The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  This time his eyes shifted into the rearview mirror. “You guys down here have issues about something?”

  “Not us. We’re happy as clams,” I replied.

  Betsy gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.

  The grounds and trees outside Otis’s house were dark with shadow when we arrived, the inside brightly lit, the air cool and filled with a fragrance of flowers and freshly baked bread in the kitchen and rainwater leaching out of the oaks into the leaves. His home was the picture of a family at peace with the world. But nothing could have been further from the truth, particularly after our arrival.

  Betsy walked up on the screened-in gallery and knocked hard on the door, her mouth crimped, her ID in her hand. In the gloaming of the day, her hair had the bright yellow color of straw. She glanced at her watch and hit on the door again, this time harder, with the flat of her fist.

  Otis answered, wearing a white shirt and tie, a piece of fried chicken in his hand.

  “Are you Mr. Baylor?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, his eyes going from Betsy to me, as though somehow I were his betrayer.

  “I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. We have a warrant to search your house. I want you and your family to sit in the living room while we do. Where is your rifle, Mr. Baylor?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Otis replied.

  “No, you won’t. You and your wife and daughter and anyone else who is in the house will sit down in the living room, then you’ll tell me where it is,” she said.

  “What the hell is this?” he said.

  “Do what she says, Mr. Baylor,” I told him.

  He went back in the kitchen and returned with Thelma and Mrs. Baylor. After they sat down, the three of them looked up at us expectantly, as children might, caught between their inveterate American desire to obey the law and the fact that strangers who were basically no different or more powerful than themselves could walk into their home, during dinner, and treat them like livestock.

  “The rifle is in the closet of the master bedroom,” Otis said. “A box of shells is on the shelf. That’s the only firearm in the house.”

  “Why are you doing this now? I thought all this was settled,” Mrs. Baylor said. She had brought her drink from the table. It was tea-colored but had no ice in it. She was trying to appear poised, her back straight, her drink resting on her knee, but somehow she made me think of a china plate threaded with hairline cracks. “Is this being given to the media? Do you know what that will do to my husband’s business?”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t report to the media,” Betsy said. “We try to treat you in a respectful fashion. We try to be as unobtrusive as possible.”

  “Then why do you keep bothering us? This is where our tax money goes? For God’s sakes, Otis, say something.”

  “The men who were shot in front of your house were shot in cold blood, Ms. Baylor. By anyone’s definition, that’s capital murder,” Betsy said. “The seventeen-year-old had no criminal record and lost his life for committing a burglary. Vigilantes were hunting people of color in uptown New Orleans. My boss isn’t going to let that stand.”

  “I’d like to contact my attorney. At this point I don’t think we should have any further conversation with you,” Otis said.

  “That’s your right, sir. But we’re not your enemies,” Betsy said.

  “Stop lying,” Thelma said.

  “Say that again?” Betsy replied.

  “You’re here to put my father in prison. Stop pretending you’re his friend. My father never hurt anybody in his life. You’re scum, all of you,” Thelma said.

  “That’s enough, Thelma,” Otis said.

  Betsy’s colleague came from the back of the house with the Springfield looped upside down over his shoulder, the bolt open on the magazine. He carried a carton of.30-06 shells in his left hand. “The marine sniper’s dream,” he said.

  Betsy looked down at Thelma. “Did you see the faces of those black dudes?” she said.

  “Yes,” Thelma said.

  “Where?” Betsy said, surprised.

  “Mr. Robicheaux showed me pictures of them the other day.”

  “Did you ever see them before the night they came to your house?” Betsy asked.

  “No.”

  “Nobody in your family would have any reason to shoot them, huh?” Betsy said.

  Thelma’s mind was working fast now, her eyes locked on Betsy’s, her expression as flat as paint on canvas. “You know that I was raped by black men, don’t you? You’re using what happened to me to build a case against my father.”

  “From what I know of your father, he wouldn’t arbitrarily shoot someone. What about that, Thelma?” Betsy said.

  “That’s it. You have what you came for. Now please leave our home,” Otis said.

  “Give it some thought, Mr. Baylor. You’re an intelligent man. We have a reason for taking your rifle. By noon tomorrow we may have evidence that can send you or a member of your family away for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”

  His eyes were glistening, his jaws locked tight.

  Outside, I got in the back of the vehicle, glad to be gone from the Baylor home and the fear and angst we had just sowed inside it. The sky was dark now, the lights of houses reflecting off the surface of Bayou Teche. I could see Betsy’s face in the glow of the dashboard. “You were pretty quiet inside, Dave,” she said.

  “It’s like using a speargun on fish in a swimming pool,” I said.

  “Funny attitude for a cop,” the man behind the wheel said.

  Betsy was half turned in her seat, her eyes searching my face. “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “We’re on the same side, aren’t we, buddy? How about losing the role of the laconic man from Shitsville?” the driver said, looking in the rearview.

