The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I waited.

  “Get him in the box. Let’s see what he’s made of,” she said.

  “On what grounds?”

  “We want to interview and continue our exclusion of him as a suspect in the break-in at your house.”

  “I’ve been that route.”

  “Tell him the sheriff of Iberia Parish wants to meet him.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to come?”

  “If he is what you say he is, he’ll come.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because he wants to show us he’s smarter than we are.”

  Helen knew our clientele. Sociopaths and most mainline recidivists share certain characteristics. They are megalomaniacs, narcissists, and manipulators. No matter how ignorant and uneducated they are, they believe they are more intelligent than law-abiding people. They also believe they can intuit the thoughts of others. It’s not coincidence they often wear a corner-of-the-mouth smirk. I’ve always suspected their behavior and general manner have something to do with the origin of the term “wiseguys.”

  I found Ronald Bledsoe sitting in a deck chair in front of his cottage, wearing Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeved shirt printed with green flowers, and dark glasses with big round white frames. He was drinking a glass of iced tea and reading the newspaper, one hairless pink leg crossed on his knee.

  “Sheriff Soileau would like for you to come down and talk to her, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said. “It’s purely voluntary. By the way, sorry about that fracas the other night.”

  He folded his newspaper and tilted his head, his eyes unreadable behind his glasses. “I’ve heard a lot about your sheriff. I hear she’s an interesting person. I think I’d be delighted to meet her. Can we go in your vehicle?”

  I didn’t overtly try to engage him in conversation on our way back to the department. He seemed to enjoy riding in a cruiser, and he kept asking questions about the various pieces of technology on the console and along the dashboard. Then he removed his glasses and I felt his eyes probing the side of my face.

  “Know what the de facto definition of a criminal is, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “A man with a demonstrable record of criminality.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s hard to argue with.”

  “You appear to be an educated person, as your daughter does. You ever run across the term ‘solipsism’ in a philosophy course when you were in college?”

  “I don’t think I did.” We were still on East Main, headed into the historical district. In less than five minutes we would be at the courthouse parking lot and in all probability Bledsoe would stop speaking on a personal level, something I didn’t want to happen. “What is ‘solipsism,’ exactly?”

  “The belief that reality exists only in ourselves and our own perceptions.”

  “That’s a new one.”

  “Let me ask you the age-old puzzle: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has it really fallen? Tell me your opinion on that and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “I’d say it had fallen.”

  He laughed to himself and watched the blocks of antebellum and Victorian and shotgun homes slip by the window.

  “So what’s your opinion?” I said.

  “I’ve already told you. You just weren’t paying attention.” He punched me in the arm with one finger.

  His eyes were merry, a liquid green under his thick, half-moon, Curious George eyebrows and jutting forehead. “Is it true your sheriff is a hermaphrodite?”

  We went through the back door of the courthouse and I took him directly to the interview room. Several uniformed cops turned around and looked at us as we passed them in the hallway.

  “I’ll tell Sheriff Soileau you’re here. How about some coffee and doughnuts?”

  “I like doughnuts.”

  “Coming up,” I said.

  I left him in the interview room and asked Wally to take him some doughnuts and a cup of Community coffee, then I told Helen that he was here.

  “How did he behave coming over?” she said.

  “He asked me if I was familiar with solipsism.”

  “With what?”

  “It’s a philosophical view that the only reality is one our minds generate. Then he asked me the riddle about a tree falling in the forest.”

  “If no one hears it, does it really fall?” she said.

  “I told him it falls, whether anyone hears it or not. He laughed.”

  “What do you think he was trying to say?”

  “Earlier he had said something about the definition of a criminal being the physical record of the criminal. I think he was ridiculing us because we can’t find evidence of any criminal activity in his life. I think he just gave us his whole MO. He’s a sociopath who doesn’t get caught. Like Bundy or BTK and probably thousands of others, they burrow into the woodwork and nobody knows they’re there until the house falls down.”

  “How do you want to play it?” she asked.

  “This guy is a sexual nightmare. I suspect he hates women, particularly female authority figures.”

  “Can you imagine that?” she replied.

  We walked down to the interview room, a relatively small enclosure, with two oblong glassed slits in the wall that allowed someone in the hallway to look at the subject with a degree of invisibility.

  “Check him out,” I said.

  Helen peered through the glass. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “Ready?”

  “When you are,” she replied.

  I opened the door and we went inside. Wally had brought Bledsoe at least four custard-filled doughnuts and a king-size paper cup of community coffee. He ate them as you would a hamburger, feeding the whole doughnut into his mouth, the yellow cream glistening on top of his nails.

  “My name’s Ronald. What’s yours?” Bledsoe said to Helen. He partially rose from his chair and sat back down again.

  “I’m Sheriff Soileau, Mr. Bledsoe. Appreciate you coming down.” She closed the door behind us and glanced up at the video camera on the wall. “Since this is just an informal conversation, I had that camera turned off.”

  “I never noticed it.”

  There were two empty chairs at the table, but Helen and I remained standing.

