The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Can you look at me, Mr. Tolliver?”

  “I’m telling you all I can, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t know any more.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on his face until he had to look at me. “Ronald Bledsoe is an unforgettable person, Mr. Tolliver. I also think he’s a man of great cruelty. If you shake his hand, you’ll feel a piece of black electricity go right up your arm. Tell me again you don’t know this man.”

  “I’m not familiar with the gentleman. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But I saw the tic under his left eye, just like a bee had walked across the skin.

  I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him. “You look like a man of some wisdom. Be forewarned, Mr. Tolliver. Ronald Bledsoe is an evil man. Serve his cause and he’ll consume you.”

  Tolliver tried to keep his face blank, but when he swallowed he looked like he had a walnut in his throat.

  THAT EVENING I dug out an old.22 ruger semiautomatic from my trunk and took Molly to the police firing range and showed her how to thumb-load the individual cartridges into the magazine and how to chamber a round. Then I taught her the use of the safety and how to dump the magazine from the gun butt and to pull back the slide to ensure a round was not still in the chamber. I did these things methodically and without joy. I did them with both reservation and a sense of depression.

  The sky was mauve-colored, the trees along the state road dark with shadows and pulsing with birds. It felt strange watching Molly take a shooting position, her arms extended, one eye closed, the foam-rubber ear guards clamped on her head. It was hard to accept the fact that my wife, a former nun and a member of Pax Christi, was popping away at a paper target with a human silhouette printed on it. When she fired the last round in the magazine, the slide locked open and a tiny tongue of smoke rose from the empty chamber.

  “You look unhappy,” she said.

  “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

  “Are you disappointed in me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You believe we’re giving power away to Ronald Bledsoe, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re good at lots of things, Dave, but lying isn’t one of them.”

  I took the ruger from her hand and dropped it in the canvas rucksack in which I kept all my shooting equipment. I put my arm over her shoulders and we walked to where my truck was parked in the trees. Hundreds of birds were throbbing in the shadows, and in the west the sun had become a red pool tucked inside a bank of rain clouds. I had the same heavy feeling in my chest that I experienced as a child when my parents set about destroying their home and family. The feeling is related to what psychiatrists call a “world destruction fantasy.” I lived with it in my dreams before I went to Vietnam and long after I returned. I addressed it with both Jim Beam and VA dope, and when they didn’t work, I addressed it with the heart-pounding adrenaline that comes with the recoil of a pistol in your palm and the smell of gunpowder in your nostrils and the whirring sound that a tumbling round makes when it flies past your ear.

  I felt that something irreplaceable was about to go out of my life, but I could not tell you why. Was it just the pull of the earth that you feel at a certain age? There are times when the scrape of a shovel pushed deep into dirt can become a sliver of glass in the ear. Was I more afraid of death than I was willing to admit? Or was Ronald Bledsoe causing my family to remake itself in his image?

  When we got home, Molly oiled and cleaned the ruger and did not return it to me.

  AT 9:17 MONDAY MORNING my desk phone rang. “Mr. Robicheaux?” a familiar voice said.

  “What do you want, Bertrand?” I replied.

  “I come here for some help. I cain’t take it no more.”

  “You’ve come where?”

  “I rode a boxcar to New Iberia. I ain’t had no sleep.”

  “You’re in New Iberia?”

  “Yeah, I cain’t take it anymore.”

  “You can’t take what anymore?”

  “Everything. People hunting me. People treating me like I’m the stink on shit. Kovick fixed it so everybody in the FEMA camps know who I am. I ain’t got no place to hide. I was gonna cap him. Or I was gonna cap his wife. But I couldn’t do nothing except stand there shaking.”

  “You tried to clip Sidney Kovick?”

  “I ain’t no killer. I learned that Saturday. I might be a coward, but I ain’t no killer.”

