DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  “Where's Miss Julia?” I asked.

  “Ain't seen her.”

  “Y'all look like you're working hard.”

  “Mr. Moleen say do it right. He ain't gonna be around for a while.”

  I took the old highway out to Spanish Lake, past the restored antebellum homes on the shore and the enormous moss-strung oak trees that rippled in the breeze off the water. Then I turned down the corrugated dirt lane, under the rusted iron trellis, into the Bertrand plantation. Whoever Moleen's business partners were, they had been busy.

  Bulldozers had cut swaths through the sugarcane, flattened old corn cribs and stables, splintered wild persimmon trees into torn root systems that lay exposed like pink tubers in the graded soil. I saw Moleen on horseback by the treeline, watching a group of land surveyors drive wood stakes and flagged laths in what appeared to be a roadway that led toward the train tracks.

  I drove across the field, through the flattened cane, and got out of my truck. The sun was white in the sky, the air layered with dust.

  Moleen wore riding pants and boots and military spurs, a blue polo shirt, a bandanna knotted wetly around his neck, a short-brimmed straw hat with a tropical band. His right hand was curled around a quirt, his face dilated in the heat that rose from the ground. “A hot day for it,” I said. “I hadn't noticed,” he said. A man operating a bulldozer shifted into reverse, made a turn by the treeline, and snapped a hackberry off at ground level like a celery stalk. “I hate looking up at a man on horseback, Moleen,” I said. “How about just saying what's on your mind?”

  “After all these years, I finally figured you out.”

  “With you, it always has to be an unpleasant moment. Why is that, sir?” he said, dismounting. He led his horse into the shade of the trees, turned to face me, a line of clear sweat sliding down his temple. Behind him, in the shadows, was the corn crib, strung with the scales of dead morning glory vines, where he and Ruthie Jean had begun their love affair years ago. “I think Julia took your weight, Moleen.”

  He looked back at me, uncomprehending. “When the child was run down, on Halloween night in eighty-three. You were the driver, not she.”

  “I think you've lost your sanity, my friend.”

  “It was a slick scam,” I said. “A successful lie always has an element of truth in it. In that way, the other side can never figure out what's true and what's deception. Julia admitted to having driven the car that night, but y'all knew the witness said the driver was a man. So what appeared to be her honesty threw his account into question.”

  “I think you need counseling. I genuinely mean that, Dave.”

  “Then you got to Rufus Arceneaux and he twisted some screws on the witness. That's why you've never dumped your wife. She could get you disbarred, even sent up the road.” His eyebrows were heavy with sweat, his knuckles white as slivers of ice on the quirt. “I don't believe I can find adequate words to express my feelings about a man like you,” he said.

  BURNING ANGEL.

  “Clean the peanut brittle out of your mouth. That child's death is on your soul.”

  “Your problem is your own, sir. You don't respect the class you were born into. You look into the mirror and always see what you came from.

  I feel sorry for you.”

  He waited, the quirt poised at his side.

  “You're not worth punching out, Moleen,” I said.

  I turned and walked back out into the field toward my truck, into the hot sunlight and the smell of diesel and the drift of dust from the machines that were chewing up the Bertrand plantation. My ears were ringing, my throat constricted as though someone had spit in my mouth.

  I heard Moleen's saddle creak as he mounted his horse. He sawed the reins and used his spurs hard at the same time, wheeling his horse and cantering toward the survey crew.

  I couldn't let it go.

  I walked after him through the destroyed cane, laced my hand inside the horse's bridle, felt it try to rear against my weight. The survey crew, men whose skin was as dark as chewing tobacco, paused in their work with chaining pins and transit and metal tapes, grinning good-naturedly, unsure of what was taking place.

  Moleen wasn't prepared for an audience.

  “If you're planning on a trip, I hope it's with Ruthie Jean,” I said.

  He tried to jerk the horse's head free. I tightened my fingers inside the leather.

  “Cops don't prevent crimes, they solve them after the fact,” I said.

  “In this case, I'm creating an exception. Don't take either her or Luke Fontenot for granted because they're black. The person who kills you is the one at your throat before you ever know it.”

  He raised his quirt. I flung the bridle from my hand, slapped his horse, and spooked it sideways among the surveyors.

