Burning Angel dr-8

by James Lee Burke

  Then his eyes clicked away from mine.

  ”Nope,“ I said.

  He wiped the front of his teeth with his index finger, rubbed it dry on his knee. His gaze roved around the room.

  ”This place is a shithole,“ he said.

  ”Sonny's dead,“ Clete said. ”You put the whack out, you ought to know, John.“

  ”You're a Magazine Street mick, Purcel, it ain't your fault you always got your foot up your own ass, so I don't take offense,“ Johnny said.

  ”But, Dave, you got a brain. I'm asking you, no, I'm begging you, if you guys are trying to cowboy Patsy, or fuck with me, or fuck with anybody in my crew, stop it now. I'm in legitimate business. We put a lot of the old ways behind us, but don't provoke me.“

  His words were those of a man in control. But I could smell a peculiar odor on his breath, like sour baby formula laced with booze.

  ”It's not us,“ I said.

  ”The guy was a disease. Nobody else cared about him,“ he said.

  ”Sonny was stand-up, Johnny. He took his own bounce and he didn't need Scotch and milk and a couple of chippies to get him through the morning,“ I said.

  Clete lit a cigarette with his Zippo, his broad shoulders hunched, seemingly unconcerned about the drift of the conversation, but through the smoke his eyes were fastened on Johnny's neck.

  ”You've developed a bad mouth, Dave. I'm here for accommodation, you don't want to listen, fuck you. Just don't try to run no games on me,“ Johnny said.

  ”The problem's inside you, John. It's not with me or Clete.“

  ”You got an office and some furniture Nig Rosewater couldn't give away in colored town and you're a shrink now?“

  ”You've got blood on your hands. It doesn't wash off easily,“ I said.

  He rose from his chair, slipped two twenty-dollar bills out of his wallet, and laid them on Clete's desk.

  ”Yall go up the street, have a nice lunch,“ he said, and walked out into the sunlight.

  Clete tipped his cigarette ashes in the tray. Then he scratched his eyebrow with his thumbnail, as though he didn't know which thought in his head to express first. ”You nailed him on that stuff about his chippies. He pays them a hundred bucks to blow him so he won't get AIDS,“ he said. He tilted back in his swivel chair and stared at the wall. ”I can't believe this, the first person in our office is a psychotic grease ball He mashed out his cigarette and went outside with the two twenties wadded in his fist.

  He caught the limo just as it was leaving the curb and knocked with his ring on the charcoal-tinted glass. Johnny Carp was bent forward on the seat when he rolled down the window, a smear of milk on his mouth.

  “Hey, John, give this to your broads for their oral hygiene,” Clete said, and bounced the bills like soiled green Kleenex off Johnny Carp's face.

  * * *

  I cut the engine on the outboard and Alafair and I drift on the wake into a sandbar, then walk toward a line of willow and cypress trees.

  The sun is white, straight overhead, in a blue, cloudless sky. Behind the lacy movement of the trees, in a trapped pool of water, is the rusted, purple outline of a wrecked tow barge. I set up a cardboard box at the end of the sandbar, walk back to the boat, and unzip the carrying case from the Beretta nine-millimeter.

  Once again, I show her the safeties and how the trigger mechanism disengages from the hammer, let her work the slide; then I take it from her and slip an empty magazine into the butt.

  “Okay, what's the rule, Alf?” I say.

  “Never assume a gun is unloaded. But never assume it's loaded, either.”

  “You've got it. Do you remember how to clear the action?”

  She pushes the release button on the butt, drops the magazine, works the slide twice, then peers into the empty chamber.

  “Terrific,” I say.

  This time I give her a loaded magazine. I stand behind her while she chambers a round and takes aim with both hands. She fires once and throws sand in the air by the side of the cardboard box.

  “Aim a little higher and to your right, Alf.”

  She misses twice and the rounds whang into the barge back in the trees. But the next round leaves a hole the size of a pencil in the cardboard.

  She starts to lower the pistol.

