DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  ”I can hurt Johnny in ways you ain't thought about. You're stupid, Robicheaux. That's why you're a cop,“ he said.

  Clete and I walked outside and closed the door behind us. The rain was swirling in the wind.

  ”What do you think he meant?“ Clete said.

  2 0

  ”Who knows?“

  ”Dave, you going to be okay? You don't look too good.“

  ”I'm fine,“ I said.

  But I wasn't. I had no sooner closed the door to the pickup's cab when I had to open it again and vomit on the concrete. My face was cold with sweat. I felt Clete's big hand on my neck.

  ”What is it, Streak?“ he said.

  ”The tattoo.“

  ”On fuckhead in there?“

  ”On Sonny's shoulder. A Madonna figure. I saw it in the mortuary.“

  Chapter 35

  ”LATER, I DROVE north of town to the sheriff's house on Bayou Teche and walked around his dripping live oaks to the gallery, where he sat in a straw chair with his pipe and a glass of lemonade. His house was painted yellow and gray, and petals from his hydrangeas were scattered like pink confetti on the grass; in back, I could see the rain dimpling on the bayou.

  He listened while I talked, never interrupting, snuffing down in his nose sometimes, clicking his pipe on his teeth.

  “Do like Purcel and Helen tell you, Dave. Let Marsallus go,” he said.

  “I feel to blame.”

  “That's vain as hell, if you ask me.”

  “C” }“

  Sir?

  ”You're a gambler, Dave. Marsallus faded the back line and bet against himself a long time ago.“

  I looked at the rain rings out on the bayou, at a black man in a pirogue under a cypress overhang who was tossing a hand line and baited treble hook into the current.

  ”And as far as this supernatural stuff is concerned, I think Marsallus is alive only in your head,“ he said.

  ”People have seen him.“

  ”Maybe they see what you want them to see.“

  Wrong, skipper, I thought. But this time I kept my own counsel.

  ”Somebody knew we were coming for Pogue,“ I said. ”Maybe we've got a leak in the department.“

  ”Who?“

  ”How about Rufus Arceneaux?“

  He thought for a moment, adjusted his shirt collar with his thumb.

  ”Rufus would probably do almost anything, Dave, as long as he thought he was in control of it. He'd be out of his depth on this one.“

  ”How'd they know we were coming?“

  ”Maybe it was just coincidence. We don't solve every crime. This might be one of them.“

  ”They're wiping their feet on us, Sheriff.“

  He ran a pipe cleaner through the stem of his pipe and watched it emerge brown and wet from the metal airhole.

  ”You're lucky you don't smoke,“ he said.

  After work I went home and put on my gym shorts and running shoes and worked out with my weight set in the backyard. It had stopped raining and the sky was rippled with purple and crimson clouds and loud with the droning of tree frogs. Then I went inside and showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and began poking through the clothes hangers in the closet. Boots sat on the bed and watched me.

  ”Where's my old charcoal shirt?“ I asked.

  ”I put it in your trunk. It's almost cheesecloth.“

  ”That's why I wear it. It's comfortable.“

  The trunk was in the back of the closet. I unlocked it and saw the shirt folded next to my ARI5 and the holstered nine-millimeter Beretta I had taught Alafair how to shoot. I removed the shirt, locked the trunk, and dropped the key in a dresser drawer.

  ”You still thinking about Sonny?“ she said.

  ”No, not really.“

  ”Dave?“

  ”It's not my job to explain what's unexplainable. St. Paul said there might be angels living among us, so we should be careful how we treat one another. Maybe he knew something.“

  ”You haven't said this to anybody else, have you?“

  ”Who cares?“ I started to button my shirt, but she got off the bed and began buttoning it for me. ”You're too much, Streak,“ she said, nudging my leg with her knee. In the morning I called a half dozen licensing agencies in Baton Rouge for any background I could get on Blue Sky Electric Company. No one seemed to know much about them, other than the fact they had acquired every permit they needed to begin construction on their current site by Cade.

