Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stared up at Robin, whose face and body looked strangely pale in the moonlight that fell through the pecan tree into the room. She slipped her hand under my arm and pulled me up gently from the edge of the bed.

  "It's no good for you in here, Streak," she said quietly. "I'll fix us warm milk in the kitchen."

  "Sure. Is the phone still ringing?"

  "What?"

  "The phone. I heard it ringing."

  "No. It didn't ri-Dave, come on out of here."

  "It didn't ring, huh? When I used to have the DTs, dead people would call me up on the phone. It was a crazy way to be back then."

  That morning I drove back to New Orleans to look for Victor Romero. As I said before, his sheet wasn't much help, and I knew that undoubtedly he was a more intelligent and far more dangerous man that it indicated. However, it was also obvious from his record that he had the same vices and sordid preoccupations and worm's-eye view of the world as did most of his kind. I talked with street people in the Quarter, bartenders, some strippers who hooked on the side, late-hour cabdrivers who pimped for the strippers, a couple of black Murphy artists, door spielers on Bourbon, a fence in Algiers, a terminal junkie who was down to shooting into his wasted thighs with an eye-dropper insulated with the white edge of a one-dollar bill. If they admitted having known Romero, they said they thought he was dead, out of the country, or in federal custody. In each instance, I might as well have held a conversation with a vacant lot.

  But sometimes what you don't hear is a statement in itself. I was convinced he was still in New Orleans-I had heard the streetcar bell in the background when he called-and if he was in town, somebody was probably hiding or supporting him, because he wasn't pimping or dealing. I went down to First District headquarters on the edge of the Quarter and talked to two detectives in vice. They said they had already tried to find Romero through his relatives, and there weren't any. His father had been a fruit picker who disappeared in Florida in the 1960s, and the mother had died in the state mental hospital at Mandeville. There were no brothers or sisters.

  "How about girlfriends?" I said.

  "Outside of whores, you're talking about his fist," one of the detectives said.

  I drove back to New Iberia in a late-afternoon shower. The sun was shining while it rained, and the yellow surface of the Atchafalaya marsh danced with light.

  I turned off at Breaux Bridge and parked my truck on the Henderson levee and stood among the buttercups and blue-bonnets and watched the light rain fall on the bays and the flooded cypress trees. The levee was thick with enormous black and yellow grasshoppers that sprang out of the grass, their lacquered backs shining in the wet light. When I was a boy, my brother and I would trap them with our straw hats, bait our trotline with them at sunset and string it between two abandoned oil platforms, and in the morning the line would be so taut and heavy with mudcat that it would take both of us to lift it clear of the water.

  I was becoming tired of being a policeman again. Hold your soul against an emery wheel long enough, and one day you'll have only air between your hands. And with that thought in mind, I left Alafair with Batist that night and took Robin to the races at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. We ate shrimp and steak in the clubhouse, then went back out to the open-air seats and sat in a box by the finish line. It was a balmy night, and heat lightning flickered all over the southern horizon; the sod, still damp from the afternoon shower, had been freshly raked, and halos of moisture glowed in the arc lamps over head. Robin wore a white cotton sundress with purple and green tiger lilies printed on it, and her tanned neck and shoulders looked smooth and cool in the shadowy light. She had never been to a horse race before, and I let her pick the horses in the first three races. She chose one horse because of the white stockings on its feet, a second because of the jockey's purple silks, a third because she said the jockey's face was shaped like a toy heart. All three placed or showed, and she was hooked. Each time the horses thundered around the last turn and then spread out from the rail as they went into the home stretch, the jockeys whipping the quirts into their flanks, the torn sod flying in the air, she would be on her feet, her arms locked in mine, her breast pressed hard against me, her whole body jiggling and bouncing in excitement. We cashed $178 worth of tickets at the pay window that night, and on the way home we stopped at a late-hour market and bought Batist and his wife a fruit-and-cheese basket with a bottle of Cold Duck in it. When I turned the truck off on the dirt road that led along the bayou south of New Iberia, she was asleep with her head on my shoulder, her hand limp inside my shirt, her lips parted in the moonlight as though she were going to whisper a little girl's secret to me.

