Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "You want out of here?"

  "Yeah. You got connections with Jesse Jackson?"

  "Save the hard-guy routine for another day, Jerry. Do you want out of here?"

  "What do you think?"

  "You robbed the mails, which is a federal offense. They'll file against you eventually, but I know somebody who can probably hurry it up. We'll get you into federal custody, and you can forget this place."

  "When?"

  "Maybe this week. In the meantime I'll call the FBI in Shreveport and tell them there's a serious civil rights violation going on here. That ought to get you into isolation until you're transferred to federal custody."

  "What do you want?"

  "Victor Romero."

  "I told you everything I know about the guy. You got a fucking obsession, man."

  "I need a name, Jerry. Somebody who can turn him."

  "I ain't got any. I'm telling you the truth. I got no reason to cover for this cat."

  "I believe that. But you're plugged into a lot of people. You're a knowledgeable man. You sell information. If you remember, you sold me and Robin for a hundred dollars."

  His eyes looked out the barred window at the shade trees on the lawn. He brushed at the dried blood in his nostril with one knuckle.

  "I'm floating round on an ice cube that's melting in a toilet," he said. "What can I tell you? I got nothing to deal with. You wasted your drive up here. Why don't you get those vice cops to help you? They think they know everything."

  "They have the same problem I do. A guy with no family and no girlfriend is hard to find."

  "Wait a minute. What do you mean no family?"

  "That's the information at the First District."

  I saw a confident mean light come back into his eyes.

  "That's why they don't never catch anybody. He's got a first cousin. I don't know the cat's name, but Romero brought him into the bar six or seven years ago. The guy pulled a scam that everybody in the Quarter was laughing about. Some guys robbed Maison Blanche of about ten thousand dollars in Bottany 500 suits. Of course, there's a big write-up about it in the Picayune. So Romero's cousin gets ahold of a bunch of these Hong Kong specials, you know, these twenty-buck suits that turn into lint and threads the first time you dry-clean them. He stops business guys up and down Canal and says, 'I got a nice suit for you. A hundred bucks. No labels. Know what I mean?' I heard he made two or three grand off these stupid shits. After they found out they got burned, they couldn't do anything about it, either."

  "Where is he now?"

  "I don't know. I only saw him once or twice. He's the kind of guy that only makes a move once in a while. I think he ran a laundry or something."

  "A laundry? Where?"

  "In New Orleans."

  "Come on, where in New Orleans?"

  "I don't know, man. What the fuck I care about a laundry?"

  "And you're sure you don't know this guy's name?"

  "Hell, no. I told you, it was a long time ago. I been straight with you. You gonna deliver or not?"

  "Okay, Jerry. I'll make some phone calls. In the meantime, you try to remember this laundry man's name."

  "Yeah, yeah. Y'all always got to go one inch deeper in a guy's hole, don't you?"

  I walked to the iron door and rattled it against the jamb for the deputy to let me out.

  "Hey, Robicheaux, I don't have any cigarettes. How about a deck of Luckies?" Jerry said.

  "All right."

  "Put a piece of paper with how many packs are in the carton, too. That trusty helps himself."

  "You got it, partner."

  The deputy let me out, and I walked back into the breezy area between the jail and the courthouse. I could smell the pines on the lawn, the hydrangeas blooming against a sunny patch of wall, hot dogs that a Negro kid was selling out of a cart on the streetcorner. I looked back through the jail window at Jerry, who sat alone at the wooden table, waiting or the trusty to take him back upstairs, his face now empty and dull and as lifeless as tallow.

