DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  He looked at the expression on my face. ”I got nothing I can help you with. That's what you don't hear.“

  ”What's in the notebook?“

  He looked at me for a beat, considering his words, perhaps already dismissing their value. ”How close are the next-door neighbors?“ he said.

  ”The next three cells are empty.“

  ”I did a gig with the DEA, not because they liked me, they just thought my city library card meant I probably had two or three brain cells more than the pipe heads and rag-noses they usually hire for their scut work. Anyway, considering the environment, it's not the kind of press I need, know what I'm saying?“

  ”Come on, Sonny.“

  ”Down in the tropics, the cocaine trail always leads back to guns. I met guys who'd been in Laos, the Golden Triangle, guys who'd helped process opium into heroin in Hong Kong. Then I started hearing stories about POWs who'd gotten written off by the government.

  “I was carrying this shitload of guilt, so I thought I could trade it off by involving myself with these MIA-POW families. I helped put together this telephone tree, with all kinds of people on it who I didn't even know. I didn't realize some of them were probably ex-intelligence guys who'd been mixed up with these opium growers in Laos. You with me?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Their consciences bothered them and they started telling the families about what went on over there. I was making out a death list and didn't know it. At least that's the best I can figure it. I burned the Xerox copy. Do the same with the original, Dave, before more people get hurt.”

  “Guilt about what?” I said.

  “I used people-Indians, peasant girls, people who'd always gotten the dirty end of the stick, anyway.”

  He brushed at the top of his bare thigh.

  ISO

  “We walked into an ambush. I had a flak vest on. Everybody around me got chewed up,” he said. “Sometimes a guy feels guilt when the guy next to him catches the bus. That's just the way it is, Sonny.”

  “I was hit twice. When I went down, a half dozen other guys got shredded into horse meat right on top of me. Later, the Indians thought I had religious powers or I was an archangel or something. 11 played it for all it was worth, Streak. Look, my whole life I peddled my ass and ran games on people. Guys like me don't see a burst of light and change their hustle.” He reached under the top of the mattress and took out a jar and unscrewed the cap. The smell was like soft fruit that had been mixed with lighter fluid and left in a sealed container on a radiator.

  After he drank from the jar the skin of his face seemed to flex against his skull. “You called me a Judas goat. I have a hard time accepting that, Sonny.”

  “Yeah, I don't like this cell too much, either.”

  “You think I led you down the slaughter chute?”

  “No, not really,” he said. I nodded, but I couldn't look at his face. We both knew that had he not phoned me at the house to warn me about Patsy Dap, he might be riding on a breezy streetcar down St. Charles Avenue. “I'll tell you something else, Dave,” he said. “I've whacked out five guys since I left the tropics. Jack and Pogue's brother were just two knots on the string.”

  “You have a peculiar way of expiating your sins.”

  “I don't want to hurt your feelings, for a roach you're a stand-up guy, but go write some parking tickets, or shuffle some papers, or take some of the Rotary boys out to supper and let them work your dork under the table.

  I'm probably going down for the big bounce. Don't drag your bullshit into my cell, Streak. This is one place where it's truly an insult.”

  I hit on the bars with the side of my fist and called for the turnkey to open up. When I looked back at him, the cartilage working in my jaw, he was picking at a callus on his foot. The tattoo of the blue Madonna on his right shoulder, with needles of orange light emanating from it, looked like a painting on polished moonstone. I started to speak again, but he turned his eyes away from me.

  Rufus Arceneaux had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps at age twenty-three. In the ten years he had been with the department he had gone from uniform to plainclothes and back to uniform again. He was a tall, raw-boned man, with a long nose and blond crewcut hair, whose polished gunbelt and holster fitted against his trim body as though it had been welded there. Rufus wore dark-tinted pilot's sunglasses and seldom smiled, but you always had the sense that his hidden eyes were watching you, taking your inventory, a suppressed sneer tugging at his mouth as soon as your back was turned.

