The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I inserted mug shots of Andre Rochon, Eddy Melancon, and Bertrand Melancon among their peers, dropped all three lineups in a brown envelope, and drove up Old Jeanerette Road to Otis Baylor’s house while a sun shower chained the bayou with rain rings.

  I cannot say what I thought I would accomplish. I was tired of people lying to me, that was obvious, but I wanted to confront Otis Baylor for another reason. As Americans we are a peculiar breed. We believe in law and order, but we also believe that real crimes are committed by a separate class of people, one that has nothing to do with our own lives or the world of reasonable behavior and mutual respect to which we belong. As a consequence, many people, particularly in higher income brackets, think of police officers as suburban maintenance personnel who should be treated politely but whose social importance is one cut above that of their gardeners.

  Ever watch reality cop shows? Check out the guys who are always streaking through wash lines and across darkened yards, their tennis shoes flopping on their feet, their crime of the day possession of a dime bag. What conclusion does the viewer arrive at? Crimes are committed by shirtless pukes. Slumlords and politicians on a pad get no play.

  It was time that someone put a human face on the men who ate a high-velocity round directly opposite Otis’s front door.

  I had assumed Otis Baylor would still be home. But he wasn’t. “Can you tell me where he is?” I asked his daughter on the gallery.

  “He’s probably down in Vermilion Parish, down by the coast. His company covered a lot of the houses down there.”

  “I understand your old man is standing up for his clients.”

  “Standing up, like?” she replied, her eyelids fluttering as though she could barely deal with my impaired abilities.

  “Your dad is making good on his clients’ water-damage claims. I hear a lot of people aren’t that lucky.”

  “Maybe my father will end up working as a route manager for the newspaper, too.”

  “Could we sit down somewhere?”

  “I have a class at one.”

  “Is your mother home?”

  “I told you, she’s my stepmother. And no, she’s not here.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, Miss Thelma, but I’m pretty tired of your bad manners. Step out in the light, please.”

  “What for?”

  “We’d like to make sure we have a positive ID on the men who were looting your neighborhood. One of these guys is dead and one is a vegetable who was kidnapped and possibly tortured because he knows where some stolen property is hidden. I don’t want any more sarcastic remarks from you. In truth, I think your family is about to drown in its own shit. Maybe you can do them a favor by being honest for a change.”

  We were standing in the yard now. She was trying to blow off the lecture she had just gotten, but her face was white inside the black rectangle of her hair, her bottom lip twitching. I seemed to tower over her and I didn’t like the feeling it gave me.

  “Here,” I said, putting the lineup holders in her hand. “Do any of these guys look like the ones you saw in front of your house the night of the shooting?”

  She began sifting the holders, sliding one stiffly against the other, perfunctorily, her eyes not quite focused, as though she already knew she would not recognize any of the men. But I did not expect what happened next. She widened her eyes, not in surprise but in an attempt to control the water welling into them.

  “Look, kiddo, I was a little hard on you there. Sit down in the glider and take your time. You and your family are decent people. Y’all got hit by a wrecking ball, but eventually you’ll get this behind you.”

  She sat down heavily in the glider and I realized that something far more serious was on her mind than seeing again the faces of men who had been looting her neighborhood.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “What is what? I’ve never seen any of these people. It was dark. I was still half asleep. How could I recognize these people?”

  Her fingers were pinched tightly on the photo holders. Then, almost as an afterthought, she pushed them at me. I didn’t offer to take them. “You don’t recognize anybody in those mug shots?” I said.

  “No, I just told you. I don’t know who they are.”

  I sat down next to her. I could hear the chains on the glider biting into the oak bark overhead. “Look at me, Thelma.”

  “I don’t want to look at you. Please go, Mr. Robicheaux. I have an anthropology class. I have to get ready.”

  I took the photos from her hands. “Why do you want to lie? Why not admit you recognize someone in these photos? Was it you who fired the rifle?”

  “No. I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I hate guns.”

  Then she pressed the palm of her hand over her mouth and began to gag. I placed my hand on her back. Her shirt was damp with perspiration and it flattened and stuck against her skin. I could feel her muscles constricting with each breath she drew. A tremor rippled through her body and she began to sob and shake all over.

  Suddenly I knew her secret. Only one kind of injury produces the level of injury and misery she was experiencing. It’s of a kind that never goes away, that carries with it an unearned sense of shame and dishonor and humiliation and rage that the worst of my own memories cannot compete with.

  “These are the guys who raped you, aren’t they?”

  “No,” she said, swallowing, drawing it back inside herself, wiping the tears off her cheeks with her fingers.

  “Yes, they are, Thelma.”

  “No, you mustn’t say that.”

  “Somehow they blundered into your life again. You recognized them and you told your old man. You won’t admit that because you’re afraid you’ll provide us with the motivation for his shooting them.”

  “Don’t do this to us, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “You’re a stand-up kid. But you’re not thinking clearly. As soon as you told your father these were the guys who attacked you, he had every right to use violent force to protect his home and family. Get a good lawyer and tell him the truth, then come into our office and do the same.”

