DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  "No, you're not going to get away with that, Drew. If you and Weldon weren't my friends, both of you would have been in jail a long time ago for obstruction of justice."

  "I guess we're very fortunate to have a friend such as you. I'm going to shut the door now. I really wish you had had some tea. I was looking forward to it."

  "Listen, Drew-"

  She closed the door softly in my face, then I heard her turn the bolt in the lock.

  I went back to my truck, took a screwdriver and three big Ziploc bags off the seat, and walked through the side yard to the gazebo. The latticework was thick with bugle and grapevine, and the myrtle bushes planted around the base were in full purple flower. I knelt down in the moist dirt and probed through the bushes until I found the two pieces of brick I had seen previously. I dropped them both in a plastic bag, then found the broken slat from an apple crate and picked it up carefully by the edges. There was a split from the top down to a nail hole in the center of the slat. I turned it over between my fingers. Even in the deep shade I could see a dark smear around the hold on the opposite side. I slipped the slat into another bag and worked my way back out of the myrtle bushes onto the grass.

  I glanced behind me and saw her face at a window. Then it disappeared behind a curtain.

  Each of the steps on the gazebo had been carpentered with a two-inch gap between the horizontal and perpendicular boards. I tried looking through the openings into the darkness below the gazebo but could see nothing. I used the screwdriver to unfasten a section of latticework at the bottom of the gazebo and lifted it out with my fingers. It was moist and cool inside and smelled of standing water and pack-rat nests. I reached underneath the steps and touched the cold metal head of a ball-peen hammer.

  I wondered if she had tried to remove it before I had arrived. I worked it out from under the steps with the screwdriver and carefully fitted it into the third plastic bag, then walked up to the screened-in porch on the side of the house.

  When she didn't answer, I banged louder with the side of my fist against the wall.

  "What is it?" she said, jerking open the door, her face pinched with both anger and defeat.

  I let her take a hard look at the two broken bricks, the split apple-box slat, and the ball-peen hammer.

  "I'm going to tell you a speculation or two, Drew, but I don't want you to say anything unless you're willing to have it used against you later. Do you understand that?"

  Her mouth was a tight line, and I could see her pulse beating in her neck.

  "Do you understand me, Drew? I don't want you to say anything to me unless you're completely aware of the jeopardy it might put you in. Are we perfectly understood on that?"

  "Yes," she said, and her voice almost broke in her throat.

  "You punched the nail through the slat, and you laid the slat across the two bricks. Then you put your hand under the nail and drove it all the way through into the step. The pain must have been terrible, but before you passed out, you splintered the slat away from the nail and shoved it and the bricks into the myrtle bushes. Then you pushed the hammer through the gap in the step."

  Her eyes were filming.

  "Your prints are probably all over the bricks and the slat, but that won't mean anything in itself," I said. "But I have a feeling there won't be any prints on the hammer except yours. That one might be hard to explain, particularly if there are blood traces on the hammer and we know for sure it's the one that was used to drive the nail into the gazebo floor."

  She was breathing hard now, her throat was aflame with color, and her eye shadow had started to run. She licked her lips and started to speak.

  "This time listen to me for a minute," I said. "I'm going to take this stuff down to the prosecutor's office and they can make of it what they want. In the meantime I recommend you drop the charges against Joey Gouza. Do it without comment or explanation."

  She nodded her head. Her eyes were glistening, and she kept shutting them to clear the tears out of the lashes.

  "It happens all the time," I said. "People change their minds. If anyone tries to build a case against you, you keep an attorney at your side and you turn to stone. You think you can do that?"

  "Yes."

  I wanted to put my arms around her shoulders. I wanted to press her against me and touch her hair.

  "Will you be okay?" I asked.

  "Yes, I believe I'll be fine."

  "Call Weldon."

  "I will."

  "Drew?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't mess with Gouza anymore. You're too good a person to get involved with lowlife people."

  She kept closing and unclosing her good hand. Her knuckles were white and as tight against her skin as a row of nickels.

  "You liked me, didn't you?" she said.

  "What?"

  "Before you went away to Vietnam. You liked me, didn't you?"

  "A woman like you makes me wish I could be more than one person and have more than one life, Drew."

  I saw the sunlight bead in her eyes.

  A few minutes earlier she had asked me whose side I was on. I felt I knew the answer now. The truth was that I served a vast, insensate legal authority that seemed determined to further impair the lives of the reckless and vulnerable while the long-ball hitters toasted each other safely at home plate.

  That night the sheriff called me at home and told me that Joey Gouza was being moved from the hospital back to a jail cell. He also said that in light of the evidence I had found at Drew Sonnier's, the prosecutor's office would probably drop charges against Gouza in the morning.

