A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  When Gouza came out of the court, in pink shirt, cream slacks, and wide black tie with white polkadots, with cops holding him by both arms, he managed to get one hand loose, grab his phallus, and spit into the lens of a television camera.

  I checked my .45 with a guard before he worked the levers that slid the barred door on a corridor that led past three holding cells and the drunk tank.

  “I’d like to go inside with him,” I said.

  “Then you’d better take a stun gun with you,” the guard said.

  “What’s he done?”

  “Look for yourself, look at the floor. The sonofabitch.”

  The corridor in front of one cell was splattered with spaghetti, coffee, and cobbler that had obviously been flung with the plastic tray and Styrofoam containers from the iron apron in the cell door.

  I walked down the corridor and propped one arm against the bars of Joey Gouza’s cell. Tieless and beltless now, he sat on a bunk that was suspended from wall chains; he smoked a cigarette methodically, his fingers pinched on the paper, his furious black eyes staring into the center of the gloom.

  Then he saw me. “It’s you.”

  “What’s happenin’, Joey?”

  “I should have figured your nose was in this someplace.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m not a player. It looks like it’s between you and other people this time.”

  “What people? What the fuck is going on, man?”

  “You should have stayed out of Iberia Parish.”

  “Are you out of your mind? You think I got an interest in some shithole that counts the mosquitoes in the population? You tell me what the fuck is going on.” His voice rasped and broke wetly in his throat. He breathed deeply to regain his momentum. “Look, I don’t sit still while people ream me. You got that, Jack? You tell me what the fucking game is.”

  “I don’t think there is one, Joey. I just think you paddled too far up shit creek this time. That’s the way it breaks sometime.”

  “The way it breaks? What do you got, yesterday’s ice cream for brains? That judge, I’ve never seen him before and he’s got a hard-on for me before they unlock me off the chain. He called me a wild animal, in front of all them people. Bail, one-point-seven-million dollars! That’s a hundred and seventy thousand large for a bondsman. You telling me these people ain’t trying to run a hook through my balls? Those two guys who busted me, they stuck guns in my face in my own restaurant. You’ve got a real problem here, some people that’s totally out of control.”

  “You’ve got good lawyers. They’ll get your bail reduced.”

  He flipped his cigarette in a shower of sparks off the wall and kneaded his hands together. His long neck and shoulders were webbed with veins.

  “What are you down here for, to toss peanut shells at the monkeys?” he said. “Go tell that screw there’s no toilet paper in here.”

  “I thought you might want to talk to me.”

  He rose from the bunk, breathing hard through his nose, and came toward me.

  “That broad’s lying,” he said.

  “She’s been pretty convincing.”

  His eyes looked hard into mine and narrowed.

  “You know it’s a ream. I see it in your face, man,” he said. “You offering me something?”

  “Somebody did it to her. I don’t think it was anybody around here. Everybody I talk to thinks you’re the number-one candidate, Joey. I think they’ve got the right person in the cell.”

  His hand shot out of the bars, knotting my shirt in his fist. His breath was rife with jailhouse funk. My collar button popped loose on the floor.

  “I ain’t going down on a phony beef. You tell that broad that,” he said. “You tell her brother to get her off my back.”

  I tore his hand loose.

  “You understand me, man?” he said. “I don’t roll over. You push me, I’ll leave your hair on the wallpaper.”

  “Tell that to everybody at your trial, Joey. It makes good courtroom theater.”

  He hit the bars with the heel of his fist. His face was livid, popping with cartilage.

  “You’re twisting me, man. What’s your stake? What’s your fucking stake?” he said.

  “Why did those guys creep Weldon Sonnier’s house?”

  He paced back and forth, his nostrils dilating.

  “I’ll print it out for you in big letters,” he said. “I’m a businessman, I don’t creep houses, I don’t drive out to some hole in the road to stoke up a bunch of small-town jackoffs. They’re the kind who send you to the electric chair and then go back to watering their plants. Look, you were a New Orleans cop. You know how it gets done. Somebody keeps getting in your face and don’t listen to reason, you tell another guy about it, then you forget it. You don’t even want to know who does it. If you’re a sick guy, with a real bone on for somebody, you get Polaroids, then you burn them.

