DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  The woman had big arms and breasts, a figure like a duck, a thick and glistening black neck hung with imitation gold chains. She walked toward me in a pair of flip-flops, holding a cigarette with two fingers, palm upward, by the side of her face, her hoop earrings swinging on her lobes.

  “You gonna tell me you the tax man, I bet,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “You ain't the beer man.”

  “I'm not that either.”

  “Sorry, sugar, if you come down to check the jellyroll. It's too early in the morning.”

  “I came down to see you,” I said, and smiled.

  “I knowed it soon as you come in.”

  “Is Luke here?”

  “You see him?”

  “How about Ruthie Jean?”

  “They come in at night. What you gonna have?” she said, and folded her arms on the bar so that her breasts swelled like cantaloupes out of her sweater. A gold tooth glinted in the corner of her mouth. “If you big enough, you can have anything you want. You big, ain't

  your

  ”How about a Dr. Pepper?“ I watched her uncap a bottle and fill a glass with ice, her thought patterns, her true attitudes toward whites, the plan or absence of a plan that governed her day, her feelings for a lover or a child, the totality of her life, all of it a mystery, hidden behind a coy cynicism that was as implacable as ceramic.

  ”Y'all don't have a gun-shot white man in one of those trailers, do you?“ I said, and drank out of my glass.

  ”Don't know nothing about guns.“

  ”I don't blame you. Who bled all over those bandages?“

  Her mouth was painted with purple lipstick. She pursed her lips into a. large, thick button and hummed to herself. ”Here's a red quarter.

  Can you put it in the jukebox for me?“ she said. ”It got fingernail polish on it so the jukebox man don't keep it when he picks up the coins.“

  I opened my badge holder on the bar.

  ”Do you mind if I look in your trailers?“ I said.

  ”I thought I had me a new boyfriend. But you just being on the job, ain't you?“

  ”I think there might be an injured man back there. So that gives me the right to go in those trailers. You want to help me?“

  She pressed her fingertip on a potato chip crumb on the bar, looked at it, and flicked it away.

  ”I give away my heart and a man wipe his feet on it every time,“ she said.

  I went back outside. The windows in both trailers were open, the curtains blowing in the breeze, but the doors were padlocked. When I reentered the bar the woman was talking on the pay phone in back. She finished her conversation, her back to me, and hung up.

  ”Had to find me a new man,“ she said.

  ”Can I have the key?“

  ”Sure. Why you ain't ax? You know how to put it in? Cain't every man always get it in by his self

  I unlocked and went inside the first trailer. It stunk of insecticide and moist garbage; roaches as fat as my thumb raced across the cracked linoleum. In the center of the floor was a double cot with a rubber air mattress on it and a tangled sheet spotted with gray stains. The small tin sink was full of empty beer cans, the drain stoppered with cigarette butts.

  The second trailer was a different matter. The floor was mopped, the tiny bathroom and shower stall clean, the two trash cans empty. In the icebox was a gallon bottle of orange juice, a box of jelly doughnuts, a package of ground chuck steak. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped from the mattress on the bed. I grabbed the mattress by one end and rolled it upside down on the springs. In the center of the rayon cover was a brown stain the size of a pie plate that looked like the source had pooled and soaked deep into the fabric.

  I opened my Swiss Army knife and grooved a line of crusted flakes onto the blade and wiped them inside a Ziploc bag. I locked the i o o trailer and started to get in my truck, then changed my mind and went back inside the bar. The woman was mopping out the women's rest room, her stomach swinging under her sweater.

  “He was a tall white man with a face full of wrinkles,” I said. “He probably doesn't like black people much, but he had at least one nine-millimeter round in him and wasn't going to argue when Sweet Pea drove him out here. How am I doing so far?”

  “It ain't my bid ness baby.”

  “What's your name?”

  “Glo. You treat me right, I light up. I light up your whole life.”

  “I don't think you mean harm to anyone, Glo. But that man, the one with the wrinkles in his face, like old wallpaper full of cracks, he's a special kind of guy, he thinks up things to do to people, anybody, you, me, maybe even some Catholic nuns, I was told he threw two of them from a helicopter at a high altitude. Was the man in the trailer that kind of guy?”

  She propped the head of the mop in a bucket of dirty water and worked her Lucky Strikes out of her shorts. Her right eye looked bulbous and watery as she held the Zippo's flame to the cigarette. She exhaled, pressed the back of her wrist to her eye socket, then cleared her throat and spat something brown into the wastebasket.

  She tilted her chin up at me, her face unmasked, suddenly real, for the first time. “That's the troot, what you saying about this guy?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I'm locking up now, sugar, gotta take my little boy to the doctor today. There's a lot of grip going around.”

  “Here my business card, Glo.”

  But she walked away from me, her arms stiff at her sides, her hands extended at right angles, as though she were floating on currents of air, her mouth gathered into a silent pucker like a purple rose.

