A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  “I thought my conscience had been eaten up with dope a long time ago. But I wanted God to take me off the planet, right there. I wanted to tell everybody in that tent they were looking at a man who had gone as low as spit on the sidewalk. I didn’t have any words, I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t see anything but those spots burning in my eyes. So I got down on my knees and I put my hands on that old woman’s head. Her hair was gray and wet with sweat and I could feel the blood beating in her temples. I prayed to God, right up through the top of the canvas, ‘Punish me, Lord, but let this lady have her way.’

  “That’s when I felt it for the first time. It kicked through both my arms just like I grabbed hold of an electric fence. It made my teeth rattle. She straightened her back, and the pain and misery drained out of her face like somebody had poured cool water through her whole body. I’d never seen anything like it. I was trembling so bad I couldn’t get off my knees. Something broke inside me and I started crying. The whole tent went crazy. But I knew, even at that moment, the power had come up through that old woman, through the faith in that old, sweaty, tormented black head. Sometimes in my sleep I can still feel her hair on my palms.

  “It won’t work for you, Dave. You came here for magic. You don’t believe in the world I belong to. It’s going to make you remorseful later, too.”

  I hadn’t eaten any of the pie. I pushed it away from me with the back of my wrist and looked through the side window at the headlights of a car clicking whitely along the dark line of oak trees on Highland Drive.

  “What I’m saying is, you gave up on your own belief,” he said. “But don’t beat up on yourself about it. You got desperate and you came here to get help for somebody else, not yourself. Just go back to doing what you were before. Sometimes you got to hump it a long way before you get out of Indian country, Loot.”

  I looked down between my knees at the linoleum. I didn’t think I had ever been so tired.

  “I appreciate your time, Lyle,” I said.

  He touched the teardrop scar tissue that ran from his right eye.

  “Long as you’re here, there’s something I want to own up to,” he said. “The last time I saw you, I tried to push buttons on you. I mean, when I mentioned that stuff about you poking my sister.”

  “I already forgot it.”

  “No, you don’t know everything involved, Dave. Drew had the hots for you back in college, and maybe she’s still got them. But maybe for a reason you don’t understand. You’re a lot like Weldon.”

  I raised my head and looked at him.

  “You’re both big, nice-looking guys,” he said. “You were both officers in the war. Neither one of you likes rules or people telling you what to do. Both of you have electric sparks leaking off your terminals.”

  I stared into his eyes.

  “Growing up, we didn’t have anybody but ourselves,” he said. “It screws you up. What’s sick behavior to one person is love to another. We didn’t care what other people said was right or wrong. They were the same people burning us with hot cigarettes or sticking us in foster homes. Weldon and Drew weren’t just brother and sister for each other. And I’m not innocent in this, either. But it was always Weldon she loved.”

  I looked away from the fine bead of pain in his eyes.

  “Why do you think I’ve had three wives?” he asked. “Or why’s Weldon married to an addict who hangs on him like a child? Or why does Drew get it on with anybody who’s got hair sticking out the top of his shirt? It’s like your feelings and your head are never on the same wavelength. Every time you make love with somebody, you get mad at them and resent them. Figure that one out.

  “Dave, you’ve got a lock on sanity. Don’t come to the likes of us for insight.”

  He forked a piece of pie into the back of his mouth and chewed it silently, his eyes never leaving my embarrassed averted face.

  SUNDAY MORNING BOOTSIE, Alafair, and I went crabbing down by the coast. We tied chicken necks inside the weighted wire traps, whose sides would collapse on the bottom of the bay and then snap back into place with a jerk of the cord that was strung through a ring on the top. In three hours we filled a washtub with bluepoint crabs, washed them later with a garden hose in the backyard, and boiled them in a black iron pot on top of my brick barbecue pit. There was a breeze through the oaks, and the sky had a blue sheen to it, like stretched silk, and white clouds were piled high as a mountain on the western horizon.

  It was a wonderful day. I had been to Mass and communion the previous evening, I had done a fifth step on my lapse of faith in my Higher Power, and I had determined once again to stop keeping score in my ongoing contention with the world, time, and mortality, and to simply thank providence for all the good things that had come to me through no plan of my own.

  Eddy Raintree, with all the instincts of a mainline con and trapped animal, had tried to trade off information about a hit on Weldon, Drew, and perhaps even me. So far I hadn’t talked with either of them about Raintree’s possible knowledge of a contract on them, primarily because it was a waste of time; I had already warned them repeatedly about the possible consequence of not cooperating with the investigation, and I was tired of being dismissed as an adverb in their lives.

  Also, I didn’t take Raintree seriously. Every sociopath or recidivist about to go down for a serious jolt suddenly has access to information about armored-truck scores, judges on the pad for the syndicate, the assassination of John Kennedy, or dope sales to a U.S. vice president.

  I would leave Sunday intact, keep it the fine day it was, and let tomorrow and its uncertainties take care of themselves. We drove into New Iberia in the purpling light and ate ice cream under a spreading oak by Bayou Teche and listened to a Cajun band play in the park. I hugged Bootsie and Alafair against me.

