The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  THE NEXT DAY, in the Atchafalaya Basin, a black man was bobber-fishing with a cane pole inside a grove of flooded trees. It wasn’t the abandoned rental car on the levee that caught his eye. It was the gray cloud of gnats that hovered above the boxlike remains of a cabin at the foot of the levee. The cabin had been built of plywood and tarpaper and had been blown or floated there years ago by a hurricane. On several occasions, during an electrical storm, the black man had taken shelter inside the cabin, and he knew it to be a dry, empty place that was clean of any dead animals or discarded food.

  He paddled his pirogue through the trees, dropping his baited hook and cork bobber into the dark pools that were unruffled by the wind out on the channel. Then he heard flies buzzing and saw shadows swooping across the grassy slope of the levee. When he looked up into the sky, he saw three turkey buzzards gliding in a circle.

  He turned his back toward the levee and lifted his pole in the air, swinging the line back toward the channel, dropping the worm next to a cypress trunk. The wind changed direction, blowing down the slope of the levee. An odor that made him gag struck his nostrils.

  He rolled his line up on his pole and paddled through the flooded trees onto the mudflat, sufficiently upwind now. He dragged the pirogue onto the grass and climbed the levee, then descended again so the wind was firmly at his back. The door to the cabin hung partially open. He picked up a stick to open it the rest of the way, then felt foolish at his fearful behavior. He put his hand on the edge of the door and dragged it open, scraping the bottom across the ground.

  “Oh Lord,” he said under his breath.

  WHEN HELEN SOILEAU and I arrived, the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department had already strung yellow crime scene tape from the flooded trees to the top of the levee, sealing off access to the cabin. The St. Mary sheriff was out of town and the investigation was being run by a lead detective named Lamar Fuselier. His blond hair was cut short and boxed on his neck, and he wore a blue windbreaker and starched khakis and spit-shined black shoes. I used to see him at Red’s Gym sometimes in Lafayette, dead-lifting three hundred pounds on the bar. That’s when he was taking courses in criminal justice at the university. That was where I also saw him pay a student in the locker room for an examination that had been stored in a fraternity file.

  “What’s the haps, Lamar?” I said.

  He was writing on a clipboard, his brow furrowed with concentration. He looked up and away from me, then huffed air out his nose. “Smell it?” he said.

  “Hard not to,” I said.

  “We’re still waiting on the coroner. The old black guy over there called it in. How come y’all are down here?”

  “We’re looking for a couple of guys who might be missing,” I said.

  “If I had to bet, I’d say these guys had been at the casino. Maybe somebody followed them or got in their car and forced them to drive down the levee.”

  “To rob them?” I said.

  “Yeah, they got no wallet or ID on them. We found four ejected twelve-gauge shells inside.”

  “What did you find in the rental?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Somebody emptied the glove box. I thought that was strange. Why would the shooter take the paperwork out of the glove box?”

  “Probably to make our jobs harder.”

  “If you see puke inside, that’s from the old guy. He got sick when he went inside.” He laughed under his breath.

  “Mind if we take a look?” Helen said.

  “Be my guest,” he replied, finally taking notice of her. His eyes traveled up and down her person. “We got barf bags in one of our cruisers if you need one.”

  “Give mine to your wife,” she said.

  The door to the cabin had been pried back onto the levee’s incline, allowing the sunlight inside. I took out a handkerchief and held it to my nose. The odor of decomposition was exacerbated by the nature of the wounds. Both men had been shot at close range, in the stomach and in the face. Their viscera were exposed, their facial features hardly recognizable. Their brain matter was splattered all over one wall. Both men wore sports coats, silk shirts, and expensive Italian shoes with tassels on them. Both of them lay on their side, the remnants of their eyes glistening.

  I stepped back out in the sunlight and blew out my breath. Helen looked at me.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s Charlie Weiss and Marco Scarlotti,” I said.

  “Kovick’s gumballs?”

  “What’s left of them.”

  “You see Bledsoe for this?”

  “I see Ronald Bledsoe for anything,” I replied.

  Then I looked up on the levee and saw Clete Purcel watching us. He must have used his police radio scanner to find the location of the double homicide. Lamar Fusilier looked up and saw him, too.

  “You got no business at this crime scene, Purcel. Haul your fat ass out of here,” he said.

  Clete lit a cigarette in the wind and flipped the dead match down the levee, never moving from his position, smoke leaking out of his mouth.

  Chapter 30

  IF YOU HAVE stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely complex and not subject to easy categorization. I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from his bones. I guess the word I’m looking for is “Empathy.” We find it in people who have none of the apparent characteristics of light-bearers.

  I had gone directly home from the levee in St. Mary Parish, primarily because I feared what Ronald Bledsoe would do next. The lead detective at the crime scene would lift all the prints he could from the shotgun shells and the tarpaper shack, but I doubted if his investigation would come up with anything of value. In my opinion, Bledsoe had been the shooter and Bledsoe wasn’t about to get nailed by a detective who had to pay for a copy of an examination in order to pass a criminal justice course.

