Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "Say that again about the witch."

  "The guy lives in a slum around a witch. Or a dead witch or something. Don't try to make sense out of it. These guys buy their brains at a junkyard. Why else would anybody work for Bubba Rocque? They all end up doing time for him. I hear when they get out of Angola he won't give them a job cleaning toilets. What a class guy."

  I picked up her hand and squeezed it. It was small and brown in mine. She looked at me in the warm shade, and her mouth parted slightly so I could see her white teeth.

  "I have to go back this afternoon."

  "Big news flash."

  "No cuteness, kiddo. Do you want to go to New Iberia with me?"

  "If your conscience bothers you, go to church."

  "I have a bait business I could use some help with. I have a little girl living with me, too."

  "Life down on the bayou isn't my style, Streak. Come on back here when you're serious."

  "You always think I'm running a shuck on you."

  "No, you're just a guy that makes impossible rules for himself. That's why you're a mess. Buy a girl lunch, will you?"

  Sometimes you leave a person alone. This was one of them.

  Out on the ocean a pelican lifted from a green trough and flew by overhead, a bloody fish dripping from its beak.

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING when I awoke, back in New Iberia, I heard blue jays and mockingbirds in my pecan trees. I put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jogged all the way to the drawbridge in the early blue light, drank coffee with the bridge tender, then hit it hard all the way home. I showered and dressed, ate a breakfast of strawberries and Grape-Nuts on the picnic table in the backyard, and watched the breeze ruffle the delicate leaves of the mimosa tree. It had been over thirty hours since I had had a drink. I was still weak, my nerve endings still felt as though they had been touched with lighted matches, but I could feel the tiger starting to let go.

  I drove to Lafayette and talked with two priests who had worked with the pilot of the plane that had gone down at Southwest Pass. What they told me was predictable: Father Melancon, the drowned priest, had been a special piece of work. He had been an organiser of migrant farm workers in Texas and Florida, had been busted up with ax handles by company goons outside Florida City, and had served three months' county time in Brownsville for slashing the tires of a sheriff's van that was loaded with arrested strikers. Then he got serious and broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised the nose cone of a nuclear missile. Next stop, the federal pen in Danbury for three years.

  I was always fascinated by the government's attempt to control political protest by the clergy in the country. Usually the prosecutor's office would try to portray them as naive idealists, bumblers who had strayed from their pulpits and convents, and when that didn't work, they were sent up the road with the perverts, geeks, and meltdown cases, which are about the only types that do hard time anymore. However, once they were in the slam, they had a way of spreading their message throughout the convict population.

  But the priest in Lafayette didn't recognise the names of Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero. They simply said that Father Melancon had been a trusting man with unusual friends, and that sometimes his unusual friends went with him when he ferried refugees out of villages in El Salvador and Guatemala.

  "Romero is a little, dark guy with black curls hanging in his face. He wears a beret," I said.

  One of the priests tapped his finger on his cheek.

  "You remember him?" I said.

  "He didn't wear a beard, but the rest of it was like you say. He was here a month ago with Father Melancon. He said he was from New Orleans but he had relatives in Guatemala."

  "Do you know where he is now?"

  "No, I'm sorry."

  "If he comes round again, call Minos Dautrieve at the Drug Enforcement Administration or call me at this number." I wrote Minos's name and my home number on a piece of paper and gave it to him.

  "Is this man in trouble?" the priest said.

  "I'm not sure what he is, Father. He used to be a drug courier and street dealer. Now he may be an informer for Immigration and Naturalisation. I'm not sure if he's moving up or down in his moral status."