  I hadn't been able to find the living, so I thought I might have better luck investigating the dead. The next afternoon Cecil and I drove to the Jungle Room on the Breaux Bridge road to see what we could learn, if anything, about Eddie Keats's connection to Victor Romero. In the blazing sunlight, the white shale parking lot and the purple cinder-block front wall with its painted coconut trees and fingernail-polish-red front door were like a slap across the eyes. But the inside was as dark as a cave, except for the soft lights behind the bar, and it smelled of the insecticide that an Orkin man was spraying with a tank in the corners of the building. Two weary and hung-over-looking women were smoking cigarettes and drinking Bloody Marys at the bar. The bartender was putting long-necked beer bottles in the cooler, his wide back ridging with muscle each time he bent over. He had platinum hair and bronze arms and he wore no shirt and a flowered silver vest that shone like dull tin. High up on the wall was the wire cage where the monkey sat among his peanut hulls and soiled newspapers.

  I showed my badge to the two women and asked them when was the last time they had seen Eddie. Their eyes looked at nothing; they blew smoke up in the air, flipped their ashes into ashtrays, and were as unknowledgeable and lifeless as cardboard cutouts.

  Had they seen Victor Romero lately?

  Their eyes were vague and empty, and their cigarettes moved back into their mouths in slow motion and then back out into the exhaled smoke.

  "I understand the funeral was this morning. Did Eddie get a nice service?" I said.

  "They cremated him and put him in a vase or something. I got up too late to go," one of the women said. Her hair was dyed red and tied back tight against her head like wire. Her skin was white and shiny, tight as a lampshade over the bone, and there was a knot of blue veins in her temple.

  "I bet he was a great guy to work for," I said.

  She turned on the barstool and looked me full in the face. Her brown eyes were liquid and malevolent.

  "I'm supposed to talk to people that buy me a drink," she said. "Then I'll put my hand in your lap and we'll talk about your rising expectations. You want somebody to help you with your rising expectations, officer?"

  I put my office card in front of her.

  "If you ever get tired of comic-book routines, call this number," I said.

  The bartender put the last beer bottle in the cooler and walked toward me on the dockboards behind the bar, pressing a stick of Num-Zit against his tooth and gum.

  "I'm Eddie's brother. You want something?" he said. His tan was almost gold, the kind that comes from applying chemicals to the skin in the sun, and the exposed hair sticking out from under his arms was bleached on the tips. He had the same thick, veined neck, powerful shoulders and adenoidal Brooklyn accent that his brother had had. I asked him when he had seen Eddie Keats last.

  "Two years ago, when he come up to visit in Canarsie," he said.

  "You know Victor Romero?"

  "No."

  "How about Bubba Rocque?"

  "I don't think I know the name."

  "Did you know a Haitian named Toot?"

  "I don't know none of these people. I just come down to take care of Eddie's business affairs. It's a big tragedy."

  "I think you're violating the law, Mr. Keats."

  "What?"

  "I t
hink you're contributing to prostitution."

  His green eyes looked at me carefully. He took a Lucky Strike from a pack on the liquor counter behind him and lit it. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue with his fingernails. He blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

  "What's the game?" he said.

  "No game. I'm just going to see if I can get you closed up."

  "You had some kind of deal with Eddie?"

  "No, I didn't like Eddie. I'm the guy who busted a pool cue across his face. What do you think of that?"

  He looked away and took another puff off his cigarette. Then he focused again on my face, a wrinkled wedge of concern between his eyes.

  "Look, you didn't like my brother, that's your problem. But I ain't Eddie. You got no reason to be down on me, man. I'm a cooperative guy. If I got to piece off a little action, that's cool. I ran a nigger bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I got along with everybody. That ain't easy to do in Bed-Stuy. I want to get along here, too."

  "No. I don't have the problem. You do. You're a pimp and you're cruel to animals. Cecil, come over here," I said.