  I drove across the cattle guard under the arched and wisteria-covered iron trellis at the entrance to the Bertrand plantation, down the dirt road to Ruthie Jean Fontenot's small white frame house, where I parked in the yard. The sun had gone behind a cloud, blanketing i o i the fields with shadow, and the breeze felt moist and warm blowing across the tops of the cane.

  Ruthie Jean opened her door on a night chain.

  “What you want?” she said.

  “Question and answer time.”

  “I'm not dressed.”

  “I'm not going away.”

  “Aren't you suppose to have a warrant or something?”

  “No.”

  She made a face, closed the door hard, then walked into the back of the house. I waited ten minutes among the gum trees where the dirt had been bladed and packed smooth by the earthmover. I picked up the twisted tongue of an old shoe. It felt as dry and light as a desiccated leaf. I heard Ruthie Jean slip the night chain on the door.

  Her small living room was cramped with rattan furniture that had come in a set. The andirons in the fireplace were stacked with stone logs, a blaze of scarlet cellophane pasted behind them to give the effect of flames. Ruthie Jean stood on her cane in a white dress with a lacy neckline, black pumps, and a red glass necklace. Her skin looked yellow and cool in the soft light.

  “You look nice,” I said, and instantly felt my cheeks burn at the license in my remark.

  “What you want down here this time?”

  Before I could answer, a phone rang in back. She walked back to the kitchen to answer it. On a shelf above the couch were a clutter of gilt-framed family photographs. In one of them Ruthie Jean was receiving a rolled certificate or diploma of some kind from a black man in a suit and tie. They were both smiling. She had no cane and was wearing a nurse's uniform. At the end of the shelf was a dust-free triangular empty space where another photograph must have been recently removed.

  “Are you a nurse?” I asked when she came back in the room.

  “I was a nurse's aide.” Her eyes went flat.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “What you care?”

  “Can I sit down, please?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You have a phone,” I said.

  She looked at me with an incredulous expression.

  “Your Aunt Bertie told me she didn't
have a phone and I'd have to leave messages for her at the convenience store. But you live just next door. Why wouldn't she tell me to call you instead?”

  “She and Luke don't get along.” Her cheek twitched when she sat down on the couch. Behind her head was the shelf with the row of framed photographs on it.

  “Because he's too close to Moleen Bertrand?” I said.

  “Ax them.”

  “I want the white man named Jack,” I said.

  She looked at her nails, then at her watch.

  “This guy's an assassin, Ruthie Jean. When he's not leaking blood in one of your trailers, he carries a cut-down twelve-gauge under his armpit.”

  She rolled her eyes, a whimsical pout on her mouth, and looked out the window at a bird on a tree branch, her eyelids fluttering. I felt my face pinch with a strange kind of anger that I didn't quite recognize.

  “I don't understand you,” I said. “You're attractive and intelligent, you graduated from a vo-tech program, you probably worked in hospitals.

  What are you doing with a bunch of lowlifes and white trash in a hot pillow joint?”

  Her face blanched.

  “Don't look injured. Sweet Pea Chaisson is supplying the girls at your club,” I said. “Why are you letting these people use you?”

  “What I'm suppose to do now, ax you to hep us, same man who say he doesn't need a warrant just 'cause he's down in the quarters?”

  “I'm not the enemy, Ruthie Jean. You've got bad people in your life and they're going to mess you up in a serious way. I guarantee it.”

  “There's nothing y'all don't know,” she said. But her voice was thick now, tired, as though a stone bruise were throbbing deep inside a vulnerable place.

  I started in again. “You're too smart to let a man like Sweet Pea or Jack run a game on you.”

  She looked back out the window, a hot light in her eyes.

  “Jack's got a friend who's built like an icebox. Did you see a guy who looks like that?” I said.

  “I been polite but I'm axing you to leave now.”

  “How do you think all this is going to end?”

  “What you mean?”

  “You think you can deal with these guys by yourself? When they leave town, they wipe everything off the blackboard. Maybe both you and your brother. Maybe Glo and your aunt, too. They call it a slop-shot.”

  “You pretend you're different from other policemen but you're not,” she said. “You pretend so your words cut deeper and hurt people more.”

  I felt my lips part but no sound came out.

  “I promise you, we'll nail this guy to the wall and I'll keep you out of it,” I said finally, still off balance, my train of thought lost.

  She leaned sideways on the couch, her hands tight on her cane, as though a sliver of pain were working its way up her spine into her eyes.

  “I didn't mean to insult or hurt you,” I said. I tried to organize my words. My eyes focused on the mole by her mouth and the soft curve of her hair against her cheek. She troubled me in a way that I didn't quite want to look at. “This man Jack is probably part of an international group of some kind. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm convinced they're here to do grave injury to us. By that I mean all of us, Ruthie Jean. White people, black people, it doesn't matter. To them another human being is just a bucket of guts sewn up in a sack of skin.”