  “Thelma Baylor looked stricken when I showed her mug shots of the looters. I think they’re the guys who raped and tortured her. I think she wanted to conceal that fact from me because it would drive the nail in her dad’s coffin.”

  “You just now decided to tell us that?” the driver said.

  I leaned forward against my safety restraint. There were small pits in the back of the driver’s neck, just below his boxed hairline. His jowls had a wrinkled sag in them, like those of a man whose face doesn’t belong on his youthful body. “My conclusions are speculative in nature. In fact, they’re based entirely on personal perception and have no prosecutorial value,” I said.

  The moon was bright overhead and the cane in the fields that had been mashed flat by Rita looked dry and hard on the ground, like thousands of discarded broom handles. The driver glanced at a row of Negro shacks speeding past us. Several of them had lost their tin roofs, and plywood and blue felt had been nailed across the exposed joists. Up ahead, a drunk man was walking unsteadily along the side of the road, his body silhouetted by the neon beer sign on a rusted house trailer that served as a bar. “This is quite a place,” the driver said. “A person needs to visit it to get the full bouquet.”

  THE NEXT MORNING a technician from the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted a print off Clete’s car tag in the spot where Ronald Bledsoe had rubbed off the mud to see a number more clearly. We ran the print through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System and came up with nothing.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Helen. “Guys like this get in trouble.”

  “Maybe he’s slicker than we think he is,” she said. “Maybe that neurotic personality is manufactured. Maybe he works for the G.”

  “How about I figure a way to bring him in?”

  “I don’t want to step on your feelings, but legally Bledsoe is the victim, not the perpetrator. Your daughter remodeled his face with her foot. He could have her up on an A and B and sue y’all cross-eyed for good measure. Count your blessings, Pops.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “I didn’t think you would,�
� she replied.

  I WENT HOME for lunch. Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she had said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-spaced typescript.

  She often wrote out her paragraphs in longhand, then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day. I was amazed at how much fine work her system produced.

  In high school she had been given special permission to enroll in a creative writing class taught by Ernest Gaines at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines believed she had an exceptional talent. So did the admissions boards at Reed College in Portland. She was given an academic scholarship and received a degree in English literature last spring. She also earned a graduate fellowship at Stanford University, which she would enter this coming spring. The fact that she had gotten herself into a conflict with an aberration like Ronald Bledsoe was a source of frustration I could barely constrain, particularly when I needed to discuss it with her in a forthright fashion.

  “Got a second, Alf?” I said.

  She rested her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead, trying to conceal her vexation at being disturbed while she was writing. “Sure, what’s going on?” she said.

  I pulled up a chair by her desk. “We’ve run Bledsoe through AFIS and the National Crime Information Center, but he’s a complete blank. In some ways that’s more disturbing than finding a sheet on him. He’s obviously a geek and geeks leave shit-prints. But this guy is the exception.”

  “So what’s that tell you?” she asked.

  “That he’s slick or he has some juice behind him.”

  “He got what he deserved. I say fuck him.”

  “Do you have to talk that way?”

  “He put his hand on me. I could feel his spittle in my ear. Want me to tell you what he said?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Okay, Alf.”

  “Will you stop calling me that stupid name?”

  “Look, one other thing, I may end up putting Otis Baylor in jail. I know you and Thelma are friends, so-”

  “I got the message. How about giving me credit for having more than two brain cells?”

  The years have not brought me much in the way of wisdom. But I have learned that the father of a young woman has to remember only two lessons in caring for his daughter: He must be by her side unreservedly when she needs him, and he must disengage when she doesn’t. The latter, at least for me, has been more difficult than the former.

  “You have more than two brain cells?” I said.

  “Have you ever been hit in the head with a basketful of manuscript paper?” she said.

  I WENT BACK to the department at 1:00 p.m. Wally, our hypertensive, elephantine dispatcher and full-time departmental comedian, stopped me on the way to my office. “I was just about to put these messages in your box,” he said.

  “Thanks, Wally,” I said, taking three pink memo slips from his hand.

  “His first name is Bertrand. He don’t like to give his last name. He also don’t have any manners.”

  “Was this a black kid?”

  “Hard to tell. When a guy says, ‘Pull the Q-tips out of your nose ’cause I cain’t understand what you saying, you honky motherfucker,’ does that mean the guy’s got racial issues?”

  “Could be. Thanks for taking the message, Wally.”

  “Glad to help out. I love this job. T’anks for introducing me to your friends.”

  I went to my office and punched in the cell number that Wally had written down on all three message slips. “Bertrand?” I said.

  “Is that you, Mr. Dave?” a voice said.

  Mr. Dave?

  “Yeah, it is, Bertrand. What’s up?”