  10

  I WAITED UNTIL Monday, when business would be open, and drove to New Orleans in the pink light of dawn and began looking up and down the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line for laundries and dry cleaners. At one time New Orleans was covered with streetcar tracks, but now only the St. Charles streetcar remains in service. It runs a short distance down Canal, the full length of St. Charles through the Garden District, past Loyola and Tulane and Audubon Park, then goes up South Carrollton and turns around on Claiborne. This particular line has been left in service because it travels along what is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the world. St. Charles and the esplanade in its center are covered by a canopy of enormous oak trees and lined on each side by old, iron-scrolled brick homes and antebellum mansions with columned porches and pike-fenced yards filled with hibiscus, blooming myrtle and oleander, bamboo, and giant philodendron. So most of the area along the streetcar line is residential, and I had to look only in a few commercially zoned neighborhoods for a laundry or dry cleaner's that might be operated by Victor Romero's cousin.

  I found only four. One was run by black people, another by Vietnamese. The third one was run by a white couple on Carrollton, but I believed it was set too far back from the street for me to have heard the streetcar bell over the telephone. However, the fourth one, a few blocks southwest of Lee Circle, was only a short distance from the tracks, and its front doors were open to let out the heat from inside, and through the big glass window I could see a telephone on the service counter and behind it a white man thumping down a clothes press in a hiss of steam.

  The laundry was on the corner, with an alley behind it, and by the garbage cans a wooden stairway led up to a living area on the second floor. I parked my pickup across the street under an oak tree in the parking lot of a small take-out café that sold fried shrimp and dirty rice. It was a hot, languid day, and the grass on the esplanade was still wet with dew in the shade, the bark on the palm trees was stained darkly with the water that had leaked from the palm fronds during the night, and the streetcar tracks looked burnished and hot in the sunlight. I went inside the café, called the city clerk's office, and found out the laundry was operated by a man named Martinez. So there was no help by way of connection with family names, except for the fact that the laundry operator was obviously Latin. It was going to be a long wait.

  I opened both doors of the truck to let in the breeze and spent the morning watching the front door and back entrance and stairway of the laundry. At noon I bought a paper-plate lunch of shrimp and rice from the café and ate it in the truck while a sudden shower beat down on the street and the oak tree above my head.

  I was never good at surveillance, in part because I didn't have the patience for it. But more important was the fact that my own mind always became my worst enemy during any period of passivity or inactivity in life, no matter how short the duration. Old grievances, fears, and unrelieved feelings of guilt and black depression would surface from the unconscious without cause and nibble on the soul's edges like iron teeth. If I didn't do something, if I didn't take my focus outside myself, those emotions would control me as quickly and completely as whiskey did when it raced through my blood and into my heart like a dark electrical current.

  I watched the rain drip out of the oak branches and hit on the windshield and hood of my truck. The sky was still dark, and low black clouds floated out of the south like cannon smoke. Annie's death haunted me. No matter who had fired the shotguns in our bedroom, no matter who had ordered and paid for it, the inalterable fact remained that her life had been made forfeit because of my pride.

  Now I had to wonder what it was I really planned if I caught Victor Romero and learned that he had killed Annie. In my mind I saw myself spread-eagling him against a wall, kicking his feet apart, ripping a pistol loose from under his shirt, cuffing him so tightly that the skin around his wrists bunched like putty, and forcing him down into the backseat of a New Orleans police car.


  I saw those images because they were what I knew I should see. But they did not represent what I felt. They did not represent what I felt at all.

  It stopped raining around three, and then, with the sun still shining, it showered again around five and the trees along the avenue were dark green in the soft yellow light. I went inside the café and ate supper, then went back out to the truck and watched the traffic thin, the laundry close, the shadows lengthen on the street, the washed-out sky become pink and lavender and then streaked with bands of crimson in the west. The neon signs came on along the avenue and reflected off the pools of water in the gutters and on the esplanade. A Negro who ran a shoeshine stand in front of a package store had turned on a radio in a window, and I could hear a ball game being broadcast from Fenway Park. The heat had gone out of the day, lifting gradually out of the baked brick and concrete streets, and now a breeze was blowing through the open doors of my truck. The big olive-green streetcar, its windows now lighted, rattled down the tracks under the trees. Then, just as the twilight faded, an electric light went on in the apartment above the laundry.