  But it was no use. I didn't know what the man named Jack had told her, or perhaps had done to her, and I suspected his tools were many, but as was too often the case, I knew I was witnessing another instance when the fear that moral cretins could inculcate in their victims was far greater than any apprehension they might have about refusing to cooperate with a law enforcement agency.

  I heard a car outside and got up and looked outside the window. Luke, in a 19705 gas guzzler, had driven just far enough up the lane to see my truck, then had dropped his car in reverse and floor boarded it back toward the entrance to the plantation, dirt rocketing off the tires like shards of flint.

  “I'm beginning to feel like the personification of anthrax around here,” I said.

  “You what?”

  “Nothing. I don't want to see y'all go down on a bad beef. I'm talking about aiding and abetting, Ruthie Jean.”

  She got up on her cane, her hand locking hard into the curved handle.

  “I cain't sit long. I got to walk around, then do some exercises and lie down,” she said.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I don't have any more to say.”

  “Okay, you do what you want. Here's my business card in case you or Luke feel like talking to me later,” I said, weary of trying to break through her fear or layers of racial distrust that were generations in the making. And in the next few moments I was about to do something that would only add to them. “Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.

  When she left the room I looked behind and under the couch. But in my heart I already knew where I was going to find it. When the perps are holding dope, stolen property, a gun that's been used in an armed robbery or murder, and they sniff the Man about to walk into their lives, they get as much geography as possible between them and it. But Ruthie Jean wasn't a perp, and when her kind want to conceal or protect something that is dear to them, they stand at the bridge or cover it with their person.

  I lifted up the cushion she had rested her back against. The gilt-frame color photograph was propped against the bamboo supports and webbing of the couch.

  I had never seen him with a suntan. He looked handsome, leaner, his blue air force cap set at an angle, his gold bars, pilot's sunglasses, unbuttoned collar, and boyish grin giving him the cavalier and romantic appearance of a World War II South Pacific aviator rather than a sixties intelligence officer who to my knowledge had never seen combat.

  I heard her weight on a floor plank. She stood in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand, her face now empty of every defense, her secrets now the stuff cops talk about casually while they spit Red Man out car windows and watch black women cross the street at intersections.

  “It must have fallen off the shelf,” I said, my skin flexing against my skull. I started to replace the photograph in the dust-free spot at the end of the shelf. But she dropped her cane to the floor, limped forward off balance, pulled the photo from my hand, and hurled the glass of water in my face.

  At the front door I looked back at her, blotted the water out of my eyes on my sleeve, and started to say something, to leave a statement hovering in the air that would somehow redeem the moment; an apology for deceiving her, or perhaps even a verbal thorn because she'd both disturbed and bested me. But it was one of those times when you have to release others and yourself to our shared failure and inadequacy and not pretend that language can heal either.

  I knew why the shame and anger burned in her eyes. I believe it had little to do with me. In a flowing calligraphy at the bottom of the photo he had written, “This was taken in some God-forsaken place whose name, fortunately, I forget—Always, Moleen.” I wondered what a plantation black woman must feel when she realizes that her white lover, grandiose in his rhetoric, lacks the decency or integrity or courage or whatever quality it takes to write her name and personalize the photo he gives her.

  i o 6

  Chapter 12

  CALLED ME from his office the next day.

  “I'll buy you dinner in Morgan City after work,” he said.

  “What are you up to, Clete?”

  “I'm taking a day off from the colostomy bags. It's not a plot. Come on down and eat some crabs.”

  “Is Johnny Carp involved in this?”

  “I know a couple of guys who used to mule dope out of Panama and Belize. They told me some interesting stuff about fuckhead.”

  “Who?”

  “Marsallus. I don't want to tell you over the phone. There're clicking sounds on my line sometimes.”

  “You're tapped?”

  “Remember when we had to smoke that greaser and his bodyguard in t
he back of their car? I know IAD had a tap on me then. Sounds just like it. You coming down?”

  “Clete-”

  “Lighten up.”

  He told me the name of the restaurant.

  It was on the far side of Morgan City, just off the highway by a boat basin lined with docks, boat slips, and tin-roofed sheds that extended out over the water. Clete was at a linen-covered table set with flowers by the window. On the horizon you could see rain falling out of the sunlight like a cloud of purple smoke. He had a small pitcher of draft beer and an ice-filmed schooner and plate of stuffed mushrooms in front of him. His face was glowing with alcohol and a fresh sunburn. “Dig in, noble mon. I've got some fried soft-shells on the way,” he said. “What's the gen on Sonny?” I left my coat on to cover my .45. “Oh, yeah,” he said, as though he had forgotten the reason for our meeting. “These two mules, I know them because they're bondsmen now and handle a lot of the pukes dealing crack in the St. Bernard where I run down about three skips a week. They were flying reefer and coke out of Belize, which was some kind of stop-off place for a whole bunch of runs going in and out of Colombia and Panama. These guys say there were a lot of weird connections down there, CIA, military people, maybe some guys hooked into the White House. Anyway, they knew as swipe and say everybody had him made for DEA.”