DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  It was like being buried alive inside his own body. Each time he fell asleep, he saw broken images in his head leading up to the moment somebody had locked down on him with a high-powered rifle. He heard the sound of the tiny emery wheel striking dryly on his cigarette lighter, then he both heard and smelled the flare of lighter fluid inside the flame guard. Just as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, he saw a needle-nosed projectile zipping over the floodwater, flying through the fire, making a thropping sound as it entered and exited his body, splintering his spinal cord like it was dried tuber.

  In the dream, he wanted to wrap his arms over his face or dive into the water. But he couldn’t move or run or even drop the burning lighter from his hand. When he would wake, he would believe for just a moment that his terror was the result of a nightmare and that his motor control was now restored, that he could walk to a bathroom and urinate into a bowl while the day and the world adjusted to his needs. But his paralysis encased him like concrete. He would push out his tongue on his lips and close and open his eyes in the dark, waiting for either movement or sensation to find its way back into his body. He would drop his eyes to where his hands lay on the sheet and wait for them to obey his mental commands. That’s when he would hear a scream inside his head that was louder than any voice he had ever heard in the actual world.

  Eddy studied the curtains of rain sliding down his window and the patterns of shadow they made on his skin. When the two men in hospital greens entered his room, he thought they were going to check his catheter or sponge-bathe him or hold a glass drinking straw to his mouth. Or maybe they would talk to him. His voice box had been spared. As long as he could talk, he still possessed a measure of control in his life. He could talk to these guys about his recovery. There must be ways to repair spinal breaks, he thought. Yeah, it was just a matter of getting to a better hospital in Houston or Boston or New York, places like that. Bertrand must have stashed the money from the house score. There would be plenty for good doctors and rehab programs. Yeah, let these local motherfuckers go play wit’ their bedpans, he told himself.

  One of the men in greens stared down at Eddy, his face floating above him like a white balloon. “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’m feeling okay,” Eddy whispered.

  Why had he answered like that? Like some kid spitting watermelon seeds and tap-dancing for Mr. Charlie. That’s not the way he had talked to the hospital personnel before. What was different about this guy?

  “Because we want you to be comfortable for the ride down to the OR,” the same man said.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Eddy said.

  “Everything is haywire, Eddy. This storm really screwed us up,” the man said. He yawned and looked at his watch. “Let’s get you down the hall. I got to get home to my kids.”

  The second man positioned a gurney next to Eddy’s bed. When a tree of lightning printed itself against a backdrop of black sky, Eddy saw the man’s face clearly. It was concave, the eyes recessed, the head elongated and bald, the lips the pink shade of an eraser on a pencil. The second man began disconnecting the wires and tubes that only moments earlier Eddy had looked upon as an annoyance.

  “What you doin’, man?” he said.

  The man with the concave face smiled down at him. “Relax. You’re in good hands,” he said.

  Then the two men in greens lifted him as though he were weightless and set him gently on the gurney. As they pushed him through the corridor toward the elevator, they kept glancing down at him with benevolent expressions, their hands patting him reassuringly whenever he started to speak. On the first floor he heard the elevator doors open, then he felt the gurney’s wheels rumbling through a passageway. A moment later there was a whoosh of air and the sound of doors sliding again, and he could smell rain and engine exhaust and hear sirens pealing through the streets.

  The two men lifted the gurney and loaded it into the back of an ambulance.

  “Who y’all? What y’all doin’ to me?” Eddy said. “Help!”

  The man with the concave face and recessed eyes got inside with him and shut the door. Eddy’s weight shifted on the gurney as the ambulance pulled out onto the street and drove away at high speed.

  “Scared?” the man said.

  “Ain’t scared of nothing,” Eddy replied. “Not of no peckerwoods, not of nothing.”

  “You ought to be,” the man said, inserting a chocolate bar into his mouth. He smiled as he chewed on the chocolate.

  CLETE PURCEL worked out of his secondary office on main and stayed at our house, but he returned to New Orleans three times in his pursuit of the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon. He used a city map to re-create the possible routes Bertrand Melancon could have used in his escape from Otis Baylor’s neighborhood immediately following the shooting. He walked through backyards and alleys and at a residential intersection found a woman throwing the remnants of her kitchen onto her terrace, smashing dishes and glass-ware on the flagstones.

  “Can I help you?” she said when she saw him watching her. Sweat was leaking out of her hair band.

  He showed her his PI badge and told her about the shooting down the street. He gave her the date and the approximate time the shooting took place.

  “I know all about it. I think they got what they deserved,” she said. She wore a halter and shorts and flip-flops, and she had chestnut hair that hung in strands on her brow. Her skin was unnaturally white and dotted with moles. Clete doubted if she was the type who would be seen in halter and shorts were it not for the intense heat inside her house.

  “Two of those guys are still on the loose. I’d like to find them. They were in a green aluminum boat, with an outboard motor on it.”

  “What, you think they’re parked somewhere on the street waiting for you?”

  “No, I think they dumped some stolen property around here. I’d like to recover it for my client.”