  “There’s something weird going on. Somebody’s handing out free cell phones to people that’s in the life. Even people in the shelters, anybody who might know something about them stones. A phone number comes wit’ the cell. I seen Andre wit’ one. They come from Wal-Mart. Andre’s attitude ain’t making me feel real comfortable.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “What you said about me being a rapist was the troot’. I done it wit’ Eddy and Andre-twice. We done it to a young girl in the Lower Nine. I been all over down there looking for her. I been in the shelters, too. Maybe she died in the storm.”

  I didn’t want to be his confessor. In fact, my stomach turned at the image of three grown men sexually assaulting a helpless fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the bad luck to walk home from a street fair by herself.

  “You still there?” Bertrand asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here. You did the crime, stack the time.”

  But he wasn’t listening. “The other girl was sitting in a car that was broke down by the Desire. She was white. She said she’d been at a high school prom. Eddy got pissed off at her and burned her with his cigarette. He burned her on her breasts.”

  “If you’re looking for Valium for your sins, you called up the wrong guy.”

  “Who else I’m gonna tell, man? People all over the city got cell phones waiting to dime me. They say you call this certain number and a guy wit’ this cracker voice tells them he gonna make them rich if they give me up. I walked past a guy in the shelter yesterday and he made these sounds like a chain saw starting up. Everybody t’ought it was funny.”

  “What happened to Father Jude LeBlanc?”

  He paused, then I heard him take a breath. “We’d been at my auntie’s house. A wave smashed right t’rou the picture window and washed us out the back. We swam up on this trash pile, but it was full of them brown recluse spiders, the kind that eat into your tissue and mess you up later. A woman was in the water wit’ them brown spiders all over her face and in her hair. They was biting her and she was screaming and swatting at them and swallowing water at the same time. That’s when we seen the priest pull his boat up to the church roof and start chopping a hole in it wit’ an ax. That’s when Eddy said, ‘it’s that motherfucker or us.’ We all went in the water and headed for him, wit’ them spiders still in our clothes.

  “I was the first one on the roof. I said, ‘We need the boat. There’s four of us and ain’t but one of you. You can come wit’ us, maybe, but we taking the boat.’

  “He stops chopping and says, ‘The attic is full of people. They gonna drown. You guys got to help me.’

  “Help him? How I’m gonna help him, wit’ Eddy and Andre and Kevin all looking at me to do something, like it’s on me, like ain’t nobody shooting off their mouth now, like I gotta do something, Eddy ain’t such big shit no more? So I grabbed the ax. What was I suppose to do? Maybe he was gonna hit me wit’ it. I seen a man shove a boy off an air mattress, just stuck his hand out and shoved him in the face, a boy wasn’t more than ten years old. That’s what it was like down there, man. You wasn’t there.”

  “What did you do to Father LeBlanc?” I said, my heart beating, my palm clammy on the phone receiver.

  “He wouldn’t give up the ax. He was standing between me and the boat, on the edge of the roof. I went toward him and he just stood there and wouldn’t get out of the way. I say, ‘Man, we gonna get that boat one way or the other. D
on’t get fucked up for something you cain’t change.’

  “He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ What’d he mean by that? I knowed what I was doing. I was saving my life. I was saving Eddy and Kevin and Andre’s life. I knowed what I was doing. I ain’t had no choice. How come he said that to me?”

  “What did you do, Bertrand?”

  “He started fighting wit’ me. He wasn’t strong at all. His arms was like sticks. He had tracks on them. I couldn’t believe it, man, he was a priest and he was a junkie. I could see his teet’ and smell his breath and he was clawing at my eyes. That’s when I hit him, man, hard, wit’ my fist, right in the face. He went over backward in the water and I heard Eddy say, ‘Hit that motherfucker wit’ the ax. Don’t let him get into the boat.’

  “But I ain’t seen him again. The water was dark and it was like he went straight down the wall of the church into the darkness, like a stone statue sinking. How come he said them words to me? I knowed what I was doing, man. I was saving lives in my own way.”

  “Are you that stupid? Most of the people in that church attic died because of you. What do you think he meant?” I said.

  Bertrand Melancon began to weep, uncontrollably. “I’m going to hell, ain’t i?”

  You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself.

  Chapter 18

  THE ARREST WARRANT with Otis Baylor’s name on it was federal, but eventually the storm-impaired processes of the Orleans Parish DA’s office would kick into gear and state charges would be filed against him as well. Ironically, the Feds were busting Otis under a Reconstruction statute that defined murder as a deprivation of a person’s civil rights by the taking of his life, the same kind of orwellian application of law that had been used to prosecute the Klansmen who lynched three civil rights workers in neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Otis had caught his necktie in the garbage grinder. I suspected that when the judicial system was finished with him, he would have to be washed off the grinder with a hose.