  I glanced back at him before I got into my truck. He was reining and soothing his horse, turning in a circle, his skin filmed with sweat and the dust that rose around him like a vortex, his face dark with shame and embarrassment.

  But it was no victory. I was convinced Moleen had sold us out,

  was bringing some new form of evil into our lives, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  An hour later I was in the Iberia Parish building permit office. All the applications for construction permits on Moleen's property had been filed by Jason Darbonne. The blueprints had the clean, rectangular lines that you associate with a high school drafting class; but they were also general in nature, and the interior seemed to be nothing more than a huge concrete pad, an empty shell, a question mark without function or purpose. “What's the name of the company?” I asked the engineer. “Blue Sky Electric,” he said. “What do they do?”

  “They work on electrical transformers or something,” he answered. In small letters, in one corner of the blueprint, was the word incinerator.

  “These plans have all the specifics of a blimp hangar,” I said. He shrugged his shoulders. “What's the problem?” he said. “I wish I knew.” Late that evening Bootsie looked out the kitchen screen into the backyard. “Clete Piircel's sitting at our picnic table,” she said.

  I went out the back door. Clete sat with his back to the house, hunched over a six-pack of Budweiser, an opened can in one hand, a Lucky Strike in the other. He wore elastic-wasted white tennis shorts, flip-flops, and a starched short-sleeve print shirt. By his foot was a cardboard box with tape across the top. The sun had dropped below my neighbor's treeline, and the sugarcane field behind my house was Covered with a purple haze. “What are you doing out here?” I asked. “Figuring out how I should tell you something.” I sat down across from him. His green eyes were filled with an indolent, alcoholic shine. My foot accidentally hit the cardboard box under the table.

  “You look like you made an early pit stop today,” I said.

  “You remember those two gee ks I put on the bus, the brander and the child rapist? I called Nig to see if they got there all right. Guess what? The brander's back in custody. He got to the victim and beat the living shit out of her. Of course, he asks Nig to write another bond for him. Nig tells him the guy is past his envelope, the guy's a flight risk, he's going down for sure this time, and, besides, even Nig can't stomach this barf bag any longer.

  ”So the barf bag gets cute, tells Nig, “Write the bond, I'll give up the guy's gonna do Purcel's buddy, what's-his-face, Robicheaux.”

  “Nig asks the barf bag who put him inside a whack on a cop, and the barf bag says, get this for lowlife class distinction, Patsy Dap used to piece off five-hundred-buck hits to him in the projects because Patsy thinks it's beneath him to do colored dope dealers.”

  Clete drank from his beer can, looked at me over the tops of his fingers.

  “Patsy's working for Johnny Carp again?” I said.

  “It makes sense, mon. Patsy's a stir bug. Johnny puts Patsy back in the jar and takes you out at the same time.”

  “They don't hit cops.”

  “Dave, you rubbed shit in John Giacano's face in front of eve
rybody he respects. You broke his nose and four of his ribs. A paramedic had to pry his bridge out of his throat. I didn't tell you everything the barf bucket said, either .. .

  ”The word is Johnny wants it in pieces, like the Giacanos did it to Tommy Fig, remember, they processed him into pork roasts and strung them from the ceiling fan in his own butcher shop, then had a big eggnog party while Tommy went spinning around in the air, except Johnny wants it to go down even worse, longer, on videotape, with an audio …“

  Clete collapsed the aluminum beer can slowly in his huge hand, his eyes glancing away from mine uncertainly.

  ”Look, I need to be off the record here,“ he said.

  ”About what?“

  ”I'm serious, Streak. When you operate with your shield you think too much like these Rotary cocksuckers .. . Excuse my language.“

  ”Will you just say it, Clete?“

  He lifted the cardboard box from under the table, tore the tape, reached down inside the flaps.

  ”This afternoon I cfeeped the dump Patsy rents out on the Jeanerette Road,“ he said. ”Don't worry, he was in a motel with his chippy at Four Corners in Lafayette. Dig this, big mon, a Tec-9, ventilated barrel, twenty-five-round nine-millimeter magazine, courtesy of an arms dealer in Miami who can provide them on the spot so the Jamaicans and the Cuban crazies don't have to wait on the mailman.“

  He worked the action, snapped the firing pin on the empty chamber.