  I drove back to New Iberia through Breaux Bridge so I could stop for lunch at Mulate's. I had deep-fried soft-shell crabs with a shrimp salad and a small bowl of étouffée with French bread and iced tea. Mulate's was a family place now, with only the long mahogany bar and the polished dance floor to remind me of the nightclub and gambling spot it had been when I was in college. The last twenty-five years had changed southern Louisiana a great deal, much of it for the better. The laws of segregation were gone; kids didn't go nigger-knocking on Saturday nights; the Ku Klux Klan didn't burn crosses all over Plaquemines Parish; the demagogues like Judge Leader Perez had slipped into history. But something else was gone, too: the soft pagan ambience that existed right in the middle of a French Catholic culture. Oh, there was still plenty of sleaze around-and narcotics, where there had been none before-but the horse race and slot machines, with their winking lights and rows of cherries and plums and gold bells, had been taken out of the restaurants and replaced with video games; the poolrooms and working-class bars with open bourée games were fewer; the mulatto juke joints, where Negroes and dark-skinned Cajuns had lost their racial identity at the door, were now frequented by white tourists who brought cassette recorders to tape zydeco music. The old hot-pillow joints-Margaret's in Opelousas, the Column Hotel in Lafayette, the cribs on Railroad Avenue in New Iberia-were shut down.

  I'd like to blame it on the boys at the Rotary and the Kiwanis. But that's not fair. We had just become a middle-class people, that's all.

  But one local anachronism had held on to the past successfully and burgeoned in the present, and that was Bubba Rocque. The kid who would eat a lightbulb for a dollar, set you up with a high-yellow washerwoman for two dollars, throw a cat into the grille of an oncoming car for free, had gone modern. I suspect that he had to piece off a lot of his action to the mob in New Orleans and they probably pulled strings on him sometimes and perhaps eventually they would cannibalise his whole operation, but in the meantime he had taken to drug dealing and big time pimping like a junkyard dog to lamb chops.

  But had he sent the two killers to my house with shotguns? I had a feeling that the net would have to go over a lot of people before I found out. Bubba didn't leave umbilical cords lying around.

  That afternoon my detective's appointment with the sheriff's department was approved. I was given a photo identification card and a gold badge, which were contained inside a soft leather wallet; a packet of printed information on departmental policies and employee benefits, which I threw away later without reading; and a Smith amp; Wesson.38 revolver with worn blueing and two notches filed in the grip. I was to report to work at the sheriff's office at eight the next morning.

  I picked up Alafair at my cousin's house in New Iberia, bought ice cream cones for both of us, and played with her on the swing sets in the park. She was a beautiful little girl when the cloud of violent memories and unanswered questions went out of her eyes. Her face was hot and bright with excitement as I swung her on the chains, high up to the edge of the oak limbs, and she was so dark with tan she seemed almost to disappear in the tree's shadows; then she would swish past me in the sunlight, in a roar of squeals, her dusty bare feet just tickling the earth.

  We went home and fixed catfish poor-boy sandwiches for supper, then I drove down the road and hired an elderly mulatto woman, whom I had known since I was a child, as a live-in baby-sitter. That night I packed my suitcase.

  I woke early the next morning to the rain falling on the pecan trees and drumming on the gallery. Alafair and the baby-sitter were still asleep. I screwed a hasp and a staple into the door and jamb of Annie's and my bedroom, closed the windows, drew the curtains, and padlocked the door.

  Why?

  I can't answer. Maybe because it's unholy to wash away the blood o
f those we love. Maybe because the placement of a tombstone on a grave is a self-serving and atavistic act. (Just as primitive people did, we weight the dead and their memory safely down in the earth.) Maybe because the only fitting monument to those who die violently is the memory of pain they've left behind.

  I loaded the.38 revolver with five shells in the cylinder, set the hammer on the empty chamber, and put it in my suitcase. I drank a cup of coffee and hot milk at the kitchen table, took apart my.45 automatic, oiled it, reamed out the barrel with a bore brush, reassembled it, and stuck a full clip back up into the magazine. Then I opened a fresh box of hollow-points and inserted them one at a time with my thumb into a second clip. They were heavy and round in my hand, and they snapped cleanly against the tension of the loading spring. When they flattened out they could blow holes the size of croquet balls in an oak door, destroy the inside of an automobile, leave a keyhole wound in a human being that no physician could heal.

