The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Tommy Fins arrived at Sidney Kovick’s flower store in Algiers in fine style, resplendent in white slacks that would fit a rhino and sky-blue silk shirt and flowing polka-dot necktie. One of Sidney ’s hired help, Marco Scarlotti, opened the door of the SUV for him, as though royalty were arriving, and walked with him to the entrance of the store. The morning was still cool, the green-and-white-striped canopy above the display window filling with the breeze off the river. Marco opened the door wide for Fat Tommy to enter. “ Sidney is running a few minutes late. Have some coffee and chocolate doughnuts. We got a shitpile of them,” he said.

  “Yeah, I could use a snack. Thanks, Marco.”

  “You got it, Tommy. You’re looking good. Looks like you lost a few pounds.”

  But while Tommy Orca had been talking to Marco, he had not kept his attention focused on the width of the doorway. Before he realized it, he had wedged himself inside the door frame, his buttocks splayed on one jamb, his stomach and scrotum crushed into the other. “You got to give me a push, Marco,” he wheezed.

  Marco began shoving from behind, squatting down, pushing with his shoulder as though loading a horse onto a trailer. Then his fellow bodyguard Charlie Weiss came from the back of the shop and began pulling on Tommy’s arm, twisting it in the socket.

  “Your face don’t look too good. You okay?” Marco said. “Get him a glass of water, Charlie.”

  “He weighs enough as it is. Christ, his legs are giving out. Stand up, Tommy. This is not the place to sit down. Oh shit,” Charlie said.

  By the time the paramedics arrived at the store, Tommy’s enormous girth had settled into the door frame like a partially deflated blimp. His lips were filmed with spittle, his breath an agonized gasp.

  “Hang on, buddy. We’re going to knock out the wall,” a paramedic said.

  But Tommy wasn’t listening. His face was pouring sweat, his eyes focused on Marco’s. “I’m fucked,” he said.

  “No, we’re getting you out, Tommy. Just hang on, man,” Marco said.

  Tommy breathed in and out, as though deliberately oxygenating his blood. “Listen, tell Sidney that Clete Purcel has got his queer. Tell Sidney to take care of my family.”

  Then Tommy the Whale closed his eyes and swam out to sea, leaving Clete with a millstone hung around his neck.

  Chapter 15

  OTIS BAYLOR CAME into my office early monday. He wore slacks and suspenders, a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie, and seemed to radiate the freshness of the morning. But obviously he did not want me to misinterpret the purpose of his visit. “I have a question that needs to be resolved,” he said.

  “Sit down.”

  “A man named Ronald Bledsoe came by my house Saturday, un-announced and uninvited. He said he’s a private investigator working for the state. He showed me a gold badge and an ID card with his photograph on it. Is this something the state is doing?”

  “I’m not sure. What did this fellow want?”

  “He said he’s investigating the shooting of those black kids. He asked me if one of them had gone up my driveway. I told him I didn’t know. He asked me if I’d found any items on my property that might have been stolen from other people’s homes.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That if I’d found stolen goods anywhere, I would have turned them over to the authorities. He said my neighbor had seen one of the looters in my driveway.”

  “Which neighbor?”

  “At first he didn’t want to tell me. Then he said it was Tom Claggart. I didn’t like this man’s manner, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “It’s Dave.”

  He ignored my correction. “I think this man is a fraud. He’s a strange-looking fellow. He has strange eyes.”

  I took a yellow legal pad out of my desk. “Did he leave a business card?”

  “No. I didn’t ask for one, either.”

  “Would you describe him, please?”

  “He’s a tall white man, bald, with a long face that’s sunken in the middle. His mouth is a funny color, like it has rouge on it, or it doesn’t go with his skin. He’s got a soft voice and accent, the kind people from the Carolinas have. His eyes are green. My daughter was working in the yard. He kept looking at her. I don’t want this guy around my house again.”

  “If he comes back, tell him to leave. If he doesn’t, call us.”

