The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Unhappily, that’s not the way it works.

  Clete and I got into his convertible and, like a pair of 1950s low-riders, headed up the bayou to the Loreauville Quarters and the home of Elizabeth Crochet.

  DECADES AGO, during the 1960s, a black minister in oakland, California, addressed an open letter to the founders of the Black Panthers, young men he had known since childhood. His thesis was simple, namely, that the foundations of the black community had always rested in the church and the family. The family was matriarchal and the church was usually Southern Baptist.

  The minister added that his young friends did not understand the atavistic nature of loyalty within the black family. Unlike whites who would call the man on their own children, the matriarch would open her veins before she would dime a grandchild with Officer chuck. Because the Panthers did not respect either the church or the traditional ethos of the family, their constituency would prove to be evanescent at best and their movement little more than a historical asterisk.

  Elizabeth Crochet wore her gray hair in a bun and walked with a cane, her back terribly bent. When she pushed open the screen for us to enter, she could barely lift her head sufficiently to see our faces. Clete removed his porkpie hat, and I showed my badge and photo ID. Her living room was neat, the faded throw rugs broom-swept clean, the slipcover on the couch printed with a floral design. She sat in a hard chair and indicated the couch and the one stuffed chair were for us. Her blue eyes jittered when she tried to focus them on us.

  “You say my lI’l car been in an accident?”

  “Down by the Jeanerette drawbridge,” I said.

  “News to me,” she said.

  “Where is your car now, ms. Crochet?” I asked.

  “It ain’t out front?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said.

  “Then I guess it ain’t here, no.”

  Clete suppressed a yawn and looked out the door, knowing the drill from many years.

  “Ms. Crochet, we’ve already spoken to a couple of your neighbors,” I said. “I know your grandson is Bertrand Melancon. I know he’s staying with you. I don’t want to see him hurt. But some very bad men will do whatever it takes to get their hands on something they believe Bertrand has in his possession or at least has access to. I can’t stress enough how dangerous these men are.”

  “He’s in trouble again, huh?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “It started with their mama,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Their mama always liked a downtown man. She went off to New Orleans, wasn’t gonna live in the Quarters like a field hand, she said. Eddy and Bertrand never had no real daddy.”

  For just a moment I thought our trip was not in vain. “Where’s Bertrand right now, ms. Crochet?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Has a man named Otis Baylor tried to contact you?”

  “Who’s he?”

  I wrote my home phone on the back of my business card and put the card on her coffee table. “Ask Bertrand to call me.”

  “I got the feeling I ain’t gonna see him again, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  I was surprised she had remembered my name and I realized that her mind and intelligence were far less influenced by her age than her body was. “Why is that?”

  “’Cause I always knowed he was gonna die young. He didn’t talk till he was fo’ years old. Know why? He was always scared. A li’l boy scared every day of his life. He always been that same li’l boy, trying to prove he ain’t scared of nobody.”

  “Bertrand told me he had an auntie in the Lower Nine. Think he might be with her?” I smiled when I said it.

  “From what I hear, ain’t nobody left in the Lower Nine, lessen you count dead people.”

  I got up to go.

  “Suh?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s Bertrand done? He ain’t killed nobody? He ain’t done somet’ing like that, no?”

  She made me think of a small bird looking up from the bottom of a nest.

  CLETE AND I got back in his convertible and drove up the lane, to the end of the Quarters, on the outside chance Bertrand was at a neighbor’s house. I could tell Clete was exasperated by the way the interview had gone. “Why didn’t you tell her her grandson probably killed a Catholic priest?” he said.

  “Because it wouldn’t do any good. Because she’s too old to handle that kind of weight.”

  “You didn’t press her about the aunt, either.”

  “I can’t chase him all over the state, Clete. I don’t have the time or the resources. How about lightening up?”

  The right-front tire hit a chuckhole and the frame slammed down on the spring, splashing water on the windshield.

  “It’s your case, but he’s still my bail skip,” Clete said. “And he’s still the guy who ran me down with his automobile.”

  “That’s right, it’s my case. I’m glad we have that straight.”

  Clete clicked on the radio, then clicked it back off, the color climbing in his neck.

  “Say it,” I said.

  “It’s your case, handle it the way you want. But I think you cut these bastards too much slack.”

  I looked out the window and decided this time not to reply.

  Clete turned onto another lane and drove slowly back toward the state road. The sky had darkened and lights were going on in the shotgun houses on either side of us. The boarded-up windows, the junker cars, the wash lines, and the open drainage ditches full of trash were like photos taken by Walker evans during the Great Depression, as though seven decades had not passed. Who was responsible? I have trouble with the notion of collective guilt. But if I had to lay it at anyone’s feet, I’d start with the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Saturday-night nigger-knockers, and all the people who did everything in their power to keep their fellow human beings poor and uneducated and at one another’s throats so they would remain a source of cheap labor.

  “Did I piss you off?” Clete said.

  “No,” I said. “I think Bertrand Melancon was at Otis Baylor’s house.”

  “He wants to square what he did to Baylor’s daughter?”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “He could give them the diamonds. But I don’t think a pus head like Melancon has it in him.”

