DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  “Oh, it gives them something to do in Washington,” Moleen said. “It's not a joke, Moleen,” Julia said. “Let me tell you something she did once,” Moleen said, spreading his napkin and replacing it on his lap.

  “When she was a cheerleader at LSU. She and these other kids, they hooked up Mike the Tiger's empty cage to a pickup truck, with the back door flopping open, and drove all over nigger town on Saturday afternoon.” He blew a laugh out of his mouth. “They'd stop in front of a bar or barbecue stand and say, ”Excuse me, we don't want to alarm anyone but have y'all seen a tiger around here?“ There were darkies climbing trees all over Baton Rouge.” I stared at him. “Don't tell that story. I didn't have anything to do with that,” Julia said, obviously pleased at the account. “It's a campus legend. People make too much about race today,” he said. “Moleen, that doesn't change what that woman has done. That's what I'm trying to say, which y'all don't seem to understand,” she said. “For God's sakes, Julia, let's change the subject,” he said. The table was quiet. Someone coughed, a knife scraped against a plate. The whites of Julia's eyes were threaded with tiny red veins, the lashes stuck together with mascara. I thought of a face painted on a wind-blown pink balloon that was quivering against its string, about to burst. Later, outside, Moleen asked me to walk with him to the edge of the marsh, where his shotguns and skeet trap rested on top of a weathered picnic table. He wore laced boots, khaki trousers with snap pockets up and down the legs, a shooter's vest with twelve-gauge shells inserted in the cloth loops. He cracked open his double-barrel and plopped two shells in the chambers. “Were you ever stationed in Thailand, Moleen?” I said. “For a little while. Why do you ask?”

  “A lot of intelligence people were there. I was just curious.”

  He scratched at the corner of his mouth with a fingernail. “You want to bust a couple?” he said.

  “No thanks.”

  “You looked a little steely-eyed at the table.”

  I watched a nutria drop off a log and swim into a cluster of hyacinths.

  “That little anecdote about Julia's cheerleading days bother you?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on, Dave, I was talking about a college prank. It's innocent stuff.”

  “Not from you it isn't.”

  “You have an irritating habit. You're always suggesting an unstated conclusion for other people to guess at,” he said. He waited. “Would you care to explain yourself, Dave?”

  “The problem isn't mine to explain, sir.” In the distance, out by the access road, I could see a heavyset man jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel looped around his glistening neck.

  “I think the role of human enigma would become kind of tiresome,” he said. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder, tracked the flight of a seagull with it, then at the last second blew the head off a clump of pampas grass. He cracked open the breech, picked the empty casing out, and flung it smoking into the mud.

  “I believe I'll go back inside,” I said.

  “I think you've made an unpleasant implication, Dave. I insist we clear it up.”

  “I went back out to your plantation this week. I'm not sure what's going on out there, but part of it has to do with Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”

  He looked into my eyes. “You want to spell that out?” he said.

  “You know damn well what I'm talking about. If you want to hide a personal relationship, that's your business. But you're hiding something else, too, Moleen, about that plantation. I just don't know what it is.”

  He fitted the shotgun's stock to his shoulder, fired at a nutria that was swimming behind a half-submerged log, and blew a pattern of bird shot all over the pond. The nutria ducked under the water and surfaced again but it was hurt and swimming erratically. Moleen snapped open the breech and flung the casing out into the water.

  “I don't take kindly to people insulting me on my own property,” he said.

  “The insult is to that woman on the plantation. You didn't even have the decency to inscribe her name on the photograph you gave her.”

  “You're beyond your limits, my friend.”

  “And you're cruel to animals as well as to people. Fuck you,” I said, and walked back toward the camp.

  I found Bootsie on the gallery.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “Dave, we just ate.”

  “I already said our good-byes. I have some work to do at the dock.”

  “No! It's rude.”

  Three women drinking coffee nearby tried not to hear our conversation.