  She walked out on the edge of her lawn. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the intersection. There were blue veins in the tops of her breasts. “I saw an outboard like that almost hit an airboat full of cops. A black man was in the stern. It looked like another guy was slumped down in the bilge. They swung around behind my house and went up the alley. Were they the ones you’re after?”

  “It sounds like them. Did they stop?”

  “I wish they had.”

  “Pardon?”

  “If looters broke into my house, I was going to serve them ham sandwiches I’d filled with rat poison. I mixed the poison with mustard so they couldn’t taste it. I made a dozen of them.”

  Clete finished jotting down her words about the boat in his notebook. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “What is it?” she said, her left eye wrinkling at the corner.

  “Why are you smashing your dishware?”

  “Because the goddamn insurance company just told me my policy doesn’t cover water damage. Because I thought I’d give their worthless asses breakage they could understand. Because they just fucked me out of every cent I got from my divorce.”

  Clete looked down the street, suppressing a smile. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name. Like to take a break, get something to eat?” he said.

  IT WAS NOON, Wednesday, and I was in Clete’s New Iberia office, located in a refurbished brick building on Main Street, listening to his account of his most recent trip to New Orleans. The nineteenth-century tin ceiling was stamped with a fleur-de-lis design and the walls were decorated with antique firearms. Outside the rear window was a brick-paved patio, shaded by potted palm and banana trees, where Clete often ate his lunch. But today he couldn’t stop talking about the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon and the new woman he had met down the street from Otis Baylor’s house.

  I believed Clete was still wired from Katrina and was now giving himself over to an obsession, one that allowed him to believe if he nailed the guys who had run over him with their automobile, he could somehow revise all the events that had
turned a gingerbread Caribbean city into food for every kind of jackal in the book.

  “I got it figured, big mon,” he said. “Bertrand Melancon almost collided into an airboat full of NOPD guys, so he swerved down this alley behind Courtney’s house—”

  “Whose house?”

  “The gal I told you about, the one breaking dishes all over her terrace. Bertrand bagged it down the alley and hid Sidney Kovick’s goods somewhere along the way. The hospital is only three blocks from Courtney’s. I think I even found his boat. It was wedged under a pile of trees. The motor was gone, but it’s a green, aluminum job. Ducks Unlimited is painted on the hull. I bet they boosted it from a rescue operation.”

  “I think you’re spending more time on these guys than you should,” I said.

  “How’d you arrive at that brilliant idea?”

  “Twisting these guys won’t bring back New Orleans, Clete. It’s gone. Just like our youth. The place we knew will be a place we look at in books that feature historical photography.”

  He got up from behind his desk and stared out the window. He was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt with bluebirds and flowers printed on it. The back of his neck was pitted, his hair lightly oiled and clipped. I could see the color rising in his neck. “Don’t say that about New Orleans.”

  “All right, I won’t. The guys who let people drown for two days are going to pour billions into rebuilding poor neighborhoods.”

  He turned and faced me. The flattened scar that ran through one eyebrow and across his nose was the dull color and shape of an elongated tire patch. “The shield I carry could have come out of a cereal box. The only credibility I have is the degree of respect I instill in scum like the Melancons. I wish it was different. I wish I was still with NOPD. But I flushed my legitimate career a long time ago. Don’t be lecturing at me, Streak.”

  The room was silent a long time.

  “I got a call this morning on my cell from Bertrand Melancon,” he said.

  “The Melancons have your number?” I replied, glad to have something else to talk about.

  “Nig gave it to Bertrand. He says his brother was kidnapped out of our Lady of the Lake. He wants me to get him back. That’s what I was trying to tell you, but you kept interrupting me.”

  “Who kidnapped him?”

  “Bertrand thinks it was Sidney Kovick’s people.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I don’t work for street pukes, particularly ones I think are rapists.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “I made a mistake. I should have figured out a way to bring him in. Bertrand must have found something in that house he can’t fence. In fact, I got the impression he’s not sure what he’s holding.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “That’s what I told Bertrand. He wants to cut a deal with Sidney to get his brother back, but he thinks whatever it is he’s holding is so hot Sidney is going to kill him and Eddy and Andre Rochon once he gets it back.”

  “Don’t get any deeper in this.”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it. Bertrand started talking about bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. He said they glowed under his boat. He said he’s going to Hell for something he did. I told him to take his bullshit to a priest and to lose my cell number. You know what he said?”

  I didn’t want to hear more of it. Clete’s face was spotted with color, the way it got when his liver was aching for a drink.

  “Bertrand said the last person he wanted to see was a priest. He said it was a priest who caused the bodies in the water to glow.”

  “I’m gone,” I said.

  “See what happens when I’m straight up with you?” he yelled at my back.

  I WENT BACK to the department, my head pounding. The enormous loss of life in New Orleans kept the media focus on Katrina, but Hurricane Rita had hurt us bad, too, and had also flattened or flooded thousands of homes along the southeast Texas coast. In Lake Charles and Orange, Texas, there were blocks of houses that looked like a lumberyard after a tornado has gone through it. My desk and cell phones rang constantly. My intake basket was overflowing, my mailbox stuffed with pink message slips. Every cop, firefighter, and paramedic in the parish was getting by on a few hours’ sleep a night, sometimes on a desktop. Cops and firefighters from other states were on lend-lease to us, but the workload was staggering. I didn’t have time to worry about people who had made bad choices for themselves or whom I couldn’t help, including Father Jude LeBlanc.

