The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Don’t get any deeper in this.”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it. Bertrand started talking about bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. He said they glowed under his boat. He said he’s going to Hell for something he did. I told him to take his bullshit to a priest and to lose my cell number. You know what he said?”

  I didn’t want to hear more of it. Clete’s face was spotted with color, the way it got when his liver was aching for a drink.

  “Bertrand said the last person he wanted to see was a priest. He said it was a priest who caused the bodies in the water to glow.”

  “I’m gone,” I said.

  “See what happens when I’m straight up with you?” he yelled at my back.

  I WENT BACK to the department, my head pounding. The enormous loss of life in New Orleans kept the media focus on Katrina, but Hurricane Rita had hurt us bad, too, and had also flattened or flooded thousands of homes along the southeast Texas coast. In Lake Charles and Orange, Texas, there were blocks of houses that looked like a lumberyard after a tornado has gone through it. My desk and cell phones rang constantly. My intake basket was overflowing, my mailbox stuffed with pink message slips. Every cop, firefighter, and paramedic in the parish was getting by on a few hours’ sleep a night, sometimes on a desktop. Cops and firefighters from other states were on lend-lease to us, but the workload was staggering. I didn’t have time to worry about people who had made bad choices for themselves or whom I couldn’t help, including Father Jude LeBlanc.

  Wasted words, wasted words.

  In his office Clete had mentioned a detail about the green aluminum boat that I couldn’t get out of my head. I picked up the phone on my desk and punched in his number. “You said you found the boat Bertrand Melancon was using?”

  “Yeah, it was upside down under a pile of tree limbs and trash by the emergency room entrance,” he replied. “It looked like it had blood smears on the bow.”

  “The words Ducks Unlimited were painted on the hull?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Was there anything else on the hull?”

  He thought for a second. “A mallard, with its wings outstretched. What’s the deal?”

  “Jude LeBlanc’s girlfriend said Jude had found a boat to evacuate his parishioners from the church attic. She said it had a duck painted on it. Jude was chopping a hole in the attic when somebody attacked him. She never saw him again.”

  He didn’t reply, and I knew Clete had done something else he wasn’t eager to tell me about.

  “What are you hiding?” I said.

  “Bertrand Melancon called me again, about three minutes ago. He wants help, but he won’t come in. He thinks I’ll either stomp his ass or turn him over to Sidney Kovick. So I gave him your cell and office numbers. If you don’t want to talk to the guy, just hang up on him.”

  “You made the right move.”

  “I don’t believe it. Are you feeling okay?” he asked.

  THAT EVENING Molly and I ate by ourselves at the kitchen table. Clete had gotten his old room back at the motor court up the street from the Winn-Dixie, and Alafair was working as a volunteer at the evacuee shelter in City Park.

  “I thought you’d like smothered steak for a change. You don’t like it?” she said.

  I couldn’t focus on her question. “I think Jude LeBlanc probably drowned in the Lower Nine. But maybe his death was a homicide,” I said.

  I saw a quiet sense of exasperation take hold in her face, like a bad memory from her sleep that the daylight hours would not dispel. “Dave, nobody can ever change what happened in New Orleans. I remember Jude. I liked him. But he was a sick man.”

  “I may have knowledge of a murder. I’m a police officer. I can’t just say, ‘Sorry, sonofabitch, I’ve got my own problems.’”

  She looked through the window at the shadows in the pecan trees and live oaks and the wide expanse of Bayou Teche, now twenty feet up in the yard. She set her fork down on her plate. Her thumb ticked at a callus on her palm. “Maybe you should take a nap and rest up before you go back on duty.”

  “ A street puke by the name of Bertrand Melancon told Clete he saw the bodies of drowned people glowing under his boat in the Lower Nine. I think he and some lowlifes like him attacked Jude and took his boat. I think it cost Jude his life and the lives of people who were waiting in a church attic for Jude to rescue them. That’s hard to blow off.”

