”Yes, suh, that's right.“

  ”Your name's Luke, you run the juke joint south of the highway?“

  ”Sometimes. I don't own it, though. You know lots of things.“ When he smiled his eyes became veiled. Behind him, I saw a young black woman watching us from the gallery. She wore white shorts and a flowered blouse, and her skin had the same gold cast as his. She walked with a cane, although I could see no infirmity in her legs. ”How many people do you think are buried in this grove?“ I asked. ”They ain't been burying round here for a long time. I ain't sure it was even in here.“

  ”Is that an armadillo hole we're looking at?“

  ”Miz Chaisson and her husband buried there. But that's the only marker I ever seen here.“

  ”Maybe those depressions are all Indian graves. What do you think?“

  ”I grew up in town, suh. I wouldn't know nothing about it.“

  ”You don't have to call me sir.“ He nodded again, his eyes looking at nothing. ”You own your house, podna?“ I said. ”Aint Bertie say she own it since her mother died. She let me and my sister stay there.“

  ”She says she owns it, huh?“

  ”Mr. Moleen say different.“

  ”Who do you believe?“ I said, and smiled. ”It's what the people at the co'rthouse say. You want anything else, suh? I got to be about my work.“

  ”Thanks for your time.“ He walked off through the dappled light, his face turned innocuously into the breeze blowing across the cane field. Had I been a cop too long? I asked myself. Had I come to dislike someone simply because he'd been up the road?

  No, it was the disingenuousness, the hostility that had no handles on it, the use of one's race like the edge of an ax.

  But why expect otherwise, I thought. We'd been good teachers.

  Five minutes after I walked into my office, Helen Soileau came through the door with a file folder in her hand and sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, her wide-set, unblinking pale eyes staring at my face.

  ”What is it?“ I said.

  ”Guess who bailed out Sweet Pea Chaisson?“

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ”Jason Darbonne, over in Lafayette. When did he start representing pimps?“

  ”Darbonne would hitch his mother to a dogsled if the price was right.“

  ”Get this. The health officer wouldn't let Sweet Pea transport the coffin back to Breaux Bridge, so he got a guy to haul it for ten bucks in a garbage truck.“

  ”What's the file folder?“

  ”You wanted to question Pissant again? Too bad. The Feds picked him up this morning .. . Hey, I thought that'd give your peaches a tug.“

  ”Helen, could you give a little thought as to how you speak to people sometimes?“

  ”I'm not the problem. The problem is that black four-eyed fuck at the jail who turned our man over to the FBI.“

  ”What does the FBI want with a house creep?“

  ”Here's the paperwork,“ she said, and threw the folder on my desk. ”If you go over to the lockup, tell that stack of whale shit
to get his mind off copping somebody' spud at least long enough to give us a phone call before he screws up an investigation.“

  ”I'm serious, Helen .. . Why not cut people a little .. . Never mind ..

  . I'll take care of it.“

  After she left my office I went over to see the parish jailer. He was a three-hundred-pound bisexual with glasses as thick as Coke bottles and moles all over his neck.

  ”I didn't release him. The night man did,“ he said.

  ”This paperwork is shit, Kelso.“

  ”Don't hurt my night man's feelings. He didn't get out of the eighth grade for nothing.“

  ”You have a peculiar sense of humor. Roland Broussard was witness to a murder.“

  ”So talk to the Feds. Maybe that's why they picked him up. Anyway, they just took him out on loan.“

  ”Where's it say that? This handwriting looks like a drunk chicken walked across the page.“

  ”You want anything else?“ he asked, taking a wax paper-wrapped sandwich out of his desk drawer.

  ”Yeah, the prisoner back in our custody.“

  He nodded, bit into his sandwich, and opened the newspaper on his desk blotter.

  ”I promise you, my man, you'll be the first to know,“ he said, his eyes already deep in a sports story.

  Chapter 4

  YOU'RE A police officer for a while, you encounter certain temptations.

  They come to you as all seductions do, in increments, a teaspoon at a time, until you discover you made an irrevocable hard left turn down the road someplace and you wake up one morning in a moral wasteland'