  Wasted words, wasted words.

  In his office Clete had mentioned a detail about the green aluminum boat that I couldn’t get out of my head. I picked up the phone on my desk and punched in his number. “You said you found the boat Bertrand Melancon was using?”

  “Yeah, it was upside down under a pile of tree limbs and trash by the emergency room entrance,” he replied. “It looked like it had blood smears on the bow.”

  “The words Ducks Unlimited were painted on the hull?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Was there anything else on the hull?”

  He thought for a second. “A mallard, with its wings outstretched. What’s the deal?”

  “Jude LeBlanc’s girlfriend said Jude had found a boat to evacuate his parishioners from the church attic. She said it had a duck painted on it. Jude was chopping a hole in the attic when somebody attacked him. She never saw him again.”

  He didn’t reply, and I knew Clete had done something else he wasn’t eager to tell me about.

  “What are you hiding?” I said.

  “Bertrand Melancon called me again, about three minutes ago. He wants help, but he won’t come in. He thinks I’ll either stomp his ass or turn him over to Sidney Kovick. So I gave him your cell and office numbers. If you don’t want to talk to the guy, just hang up on him.”

  “You made the right move.”

  “I don’t believe it. Are you feeling okay?” he asked.

  THAT EVENING Molly and I ate by ourselves at the kitchen table. Clete had gotten his old room back at the motor court up the street from the Winn-Dixie, and Alafair was working as a volunteer at the evacuee shelter in City Park.

  “I thought you’d like smothered steak for a change. You don’t like it?” she said.

  I couldn’t focus on her question. “I think Jude LeBlanc probably drowned in the Lower Nine. But maybe his death was a homicide,” I said.

  I saw a quiet sense of exasperation take hold in her face, like a bad memory from her sleep that the daylight hours would not dispel. “Dave, nobody can ever change what happened in New Orleans. I remember Jude. I liked him. But he was a sick man.”

  “I may have knowledge of a murder. I’m a police officer. I can’t just say, ‘Sorry, sonofabitch, I’ve got my own problems.’”

  She looked through the window at the shadows in the pecan trees and live oaks and the wide expanse of Bayou Teche, now twenty feet up in the yard. She set her fork down on her plate. Her thumb ticked at a callus on her palm. “Maybe you should take a nap and rest up before you go back on duty.”

  “A street puke by the name of Bertrand Melancon told Clete he saw the bodies of drowned people glowing under his boat in the Lower Nine. I think he and some lowlifes like him attacked Jude and took his boat. I think it cost Jude his life and the lives of people who were waiting in a church attic for Jude to rescue them. That’s hard to blow off.”

  Her plate was only half empty. She picked it up and walked outside, peering down the slope as though she wanted to witness the gloaming of the day. I thought perhaps she was going to finish her supper at the picnic table in solitude. But she scraped her smothered steak and rice and brown gravy and creamed corn on the ground for Tripod and Snuggs. When she came back in, she washed her dishes and knife and fork in the sink, set them in the dry rack, and let out her breath. “I think I’ll take a walk. Do you want to come?” she said.

  “Not right now, thanks.”

  “Then
I’ll see you later.”

  “I like the food real good, Molly. I can’t get all those dead people off my mind. I think about them and I want to kill somebody. That’s just the way it is.”

  I heard the front door shut behind her. Through the side window I could see my neighbor’s rotund, feminine, middle-aged son up-ending a longneck beer in his backyard, his throat working smoothly, a band of late sunlight sparkling inside the bottle.

  Fifteen minutes later, a tan Honda stopped at the curb. Alafair got out and thanked the young woman driving, then came inside. “Where’s Molly?” she said.

  “Taking a walk. Who was that?”

  “Thelma Baylor. She’s helping out at the shelter.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “She says you were out to her house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She says you think her dad shot some black guys.”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Baylor is that kind of man.”

  “Maybe he’s not, Alf.”

  “Don’t call me that stupid name.”

  “Mr. Baylor’s daughter was raped and sodomized and burned with cigarettes by three black degenerates. If that happened to you, maybe I would not be the same kind of person you think I am.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Dave.”

  “I don’t want to tell you whom to associate with, but I’d lose the connection with Thelma Baylor.”

  “That’s as judgmental as it is unfair.”

  “So is killing people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Like you said, Mr. Baylor doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who gets off dumping a seventeen-year-old kid’s brainpan into the water. But how about his daughter? You think she might be a candidate?”

  “I come home from the shelter and I feel like I just walked through cobweb.”

  “Did you eat yet?”

  “God!” she said.

  I walked across the railroad tracks in the drone of cicadas to an AA meeting that was held twice a week in a cottage opposite the old high school I attended many years ago. After the meeting, I walked to the office and began sorting out the piles of paperwork in my intake basket. At 10:14 p.m. My cell phone rang.