  Cecil was leaning against the wall by the cue rack, with his arms folded in front of him, a dark light in his face. Like many people of color, he didn't like the class of white people that Keat's brother and the two prostitutes represented to him. He walked toward us with his massive weight, his mouth a tight line, a lump of Red Man as taut as a golf ball inside his jaw. He opened and closed his hands at his sides.

  The bartender stepped backwards.

  "Now wait a minute," he said.

  "Mr Keats wants us to take down that monkey cage," I said.

  "I was't'inking that same't'ing myself," Cecil said, and used the barstool to climb up on the bar. Then he stepped with one foot over onto the liquor counter and shook the monkey cage loose from a hook screwed into the ceiling. His huge shoe knocked over a half-dozen bottles of whiskey that rolled off the counter and crashed on the duckboards. The monkey's eyes were wide with fright, his leathery paws enmeshed in the wire screen. Cecil held the cage out stiffly with one arm and dropped to the floor again.

  "The lady has my office card. You can file a complaint if you don't like it. Welcome to south Louisiana, podjo," I said.

  Cecil and I went outside into the white glare of sunlight on the shale parking lot. Then we walked into the shady grove of live oaks behind the bar and set the cage down in the grass. I unfastened the wire on the door and pulled it open. The monkey sat in his wet tangle of newspaper, too frightened to move, his tail pressed up one side of the cage. Then I tilted the cage forward and he toppled out on the grass, chattered and squeaked once, and climbed high into the fork of an oak, where he looked back at us with his wide eyes. The wind blew the moss in the trees.

  "I like working wit' you, Dave," Cecil said.

  But sometimes when an investigation seems to go nowhere, when the street people stonewall you and lowlife like Victor Romero seems to have Vaseline all over him, a door quietly drifts open on the edge of your vision. It was Saturday, the day after Cecil and I had gone to Keats's bar, and I was reading the Times-Picayune under the canvas umbrella on the dock. Even in the shade, the light was bright on the newsprint and hurt my eyes. Then the sun went behind clouds and the day was suddenly gray and the breeze came up and ruffled the water and bent the cattails and reeds along the bank. I pinched my eyes with my fingers, and glanced again at the state wrap-up column in the second section. At the bottom of the column was a five-line wire service story about the arrest in north eastern Louisiana of a man who was suspected of robbing apartment mailboxes in a welfare project and assaulting elderly people for their social security checks. His name was Jerry Falgout.

  I went inside the bait shop and called the sheriff's office there. The sheriff wasn't in, and the deputy I spoke to, who sounded black, wasn't cooperative.

  "Is this guy a bartender in New Orleans?" I said.

  "I don't know."

  "What did you get on him from Baton Rouge?"

  "You gotta ask the sheriff that."

  "Come on, he's in your custody. You must know something about him. Has he been in Angola?"

  "I don't know. He don't say."

  "What's his bond?"

  "A hundred thousand."

  "Why so high?"

  "He pushed an old woman down the stairs at the project. She's got a fractured skull."

  I was about to give up talking to the deputy and call the sheriff at his home. I tried one more question.

  "What does he tell you?"

  "He don't like it here and he ain't no swinging dick."

  Fifteen minutes later I was in the pickup truck on the road to Lafayette, headed towards the northbound four-lane, while the arching limbs of oak trees swept by overhead.

  The country began to change as I drove north of the Red River. The sugarcane and rice fields were behind me now. The black earth and flooded cypress and oak trees were replaced by pastureland and piney woods, lumber mills and cotton acreage, sandy red roads that cut through limitless pecan orchards, Negro towns of paintless shacks and clapboard beer joints and old brick warehouses built along railroad spurs. The French and Spanish names were gone from the mailboxes and the fronts of general stores, too. I was back into the Anglo-Saxon South, where the streets were empty on Sunday and the Baptist churches were full and Negroes baptized in the river bottoms. It was peckerwood country, where Klansmen still burned crosses on rural roads at night and rednecks had coon-on-a-log contests in which a raccoon was chained by his foot to a log in a pond while people sicked their hunting dogs on him.