  It was Friday morning when Luke Fontenot called and told me his sister, Ruthie Jean, was in jail and that Rufus had been the arresting officer.

  I walked down to his office and went inside without knocking. He was talking on the phone, one leg propped across an opened desk drawer. He glanced sideways at me, then returned to his conversation. I waited for him to finish. But he didn't.

  His mouth dropped open when I tore the receiver out of his hand and hung it up in the cradle.

  “What the hell you think you're doing, Robicheaux?”

  “You busted Ruthie Fontenot for procuring?”

  “So what?”

  “You're intruding in a homicide investigation.”

  “Tough shit. That place is crawling with nigger whores. It should have been cleaned out a long time ago.”

  “You think Julia Bertrand is going to get you promoted?”

  “Get the fuck out of my office.”

  I leveled my finger at him. “She'd better be kicked loose by five o'clock this afternoon. Don't underestimate your situation, Rufus.”

  “Fuck you,” he said as I went out the door.

  I talked with the sheriff and the prosecutor's office. Rufus had done his job well; he used another deputy as a witness to the sting, paid a prostitute at the juke to go in back, waited until she in turn passed the money to Ruthie Jean at the bar, and busted and Mirandized both the hooker and Ruthie Jean on the spot. At eleven o'clock I got a surprise phone call. “What can you do?” Moleen said. “I don't know. Maybe nothing,” I said. “She's not a procurer. What kind of crazy ideas do y'all operate on down there?”

  “She took the money, she put it in the cash register.”

  “You know what goes on in those places. She can't sanitize every dollar that goes through her hands.”

  “You're getting on the wrong person's case, Moleen.”

  “Yeah?” I didn't speak. I could almost hear his anger building on the other end of the line. “Goddamn it, you stop jerking me around, Dave.”

  “Your wife was in here yesterday. I explained to her I didn't take vice complaints. I think she found the right person, though.”

  “Are you telling me .. .” He couldn't get the sentence out. “The arresting officer was Rufus Arceneaux. Talk to him, Moleen. In the meantime, you want to do some good, go her bail.”

  “You self-righteous sonofabitch.”

  “Thanks for your call,” I said, and hung up. At noon, as I was leaving the building for lunch, I saw Luke Fontenot's paint less smoking, 1970s gas-guzzler, its ruptured muffler roaring against the pavement, swing out of the traffic toward the curb. He leaned down so he could see me through the passenger's window. “I ain't gone hide no more,” he said. “I got to talk. When you gone be back?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “He ain't want the baby. That's where it all gone bad, even before I had to shoot that man 'cause he was bad-mouthing my sister and blackmailing Mr. Moleen at the same time.”

  I opened the car door and got in beside him.

  “How about I buy us both a po'-boy?” I said.

  Chapter 16

  is HOW LUKE TOLD IT to me, or as best as I can reconstruct it.

  The Bertrand family had always been absentee landowners and had left the general care of the plantation to an overseer named Noah Wirtz, a sharecropper from the Red River parishes who could pass or not pass for a person of color, whichever the situation required. Other than a few tea
chers at the rural elementary school, Ruthie Jean, at age eleven, had little immediate contact with white adults, until that smoky winter morning when Moleen came to the plantation with his college friends from Springhill to shoot doves.

  He had been kneeling by the coulee's edge, his double-barrel propped against the trunk of a leafless sycamore, pouring a cup of coffee from his thermos while his dog hunted for the birds Moleen had just downed in the cane stubble, when he turned around and saw her watching him.

  Her pigtails were tied with rubber bands, her plump body lost in a man's mackinaw.

  “Why, good heavens, you gave me a start,” he said, although she knew it wasn't true. He winked at her. “My friends and I are all out of coffee. Can you go ask your mama to fill this up?”

  She took the thermos and wet cup from his hands, her eyes fascinated with his handsome face and the lifeless birds that he had charmed out of the sky into his canvas game pouch.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, and slipped his thumb in his watch pocket and put a silver dollar in her palm. The ends of his slender fingers brushed her skin. She had not known a coin could be that heavy and big. “That's for Christmas. Now, run along and tell your mama the coffee's for Mr. Moleen.”

