DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  I didn't answer his question. “I thought you might enjoy some takeout from Victor's rather than eat at the slam,” I said, parking in front of a small cafeteria on Main across from the bayou. “You want to go get it?”

  “You're not afraid I'll go out the back door?”

  “There isn't one.” I put eight one-dollar bills in his hand. “Make mine scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, and coffee.”

  I watched him walk inside, tucking my borrowed tropical shirt inside his rumpled slacks. He was grinning when he came back out and got in the truck.

  “There is a back door, Streak. You didn't know that?” he said.

  “Huh,” I said, and drove us across the drawbridge, over the Teche, into City Park. The bayou was high and yellow with mud, and the wake from a tug with green and red running lights washed over the banks into the grass. We ate at a picnic table under a tree that was alive with mockingbirds.

  “You ever see a leg iron like that before, Sonny?”

  “Yeah, in the museum at Jackson Square.”

  “Why would you make it your business to know that Jean Lafitte operated a barracoon outside New Iberia?”

  “Delia told me. She was into stuff like that.” Then he wiped his face with his hand. “It's already getting hot.”

  “I read your notebook. It doesn't seem to have any great illumination in it, Sonny.”

  “Maybe I'm a lousy writer.”

  “Why do these bozos want to kill people over your notebook?”

  “They're called cleanup guys. They hose a guy and everything around him right off the planet.”

  “I'll put it to you, partner, that girl died a miserable death. You want to help me nail them or not?”

  A pinched light came into his face. His hand tightened on the edge of the table. He looked out toward the bayou.

  “I don't know who they were,” he said. “Look, what I can tell you won't help. But you're a cop and you'll end up putting it in a federal computer. You might as well swallow a piece of broken glass.”

  I took Roy Bumgartner's dog tag out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the table beside Sonny's Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “What's that mean to you?” I asked. He stared at the name. “Nothing,”

  he said.

  “He flew a slick in Vietnam and disappeared in Laos. Somebody left this in my bait shop for me to find.”

  “The guy was an MIA or POW?”

  “Yeah, and a friend of mine.”

  “There's a network, Dave, old-time intelligence guys, meres, cowboys, shitheads, whatever you want to call them. They were mixed up with opium growers in the Golden Triangle.

  Some people believe that's why our guys were left behind over there.

  They knew too much about ties between narcotics and the American government.” I looked at him for a long time. “What?” he said. “You remind me of myself when I was on the grog, Sonny. I didn't trust anyone. So I seriously fucked up my life as well as other people's.”

  “Yeah, well, this breakfast has started to get expensive.”

  “I've got a few things to do in town. Can you take yourself back to the jail?”

  “Take myself back to-”

  “Yeah, check yourself in. Kelso's got a sense of humor. Tell him you heard the Iberia Parish lockup is run like the public library.” I stuck my business card in his shirt pocket. “When you get tired of grandiose dog shit, give me a call.” I picked up my coffee cup and walked back toward my truck. “Hey, Dave, this isn't right,” he said behind me. “You want to hang from a cross. Do it without me, partner,” I said. At one that afternoon I called Kelso at the lockup. “Did Marsallus make it back there?” I asked. “Yeah, we're putting in a special cell with a turnstile for him. You're a laugh a minute,” he said. “Kick him loose.”

  “You know what kind of paperwork you make for me?”

  “You were right, Kelso, the prosecutor says we can't hold him. He wasn't a witness to anything. Sorry to inconvenience you.”

  “You know your problem, Robicheaux? You don't like doing the peon work like everybody else-filling out forms, punching clocks, going to coffee at ten A.M. instead of when you feel like it. So you're always figuring out ways to work a finger in somebody's crack.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, keep that punk out of here.”

  “What's he done now?”

  “Giving speeches to the wet-brains in the tank. I don't need that kind of shit in my jail. Wait a minute, I wrote the names down he was talking about to these guys. Who's Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie?”

  “Guys from another era, Kelso.”

