The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I lay down beside her and pulled her against me. I could feel her breath against my ear. Her hands pressed me hard in the small of my back. She hooked a thumb in the elastic of my underwear and began to work the fabric down on my hip. Then she gave it up and let me undress by myself while she pulled off her panties and nightgown. I started to get on top of her, but she pushed me back and sat on my thighs, her arms propped by my shoulders. She stared down at me in a way I didn’t understand. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you, Dave. I never thought I would feel that way about a man. But I do about you,” she said.

  “Molly-” I began.

  “No, that’s the way it is. Anyone who tries to hurt you will have to kill me first.”

  She lowered her hand and pressed me inside her. When it was over, I placed my head against the dampness of her breast and could hear her heart beating as loud and full as a drum.

  THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, a homeless man was rooting in a Dumpster behind a Baton Rouge veterinary clinic, spearing cans out of it with a stick that he had mounted a nail on. All the animals had been removed from the clinic in advance of Hurricane Rita and the veterinary had not returned to reopen his business. The bar next door had opened at 7:00 a.m., but the only movement inside was the swamper airing out the building and sweeping trash through the back door into the alley. The homeless man filled his vinyl bag with cans and was tying the top when he heard a sound that did not fit into the normal routine of his morning.

  He set his bag down gingerly on the asphalt and let the cans settle inside the vinyl. He listened for the sound to repeat itself but heard nothing except the wind blowing through the trees in the cemetery at the end of the block. He walked down to one end of the alley and looked both ways, then went to the other end and did the same. The swamper, a black man, paused in his work. “Something wrong?” he said.

  “You ain’t heard that sound?” the homeless man asked.

  “What sound?” the swamper said.

  “A sound like an animal trapped in the wall or something.”

  “There ain’t no animals in that building. Owners came and got ’ em all. Lightning burned out the air-conditioning. Ain’t no animal in the wall, either.”

  The swamper went back in the bar, but the homeless man continued to stand in the middle of the alley, turning his head one way, then another, as the wind gusted and died. He picked up his bag of cans and flung it over his shoulder, the heavy load of it hitting him solidly in the back. Then he heard the sound again. This time there was no doubt where it came from. The homeless man set down his bag and pulled open a heavy metal door that gave onto a foyer and the delivery entrance to the clinic.

  Deep inside the gloom, he could make out a gurney that had been left by the clinic door. On top of it was an oblong shape someone had wrapped with a sheet and strapped down against a rubber pad that smelled of urine. The homeless man lifted up the sheet, revealing the crown of a black man’s head. He peeled back the sheet farther and saw the black man’s eyes and unshaved jaws and a bandaged wound in his throat. But it was the eyes and the expression in the black man’s face that caused the homeless man’s hands to shake.

  “I’ll get help. I’m coming back. I promise,” he said.

  He tripped over his bag of cans as he ran for the back door of the bar, waving his arms.

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON I received a call from Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher in Baton Rouge. She had grown up in Chugwater, Wyoming, and wore jeans and boots and on one occasion tracked horse-shit into Helen Soileau’s office and to Helen’s face referred to her as a member of “the tongue-and-groove club.” oddly, they became the best of friends.

  “How’s it going, Dave? I’m taking over the shooting of Eddy Melancon and Kevin Rochon. I thought I should update you.”

  Betsy Mossbacher was an in-your-face cowgirl, probably the most socially inept federal law officer at the Bureau, and the worst nondrunk automobile driver I ever worked with. But her level of integrity and courage was unquestionable. I had previously thought that the investigation into the shooting of Melancon and Rochon would either die as a result of investigative dead ends or simple bureaucratic inertia. Betsy’s assignment as the new case officer was not good news for whoever had pulled the trigger.

  “I’m only involved in the Melancon-Rochon investigation in a tangential way,” I said.

  “I love your vocabulary. But cut the crap. A homeless guy found Eddy Melancon behind an animal hospital early this morning.”

  “Melancon is dead?”