  She didn't see him again for six years, then on a cold New Year's afternoon she heard guns popping on the far side of the cane field, out by the treeline, and when she went out on the gallery she saw four men walking abreast through the frozen stubble, while a frenzy of birds leaped into the air in front of them and tried to find invisibility against a pitiless blue sky.

  The hunters unloaded canvas chairs, a cooler, a collapsible grill from the bed of a pickup, and drank whiskey and cooked two-inch bloodred steaks on a wood fire that whipped in the wind like a torn handkerchief. When the one named Moleen saw her from across the field and asked her to bring water, she went quickly into the kitchen and filled a plastic pitcher, her heart beating in her breast for a reason she didn't understand.

  The faces of the hunters were red with windburn and bourbon, their eyes playful, their conversation roaming between the depth of drilling wells and the remembered adrenaline surge in the glands when they led a throbbing covey with ventilated-rib sights and, one-two-three-four-five, turned each bird into a broken smudge against the winter sun. She filled their glasses, now aware that her sense of alarm was not only baseless but vain, that their eyes never really took note of her, other than a glance to ensure the water didn't spill over their outstretched wrists.

  But as she walked away, she heard a pause, a silence so loud that her ears popped, then the register dropped in one man's voice, and the muscles in her back seemed to gather and constrict inside her dress, as though the coarseness, the undisguised connotation of the i56 remark had the power to shrink her in physical as well as emotional stature.

  “It's all pink inside, Moleen. ”

  She kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the gallery where her aunt and brother were husking and shelling pecans in a bucket, where the Christmas lights were still strung under the eaves, where her two cats played in a water oak that stood as stark against the winter light as a cluster of broken fingers.

  She expected to hear the hunters laugh. Instead, there was silence again, and in the wind blowing at her back she clearly heard the voice of the man named Moleen:

  “You've had too much to drink, sir. Regardless, I won't abide that kind of discourtesy toward a woman on my property.”

  She never forgot that moment.

  He came back from the service long after the other soldiers had returned. He never explained why, or told anyone exactly where he had been. But he had the quiet detachment of someone who has lived close to death, or perhaps of one who has watched the erosion of the only identity he ever had. He often sat alone in his car by the grove of gum trees, the doors open to catch the evening breeze, while he smoked a cigar in the drone of cicadas and stared at the molten sun descending over the cane fields.

  One time Ruthie Jean opened an old issue of Life magazine and saw a picture taken in Indochina of a valley filled with green elephant grass and a sun like a red wafer slipping into the watery horizon. She walked with it to Moleen's car, almost as though she had pick locked his thoughts, and placed it in his hand and looked him directly in the face, as if to say the debt for the silver dollar and the rebuke of the drunken hunter was not being repaid but openly acknowledged as the bond between them that race and social station had made improbable.

  He knew it, too. Whatever sin he had carried back from the Orient, blood that could not be rinsed from his dreams, a shameful and unspoken memory he seemed to see re-created in the fire of Western skies, he knew she looked into him and saw it there and didn't condemn him for it and instead by her very proximity told him he was still the same young man who was kind to a child on a hunter's dawn and who had struck dumb a peer whose words had the power to flay the soul. The first time it happened was back beyond the treeline, toward the lake, in a cypress shack that had once been part of the old slave quarters and was later used as a corn crib. The two of them pulled the backseat out of his car and carried it inside, their bodies still hot from their first caresses only moments earlier. They undressed without speaking, their private fears etched in their faces, and when he found himself nude before she was, he couldn't wait, either out of need or embarrassment, and began kissing her shoulders and neck and then the tops of her breasts while she was still attempting to unsnap her bra. She had never been with a white man before, and he felt strangely gentle and tender between her thighs, and when they came at the same time, she kissed his wet hair and pressed her palms into the small of his back and kept her stomach and womb tight against him until the last violent shudder in his muscles seemed to exorcise the succubus that fed at his heart. He bought her a gold watch with sapphires set in the obsidian face, sent her gift certificates for clothes at Maison Blanche in New Orleans, and then one day an envelope with a plane ticket to Veracruz, money, and directions to a hotel farther down the coast. Their rooms adjoined. Moleen said the owners of the hotel were traditional people whom he respected and to whom he did not want to lie by saying they were married. The rented boat he took her out on was as white and gleaming as porcelain, with outriggers, fighting chairs, and a flying bridge. He would tie leader with the care and concentration of a weaver, bait the feathered spoons, then fling them into the boat's wake, his grin full of confidence and expectation. The curls of hair on his chest and shoulders looked like bleached corn silk against his tan skin.