  “Yeah, well, two or three like your redheaded friend could have this town in flames. The wet-brains and stew-bums are all trying to talk and walk like him now, like they're all hipsters who grew up on Canal Street. It's fucking pathetic.”

  Two days later Helen Soileau called in sick. An hour later, the phone on my desk rang.

  “Can you come out to my house?” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Can you come out?”

  “Yeah, if you want me to. Are you all right?”

  “Hurry up, Dave.”

  I could hear her breath against the receiver, heated, dry, suddenly jerking in the back of her throat.

  Chapter 9

  LIVED ALONE in a racially mixed neighborhood in a one-story frame house with a screened-in gallery that she had inherited from her mother. The house was Spartan and neat, with a new tin roof and a fresh coat of metallic gray paint, the cement steps and pilings whitewashed, the flower beds bursting with pink and blue hydrangeas in the shade of a chinaberry tree.

  To my knowledge, she never entertained, joined a club, or attended a church. Once a year she left the area on a vacation; except for the sheriff, she never told anyone where she was going, and no one ever asked. Her only interest, other than law enforcement, seemed to lie in the care of animals.

  She wore no makeup when she opened the door. Her eyes went past me, out to the street. Her face looked as hard and shiny as ceramic.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  Her nine-millimeter automatic was in a checkered leather holster on the couch next to an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. The interior of the house was immaculate, slatted with sunlight, and smelled of burnt toast and coffee that had boiled over on the stove.

  “You had me worried a little bit, Helen,” I said.

  “I had visitors during the night,” she said. “You mean a break-in?”

  “They didn't come inside.” Then her mouth twitched. She turned her face away and curled one finger at me. I followed her through the kitchen and into the backyard, which was shaded by a neighbor's oak whose limbs grew across her fence. At the back of the lawn was a row of elevated screened pens where Helen kept rabbits, possums, armadillos, fighting cocks, or any kind of wounded or sick animal or bird that the humane society or neighborhood children brought her. The tarps were pulled back on top of all the pens. “It was warm with no rain in the forecast last night, so I left them uncovered,” she said.

  “When I went out this morning, the tarps were down. That's when I saw that bucket on the ground.” I picked it up and smelled it. The inside was coated with a white powder. My head jerked back involuntarily from the odor, my nasal passages burning, as though a rubber band had snapped behind my eyes. “They sprinkled it through the wire, then pulled the canvas down,” she said. The birds lay in lumps in the bottom of the pens, the way birds look after they've been shot in flight, their feathers puffing in the breeze. But the type of death the birds and animals died alike was more obvious in the stiffened bodies of the possums and coons. Their mouths were wide, their necks and spines twisted from convulsions, their claws extended as though they were defending themselves against invisible enemies. “I'm sorry, Helen. It took a real sonofabitch to do something like this,” I said. “Two of them. Look at the footprints. One of them must wear lead shoes.”

  “Why didn't you call this in?” Then on
ce again I saw in her face the adversarial light and lack of faith in people that always characterized her dealings with others. “I need some serious advice,”

  she said. I could hear her breathing.

  Her right hand opened and closed at her side. There were drops of perspiration on her upper lip. “Go ahead, Helen.”

  “I'll show you something that was under my door this morning,” she said, and led the way back into her living room. She sat on her rattan couch and picked up the manila folder. The sunlight through the blinds made bright yellow stripes across her face. “Would you work with a queer?” she asked. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Answer it.”

  “What other people do in their private lives is none of my business.”

  “How about a bull or a switch-hitter?”

  “I don't know where you're going with this, but it's not necessary.” Her hand was inserted in the envelope, her teeth biting on the corner of her lip. She pulled a large glossy black-and-white photograph out and handed it to me. “It was taken two nights ago. The grain's bad because he didn't use a flash. From the angle, I'd say it was shot through that side window.” I looked down at the photo and felt my throat color. She kept her eyes on the far wall.

  “I don't think that's any big deal,” I said. “Women kiss each other. It's how people show affection.”