  But history had had its joke with some of those northern parishes. Since the 1960s, Louisiana Negroes had become registered voters in large numbers, and in those parishes and towns where whites were a minority, the mayors' offices and the sheriffs' departments and the police juries had become filled with black people. Or at least that was what had happened in the town upriver from Natchez where Jerry Falgout was being held in the old brick jail behind a courthouse that Yankee soldiers had tried to burn during the Civil War.

  It was a poor town, with brick streets and wooden colonnades built over the dilapidated storefronts. On the town square were a bail-bond office, a café, a dime store, and a barber college with a Confederate flag, now flaked and peeling, painted above the door. The elevated sidewalks were cracked and sagging, and the iron tethering rings set in the concrete bled rusty streaks into the gutters. The courthouse building and lawn and the Confederate cannon and the World War I monument were covered in deep shadow by the oak trees that towered above the second story. I walked up the courthouse sidewalk past the scrolled-iron benches where groups of elderly Negro men, in overalls or seersucker slacks, sat and stared out of the shade at the shimmering blaze of light on the street.

  A black deputy walked me out the back door of the courthouse into the visiting room of the jail. The bars on the windows and the grid of iron strips on the main door were layered with both white and yellow paint. The room wasn't air-conditioned, and it was hot and close inside and smelled of the oil on the wood floors and tobacco juice that someone had been spitting in a box of sawdust in one corner. A white trusty in jail denims brought Jerry Falgout down a spiral metal stairs at the back of a dark hall and walked him into the visiting area.

  His bottom lip was purple and swollen, and there was a crust of blood in one of his nostrils. He kept widening his nostril and sniffing as though he were trying to open a blocked nasal passage. At the corner of one eye was a long, red, scraped area, like a smear of dirty rouge. The trusty went back upstairs, and the deputy locked us in. Jerry sat across from me, his hands limp on top of the wooden table, his eyes sullen and pained as they looked into mine. I could smell the sour reek of his dried sweat.

  "What's going on up there?" I said.

  "It's a nigger jail. What do you think?"

  "Were these black people you've been robbing?"

  "I didn't rob nobody man. I was up here visiting my rela
tives."

  "Cut the dogshit, Jerry."

  "Come on, man. You think I'm gonna rob somebody, I'm gonna rob niggers in a welfare project? Some old lady got thrown down a stairs or something. She was already senile, now she's got a fractured skull, and she says I done it. The night screw is her nephew. So guess what he tells all the boons upstairs?"

  "Sounds like a bad situation, all right."

  "Yeah, you're all heart."

  I looked at him a moment before I spoke again.

  "You haven't hit the shower in a while, Jerry."

  He turned his face away from me, and a small circle of color formed in one cheek.

  "They got you made for stuff, partner?" I said.

  "Look, man, I tried to get along. It didn't matter to me if they were colored or not. I tried to make a stinger, you know, a hot plate for these guys so we could warm up the macaroni in the evening. Then this big black bastard walks dripping wet out of the shower and picks up the pot, with his bare feet on the concrete floor. It popped him so hard he looked like somebody shoved a cattle prod up his butt. So he blames me for it. First, he starts throwing shit at me-macaroni and plates and tin cups. Then he starts grinning and tells me his cock is all charged up now. He says he's gonna take a white boy's cherry the next time I come into the shower. And then the other boons are gonna get seconds."

  His face was flushed now, his eyes narrow and glistening.

  I walked over to a rust-streaked sink against one wall and filled a paper cup from the tap. I set the water in front of him and sat back down.

  "Is your mother going to go bond?" I said.

  "She's gotta put up ten grand for the bondsman. She ain't got that kind of gelt, man."

  "How about a property bond?"

  "She ain't got it. I told you." His eyes avoided mine.

  "I see."

  "Look, man, I did five years in Angola. I did it with guys that'd cut your face up with a razor for twenty dollars. I seen a snitch burned up in his cell with a Molotov cocktail. I seen a kid drowned in a toilet because he wouldn't suck some guy off. I'm not gonna get broke by a nigger jail in some backwater shithole."