  with no idea who you are. I'm not talking about going on a pad, ripping off dope from an evidence locker, or taking juice from dealers, either. Those temptations are not inherent in the job; they're in the person. The big trade-off is in one's humanity. The discretionary power of a police officer is enormous, at least in the lower strata of society, where you spend most of your time. You start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You're not welcome in their part of town; you're lied to with regularity, excoriated, your cruiser Molotoved. The most venal bail bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you'll be shot at by snipers. You begin to believe there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman, morally diseased, or, at best, as caricatures whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals. Then maybe you're the first to arrive on the scene after another cop has shot and killed a fleeing suspect. The summer night is hot and boiling with insects, the air already charged with a knowledge you don't want to accept. It was a simple BE, a slashed screen in the back of a house; the dead man is a full-time bumbling loser known to every cop on the beat; the two wounds are three inches apart. ”He was running?“ you say to the other cop, who's wired to the eyes. ”You goddamn right he was. He stopped and turned on me. Look, he had a piece.“ The gun is in the weeds; it's blue-black, the grips wrapped with electrician's tape. The moon is down, the night so dark you wonder how anyone could see the weapon in the hand of a black suspect. ”I'm counting on you, kid,“ the other cop says. ”Just tell people what you saw. There's the fucking gun. Right? It ain't a mushroom.“ And you step across a line. Don't sweat it, a sergeant and drinking buddy tells you later. It's just one more lowlife off the board. Most of these guys wouldn't make good bars of soap. Then something happens that reminds you we all fell out of the same tree. Imagine a man locked in a car trunk, his wrists bound behind him, his nose running from the dust and the thick oily smell of the spare tire. The car's brake lights go on, illuminating the interior of the trunk briefly, then the car turns on a rural road and gravel pings like rifle shot under the fenders. But something changes, a stroke of luck the bound man can't believe-the car bangs over a rut and the latch on the trunk springs loose from the lock, hooking just enough so that the trunk lid doesn't fly up in the driver's rearview mirror. The air that blows through the opening smells of rain and wet trees and flowers; the man can hear hundreds of frogs croaking in unison. He readies himself, presses the sole of his tennis shoe against the latch, eases it free, then rolls over the trunk's lip, tumbles off the bumper, and bounces like a tire in the middle of the road. The breath goes out of his chest in a long wheeze, as though he had been dropped from a great height; rocks scour divots out of his face and grind red circles the size of silver dollars on his elbows. Thirty yards up the car has skidded to a stop, the lid of the trunk flopping in the air. And the bound man splashes through the cattails into a slough by the side of the road, his legs tangling in dead hyacinth vines below the surface, the silt locking around his ankles like soft cement. Ahead he can see the flooded stands of cypress and willow trees, the green layer of algae on the dead water, the shadows that envelop and protect him like a cloak. The hyacinth vines are like wire around his legs; he trips, falls on one knee. A brown cloud of mud mushrooms around him. He stumbles forward again, jerking at the clothesline that binds his wrists, his heart exploding in his chest. His pursuers are directly behind him now; his back twitches as though the skin has been stripped off with pliers. Then he wonders if the scream he hears is his own or that of a nutria out on the lake. They fire only one round. It passes through him like a shaft of ice, right above the kidney. When he opens his eyes, he's on his back, stretched across a cushion of crushed willows on top of a sand spit, his legs in the water. The sound of the pistol report is still ringing in his ears. The man who wades toward him in silhouette is smoking a cigarette. Not twice. It's not fair, Roland Broussard wants to say. I got a meth problem. That's the only reason I was there. I'm a nobody guy, man. You don't need to do this.

  The man in silhouette takes another puff off his cigarette, pitches it out into the trees, perhaps moves out of the moon's glow so Roland's face will be better illuminated. Then he sights along the barrel and puts another round from the .357 Magnum right through Roland's eyebrow.

  He walks with a heavy step back up the embankment, where a companion has waited for him as though he were watching the rerun of an old film.

  Chapter 5

  LISTENED, HIS powder blue porkpie hat slanted down on his forehead, his eyes roving out into the hall while I talked. He wore an immaculate pair of white tennis shorts and a print shirt covered with parakeets.

  The back of his neck and the tops of his immense arms were flaking with sunburn. ”Kidnapping a guy already in custody is pretty slick. Who do you figure these characters were?“ he said, his eyes leaving two uniformed deputies on the other side of the glass. ”Guys who knew the drill, at least well enough to convince a night jailer they were FBI.“

  ”The grease balls “Maybe.”

  “It's not their normal style. They don't like to stray into federal jurisdiction.” He glanced through the glass partition into the hall again. “Why do I get the feeling I'm some kind of zoo exhibit?”

  “It's your imagination,” I said, my face flat. “I bet.” Then he winked and pointed at a deputy with one finger. The deputy looked down at some papers in his hand. “Knock it off, Clete.”

  “Why'd you ask me down here?”

  “I thought you'd like to go fishing.”

  He smiled. His face was round and pink, his green eyes lighted with a private sense of humor. A scar ran through part of his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel.

  “Dave, I know what my old Homicide podjo is going to think before he thinks it.”

  “I've got two open murder cases. One of the victims may have been Sonny Boy Marsallus's girlfriend.”

  “Marsallus, huh?” he said, his face sobering.

  “I tried to have him picked up by NOPD, but he went off the screen.”

  He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.

  “Leave him off the screen,” he said.

  “What was he into down in the tropics?” I aske
d.

  “A lot of grief.”

  Helen Soileau came through the door, without knocking, and dropped the crime scene report on my desk.

  “You want to look it over and sign it?” she said. Her eyes went up and down Clete's body.

  “Do y'all know each other?” I said.

  “Only by reputation. Didn't he work for Sally Dio?” she said.

  Clete fed a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at me.

  “I'll go over the report in a few minutes, Helen,” I said.

  “We couldn't get a print off the cigarette butt, but the casts on the footprints and tire tracks look good,” she said. “By the way, the .357 rounds were hollow-points.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Clete swiveled around in his chair and watched her go back out the door.

  “Who's the muff-driver?” he said.

  “Come on, Clete.”

  “One look at that broad is enough to drive you to a monastery.”

  It was a quarter to five.

  “Do you want to pull your car around front and I'll meet you there?” I said. He followed me in his old Cadillac convertible to the Henderson levee outside Breaux Bridge. We put my boat and outboard in the water and fished on the far side of a bay dotted with abandoned oil platforms and dead cypress trees. The rain was falling through shafts of sunlight in the west, and the rain looked like tunnels of spun glass and smoke rising into the sky. Clete took a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer from the cooler and snapped off the top with his pocketknife. The foam slid down the inside of the neck when he removed the bottle from his mouth. Then he drank again, his throat working a long time. His face looked tired, vaguely morose. “Were you bothered by that crack Helen made about Sally Dio?”