  “You’ll come out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all I needed to know.” He started to rise from his chair.

  “I wanted to ask you a question on another subject,” I said, pushing aside my legal pad as though our official business were over. “In the army the first military weapon I fired was the ’03 Springfield.”

  He was standing up now, waiting for me to pull the string.

  “It’s a fine rifle. Did you leave yours behind in New Orleans?” I said.

  “No, it’s in my house in New Iberia. You want to see it?”

  “I thought maybe I could shoot it sometime.”

  “Be my guest. You must have a lot of time on your hands,” he said.

  After he was gone, I stirred my pen in a circle on my ink blotter. Otis Baylor was either an innocent man or a very smart one. If he or a member of his family had shot the two looters, the temptation would have been to lose the probable murder weapon in the event the round was found embedded in a house or tree trunk across the street. But I suspected Otis did not get where he was by doing the predictable.

  I pulled the file on the shooting from my metal cabinet and looked back at the notes on my interview with the next-door neighbor, Tom Claggart. Claggart had said he had been sound asleep and had not heard the shot that crippled Eddy Melancon and killed Kevin Rochon. But the man calling himself a private investigator claimed Claggart had told him he saw one of the looters emerge from Otis Baylor’s driveway. If the PI was telling the truth, Claggart had lied to either me or the PI.

  Why?

  I didn’t know.

  EARLY TUESDAY MORNING Clete Purcel woke to the sound of birdsong in his cottage at the motor court. In its shabby way, his home away from home was a grand place, straight out of another era, with no telephones in the rooms, shaded by live oaks, the slope down to the bayou spangled with autumnal sunshine. He fixed coffee and dropped a ham steak and three eggs in a frying plan and brushed his teeth and shaved while his food cooked. Then he opened the blinds and looked out upon his Caddy, its top spotted with bird droppings. It sat where he had parked it the previous night, under a spreading live oak. A tall man whose waxed bald head seemed unnaturally elongated was studying it, a knuckle poised on his chin. He leaned down and looked at the wire wheels and the rusted chrome on the back bumper and the Louisiana tag filmed with dried mud. He wiped the film from one number on the tag with his thumb, then dusted off his fingers.

  “Can I help you with something?” Clete said from his doorway.

  “I was admiring your vehicle. I restore vintage cars as a hobby,” the man replied. He had heavy eyebrows, like half-moon strips of animal fur that had been glued onto an expressionless face. “I own a Rolls-Royce. But I love Cadillacs, too. Where’d you get yours?”

  “A movie company was making a film in New Iberia. They sold off all their vehicles when they left town.”

  “I wish I could have gotten in on that,” the man said. “My name is Ronald Bledsoe. What’s yours?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m eating breakfast right now,” Clete said. He started to close the door.

  “I just moved in across the way and wanted to introduce myself.”

  “That’s funny. A family that got blown out of cameron Parish was staying there.”

  “My agency helped them relocate. I’m a private investigator.”

  “Is that why you were checking out my tag?”

  “No, it’s just a habit I have. I see dirt and I wipe it off. Early up-bringing, I guess.”

  “Maybe you can recommend a place that restores old caddies.”

  The man
who called himself Ronald Bledsoe stared thoughtfully at the bayou. “As a matter of fact, I do know a local gentleman. Let me write his name down for you on my business card.” he wrote on the back of a card and handed it to Clete. “Tell him I sent you.”

  “Thanks a lot. I appreciate this,” Clete said, holding up the card, sticking it into his shirt pocket.

  CLETE FINISHED HIS BREAKFAST, then called me on his cell phone. “A guy with a hush-puppy accent and the name Ronald Bledsoe was messing around my Caddy. He’s hinky as a corkscrew. Can you run him through the NCIC?”

  “I already did.”

  “What’d you get back on him?”

  “The same guy was out to Otis Baylor’s house. Baylor thought he was weird, too. The National Crime Information Center has nothing on him.”

  “Why was this guy talking to Baylor?”

