“Spit in the punch bowl.”
I called the Daily Iberian, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Sierra Club, an ACLU lawyer who delighted in filing class action suits on behalf of minorities against polluters, and a RICO prosecutor with the U.S. attorney general's office.
* * *
After work, Rufus Arceneaux stopped me on the way to my truck in the parking lot. His armpits were dark with sweat rings, his breath as rank as an ashtray.
“I need to talk with you,” he said.
“Do it on the clock.”
“This is private. I got no deep involvement with the Bertrands. I did a little security for them, that's all.”
“What are you telling me, Roof?”
“Any kind of shit coming down on their head, problems with the grease balls it's got nothing to do with me. I'm out. Understand what I'm saying?”
“No.”
I could smell the fear in his sweat. He walked away from me, his GI haircut as slick as a peeled onion against the late sun.
* * *
That evening I helped Batist bail and chain-lock our rental boats and close up the bait shop. The air was dry and hot, the sky empty of clouds and filled with a dull white light like a reflection off tin. My hands, my chest, seemed to burn with an energy I couldn't free myself from.
“What's got your burner on, Streak?” Bootsie said in the living room.
“Rufus Arceneaux's trying to disassociate himself from the Bertrands. He knows something's about to hit the fan.”
“I don't un-” she began.
“Clete and I shook up Patsy Dapolito. He said he could hurt Johnny Carp in ways I hadn't thought about.”
“That psychopath is after Julia and Moleen?”
“I don't know,” I said. I went into the bedroom, picked up my .45 in its holster, and drove into New Iberia.
* * *
It was dusk when I turned into Moleen's drive and parked by his glassed-in back porch. Every light was on in the house, but I saw Moleen out on his sloping lawn, raking pine needles into a pile under a tree. Behind him a shrimp boat with green and red running lights on was headed down Bayou Teche toward the Gulf.
“Is there some reason I should have been expecting you?” he said.
“Patsy Dap.”
“Who?”
“I kicked a two-by-four up his butt yesterday. I think he might try to square a beef with Johnny by going through you.”
“You have problems with your conscience, sir?”
“Not over you.”
“A matter of principle, that sort of thing?”
“I've said what I had to say.”
“You loathed us long before any of this began.”
“Your friends murdered Sonny Boy Marsallus. Either you or Julia ran down and killed a child. One of these days the bill's going to come due, Moleen.”
I walked back toward my truck. Through the lighted windows I could see Julia, in a yellow dress, a drink in her hand, talking brightly on the phone. I heard Moleen behind me, felt his hand bite into my arm with surprising strength.
“Do you think I wanted any of this to happen? Do you know what it's like to wake up every morning with your whole-” He waved his arm vaguely at the air, as a drunk man might. Then he blanched, as though he were watching himself from outside his own skin.
“I don't think you're well, Moleen. Get some help. Go into the witness protection program.”
“What do you suggest about Ruthie Jean?”
“If that's her choice, she can go with you.”
“You have no idea how naive you are, sir,” he said.
He wore a stained white shirt and a pair of baggy seersucker slacks with no belt. For just a moment, in the deepening shadows, with the splayed cane rake propped in his hand, a drop of sweat hanging on his chin, he no longer looked like the man whom I had resented most of my life.
“Is there anything I can do?” I said.
“No, but thank you, anyway, Dave. Good night.”
I held out my business card. He hesitated, then took it, smiling wanly, and inserted it in his watch pocket.
“Good night, Moleen,” I said.
* * *
I woke early Saturday morning and went to Red's Gym in Lafayette and worked out hard on the speed and heavy bag, did three miles on the outdoor track, then drove back home and helped Alafair and Batist fix lunch for the fishermen who returned to the dock during the midday heat. But I couldn't rid myself of a nameless, undefined red-black energy that made my palms ring, the pulse beat in my wrists. The only feeling I'd had like it was on benders of years ago when my whiskey supply was cut off, or in Vietnam, when we were moved into a free-fire zone only to learn that the enemy had gone. I called Moleen's house.
“I'm afraid you've missed him,” Julia said. “Would you have him call me when he comes back?”
“I've just hired an auctioneer to get rid of his things. Oh, I'm sorry, would you like to come out before the sale and pick up a bargain or two?”
“There's a New Orleans grease ball in town named Patsy Dapolito.”
“I'm supposed to be on the first tee by one o'clock. Otherwise, I'd love to chat. You're always so interesting, Dave.”
“We can put a cruiser by your house. There's still time for alternatives, Julia.”
“You're such a dear. Bye-bye now.”
* * *
Later, Alafair went to a picture show in town and Bootsie and I fixed deviled eggs and ham and onion sandwiches and ate them on the kitchen table in front of the floor fan.
“You want to go to Mass this afternoon instead of in the morning?” she said.
“Sure.”
She swallowed a small bite from her sandwich and fixed her eyes on my face. Her hair moved in the breeze from the fan. She started to speak.
“I've made my peace about Sonny,” I said. “He was brave, he was stand-up, he never compromised his principles. That's not a bad recommendation to take into the next world.”
“You're special, Streak.”