  He described the scene in the flower shop, the fear that fed like weevil worms at his heart, the bitch slaps across the face, the.38 cartridges poured on his genitals, the vicious kick that drew blood from his rectum. His self-pity and victimhood were hard to listen to. But I didn’t doubt the level of his emotional pain. I suspected that, under it all, Bertrand Melancon was probably about seven years old.

  “Give me your location.”

  There was a beat. “That ain’t why I called. You got to explain something. I went to the evacuee shelter in the park ’cause I ain’t had nothing to eat since yesterday. The white girl I seen in the car wit’ the dead batt’ry by the Desire was there.”

  “You mean the white girl you raped?”

  “Yeah, that one, she was there, man, serving meals at the shelter. I tole myself that wasn’t possible. I axed a guy who she was and he said she was from New Orleans, her name is Thelma Baylor. That’s the name of the people in the house where the shot come from, the one that hit Eddy and killed Kevin.”

  I realized what had happened. Thelma had probably gone to the shelter with Alafair to help out, and Bertrand had blundered inside and had seen her. I tried to concentrate, to prevent his accidental discovery from becoming a catalyst for events I didn’t even want to think about.

  “She lost weight, she look a lI’l older, but it’s her, ain’t it?”

  The idea that he was taking the physical inventory of a young woman he had assaulted and asking me to confirm it seemed to invade the moral senses on more levels than I could count. “She’s not your business, partner.”

  “I got to make it right.”

  “You stay away from the Baylors.”

  “I got a plan. I’ll get back to you.”

  He broke the connection.

  I checked out a cruiser and drove to the recreation building in City Park. Alafair was stacking the cots of a family that was relocating to Dallas. She seemed preoccupied, not quite focused. A kid was dribbling a basketball in the background, smacking it loudly on the floor.

  “Where’s Thelma?” I asked.

  “Her father picked her up. I think they were going home,” she replied. She hefted a load of folded bedclothes and looked at me.

  “Was a black guy in his early twenties hanging around? Somebody you haven’t seen before?”

  “If he was, I didn’t notice.”

  “His name is Bertrand Melancon. He’s one of the guys who raped Thelma.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Guilt, fear, opportunism. I doubt if even he knows. Maybe he’s nuts.”

  “Is this related to Ronald Bledsoe?”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s related to blood diamonds, too. We need to get Melancon into a cage, for his own good as well as everyone else’s.”

  “I’m sick of this.”

  “Of what?”

  “Ronald Bledsoe was here this morning. He told the room supervisor he’d like to be a volunteer. But his eyes were on me the whole time. He had that sick grin on his face.”

  Outside the front door, children were playing on swing sets and seesaws under the oak trees. I could remember when Alafair was their age and doing the same kinds of things. “Have lunch with me,” I said.

  “What are we going to do about this asshole, Dave?” she replied.

  I returned to the department and knocked on Helen’s door. She wasn’t happy to hear the latest on Bertrand Melancon.

  “Tell me if I missed anything? He raped the Baylor girl and another girl in the Lower Nine and tried to kill Sidney Kovick, and he’s in New Iberia, calli
ng you with his problems of conscience.”

  “I guess that about says it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get ahold of Otis Baylor and his daughter. Tell them Melancon is in the area and that we plan on picking him up. But make sure Baylor understands that Melancon belongs to us.”

  “Got it.”

  She stood up from the desk and put her hands on her hips. She was wearing western-cut tan slacks and a braided belt and tight shirt. Then unexpectedly she looked me straight-on in the face and her eyes and manner took on that peculiar androgynous cast that had a way of turning her into a lovely mystery, one that was both arousing and unsettling at the same time.

  “I should have never sent you back to New Orleans,” she said.

  “Why’s that?

  “Because the Feds have money to clean up their own messes and we don’t. Because you’re a good cop and you never shut the drawer on your cases. Everybody in your caseload stays in your head. If you weren’t a cop, you’d have a Roman collar on.” Her eyes were violet-colored, warmer than they should have been.

