DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "Forget that bullshit about procedure. What bothers me is the feeling I've been used," he said.

  "I called before I left. You weren't in," I said.

  "That's not enough."

  Again I didn't answer him. The bagged rifle shells were on his desk.

  "Tell the truth. What would you have done if you'd found the Haitian alive?" he asked.

  "Busted him."

  "I want to believe that."

  I looked out of the window at a bright green magnolia tree in the morning haze.

  "I'm sorry about what I did. It won't happen again," I said.

  "If it does, you won't have to resign. I'll take your badge myself."

  I looked at the magnolia tree a moment and watched a hummingbird hang over one of the white flowers.

  "If we get a print off those shells, I want to send it to New Orleans," I said.

  "Why?"

  "The scene investigator dusted the radio that was in the bathtub with the Haitian. Maybe there's a connection with our shooter."

  "How?"

  "Who knows? I want New Orleans to give us a copy of Victor Romero's sheet and prints, too."

  "You think he was the shooter?"

  "Maybe."

  "What's the motive?"

  "Hell if I know."

  "Dave, do you think maybe you're trying to tie too many things together here? I mean, you want your wife's killers. But you've only got one set of suspects that you can reach out and touch, so maybe you've decided to see some threads that aren't there. Like you said, you put a lot of people in Angola."

  "The ex-con who snuffs you wants you to see his face and enjoy a couple of memories with him. The guy who shot at me last night did it for money. I don't know him."

  "Well, maybe the guy's car will show up. I don't know how he got it out of the parish with all those holes in it."

  "He boosted it, and it's in the bayou or a garage somewhere. We won't find it. At least not for a while."

  "You're really an optimist, aren't you?"

  I spent the day doing the routine investigative work of a sheriff's detective in a rural parish, I didn't enjoy it. For some reason, probably because he was afraid I'd run off again, the sheriff assigned me a uniformed deputy named Cecil Aguillard, an enormous, slow-witted redbone. He was a mixture of Cajun, Negro and Chitimacha Indian; his skin was the color of burnt brick, and he had tiny, turquoise-green eyes and a pie-plate face you could break a barrel slat across without his changing expression. He drove seventy miles an hour with one hand, spit Red Man out of the window, and pressed on the pedals with such weight and force that he had worn the rubber off the metal.

  We investigated a stabbing in a Negro bar, the molestation of a retarded girl by her uncle, an arson case in which a man set fire to his own fish camp because his drunken guests wouldn't leave his party by the next morning, and finally, late that afternoon, the armed robbery of a grocery store out on the Abbeville road. The owner was a black man, a cousin of Cecil Aguillard, and the robber had taken ninety-five dollars from him, walked him back to the freezer, hit him across the eye with his pistol barrel, and locked him inside. When we questioned him he was still shaking from the cold, and his eye was swollen into a purple knot. He could only tell us that the robber was white, that he had driven up in a small brown car with an out-of-state license plate, had walked inside with a hat on, then suddenly rolled down a nylon stocking over his face, mashing his features into a blur of skin and hair.

  "Somet'ing else. He took a bottle of apricot brandy and a bunch of them Tootsie Roll," the Negro said. "I tell him 'Big man with a gun, sucking on Tootsie Roll.' So he bust me in the face, him. I need that money for my daughter's col'ech in Lafeyette. It ain't cheap, no. You gonna get it back?"

  I wrote on my clipboard and didn't reply.

  "You gonna get it back, you?"

  "It's hard to tell sometimes."

  I knew better, of course. In fact, I figured our man was in Lake Charles or Baton Rouge by now. But time and chance happeneth to us all, even to the lowlifes.

  On our radio we heard a deputy in a patrol car run a check on a 1981 tan Chevette with a Florida tag. He had stopped the Chevette out on the Jeanerette road because the driver had thrown a liquor bottle at a road sign. I called the dispatcher and asked her to tell the deputy to hold the driver until we got there.

  Cecil drove the ten mile distance in less than eight minutes. The Chevette was pulled over on the oyster-shell parking lot of a ramshackle clapboard dance hall built back from the road. It was five p.m., the sun was orange over the rain clouds piled in the west, and Haliburton and cement and pickup trucks were parked around the entrance to the bar. A deeply tanned man in blue jeans, with no shirt on, leaned with one arm hooked over the open door of his Chevette, spitting disgustedly between his legs. His back was tattooed with a blue spider caught in a web. The web extended over both of his shoulder blades.

  "What have you got him on?" I said to the deputy who had held him for us.

  "Nothing. Littering. He says he works seven-and-seven offshore."

  "Where's he break the bottle?"

  "Back there. Against the railroad sign."

  "We'll take it from here. Thanks for you help," I said.

  The deputy nodded and drove off in his car.

  "Shake this guy down, Cecil. I'll be back in a minute," I said.

  I walked back to the railroad crossing, where an old Louisiana law—stop sign was postholed by the side of the gravel bedding. The wooden boards were stained with a dark, wet smear. I picked up pieces of glass out of the gravel and sootblackened weeds until I found two amber-colored pieces that were hinged together by an apricot brandy label.