“So are you, kiddo.”
After we did the dishes she walked down to the vegetable garden at the end of the coulee, with the portable phone in her hand in case I was down at the dock when Alafair called from the show. A blue Plymouth turned into the drive, and a moment later I saw Terry Serrett walk across the grass toward the gallery. She was dressed in loose-fitting pink-striped shorts, a white blouse, and red sandals; her drawstring beach bag swung against her thigh. Before she mounted the steps, she paused, looked back at the road and down at the dock.
I came to the screen door before she knocked. Her sunglasses were black in the shade; her mouth, which was bright red with lipstick, opened in surprise.
“Oh, there you are!” she said.
“Can I help you?”
“Maybe, if I could come in a minute.”
I looked at my watch and tried to smile. “What's up?” I said. But I didn't open the screen.
She looked awkward, uncomfortable, her shoulders stiffening, an embarrassed grin breaking on the corner of her mouth.
“I'm sorry to ask you this, but I have to use your rest room.”
I opened the door and she walked past me into the living room, her eyes seeming to adjust or focus behind her glasses, as though she were examining the furniture in the room or perhaps in the hallway or in the kitchen.
“It's down the hall,” I said.
A moment later I heard the toilet flush and the water in the lavatory running.
She walked back into the living room.
“That's better,” she said. She examined the room, listening. “It's so quiet. Are you Saturday house-sitting?”
“Oh, I'll be going down to work at the dock in a little while.”
She was absolutely immobile, as though she were caught between two antithetical thoughts, her thickly made-up face as white and as impossible to penetrate as a Kabuki mask.
The phone rang on the table by the couch.
“Excuse me a minute,” I said, and sat down and picked up the receiver from the hook. Through the front screen I saw Batist walking from the dock, up the slope toward the house.
“Dave?” the voice said through the receiver.
“Hey, Clete, what's happening?” I said.
“You remember Helen gave me a Xerox of Sonny's diary? All this time I had it under my car seat. This morning I brought it in and told Terry to stick it in the safe. A little while later I check, guess what, it's gone and so is she. I'm sitting at the desk by the safe, feeling like a stupid fuck, and I look down at the notepad there, you know, the one I took directions to Pogue's place on, and I realize the top sheet's clean. I'm sure I haven't used that pad since Pogue called. Somebody tore off the page that had my pencil impressions on it …You there?“
CHAPTER 36
She pointed the Ruger .22 caliber automatic at my stomach.
”So you're Charlie,“ I said.
She didn't answer. Her body was framed against the light through the window, as though crystal splinters were breaking over her shoulders.
She looked out the window at Batist walking through the shade trees toward the gallery.
”Tell him you're busy, you'll be down at the dock later,“ she said.
”Use those exact words.“
”None of this serves your cause.“
She picked up a pillow from a stuffed chair.
”You need to get rid of the black man,“ she said.
I rose to my feet. She backed against the front wall, the pillow folded across the top of the Ruger. Her mouth was parted slightly, as though she used air only in teaspoons. I stood in the door and called through the screen: ”I'll be down at the dock later, Batist.“
”The air pump gone out on the shiner tank,“ he said.
I hesitated, opened and closed my hands at my sides, felt the trees, the yard, the fractured blue of the sky almost pulling me through the screen. The woman named Terry raised the Ruger level with the side of my head, whispered dryly: ”He won't make three steps after I do you.“
”Give me a few minutes,“ I called.
”One of us got to go in town.“
”I know that, podna.“
”Long as you know,“ he said, and walked back down the slope.
I could hear the wood in the floor creak under my feet, the wind scudding leaves across the gallery.
”Back away from the door,“ the woman said.
”We've still got the original manuscript,“ I said.
”Nobody else cares about it. Back away from the door and sit in the stuffed chair.“
”Fuck you, Terry, or whatever your name is.“
Her face was as opaque as plaster. She closed the ends of the pillow around the Ruger, brought the barrel's tip upward until it was aimed at my throat.
I felt my eyes water and go out of focus.
Outside, Tripod raced on his chain up and down the clothesline. Her face jerked at the sound, then she shifted her weight, glanced quickly at the side window, an incisor tooth biting down on her lip, inadvertently moved the barrel's aim two inches to the side of my throat.
Bootsie fired from the hallway, the Beretta pointed in front of her with both hands.
The first round hit the woman high up in the right arm. Her blouse jumped and colored as though a small rose had been painted in the cloth by an invisible brush. But she swallowed the sound that tried to rise from her throat, and turned toward the hallway with the Ruger still in her hand.
Bootsie fired again, and the second round snapped a brittle hole through the left lens of the black-tinted sunglasses worn by the woman named Terry. Her fingers splayed stiffly at odd angles from one another as though all of her nerve connections had been severed; then her face seemed to melt like wax held to a flame as she slipped down between the wall and the stuffed chair, a vertical red line streaking the wallpaper.
My hands were shaking when I set the safety on the Beretta and removed it from Bootsie's grasp, pulled the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber.
I squeezed her against me, rubbed my hands over her hair and back, kissed her eyes and the sweat on her neck.”