  Five minutes later, Victor Romero came down the wooden back stairs. He wore a pair of Marine Corps utilities, an oversized Hawaiian print shirt with purple flowers on it, a beret on his black curls. He stepped quickly over the puddles in the brick alley and entered the side door of a small grocery store. I took my.45 from the glove box, stuck it inside my belt, pulled my shirt over the butt, and got out of the truck.

  I had three ways I could go, I thought. I could take him inside the store, but if he was armed (and he probably was, because his shirt was pulled outside his utilities) an innocent person could be hurt or be taken hostage. I could wait for him at the side entrance to the store and nail him in the alley, but that way I would lose sight of the front door, and if he didn't go directly back to the apartment and instead left by the front, I could lose him altogether. The third alternative was to wait in the shadows by my truck, the angular lines of the.45 hard against my stomach, my pulse racing in my neck.

  I opened and closed my hands, wiped them on my trousers, breathed deeply and slowly through my mouth. Then the screen door opened into the alley, and Romero stepped out into the neon light with a sack of groceries in his arm and looked blankly toward the street. His black curls hung down from under his beret, and his skin looked purple in the neon reflection off the bricks. He hitched his belt up with his thumb, looked down toward the other end of the alley, and jumped across a puddle. When he did, he pressed his hand against the small of his back. I watched him climb the stairs, go inside the apartment, close the screen, and walk in broken silhouette past a window fan.

  I crossed the street, paused at the bottom of the stairs, pulled back the receiver on the.45, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber. The pistol felt heavy and warm in my hand. Upstairs I could hear Romero pulling groceries out of his sack, pouring tap water in a pan, clattering pans on a stove. I held on to the bannister for balance and eased up the stairs two at a time while the streetcar rattled down the tracks out on St. Charles. I ducked under the window at the top of the stairs and then flattened myself against the wall between the screen door and the window. Romero's shadow moved back and forth against the screen. Swallows glided above the trees across the street in the sun's last red light.

  I heard him set something heavy and metal on a tabletop, then walk past the screen again and into another room. I took a deep breath, tore open the door, and went in after him. In the hard electric light, he and I both seemed caught as though in the sudden flash of a photographer's camera. I saw the stiff spaghetti noodles protruding from a pot of steaming water on the stove, a loaf of French bread and a block of cheese and a dark bottle of Chianti on the drain-board, an army.45 like mine, except chrome-plated, where he had placed it on a breakfast table. I saw the animal fear and anger in his face as he stood motionless in the bedroom doorway, the tight mouth, the white quiver around his pinched nostrils, his hot black eyes that stared both at me and at the pistol that he had left beyond his grasp.

  "You're busted, sonofabitch! Down on your face!" I yelled.

  But I should have known (and perhaps I already did) that a man who had lived on snakes and insects and crawled alone through elephant grass with an '03 Springfield to the edge of a Vietcong village would not allow himself to be taken by a small-town cop who was foolish enough to extend the game after one side had just lost badly.

  One of his hands rested on the edge of the bedroom door. His eyes stared into mine, his face twisted with some brief thought, then his arm shot forward and slammed the door in my face. I grabbed the knob, turned it, pushed and threw my weight against the wood, but the spring lock was set solidly in the jamb.

  Then I heard him jerk a drawer out on the floor and a second later I heard the clack of metal sliding back on metal. I leaped aside and tumbled over a chair just as the shotgun exploded a hole the size of a pie plate through the door. The buckshot blew splinters of wood all over the kitchen, raked the breakfast table clean of groceries, whanged off the stove and the pot heating on the burner. I was off balance, on my knees, pressed against the wall by the jamb, when he let off two more rounds at a different angle. I suspected the barrel was sawed off, because the pattern spread out like cannister, ripped through the wood as though it had been touched with a chain saw, and blew dishes into the air, water out of the pot, a half-gallon bottle of ketchup all over the far wall.

  But when he ejected the spent casing and fired again, I gave him something to think about, too. I remained flat against the wall, bent my wrist backwards around the door-jamb, and let off two rounds flush against the wood. The recoil almost knocked the pistol from my hand, but a.45 hollow-point fired through one surface at a target farther beyond makes an awe-inspiring impression on the person who happens to be the target.