  “Keep shooting till you're empty, Alf.”

  The Beretta spits the empty casings into the sunlight, pow, pow, pow, each report echoes across the water. The breech locks open; a tongue of cotton white smoke rises from the chamber. The box is tilted sideways now, its clean surfaces peppered with black holes.

  When Alafair smiles at me, I wonder if I have given away a knowledge that should never belong to a child.

  She wants to reload.

  * * *

  It rained in the predawn hours this morning and the trees in the swamp were gray and shaggy with mist. Then the sun rose out of the steam and broke against the seal of clouds like a flattened rose. I drop into the office on Main, a sojourner, still not quite accepting the reality of being a fired cop. The door is open to let in the clean smell of the rain tumbling out of the sunlight.

  Clete is hooking paper clips in a chain on his desk blotter. I can feel his eyes flicking back and forth between his preoccupation and the side of my face.

  “When you chase skips, you've got latitude no cop does,” he says. “You can cross state lines, bust in doors without a warrant, pick up one perp to squeeze another. The Supreme Court will get a hand on it eventually, but right now it's kind of like being on point in a free-fire zone.”

  He knows I'm not listening, but he continues anyway.

  “We'll have a secretary in here tomorrow. I'm transferring some of the business from the New Orleans office. It just takes a while to make things come together,” he says.

  I nod absently, try to avoid looking at my watch.

  “You bother me, big mon,” he says.

  “Don't start it, Clete.”

  “It's not Sonny's death. It's not getting canned from your department, either. Even though that's what you want me to think.”

  “I'm not up to it.” I splay my fingers in the air.

  “The big problem is one that won't go away, Dave. You can't accept change. That's why you always got a firestorm inside you, that's why you ripped up Patsy Dap. You got to ease up, noble mon. You don't have a shield anymore. You smoke the wrong dude, you go down on a murder beef. Take it from a cat who's been there.”

  “I think I'll go back to the bait shop now,” I say.

  “Yeah, I guess you better.”

  “I apologize for my attitude. You've been a real friend about this partnership.”

  “No big deal. My business in New Orleans is going down the drain, anyway.”

  Outside, the rain is blowing in the sunlight. When I look back through the office window, Clete is drinking coffee, staring at nothing, alone in the silence, a new, virtually unused white telephone on his army surplus desk.

  I feel a pain in my chest and go back inside the office. Together, we walk down Main to Victor's for lunch.

  * * *

  Johnny Carp had made a pilgrimage to New Iberia, his second attempt at reconciliation. He was a mercurial head case a functioning drunk, a physiological caricature, a libidinous nightmare whose sexual habits you tried never to think about, but, most important, Johnny, like all drunks, was driven by a self-centered fear that made his kind see blood in tap water and dead men walking out of the surf.

  I called Helen Soileau at the sheriff's department.

  “What's the deal on Patsy Dapolito?” I asked.

  “He has a rental dump by a pipe yard on the Jeanerette Road. Somebody popped one right through his bedroom window.”

  “It was a nine-millimeter?”

  “Or a .38. It was pretty beat up. Why?”

  “Johnny Carp thinks Sonny was the shooter.”

  “Big reach from the salt.” She paused. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Sonny's nine-millimeter is still in Possession
s, isn't it?” I said.

  “I hate to admit this, but I asked that question myself. No.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “We didn't charge him with carrying a concealed weapon because we busted him in Orleans Parish. So when he skated on the murder beef, he was home free and got his nine back. A Smith & Wesson, right?”

  “What's the status on Dapolito?”

  “We painted his doorknobs with roach paste so he can't go outside. Come on, Dave, what status? Even New Orleans doesn't know how to deal with this guy. We get three or four calls a day on him. He took a leak in the washbasin at Mulate's.”

  “Thanks for your help, Helen.”

  “It's not right what the old man did. I told him what I thought, too.”

  “You shouldn't take my weight.”

  She was quiet, as if she was deciding something, perhaps a choice about trust, which was always Helen's most difficult moment.