  But she was already running for the inside of her house, like a little girl who has just been tricked into betraying the only friend she has.

  Chapter 16

  CLETE PURCEL’S ADVICE on dealing with mainline perps and full-time dirtbags was simple: When they deal the play, you bust them or dust them. But what about a guy who didn’t have a category? Or worse, one who operated without handles?

  Early Saturday morning, Alafair went to City Park with Clete, jogging with him down a serpentine asphalt path that led through live oaks still deep in shadow. Somehow she had convinced herself she could wean him from his diet of booze and fried food and the self-delusion that clanking iron three times a week while he drank a pitcher of vodka Collins would control his weight and reduce his blood pressure.

  Rain clouds had sealed the sky and inside the trees the air was warm and almost luminescent with humidity. Clete and Alafair jogged past the old brick firehouse, then across close-cropped St. Augustine grass that was emerald green from the rains, past camellia bushes and islands of hyacinths floating in the bayou and a cypress pond set in the center of the park. They thumped across a wood pedestrian bridge and caught the asphalt again, their eyes stinging with sweat, the smell of burning leaves clinging to their skin. Up ahead they saw a man sitting in a picnic shelter, tying his tennis shoe, his mouth twisted in a self-amused smile. He was overdressed for the morning, his navy blue workout pants dark with sweat below his waist, his matching windbreaker open on a T-shirt that was glued to his breastbone.

  “See that dude with the caved-in face?” Clete said, panting with the effort.

  “What about him?” Alafair said.

  “He’s bad news. Cut across the grass.”

  Alafair followed Clete as he angled back toward the bayou, running through shade trees again, down into depressions sprinkled with leaves, tannic with the smell of gas. Then she made a mistake
. She looked back over her shoulder at the man with an elongated head and a face that seemed to have melted and been remolded to resemble the back of a thumb.

  A moment later she heard a man’s feet pounding the sod behind her, his breath coming hard in his throat.

  “Thought that was you,” the man said to Clete. “Who’s your young friend?”

  Clete slowed, working hard to catch his wind. “We’re on our run, here,” he said.

  “Watch this,” the man said. He sprang onto a picnic bench and caught a limb with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, his exposed stomach fish-belly white, splayed with black hair. He dropped to the ground with a thump. He wiped his hands on the front of his windbreaker, his smile still in place. His eyes were green and recessed, playful as marbles. “I’m ronald,” he said to Alafair.

  “How do you do?” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.

  “She didn’t give it. We need to finish our regimen, here, Mr. Bledsoe. I’ll chat you up some other time,” Clete said.

  “You’re all out of breath, there. I’ve got cold drinks in my cooler. I have some po’boy sandwiches as well.” his eyes shifted to Alafair, lighting with curiosity or perhaps a proprietary sense that he knew and had claim on her. “Are you Mr. Purcel’s daughter?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Clete placed both of his hands against a tree trunk, breathing through his nose, his heart rate starting to drop, his head spinning. “I don’t know how else to say this to you, podjo, but you seriously need to dee-dee. That means beat feet down the road. No insult intended.”

  “You from South Ca’lina?” Bledsoe asked, ignoring Clete, stiffening an index finger playfully at Alafair.

  She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass clean with her wrist. She tapped on it with a fingernail, as though the second hand were stuck. In the silence the man named Bledsoe shifted his weight, his shoe crunching a pecan husk.

  “I knew a girl ’Cross the line in Savannah, looked just like you,” he said. “She was part Indian and had the same kind of coloring. She had long legs and wore an ankle bracelet, the kind with little charms all over it. You could hear her jingling when she walked. I always got a kick out of her.”

  “Go on without me for a minute,” Clete said to Alafair.

  “Dave and Molly are expecting us, Clete,” she replied, squeezing his upper arm. “Let’s go.”

  He put his car keys in her hand. “Bring the Caddy around. I blew my circuits. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He winked. “Believe me, I’m copacetic here.”

  The keys felt heavy and hard inside her palm, foreign and reductive somehow, as though their presentation to her had relegated her to the level of an object, one that required protection. The sun came out and she saw motes of desiccated leaves swimming in the shafts of light that fell through the tree overhead. The air was damp and stained with the septic odor of a public restroom a few feet away. She wiped a cloud of mosquitoes out of her face and felt a surge of anger like a bubble rising in her chest. A fox squirrel clattered across a limb above her head and involuntarily she looked up at it. When she lowered her gaze, the man named Ronald Bledsoe was staring at her, intrigued, his eyes roving over her features and the broken lines of sweat trickling into her sports bra.

  “I’m going to get my friend’s car and come back for him,” she said. “If you bother my friend or me in this park again, I’ll have you arrested.”

  “I wouldn’t offend you for the world,” Bledsoe said, placing his hand on his heart. “But you still haven’t told me your name, little darlin’.”