  "You've had it, Romero. Throw it down. Cops'll be all over the street in three minutes," I said.

  The room was hot and still. The air smelled heavily of cordite and an empty pot burning on the stove. I heard him snick two shells into the shotgun's magazine and then heard his feet thundering up a wooden stairway. I stood quickly in front of the door, the.45 extended in both arms, and fired the whole clip at an upward angle into the bedroom. I chopped holes out of the wood that looked like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth, and even among the explosions of smoke and flame and splintered lead and flying pieces of door I could hear and even glimpse the damage taking place inside the room: a mirror crashing to the floor, a wall lamp whipped into the air against its cord, a water pipe bursting inside a wall, a window erupting into the street.

  The breech locked open, and I ripped the empty clip out of the handle, shoved in another one, slid the top round into the chamber, and kicked the shattered door loose from the jamb. By the side wall, safe from my angle of fire, was a stairway that pulled out of the ceiling by a rope. I pointed my.45 at the attic's dark opening, my blood roaring in my ears.

  The room was quiet. There was no movement upstairs. Particles of dust and threads of fiberboard floated in the light from the broken ceramic lamp that swung back and forth on its cord against the wall. Down the street I heard sirens.

  I had every reason to believe that he was trapped-even though Victor Romero had survived Vietnam, thrived as a street dealer and pimp, gotten out from under federal custody after he probably killed the four people in the plane at Southwest Pass, escaped unhurt in the Toyota when I punched it full of holes with the.45, and managed in all probability to blow away Eddie Keats. It wasn't a record to ignore.

  For the first time I glanced through the side window and saw a flat, tarpapered roof outside. There were air vents on it from the laundry, a lighted neon sign, two peaked enclosures with small doors that probably housed ventilator fans, the rusted top of an iron ladder that dropped down to ground level.

  Then I saw the boards at the edge of the attic entrance bend with his weight as he moved quietly toward the wall and a probable window that overlooked th
e roof. I raised the.45 and waited until one board eased back into place and the edges of the next one moved slightly out of the flat, geometric pattern that formed the ceiling, then I aimed just ahead of the spread between his two feet and began firing. I pulled the trigger five times, deliberately and with calculation, saving three shells in the clip, and let the recoil bring each round farther back from the point of his leading foot and the attic entrance.

  I think he screamed at one point. But I can't be sure. I didn't really care, either. I've heard that scream before; it represents the failure of everything, particularly of hope and humanity. You hear it in your dreams; it replays itself even when they die silently.

  He fell back through the attic opening and crashed on the floor by the foot of the ladder. He lay on his back, one leg bent under him, his eyes filled with black light, his mouth working for air. A round had cut off three fingers of his right hand. The hand trembled with shock on the floor, the knuckles rattling on the wood. There was a deep sucking wound in his chest, and the wet cloth of his shirt fluttered in the wound each time he tried to breathe. Outside, the street was filled with sirens and the revolving blue and red lights of emergency vehicles.

  He was trying to speak. His mouth opened, his voice clicked in the back of his throat, and blood and saliva ran down his cheek into his black curls. I knelt by him, as a priest might, and turned my ear toward his face. I could smell his dried sweat, the oil in his hair.

  "… did her," he rasped.

  "I can't understand."

  He tried again, but he choked on the saliva in his throat. I turned his face to the side with my fingers so his mouth would drain.

  His lips were bright red, and they formed a wet smile like a clown's. Then the voice came out in a long whisper, smelling of bile and nicotine: "I did your wife, motherfucker."

  He was dead two minutes later when three uniformed cops came through the apartment door. A flattened round had caught him in the lower back, tunneled upward through his trunk, and torn a hole in his lung. The coroner told me that the spine had probably been severed and that he was paralyzed when he crashed down the ladder. After the paramedics had lifted him on a stretcher and taken him away, his blood left a pattern like horsetails on the wooden floor.