A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  The hallway was strewn with sheets, mattress stuffing, clothes, and shoes that had been thrown out of the doorways to the bedrooms. The only light came from behind a partially closed door at the end of the hall. Through the opening I could see a desk, a word processor, a black leather chair whose back had been split in a large X. I moved along the wall with the .45 at an upward angle, past two demolished bedrooms, a linen closet, a darkened bathroom, an overturned dirty-clothes hamper, a dumbwaiter, until I reached the last bedroom, which was only ten feet from the lighted room that Weldon probably used as a home office. I stepped quickly inside the bedroom door and swept my .45 back and forth in the darkness. The room was still intact, except for the fact that the box springs had been shoved halfway off the frame of the canopy bed, a warning that I didn’t heed.

  I caught my breath, squatted down at the base of the door, wiped the sweat and rainwater out of my eyes with my knuckle, then aimed the .45 along the wall at the lighted opening of the office.

  “This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. You’re under arrest. Throw your weapons out in the hall. Don’t think about it. Do it.”

  But there was no sound from inside.

  “Right now it’s breaking and entering,” I said. “You can be smart and come out on your own. If we have to come in after you, we’ll paint the walls with you. I guarantee it.”

  Beyond the opening in the door I saw a shadow break across Weldon’s desk. I could feel the veins tightening in my head, the sweat dripping out of my hair. It wasn’t going to go down right, I thought. When they think about it, they either freeze or become cunning. And my situation was all wrong. I had been forced to take up a position on the right-hand side of the hallway, so that I had to extend my right arm at an awkward angle around the doorjamb. I was getting a charley horse in my leg and a muscle twitch in my back. Where were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

  “Last chance, partner. We’re about to shift up into the dirty boogie,” I said. But it was hard-guy flimflam. All I could do was contain whoever was in there and wait for backup.

  Then the shadow broke across the desk again, a shoe scraped against a piece of furniture, and I straightened my back, stiffened my right arm, and aimed the .45 in the middle of the door, my eyes burning with salt.

  But I’d forgotten that old admonition from Vietnam: Don’t let them get behind you, Robicheaux.

  He came out of the bedroom closet like a spring exploding from a broken clock, a short crowbar raised above his head. His head was huge, his face full of bone, his torso knotted with muscle under his wet T-shirt. I tried to pivot, swing the .45 clear of the doorjamb and aim it at his chest, or simply stand erect and get away from the arch of the crowbar, but my knees popped and burned and seemed to have all the resilience of cobweb. The crowbar thudded into my shoulder and raked down my arm and sent the .45 bouncing across the carpet.

  Then he was on me in earnest and I was rolling away from him, toward the canopy bed, my arms wrapped around my head. He hit me once in the back, a blow that felt just like a wild inside pitch that catches you flat and hard in the spine as you try to twist away from it in the batter’s box, and I kicked at him with one foot, tripped backward over the box springs, and saw the bone-plated, muddy-eyed resolution in his face as he came toward me again.

  “Get away, Eddy! I’m gonna blow up his shit!” a voice behind him said.

  A toy of a man stood in the doorway. He looked like a racehorse jockey, except his little body had the rigid lines of a weight lifter’s. In his diminutive hand was a blue revolver.

  But they had intervened in each other’s script and hesitated too long. I saw the .45 on the carpet, next to the hanging box springs, and I grabbed it and tumbled sideways into a half bathroom just as the toy man started firing.

  I saw the sparks of gunpowder fly out into the darkness, heard two rounds whock into the tile wall and a third whang off the toilet bowl and blow the tank apart in a cascade of water and splintered ceramic; then he tried to change his angle of fire, and a fourth round ricocheted off a chrome towel rack and collapsed the shower door in a pile of frosted glass.

  I was flat on the floor, in a spreading pool of water, my back and hair covered with bits of glass and tile caulking. But it had turned around on him, and he knew it, because he was already backing fast into the hallway when I raised up and started firing.

  The roar of the .45 was deafening, the recoil as powerful and palm-numbing and disconnected as the kick of an air hammer; then the .45 felt suddenly weightless in my hand just before I pulled the trigger again. I fired four times at the bedroom entrance, then stood erect in a tinkle of glass at my feet, opening and closing my mouth to clear my eyes. The bedroom doorway was empty, the layered smoke motionless in the air. Out in the hall, an oil painting lay face down on the carpet, with three holes cored through the back of the canvas.

  I could hear them on the stairway, but one of them obviously wanted the game to go into extra innings. He had the high-pitched, metallic voice of a midget.

  “Give me your piece! I got that fuck bottled!”

  “The boat’s leaving, Jewel. Either haul ass or you’re on your own,” another man said.

  I looked around the edge of the doorjamb and let off the .45—too quickly, high and wide, scouring a long trench in the wallpaper. But this time I saw three men—the man with the crowbar, the toy man, who wore black, silver-studded cowboy boots and had short-clipped blond hair that looked like duck down, and a third, older man in a brown windbreaker, black trousers like a priest’s, black, razor-trimmed hair, and a mouthful of metal fillings that reflected the light from Weldon’s office. Or at least that’s how the image of the three men froze itself in my mind just before I heard a sound that I thought was the unmistakable ring of opportunity, the cylinder of a revolver being clicked open and ejected brass cartridges rattling on a wood surface.