  When I got to the jail on East Main early the next morning, the sun was yellow and hazy through the moss-hung canopy of oak trees over the street, and the sidewalks were streaked with dew. I left my seersucker coat on when I went inside and stopped in the men's room. I took my.45 out of the holster, pulled the clip out of the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and slipped the pistol and the clip in the back of my belt under my coat. Then I unclipped the holster from my belt and dropped it in my coat pocket.

  I waited for the guard to open the barred door that gave onto the row of cells where Joey Gouza was housed.

  "You want to check your weapon, Dave?" he asked.

  "They've got it up front."

  "Somebody said he might walk. Is that true?"

  "Yep."

  "How the hell'd that happen?"

  "Long story."

  "The sonofabitch is eating his soft-boiled eggs now. Can you beat that? Fucking soft-boiled eggs for a piece of shit like that."

  He opened the door, then walked with me down the corridor to Gouza's cell and turned the key in the lock.

  "You sure you want inside with this guy?" he asked. "He won't shower. He thinks somebody's gonna shank him if he leaves his cell."

  "It's all right. I'll yell when I'm ready," I said.

  The guard closed the door behind me and went away.

  Gouza lay on his bunk in his jockey underwear. A band of dark hair grew in a line from his navel to his sternum. An empty bowl streaked with egg yolk and a wastebasket filled with torn and stained newspaper sat on the floor by his bunk. His face looked as pale as it had been in the hospital.

  His seemingly lidless black eyes studied me as I pulled up the single chair in the cell and sat on it.

  "They're going to kick you loose," I said.

  "Yeah, I owe you one."

  "You really believe that somebody is going to do you in the shower?"

  "Put it this way. One guy in this place got poisoned. Me. Your people say it was an accident. Maybe so. But I don't want any more accidents. Does that seem reasonable?"

  I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs. "I've got a problem," I said.

  "You've got a problem?"

  "Yeah, a serious one, Joey."

  "What are you talking-"

  "You're a made guy. A made guy worries about respect, about what people think of him."

  "So?"

&nb
sp; "When you get out of here, you'll probably have a nice dinner somewhere, maybe drink a glass of wine, maybe do a few lines with one of your whores. Then after a while all kinds of thoughts will start to turn over in your head. Are you with me?"

  "No."

  "You'll think about how you were humiliated, how a woman set you up for a fall, how Elmer Fudd and company turned you into a sideshow. Then you'll remember how you got scared and asked for your own hot plate and canned food and told the screw you wanted to stay in lockup. You'll wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night, then you'll wonder if the people around you are figuring you for a guy who's about to lose it, maybe a guy who's ripe for replacement. That's when you'll decide it's time for an object lesson. So that's what's been on my mind, partner. Sooner or later we'll have a visit from one of your people, a button man from Miami or maybe some AB sex deviate you turn loose on women."

  He leaned over the bunk and spat into the wastebasket, then took a sip from a brown bottle of chalky medicine and screwed the cap back on.

  "Think anything you want," he said. "I got nothing on my mind except getting treatment for my ulcers before they have to cut out half my stomach. Any beef I got against this shithole I let my lawyers handle with a civil suit. You can thank Fudd and the broad if y'all have to pass a sales tax to pay off the damages."

  "What I'm really trying to do is apologize to you, Joey."

  He raised his elon ated head up on his elbow. The skin at the corner of his mouth wrinkled with a smile.

  "You're gonna apologize? You're good, man. You ought to get yourself some kind of nightclub act. I can probably book you into a couple of places."

  "Because I was going to pull a cheap ruse on you. I was going to treat you like a punk instead of a made guy. So I'm apologizing."

  "You talk like you got clap in your brain or something. What's with you? You never make sense. Can't you talk to people like you got sense?"

  I reached behind me and pulled the.45 from under my coat. I rested it on my thigh.

  "You ain't supposed to have that in here, man," he said.

  "You're right. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I want to apologize for what I had in mind."

  He was rigid in the bunk. I stared intently at the floor, then cocked the hammer with my thumb and raised the barrel and fitted it into the hollow of his cheek. His eyes closed, then opened again, and his Adam's apple worked up and down with a dry click in his throat.

  I squeezed the trigger, and the hammer snapped on the empty chamber. He gasped, and his face jerked like he'd been slapped.

  "I was going to pull a cheap trick like that to scare you," I said. "But you're a made guy, Joey, and you deserve more respect than I've shown you. And even if I rattled you a little bit, you'd be back, wouldn't you?" I winked at him.

  "You'd really rip some ass, right or wrong?"

  A sweat had broken on his ashen face.

  "You're a head case, man," he said. "You stop this shit. You get the fuck out of my life."

