The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Clete was waiting for me in the kitchen when I came back into the house.

  “When I told you about the dream? About you walking into the water? I saw a look on your face. Why’d you look like that, Dave?”

  “I don’t remember,” I replied, avoiding his eyes. “Let’s fix lunch. I have to get back to work.”

  THAT AFTERNOON Wally came up to my office, wheezing from the effort of climbing the stairs. He had a folded sheet of lined paper in his hand. “This come over from lockup. It’s for you,” he said.

  I unfolded the letter and looked at the flowing calligraphy and the name at the bottom. “Thanks, Wally.”

  After he had gone, I sat down and read the letter. No one is exactly sure of the engines that drive the alcoholic. AA literature makes use of terms like “self-centered fear” and “self-will run riot” and “moral and psychological insanity.” Some people consider it a deep-seated neurosis and personality disorder. But regardless of its origins, pride is high up on the list of its attributes.

  To Detective Robicheaux,

  I want to clarify my statement in your office earlier today. I shot into the darkness in order to dissuade the looters from entering our home. Now I must be accountable for that, even though I think one of the looters positioned himself in the path of the bullet, probably because of the self-destructive nature of his kind, although I cannot say that for certain.

  I confessed to my “crime” because you harassed my husband and daughter and would give our family no peace. I have been told by members of my aerobics class you have a history as a drunkard and your meddlesome ways are your means to avoid not being drunk all the time.

  If you want the truth about what happened that terrible night, I will now tell you and you can attach it to my earlier statement. We were at the mercy of depraved animals. The next-door neighbor and his friends said they would protect us. But the next-door neighbor, with his supposed military training and background as a “Southern gentleman,” is a poseur and a blowhard as well as a drunkard like yourself, and after my husband fell asleep from exhaustion, I had to take charge of things and fire blindly into the darkness before the looters who were also the ones who raped our daughter broke down our doors.

  I forgive you for what you did. Your ineptitude and low intelligence are probably not your fault, but your alcoholic personality is. If I were you, I would do something about it, if not for your own sake, then for the sake of those who have to live around you.

  Sincerely,

  Melanie Baylor

  I made a Xerox copy of the letter and sent the original to the district attorney’s office, hoping I never heard the name of Melanie Baylor again.

  Chapter 31

  LATER, I CALLED Betsy Mossbacher at the FBI office in Baton Rouge. I had left her a message after I had found out Bertrand Melancon was in the Ninth Ward. I had also called her after Bobby Mack Rydel had tried to kill my family. But she had not returned my calls. This time she picked up.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “All over the state. What’s this about?”

  “I left you a message about Bertrand Melancon. Otis Baylor found him. Melancon is at his aunt’s house in the Ninth Ward. I also left you a message about Bobby Mack Rydel.”

  “Yeah, I was sorry to hear about that. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

  “Y’all been pretty busy?” I said.

  “Give me Melancon’s address. I’ll see what we can do.”

  I could feel my energies draining. We had been called into a jurisdiction not our own and asked to do scut work that was the responsibility of other agencies. Now I was getting the inference, I had become an annoyance. I gave her the address of Melancon’s aunt in the Ninth Ward.

  “Melanie Baylor confessed this morning to shooting the looters. Her husband was covering for her.”

  “Sheriff Soileau faxed us that info an hour ago.”

  “Melancon wrote a letter of amends to the Baylor family. He gave them directions to the blood diamonds. Except the letter got water-soaked and so far hasn’t been of much value to us. In the meantime, two of Sidney Kovick’s guys got whacked in the Atchafalaya Basin.”

  “Yeah, we got that.”

  “Betsy, I’m supposed to share information with you. If you don’t want me to do that, tell me to get lost.”

  “We’re buried alive in work. Maybe all this will get sorted out one day, but it’s going to be a long time. Do you have any idea how many open homicide cases we have in New Orleans? The city is a giant repository for the dead. I’m not talking about gangbangers, I’m talking about patients who were allowed to drown in nursing homes. Do you realize how many complaints about unjustified police shootings we have to investigate? I can’t even get information about our own people. I think some navy SEALs took out some snipers we don’t know about.”

  But I wasn’t concerned with the FBI’s problems. “I’ve got to get a net over Ronald Bledsoe. He’s ruining our lives,” I said.

  I heard her breathe air out her nose. But I didn’t allow her to speak and continued to bore in. “Sidney Kovick inasmuch as told me he took the diamonds off some guys from the Mideast. You told me yourself he fancied himself a patriot. Maybe these guys are al Qaeda. You have unlimited electronic access when it comes to Homeland Security matters. Bledsoe is the loose thread on the sweater. We just have to pull on it.”

  “Good try, no cigar.”

  “So long, Betsy. I think you’re working for the right bunch,” I said, and hung up, coming down hard with the receiver.