She started toward the woman on the floor.
“No,” I said, and turned her toward the kitchen, the light pouring through the western windows, the trees outside swelling with wind.
“We have to go back,” she said.
“No.”
“Maybe she's still… Maybe she needs…”
“No.”
I made her sit down on the redwood picnic bench while I walked to the garden by the coulee and found the portable phone where she had dropped it in the grass, the transmission button still on. But before I could punch in 911 I heard sirens in the distance and saw Batist come out the back door with a dogleg twenty-gauge in his hand.
“It's okay,” I said. “Send the deputies inside.”
His eyes went from me to Bootsie.
“We're fine here, Batist,” I said.
He nodded, cracked open the barrel of the shotgun, and walked down the drive, the open breech crooked over his forearm, peeling the cellophane off a cigar with his thumbnail.
I put my palm on Bootsie's neck, felt the wetness of her hair, her skin that was as hot as a lamp shade.
“It's going to pass,” I said.
“What?” She looked at me blankly.
“You didn't have a choice. If you hadn't picked up Clete's call, I'd be dead.”
“Clete? Clete didn't… The phone rang out in the garden and he said, ‘Dave's in trouble. I can't help him. It's too far to come now. You have to do it.’“
“Who?”
“I can't handle this. You said you saw his tattoo on the remains in the morgue. You swore you did. But I know that voice, Dave. My God…” But she didn't finish. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and began to weep.
CHAPTER 37
I believe Moleen Bertram was like many of my generation with whom I grew up along Bayou Teche. We found ourselves caught inside a historical envelope that we never understood, borne along on wind currents that marked our ending, not our beginning, first as provincial remnants of a dying Acadian culture, later as part of that excoriated neo-colonial army who would go off to a war whose origins were as arcane to us as the economics of French poppy growers.
When we finally made a plan for ourselves, it was to tear a hole in the middle of our lives.
I don't know why Moleen chose to do it in an apartment off Rampart, near the edge of the Quarter, not far from the one-time quadroon brothels of Storyville and the Iberville Project where Sonny Boy grew up. Perhaps it was because the ambiance of palm fronds, rusting grillwork, and garish pastels that tried to cover the cracked plaster and crumbling brick was ultimately the signature of Moleen's world-jaded, alluring in its decay, seemingly reborn daily amidst tropical flowers and Gulf rainstorms, inextricably linked to a corrupt past that we secretly admired.
At five in the morning I got the call from an alcoholic ex-Homicide partner at First District Headquarters.
“The coroner won't be able to bag it up till after eight, in case you want to come down and check it out,” he said,
“How'd you know to call me?” I said.
“Your business card was on his nightstand. That and his driver's license were about all he had on him. The place got creeped before we arrived.” He yawned into the phone.
“What was he, a pimp?”
The flight in the department's single-engine plane was only a half hour, but the day was already warm, the streets dense with humidity, when Helen Soileau and I walked through the brick-paved courtyard of the building, into the small apartment whose walls were painted an arterial red and hung with black velvet curtains that covered no windows. Moleen and Ruthie Jean lay fully clothed on top of the double bed, their heads wrapped in clear plastic bags. A crime scene photographer was taking their picture from several angles; each time his flash went off their faces se
emed to leap to life inside the folds of the plastic.
“He was a lawyer, huh? Who was the broad?” my ex-partner said. He wore a hat and was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
“Just a farm girl,” I said.
“Some farm girl. She did both of them.”
“She did what?” I said.
“His bag was tied from behind, hers in front. I hope she was a good piece of ass,” he said.
“Shut up,” Helen said. “Did you hear me? Just shut the fuck up.”
* * *
Later, Helen and I turned down an offer of a ride to the airport and instead walked up to Canal to catch a cab. The street was loud with traffic and car horns, the air stifling, the muted sun as unrelenting and eye-watering as a hangover. The crowds of people on the sidewalks moved through the heat, their faces expressionless, the gaze in their eyes introspective and dead, preset on destinations that held neither joy nor pain, neither loss nor victory.
“What are you doing, Streak?” Helen said.
I took her by the hand and crossed to the neutral ground, drew her with me into the belly of the great iron streetcar from the year 1910 that creaked on curved tracks past the Pearl, with its scrolled black colonnade on the corner of Canal and St. Charles, where Sonny Boy used to put together deals under a wood-bladed fan, on up the avenue, clattering past sidewalks cracked by oak roots as thick as swollen fire hoses, into a long tunnel of trees and heliographic light that was like tumbling through the bottom of a green well, to a place where, perhaps, the confines of reason and predictability had little application.
EPILOGUE
Fall is a strange time of year in southern Louisiana. After first frost robins fill the trees along the bayou and camellias that seem fashioned from crepe paper bloom with the colors of spring, even though winter is at hand. The sky is absolutely blue and cloudless, without an imperfection in it, but at evening the sunlight hardens and grows cold, as it might in a metaphysical poem, the backroads are choked with cane wagons on their way to the mill, and the stubble fires on the fields drench the air with an acrid, sweet smell like syrup scorched on a woodstove.
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