  She walked back to the parking area by the concrete boat ramp and started up Clete’s Caddy, the exhaust pipe coughing a cloud of oil smoke into the air. As she drove back toward the clump of oak trees, she saw Clete talking heatedly to Bledsoe, like a third-base coach angry at an umpire, his arms pumped. All the while, Bledsoe continued to look back at Clete without speaking, nodding occasionally, his mouth forming a smile that made her think of earthworms constricting on a hand-rolled piece of pie dough. She drove out onto the grass and stopped the car a few feet from them. The top of the Caddy was down and leaves drifted out of the trees onto the leather seats. “Time to boogie, Cletus,” she said.

  “You got it,” he said, pulling open the passenger door, looking back over his shoulder, his face as hot as a slap.

  Alafair turned the convertible around and headed out of the park. She looked in the rearview mirror. “What’d that guy say?” she said.

  “Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who’s a couple of quarts down.”

  But wheels were turning in Clete’s head all the way back to the house, his sweat drying in a glaze on his skin. She pulled the Caddy to the curb in front of the house and got out. “Tell me what he said, Clete.”

  “The guy’s a meltdown. Just stay away from him.” He slid behind the wheel and rubbed his palms along its surface and clicked the radio on and off.

  “Stop acting like a dope and tell me what he said.”

  Clete blew out his breath and lifted his eyes up to hers. “How about I take y’all to dinner tonight?” he replied.

  DOWN THE STREET, Clete got stuck behind a tourist bus in front of an antebellum home called the Shadows. He turned out of the traffic at the red light and headed down St. Peter’s Street toward his motor court, punching in my number on his cell.

  “Dave?”

  “Hey, Clete.”

  “We ran into this character Ronald Bledsoe in the park,” he said. “He was coming on wise to Alafair.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “Innuendos mostly. But…”

  “But what?

  “The guy gives me the chills. His eyes were all over Alafair’s body. The guy’s a sadist. You can smell it on him. Can Alafair hear you now?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “What do you mean? I just dropped her off.”

  I put down the phone and looked out the front door and through the side window. “She’s not here, Clete. What did this guy say?”

  “I sent her to get the car. He watched her walk away, then he said, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher. That’s what country people say back in South Ca’lina.’”

  “I’ll call you back,” I said.

  I knocked the garbage can into an oak tree getting out of the driveway.

  ALAFAIR HAD JOGGED back down East Main and crossed the drawbridge at Burke Street, taking long strides, breathing evenly, the bottoms of her running shoes ringing on the bridge’s steel grid. The sun was well above the trees now, the bayou’s surface bladed with mirrorlike reflections that made her eyes water. Up ahead, inside the park, she saw the man who called himself Ronald Bledsoe standing under a picnic shelter, gazing across the bayou in the direction of her house.

  She jogged down the asphalt path, then slowed to a walk, studying the ground as she did, Bledsoe’s silhouetted image hovering on the edge of her vision. Dave would have told her not to confront a defective man, not to empower those whose destructive energies always turned against them if you left them alone. But Clete had treated her as he would a child and then had tried to conceal information from her, as though she were incapable of dealing with the world. And Bledsoe had violated her with his eyes and his language and the lascivious curl of his mouth, and had gotten away with it.

  She walked down to the bayou’s edge, perhaps thirty feet from the picnic shelter. She tossed a stick into the current. The wind wrinkled the water’s surface and carried with it the smell of charcoal starter flaring on a grill.

  “I knew you’d be back,” Bledsoe said from the edge of her vision.

  “Is that right?” she replied.

  He was sitting on the picnic table now, one foot resting on a bench, his smile like a slit upturned at the corners. “Know how I knew that?”

  “No, but why don’t you tell me?” she said.

  “’Cause you don’t let people push you around.”

&nbs
p; “Really?”

  “You have sharp edges. That means people cain’t get over on you. That means you don’t let an older man boss you around.”

  The stick she had tossed into the water spun on the edge of the current, a green horsefly resting on top of it. “I didn’t want you to have a wrong impression back there,” she said.

  “I know that. I know what you gonna think before you think it, darlin’.”

  “You see, I am Indian. I was born in a village in El Salvador. A Catholic priest tried to fly my mother and me into the United States, but we crashed off Southwest Pass. My mother drowned in the plane. I think she was a brave woman.”

  “You have quite a history. It seems you’re educated, too. But you got something else on your mind, too, don’t you, little sweetheart? You weren’t gonna let Mr. Purcel treat you like you don’t know your own mind about things.”

  He reached into a cooler and removed a dark bottle of beer with a silver and gold label on it. He made a ring with his thumb and forefinger and wiped the crushed ice from the surface, then cracked off the cap. He stepped out into the sunlight and approached her, his hand cupped around the bottle’s coldness. “Here,” he said. “Put this in your mouth and tell me how you like it.”

  “I told you about my mother because I wanted you to understand I couldn’t care less about the racist and sexist remarks of a peckerwood degenerate. Because of your impoverished background and your cultural ignorance, we’re going to let you slide with a C minus as a human being and hope you go away someplace where the standards are minimal. But that’s a one-time-only exception. You shouldn’t presume you’ll be treated as generously in the future. Are you able to follow what you have just heard?”