  “Okay, I'm going to put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jog a couple of miles. Pick me up out on the road.” She looked at me with a strangled expression on her face. “I'll explain it later.”

  We had come in Bootsie's Toyota. I unlocked the trunk, took out my running shoes and gym shorts, and changed in the lee of the car. Then I jogged across a glade full of buttercups, past a stand of persimmon trees that fringed the woods, and out onto the hard-packed dirt road that led off the chenier.

  The wind was warm and the afternoon sky marbled with yellow and maroon clouds. I turned my face into the breeze, kept a steady pace for a quarter mile, then poured it on, the sweat popping on my forehead, the blood singing in my chest until Moleen Bertrand's words, his supercilious arrogance, became more and more distant in my mind.

  I passed a clump of pecan trees that were in deep shadow, the ground under them thick with palmettos. Then in the corner of my

  12 O

  vision I saw another jogger step out into the spangled light and fall in beside me.

  I smelled him before I saw him. His odor was like a fog, gray, visceral, secreted out of glands that could have been transplanted from animals. His head was a tan cannonball, the shoulders ax-handle wide, the hips tapering down to a small butt that a woman could probably cover with both her hands. His T-shirt was rotted into cheesecloth, the armpits dark and sopping, the flat chest a nest of wet black hair.

  His teeth were like tombstones when he grinned.

  “You do it in bursts, don't you?” he said. His voice was low, full of grit, like a man with throat cancer. “Me, too.”

  His shoulder was inches away, the steady pat-pat-pat-pat of his tennis shoes in rhythm with mine, even the steady intake and exhalation of his breath now part of mine. He wrapped his towel over his head and knotted it under his chin.

  “How you doin'?” I said.

  “Great. You ever run on the grinder at Quantico?” He turned his face to me. The eyes were cavernous, like chunks of lead shot.

  “No, I wasn't in the Corps,” I said.

  “I knew a guy looked like you. That's why I asked.”

  I didn't answer. Out over the salt a single-engine plane was flying out of the sun, its wings tilting and bouncing hard in the wind.

  “Were you at Benning?” the man said.

  “Nope.”

  “I know you from somewhere.”

  “I don't think so.”

  “Maybe it was Bragg. No, I remember you now. Saigon, sixty-five.

  Bring Cash Alley. You could get on the pipe and laid for twenty bucks.

  Fucking A, I never forget a face.”

  I slowed to a walk, breathing hard, my chest running with sweat. He slowed with me.

  “What's the game, partner?” I said.

  “It's a small club. No game. A guy with two Hearts is a charter member in my view.” He pulled his towel off his head and mopped his face with it, then offered it to me. I saw Bootsie's Toyota headed down the road toward us.

  I backed away from him, my eyes locked on his.

  “You take it easy, now,” I said.

  “You too, chief. Try a liquid protein malt. It's like wrapping copper wire around your nuts, really puts an edge on your run.”

  I heard Bootsie brake behind me. I got in the passenger seat beside her. My bare back left a dark wet stain on the seat.

  “Dave, put on your shirt,” she said.

  “Le
t's go.”

  “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. The man with the tan cannon-ball head was mopping the inside of his thighs with the towel.

  “Yuck,” she said. “Who's that?”

  “I have a feeling I just met Mr. Emile Pogue,” I answered.

  Chapter 13

  DOESN'T HAPPEN,“ the sheriff said, his hands on his hips, looking at the manila folders and papers on my floor, the prise marks where a screwdriver had sprung the locks on the drawers in my desk and file cabinet. ”We have to investigate the burglary of our own department.“

  It was 8 A.M. Monday morning and raining hard outside. The sheriff had just come into the office. I'd been there since seven.

  ”What's missing?“ he asked.

  ”Nothing that I can see. The files on Marsallus and Delia Landry are all over the floor, but they didn't take anything.“

  ”What about Helen's files?“

  ”She can't find her spare house key. She's going to have her locks changed today,“ I said.

  He sat down in my swivel chair.