  “You want to see the others?”

  “Don't do this to yourself.”

  “Somebody already has.”

  “I'm not going to be party to an invasion of your private life, Helen. I respect you for what you are. These photographs don't change anything.”

  “You recognize the other woman?”

  “No.”

  “She used to be a chicken for Sweet Pea Chaisson. I tried to help her get out of the life. Except we went a little bit beyond that.”

  “Who cares?”

  “I've got to turn this stuff in, Dave.”

  “The hell you do.”

  She was silent, waiting. “Do you have to prove you're an honest person?” I said. “And by doing so, cooperate with evil people in injuring yourself. That's not integrity, Helen, it's pride.” She returned the photo to the envelope, then studied the backs of her hands. Her fingers were thick and ring less square on the ends. “The only guy who comes to mind is that paramilitary fuck, what's his name, Tommy Carrol,” she said. “Maybe,” I said. But I was already remembering Sonny Boy's warning. “But why would he put this note on the envelope?” She turned it over so I could read the line someone had written with a felt pen- Keep your mind on parking tickets, Mujfy. “Why the look?”

  “Sonny Marsallus. He told me not to send anything on this guy Emile Pogue through the federal computer. All those informational requests had your name on them, Helen.” She nodded, then I saw her face cloud with an expression that I had seen too often, on too many people, over the years. Suddenly they realize they have been arbitrarily selected as the victim of an individual or a group about whom they have no knowledge and against whom they've committed no personal offense. It's a solitary moment, and it's never a good one. I worked the envelope out from under her hands. “We could do all kinds of doo-dah with these photos, and in all probability none of it would lead anywhere,” I said. I slipped the photos facedown out of the envelope and walked with them into the kitchen. “So I'm making use of a Clete Purcel procedure here, which is, when the rules start working for the lowlifes, get a new set of rules.” I took a lucifer match from a box on the windowsill above the sink, scratched it on the striker, and held the flame to the corner of the photographs. The fire rippled and curled across the paper like water; I separated each sheet from the others to let the air and heat gather on the underside, the images, whatever they were, shrinking and disappearing into blackened cones while dirty strings of smoke drifted out the screen. Then I turned on the faucet and washed the ashes down the drain, wiped the sink clean with a paper towel and dropped it in the trash.

  “You want to have some early lunch, then go to the office?” I said.

  “Give me a minute to change.” Then she said, “Thanks for what you did.”

  “forget it.”

  “I'll say this only once,” she said. “Men are kind to women for one of two reasons. Either they want inside the squeeze box or they have-genuine balls and don't have to prove anything. When I said thank you, I meant it.”

  There are compliments you don't forget.

  Before I drove away I put the stiffened body of one of the dead coons in a vinyl garbage sack and placed it in the bed of my truck.

  The investigation had gone nowhere since the night of Delia Landry's murder. I had made a mistake and listened to Sonny Boy's deprecation of the mob and his involvement with them. Sweet Pea Chaisson's name had surfaced again, and Sweet Pea didn't change toilet paper rolls without first seeking permission of the Giacano family. If the spaghetti heads had started to crash and burn back in the seventies, it was a secret to everyone except Sonny.

  The heir to the old fat boy, Didoni Giacano, also known as Didi Gee, whose logo had been the bloodstained baseball bat that rode in the backseat of his Caddy convertible when he was a loan collector and who sometimes held down the hand of an adversary in an aquarium filled with piranhas, was his nephew, a businessman first, a gangster second, but with a bizarre talent for clicking psychotic episodes on and off at will-John Polycarp Giacano, also known as Johnny Carp and Polly Gee.

  Friday morning I found him in his office out by a trash dump in Jefferson Parish. His eyes, nose, and guppy mouth were set unnaturally in the center of his face, compressed into an area the size of your palm. His high forehead was ridged and knurled even though he wasn't frowning. His hair was liquid black, waved on the top and sides, like plastic that had been melted, molded, and then cooled again.