  “He seemed to think Bertrand Melancon might have stashed stolen goods on Baylor’s property. He claims to be working for the state.”

  “His business card says he’s out of Key West. I called the number, but the phone is disconnected. He also referred me to a car detailer in Lafayette. The guy didn’t recognize the name. You think he’s working for Sidney?”

  “Maybe.”

  “This guy is a real creep, Dave.”

  “How many PIs are normal people?”

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m glad you explained that. Otherwise I would think you’re insulting as hell.”

  CLETE HAD SAID that since Katrina he had heard the sounds of little piggy feet clattering to the trough. I think his image was kind. I think the reality was far worse. The players were much bigger than the homegrown parasites that have sucked the life out of Louisiana for generations. The new bunch was educated and groomed and had global experience in avarice and venality and made the hair-oil and polyester crowd in our state legislature look like the Ecclesiastical College of Cardinals. Think of an inverted pyramid. Staggering sums of money were given to insider corporations who subcontracted the jobs to small outfits that used only nonunion labor. A $500 million contract for debris removal was given to a company in Miami that did not own a single truck, then the work was subcontracted to people who actually load debris and haul it away. Emergency roof repairs, what are called “blue roof jobs,” involved little more than tacking down rolls of blue felt on plywood. FEMA provided the felt free. Insider contractors got the jobs for one hundred dollars a square foot and paid the subs two dollars a square foot. In the meantime, fifty thousand nonunion workers were brought into the city, most of them from the Caribbean, and were paid an average of eight to nine dollars an hour to do the work.

  Why dwell on it? It’s unavoidable. It became obvious right after Katrina that the destruction of New Orleans was an ongoing national tragedy and probably an American watershed in the history of political cynicism. I knew early on that the events taking place in New Orleans now would lay large claim on the rest of my career if not my life. If I had been able to convince myself otherwise, the call I was about to receive from Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher would have quickly disillusioned me.

  “Sorry to bother you again, but I’ve got some conflicting information here regarding a Felix Ramos, street name Chula Ramos. This guy and his buddy were supposed to be transferred from the Iberia Parish Prison into our custody,” she said.

  “That’s right. He and his fall partner got nailed at a meth lab. I interviewed both of them. That was right before Katrina. You guys were supposed to pick them up.”

  “Two informants, independently of each other, say Chula is working as an electrician and plumber in New Orleans. I’ve talked to five different people in Iberia Parish, including your jailer. No one seems to know where Ramos is or what happened to him or if he ever existed. Can you explain that?”

  “How about his partner?”

  “His partner is in the stockade. There’s no problem with his partner. Not unless you guys lose him before we can get down there.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  I called the parish prison and the district attorney. Then I went into Helen’s office. “The FBI thinks we’ve lost Felix Ramos, one of those guys who-”

  “Yeah, the one who called me a queer in Spanish.”

  “Yeah, that one,” I said, my eyes slipping off hers. “The ADA who caught the case says he was marked for transfer to federal custody, so she put everything on hold. In fact, she thought the FBI had already picked him up.”

  “Maybe they did. Maybe they lost him in their own system.”

  “Betsy Mossbacher isn’t one to screw up like that. She says Ramos may be drawing paychecks in New Orleans. A lot of MS-13 guys are in the trades.”

  “Give me a few minutes,” she said.

  I went back to my office. It was almost quitting time. I felt like I was in a bad dream, unable to extract myself from New Orleans and the Melancon-Rochon shooting and the probable homicide of Jude LeBlanc. I wanted to go home and eat a hot supper with my family and perhaps walk down Main Street with them in the twilight and have a dessert on the terrace behind Clementine’s restaurant. I wanted to have a normal life again.

  My extension buzzed. “Ramos’s name got misspelled on the arrest report,” Helen said. “The misspelling went into the computer. We have three other inmates in custody who have similar names. One of them finished his sentence during Rita. The day he was supposed to get out he was at Iberia General for treatment of a venereal infection. Felix Ramos walked out in his stead. To top it off, the ADA says the bust probably won’t hold anyway. Ramos was a hundred feet from the lab when it was raided and there’s no evidence or witness statements to put him inside it. Nothing like drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola on the bayou, huh, boss?”