  “That would be one way of describing him. He has sensation from the neck up, but there’s no way to know about his brain. There were adhesive traces over his mouth and nose. I suspect he was tortured in some fashion involving air deprivation. My guess is he didn’t have anything to give up and it took a long time for his abductors to accept that.”

  She paused to let the implications sink in. “What have you got on your end?”

  “Not much. It started as a lend-lease investigation following Katrina,” I said. “I talked with Bertrand Melancon in a bar in Jeanerette last night. I think he’s holding goods he stole from Sidney Kovick’s house and is afraid to keep them and even more afraid to give them back.”

  “You were with Bertrand Melancon and didn’t bust him?”

  “Our Ritz-carlton is full-up. How about yours?”

  I could hear her frustration building. “Listen, Dave, this case would go away except for the fact somebody put a bullet through the brain of a seventeen-year-old black kid with no record. Too many white swinging dicks were having a fine time shooting black ass in uptown New Orleans. Or at least that’s what my boss thinks. Secondly, Sidney Kovick is a person of ongoing great interest to the Bureau. When you interview perps who are in my caseload, I want to know about it.”

  “Bertrand told me he’s holding stones of some kind from Kovick’s house. He was talking about stones that have blood on them.”

  This time it was my turn to let the implications sink in.

  “Blood diamonds?” she said.

  “That’s what it sounds like.”

  “You mean a street puke may have scored millions on a simple B and E?”

  “I think right now Bertrand would trade them for a bus ticket to Saskatoon.”

  I WANTED TO forget about the Melancon brothers and the Rochons and Sidney Kovick, but I couldn’t get Father Jude LeBlanc off my mind. Regardless, I hadn’t brought up his name with Betsy Mossbacher. Why? Because the honest-to-God truth is law enforcement is not even law “enforcement.” We deal with problems after the fact. We catch criminals by chance and accident, either during the commission of crimes or through snitches. Because of forensic and evidentiary problems, most of the crimes recidivists commit are not even prosecutable. Most inmates currently in the slams spend lifetimes figuring out ways to come to the attention of the system. Ultimately, jail is the only place they feel safe from their own failure.

  Unfortunately, the last people on our minds are the victims of crime. They become an addendum to both the investigation and the prosecution of the case, adverbs instead of nouns. Ask rape victims or people who have been beaten with gun butts or metal pipes or tied to chairs and tortured how they felt toward the system after they learned that their assailants were released on bond without the victims being notified.

  I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I don’t argue with the prosecutors who support it. The mouths of the people they represent are stopped with dust. What kind of advocate would not try to give them voice? But what could I possibly do for Jude LeBlanc? He had volunteered for the Garden of Gethsemane, hadn’t he? Everybody takes his own bounce.

  Those were the kinds of thoughts I walked around with in the middle of the day.

  THAT EVENING, at sunset, the sky directly overhead was absolutely blue, the trees in our yard dark with shadow and pulsing with robins who were returning from the North. As we were clearing the dishes from the kitchen table, Alafair happened to glan
ce out the window. “Clete Purcel is in our backyard,” she said.

  He was sitting at the redwood table, watching a tugboat pass on the bayou. Tripod and Snuggs were both on the tabletop, enjoying the evening. Tripod was sniffing the breeze while Snuggs paced up and down, his stiffened tail bouncing off Clete’s face.

  Clete lit a cigarette, something I hadn’t seen him do in months. I went outside and sat down next to him. His face was red, but I couldn’t smell booze on his breath or weed on his clothes. He read my eyes. “I drove back to the Big Sleazy with the top down,” he said.

  “You in the dumps about something?”

  “Courtney and I got a little greedy.”

  “Wait a minute, who’s Courtney again?”

  “Courtney Degravelle, the gal who lives up the street from Otis Baylor’s house, the one who saw Bertrand Melancon almost side-swipe an NOPD airboat.”

  I took the cigarette from Clete’s hand, dropped it on the ground, and mashed it out.

  “Dave, cut me some slack, will you?”