  A dark meditation? Yes. Guns kill. That's their function. I had never deliberately kicked a situation into the full-tilt boogie. The other side had always taken care of that readily enough. I was sure they would again.

  I called the sheriff at his office. He wasn't in. I left a message that I was on my way to New Orleans, that I would see him in one or two days. I looked in on Alafair, who was sleeping with her thumb in her mouth in front of the window fan, then picked up my suitcase, draped my raincoat over my head, and ran through the mud puddles and dripping trees to my truck.

  The sun was out but it was still raining when I reached New Orleans at eleven o'clock. I parked my truck on Basin and walked into the old St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the warm rain hitting on the brim of my hat. There were rows and rows of white-painted brick crypts, the bottom level of tombs often pressed deep into the earth so that you could not read the French on the cracked and worn marble tablets that covered the coffins. Glass jars and rusted tin cans filled with withered flowers littered the ground. Many of the dead had died during one of the city's nineteenth-century epidemics of yellow fever, when the corpses were collected in wagons and stacked like firewood, sprinkled with lime and interred by convicts in chains who were allowed to get drunk before they began their work. Some of the crypts had been gutted by looters, the pieces of bone and moldy cloth and rotted wood raked out onto the ground. On rainy or cold nights, winos crawled inside and slept in fetal positions with bottles of synthetic wine pulled against their chests.

  New Orleans's wealthiest and most famous were here: French and Spanish governors, aristocrats killed in duels or in the battle against the British of Chalmette, slave dealers and skippers of clipper ships who ran the Yankee blockade of the city. I even found the grave of Dominique You, the Napoleonic soldier of fortune who became Jean Lafitte's chief gunnery officer. But I was interested in only one grave that day, and even when I found it I couldn't be sure that Marie Laveau was inside it (some people said she was buried in an old oven a couple of blocks away, in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2).

  She was known as the voodoo queen of New Orleans during the mid-nineteenth century. She was called a witch, a practitioner of black magic from the Islands, a mulatto opportunist. But regardless, her following had been large, and I suspected that there was still at least one man in this neighborhood who would scoop dirt from her grave and carry it in a red flannel pouch, divine the future by shaking out pigs' bones on the top of her crypt, or one night a month climb into the guttered ruin next to it.

  I had no real plan, and it would probably be a matter of luck if I grabbed Toot in that rundown neighborhood around the cemetery. In fact, I was out of my jurisdiction and didn't even have authority to be there. But if I went through official procedure, I would still be in New Iberia and a couple of New Orleans street cops would ask a couple of questions around the neighborhood, provided they had time, and when that didn't work, a night-shift plainclothes with sheaves of outstanding warrants wrapped in rubber bands on his car seat would add Toot's name to the list of wanted suspects in that area and the upshot would be absolutely nothing.

  Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.

  But I guess my greatest fear was that the locals would scare Toot out of the area, or maybe even nail him and then kick him loose before we could bring him back to New Iberia. It happens. The criminals aren't the only dumb guys in town.

  When I was a homicide detective in the First Division on Basin we busted a serial killer from Georgia who had murdered people all the way across the South. He was a thirty-five-year-old carnival worker, a blond, rugged-looking man of fearsome physical proportions who wore earrings made out of gold crucifixes. He had a third-grade education, drew his signature as a child might, and plugged up his toilet with a blanket and flooded the deadlock section of the jail because he couldn't watch television with the other men in the main holding area; but nevertheless he was able to convince two homicide detectives that he could show them where a young girl was buried in the levee down in Plaquemines Parish. They put him in handcuffs rather than leg and waist chains, and drove him down a board road deep into a swamp.

  But he had hidden a paper clip in his mouth. He picked the lock on his handcuffs, ripped the.357 Magnum out of the driver's shoulder holster, and blew both detectives all over the front windshield.

  He was never caught again. The bucket of a Ferris wheel fell on him in Pocatello, Idaho.