  I was tired and didn’t want to think about it anymore. “I’ll buy you a Dr Pepper up at miller’s market.”

  “I can’t wait. Life with you is-”

  “What?”

  “You’re the best cop I ever knew. But you’re nuts, Dave. You always have been,” he said. “Life with you is like being around a guy who’s got kryptonite for a brain.”

  THE CALL CAME in the middle of the night. Outside, the moon was white in the heavens and the wind buffeted the house and whipped leaves down the slope onto the surface of the bayou. I turned on the light in the kitchen and picked up the receiver. The caller ID indicated the caller was using a cell phone. “Mr. Dave?” the voice said.

  “Listen, Bertrand-”

  “Don’t hang up, man. Somebody shot into my grandmother’s house. I was standing by the window and the bullet come right t’rou the glass. I was packing my things and my grandmother axed me to get her a glass of water. If I ain’t turned around just then, I’d be dead.”

  “Who shot at you?”

  “I don’t know. This guy Ronald was at my grandmother’s house, pretending he’s some kind of insurance cop, trying to bribe me into telling him where them stones is at. I think he works for Sidney Kovick, except maybe he decided to screw Kovick and put toget’er his own deal. So I called up Kovick and tole him that.”

  “You dimed Ronald Bledsoe with Kovick?”

  “Yeah, you could put it that way. Hey, man, what worse trouble could I be in? I helped tear Kovick’s house apart. I stole his diamonds and his counterfeit money and his blow and his thirty-eight out of the wall. We even tore the chandeliers out of the ceiling.”

  “Kovick had cocaine in
his walls?”

  “Just one bag. We took it wit’ us. It had already been stepped on. It was his private stash.”

  That piece of information didn’t fit, but I didn’t pursue it. “Where are you, Bertrand?”

  “Wit’ my grandmother, in a safe place.”

  “Where?”

  “Look, I tried to make it up to the Baylor family. But they wasn’t interested. I cain’t do no more than what I done. You been straight wit’ me, man, so I t’ought I had to tell you these things. My grandmother didn’t have nothing to do wit’ any of it. She don’t know about no crimes I committed, either, so don’t be hanging an aiding-and-abetting on her.”

  “How did you try to make it up, Bertrand?”

  “What difference do it make now?”

  There was no point in trying to extract any more information from him. Maybe it was finally time to leave Bertrand Melancon to his fate, whatever it was. But I had one more question.

  “When Father LeBlanc fell from his church roof and you saw lights under the water, did a Coast Guard helicopter fly by overhead?”

  “There wasn’t no helicopter. That’s how come all them people drowned,” he replied. “Who tole you there was a helicopter? I would have heard it. All I heard was them people yelling for help inside that attic. You don’t never forget sounds like that.”

  Chapter 27

  I COULDN’T SLEEP the rest of the night. In the morning I told Molly about the content of Bertrand’s phone call. Alafair had stayed overnight at a girlfriend’s house in Lafayette. It was 8:37 a.m.

  “What time did Alafair say she was going to be home?” I said.

  “She didn’t. Why?” Molly said.

  “Because I think Bledsoe is making a move. He tried to double-cross Kovick or whoever hired him by bribing Melancon, then he tried to clip Melancon to cover it up. I think he plans to blow Dodge, but not before he pays back Alafair for kicking his face in.”

  Molly was framed in the back door, Snuggs’s bowl in one hand and a sack of dry food in the other. The sunlight seemed to form a red nimbus around her head. “Maybe Bledsoe won’t do that.”

  “A guy like that doesn’t make decisions. His choices are already hardwired into his head. He seeks pleasure for himself or he seeks revenge against his enemies. Often the two are the same.”

  “If you’re trying to scare the hell out of me, you’re succeeding.”

  I looked through the Rolodex and called the home of Alafair’s friend in Lafayette. No one answered. I tried to think, but I was too tired, too used up to see anything straight.

  “Something Melancon mentioned doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He told me he and the other looters took a bag of cocaine, a thirty-eight, some counterfeit money, and the blood diamonds from Kovick’s wall. He said the coke had already been cut, which to Melancon meant it was probably Kovick’s private stash. Except Sidney isn’t a doper and neither is his wife. I think the coke and gun and counterfeit all belonged to the same people Sidney took the diamonds from.”

  “I’m not following you,” Molly said.

  “Maybe Sidney has no connection to Ronald Bledsoe. Maybe our enemy is Sidney ’s enemy.”

  Molly poured dry food into Snuggs’s bowl and set it on the floor, then opened the back screen and let Tripod in. Tripod and Snuggs began eating nose-to-nose out of the same bowl, their tails stretched out behind them. Molly lit a burner on the stove and dragged a big iron skillet on top of it.

  “Bledsoe is evil, Dave. I don’t care who he works for. If he comes here with the intention of hurting any member of this family, I’ll kill him. That’s a promise. Now sit down while I fix us some eggs and coffee.”

  It must have been coincidence, but both Snuggs and Tripod stopped eating and looked up from their bowl.