  At 4:41 p.m. Sidney and Eunice Kovick pulled into my driveway, Sidney behind the wheel, both of them looking like people who had just discovered the enormity of their own miscalculations. Sidney got out of his vehicle and rested one hand on the roof. “I heard two guys got it in the Atchafalaya,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Who were they?”

  “They didn’t have any ID on them. I suspect by tonight or tomorrow the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department will have some definite information.”

  “I heard about it on the radio. I went by your office. Nobody would tell me anything. They said you were over here.”

  “I’ve told you what I know, Sidney,” I said.

  “Dave,” Eunice said softly. She was still belted in the passenger seat, her face turned up toward mine.

  “These guys were driving a rental Avalon,” I said.

  “You saw the bodies?” Sidney said.

  “The shooter used a twelve-gauge shotgun. The features were hard to recognize. But the victims looked like Charlie and Marco,” I said.

  Sidney clenched his fist on top of the roof. “Where’s Ronald Bledsoe?”

  “I’m supposed to know that? You’ve been jerking me around from the jump, Sidney. Maybe it’s time you develop a little clarity in your life.”

  “You don’t understand, Dave. You’ve never understood what’s going on,” Eunice said.

  “How can I? You don’t share information. Sidney believes the function of cops is to return property to him that he stole from somebody else.”

  “Here’s your news bulletin of the day. I didn’t steal anything from anybody. I made a deal to bring certain goods into the country. I paid for them. Then I found out these goods were being handled by some guys who wipe the
ir ass on their bare hand. So I blew the deal out of the water and confiscated my goods and maybe left a couple of guys with some bad memories to take back to Crap-a-stan.”

  “Bo Wiggins was your partner in this?”

  “Bo who?” he said.

  “We’re done here, Sidney. You want to make your bullshit a matter of record, come into the office tomorrow.”

  “You listen to me, Dave. Marco took a shank in the arm for me when we were kids in the project. Charlie Weiss’s daddy fought on five-buck-a-pop fight cards with my old man during the Depression. Charlie did thirty-eight months on Camp J rather than give me up.”

  “Why were they following Bledsoe into the Atchafalaya Basin?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. They were following him all over. We wanted to find the black kid who looted my house. We figured Bledsoe had a lead on him. I feel to blame.”

  Sidney ’s face was covered with shadow, and leaves were drifting out of the trees onto the waxed surface of his car, further obscuring his expression. I believe his eyes were actually glistening.

  THAT NIGHT I sat in the kitchen and tried to figure out combinations of letters that would give meaning to the illegible remnant of Bertrand Melancon’s statement of amends to the Baylor family. In reality, I didn’t care if anyone ever found the blood diamonds or not. My only interest in them at this point was to find out who had hired Ronald Bledsoe. I still believed he may have worked for Sidney. But if Sidney wasn’t lying, that left only Bo Diddley Wiggins.

  “What are you doing?” Alafair asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “Probably wasting time,” I replied.

  “Is this part of the note you said was in the Baylors’ yard?”

  “That’s right.”

  She picked up the yellow legal pad on which I had printed the disconnected letters. “Let me try a few combinations on the computer.”

  “How’s that going to help?”

  “If the words had been typed rather than hand-printed, it would be fairly easy. The problem with a hand-printed version is the absence of uniform spacing. So you have to be imaginative in order to compensate.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Lose the sardonic attitude,” she said.

  I walked down the slope of the yard to the bayou. The air was damp, the evening sky lit by the fire stacks at the sugar mill. I was more tired than I had ever been. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could almost feel a great weight oppressing the land, a darkness stealing across its surface, a theft of light that seemed to have no origin. Was this just more of the world destruction fantasy that had invaded my childhood dreams and followed me to Vietnam and into bars all over the Orient? Or was William Blake’s tiger much larger than we ever guessed, its time finally come round?

  I called Clete on his cell phone. “Where are you?” I said.

  “At the motor court.”

  “Any sign of Bledsoe?”

  “No.”

  “Look, I don’t want to leave the house. Come on over.”

  “What for?”

  “Nothing. That’s it. Nothing is up. And I’m powerless to do anything about any of it.”

  “Any of what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s it, I don’t know. Sunday, I blew a plug out of a guy’s chest the size of a quarter. I enjoyed it. I had a fantasy about the guy going to Hell.”

  “So what?”

  “We’ve got blood splatter all over us, Clete.”

  “The only time that’s a problem is when it’s ours and not theirs.”

  “Wrong,” I said.

  “Dangle loose. I’m going to motor on over.”

  I had advised Sidney Kovick to develop some clarity in his life. What a joke.

  WEDNESDAY MORNING I experienced one of those instances when middle-class people walk into a law enforcement agency and in the next few minutes trustingly consign their lives to a bureaucratic system that operates with all the compassion of dice clattering out of a leather cup.

