Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  The old Creole buildings and narrow streets never changed. Palm fronds and banana trees hung over the stone walls and iron gates of the courtyards; it was always shady under the scrolled colonnades that extended over the sidewalks, and the small grocery stores with their wood-bladed fans always smelled of cheese, sausage, ground coffee, and crates of peaches and plums. The brick of the buildings was worn and cool and smooth to the touch, the flagstones in the alleys troughed and etched from the rainwater that sluiced off the roofs and balconies overhead. Sometimes you looked through the scrolled iron door of a brick walkway and saw a courtyard in the interior of a building ablaze with sunlight and purple wisteria and climbing yellow roses, and when the wind was right you could smell the river, the damp brick walls, a fountain dripping into a stagnant well, the sour odor of spilled wine, the ivy that rooted in the mortar like the claws of a lizard, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, and a green garden of spearmint erupting against a sunlit stucco wall.

  The shadows were growing longer in Jackson Square. I looked again at the swizzle stick I had found in the dead man's shirt pocket. The smears of purple dye on it did not look like much now, but that morning a friend of mine at the university in Lafayette had put it under an infrared microscope that was a technological miracle. It could lighten and darken both the wood and the dye, and as my friend shifted the grain in and out of focus we could identify eight of twelve letters printed on the stick: SM LI G J KS.

  Why would people who went to the trouble of removing a body from a submerged plane and lying about it to the press (successfully, too) be so careless as to leave behind the dead man's shirt for a bait salesman to find? Easy answer. People who lie, run games, manipulate, and steal usually do so because they don't have the brains and forethought to pull it off otherwise. The Watergate burglars were not nickel-and-dime second-story creeps. These were guys who had worked for the CIA and FBI. They got nailed because they taped back the spring lock on an office door by wrapping the tape horizontally around the lock rather than vertically. A minimum-wage security guard saw the tape and removed it but didn't report it. One of the burglars came back and taped the door open a second time. The security guard made his rounds again and saw the fresh tape and called the D.C. police. The burglars were still in the building when the police arrived.

  I walked through the cooling streets to Bourbon, which was now starting to fill with tourists. Families from Grand Rapids looked through the half-opened doors of the strip joints and the bars that advertised female wrestling and French orgies, their faces scrubbed and smiling and iridescent in the late-afternoon light. They were as innocent in their oblique fascination with the lascivious as the crowds of college boys with their paper beer cups who laughed at the burlesque spielers and street crazies and knew that they themselves would never be subject to time and death; or maybe they were even as innocent as the businessman from Meridian, who walked with grinning detachment and ease past the flashes of thighs and breasts through those opened doors, but who would wake trembling and sick tomorrow in a motel off the old Airline Highway, his empty wallet floating in the toilet, his nocturnal memories a tangle of vipers that made sweat pop out on his forehead.

  Smiling Jack's was on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse. If Robin Gaddis was still stripping there, and still feeding all the dragons that had lived inside her since she was a little girl, she'd be at the bar for her first vodka collins by six o'clock, do some whites on the half-shell at six-thirty, and an hour later get serious with some black speed and shift up to the full-tilt boogie. I had taken her to a couple of AA meetings with me, but she'd said it wasn't for her. I guessed she was one of those who had no bottom. In the years I had known her she had been jailed dozens of times by vice, stabbed through the thigh by a John, and had her jaw broken with an ice mallet by one of her husbands. One time when I was over at the social welfare agency I pulled her family file, a three-generation case history that was a study in institutional failure and human inadequacy. She had grown up in the public housing project by St. Louis Cemetery, the daughter of a half-wit mother and an alcoholic father who used to wrap the urine soaked sheets around her head when she wet the bed. Now, in her adulthood, she had managed to move a half-mile away from the place of her birth.

  But she wasn't at the bar. In fact, Smiling Jack's was almost empty. The mirrored runway behind the bar was darkened; the musical instruments of the three-piece band sat unattended in the small pit at the end of the runway; and in the empty gloom a turning strobe light overhead made a revolving shotgun pattern of darkness and light that could be equaled only by seasickness. I asked the bartender if she would be in. He was perhaps thirty and wore hillbilly sideburns, a black fedora, and a black T-shirt with the faces of the Three Stooges embossed whitely on the front.