  ”It's got a 'hell trigger' these guys out in Colorado make. You can fire bursts with it almost as fast as a machine gun. Fits neatly under a raincoat. Great for schoolyards and late-night convenience-store visits .. . Here's a set of Smith & Wesson handcuffs, state of the art, solid steel, spring-loaded. Aren't you glad to know a guy like Patsy can buy these at any police supply store .. .“

  He put his hand back in the box and I saw his face change, his mouth form a seamed, crooked line, the scar through his eyebrow tighten against the bone. His hand was fitted through the handle of a stubby, cylindrical metal object shaped like a coffeepot.

  ”The receipt was stuck to the bottom, Dave. He bought it yesterday.

  Patsy Bones with a blowtorch? Put yourself inside his head-“

  Through the kitchen window I could see Bootsie and Alafair washing dishes, talking to each other, the breeze from the attic fan blowing the curtains by the sides of their lighted faces.

  Clete scratched his cheek with four fingers, like a zoo creature in a cage, his eyes waiting.

  Chapter 3O

  WAS MIDMORNING, the sun hazy through the oak trees that shaded the cluster of trailers and cottages where Patsy Dapolito lived east of town. Helen and I were parked in my truck behind a tin shed that had already started to creak with heat, watching Patsy shoot baskets in a dirt clearing by the side of a garage. His sock less ankles and white legs were layered with scar tissue and filmed with dust, his gym shorts knotted around his genitals like a drenched swimsuit, his T-shirt contoured against his hard body like wet Kleenex.

  He whanged one more shot off the hoop, then dribbled the ball- bing, bing, bing-toward the door to his cottage. I got out of the truck, moved in fast behind him, and pushed him hard through the door. When he turned around, his mouth hooked like a cornered predator's, my .45 was pointed in the middle of his face.

  ”Oh, you again,“ he said.

  I shoved him into a wood chair. My hand came away damp from his T-shirt.

  The floor was littered with movie and wrestling and UFO magazines, hamburger containers, empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, dozens of beer and soda cans.

  Helen came through the door with Clete's cardboard box hanging from her hand. She looked around the room.

  ”I think it needs a trough inset in the floor,“ she said.

  ”This my get-out-of-Shitsville roust?“ he said.

  Helen gathered up his basketball, bounced it on the linoleum floor twice-bing, bing-then two-handed it off his forehead and caught the rebound between her palms. His head jerked, as though a thin wire had snapped behind his eyes, then he stared at her, with that bemused, inverted grin, the mouth turned downward at the corners, the teeth barely showing in a wet line above the lip.

  ”Your place got creeped, Patsy. We're returning your goods,“ I said. I replaced my .45 in my clip-on holster and one at a time removed the Tec-9, the handcuffs, and the blowtorch from the cardboard box and set them on his breakfast table. He fingered the half-moon scars and divots on his face, watched me as though I were a strange shadow moving about on a surreal landscape that only he saw.

  ”The contract you took from Johnny is already sour, Patsy,“ I said.

  ”There's a guy willing to give you up.“

  ”It must have been lard-ass that got in my place. He helped himself to the beer and potato salad in my icebox,“ Patsy said. There was a red spot, like a small apple, in the middle of his forehead.

  ”You going to do me?“ I said.

  He picked at the calluses on his palm, looked up at me, breathed over the top of his teeth, his eyes smiling.

  Helen caromed the ball off his head again.

  ”Hey!“ he said, swatting the air, his face knotting. ”Lay off that!“

  I reached back down in the cardboard box and retrieved a manila folder that was almost three inches thick. I pulled out a chair and sat in it, spread the folder on one thigh.

  ”You did a nickel on Camp J, you've gone out max-time twice, we're not going to insult you by treating you like a fish. I'm talking about the consequences of harming a police officer,“ I said.

  He crinkled his nose, looked at a spot three inches in front of his eyes. The shape of his head reminded me of a darning sock.

  ”But there's some weird stuff in your jacket, Patsy,“ I said. ”You got picked up in a porno theater in New York once. The owner was connected to a child prostitution ring. You remember that gig?“

  His eyes lifted into mine.