  What was their history? No one seemed to know that, either. Where had they been in business previously? Eastern Washington and briefly in Missoula, Montana. I called a friend in the chemistry department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, then met him for lunch in the student center, which looked out upon a cypress-filled lake on the side of old Burke Hall. He was an elderly, wizened man who didn't suffer fools and was notorious for his classroom histrionics, namely, kicking his shoes across the lecture room the first day of class and gracefully flipping the text over his shoulder into a wastebasket. ”What do these guys make?“ he said. ”Nobody seems to know.“

  ”What do they un-make?“

  ”I beg your pardon?“

  ”It's not a profound concept, Dave. If they don't make things, they dispose of things. You said they had an incinerator. Who besides Satan needs an incinerator in a climate like this?“

  ”They do something with electrical transformers,“ I said.

  His eyes looked like slits, his skin webbed like dry clay.

  ”If they're incinerating the oil in the transformers, they're probably emitting PCB's into the environment. PCB's not only go into the air, they go into the food chain. Anticipate a change in local cancer statistics,“ he said.

  Back at my office I called the EPA in Washington, D.C.” then newspapers and wire services in Seattle and Helena, Montana. Blue Sky Electric had changed its corporate name at least seven times and had been kicked out of or refused admission to thirteen states. Each time it departed an area, it left behind a Superfund cleanup that ran into millions of dollars. The great irony was that the cleanup was contracted by the same corporation that owned the nonunion railroad that transported the transformers to Blue Sky Electric.

  The last place they had tried to set up business was in Missoula, where they had been driven out of town by a virtual lynch mob.

  Now they had found a new home with the Bertrand family, I thought.

  “What are you going to do?” Helen said.

  “Spit in the punch bowl.”

  I called the Daily Iberian, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Sierra Club, an ACLU lawyer who delighted in filing class action suits on behalf of minorities against polluters, and a RICO prosecutor with the U.S. attorney general's office.

  After work, Rufus Arceneaux stopped me on the way to my truck in the parking lot. His armpits were dark with sweat rings, his breath as rank as an ashtray.

  “I need to talk with you,” he said.

  “Do it on the clock.”

  “This is private. I got no deep involvement with the Bertrands. I did a little security for them, that's all.”

  “What are you telling me, Roof?”

  “Any kind of shit coming down on their head, problems with the grease balls it's got nothing to do with me. I'm out. Understand what I'm saying?”

  “No.”

  I could smell the fear in his sweat. He walked away from me, his GI haircut as slick as a peeled onion against the late sun.

  That evening I helped Batist bail and chain-lock our rental boats and close up the bait shop. The air was dry and hot, the sky empty of clouds and filled with a dull white light like a reflection off tin. My hands, my chest, seemed to burn with an energy I couldn't free myself from.

  “What's got your burner on, Streak?” Bootsie said in the living room.

  “Rufus Arceneaux's trying to disassociate himself from the Her-trands.

  He knows something's about to hit the fa
n.”

  “I don't un-” she began.

  “Clete and I shook up Patsy Dapolito. He said he could hurt Johnny Carp in ways I hadn't thought about.”

  “That psychopath is after Julia and Moleen?”

  “I don't know,” I said. I went into the bedroom, picked up my .45 in its holster, and drove into New Iberia.

  It was dusk when I turned into Moleen's drive and parked by his glassed-in back porch. Every light was on in the house, but I saw Moleen out on his sloping lawn, raking pine needles into a pile under a tree. Behind him a shrimp boat with green and red running lights on was headed down Bayou Teche toward the Gulf.

  “Is there some reason I should have been expecting you?” he said.

  “Patsy Dap.”

  “Who?”

  “I kicked a two-by-four up his butt yesterday. I think he might try to square a beef with Johnny by going through you.”

  “You have problems with your conscience, sir?”

  “Not over you.”

  “A matter of principle, that sort of thing?”

  “I've said what I had to say.”

  “You loathed us long before any of this began.”