  IN THE MORNING I decided the only way to deal with the Melancon-Rochon file was to hit it head-on and to stop giving a free pass to people who had lied to me. There was no conventional telephone service in New Orleans and I doubted there would be any for a long time. I called Otis Baylor and asked if he had a cell number for his next-door neighbor, Tom Claggart. “There might be one in my Rolodex,” he said.

  “Do you mind looking it up?”

  After a pause, he said, “Just a minute.”

  He came back to the phone and gave me the number, but he did not hide his impatience well. “Does your call to Tom Claggart concern us?”

  “I’m not sure. But it’s a police matter, Mr. Baylor. We’re not obligated to inform the public about the content of an investigation or the procedures we follow. I think it’s important we all understand that.”

  He eased the telephone back into the cradle, breaking the connection.

  I punched in Claggart’s cell number. He answered on the third ring. “Tom Claggart,” he said.

  “This is Dave Robicheaux again. I need to check a discrepancy between-”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “That’s not the issue, Mr. Claggart.”

  “It is to me. My cell number is private.”

  “Would you like to conduct this interview in handcuffs?”

  “I’m sorry. We’re under a lot of pressure here. I should have gone with Otis Baylor. He can be a pain in the ass, but at least he’s honest.”

  “Say again?”

  “I should have bought my insurance policy from Otis. My carrier is sticking it to me. I hear Otis has been approving his clients’ water-damage claims on the spot. I bet his company is shitting their pants.”

  I tried to get the conversation back on track. “There’s a discrepancy between your statement to me and the account you gave a private investigator regarding the shooting of the looters. You told me you were asleep and you heard and saw nothing. Do you stand by that statement?”

  “I had a few drinks that night. Things got kind of mixed up.”

  “Did you tell the private investigator one of the looters was in the Baylor driveway, that maybe he left stolen goods there?
”

  “I don’t remember saying that. I mean, I don’t remember saying that last part.”

  “The investigator’s name is Ronald Bledsoe. Do you remember that name?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can you come into my office?”

  “No, I can’t do that. I’m all tied up here. I don’t know what all this is about.”

  Why had he lied? Was it because he had done nothing to stop the looters? Was he simply trying to hide the fact he was a blowhard? People lie over less.

  “You told Bledsoe the truth?”

  “Maybe I saw one of those black guys in the shadows. But I didn’t see the shooting. Look, I just want out of this.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Everything. I didn’t hurt anyone. Leave me alone.”

  I could almost smell his fear on the other side of the connection. “Mr. Claggart?”

  He clicked off his cell.

  In my mind’s eye I saw a man whose eyes were tightly shut, his hand clenched around his cell phone as he tried to rethink every misstep he had just made. I saw a man who despised himself for his own weakness and who now carried the extra burden of knowing that through his own volition he had revealed himself to others as a liar and a fraud if not a coward. Also he had blurted out that he had not “hurt anyone,” when in fact no one had accused him of doing so. There was a very good chance Tom Claggart was speaking of another incident, perhaps another crime, of which I had no knowledge. For whatever reason, he had done all these things to himself, without external provocation. I believe that Tom Claggart had just discovered that stacking time on the hard road is a matter of definition and not geography.

  AFTER I HUNG UP, I assembled three photo lineups. A photo lineup is composed of six mug shots inserted in a cardboard holder. Among the six photos only one is of the suspect. Ideally the other photos should be of people in the same age range and of the same race as the suspect. The photo lineup has several advantages. The viewer, who is often a victim of a violent crime, is spared public embarrassment and is less fearful of retaliation from the suspect’s friends and relatives and hence less apt to be influenced by the presence of either prosecutors or defense attorneys in a police station environment. Secondly, jailhouse photography indicates by its nature that the suspect has been put away previously and hence can be put away again.