  On the first morning he showed her how to steer the boat and read the instrument panel. The day was boiling, the Gulf emerald green with patches of blue in it like clouds of ink, and while she stood at the wheel, her palms on the spokes, the engines throbbing through the deck, she felt his hands on her shoulders, her sides and hips, her breasts and stomach, then his mouth was buried in the swirls of her hair and she could feel his hardness grow against her.

  They made love on an air mattress, their bodies breaking out with sweat, the boat rolling under them, the sky above them spinning with light and the cry of gulls. She came before he did, and then moments later she came again, something she had never done with another man.

  Later, he fixed vodka and collins mix and cracked ice in two glasses, wrapped them in napkins with rubber bands, and they sat in their bathing suits in the fighting chairs and trolled across a coral reef whose crest was covered with undulating purple and orange sea fans.

  She went below to use the rest room. When she came back up into the cabin, she saw another fishing boat off their port bow. A man and woman on the stern were waving at Moleen. He put his binoculars on them, then rose from his chair and came inside the cabin.

  “Who's that?” she said.

  “I don't know. They probably think we're someone else,” he said.

  He took the wheel and eased the throttle forward. She watched the other boat drop behind them, the two figures on the stern staring motionlessly after them. She picked up the bi
noculars from the top of the instrument panel and focused them on the lettering on the boat's hull.

  Later, she would not remember the boat's name, but the words designating its home port, Morgan City, Louisiana, filled her with a bitter knowledge that trysts among palm trees, or even the naked hunger that he would bring again and again to the plantation, on his knees in the corn crib, his hands clenching the backs of her thighs, would never efface.

  Noah Wirtz was a lean, short man, with skin that looked like it had been singed by a gunpowder flash. He wore a black, short-billed leather cap, even in summer, and always smiled, as though the situation around him was fraught with humor that only he saw. He lived in a frame house at the head of the road with his wife, a fundamentalist Sunday school teacher from Mississippi who walked on a wooden leg. The black people on the plantation said, “Mr. Noah know how to make the eagle scream.” He and his wife spent nothing on movies, vacations, automobiles, liquor, outboard boats, pickup trucks, shotguns, even food that would make their fare better than the cornbread, greens, bulk rice and red beans, buffalo fish, carp, and low-grade meat most of the blacks ate. Every spare nickel from his meager salary went into the small grocery store they bought in Cade, and the profits from the store went into farm machinery, which he began to lease to sugar growers in Iberia and St. Martin parishes.

  It was a sweltering August night, the trees threaded with the electric patterns of fireflies, when Moleen discovered the potential of his overseer. He and Ruthie Jean had met in the shack beyond the treeline, and just as he had risen from her, his body dripping and limp, her fingers sliding away from his hips, he heard dry leaves breaking, a stick cracking, a heavy, audibly breathing presence moving through the undergrowth outside.

  He put on his khakis, pulled his polo shirt on over his head, and ran out into the heated air and the aching drone of cicadas. Through the tree trunks, on the edge of the field, he saw Noah Wirtz getting into his battered flatbed truck, the points of his cowboy boots curled up into snouts on his feet, the armpits of his long-sleeved denim shirt looped with sweat.