  “Your friends murdered Sonny Boy Marsallus. Either you or Julia ran down and killed a child. One of these days the bill's going to come due, Moleen.”

  I walked back toward my truck. Through the lighted windows I could see Julia, in a yellow dress, a drink in her hand, talking brightly on the phone.

  I heard Moleen behind me, felt his hand bite into my arm with surprising strength.

  “Do you think I wanted any of this to happen? Do you know what it's like to wake up every morning with your whole-” He waved his arm vaguely at the air, as a drunk man might. Then he blanched, as though he were watching himself from outside his own skin.

  “I don't think you're well, Moleen. Get some help. Go into the witness protection program.”

  “What do you suggest about Ruthie Jean?”

  “If that's her choice, she can go with you.”

  “You have no idea how naive you are, sir,” he said.

  He wore a stained white shirt and a pair of baggy seersucker slacks with no belt. For just a moment, in the deepening shadows, with the splayed cane rake propped in his hand, a drop of sweat hanging on his chin, he no longer looked like the man whom I had resented most of my life.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I said.

  “No, but thank you, anyway, Dave. Good night.”

  I held out my business card. He hesitated, then took it, smiling wanly, and inserted it in his watch pocket.

  “Good night, Moleen,” I said.

  I woke early Saturday morning and went to Red's Gym in Lafayette and worked out hard on the speed and heavy bag, did three miles on the outdoor track, then drove back home and helped Alafair and Batist fix lunch for the fishermen who returned to the dock during the midday heat. But I couldn't rid myself of a nameless, undefined red-black energy that made my palms ring, the pulse beat in my wrists. The only feeling I'd had like it was on benders of years ago when my whiskey supply was cut off, or in Vietnam, when we were moved into a free-fire zone only to learn that the enemy had gone. I called Moleen's house.

  “I'm afraid you've missed him,” Julia said. “Would you have him call me when he comes back?”

  “I've just hired an auctioneer to get rid of his things. Oh, I'm sorry, would you like to come out before the sale and pick up a bargain or two?”

  “There's a New Orleans grease ball in town named Patsy Dapolito.”

  “I'm supposed to be on the first tee by one o'clock. Otherwise, I'd love to chat. You're always so interesting, Dave.”

  “We can put a cruiser by your house. There's still time for alternatives, Julia.”

  “You're such a dear. Bye-bye now.” Later, Alafair went to a picture show in town and Bootsie and I fixed deviled eggs and ham and onion sandwiches and ate them on the kitchen table in front of the floor fan. “You want to go to Mass this afternoon instead of in the morning?” she said. sure. She swallowed a small bite from her sandwich and fixed her eyes on my face. Her hair moved in the breeze from the fan. She started to speak. “I've made my peace about Sonny,” I said. “He was brave, he was stand-up, he never compromised his principles. That's not a bad recommendation to take into the next world.”

  “You're special, Streak.”

  “So are you, kiddo.”

  After we did the dishes she walked down to the vegetable garden at the end of the coulee, with the portable phone in her hand in case I was down at the dock when Alafair called from the show. A blue Plymouth turned into the drive, and a moment later I saw Terry Serrett walk across the grass toward the gallery. She was dressed in loose-fitting pink-striped shorts, a white blouse, and red sandals;

  her drawstring beach bag swung against her thigh. Before she mounted the steps, she paused, looked back at the road and down at the dock.

  I came to the screen door before she knocked. Her sunglasses were black in the shade; her mouth, which was bright red with lipstick, opened in surprise.

  “Oh, there you are!” she said.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Maybe, if I could come in a minute.”

  I looked at my watch and tried to smile. “What's up?” I said. But I didn't open the screen.

  She looked awkward, uncomfortable, her shoulders stiffening, an embarrassed grin breaking on the corner of her mouth.

  “I'm sorry to ask you this, but I have to use your rest room.”

  I opened the door and she walked past me into the living room, her eyes seeming to adjust or focus behind her glasses, as though she were examining the furniture in the room or perhaps in the hallway or in the kitchen.