  ”Do you mind?“ he said.

  ”Not at all.“ I began picking up the scattered papers and photographs from the floor and arranging them in their case folders.

  He took a breath. ”All right, Wally says the cleaning crew came in about eleven last night. They vacuumed, waxed the floors, dusted,

  did the rest rooms, and left around two A.M. He's sure it was the regular bunch.“

  ”It probably was.“

  ”Then who got in here?“

  ”My guess is somebody else wearing the same kind of uniform came in and picked the locks, probably right after the cleaning crew left. Nobody pays much attention to these guys, so the only people who might have recognized the impostors were gone.“

  The sheriff picked up my phone and punched a number.

  ”Come down to Dave's office a minute,“ he said into the receiver. After he hung up he leaned one elbow on the desk and pushed a thumb into the center of his forehead. ”This makes me madder than hell. What's this country coming to?“

  Wally opened my office door. He was a tall, fat man, with hypertension and a florid face and a shirt pocket full of cellophane-wrapped cigars.

  He was at the end of his shift and his eyes had circles under them.

  ”You're sure everybody on the cleaning crew was gone by two A.M.?“ the sheriff said.

  ”Pretty sure. I mean after they went out the front door the hall down here was dark and I didn't hear nothing.“

  ”Think about it, Wally. What time exactly did the last cleaning person leave?“ the sheriff said.

  ”I told you, two A.M.“ or a minute or two one side or another of it.”

  “They all left together?” the sheriff said.

  “The last guy out said good night at two A.M.”

  “Was it the last guy or the whole bunch?” I asked.

  He fingered the cigars in his pocket and stared into space, his eyes trying to concentrate.

  “I don't remember,” he said.

  “Did you know the guy who said good night?” I asked.

  “He walked by me with a lunch pail and a thermos. A shooting came in two minutes earlier. That's how I knew the time. I wasn't thinking about the guy.”

  “Don't worry about it,” I said.

  Wally looked at the sheriff.

  “It's not your fault, Wally. Thanks for your help,” the sheriff said.

  A moment later he said to me, “What are these guys after?”

  “They don't know that Marsallus gave me his notebook. But I bet they think we found a copy of it that they missed in Delia Landry's house.”

  “What's in it, though? You said it reads like St. Augustine's Confessions among the banana trees.”

  “You got me. But it must be information they need rather than information they're trying to keep from us. You follow me?”

  “No.”

  “If we have it, they know we've read it, maybe made copies of it ourselves. So that means the notebook contains something indispensable to them that makes sense only to themselves.”

  “This guy you met jogging yesterday, you think he's this mercenary, what's his name, Pogue?”

  “He knew the year I was in Vietnam. He even knew how many times I'd been wounded.”

  The sheriff looked at the blowing rain and a mimosa branch flattening against the window.

  “I see only one way through this,” he said. “We find Marsallus again and charge him with shooting the man in front of your house. Then he can talk to us or take up soybean farming at Angola.”

  “We don't have a shooting victim.”

  “Find him.”

  “I need a warrant on Sweet Pea's Cadillac.”

  “You're not going to get it. Why aren't you sweating that black woman out at the Bertrand plantation on this?”

  “That's a hard word,” I said.

  “She's involved, she's dirty. Sorry to offend your sensibilities.”

  “It's the way we've always done it,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  The air-conditioning was turned up high, but the room was humid and close, like a wet cotton glove on the skin.

  “Rounding up people who're vulnerable and turning dials on them. Should we kick a board up Moleen Bertrand's butt while we're at it? I think he's dirty, too. I just don't know how,” I said.

  “Do whatever you have to,” the sheriff said. He stood up and straightened his back, his eyes empty.

  But no urgency about Moleen, I thought.

  He read it in my face.

  “We have two open murder cases, one involving a victim kidnapped from our own jail,” he said. “In part we have shit smeared on our faces because you and Purcel acted on your own and queered a solid investigative lead. Your remarks are genuinely testing my level of tolerance.”