  “That’s how it works. You don’t drive into some broad’s backyard and nail her to a gazebo. You don’t end up in a hick court with Elmer Fudd dropping a one-point-seven-million-dollar bond on your head. The point is, when people got dog food between their ears they’re dangerous, and I don’t fuck with them. Is it starting to clear up for you now?”

  He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and hunted in his shirt pockets for a match.

  “Gimme a light,” he said.

  “How’d you get involved with Bobby Earl?” I said.

  He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and shook it at me.

  “You quit trying to jerk my chain, man,” he said. “You want to know how I got this voice? A swinging dick tried to make me his punk when I was a seventeen-year-old fish. I caught him in the shower with a string knife. Except he was a made guy, and I didn’t know the rules about made guys back then, and his friends hung me up in my cell with a coat hanger. They crushed my voice box. But I didn’t roll over then, man, and I don’t roll over now.

  “Explain to the broad I’m a three-time loser. If I go down on the bitch, I got nothing to lose. That means I can cop to anything they want and take Sonnier with me. I’ll make sure he gets heavy time, and I’ll be inside with him when he does it. Let her think about that.”

  “You’re a hard man, Joey.”

  “Tell that screw down there to get me processed or send up some toilet paper.”

  He scratched at the inside of his nostril with his thumbnail and blew air through his nasal passages. He had already lost interest in my presence, but a dark light remained in his face, as though he were breathing bad air, and his heated eyes, the nests of veins in his neck, his unwashed smell, the soft scud of his loafers on the cement, his jug head in silhouette against the cell window, made me think of the circus creatures who pawed the dark while they watched the denouement of Eddy Raintree from their cages.

  LATER, I CALLED Weldon at his office and was told that he was with a drilling crew at the old Sonnier farm.

  I drove down the dirt road past the rusted windmill and crumbled brick supports where the house had stood before Weldon had hired a gang of drunken blacks to tear it apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. I parked my truck by a sludge pond and an open-sided shed stacked with pipe and sacks of drilling mud, and walked up the iron steps of a rig that roared with the noise of the drilling engine.

  The roughnecks on the floor were slimy with mud, bent into their work at the wellhead with the concentration of men who know the result of a moment’s inattention on a rig, when the tongs or a whirling chain can pinch off your fingers or snap your bones like sticks.

  A tool pusher put a hard hat on my head.

  “Where’s Weldon?” I shouted at him.

  “What?”

  “Where’s Weldon Sonnier?” I shouted again over the engine’s roar.

  He pointed up into the rig.

  High up on the tower I saw Weldon in coveralls and hard hat, working with the derrick man on the monkey board. The derrick man was clipped to the tower with a safety belt. I couldn’t see one on Weldon. His face
was small and round against his yellow hat as he looked down at me.

  A moment later he put one foot out on the hoist, grabbed the cable with one hand, and rode it down to the rig floor. There was a single smear of bright grease, like war paint, on one of his cheekbones.

  “Coffee time,” he yelled at the floormen.

  Somebody killed the drilling engine, and I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Weldon pulled off his bradded gloves, unzipped his coveralls, and stepped out of them. He was wearing slacks and a polo shirt, and his armpits and the center of his chest were dark with sweat.

  “Let’s go over here in the shade,” he said. “It must be ninety-five today.”

  We walked to the far end of the platform and leaned against the railing under a canvas awning. The air was sour with natural gas.

  “I thought you’d pretty well punched out this field,” I said.

  “Anyplace there was an ocean, there’s oil. You just got to go deep enough to find it.”

  I looked out at the wells pumping up and down in the distance and the long spans of silver pipe that sweated coldly from the natural gas running inside.

  “With the low price of crude, a lot of outfits are shut down now,” I said.

  “That’s them, not me. What are you out here for, Dave?”

  “To deliver a message.”

  “Oh?”

  “Actually I’m just passing on an observation. Have you been up to see Drew today?”