  I gripped the handle of the .45 with both hands and started to step out into the hall and begin firing, but the man in the windbreaker was a pro and had anticipated me. He had gone to one knee, three steps down from the landing, while the other two men had fled past him, and when he squeezed off his automatic I felt my raincoat leap out from my side as though a gust of air had blown through it. I spun back inside the cover of the doorway and heard him running into the darkness of the house below.

  They’ll drop you coming down the stairs, I thought. Think, think. They didn’t have a car in front or out on the blacktop. There’s no access road in the back. They came on the bayou. They have to go back to it on foot.

  I crossed the hallway and went into a bedroom on the opposite side, one with French doors and a verandah that overlooked the driveway, the garage, and the bamboo border of Weldon’s backyard. A moment later I heard them running hard on the wet gravel. They were visible for not more than two or three seconds, between the corner of the house and the back of the garage, but I aimed the .45 with both hands across the wood railing and fired until the clip was empty and the breech locked open and a solitary tongue of white smoke rose from the exposed chamber. Just before the three men crashed through the bamboo and disappeared into the rain, just as the man called Eddy was almost home free, the last round in the magazine ripped the corner off the garage and filled his face with a shower of wood splinters. He screamed, and his hand clutched his eye as though he had been scalded.

  Then I saw a patrol car turn off the blacktop and head fast up the front drive, the rain spinning in the blue and red kaleidoscopic flashing of emergency lights. I felt in my pocket for my flashlight, but it was gone. I ran down the stairs and out the front door just as LeBlanc and Thibodeaux pulled abreast of the porch, their faces looking at me expectantly through the open passenger window.

  “They’re headed for the bayou, three of them. They’re armed. One guy’s hurt. Nail ’em,” I said.

  The driver stepped on the accelerator, and the car shot around the side of the house, scouring skid marks in the gravel, gutting a big
potted plant by the edge of the rose bed. I pulled the empty clip from the magazine of the .45, inserted a full one, and followed them through the rain toward the back of the property.

  But it was all comedy now. They drove through Weldon’s bamboo, destroyed his vegetable garden, and spun sideways into the coulee. The back wheels of the car whined and smoked in the mud. Out in the darkness I heard an outboard engine roar away from the dock, up the bayou toward St. Martinville.

  The driver rolled down his window and looked at me in exasperation.

  “Get on the radio,” I said.

  “Sorry, Dave. I didn’t know that goddamn coulee was there.”

  “Forget about it. Call an ambulance, too.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. But I think Garrett’s not.”

  “What happened in there?” the other deputy said, getting out of the passenger’s seat.

  But I was already walking back toward the house, the rain cold on my head, the .45 heavy and loose in my coat pocket. I found him at the bottom of the cellar stairs. The green dragon on his right forearm was laced with blood. I didn’t even want to look at the rest of it.

  AN HOUR LATER the medical examiner and I stood on the columned marble front porch and watched the two ambulance attendants load the gurney into the ambulance and close the doors on it. The rain had stopped, and the ambulance lights made swinging red patterns in the oaks. I could hear the frogs out on the bayou.

  “Have you ever seen one like that before?” the medical examiner said. He was a thin elderly man who wore gold-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie and carried a pocket watch on a chain. His sleeves were rolled, and he kept brushing at his wrist with a piece of wet paper towel.

  “In New Orleans. When I was at the First District,” I said.

  He wadded up the towel and threw it into the flower bed. His face looked disgusted.

  “It’s a first for me,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’ll stay in New Iberia. Does he have family here?”

  “I think he was single. I don’t know if he has relatives back in Houston or not.”

  “If you have to talk with any of them, you can tell them he was probably out of it with the first shot.”

  “Is it true?”

  “It’s what you can tell them, Dave.”

  “I see.”

  “His eyes were open when he got the next one. He probably saw it coming. But where’s the law say that relatives need to know everything?” A fingerprint man went out the door, and a deputy locked it behind him. They both got in their cars. “So you figure the shooter’s from the mob?” the examiner said.

  “Who knows? It’s their signature.”

  “Why do they do it that way? Just to be thorough?”

  “More likely because most of them are degenerates and sadists. But maybe I say that just because I’m tired.” I tried to smile.

  “How’s your shoulder?”

  “All right. I’ll put some ice on it.”

  “I scraped a blood specimen off the corner of the garage. It might help you later.”

  “Thanks, doctor. I’d appreciate it if you’d send me a copy of the autopsy report as soon as it’s ready.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right? It got pretty close in there, didn’t it?”

  “The bottom line is I should have figured someone was in that bedroom. He’d just started to toss it when he heard me in the hallway. I’m lucky I didn’t get my eggs scrambled.”

  “If it’s any consolation, the guy you wounded probably has a sizable slice of wood in his neck or face. He might show up at a hospital. My experience has been that most of these guys are crybabies when it comes to pain.”

  “Maybe so. Goodnight, doctor.”