  “Can I have a raise?”

  She jiggled her fingers at me. “Bwana go now.”

  I SKIPPED LUNCH and drove out to Otis Baylor’s house on Old Jeanerette Road. He was in his yard, inside deep shade, a four-gallon tank of insect spray on his back. He worked his way along the side of the house, spraying the flower beds and the foundation. It was cool inside the shade, but the canvas loops of his spray tank had formed sweat rings on his shirt. I had a feeling Otis Baylor was pinching every dollar he could.

  I sat on his front steps without invitation, as a neighbor might. Down the long green slope of his property, the bayou wrinkled in the wind and elephant ears grew thickly along the banks. Otis’s nineteenth-century house, with its rusted screens, tin roof, deep shade, and green mold on the foundation, was a humble setting. But inside the trees the air was cool-smelling and filled with the sounds of wind in the bamboo and the drift of pine needles across the roof. It was the kind of place where a man could be at peace with himself and his family and set aside the ambitions that never allow the soul to rest. But I doubted that Otis would ever find that kind of peace, no matter where he chose to live.

  “I took your advice,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Not to play Ronald Bledsoe’s game.”

  He continued to spray along the bottom of the house, as though I hadn’t spoken. “These Formosa termites will flat eat your house up, won’t they?” he said. “If you don’t stay after them, they’ll eat right through the concrete.”

  “One of the guys who attacked Thelma is in town,” I said. “He called me on a cell phone. His name is Bertrand Melancon. He’s the brother of the guy who took one through the throat.”

  Otis nodded, his eyes flat, his spray wand hissing across the latticework at the base of the gallery. “Why would he call you?”

  “He’s scared. I also think he’s remorseful for what he’s done.”

  Otis pumped the handle that pressurized his tank, his eyes looking at nothing. “He should be.”

  Should be scared or remorseful, which? Or both? I pulled on my earlobe. “My boss wants you to know that Bertrand Melancon belongs to us.”

  “Now, you listen, Mr. Robicheaux-”

  This time it was I who interrupted. “You know what kimberlite diamonds are?”

  “No.”

  “A few years back, warlords in Africa were selling them illegally to fuel their war machines. To harvest these diamonds, these warlords massacred large numbers of defenseless people and chopped off the arms of children. That’s why they’re called blood diamonds. Somehow Sidney got his hands on a bunch of them. The guys who looted Sidney ’s house accidentally stumbled into the biggest score of their lives. Can you imagine what Sidney or his business partners will do to get them back?”

  Otis paused in his work and seemed to stare into the shadows. He slipped the tank off his bank and, holding it by one loop, set it gently on the grass, the insecticide sloshing inside. He sat down on the step in front of me, rubbing the backs of his hands, his coarse skin making a whispering sound.

  “Those men think we’re between them and their diamonds?” he said.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied.

  “Where’s this black kid now?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “All this is about those diamonds, huh? It doesn’t have squat to do with me or my family, does it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  He stood up and shook my hand, then walked into his backyard without saying good-bye.

  THAT EVENING ALAFAIR went to a book signing at Barnes amp; Noble in Lafayette, with plans to stay over at a friend’s. Molly and I hooked up my boat and trailer, and drove up to Henderson Swamp. It was a fine evening to fish for big-mouth bass. The wind had died, and the islands of willows and cypress trees had taken on a gold cast against the sunset. Clouds of insects gathered in the lee of the islands, and you could see bream popping the surface and occasionally the slick, black-green roll of a bass’s dorsal fin on the edge of lily pads.

  Molly had fixed fried-oyster po’boy sandwiches for us and packed several cans of Dr Pepper with crushed ice in a cooler, but I had no appetite and could not concentrate on the perfection of the evening or the fish that were feeding in the shadows of trees that were now etched like pyro-fountains against the sun.