  I pulled the clip from my belt and let it rest against my thigh. The hollow-points were loaded tightly against the spring. I rubbed my thumb casually over the top round in the clip. The fingers of both my hands made tiny, delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil on the steel surfaces of the pistol and the clip. I could hear him breathing loudly through his nose and smell the odor of fear that rose from his armpits.

  "You weren't in the service, were you?" I said.

  "Who gives a shit?"

  "Did you ever kill anybody close up?"

  He didn't answer. His eyes went from my hands to my face and back to my hands again. I inserted the clip in the magazine, pulled back the receiver, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber.

  "I'm going to give you your chance," I said.

  "What?"

  "for do me. Right in this cell. I lied to the guard and told him I'd already checked my weapon. So everybody will believe you when you tell them I tried to kill you, that you got the weapon away from me and did me instead."

  "I ain't playing this game."

  "Yes, you are."

  "I want the screw."

  "It's just you and me, Joey. Here," I said, and I laid the.45 on the striped mattress next to his arm.

  His hands were shaking. A drop of sweat fell from the point of his chin.

  "I ain't touching it," he said.

  "It's the only chance you'll get at me. If you send anybody back to Iberia Parish to square a beef, I'll be coming through your door two hours after it happens. It'll be under a black flag, too, Joey. No warrant, no rules, just you and me and maybe Clete Purcel as a Lucky Strike extra. Are you going to pick it up?"

  He pressed one hand against his naked stomach and grimaced with a spasm that made his eyes close.

  "You quit doing this to me. You fucking lay off," he said hoarsely.

  I reached out and took the.45 back and eased the hammer back down. I tried to hide the deep breath that I drew into my lungs.

  He leaned his head over the bunk and vomited into the wastebasket. The hair on his bare shoulders was damp with sweat. I wet some paper towels in the washbasin and handed them to him.

  "Any vendetta you have against the Sonniers ends here, Joey," I said. "Are we understood on this?"

  He sat up on the bunk and took the crumpled towels away from his mouth.

  "I'll give you what you want," he said.

  "I'm not quite following you."

  "I'll give you the guy you want. You get the guy."

  "Which guy?"

  "I'll deliver him up. Packaged. You get the guy."

  " 'Packaged'? What do you mean 'packaged'?"

  "Don't act like a stupid fuck. You know what I mean."

  "You're coming to some wrong conclusions. You don't make terms, you don't do our job."

  "You got a dead cop. You want it squared. So the beef gets squared. Now, you stop pulling my insides out."

  He hung his head over the wastebasket, one hand trembling on his temple. His long neck looked like a bent swan's.

  "You can't walk out of here with that kind of misunderstanding, Joey. Do you hear me? This isn't a barter situation. Are you listening to me? Look at me."

  But he continued to stare between his legs, his eyes glazed and dull, focused inward on his own pain.

  That evening, eleven hours after Joey Gouza was kicked loose from custody, someone tried to garrote Weldon Sonnier in his boathouse with a strand of piano wire.

  CHAPTER 13

  The AA meeting room upstairs in the Episcopalian Tchurch is foul with cigarette smoke. On the walls are framed photographs of our founders, whom we still affectionately call Dr. Bob and Bill W., as though their anonymity need be protected even in death. Also on the wall are the twelve steps of AA recovery and the simple two axioms that we attempt to live by: ONE DAY AT A TIME and EASY DOES IT.

  The meeting is over now, and volunteers are washing coffee cups, emptying ashtrays, and wiping down the tables. I sit by a big floor fan that is blowing the smoke out the windows into the early-morning air. My AA sponsor, Tee Neg, who looks like a mulatto, sits across from me. Before he bought the bar and poolroom that he now owns on East Main, he was a pipeliner and oil-field roughneck, and three fingers on his right hand were snipped off by a drilling chain. He's uneducated, can barely read and write, but he's tough-minded and intelligent and unfailing in his loyalty to me.

  "You mad at somet'ing again, Dave. That ain't good," he says.

  "I'm not mad."

  "We get drunk at somebody. Or maybe at somet'ing. That's the way it works. It's them resentments mess us up. Don't be telling me different, no."

  "I know that, Tee Neg."

  "It ain't worrying about Bootsie this time. It's somet'ing else, ain't it?"

  "Maybe."

  "You want to know what I Cink's on your mind, podna?"

  "I have a feeling you're going to tell me, anyway."

  "You're studying on this case all the time. You Cink that's it, b
ut it ain't. You bothered by the way Cings are, the way we got trouble with the colored people all the time, you bothered 'cause it ain't like it used to be. You want soul' Lou'sana to be like it was when you and me and yo' daddy went all day and went everywhere and never spoke one word of English. You walk away when you hear white people talking bad about them Negro, like that bad feeling ain't in their hearts. But you keep pretend it's like it used to be, Dave, that these bad Cings ain't in white people's hearts, then you gonna be walking away the rest of yo' life."