  “It's down the hall,” I said.

  A moment later I heard the toilet flush and the water in the lavatory running.

  She walked back into the living room.

  “That's better,” she said. She examined the room, listening. “It's so quiet. Are you Saturday house-sitting?”

  “Oh, I'll be going down to work at the dock in a little while.”

  She was absolutely immobile, as though she were caught between two antithetical thoughts, her thickly made-up face as white and as impossible to penetrate as a Kabuki mask.

  The phone rang on the table by the couch.

  “Excuse me a minute,” I said, and sat down and picked up the receiver from the hook. Through the front screen I saw Batist walking from the dock, up the slope toward the house.

  “Dave?” the voice said through the receiver.

  “Hey, Clete, what's happening?” I said.

  “You remember Helen gave me a Xerox of Sonny's diary? All this time I had it under my car seat. This morning I brought it in and told Terry to stick it in the safe. A little while later I check, guess what, it's gone and so is she. I'm sitting at the desk by the safe, feeling like a stupid fuck, and I look down at the notepad there, you know, the one I took directions to Pogue's place on, and I realize the top sheet's clean. I'm sure I haven't used that pad since Pogue called.

  Somebody tore off the page that had my pencil impressions on it …

  ”You there?“

  Chapter 36

  E POINTED THE Ruger .22 caliber automatic at my stomach.

  ”So you're Charlie,“ I said.

  She didn't answer. Her body was framed against the light through the window, as though crystal splinters were breaking over her shoulders.

  She looked out the window at Batist walking through the shade trees toward the gallery.

  ”Tell him you're busy, you'll be down at the dock later,“ she said.

  ”Use those exact words.“

  ”None of this serves your cause.“

  She picked up a pillow from a stuffed chair.

  ”You need to get rid of the black man,“ she said.

  I rose to my feet. She backed against the front wall, the pillow folded across the top of the Ruger. Her mouth was parted slightly, as th
ough she used air only in teaspoons. I stood in the door and called through the screen: ”I'll be down at the dock later, Batist.“

  ”The air pump gone out on the shiner tank,“ he said.

  I hesitated, opened and closed my hands at my sides, felt the trees, the yard, the fractured blue of the sky almost pulling me through the screen. The woman named Terry raised the Ruger level with the side of my head, whispered dryly: ”He won't make three steps after I do you.“

  ”Give me a few minutes,“ I called.

  ”One of us got to go in town.“

  ”I know that, podna.“

  ”Long as you know,“ he said, and walked back down the slope.

  I could hear the wood in the floor creak under my feet, the wind scudding leaves across the gallery.

  ”Back away from the door,“ the woman said.

  ”We've still got the original manuscript,“ I said.

  ”Nobody else cares about it. Back away from the door and sit in the stuffed chair.“

  ”Fuck you, Terry, or whatever your name is.“

  Her face was as opaque as plaster. She closed the ends of the pillow around the Ruger, brought the barrel's tip upward until it was aimed at my throat.

  I felt my eyes water and go out of focus.

  Outside, Tripod raced on his chain up and down the clothesline. Her face jerked at the sound, then she shifted her weight, glanced quickly at the side window, an incisor tooth biting down on her lip, inadvertently moved the barrel's aim two inches to the side of my throat.

  Bootsie fired from the hallway, the Beretta pointed in front of her with both hands.

  The first round hit the woman high up in the right arm. Her blouse jumped and colored as though a small rose had been painted in the cloth by an invisible brush. But she swallowed the sound that tried to rise from her throat, and turned toward the hallway with the Ruger still in her hand.

  Bootsie fired again, and the second round snapped a brittle hole through the left lens of the black-tinted sunglasses worn by the woman named Terry. Her fingers splayed stiffly at odd angles from one another as though all of her nerve connections had been severed; then her face seemed to melt like wax held to a flame as she slipped down between the wall and the stuffed chair, a vertical red line streaking the wallpaper.