  “Got greedy how?”

  He lifted up Snuggs by his tail and bounced him up and down on his back paws. Snuggs was thick-necked and had short white hair and muscles that rippled when he walked. His ears were chewed and bent, his fur threaded with pink scars. He was profligate in his romantic life and proprietary about his yard. He fought ferocious battles to safeguard Tripod and often slept on the roof at night to make sure no interlopers violated his and Tripod’s turf. Clete was the only person he would allow to take liberties with him, I suspect because Snuggs knew a brother in arms when he saw one.

  “Courtney says she saw a young black guy prowling in the alley behind her house a couple of weeks ago. He was pulling something out of a rafter in a garage. She didn’t think a lot about it until I told her I believed Bertrand Melancon stashed Kovick’s goods somewhere in that alley before he took his brother to the hospital.”

  “You told her all this?”

  “Hey, she’s trying to help. She called me yesterday and says she found some soaked bills in her hedge. Not just a few, bundles of them. I think Bertrand dropped them in the water and they floated down to Courtney’s.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “Seventeen grand and change.”

  “You and Courtney were going to keep it?”

  “I thought about it. What was I going to do, take it to Sidney? What if it wasn’t his? Think he was going to admit that? ‘Not mine, Purcel. You keep it because you’re a great guy.’”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I had a funny feeling about the bills. If they were Sidney ’s, why would he keep them in his house? Even if the money was hot, he could launder it through a South American bank. So I took a few bills to Fat Tommy Whalen, remember him, Tommy Orca, used to fence smash-and-grab jewelry and watches for the Carlucci crew? Tommy started going over the bills with a magnifying glass, making all these bubbling sounds of approval, until finally I say, ‘You turning queer for dead presidents?’

  “‘Yeah, “queer” is the word, Purcel,’ he says. ‘the work is beautiful, but it’s queer. Who did it?’

  “Can you believe that? The street pukes not only had the bad luck to rob and destroy Sidney Kovick’s house, the money they got out of it is counterfeit.”

  His account had been long and circuitous, which was always Clete’s method of avoiding an admission of some kind.

  “Back to the subject,” I said.

  “I want to take a bath in lye water. Ever since Katrina hit, I’ve been hearing the sound of little piggy feet running for the trough. Washington insiders are down here by the shitload. Now I’m as dirty as they are.”

  I tapped him between the shoulder blades with the flat of my fist. “You’re the best of the best, cletus. Give the bills back to Courtney Degravelle and tell her to turn them over to the FBI. Stay away from Sidney. End of story.”

  Snuggs did a u-turn, bumping his tail across Clete’s face, waiting for Clete to scratch him between the ears.

  IN THE MORNING I called Betsy Mossbacher’s extension at the FBI office in Baton Rouge and got her voice mail.

  “Sidney Kovick may have had counterfeit money stashed in his house. Some bills washed up in an alley down the street. Again, I’m not sure they’re his. Good luck,” I said.

  I hoped I would not hear from Betsy for a while. She rang back three minutes later. “How do you know about these bills?” she asked.

  “Confidential informant,” I replied.

  “Right.”

  Then I broached the subject that had preyed on my mind since Natalia Ramos had first told me of Jude LeBlanc’s probable fate. “You hear anything about a priest drowning in the Lower Nine?”

  “No.”

  “His name is Father Jude LeBlanc. He was trying to chop a hole in the attic of a church when his boat was stolen from him. Maybe the Melancon brothers and the two Rochons were the guys who took the boat.”

  “A lot of people were washed out to sea,” she said. “I think there’re still hundreds of people under the debris. Some state troopers believe there’re over thirty-five people buried under one building alone. The smell is awful.”

  “There’s more to the story, Betsy. Bertrand Melancon says he saw luminescent bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. You hear of anything like that?”

  “I’d better let you go.”

  “Don’t blow me off. Melancon said Jude LeBlanc caused the bodies to glow. The guy’s got the Furies after him. He saw or did something out there. Maybe he committed a homicide.”