  "You bet," he said, and smiled. "The first show is at eight. She'll be in by six-thirty for the glug-glug hour. You a friend of hers?"

  "Yes."

  "What are you drinking?"

  "Do you have a Dr. Pepper?"

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "Give me a 7-Up."

  "It's two bucks. You sure you want to drink soda pop?"

  I put the two dollars on the bar.

  "I know you, right?" he said, and smiled again.

  "Maybe."

  "You're a cop, right?"

  "Nope."

  "Hey, come on, man, I got two big talents-one as a mixologist and the other for faces. But you're not vice, right?"

  "I'm not a cop."

  "Wait a minute, I got it. Homicide. You used to work out of the First District on Basin."

  "Not anymore."

  "You get moved or something?"

  "I'm out of the business."

  "Early change of life, huh?" he said. His eyes were green and they stayed sufficiently narrowed so you couldn't read them. "You remember me?"

  "It's Jerry something-or-other. Five years ago you went up the road for bashing an old man with a pipe. How'd you like it up there at Angola?"

  His green eyes widened a moment, looked boldly at me from under the brim of the black fedora, then narrowed and crinkled again. He began drying glasses with a towel, his face turned at an oblique angle.

  "It wasn't bad. I was outdoors a lot, lots of fresh air, gave me a chance to get in shape. I like farm work. I grew up on one," he said. "Hey, have another 7-Up. You're impressive, man. A sharp guy like you should have a 7-Up on the house."

  "You drink it for me," I said, and picked up my glass and walked to the back of the bar. I watched him light a cigarette, smoke only a few puffs off it, then flip it angrily through the front door onto the tourist-filled sidewalk.

  She came in a half hour later, dressed in sandals, blue jeans low on her hips, and a tank top that exposed her flat, tanned stomach. Unlike most of the strippers, she wore her black hair cut short, like a 1940 schoolgirl's. And in spite of all the booze, coke, and speed that went into her body, she was still good to look at.

  "Wow, they put the first team back on the street," she said, and smiled. "How you doing, Streak? I'd heard you were remarried and back on the bayou, selling worms and all that jazz."

  "That's right. I'm just a tourist now."

  "You really hung it up for good, huh? That must take guts, I mean just to boogie on out of it one day and do something weird like sell worms to people. What'd you say, 'Sayonara, crime-stoppers, keep your guns in your pants'?"

  "Something like that."

  "Hey, Jerry, does it look like we got AIDS down here? It's glug-glug time for mommy."

  "I'm trying to find out something about a guy," I said.

  "I'm not exactly an information center, Streak. Didn't you ever want to touch up that white spot in your hair? You've got the blackest hair I've ever seen in a man, except for that white patch." She touched the side of my head with her fingers.

  "This guy had a green and red snake tattooed on his chest. I think he probably came in here."

  "They pay to see me take off my clothes. It's
not the other way around. Unless you mean something else."

  "I'm talking about a big, dark guy with a head the size of a watermelon. The tattoo was just above the nipple. If you saw it, you wouldn't forget it."

  "Why's that?" She lit a cigarette and kept her eyes on the vodka collins that Jerry was mixing for her down the bar.

  "There was a tattoo artist in Bring-Cash Alley in Saigon who used the same dark green and red ink. His work was famous in the Orient. He was in Hong Kong for years. British sailors all over the world have his work on them."

  "Why would I get to see it?"

  "Listen, Robin, I was always your friend. I never judged what you did. Cut the bullshit."

  "Oh, that's what it is, huh?" She took the collins glass from Jerry's hand and drank from it. Her mouth looked wet and red and cold when she set the glass down. "I don't do the other stuff anymore. I don't have to. I work this place six months, then I have two gigs in Fort Lauderdale for the winter. Ask your pals in vice."

  "They're not my pals. They hung me out to dry. When I was suspended I found out what real solitude was all about."

  "I wish you had come around. I could have really gone for you, Dave."

  "Maybe I wish I had."