  “I've got an awful feeling, Streak. It's like somebody put out a cigarette on my stomach lining. I get up in the morning with it.”

  “Feeling about what?”

  “They tore Delia Landry apart with their bare hands. They took down Sonny Marsallus in broad daylight. You watch your butt, you understand me?”

  “Don't worry about me.”

  I heard her hand clench and squeak on the receiver.

  “I'm not explaining myself well,” she said. “When I dropped those two perps, I saw my face on theirs. That's how I feel now. Do you understand what I'm talking about?”

  I told her it was her imagination, to get away from that kind of thinking. I told her Batist was waiting for me down at the dock.

  My answer was not an honest one.

  * * *

  Later, I sat in the backyard and tried to convince myself that my evasiveness was based on concern for a friend. A physician turns his eyes into meaningless glass, shows no expression when he listens through a stethoscope, I told myself. But that wasn't it. Her fear, whether for me or herself, had made me angry.

  When you buy into premonitions, you jinx yourself and everyone around you. Ask anyone who's smelled its vinegar reek in the man next to him.

  I remembered a helicopter hovering against a fiery red ball that could have been heated in a devil's forge, its blades thropping monotonously, the red dust and plumes from smoke grenades swirling into the air. But for those of us who lay on poncho liners, our wounds sealed with crusted field dressings and our own dried fluids, the dust was forming itself into an enormous, animate shape-domed, slack-jawed, leering, the nose a jagged hole cut in bone, a death's head that ballooned larger and larger above the clearing and called our names through the churning of the blades, the din of voices on the ground, the popping of small-arms fire that was now part of somebody else's war, just like the watery sound of a human voice speaking into an electric fan.

  And if you did not shut out the syllables of your name, or if you looked into the face of the man next to you and allowed the peculiar light in his eyes to steal into your own, your soul could take flight from your breast as quickly as a dog tag being snipped onto a wire ring.

  * * *

  The sheriff called me early the next morning.

  “I can't just deal you out, Dave. You need to be told this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sweet Pea and a black woman. We're not sure who she is yet.”

  “Could you start over?” I said.

  During the night a farmer had seen a cone of fire burning in an oak grove out by Cade. The heat was so intense the trees were scaled and baked into black stone. After the firemen covered the Cadillac with foam and stared through the smoke still billowing off the exploded tires, they made out the carbonized remains of two figures sitting erectly on the springs of the front seat, their lipless mouths wide with secrets that had risen like ash into the scorched air.

  “The pathologist says double-ought bucks,” the sheriff said.

  But he knew that was not the information I was waiting for.

  “Sweet Pea had on a locket with his mother's name engraved on it,” he said. Then he said, “I don't have any idea who she is, Dave. Look, I've already tried to find Ruthie Jean. She's disappeared. What else can I tell you? I don't like making this damn phone call.”

  I guess you don't, I thought.

  CHAPTER 24

  I called Clete at the small house he had rented by City Park and asked him to meet me at the office on Main. When I got there the newly hired secretary was hanging a curtain on the front window. She was a short, thick-bodied blond woman, with orange rouge on her cheeks and a pleasant smile.

  “Clete didn't get here yet?” I said.

  “He went for some coffee. Are you Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Yes. How do you do? I'm sorry, I didn't get your name.”

  “Terry Serrett. It's nice to know you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “You're not from New Iberia, are you?”

  “No, I grew up in Opelousas.”

  “I see. Well, it's nice meeting you,” I said. Through the window I saw Clete crossing the street with a box of doughnuts and three sealed paper cups of coffee. I met him at the door.

  “Let's take it with us,” I said.

  He drove with one hand and ate with the other on the way out to Cade. The top was down and his sandy hair was blowing on his forehead.

  “How are you going to pay a secretary?” I said.

  “She works for five bucks an hour.”

  “That's five bucks more than we're making,” I said.

  He shook his head and smiled to himself.

  “What's the joke?” I asked.