  I spent the day driving and walking the streets of the neighborhood, from Canal all the way over the Esplanade Avenue. I talked with blacks, Chicanos, and blue-collar white people in shoe-shine stands, seven a.m. bars, and corner grocery stores that smelled of chitlins and smoked carp. Yesterday I had been a small-town businessman. Today I was a cop, and I got the reception that cops usually get in a poor neighborhood. They made me for either a bill collector, a bondsman, a burial insurance man, a process server for a landlord, or Mr. Charlie with his badge (it's strange how we as white people wonder at minority attitudes towards us, when we send our worst emissaries among them).

  Once I thought I might be close. An ex-boxer who owned a bar that had a Confederate flag auto tag nailed in the middle of the front door took the wet end of his cigar out of his mouth, looked at me with a face that was shapeless with scar tissue, and said, "Haitian? You're talking about a boon from the Islands, right?"

  "Right."

  "There's a bunch of those cannibals over on North Villere. They eat all the dogs in the neighborhood. They even seine the goldfish out of the pond in the park. Don't stay for supper. You might end up in the pot."

  The yard of the one-story, wood-frame yellow house he directed me to was overgrown with wet weeds and littered with automobile and washing-machine parts. I drove down the alley and tried to see through the back windows, but the shades were pulled against the late-afternoon sun. I could hear a baby crying. Sacks of garbage that smelled of rotting fish were stacked on the back steps, and the diapers that hung on the clothesline were gray and frayed from handwashing. I went around front and knocked on the door.

  A small, frightened black man with a face like a cooked apple came to within three feet of the screen and looked at me out of the gloom.

  "Where's Toot?" I said.

  He shook his head as though he didn't understand.

  "Toot," I said.

  He held his palms outward and shook them back and forth. His eyes were red in the gloom. Two children were coloring in a book on the floor. A wide-hipped woman with an infant on her shoulder watched me from the kitchen door.

  "Vous connaissez un homme qui s'appelle Toot?" I said.

  He answered me in a polyglot of French and English and perhaps African that was incomprehensible. He was also terrified.

  "I'm not from Immigration," I said. "Comprenez? Pas Immigration."

  But he wasn't buying it. I couldn't reach past his f
ear nor make him understand my words, and then I made matters worse when I asked again about Toot and used the term tonton macoute. The man's eyes widened, and he swallowed as though he had a pebble in his throat.

  But it was hopeless. Good work, Robicheaux, I thought. Now these poor people will probably stay frightened for days, shuddering every time an automobile slows out front. They would never figure out who I was and would simply assume that I was only a prelude of worse things to come. Then I had another thought. Police officers and Immigration officials didn't give money to illegal immigrants.

  I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet, creased it lengthwise, and slipped it through the jamb of the latched screen.

  "This is for your baby," I said "Pour vot' enfant."

  He stared at me dumbfounded. When I looked back at the screen from my truck, he and his wife were both staring at me.

  I bought a block of cheese, a half-pound of sliced ham, an onion, a loaf of French bread, and a quart of milk in a Negro grocery store, parked by the cemetery, and ate supper while the rain began falling out of the purple twilight. Over on Basin I saw a neon Jax signal light over a barroom.

  When you don't nail a guy like Toot in his lair, you look for him in the places that take care of his desires. Most violent men like women. The perverts bust them up; contract hit men use them as both reward for their accomplishment and testimony of their power. I knew almost every black and high-yellow pick-up bar and hot-pillow joint in New Orleans. It was going to be a long night.

  I was exhausted when the sun came up in the morning. It had stopped raining at about three a.m., and the pools of water in the street were drying in the hot sunlight, and you could feel the moisture and heat radiate up from the concrete like steam.

  I brushed my teeth and shaved in a filling station rest room. My eyes were red around the rims, my face lined with fatigue. I had gone into a dozen lowlife Negro bars during the night, had been propositioned, threatened, and even ignored, but no one knew a Haitian by the name of Toot.