  “Yeah, a little while ago.”

  “You know you’re going to end up testifying at Gouza’s trial, then?”

  “So?”

  “I get the feeling you think somebody’s going to wave a wand over your situation and you won’t ever have to explain your dealings with Gouza. He’s not copping a plea. He’s facing life in Angola. His defense attorneys are going to use a chain saw when they get you and Drew on the stand.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Give some thought to what Drew’s doing.”

  He wiped at the grease on his face with a clean mechanic’s cloth.

  “Tell Gouza he doesn’t want to make bond,” he said. “Believe me, he doesn’t want to see me unless he’s got some cops around him.”

  “Then you buy it?”

  “You think she did it to herself? You’ve got the right guy in jail. Just make sure he stays there.”

  “Here’s the problem I have, Weldon. Joey Gouza is what they call a made guy. That’s unusual in his case. He wasn’t born to it, he didn’t have any patrons or political allies greasing the wheels for him. He worked his way up from a reformatory punk. That means that in his world he’s a lot smarter than a lot of the people around him. Come on, you know him, Weldon, do you think he’d set himself up for a fall like this?”

  He folded the pink mechanic’s cloth in a neat square and balanced it on the rail. Then he moved it and balanced it again.

  “Stonewall time is over,” I said. “Your sister just put the tape on fast forward.”

  “So you’ve come out here to tell me she’s a liar?”

  “No, I’ve come out here to tell you she’s a victim. I’m using the word in a broad sense, too. There’s a certain kind of victimization that starts in childhood. Then the person grows older and never learns any other role. Except maybe one other. The word for that one is enabler.”

  “You better get to it, Dave.” He turned toward me and rested his hand on the metal rail.

  “Lyle understands it and he never finished high school.”

  “I’m going to ask you to choose each of your words carefully, Dave.”

  I took a deep breath. The air was pungent with gas, acrid with the smell of oil sludge and dead weeds in the sunlight.

  “Look, Weldon, if I know about your family history, about some of the complexities in it, do you believe that Gouza’s attorneys won’t have access to the same information, that they won’t use it to tear your sister apart?”

  “Say it or shut the fuck up and get out of here.”

  “She’s not just your sister. In her mind she’s your wife, your lover, your mother. She’ll do anything for you. It’s a way of life for her. You know it, too, you rotten sonofabitch.”

  His feet were already set when he swung. He caught me on the chin, and my head snapped back and my hard hat rolled across the rig floor.

  I straightened up, held the rail with one hand, and looked into his face. It was stretched tight on the bone, and the suntanned skin at the corners of his eyes was filled with white lines.

  The roughnecks on the floor stared at us in disbelief.

  I pushed at the side of my chin with my thumb.

  “They’ll melt you into lard in the courtroom, Weldon,” I said. “Gouza won’t even have to take the stand. Instead, you and Drew will be on trial, and those defense attorneys will make you sound like a pornographer’s wet dream.”

  I saw his hand move, his eyes click again as though he’d been slapped.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “The first one was free. You come at me again, and I’ll make sure you do time for assaulting a police officer.” I picked up the hard hat from the rig floor and shoved it into his hands, jammed it into his chest. “Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suborning perjury. Or apply for a pilot’s job in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. See you around, Weldon.”

  I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.

  THE NEXT MORNING I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state’s political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor’s brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.

  I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.

  They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.

  “I don’t think we have a seating for one, sir.
Would you like to wait in the bar?” the maître d’ said.

  “I’m with Mr. Earl’s party. Ah, there he is right over there,” I said.

  “Very well. Please follow me, sir,” he said.

  I walked with the maître d’ to Bobby Earl’s table. The maître d’ set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.

  “Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I’m just in town briefly and I didn’t want to disturb you at the legislature,” I said. “How are you gentlemen? I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y’all go right ahead with your lunch.”

  They went on talking to each other, as though my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.

  Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Do you know that Joey Gouza’s in custody?”

  “No.”

  I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.

  “I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier’s hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don’t know Joey Gouza?”

  “I’m not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?”

  A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.

  “You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy’s face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn’t you?”