  “What’s that for?” Alafair said, her eyes squinting with her grin.

  “I have to make sure you guys don’t get away from me,” I said.

  At eleven o’clock that night, just as raindrops started to splash on the window fan in our bedroom, the sheriff called and said that Drew Sonnier had been found nailed to the gazebo in her backyard.

  CHAPTER 11

  A NEIGHBOR HAD FOUND her seated on the steps, half conscious, white with shock, her left hand impaled on the gazebo floor with a sixteen-penny nail, a pool of vomit in her lap.

  “Hey, are you all right?” the sheriff said.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s at the hospital, she’s doing okay. At least under the circumstances.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for this.”

  “The guys from the Garrett killing?”

  “Joey Gouza himself. Or at least he gave the orders and watched while two of his goons held her down and drove it through her hand.”

  “What?” I said incredulously.

  “She said it was Gouza. She can identify him, she’ll testify against him. Maybe we just hit the big one. . . . What’s the matter?”

  “She can make Joey Gouza? How does she know him?”

  “All I know is what the city cops told me, Dave.”

  “What’s the motive?”

  “Since it’s your day off, I was going to send somebody else to take her statement. But I think maybe you’d better do it. Or had you rather somebody else do it?”

  He was a good man, but he was basically an administrator and more conscious of the need for professional civility than dealing with realities.

  “I’ll go on over there in a few minutes,” I said. “Besides the neighbor, who was the first person at the scene?”

  “I think the paramedics got there first, then the city cops.” He paused a moment. The rain was clattering on the tin roof of the gallery now. “They’re cutting a warrant on Gouza now. I don’t care if he’s in the city jail or ours, but I want that sonofabitch in a cage. Nobody’s going to do that to a woman in this parish while I’m sheriff.”

  I was surprised. He wasn’t given to prof
anity or anger. I had an idea that Joey Meatballs was about to wish that he had not gotten involved with the Sonnier family and the rural unsophistication of Iberia Parish.

  I WENT TO the hospital, but I didn’t go up to Drew’s room. Instead, I questioned one of the paramedics who had brought her in. I sat next to him on a wood bench by the emergency-room entrance while he drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He told me he had been a navy corpsman before he had gone to work for the parish as a paramedic. His face was young and clean-shaved, and he reminded me of most medics, firemen, or U.S. Forest Service smoke jumpers whom I had known. They were enamored of the adrenaline rush, living on the edge, but they tended to be quiet and self-effacing men, and unlike many cops they didn’t have self-destructive obsessions.

  “What’d you see at the scene besides Ms. Sonnier?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Did you see a hammer?”

  He looked out the glass door at the rain falling on the bayou.

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t think so. But it was getting dark.”

  “What do you think they used to nail her hand down?”

  “I don’t know. But whoever did it drove it all the way down to the skin. It was a son of a gun to pull out of the boards. I had to press her hand down flat while my partner worked the nail out with a pair of vise grips. She passed out while we were doing it, poor lady.”

  “Did she look like she had fought with them? Was she bruised or scratched?”

  “She could have been, I didn’t notice. I was thinking about getting that nail out of her hand.”

  “Did she tell you anything?”

  “She was in trauma. When something like that happens to them, it’s like they’ve been drug behind a car. Maybe you ought to talk with the city cops. They were up there a little while ago.”

  “I will. Thanks for your time. Here’s my telephone number in case you think of anything later that might be important.”

  “She’s a nice lady. She jogs by my house sometimes. She must have got messed up with a bad guy. Maybe they were both drunk when he did it to her. I’ve seen some bad stuff since I came to work here, but not one like this.”

  “What do you mean drunk?”

  “She must have puked up a fifth of gin and vermouth. There’s no mistaking the smell.”

  I decided not to take a statement from Drew right then. Sometimes trial attorneys use the axiom “Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.” The same is not absolutely true for a police officer, but you do have to know some of the answers in advance in order to gauge the accuracy or truthfulness of the others.

  I drove to the city police station and read the report written up by the investigating officer. It was one paragraph long, ungrammatical, full of misspellings, and described almost nothing about the crime scene or the crime itself except the nature of the injury to the victim and the fact that in the hospital she had identified her assailants as two white males of medium height and build and a third white male by the name of Joey Gouza, who had watched the assault from the driver’s window of his automobile.

  The only evidence recovered or noted at the crime scene was the sixteen-penny nail.

  Drew’s house was dark and the rain was slanting through the trees as I walked through her sideyard with a six-battery flashlight. I squatted down on the floor of the gazebo and shined the beam on the planks by the top of the steps. They were smeared with miniature horsetails of dried blood, and one was centered with a blond nail hole. I walked back into the rain and searched in the myrtle bushes around the gazebo. The light flicked across a pop bottle impacted with dirt, two broken bricks, and what looked like a shattered slat from an apple crate that lay propped against some myrtle branches at the base of the gazebo.

  But there was no hammer.

  I stooped into the wet bushes and examined the bricks by turning them over with my pocket knife and shining the light on all their surfaces. But I saw no chip marks or scratches that would indicate that either had been used to drive a nail into a hardwood surface.