  Her plate was only half empty. She picked it up and walked outside, peering down the slope as though she wanted to witness the gloaming of the day. I thought perhaps she was going to finish her supper at the picnic table in solitude. But she scraped her smothered steak and rice and brown gravy and creamed corn on the ground for Tripod and Snuggs. When she came back in, she washed her dishes and knife and fork in the sink, set them in the dry rack, and let out her breath. “I think I’ll take a walk. Do you want to come?” she said.

  “Not right now, thanks.”

  “Then I’ll see you later.”

  “I like the food real good, Molly. I can’t get all those dead people off my mind. I think about them and I want to kill somebody. That’s just the way it is.”

  I heard the front door shut behind her. Through the side window I could see my neighbor’s rotund, feminine, middle-aged son up-ending a longneck beer in his backyard, his throat working smoothly, a band of late sunlight sparkling inside the bottle.

  Fifteen minutes later, a tan Honda stopped at the curb. Alafair got out and thanked the young woman driving, then came inside. “Where’s Molly?” she said.

  “Taking a walk. Who was that?”

  “Thelma Baylor. She’s helping out at the shelter.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “She says you were out to her house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She says you think her dad shot some black guys.”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Baylor is that kind of man.”

  “Maybe he’s not, Alf.”

  “Don’t call me that stupid name.”

  “Mr. Baylor’s daughter was raped and sodomized and burned with cigarettes by three black degenerates. If that happened to you, maybe I would not be the same kind of person you think I am.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Dave.”

  “I don’t want to tell you whom to associate with, but I’d lose the connection with Thelma Baylor.”

  “That’s as judgmental as it is unfair.”

  “So is killing people.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Like you said, Mr. Baylor doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who gets off dumping a seventeen-year-old kid’s brainpan into the water. But how about his daughter? You think she might be a candidate?”

  “I come home from the shelter and I feel like I just walked through cobweb.”

  “Did you eat yet?”

  “God!” she said.

  I walked across the railroad tracks in the drone of cicadas to an AA meeting that was held twice a week in a cottage opposite the old high school I attended many years ago. After the meeting, I walked to the office and began sorting out the piles of paperwork in my intake basket. At 10:14 p.m. My cell phone rang.

  “You Mr. Robicheaux?” a voice said.

  “I am.”

  “These motherfuckers in Baton Rouge ain’t gonna do nothing ’bout my brother.”

  “Would you watch your language?”

  “What, my brother been kidnapped and you bothered ’bout my motherfucking language?”

  “I’m going to take a guess. You’re Bertrand Melancon.”

  “Look, man, I don’t know if them stones got blood on them or what, I just want my brother back.”

  “Stones with blood on them?”

  “You got a hearing problem?”

  My wiring was frayed, my batteries on zero. The behavior of violent and stupid people never varies. The problem in attitude and frame of reference is yours, not thei
rs. If you’re a pro, you become laconic and impassive and turn their own energies against them. But I wasn’t up for it. “You listen, you idiot, your brother was shot because he asked for it. I don’t know what ‘stones’ you’re talking about and I’m not your brother’s keeper or yours, either.”

  “I tried to tell that fat cracker Purcel, but he wouldn’t listen. I want to wash this city off me, man. I want to take my brother out of here. I want to make up for what we done. I ain’t blowing gas, Jack. You gonna help me or not? If you ain’t, say it now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I got to have your word, man.”

  “You’re not in my jurisdiction. The warrants on you are in Orleans Parish. That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  I could hear him breathing into the phone’s mouthpiece. “You know your way around Jeanerette? I see a cruiser, I see a uniform, I’m a rocket.”

