A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  “Maybe your fears are getting ahead of you,” I said.

  “You don’t understand. I had some trouble over there.”

  “Where?”

  “In Laos.” He waited until the barman had brought him another shot and a fresh draft chaser. He tipped the whiskey into the beer and watched it balloon in a brown cloud off the bottom of the glass. “We operated a kind of flying taxi service for some of the local warlords. We were also transporting some of their home-grown organic. Eventually it got processed into heroin in Hong Kong. For all I know, GIs in Saigon ended up shooting it in their arms. Not too good, huh?”

  “Go on.”

  “I got sick of it. On one trip I told this colonel, this half-Chinese character named Liu, that I wasn’t going to load his dope. I pushed him off the plane and took off down the runway. Big mistake. They shot the shit out of us, killed my copilot and two of my kickers. I got out of the wreck with another guy, and we ran through jungle for two hours. Then the other guy, this Vietnamese kid, said he was going to head for a village on the border. I told him I thought NVA were there, but he took off anyway. I never found out what happened to him, but Liu’s lice heads caught me an hour later. They marched me on a rope for three days to a camp in the mountains, and I spent the next eighty-three days in a bamboo cage just big enough to crawl around in.

  “I lived in my own stink, I ate rice with worms in it, and I wedged my head through the bamboo to lick rainwater out of the mud. At night the lice heads would get drunk on hot beer and break the bottles against my cage. Then one morning I smelled this funny odor. It was blowing in the smoke from the campfire. It smelled like burned hair or cowhide, then, when the wind flattened out the smoke, I saw a half-dozen human heads on pikes around the fire. I don’t want to tell you what their faces looked like.

  “Liu’s buttholes probably wanted to ransom me, but at the same time they were afraid of our guys because they’d shot up the plane and killed three of my crew. So I figured eventually they’d get tired of busting bottles on my cage and pissing on me through the bars, and my head was going to be curing in the smoke with those others.

  “I used to wake with fear in the morning that was unbelievable. I’d pray at night that I would die in my sleep. Then one day some other guys came into the camp, guys who knew I was money on the hoof and who wanted to make some toady points with the CIA. They bought me for a case of Budweiser and six cartons of cigarettes.”

  He drank from his boilermaker, his eyes glazed faintly with shame.

  “It’s a funny experience to have,” he said. “It makes you wonder about your worth.”

  “Cut it loose, Weldon.”

  “What?”

  “We already paid our dues. Why run the same old tape over and over again?”

  “I volunteered for Air America. I can’t blame that on somebody else.”

  “You didn’t volunteer to be a heroin mule.”

  He pulled the cellophane off a cigar and rubbed it between his fingers until it was a small ball.

  “If you were going to cut a deal with the feds, who would you go to?”

  “It depends on what you did.”

  “We’re talking about guns and dope.”

  “You mean you got into it again?”

  “Yes and no.”

  I looked at him quietly. He made a series of wet rings on the table with his jigger.

  “The guns and the dope didn’t get delivered, but I burned some guys for one hundred and eighty grand,” he said.

  His eyes flicked away from mine.

  “This is straight? You actually ripped off some traffickers for that kind of money?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess it was sort of a first for them.”

  “One of the guys you burned is right there in the city jail, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. My advice is you should talk to the DEA or to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know a pretty good agent in Lafayette.”

  “That’s about all you can suggest, huh? No magic answers.”

  “You won’t confide in me. I’m at a loss to help you.”

  “If I did confide in you, I’d probably be under arrest.”

  He smiled wanly and started to drink from his glass, then set it back down.

  “I’ll give what you said some thought, Dave.”

  “No, I doubt that, Weldon. You’ll go your own way until you beat your head into jelly.”

  “I wish I always knew what was going on inside other people. It’d be a great asset in the oil business.”

  BEFORE I DROVE back to the office I walked across the drawbridge over the Teche and watched the current running through the pilings and the backs of the garfish breaking the water in the sunlight. The air was hot, the sky bright with haze, the humidity so intense that my eyes burned with salt and my skin felt like insects were crawling on it. Even under the trees by the old brick firehouse in the park, the air felt close and moist, like steam rising off a stove.

  Weldon had his problems, but I had mine, too. This case went far beyond Iberia Parish, and it appeared to involve people and power and politics of a kind that our small law-enforcement agencies were hardly adequate to deal with. Once again, I felt like the outside world was having its way with us, that it had found something vulnerable or weak or perhaps even desirous in us that allowed the venal and the meretricious to leave us with less of ourselves, less of a way of life that had been as sweet in the mouth as peeled sugarcane, as poignant and heartbreaking in its passing as the words to “La Jolie Blonde” on Tee Neg’s jukebox:

  Jolie blonde, gardez donc c’est t’as fait.

  Ta m’as quit-té pour t’en aller,

  Pour t’en aller avec un autre que moi.

  Jolie blonde, pretty girl,

  Flower of my heart

  I’ll love you forever,

  My jolie blonde.

  Still, Joey Gouza was in the city of New Iberia’s custody, and if the prosecutor’s office had its way he would be hoeing sweet potatoes on Angola Farm the rest of his life.