  I searched among the oak trees, in the flower beds, and over the lawn, and found no hammer there, either, not that I should, I told myself. But it was something else that I didn’t see that bothered me most. According to the report, she had told the city cops that Gouza had watched the assault from the window of his automobile. I returned to the gazebo’s steps and shined the flashlight back toward the house. The long driveway and garage were obscured from view by a hedge and two huge clumps of banana trees. If Gouza had had a direct line of vision from his car to the gazebo, he would have had to pull it around the garage and park it on the grass behind the house.

  And there were no tire tracks on the lawn. But it had rained, I thought, and maybe the depressed blades of grass had sprung back into place.

  What I did find, in the weeded area around a lime tree, was a wet handkerchief spotted with blood. I put it in a Ziploc bag, and I had no idea what it meant, if anything.

  THE NEXT MORNING I sat by Drew’s hospital bed and put a half dozen mug shots facedown on the sheets next to her good hand. Her other hand, her left, was wrapped thickly with bandages and rested on top of a pillow. She wore no makeup, and her hair was unbrushed and her face still puffy with sleep.

  “I thought you might wait until after breakfast,” she said. “Would you excuse me a minute?”

  She went into the bath, then came back out a few minutes later, touching at her face with a towel and widening her eyes. She got back in the bed and pulled the sheet up to her stomach.

  “Look at the pictures, Drew.”

  She turned them over mechanically, one by one. Then she picked up one and dropped it in front of me.

  “You have no doubt that’s the guy?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you tell me, Dave? Is that Joey Gouza or not?”

  “It’s Joey Gouza.”

  “So arrest him.”

  “Somebody else is taking care of that. Did the city cops show you mug shots last night?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you know it was Gouza?”

  “He was at a party Weldon gave in New Orleans.”

  “When I mentioned his name once before, you seemed a little vague about it, Drew.”

  “That’s the man who smoked a cigarette while his two pieces of shit tried to crucify me.”

  I picked up the photographs and put a rubber band around them. The grass outside the window was bright green, and the sunlight looked hot on the trees, which were still wet from last night’s rain.

  “Why do you think they did it?” I asked.

  “Gouza said, ‘Tell your brother to pay his debts.’ ”

  “What’s his voice sound like? Does he have an accent?”

  “Why are you asking me things like this?”

  “A prosecutor is going to ask you, his defense attorney is. Why do you object to me asking you?”

  “He has an accent like any other New Orleans lowlife.”

  “I see. That’d make sense, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, what you’re really asking is something else. There’s something wrong with his voice. He sounds like he has a strep throat. No, it’s worse than that. He sounds like his vocal cords were burnt with acid.”

  “Here are some other mug shots, Drew. See if any of these guys look like the two men who hurt you.”

  She went through them one at a time, looking carefully at each one. Among the six mug shots were the faces of Jewel Fluck, Eddy Raintree, and Jack Gates. She shook her head.

  “I’ve never seen any of these men,” she said. She touched the tops of my fingers as I gathered up the photographs from the sheet. “What happened to your thumb?”

  “A man bit it the other night.”

  “Maybe it’s catching.”

  “He used to be a bodyguard for Bobby Earl.”

  “What did you do with him, put him in the dog pound?”

  “No, I didn’t get the chance, Drew. I had him cuffe
d by a railroad track when a guy named Jewel Fluck blew most of his face off with a shotgun. His name was Eddy Raintree. He was one of the guys I just showed you. Would you describe the two men who hurt you?”

  “Do you know what victim rape is?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a little bit used up right now. You said something before about me being a soldier. I’m not. I’m still shaking inside. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop. If you want to take me over the hurdles, you can. But I think you’re acting like a shit.”

  “The sheriff told me to come up here last night and take a statement. But I didn’t. I figured the city cops had pretty well worn you out. Maybe you ought to consider who your real friends are, Drew.”

  She turned her head on the pillow and looked out the window. I could see a tear secrete brightly in the corner of her eye.

  “I’ll come back later,” I said.

  She nodded, her head still turned toward the window. Her skin looked dull in the sunlight.

  I paused before I went out the door.

  “You’re willing to testify against Gouza at a trial, Drew?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “You know they’ll put Weldon on the stand, too, don’t you?”

  She twisted her head back toward me on the pillow. I saw that her projections about the future had not yet reached the last probability. She drank from a glass of water and pulled her knees up under the sheet. Her face had the divorced, empty look of a person who might have lived one way all her life only to awake one morning and discover that none of her experience counted, that she was cut loose and voiceless in a place where no other people lived.

  On the way out of the hospital I stopped by the gift shop and sent a vase of flowers to her room. I signed the card “From your many friends in Amnesty International.”

  THEY BROUGHT JOEY Gouza from New Orleans in leg and waist chains, got him arraigned that afternoon, and amidst a crowd of photographers, news reporters, and onlookers, who behaved like spectators at a cockfight, virtually trundled him from the courtroom to a city jail cell. Bail was set by Judge James Lefleur, an ill-tempered right-wing coonass also known as Whiskey Jim.