  I DROVE TO Helen Soileau’s house in an old neighborhood close to the downtown area. Her house had a wide gallery and tall windows with ventilated shutters like my own. Almost every Saturday morning children came to her house ostensibly to help with the yard work, but the morning activities usually ended with homemade ice cream and hot dogs. On this particular morning four or five kids were helping her weed her flower beds. I parked my pickup at the curb and walked up on the lawn. She got up from her knees, brushing grains of dirt from her gloves. She looked at my face.

  “You okay, Pops?” she said.

  “We need to get Bledsoe into custody.”

  “What else is new?”

  “He may have taken a shot at Bertrand Melancon last night. If that’s the case, I suspect he’s about to blow town. I think he might try to get even with a few other people before he does.”

  “You said ‘if.’”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Bledsoe. Sidney Kovick’s gumballs are in New Iberia. Maybe they’d like to take Melancon off at the neck, too. Plus, I think Otis Baylor may have found out Melancon was staying at his grandmother’s in Loreauville.”

  “How does one black kid get half the planet on his case?”

  “But the one certifiable psychopath in the mix is still Ronald Bledsoe. He also has the greatest motivation. He tried to cut his own deal with Melancon and Melancon dimed him with Kovick.”

  The day was cool, the sky a hard blue, the sunlight through the trees like gold coins on her face. She watched two children spraying charcoal lighter on the portable grill in the side yard. “You guys wait for me to do that,” she said.

  Then she looked back at me, her thumbs hooked in the sides of her jeans. “We rousted him once. It didn’t work. We can’t tell the guy ‘We don’t like you. Get out of town before sundown.’”

  “How would you like him around these kids?”

  “You want my job, run for office. In the meantime, don’t lecture me, Streak.”

  I got back in my truck without saying good-bye and drove away. In my rearview mirror I saw her toe at the grass, her thumbs still hooked in her jeans, like a teenage girl who had just lost something of value.

  ALAFAIR CAME HOME at noon, blowing out her breath as she came through the door, a drawstring bag slung over her shoulder. I wanted her to tell me her overnight stay in Lafayette had been uneventful, that somehow my concerns were inflated. But I knew better, even before she spoke.

  “I think I saw Ronald Bledsoe this morning,” she said. “We were eating breakfast in a café by the university. He was parked in a blue car under a tree. We went to the mall and I saw him again.”

  “Why didn’t you call me, Alf?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure the man in the blue car was Bledsoe. At the mall I was. Are you going to arrest him because he goes to the same mall I do?”

  “If there’s a pattern, we can get a restraining order.”

  “With Bledsoe, that’s like writing a traffic citation on the guys who flew planes into the Towers.”

  She was right. To make matters worse, we were now arguing among ourselves about a degenerate.

  “Stay close today, will you, kiddo?”

  “I’m not a child, Dave. Don’t treat me like one,” she replied.

  Clete Purcel had always said “Bust them or dust them.” But what do you do with those who have probably been looking for an executioner all their lives, perhaps ensuring their evil lives on in the rest of us long after they are gone? What do you do when those you love most become angry when you try to protect them?

  Maybe there was another way to deal with Ronald Bledsoe.

  I WENT TO CITY PARK and used my cell phone to call Sidney Kovick’s flower shop. His wife answered the phone.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Eunice. I need to talk to Sidney.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “On Saturday?”

  “No, he’s not here,” she repeated. But she didn’t tell me where he was.

  “This isn’t a courtesy call. Marco Scarlotti and Charlie Weiss are in New Iberia. I think I know why they’re here, too. Sidney needs to talk with me.”

  “Give me your number.”

  I gave her both my cell and home numbe
rs. I thought the conversation was over, but it wasn’t.

  “Dave, you don’t know what’s going on. Years ago, Sidney committed a terrible deed. It never allowed him any peace. But he met Father Jude LeBlanc through Natalia Ramos, the El Salvadoran girl he hired to clean his office. You remember my mentioning her to you?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I replied, my attention starting to wane.

  “Father Jude talked to Sidney about changing his life and making up for what he did. Sidney is trying hard to be the best man he can. He’s not always successful, but he’s trying. Be patient with him, will you?”

  Patient with Sidney Kovick? Sidney as victim was a hard act to buy into. “He’s in New Iberia, isn’t he?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Yeah, you are, Eunice, I thought. But I let it go. “I look forward to hearing from him,” I said, and closed my cell phone.

  Actually, at this point I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk with Sidney or not. Was Sidney actually trying to change or just feeding Eunice’s illusions? I was tempted to turn my cell phone off. But as I sat in the picnic shelter on the bayou’s edge, I could look across the water and see the shadows in my backyard and the caladiums rippling around the trunks of the trees and the lighted kitchen where Molly and Alafair were preparing an early supper so we could go to Saturday afternoon Mass in Loreauville.

  Somewhere out there in the larger world, William Blake’s tiger waited to take it all from me.

  Which was more important, protecting one’s family or worrying about the redemption of a man who had put on a raincoat and rubber boots before entering a basement with a chain saw? In my mind’s eye I saw his victim-in handcuffs, probably bound at the ankles, his mouth taped, his eyes popping with terror. What kind of human being could do something like that to his fellow man?