  But something that had bothered me at noon while I had watched Alafair playing in the park was troubling me again, this time because of an idle glance across the bayou at a young man fishing under a cypress tree. I was watching him because he reminded me of so many working-class Cajun boys I had grown up with. He stood while he fished, bare-chested, lean, olive-skinned, his body knotted with muscle, his Marine Corps utilities low on his stomach, smoking a cigarette in the center of his mouth without taking it out. His bobber went under, and he jerked his pole up and pulled a catfish through the lily pads. Then I noticed that his left hand was gone at the wrist and he had to unhook the catfish and string it with one hand. But he was quite good at it. He laid the fish across a rock, pressed the sole of his boot down on its stomach, slipped the hook loose from the corner of its mouth, and worked a shaved willow fork through the gills until the hard white point emerged bloody and coated with membrane from the mouth. Then with his good hand he flopped the fish into the shallows and sank the willow fork deep into the mud.

  THE SHERIFF WAS sitting sideways in his swivel chair, reading a diet book, punching at his stomach with three fingers, when I walked into his office. He looked up at me, then put the book in his drawer and began fiddling with some papers on his blotter. Like many Cajun men, his chin was round and dimpled and his cheeks ruddy and flecked with small veins.

  “I was thinking about going on a diet myself,” I said.

  “Somebody left that in here. I don’t know who it belongs to.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s up?”

  I told him I was going out to Drew Sonnier’s again and my suspicions about what had happened at the gazebo.

  “All right, Dave, but make sure you get her permission to look around on the property. If she won’t give it to you, let’s get a warrant. We don’t want any tainted evidence.”

  He saw me raise my eyebrows.

 
“What?” he said.

  “You’re talking about evidence we might use against her?”

  “It’s not up to us. If she’s filed false charges against Joey Gouza, the prosecutor might want to stick it to her. You still want to go out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then do it. By the way, she was discharged from the hospital this morning, so she’s back home now.”

  “Okeydoke.”

  “Dave, a little advice. Try to put the lid on your personal feelings about the Sonniers. They’re grown-up people now.”

  “All right, sheriff.”

  “There’re a couple of other things I need to tell you. While you were out the jailer called. It seems one trusty decided to snitch on another one. The night Joey Gouza went apeshit and vomited all over his cell, the trusty preparing the food got swacked on paregoric and accidentally knocked a box of ant poison off the shelf onto a table. It probably got in Gouza’s food. Except the trusty didn’t tell anybody about it. Instead he wiped off the table and served the trays like nothing had happened.”

  “Gouza’s convinced there’s a hit on him.”

  “That might be, but this time it looks like it was an accident.”

  “Where’s the trusty now?”

  “They’re moving him over to the parish jail. I’d hate to be that guy when Gouza finds out who fired up his ulcers.”

  “There’s no chance an AB guy was involved?”

  “The guy who spilled the ant poison is a migrant farm worker in for DWI. . . . You almost look disappointed.”

  “No, I just thought maybe the guys in the black hats were starting to cannibalize each other. Anyway, was there something else?”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid there is.” He kept putting one hand on top of the other, which was always his habit when he didn’t want to say something offensive to someone. Then he pressed his glasses more tightly against his eyes. “I got three phone calls, two from state legislators and one from Bobby Earl’s attorney. They say you’re harassing Earl.”

  “I don’t read it that way.”

  “They say you gave him a pretty bad time in a Baton Rouge restaurant.”

  “I had five minutes’ conversation with him. I didn’t see anything that unusual in it, considering the fact that I think he’s involved with a murder.”

  “This is another thing that bothers me, Dave. We don’t have any evidence that Earl is connected with Garrett’s death. But you seem determined to tie Earl to it.”

  “Should I leave him alone?” I looked him straight in the face.

  “I didn’t say that. I’m just asking you to look at your motivations.”

  “I want—”

  He saw the heat in my face. “What?” he asked.

  “I want to turn the key on the people who killed Garrett. It’s that simple, sheriff.”

  “Sometimes we have an agenda we don’t tell ourselves about. It’s just human.”

  “Maybe it’s time somebody ’fronts a guy like Earl. Maybe he’s gotten a free pass too long.”

  “You’re going to have to ease up, Dave, or it’ll be out of my hands.”

  “He’s got that kind of juice?”

  “No, he doesn’t. But if you try to shave the dice, you’ll give it to him. You got into it at his house, then you created a situation with him in a public place. I don’t want a suit filed against this department, I don’t want a couple of peckerwood politicians telling me I’ve got a rogue cop on my hands. It’s time to take your foot off the accelerator, Dave.”

  My palms were ringing with anger.

  “You think I’m being too hard on you?” he asked.

  “You have to do what you think is right.”

  “You’re probably the best cop we ever had in this department. Don’t walk out of here thinking my opinion is otherwise, Dave. But you’ve got a way of kicking it up into overdrive.”

  “Then the bottom line is we’re cutting Bobby Earl some slack.”

  “You once told me the best pitch in baseball is a change of pace. Why not ease up on the batter and see what happens?”

  “Ease up on the wrong guy and he’ll drill a hole in your sternum with it.”