  WEDNESDAY EVENING was exceptionally beautiful, as though the earth and the heavens had decided to join together and re-create South Louisiana the way it was before Katrina and Rita tore it apart. The sky was a hard blue, the evening star twinkling in the west, a big brown moon rising above the cane fields. The rains had turned the oaks a deeper green and had sent Bayou Teche over its banks, swirling along the edges of our yards. You could smell barbecue fires in the park and the tannic odor of chrysanthemums and a clean, bright odor that perhaps signaled the coming of winter, but not in a bad way. For no demonstrable reason, I felt a sense of peace, as though I had been invited to a war but at the last moment had decided not to attend.

  Alafair was returning to the university library to finish the research for her novel and Molly was going to drive her. “You’re sure you won’t come?” Molly said from the doorway.

  “I’ll probably just read a bit and take a walk,” I said.

  “I think I almost have the words worked out on the bottom of the letter the black guy left at the Baylors’,” Alafair said. “It’s just a matter of finding the right combination, not the letters, but the words themselves, so they form a sensible statement.”

  I tried not to show my lack of enthusiasm. “That’s good,” I said.

  “Would the word ‘bricks’ mean anything?” she said.

  I thought about it. “Yeah, it could.”

  “I’ll let you know what I come up with. Actually this is great material. I’d like to use it in my novel.”

  They said good-bye and started out the door. Alafair snapped her fingers in the air. “I forgot my purse. I don’t have any money,” she said. “I was going to pick up a dessert.”

  “Here,” I said. I took twenty dollars from my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

  “We won’t be late,” she said.

  “I’ll still be up,” I replied, and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the one I had always given her when she was little.

  A HALF HOUR LATER, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull into the driveway. I went outside and waited for him on the gallery. He tore the tab on a can of beer and sat down on the steps, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his forehead. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and blew smoke out into the yard. He still had not spoken except to comment negatively on the price of gasoline. I took the cigarette from his mouth, walked out to the curb, and dro
pped it into the storm drain.

  “Dave, being around you is like being married. Will you lay off it?”

  “What’s on your mind, Cletus?”

  “What’s on my mind is I’ve either been living in my own thoughts too long or I’ve developed shit-for-brains syndrome.”

  I sat down next to him. The streetlights had gone on and the canopy of oaks that arched over the street ruffled when the wind blew.

  “Remember when we were searching the Baylor property and the neighbor came out and asked us what we were doing?” he said.

  “Yeah, his name is Tom Claggart.”

  “Remember I told you I thought I’d seen him somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Last year I took a gal for a boat ride out in the Basin. It was cold as hell and I ran out of gas. There were some hunters in a camp up on an island, about three hundred yards from the Atchafalaya. I walked up on them while they were dressing a deer. The deer was hanging by its feet from a tree. There were guts and strips of hide all over the ground. These guys looked pretty uncomfortable. Then I remembered deer season had closed two or three days earlier.

  “One guy goes, ‘We got this six-pointer last week, but it froze up on us.’

  “I pretended I didn’t know or care what he was talking about. They gave me two gallons of gas and wouldn’t let me pay them for it. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a bullet head and thick mustache came to the door and looked at me. I think it was that Claggart guy.”

  “So maybe Claggart hunts deer or has a camp in the Basin,” I said.

  “There was a laptop opened on the table behind him. I could see it through the doorway. The image on the screen was a bunch of playing cards floating into a black hat, you know, the kind magicians use. I think it’s one of those video games for gamblers. Bledsoe is always playing them.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, he doesn’t just play them. He plays that one,” I said.

  “Say again?”

  “I saw that program running on Bledsoe’s laptop when I was in his cottage.”

  “Oh man, we walked right over it, didn’t we? Where you going?”

  “To apologize to the FBI.”

  I went into the kitchen and called Betsy Mossbacher’s cell phone.

  “Hello, Dave,” she said.

  “Can we deep-six that conversation we had this afternoon? I need your help,” I said.

  “You push me into corners, then you blow hot and cold. I never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box. It can be a drag, Dave.”

  Don’t argue, don’t contend, I heard a voice say.

  “We’ve been looking in the wrong places for information on Ronald Bledsoe. We’ve been looking for a criminal record that doesn’t exist and faulting ourselves for not finding it. The real story on a guy like Bledsoe is in the façade of normalcy.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The reason guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?”

  “I got the point. What do you need?”

  “Everything I can get on a guy by the name of Tom Claggart. He has a house next door to Otis Baylor’s place in New Orleans.”

  “What’s his tie-in?”

  “He’s an export-import man. Baylor said Claggart attended either Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel. The Citadel is in South Carolina. That’s where Bledsoe seems to be from.”

  “How soon do you need this?”

  “Right now.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Betsy, Bledsoe sent Bobby Mack Rydel after my daughter. She came within inches of being killed. We’ve been square with you guys. You owe me.”

  There was a beat. “I think we do,” she replied.