  "Come on, I can see you hooked up with a broad that whips out her jugs every night for a roomful of middle-aged titty-babies. Hey, Jerry, can you take it out of slow motion?"

  He took away her glass and refilled it with vodka and mix, but didn't bother to put fresh ice or an orange slice in it.

  "You're always a class guy," she said to him.

  "What can I say, it's a gift," he said, and went back down the bar and began loading beer bottles in the cooler. He turned his face from side to side each time he placed a bottle in the cooler in case one of them should explode.

  "I gotta get out of this place. It gets crazier all the time," she said. "If you think his burner's turned off, you ought to meet his mom. She owns this dump and the souvenir shop next door. She's got hair like a Roto-Rooter brush, you know, the kind they run through sewer pipes. Except she thinks she's an opera star. She wears muumuu dresses and glass jewelry hanging all over her, and in the morning she puts a boom-box on the bar and she and him scrub out the toilets and sing opera together like somebody stuck them in the butt with a hayfork."

  "Robin, I know this tattooed man was in here. I really need you to help me."

  She flicked her cigarette ashes into the ashtray and didn't answer.

  "Look, you're not dropping the dime on him. He's dead," I said. "He was in a plane crash with a priest and some illegals."

  She exhaled smoke into the spinning circles of light and brushed a strand of hair out of her eye.

  "You mean like with wetbacks or something?" she said.

  "You could call them that."

  "I don't know what Johnny Dartez would be doing with a priest and wetbacks."

  "Who is he?"

  "He's been around here for years, except when he was in the marines. He used to be a stall for a couple of street dips."

  "He was a pickpocket?"

  "He tried to be one. He was so clumsy he'd usually knock the mark down before they could boost his wallet. He's a loser. I don't think this is your guy."

  "What's he been doing lately?"

  She hesitated.

  "I think maybe he was buying room keys and credit cards," she said.

  "I thought you were out of that, kiddo."

  "It was a while back."

  "I'm talking about now. What's the guy doing now, Robin?"

  "I heard he was a mule for Bubba Rocque," she said, and her voice fell to almost a whisper.

  "Bubba Rocque?" I said.

  "Yeah. Take it easy, will you?"

  "I gotta go in back. You want another collins?" Jerry said.

  "Yeah. Wash your hands when to go to the bathroom, too."

  "You know, Robin, when you come in here I hear this funny sound," he said. "I got to listen real close, but I hear it. It sounds like mice eating on something. I think it's your brain rotting."

  "Who's your PO, podna?" I said.

  "I don't have one. I went out free and clear, max time, all sins forgiven. Does that mess up your day?" He grinned at me from under his black fedora.

  "No, I was just wondering about some of those rum bottles behind the bar," I said. "I can't see an ATF Bureau seal on them. You were probably shopping in the duty-free store over in the Islands, and then you got your own bottles mixed up with your bar stock."

  He put his hands on his hips and looked at the bottles on the shelf and shook his head profoundly.

  "Boy, I think you called it," he said. "Am I glad you brought that to my attention. Robin, you ought to hold on to this guy."

  "You better lay off it, Jerry," she said.

  "He knows I don't mean any harm. Right, chief? I don't get in people's face, I don't mess in their space. I ain't no swinging dick. You know what that is, don't you, chief?"

  "Show time's over," I said.

  "You telling me? I get minimum wage and tips in this place, and I don't need the hassle. Believe me, I don't need the hassle."

  I watched him walk into the storage room at the back of the bar. He walked like a mainline con and full-time wiseguy, from the hips down, with no motion in the chest or arms, a guy who would break into jails or be in a case file of some kind the rest of his life. What produced them? Defective genes, growing up in a shithole, bad toilet training? Even after fourteen years with the New Orleans police department, I never had an adequate answer.

  "About that Bubba Rocque stuff, that's just what I heard. I mean, it didn't come from me, okay?" she said. "Bubba's crazy, Dave. I know a girl, she tried to go independent. His guys soaked her in gasoline and set her on fire."

  "You didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about Bubba. You understand that? You're not a source."

  But I could still see the bright sheen of fear in her eyes.