  “Goodnight, Dave. Drive carefully.”

  The fields were white with mist as I drove back toward New Iberia. My collarbone throbbed and felt swollen and hot when I touched it. The pink neon sign over the roadside bar gleamed softly on the oyster-shell parking lot. In my mind I kept repeating something told me by a platoon sergeant during my first week in Vietnam: don’t think about it before it happens, and never think about it afterward. Yes, that was the trick. Just put one logical foot after the other. I yawned and my ears popped like firecrackers.

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, I called Weldon at his mother-in-law’s home in Baton Rouge. I had woken him up, and he kept asking me to repeat myself.

  “Look, I think it’s better that you drive back to New Iberia in the morning and then we’ll have a long talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t think you listen well. The inside of your home is virtually destroyed. Three guys tore it apart because they were looking for something that’s obviously important to them. Meanwhile they murdered a sheriff’s deputy. Do you want to know how they did it?”

  He was silent.

  “They shot him through the back, probably when he came down the basement stairs,” I said. “Then they put one under his chin, one through his temple, and one through the back of his head. Do you know any low-rent wiseguys named Eddy or Jewel?”

  I heard him cough in the back of his throat.

  “I’m tied up here with some business for the next few days,” he said. “I’m going to send some repair people out to the house. You’ve got this number if you need me.”

  “Maybe it’s about time you plug into reality, Weldon. You don’t make the rules in a murder investigation. That means you’ll be in this office before noon tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to leave Bama by herself, and I don’t want to bring her back there, either.”

  “That’s a problem you’re going to have to work out. We’re either going to be talking in my office tomorrow morning, or you’re going to be in custody as a material witness.”

  “Sounds like legalese doodah to me.”

  “It’s easy to find out.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll check my schedule. You want to have lunch?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve sure got a dark view of things, Dave. Lighten up.”

  “The warrant gets cut one minute after twelve noon,” I said, and hung up.

  As was typical of Weldon, which was to do everything possible in a contrary and unpredictable fashion, he came up the front walk of the sheriff’s department at eight o’clock sharp, dressed in a pair of khakis, sandals without socks, a green-and-red-flowered shirt hanging outside his trousers, and a yellow panama hat at a jaunty angle on his head. His jaws were clean and red with a fresh shave.

  He helped himself to a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the outer office, then sat in a chair across the desk from me, folded one leg over the other, and played with his hat on his knee. My shoulder still throbbed, down in the bone, like a dull toothache.

  “What were they after, Weldon?” I asked.

  “Search me.”

  “You have no idea?”

  “Nope.” He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and turned it in circles with his fingers.

  “It wasn’t money or jewelry. They left that scattered all over the place.”

  “There’re a lot of weird guys around these days. I think it’s got something to do with the times. The country has weirded out on us, Dave.”

  “I haven’t had to talk with any of Deputy Garrett’s family yet. It’s something I don’t want to do, either. But I hope I have something more to offer them than a statement about the country weirding out on us.”

  He looked momentarily shamefaced.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked.

  “Who are these guys?”

  “You tell me. You saw them. I didn’t.”

  “Eddy and Jewel. What do those names mean to you? Who’s the guy with a mouthful of metal?”

  “I’m sorry about your friend in the basement. I wish he hadn’t gone in there.”

  “It was his job.”

  He gazed out the window at a cloud that hung on the edge of the early sun. His face became melancholy.

  “Do y
ou believe in karma? I do. Or at least I came to believe in it when I was in the Orient,” he said. His eyes wandered around the room.

  “What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know what’s the point. You ever hear of a flyer named Earthquake McGoon? His real name was Ed McGovern, from New Jersey. He was kind of a legend among certain people in the Orient. He was a huge fat guy, and one time he and his copilot, this Chinese kid, got locked up in a Chinese jail. Earthquake kept yelling at the guards, ‘Goddamn it, you haven’t fed me. Give me some goddamn food.’ They told him he’d already had his rice bowl and to shut his mouth. That night when the guards went home Earthquake bent the bars apart and told his copilot to beat it, then he pushed the bars back into shape. The guards came back in the morning and said, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ Earthquake said, ‘I told you to feed me, and you wouldn’t do it, so I ate the sonofabitch.’

  “He was one of those indestructible guys. Except he was doing a supply drop for the French at Dien Bien Phu and he got hit by some ground fire. He tried to get his parachute on but he was too fat. He told his kickers to jump and he was going to set it down on Highway One going into Hanoi. They said if he was going to ride it down, they would, too. He came in like a powder puff. It looked like they were home free, then his wing tipped a telephone pole, and they flipped and burned.”

  He looked at me as though I should find meaning in his face or his story.

  “That’s what karma is,” he said. “Highway One outside of Hanoi is waiting for us. It’s all part of a piece. I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “Have you ever been in jail?” I said.

  “No. Why?”

  I walked around the side of the desk.

  “Let me see your hand,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me see your hand.”

  “Which hand?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I lifted his right hand off the chair arm and snipped one end of my handcuffs around his wrist. Then I locked the other end to the D-ring on the floor.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?”