  When I knew him in the First District, he had been a minor soldier in the organization, a fight fixer, and a Shylock with jockies out at Jefferson Downs and the Fairgrounds. Supposedly, as a kid, he had been the wheel man on a couple of hundred-dollar hits with the Calucci brothers; but for all his criminal history, he'd only been down once, a one-year bit for possession of stolen food stamps in the late sixties, and he did the time in a minimum security federal facility, where he had weekend furloughs and golf and tennis privileges.

  Johnny Carp was smart; he went with the flow and gave people what they wanted, didn't contend with the world or argue with the way things were. Celebrities had their picture taken with him. He lent money to cops with no vig and was never known to be rude. Those who saw his other side, his apologists maintained, had broken rules and earned their fate.

  “You look great,” he said, tilting back in his swivel chair. Through the window behind him, seagulls were wheeling and dipping over mountains of garbage that were being systematically spread and buried and packed down in the landfill by bulldozers.

  “When did you get into the trash business, Johnny?”

  “Oh, I'm just out here a couple of days a week to make sure the Johns flush,” he said. He wore a beige suit with thin brown stripes in it, a purple shirt and brown knit tie, and a small rose in his lapel. He winked. “Hey, I know you don't drink no more. Me, neither. I found a way around the problem. I ain't putting you on: Watch.”

  He opened a small icebox by the wall and took out an unopened quart bottle of milk. There were two inches of cream in the neck. Then he lifted a heavy black bottle of Scotch, with a red wax seal on it, from his bottom desk drawer. He poured four fingers into a thick water glass and added milk to it, smiling all the while. The Scotch ballooned and turned inside the milk and cream like soft licorice.

  “I don't get drunk, I don't get ulcers, I don't get hangovers, it's great, Dave. You want a hit?”

  “No thanks. You know why anybody would want to take down Sonny Boy Marsallus?”

  “Maybe it's mental health week. You know, help out your neighborhood, kill your local lunatic. The guy's head glows in the dark.”

  “How ab
out Sweet Pea Chaisson?”

  “Clip Sonny? Sweet Pea's a marshmallow. Why you asking me this stuff, anyway?”

  “You're the man, Johnny.”

  “Uncle Didi was the man. That's the old days we're talking about.”

  “You have a lot of people's respect, Johnny.”

  “Yeah? The day I go broke I start being toe jam again. You want to know about Marsallus? He came out of the womb with a hard-on.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “He's read enough books to sound like he's somebody he ain't, but he's got sperm on the brain. He uses broads like Kleenex. Don't let that punk take you over the hurdles. He'd stand in line to fuck his mother … I say something wrong?”

  “No,” I said, my face blank.

  He folded his hands, his elbows splayed, and leaned forward. “Serious,”

  he said, “somebody's trying to whack out Sonny?”

  “Maybe.”

  He looked sideways out the window, thinking, his coat bunched up on his neck. “It ain't anybody in the city. Look, Sonny wasn't never a threat to anybody's action, you understand what I'm saying? His problem is he thinks his shit don't stink. He floats above the ground the rest of us got to walk on.”

  “Well, it was good seeing you, Johnny.”

  “Yeah, always a pleasure.”

  I pulled on my earlobe as I got up to go.

  “It's funny you'd tell me Sonny uses women badly. That was never his reputation,” I said.

  “People in the projects don't work. What do you think they do all day, why you think they have all them kids? He's a nickel-and-dime street mutt. The head he thinks with ain't on his shoulders. I'm getting through here?”

  “See you around, Johnny.”

  He cocked one finger at me, drank from his glass of milk and Scotch, his compressed features almost disappearing behind his hand and wrist.

  I don't remember the psychological term for it, but cops and prosecutors know the mechanism well. It involves unintended acknowledgment of guilt through the expression of denial. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody after the assassination of President Kennedy, he seemed to answer truthfully many of the questions asked him by cops and newsmen. But he consistently denied ownership of the 6.5 millimeter rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the one piece of physical evidence to which he was unquestionably and inextricably linked.