  “We're going out to see where Sweet Pea Chaisson got turned into a human candle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we on somebody's clock? Am I a dumb shit who's missed something?”

  “You want to go back?”

  He set his coffee cup in a wire ring that was attached to his dashboard and tried to put on his porkpie hat without losing it in the wind.

  “You think they're wiping the slate clean?” he said.

  “Their object lessons tend to be in Technicolor.”

  “Why the black woman?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time, maybe. Unless the dead woman is Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”

  “I don't get it. Black people keep showing up in the middle of all this bullshit. Let's face it, mon. Ripping off the food stamp brigade isn't exactly the big score for these guys.”

  “It's land.”

  “For what?”

  I didn't have an answer.

  * * *

  We drove down a gravel road through sugar and cattle acreage, then turned into an empty field where a section of barbed wire fence had been knocked flat. The weeds in the field were crisscrossed with tire tracks, and in the distance I could see the oak grove and a bright yellow strand of crime scene tape jittering in the wind.

  Clete parked by the trees and we got out and walked into the shade. The fire-gutted, lopsided shell of Sweet Pea's convertible was covered with magpies. I picked up a rock and sailed it into the frame; they rose in an angry clatter through the leafless branches overhead.

  Clete fanned the air in front of his face.

  “I don't think the ME got everything off the springs,” he said.

  “Look at this,” I said. “There's glass blown into the backseat and a partial pattern on top of the door.” I inserted my little finger into a ragged hole at the top of the passenger door, then looked at the ground for empty shell casings. There weren't any.

  “What a way to get it,” Clete said.

  “You can see the angle of fire,” I said. “Look at the holes in the paneling just behind the driver's seat.” I aimed over the top of my extended arm and stepped backward several feet. “Somebody stood just about where I'm standing now and fired right into their faces.”

  “I don't see Sweet Pea letting himself get set up like this,” Clete said.

  “Somebody he trusted got in the
backseat. Another car followed. Then the dice were out of the cup.”

  “I got to get out of this smell,” Clete said. He walked back into the sunlight, spit in the weeds, and wiped his eyes on his forearm.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “In ”Nam I saw a tank burn. The guys inside couldn't get out. I don't like remembering it, that's all.“

  I nodded.

  ”So I probably signed Sweet Pea's death warrant when I put him in the trunk of my car,“ he said. ”But that's the breaks, right? One more piece of shit scrubbed off the planet.“ With his shoe he rubbed the place where he had spit.

  ”You blaming yourself for the woman?“ I asked.

  He didn't have time to answer. We heard a car on the gravel road. It slowed, then turned through the downed fence and rolled across the field, the weeds rattling and flattening under the bumper.

  ”I know that guy, what's his name, he thinks we should be buddies because we were both in the Crotch,“ Clete said.

  ”Rufus Arceneaux,“ I said.

  ”Oh, oh, he doesn't look like he wants to be friends anymore.“

  Rufus cut the engine and got out of the car. He wore tight blue jeans and a faded yellow polo shirt and his pilot's sunglasses, with his badge and holster clipped on a western belt. A small black boy of about ten, in an Astros baseball cap and oversize T-shirt, sat in the backseat. The windows were rolled up to keep the air-conditioning inside the car. But the engine was off now and the doors were shut.

  ”What the hell do you think you're doing?“ Rufus said.

  ”The sheriff called me this morning,“ I said.

  ”He told you to come out here?“

  ”Not exactly.“

  ”Then you'd better get out of here.“

  ”Did y'all find out who the broad was?“ Clete said.

  ”It's not your business, pal,“ Rufus said.

  ”Pal. Terrific,“ Clete said. ”Who's the kid? He looks like he's about to melt.“

  ”Did y'all find any shell casings?“ I said, and opened the back door to Rufus's car and brought the little boy outside. There was a dark, inverted V in his blue jeans where he had wet his pants.

  ”I don't know what it is with you, Robicheaux,“ Rufus said. ”But, to be honest, I'd like to beat the living shit out of you.“