  Chapter 14

  THE CLUB WAS constructed of cinder block, with a flat tin roof salvaged from a barn, and was located on a back street in Jeanerette not far from a drawbridge over the Teche. The sky was black, but floodlights illuminated the signs advertising the drive-by window where the owner sold frozen daiquiris to the happy-motoring crowd at five bucks a pop. The outside lights also lit the iron framework of the bridge and the bayou’s surface, which was running high up on the pilings and looked like yellow rust. When I got out of my pickup, the night air was throbbing with the sounds of tree frogs, the wind blowing through a sugarcane field out in the darkness. I didn’t want to enter the club. I didn’t want to breathe the cigarette smoke and bathroom disinfectant and refrigerated sweat, and revisit the world in which I had lived a large part of my teenage and adult life. But that’s what I did.

  The only light inside came from the neon beer signs over the bar and the partially opened doors to the restrooms. The booths were made of wood and red vinyl and were nicked, split, gouged, and cigarette-burned, and reminded me of a row of darkened caves along the wall. Most of the people drinking in the club were either African-American or blue-collar, hard-core coonasses or people who called themselves Creoles and lived on both sides of the color line. It was a place marked by neither joy nor despair and seldom by violence or as a place of inception for romantic trysts. It was a place people went when they wished to set their lives into abeyance, where clocks didn’t matter, and where Fox News assured them the problems in their lives were of other people’s manufacture.

  In a booth at the back of the club I saw a young black man sitting by himself, a beer and a length of microwave white boudin unwrapped from its wax paper in front of him. He was wearing a short-brim fedora, with a tiny red feather in the band, one like John Lee Hooker used to wear. But he had the same haunted, jailhouse look as the kid whose mug shot was in a manila folder in my office file cabinet. His eyes lifted into mine. “You Robicheaux?”

  I sat down across from him. “You called me ‘mister’ on the phone. You can call me ‘mister’ now or ‘Detective’ now.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’ve got a long night ahead of me. What is it you have that might be of interest to us?”

  “Man, you’re reeking of hostility. What’s your fucking problem?”

  “You are.”

  “Me? What I ever done to you?”

  “I have it on fairly good authority you and your brother and your friends are probably rapists.”

  “How about lowering your voice, man?”

  I could feel a tuning fork start to tremble inside me. I once saw American troops who had been hung in trees and skinned alive. The anger I experienced then was of a kind that destroys our humanity and gives false justification for the evil we in turn perpetrate upon others. I had these same feelings toward Bertrand Melancon now.

  I went to the bar and bought a bottle of carbonated water and sat back down. I drank from the bottle and screwed the cap tight. “What did you take out of Sidney Kovick’s house?”

  He kept trying to read my face, as though he were watching a dangerous animal through the bars of a cage. “A thirty-eight and some cash and silverware and shit. Lookie here, man, before I say anything else-”

  “What are these ‘stones’ you keep talking about?”

  “No, man, you got to clear up this rumor I’m hearing. About this guy Kovick. He cut off somebody’s legs with a chain saw?”

  “Sidney and his wife used to live in Metairie. They had a little boy who was five years old. He was playing on his three-wheeler in the next-door neighbor’s drive. The neighbor came home drunk and drove over him with his car and killed him. About six months later the neighbor disappeared. No one knows what happened to him. But some people say Sidney put on a raincoat and rubber gloves and went down in a basement in Shreveport and committed an awful deed. I don’t know if I’d put a lot of credence in that or not.”

  Bertrand’s face looked stricken and seemed to actually turn gray with fear. He clenched his hands between his thighs and drew air through his teeth. “Man, I don’t want to hear stuff like that.”

  “You mess with Sidney, that’s the way it flushes. Tell me about the stones you took from Sidney ’s house.”

  “No fence is gonna touch them. The word’s out. The guy holding these rocks is gonna get hung up in a meat locker, a piece at a time. That ain’t a shuck, man. Three different guys tole me that. That’s why they took Eddy. While we’re sitting here, they’re sweating Eddy. I cain’t stand thinking about it.”

  His breath was sour with funk, his face coated with an oily sheen. He gripped his stomach and shut his eyes.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I got ulcers.”