  I didn’t want revenge against Ronald Bledsoe. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to do it close up, with a.45, one loaded with 230-grain brass-jacketed hollow-points. I wanted to empty the whole magazine into him. I wanted to smell the good, clean, head-reeling odor of burnt gunpowder and feel the jackhammer recoil of the steel frame in my wrist. I wanted to see Ronald Bledsoe translated into wallpaper.

  “Why so quiet?” Molly asked.

  “No reason,” I replied.

  Had I confessed the nature of my thoughts to Molly, I would not have only frightened or perhaps even repelled her, I would have also revealed my inability to find a legal solution for dealing with Bledsoe and those like him.

  Supposedly we are a Christian society, or at least one founded by Christians. According to our self-manufactured mythos, we revere Jesus and Mother Teresa and Saint Francis of Assisi. But I think the truth is otherwise. When we feel collectively threatened, or when we are collectively injured, we want the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on the job and we want the bad guys smoked, dried, fried, and plowed under with bulldozers.

  For that reason, I no longer feel guilt and shame over my own inclinations. But I don’t talk about them, either.

  Just as the sun seemed to descend like a molten ball beyond the causeway that spanned the swamp, I cast a Mepps spinner into a cut between two willow islands. There was a current between the islands, and insects that fell from the trees onto the surface were carried into a narrow channel flanged on each side with lily pads. The water was dark and deep and undisturbed. The Mepps arched over the channel and made a tiny splash by a cluster of blooming hyacinths. Just as I began to rotate the handle on my reel, taking the slack from the line, I saw the water swell under the hyacinths as though a pillow of air were rising from the bottom. Then a dorsal fin cut the surface and something hit the Mepps so hard my rod smacked down on the gunwale like a broom handle.

  In Louisiana, in freshwater areas, only large-mouth bass hit with that kind of power and force. I socked him hard, setting the treble hook, and tried to lift the rod and keep the tension and weight of the fish off the monofilament. But the tip of my rod arched to the water, bowing so severely I thought it would break, beads of water shining on the line. Then he began stripping the drag, sawing the line under the boat, trying to find a stump or log to wind it around.

  Molly used the oars to turn us in a half circle, freeing the line from under the boat and allowing the bass to head up the channel. He came up once, rattling the Mepps at the corner of his mouth, then went
deep again and tried to pull the boat. He fought for ten minutes, and when he finally began to swim with the pressure of the line and the hook in his mouth, I knew he was done. It was the kind of victory a fisherman doesn’t necessarily take pride in.

  I slipped the net under him and lifted him into the boat. He was heavy and wet and thick-bodied inside the netting, the barbs of the treble hook protruding from the webbed skin at the corner of his mouth. I wet one hand in the water and lifted him, still inside the net, onto the boat seat and worked the hook out of his mouth. Then I cupped him under the belly and eased him back into the water. I could see his gills working, then he dropped away into the current like a green-gold bubble going in the wrong direction.

  “Giving dispensations these days?” Molly said.

  “Only to warriors and other guys who deserve them,” I said.

  She laughed and opened a can of Dr Pepper and drank it in silence. Then a peculiar phenomenon occurred. Maybe it was because the sun had died and we were deeper into the fall. Maybe it was because the stars were out early and the moon was rising. Maybe car lights on the causeway or the evening glow of Lafayette were reflected off the clouds. But in the cut between the two willow islands, in the darkness of the water where I had just placed the valiant bass, I saw lights that were like pieces of a broken mirror swimming about. I saw them as surely as I had caught that fish and felt it fat and heavy and dripping in my palm.

  Chapter 23

  HOW DO YOU nail the perps when they have no handles?

  Tuesday afternoon, just before quitting time, Clete called me at the office. “A guy who’s a regular at the casino just went in Bledsoe’s cottage,” he said. “This dude is a Texas Hold ’ Em player. I saw him reading the back of a package of rubbers in the restroom, in front of about six guys who’d seen him with his girlfriend outside the door.”

  “You think he can be a lead?”