  “Let’s get right to it,” she said. “Somebody broke into Detective Robicheaux’s home and vandalized his daughter’s computer and pissed in the wastebasket. You gave us your DNA voluntarily and we appreciate that. But we have a larger concern. What the hell are you doing here in New Iberia?”

  The shift in her tone caught him off guard. He lifted his eyes into hers. They were as bright and green as emeralds. “I’m a private investigator in the employ of several insurance carriers.”

  “Which carriers?”

  “Confidentiality precludes my giving out their names.”

  “I see. Do you know what obstruction of justice is?”

  “I do.”

  “You’ve factored yourself into a homicide investigation, Mr. Bledsoe. I’m talking about the shooting of two black men in front of Otis Baylor’s house in New Orleans.”

  “Those men of color were looters. They stole from homes insured by my employers.”

  “Otis Baylor is going to help you recover stolen property?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You know Sidney Kovick?”

  “I know his name. Everyone in New Orleans does.”

  “Do you work for him?”

  “No, I’m a bond agent and an insurance investigator, not unlike Mr. Purcel, Mr. Robicheaux’s friend. Can you tell me why Mr. Purcel is not in custody, considering the amount of injury he did to Bobby Mack Rydel?”

  “Our focus is on you, Mr. Bledsoe.”

  “Do you have any more napkins? These are messy.”

  “Is that what your mother told you? Don’t have messy hands?”

  “What was that?” he said.

  Helen leaned down and propped her fists on the ta
ble, only inches away from him. A tube of muscle stood out in the back of each upper arm. Her hair hung on her cheeks. Her physical presence was palpable, her scent like a mixture of flowers and male body heat. Bledsoe’s nostrils whitened around the edges. He shifted in his chair and placed his hands in front of him. His fingers were long and pale, as though they had been in water a long time.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Helen said.

  He looked straight ahead and seemed to gather his body inside his clothes. “You don’t have the legal right to touch my person.”

  “If I touched your person, Mr. Bledsoe, I would scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush. Is it true you get off scaring the hell out of working girls?”

  He glanced up at the camera on the wall, clearly wondering if indeed it was turned off and if that was good or bad for him. “Does it seem logical that a man who hires prostitutes would want to scare off prostitutes?” he said.

  “Yeah, if everything about him creeps them out,” Helen said.

  For the first time I saw a darkness sweep across his face. Helen leaned closer to him, her hip brushing again him, her face intersecting his line of vision. “What did your mother do to you when you were a kid?”

  “She didn’t do anything.”

  “When you wet the bed, did she make you sleep in your own stink? Did she wash out your mouth with soap when you sassed her? Did she tell you your underwear was inside out and that skid marks were on it, that you made her ashamed you were her son, that you disgusted her?”

  He started to get up from the chair.

  “Sit down. I’m not through talking to you,” she said. “She did things to you in the dark, didn’t she? Your father wasn’t around and so you were the dildo. Did she ever hold your penis in her hand and then punish you for it later?”

  The temperature in the room had grown warmer and I felt myself clearing my throat.

  “You’re making this up. You don’t know me,” Bledsoe said.

  “You made a mistake coming to this parish. You’re a sick man and you’ll be treated as such. Detective Robicheaux, go get him another cup of coffee. I want to talk to Mr. Bledsoe a little more privately.”

  “I don’t want any. I want to return to my cottage now.”

  “You know why you keep looking at that camera, Mr. Bledsoe?” she said. “It’s because your identity is self-manufactured and you’re nothing like the person you want the world to see. We know everything about you. You’re genetically and psychologically defective. People like you and Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy should have been flushed down the toilet with the afterbirth five minutes after y’all were born. Unfortunately your mommies didn’t do that and instead raised up big titty babies that everyone else has to take care of.”

  I picked up his coffee cup from the table. “You want cream or sugar?”

  His bottom lip trembled. Helen had delivered a cut that went to the bone.

  “Answer him,” she said.

  He sat up in the chair, his eyes blinking and refocusing, like a man who had just undergone a violent decompression inside a bathysphere. Then he huffed air out his nostrils and straightened his shoulders. I suspected that behind that jutting forehead he was rebuilding his mental fortifications a block at a time, a process he had learned in an environment most of us can only guess at. He bit into a doughnut and pushed the custard inside his mouth with his fingers.

  “It’s been real nice y’all having me here,” he said. “I won’t hold your words against you. That’s not my way. My mother was a lovely, kind woman and you don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “You need to talk to us, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said.

  “No, sir, I surely don’t. Very harsh things have been said here today.” He got up from the chair and took his pair of dark glasses from his pocket, the ones with the round white frames, and fitted them on his face. “Looks is only skin deep, Ms. Soileau. If you’re a Christian, maybe you should give more thought to the feelings of other people.”

  With that, he walked out of the room, down the hall, and out of the courthouse.

  “Do you believe that?” Helen said.

  “Want me to take him home?” I said.