  He turned his hands up on the blotter.

  “I tried,” he said, and smiled.

  When I left the room, the back of my neck felt as though someone had held a lighted match to it.

  DREW ANSWERED HER door in a print sundress covered with yellow flowers. Her tan shoulders were spotted with freckles the size of pennies. Even though her left hand was swathed in bandages as thick as a boxing glove, she had put on eye shadow, lipstick, and dangling earrings set with scarlet stones, and she looked absolutely stunning as she stood with one plump hip pressed against the doorjamb.

  I had called fifteen minutes earlier.

  “I don’t want to keep you if you’re on your way out, Drew,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine. Let’s sit on the porch. I fixed some tea with mint leaves in it.”

  “I just need to look around back.”

  “What for?”

  “I might have missed something when I was out before.”

  “I thought you might like some tea.”

  “Thanks just the same.”

  “I appreciated the flowers.”

  “What flowers?”

  “The ones you sent up to my hospital room with the Amnesty International card. One of the pink ladies saw you buy them.”

  “She must have been mistaken.”

  “I wanted to act nice toward you.”

  “I need to look around back. If you don’t want to give me your permission, I have to get a warrant.”

  “Who lit your fuse today?”

  “The law’s impersonal sometimes.”

  “You think I’m trying to get you in the sack?”

  “Give it a break, Drew.”

  “No, give me an honest answer. You think I’m all heated up for you, that I’m going to walk you into my bedroom and ruin your marriage? Do you think your old girlfriends are lining up to ruin your marriage?”

  “Can I go in back?”

  She put her good hand on her hip. Her chest swelled with her breathing.

  “What do you think you’ll find that no one else did?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Whose side are you on, Dave? Why do you have to spend so much time and effort on me and Weldon? Do you have any doubt at all that an animal like Joey Gouza belongs in jail? Of all the people in the parish, why are you the only one who keeps turning the screws on us? Have you asked yourself that?”

  “Should I go after the warrant?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “Look anywhere you want to. . . . You’re a strange man. You understand principle, but I wonder how well you understand pain in other people.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say.”

  “Too bad.”

  “No, you’re not going to get away with that, Drew. If you and Weldon weren’t my friends, both of you would have been in jail a long time ago for obstruction of justice.”

  “I guess we’re very fortunate to have a friend such as you. I’m going to shut the door now. I really wish you had had some tea. I was looking forward to it.”

  “Listen, Drew—”

  She closed the door softly in my face, then I heard her turn the bolt in the lock.

  I went back to my truck, took a screwdriver and three big Ziploc bags off the seat, and walked through the side yard to the gazebo. The latticework was thick with bugle and grapevine, and the myrtle bushes planted around the base were in full purple flower. I knelt down in the moist dirt and probed through the bushes until I found the two pieces of brick I had seen previously. I dropped them both in a plastic bag, then found the broken slat from an apple crate and picked it up carefully by the edges. There was a split from the top down to a nail hole in the center of the slat. I turned it over between my fingers. Even in the deep shade I could see a dark smear around the hole on the opposite side. I slipped
the slat into another bag and worked my way back out of the myrtle bushes onto the grass.

  I glanced behind me and saw her face at a window. Then it disappeared behind a curtain.

  Each of the steps on the gazebo had been carpentered with a two-inch gap between the horizontal and perpendicular boards. I tried looking through the openings into the darkness below the gazebo but could see nothing. I used the screwdriver to unfasten a section of latticework at the bottom of the gazebo and lifted it out with my fingers. It was moist and cool inside and smelled of standing water and pack-rat nests. I reached underneath the steps and touched the cold metal head of a ball-peen hammer.

  I wondered if she had tried to remove it before I had arrived. I worked it out from under the steps with the screwdriver and carefully fitted it into the third plastic bag, then walked up to the screened-in porch on the side of the house.

  When she didn’t answer, I banged louder with the side of my fist against the wall.

  “What is it?” she said, jerking open the door, her face pinched with both anger and defeat.

  I let her take a hard look at the two broken bricks, the split apple-box slat, and the ball-peen hammer.

  “I’m going to tell you a speculation or two, Drew, but I don’t want you to say anything unless you’re willing to have it used against you later. Do you understand that?”

  Her mouth was a tight line, and I could see her pulse beating in her neck.

  “Do you understand me, Drew? I don’t want you to say anything to me unless you’re completely aware of the jeopardy it might put you in. Are we perfectly understood on that?”

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice almost broke in her throat.

  “You punched the nail through the slat, and you laid the slat across the two bricks. Then you put your hand under the nail and drove it all the way through into the step. The pain must have been terrible, but before you passed out, you splintered the slat away from the nail and shoved it and the bricks into the myrtle bushes. Then you pushed the hammer through the gap in the step.”

  Her eyes were filming.

  “Your prints are probably all over the bricks and the slat, but that won’t mean anything in itself,” I said. “But I have a feeling there won’t be any prints on the hammer except yours. That one might be hard to explain, particularly if there are blood traces on the hammer and we know for sure it’s the one that was used to drive the nail into the gazebo floor.”