  “If you want to stick it to Moleen, there's a way to do it,” I said.

  The sheriff waited, his face narrow and cheerless. “Create some serious man-hours and reactivate the vehicular homicide file on his wife.”

  “You'd do that?” he asked.

  “No, I wouldn't. But when you sweat people, that's the kind of furnace you kick open in their face, Sheriff. It's just easier when the name's not Bertrand.”

  “I don't have anything else to say to you, sir,” he said, and walked out.

  Sometimes you get lucky.

  In this case it was a call from an elderly Creole man who had been fishing with a treble hook, using a steel bolt for weight and chicken guts for bait, in a slough down by Vermilion Bay.

  Helen and I drove atop a levee through a long plain of flooded saw grass and got there ahead of the divers and the medical examiner. It had stopped raining and the sun was high and white in the sky and water was dripping out of the cypress trees the elderly man had been fishing under.

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  “All the way across, right past them cattails,” he said. His skin was the color of dusty brick, his turquoise eyes dim with cataracts.

  “My line went bump, and I thought I hooked me a gar. I started to yank on it, then I knew it wasn't no gar. That's when I drove back up to the sto' and called y'all.”

  His throw line, which was stained dark green with silt and algae, was tied to a cypress knee and stretched across the slough. It had disappeared beneath the surface by a cluster of lily pads and reeds.

  Helen squatted down and hooked her index finger under it to feel the tension. The line was snagged on an object that was tugging in the current by the slough's mouth.

  “Tell us again what you saw,” she said.

  “I done tole the man answered the phone,” he said. “It come up out of the water. It liked to made my heart stop.”

  “You saw a hand?” I said.

  “I didn't say that. It looked like a flipper. Or the foot on a big gator. But it wasn't no gator,” he said.

  “You didn't walk over
to the other side?” Helen said.

  “I ain't lost nothing there,” he said.

  “A flipper?” I said.

  “It was like a stub, it didn't have no fingers, how else I'm gonna say it to y'all?” he said.

  Helen and I walked around the end of the slough and back down the far side to the opening that gave onto a canal. The current in the canal was flowing southward into the bay as the tide went out. The sun's heat rose like steam from the water's surface and smelled of stagnant mud and dead vegetation.

  Helen shoved a stick into the lily pads and moved something soft under it. A cloud of mud mushroomed to the surface. She poked the stick into the mud again, and this time she retrieved a taut web of monofilament fishing line that was looped through a corroded yellow chunk of pipe casing. She let it slide off the stick into the water again. Then an oval pie of wrinkled skin rolled against the surface and disappeared.

  “Why do we always get the floaters?” she said.

  “People here throw everything else in the water,” I said.

  “You ever see a shrink?”

  “Not in a while, anyway,” I said. In the distance I could see two emergency vehicles and a TV news van coming down the levee. “I went to one in New Orleans. I was ready for him to ask me about my father playing with his weenie in front of the kids.

  Instead, he asked me why I wanted to be a homicide detective. I told him it's us against the bad guys, I want to make a difference, it bothers me when I pull a child's body out of a sewer pipe after a sex predator has gotten through with him. All the while he's smiling at me, with this face that looks like bread pudding with raisins all over it. I go, ”Look, Doc, the bad guys torture and rape and kill innocent people. If we don't send them in for fifty or seventy-five or ship them off for the Big Sleep, they come back for encores.“

  ”He keeps smiling at me. I go, “The truth is I got tired of being a meter maid.”

  He thought that was pretty funny.“ I waited for her to go on. ”That's the end of the story. I never went back,“ she said. ”Why not?“

  ”You know why.“

  ”It still beats selling shoes,“ I said. She combed her hair with a comb from the back pocket of her Levi's. Her breasts stood out against her shirt like softballs. ”Fix your tie, cutie. You're about to be geek of the week on the evening news,“ she said. ”Helen, would you please stop that?“