  “Screw him,” she said. She walked in a circle, her hands on her hips. “Think he slipped the punch?”

  “You took his skin off.”

  “And?”

  “Bledsoe’s a psychopath. He’s incapable of accepting injury done to him by others, either real or imagined. He hates our guts and he’ll get even in whatever way he can.”

  I think Helen had drawn on her own childhood experience when she turned the screws on Bledsoe. I also suspected some of the images she had used in her interrogation were of a kind she herself did not like to remember.

  “Some fun, huh, bwana?” she said.

  LATER THAT DAY Bertrand Melancon was sitting on the steps of his grandmother’s gallery, wondering what he should do next, when a blue Mercury turned in to the Quarters and splashed through a puddle, fanning a muddy spray back across its immaculate surface. The driver sighted Bertrand and turned in to his grandmother’s yard.

  Another storm front had moved in and the sky overhead was blue-black and blooming with electricity. The driver of the Mercury got out and walked toward the gallery, avoiding the pools of rainwater, lifting his trouser cuffs above his two-tone shoes.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “What’s happenin’?” Bertrand replied.

  “My name is Ronald. What’s yours?”

  “Same as it was this morning, when a guy wit’ a face just like yours was following me down by the drawbridge in Jeanerette.”

  “You’re smart. I bet you been to college.”

  “What you want, man?”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “No.”

  The man with the indented face opened a badge holder with a photo ID and an ornate gold and blue shield inside. “I’m an investigator for an insurance carrier. I’d like to pay you a recovery fee.”

  Was this one of the guys who had taken Eddy out of our Lady of the Lake and stolen his mind? Bertrand wondered. Or lured Andre into a car outside the FEMA camp? No, those guys wouldn’t drive up to his grandmother’s house in daylight, in full view of the neighbors.

  “Recovery of what?”

  The man who had introduced himself as Ronald removed a big envelope from his side pocket. It was thick and crimped tightly in the center with two double-wrapped rubber bands.

  “Here, see what’s inside,” he said, holding it in front of Bertrand’s face.

  Bertrand folded his hands and pretended to look into the distance.

  “Open it up,” Ronald said. “A smart man always gets the information up front before he does his decision making. A smart man sees what’s on the table, then makes an informed choice. You’re a student of people, I can tell that. You a cautious, smart man. I know that, ’Cause I’m a student of people, too.”

  The man named Ronald touched the edge of the envelope against the back of Bertrand’s hand. “What you got to lose?” he said. “Think those rich people in those big houses down the road are worried about you and your grandmother?”

  Bertrand looked down the street that was lined with shotgun houses and dirt yards in which the people parked their vehicles. Across the state road he could see a field full of green sugarcane and a thoroughbred horse farm bordered by white-painted railed iron fences and dotted with breeding barns that cost more than his grandmother’s entire neighborhood, all of it backdropped by a sky that leaked thunder.

  Bertrand reached out and took the envelope. It was heavy and solid and felt good in his hand, the way a stack of money packed into an envelope can feel solid and good.

  “How much in here?” he said, his voice suddenly dry and speaking of its own accord, before he could even organize the words in an intelligible fashion.

  “Forty thousand. But that’s just for now. You get another forty thousand after we do the recovery. Go ah
ead. Stick your finger in there. Close your eyes and tell me what it feels like. Make you think of anything else?”

  Bertrand cracked the glue on the seal with his thumb and looked at the sheaves of one-hundred-dollar bills inside. “How I know it ain’t counterfeit?”

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll drive you to the bank. Or tonight we can go to the casino. We’ll buy some chips with it and see what happens. The people at the casino know counterfeit when they see it. You’re a smart man, all right.”

  A camera lens opened in Bertrand’s mind and he saw himself driving a convertible down an ocean highway, waves sliding up on the sand, big coral rocks hissing with foam. He saw girls in bikinis slapping a volleyball back and forth across a net. He heard music pounding from his stereo speakers and felt the salt spray in his face.

  “Time to start a new life,” Bledsoe said.

  Next door a woman began shouting at her children. Bertrand heard her hit one of them, a bone-deep slap, the kind that sent a child to the floor.

  “You right,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “That why I ain’t interested. Besides, you got the wrong guy,” Bertrand said.

  He handed the envelope back to Bledsoe and knitted his fingers between his legs. Spots swam before his eyes. He could not believe the amount of money he had just held in his hand and returned to the man who had offered it to him. He spit between his knees and let his mind go empty.

  “What you just said is not only illogical, it’s untrue,” Ronald said, mustering his most tolerant voice.

  “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  “If you’re the wrong guy, you wouldn’t know enough to say you’re not interested. Besides, you look just like your brother.”

  Bertrand could hear an electric rip in a cloud, a tearing sound at the bottom of the sky. “How you know what my brother looks like?” he asked.

  Ronald’s eyes retained their mirthful brightness, but a pause took place in them, a beat or a blink that was not a blink, a split-second inner recognition that he had made a slip.

  “I got both y’all’s mug shots. I got them from a friend at NOPD.”