  “And you’re eating boudin and drinking alcohol?”

  “Lookie, what if I leave most everything for you in a bag, maybe I just hold back a lI’l, and you give it to Mr. Kovick?”

  “Where did the shot come from?”

  He swallowed, disconcerted, angry over his powerlessness and the fact that I kept redirecting the conversation. “I ain’t seen it. I just heard it and saw Eddy go down.”

  “You know what bothers me here, Bertrand? You make no mention of Kevin Rochon. He was seventeen. He was the only one among y’all without a sheet. He got his brains blown out and all you can talk about is yourself and your brother.”

  “We tole Andre not to bring him. It ain’t our fault. Why you keep getting on my case?”

  “You boosted a boat in the Lower Nine, didn’t you?”

  I saw his fingers splay on his stomach again, his mouth hang open as a rush of pain flared into his bowels and rectum. “I cain’t take this. I wish it had been me instead of Kevin or Eddy. I just want to get my brother back. I just want out.”

  He wasn’t acting. I genuinely believed that Bertrand Melancon had taken up residence in a place that does not have geographical boundaries, one that we associate with mythology and outmoded religions.

  “If I were you, I’d ship Kovick’s goods to his flower store in Algiers. With luck, he’ll turn your brother loose and he won’t come after you.”

  I tried to hold my eyes on his and not blink, but he read the lie in them.

  “I’m dead, ain’t I?”

  “Tell me what you did to the priest in the Lower Nine.”

  “That fat cracker said you was straight up. But you ain’t no different from me. You working the angle, running the con, trying to make me sick and afraid so you can get what you want. The people glowed under the water. That’s what happened out there, man. Won’t nobody believe that. But I seen it. I hope I end up wit’ them. Maybe you gonna feel like that one day, too, motherfucker.”

  He clutched his boudin inside the wax paper it had been heated in and took it with him out the door. I unscrewed the cap from the bottle of carbonated water and drank from the neck. I wondered at the ease with which I had just gone about dismembering an impaired man. The club was stone-quiet. I could hear the carbonation bubbling inside the bottle in my hand.

  MOLLY WAS ASLEEP when I go
t home, her face turned toward the wall, her hip rounded under the sheet. I lay my shirt and trousers across the back of a chair, but I didn’t get in bed. Instead, I sat on the floor, in my skivvies, inside a box of slatted moonlight, my spine against the bed frame. I sat there for a long time, but I cannot tell you exactly why. Outside, I could hear the drawbridge clanking at Burke Street and the droning of a deep-draft workboat laboring down the bayou.

  “What are you doing down there?” Molly said above me.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  I could hear her moving herself across the mattress so she could see me better. “You’re not going crazy on me, are you?”

  She meant it as a joke.

  “I have memories I can’t get rid of, no matter what I do,” I replied. “It’s like trying to self-exorcise a succubus. I don’t have your degree of spiritual conviction, Molly. I remember events that happened either yesterday or years ago, and I remember the bastards who caused them, and I want to go back in time and do them great injury. That’s not honest. I want to paint the wall with them.”

  She lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her head hanging down close to mine. “You can’t confide in me? You don’t think we’re a partnership in dealing with whatever problems come down the road? Is that where we are in our marriage?”

  She tapped a finger on my neck. “I asked you a question, trooper.”

  “I just put the screws to a black kid in Jeanerette. He’s a street puke and meth dealer and maybe a rapist. But you don’t rip out their spokes when their wheels are already broken.”

  Her face hovered on the side of my vision. I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “You never deliberately hurt an innocent person in your life, Dave,” she said. “You take on other people’s suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness.”

  I turned my head and looked into her face. Her mouth was pink, her skin shiny in the moonlight. She’d had her hair cut short so that it was thick and even on the ends where it hung down on her cheeks. One of her nightgown straps had pulled loose and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulder. She walked her fingers through my hair. “Will you get off the floor, please?” she said.