  THE SKY HAD SOFTENED to a dark blue when Molly and Alafair parked their automobile next to Burke Hall, the old drama and arts building hard by a lake that was thick with flooded cypress. Molly had a guest-faculty sticker on her car and almost always used the same parking area when she visited the university because there were no evening classes in Burke Hall and the spot between the building and the lake was secluded and usually empty. She put her purse under the seat and locked the car, then she and Alafair walked across the campus to the library.

  The grass in the quadrangle had just been mowed, and the air smelled like flowers blooming and wet hay, and leaves and pecan husks someone was burning in a damp pile. The roofed walkways that enclosed the quadrangle were full of students, the moss in the live oaks limned by the glow of the lighted windows in classroom buildings and student dorms. A sorority was conducting a bake sale in front of the library entrance, the girls wearing sweaters because of the chill, an aura of innocence about them that one would associate with a 1940s movie. The scene I describe is not one of nostalgia. It’s one that existed. It’s one in which we either believe or disbelieve. It represents I think to all of us the kind of moment that should be inviolate.

  Unfortunately it is not.

  After Molly and Alafair entered the building, a man in a raincoat paused at the bake-sale table and bought a pastry. He wore a rain hat that seemed too large for his head and cupped his ears, like an oversize bowler sitting on a manikin. He also wore a mustache with streaks of white in it. He seemed to be a nervous man, and he gave off a smell that was like a mixture of deodorant and moldy fabric or socks left in a gym locker.

  He paid for the pastry with a five-dollar bill and wanted no change. When he pushed the pastry into his mouth, his eyes were fastened on the interior of the library. The coed who had sold him the pastry offered him a napkin. He took it from her and entered the building, wiping his mouth. In his right hand he still held the napkin the coed had given him and the cellophane the pastry had come wrapped in. A trash receptacle was less than three feet from him. But he balled the cellophane and napkin in his palm and shoved them in his coat pocket. Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the library, his face lifted, like a hunter glancing upward into the canopy of a forest.

  I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but the people on duty were all after-hours personnel and had the same problem I did, namely that all the state offices that could give answers about Tom Claggart were closed.

  Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian. Their salaries are wretched and they receive credit for nothing. Their desks are usually tucked away in the stacks or in a remote corner where they have to shush noisy high school students or put up with street people blowing wine in their faces or snoring in the stuffed chairs. But their ability to find obscure information is remarkable and they persevere like Spartans.

  The tidewater accent of the one I spoke with at the Citadel library in Charleston was a genuine pleasure to listen to. Her name was iris Rosecrans and I had the feeling she could read aloud from the telephone directory and make it sound like a recitation of Shakespearean sonnets. I told her who I was and asked if she could find any record of a past student by the name of Tom Claggart.

  “As you probably have already gathered, Mr. Robicheaux, the registrar’s office is closed until tomorrow morning,” she said. “However, that said, I think I can go back through some of the yearbooks and be of some service to you.”

  “Ms. Rosecrans, I need every bit of information I can get regarding this man. It’s extremely urgent. I don’t want to burden you with my situation or to seem melodramatic, but someone tried to kill my daughter and I think the man responsible is named Ronald Bledsoe. I think Ronald Bledsoe may have some relationship to
Tom Claggart.”

  She paused a moment. “Spell ‘Bledsoe’ for me, please.”

  Twenty minutes later she called back. “Thomas S. Claggart was a freshman and sophomore student here in 1977 and ’78. His hometown is listed as Camden. He’s not included in the yearbooks after ’78. Ronald Bledsoe appears never to have been a student here.”

  “Well, I appreciate your-”

  I heard a piece of paper crinkle, like a sheet on a tablet being folded back. “I do have other information, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

  “Please, go ahead.”

  “I talked to the reference librarian in Camden. She checked the old telephone directories and found a T. S. Claggart listed during the years ’76 to ’79. I called the police station there, but no one had heard of a Claggart family. The officer I spoke with was kind enough to give me the number of the man who was police chief at the time. So I called him at his house. Would you like his name?”

  “No, no, what did he tell you?”

  “He remembered the senior Claggart quite well. He said he was a United States Army sergeant stationed at Fort Jackson. His wife had died several years earlier, but he had a son named Tom Junior, and perhaps a stepson. The stepson was named Ronald.”

  “Bledsoe?”

  “The retired police chief wasn’t sure of the last name. But it was not Claggart. He said the boy was peculiar-looking and strange in his behavior. He had the feeling the boy had been in foster homes or a place for disturbed children.

  “That’s all I was able to gather. We’re about to close. Would you like for me to search a little bit more tomorrow? I don’t mind.”

  “What I would like, Ms. Rosecrans, is to buy you an island in the Caribbean. Or perhaps to ask the Vatican to grant you early canonization.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” she said.

  I told Clete what I had just learned from Ms. Rosecrans. He was eating a sandwich in the living room, watching the History Channel.