  "Listen, I've known him all my life," I said. "He still owns a home outside of Lafayette. There's nothing you could tell me about him that's new."

  She let out her breath and took a drink from her glass.

  "I know you were a good cop and all that bullshit," she said, "but there's a lot of stuff you guys never see. You can't. You don't live in it, Streak. You're a visitor."

  "I've got to run, kiddo," I said. "We live just south of New Iberia. If you ever want to work in the boat-and-bait business, give me a call."

  "Dave…"

  "Yeah?"

  "Come see me again, okay?"

  I walked out into the dusky, neon-lit street. The music from the Dixieland and rockabilly bars was thunderous. I looked back at Robin, but her barstool was empty.

  That night I rolled along the I-10 causeway over the Atchafalaya flood basin. The willows and the half-submerged dead trunks of the cypress trees were gray and silver in the moonlight. There was no breeze, and the water was still and black and dented with the moon's reflection. A half-dozen oil derricks stood out blackly against the moon, then a wind blew up from the Gulf, ruffling the willows along the far shore, and wrinkled the water's surface like skin all the way out to the causeway.

  I turned off at Breaux Bridge and followed the old backroad through St. Martinville toward New Iberia. An electric floodlight shone on the white face of the eighteenth-century Catholic church where Evangeline and her lover were buried under a spreading oak. The trees that arched over the road were thick with Spanish moss, and the wind smelled of plowed earth and the young sugarcane out in the fields. But I could not get Bubba Rocque's name out of my mind.

  He was among the few white kids in New Iberia who were tough and desperate enough to set pins at the bowling alley, in the years before air conditioning when the pits were 120 degrees and filled with exploding pins, crashing metal racks, cursing Negroes, and careening bowling balls that could snap a pinsetter's shinbone in half. He was the kid who wore no coat in winter, had scabs in his hair, and cracked his knuckles until they
were the size of quarters. He was dirty and he smelled bad and he'd spit down a girl's collar for a nickel. He was also the subject of legends: he got laid by his aunt when he was ten; he hunted the neighborhood cats with a Benjamin pump; he tried to rape a Negro woman who worked in the high school lunch room; his father whipped him with a dog chain; he set fire to his clapboard house, which was located between the scrap yard and the SP tracks.

  But what I remember most about him were his wide-set gray-blue eyes. They never seemed to blink, as though the lids had been surgically removed. I fought him to a draw in district Golden Gloves. You could break your hands on his face and he'd keep coming at you, the pupils of those unrelenting eyes like burnt cinders.

  I needed to disengage. I wasn't a copy anymore, and my obligations were elsewhere. If Bubba Rocque's people were involved with the plane crash, a bad moon was on the rise and I didn't want anything more to do with it. Let the feds and the lowlifes jerk each other around. I was out of it.

  When I got home the house was dark under the pecan trees, except for the glow of the television set in the front room. I opened the screen door and saw Annie asleep on a pallet in front of the television, the wood-bladed fan overhead blowing the curls on the back of her neck. Two empty ice cream bowls streaked with strawberry juice were beside her. Then in the corner I saw Alafair, wearing my blue-denim shirt like pajamas, her frightened face fixed on the television screen. A documentary about World War II showed a column of GIs marching along a dirt road outside of a bombed-out Italian town. They wore their pots at an angle, cigarettes dangled from their grinning mouths, a BAR man had a puppy buttoned up in his field jacket. But to Alafair these were not the liberators of Western Europe. Her thin body trembled under my hands when I picked her up.

  "Vienen los soldados aqui?" she said, her face a terrible question mark.

  She had other questions for us, too, ones not easily resolved by Annie's and my poor Spanish, or more importantly our adult unwillingness to force the stark realisation of mortality upon a bewildered child. Perhaps in her sleep she still felt her mother's hands on her thighs, raising her up into the wobbling bubble of air inside the plane's cabin; maybe she thought I was more than human, that I could resurrect the dead from water, anoint them with my hand, and make them walk from the dark world of sleep into the waking day. Alafair's eyes searched mine as though she would see in them the reflected image of her mother. But try as we might, neither Annie nor I could use the word muerto.