  ”When you were thirty-eight you went down for statutory rape. She was fourteen, Patsy. Then way back here …“ I turned to the front of the folder, looked down at a page. ”It“ says here you got busted for abducting a little girl from a playground. The father wouldn't stand up so you walked. You see a pattern here?”

  His hands shifted into his lap, his fingers netting together. Helen and I stared at him silently. His eyes blinked, looked back and forth between us, his nostrils whitening, as though he were breathing air off a block of ice.

  “What?” he said. “What?”

  “You're a button man, all right, but you're a pedophile first,” I said.

  He churned the edges of his tennis shoes on the floor, his ankles bent sideways, his shoulders pinched forward, his neck hunched. I could hear him breathing, smell an odor like soiled cat litter that rose from his armpits. He started to speak.

  “Here's the rest of it, Patsy. Your mother set fire to you in your crib,” I said.

  His pale eyes stared back at me as though they had no lids. His mouth looked like a deformed keyhole in his face.

  “You try to do me, all this becomes public knowledge,” I said. “Anytime you're around Four Corners, you'll be picked up as a sex predator. We'll put you with every open molestation case we have, we'll make sure NOPD Vice gets in on it, too.”

  “They'll have your picture in the T and A joints on Bourbon, Patsy,”

  Helen said.

  “They made that up about my mother. There was a fire in the project,”

  he said.

  “Yeah, she set it. That's why she died in the insane asylum,” I said.

  “The message is, you're a geek. You start some shit, we'll finish it.

  You still think this is just a roust in Bumfuck?” Helen said, stepping toward him, her arms pumped. When we left him, he was still seated in the chair, his head canted to one side, his mouth indented like a collapsed football bladder, his ankles folded almost flat with the floor, his eyes staring into tunnels and secret rooms that only Patsy Dapolito knew about. Smoke “em
or bust 'em, make their puds shrivel up and hide, Clete used to say. But how do you take pride in wrapping razor wire around the soul of a man who in all probability was detested before he left the womb? It rained after sunset, and the mist floated like smoke out of the cypress in the swamp. The air was cool when I closed up the bait shop, and I could hear bass flopping back in the bays. Through the screen I saw Alafair walking Tripod on his chain down the dock, while his nose sniffed at the dried blood and fish scales baked into the planks. She came through the door, eased it back on the spring so it wouldn't slam, sat on a counter stool, and lifted Tripod into her lap. She had put on a fresh pair of blue jeans, a flowered cowboy shirt, and had tied her hair in back with a blue ribbon. But her face looked empty, her brown eyes remote with thoughts she couldn't resolve. ”What's the trouble, Alf?“ I said. ”It's gonna make you mad.“

  ”Let's find out.“

  ”A bunch of us were up by the bar, you know, Goula's, the other side of the drawbridge.“

  ”A bunch of you?“

  ”We were in Danny Bordelon's pickup truck. They wanted to get some beer.“ She watched my face. ”Danny had his brother's ID card. He went inside the bar and got it.“ iCT )) I see. ”They were going to drink it down the road.“

  ”What happened?“

  ”Are you going to be mad at Danny?“

  ”He shouldn't be buying beer for you guys.“

  ”I got out of the truck and walked. I was scared. They were mixing it with something called “Ever Clear,” it's like pure grain alcohol or something.“

  ”Danny didn't try to take you home?“

  ”No.“ She dropped her eyes to the floor. ”So we leave Danny alone in the future. You did the right thing, Alafair.“

  ”That's not all that happened, Dave … It started to rain and the wind was blowing real hard out of the swamp. A car came up the road with its lights on. The man who got Tripod out of the coulee, the man you handcuffed, he rolled down his window and said he'd take me home …“

  ”Did you get in the-“

  ”No. The way he looked at me, it was sickening. His eyes went all over me, like they were full of dirty thoughts and he didn't care if I knew it or not.“ I sat on the stool next to her, put my hand on her back. ”Tell me what happened, Alf,“ I said. ”I told him I didn't want a ride. I kept walking toward the house. The rain was stinging my face and he kept backing up with me, telling me to get in, he was a friend of yours, I was gonna catch cold if I didn't get in.“