  I happened to glance out the window just as Melanie and Otis and Thelma Baylor entered the building. I believed I knew the nature of their visit and I didn’t want to be part of it. Contrary to popular belief, the lion’s share of police work is administrative or clerical in nature. Occasionally we get to slam the door on people whose convictions represent only a small fraction of their crimes and you take a pleasure in separating them from the rest of us. But sometimes you are forced to sit down with offenders who are little different from yourself. They cannot believe the damage they have done to their lives. Even worse, they cannot deal with the institutional consequences that await them. I had come to believe the Baylors fell into this category and I did not want to aid them in their own dismemberment.

  Sure enough, Wally buzzed me on my extension and told me the Baylors wanted to see me.

  “Keep them down there,” I said.

  “I t’ought you liked Mr. Baylor. I already sent them up.”

  “It’s okay, Wally. Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  I met them at the door and stopped Otis before he could speak. “I think you need to talk to either the district attorney or Sheriff Soileau.”

  “No, we need to talk to you, Mr. Robicheaux. We’ve deceived you and we need to set things right,” Otis said.

  Of course, they had no attorney with them.

  “I want you to understand this. The Iberia Sheriff’s Department has no direct relationship to the prosecution of your case, Mr. Baylor. We’re liaison people on lend-lease to other agencies. It’s only because of Katrina that we were drawn into your case. Your issue is with the FBI and the Orleans Parish DA’s office. Sir, use your head.”

  “Shut up, Mr. Robicheaux,” Melanie Baylor said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re going to tell us to get a lawyer. We have a lawyer. I let you hound my husband and I have to account for that. I shot the two black men. My husband had nothing to do with it and neither did my stepdaughter.”

  There were circles under her eyes, and the smell of whiskey and cigarettes was deep in her lungs. I suspected that in her naïveté she believed her sudden admission of guilt would disarm and vanquish all those who had persecuted her and her family, that somehow culpability and accusation would be replaced by the healing balm of martyrdom.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I said to her.

  “What for?” she replied.

  I took a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen from a shelf and dropped them on my desk. “So you can write out an account of what happened the night the two men were shot in front of your house,” I said.

  “I don’t see why that’s necessary. I just told you what happened,” she said.

  “You’re under arrest, Mrs. Baylor. You can have a lawyer here if you wish. You do not have to talk to me, you do not have to write on that legal pad. Whatever you say here from this moment on can be used against you. You are now formally in custody and in all probability you will not return home today. But you came to my office of your own volition. I think that fact will have a strong influence on the disposition of your case. I wouldn’t mar that gesture by obfuscation and recalcitrance now.”

  She looked at her husband and stepdaughter.

  “Do what he says, Melanie,” Otis said.

  Then her face began to dissolve, just like papier-mâché held to a hot light.

  Mrs. Baylor was not a likable woman. I believe she sighted on Eddy Melancon’s throat with forethought and intentionally took his life. I also believe his death was entirely avoidable and that he and Kevin Rochon posed no threat to her safety. But in that moment, as she broke down in my office, who would choose to take on her burden by becoming her judge?

  I handed her a box of Kleenex and watched the Sunset Limited wobble down the railway tracks while she wrote on my legal pad.

  CLETE PICKED ME UP at noon and we drove toward my house in his Caddy, the top down. Molly was at work and Alafair was doing research for her novel at the university library in Lafayette.
Ronald Bledsoe still had not returned to his cottage at the motor court. I told Clete about the confession of Melanie Baylor.

  “How do you think it’ll play out?” he said.

  “Remember that Japanese exchange student who went up a driveway in Baton Rouge on Halloween evening? He asked at the side door for directions to a party?”

  “The wife panicked and the husband shot and killed the kid with a forty-four Mag?” he said.

  “Yeah, the shooter walked.”

  “That’s because the Feds weren’t in on that one. This time they are. Look, Dave, we’ve got one issue here and that’s to bag the guys who tried to kill your family.” He turned onto East Main, a net of light and shadow sliding across his face. “We’ve missed something, I just don’t know what it is. I had a funny dream last night. I was walking in a woods and I could smell fall in the air. There were leaves and mushrooms all over the ground, and air vines were hanging from the trees. When I came out of the woods, you were standing on the edge of a stream with a suitcase by your foot, like you were about to go on a trip. You said, ‘You walked over a grave, Clete. Didn’t you see it?’ Then you waded into the water.”

  The connotations of his dream made something drop in my chest, like a stone tumbling down a well.

  “What do you think it means?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Dreams are just dreams.”

  “No, we missed something. I stepped on a grave and didn’t see it. We’ve been chasing blood diamonds and street pukes and dealing with Dagwood and Blondie while Ronald Bledsoe wipes his ass on the drapes. Bledsoe is the key. How could a guy like that go this long without getting busted somewhere for something? There’s another story to this, Streak.”

  We pulled into my driveway. I opened the front door of the house, then checked all the locks and the windows. I went into the backyard and checked on Snuggs and Tripod. I even squatted down and looked under the house for wires or a device or a package that didn’t belong there. That’s what the inculcation of fear does. Without leaving his home, your enemy makes you his prisoner and controls every minute of your day.