  “These are bad times. Why carry a load that will break your back and not make the load lighter for anybody else? Take care of yourself, Dave.”

  MANY YEARS AGO, United States Senator Huey P. Long, also known as the Kingfish, made a gift of our state to Frank Costello. In turn, Costello subcontracted the vice in Louisiana to a crime family in New Orleans. NOPD and the Mob coexisted in much the same way the Mob had coexisted with legal authority in Chicago and New York. The French Quarter was Elsie the cash cow, and no one was allowed to mess with her. The model was the Baths of Caracalla. Conventioneers from Omaha and Meridian could watch bottomless strip shows on Bourbon. They could spit whiskey and soda on each other in hotel bedrooms and get laid by hookers who looked like movie stars. At Mardi Gras they could frolic with transvestites and twirl their phalluses on the balcony of Tony Bacino’s gay nightclub. If the bill was a little high, few complained. The operational rule was simple: Everyone had a grand time and went home happy. Sin City was safe and all sins committed there were forgiven, courtesy of NOPD and the local chapter of the New Orleans Mafia.

  “Law and order” and “family values” were not abstractions. Murphy artists got thrown off roofs, and jack-rollers and street dips got escorted to the parish line and had their bone structure remodeled. Anyone who stuck up a restaurant or bar frequented either by New Orleans cops or wiseguys got smoked on the spot. No one was sure what happened to child molesters. I always suspected some of them started new incarnations as fish chum.

  Cultural symbiosis was a way of life. The Mob’s leadership was amoral and ruthless, but they always operated in pragmatic fashion. They were family men and adhered to certain rules, one of which was not to attract attention. As businessmen, they understood the importance of public church attendance, ceremonial patriotism, and the appearance of decency. Most of them kept their word, particularly when they dealt with NOPD. In fact, it was the only currency that allowed them to remain functional.

  This all changed when crack cocaine hit the City. Within two or three years’ time, the walking dead were all over the downtown area. Black teenagers who looked like they had baked their mush in the microwave that morning were wandering around with nine-millimeters, totally disconnected from the suffering and death they sometimes inflicted. New Orleans ’s long and happy relationship with the Great Whore of Babylon was over. A kid with the IQ of tapioca pudding might rob you of your money in the St. Louis Ce
metery and as an afterthought, for no reason he would ever be able to explain, splatter your brains all over a brick crypt.

  John Dillinger, while being booked at the Crown Point, Indiana, jail, was asked by a newsman what he thought of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. He grinned lopsidedly and replied, “They’re a pair of punks. They’re giving bank robbery a bad name.” In New Orleans the respectable criminal infrastructure of the city was being replaced by pipeheads and street pukes. They were the new “punks” and they were ruining the fun for everyone.

  But some members of the old order clung to the old ways and refused to accept the fact they were dinosaurs. One of these was a 585-pound pile of whale sperm by the name of Fat Tommy Whalen, also know as Tommy Orca and Tommy Fins. He wore ice-cream linen suits and had slits for eyes. His neighborhood country club revoked his membership after he cannonballed off the diving board and sent a tidal wave into a wedding party and knocked the bride into a flower bed. His family vehicle was an SUV whose undercarriage was supported by tank springs. The youngest of his five children, his daughter, weighed over three hundred pounds. Years ago, every Wednesday and Saturday night, Tommy took the entire Whalen family to an all-you-can-eat, six-dollar buffet in Metairie and drove the owner out of business. He was a Damon Runyon character I had shared a box with at the racetrack, a gelatinous cartoon of a human being who smelled of baby power and lilac water and mouth spray. But the dope culture had been the bane of respectable illegal enterprise in New Orleans, and Tommy’s personal code had gone down the toilet with the city’s.

  The shorter version? Clete Purcel had managed to walk into an airplane propeller.

  The general story made the Times-Picayune; the particulars came to me from a New Iberia paramedic who had gone to work in New Orleans right after the storm.