  I started back toward the parking lot with the two pieces of wet glass in my shirt pocket. Cecil had the tattooed man spread on the front of the fender of the Chevette and was ripping his pockets inside out. The tattooed man turned his head backwards, said something, and started to stand erect, when Cecil simultaneously picked him up in the air by his belt and slammed his head down on the hood. The man's face went white with concussion. Some oilfield roughnecks in tin hats, their denims spattered with drilling mud, stopped in the bar entrance and walked towards us.

  "We're not supposed to bruise the freight, Cecil," I said.

  "You want to know what he said to me?"

  "Ease up. Our man here isn't going to give us any more trouble. He's already standing in the pig slop up to his kneecaps."

  I turned to the oilfield workers, who obviously didn't like the idea of a redbone knocking around a white man.

  "Private party, gentlemen," I said. "Read about it in the paper tomorrow. Just don't try to get your name in the story today. You got my drift?"

  They made a pretense of staring me sullenly in the face, but a cold beer was much more interesting to them than a night in the parish jail.

  The tattooed man was leaning on his arms against the front fender again. There were grains of dirt on the side of his face where it had hit the hood, and a pinched, angry light in his eyes. His blond hair was uncut and as thick and dry as old straw. Two Tootsie Roll wrappers lay on the floor of his car.

  I looked under the seats. Nothing was there.

  "You want to open the hatchback for us?" I said.

  "Open it yourself," he said.

  "I asked you if you wanted to do that. You don't have to. It beats going to jail, though. Of course, that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to jail. I just thought you might want to be a regular guy and help us out."

  "Because you got no cause."

  "That's right. It's called 'probable cause.' Were you in Raiford? I like the artwork on your back," I said.

  "You want to look in my fucking car? I don't give a shit. Help yourself," he said, pulled the keys from the ignition, popped up the hatchback, and pulled open the tire well. There was nothing inside it except the spare and a jack.

  "Cuff him and put him behind the screen," I told Cecil.

  Cecil pulled the ma
n's hands behind his back, snapped the handcuffs tightly onto his wrists, and walked him back to our car as though he were a wounded bird. He locked him behind the wire mesh that separated the back and front seats, and waited for me to get into the passenger's seat. When I didn't, he walked back to where I stood by the Chevette.

  "What's the deal? He's the one, ain't he?" he said.

  "Yep."

  "Let's take him in."

  "We've got a problem, Cecil. There's no gun, no hat, no nylon stocking. Your cousin's not going to be able to identify him in a lineup, either."

  "I seen you pick up them brandy glass. I seen you look at them Tootsie Roll paper."

  "That's right. But the prosecutor's office will tell us to kick him loose. We don't have enough evidence, podna."

  "My fucking ass. You get a beer, you. Come see in ten minutes. He give you that stocking, you better believe, yeah."

  "How much money was in his wallet?"

  "A hunnerd maybe."

  "I think there's another way to do it, Cecil. Stay here a minute."

  I walked back to our car. It was hot inside, and the handcuffed man was sweating heavily. He was trying to blow a mosquito away from his face with his breath.

  "My partner wants to bust you," I said.

  "So?"

  "There's a catch. I don't like you. That means I don't like protecting you."

  "What are you talking about, man?"

  "I went off duty at five o'clock. I'm going to get me a shrimp sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and let him take you in. Are you starting to see the picture now?"

  He shook back his damp hair from his eyes and tried to look indifferent, but he didn't hide fear well.

  "I have a feeling that somewhere between here and the jail you're going to remember where you left that gun and stocking," I said. "But anyway it's between you and him now. And I don't take stock in rumors."

  "What? What the fuck you talking about rumors, man?"

  "That he took a suspect into the woods and put out his eye with a bicycle spoke. I don't believe it."

  I saw him swallow. The sweat ran out of his hair.

  "Hey, did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked. "There's a great scene in there when this Mexican bandit says to Humphrey Bogart, 'I like your watch. I think you give me your watch.' Maybe you saw it on the late show at Raiford."

  "I ain't playing this bullshit, man."

  "Come on you, you can do it. You pretend you're Humphrey Bogart. You drive your car back to that convenience store and you give the owner your hundred dollars and that Gucci watch you're wearing. It's going to brighten up your day. I guarantee it."

  The mosquito sat on the end of his nose.

  "Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.

  The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.

  Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.

  "I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.

  "Sure. Or I can change it for you."

  "There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.

  "What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"

  "It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."

  "I see."

  "Am I putting you out?"

  "No. I'll be just a minute."

  I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.

  "Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.

  "I'm sorry about your wife," she said.

  "Thank you."

  "It's a terrible thing."

  I held the truck door open for her and didn't answer.

  She sat with her back at an angle to the far door, her legs slightly apart, and moved her eyes over my face.

  Oh boy, I thought. I drove out of the shadows of the pecan trees, back onto the bayou road.

  "You look uncomfortable," she said.

  "Long day."

  "Are you afraid of Bubba?"

  "I don't think about him," I lied.

  "I don't think you're afraid of very much."

  "I respect your husband's potential. I apologise for not asking you in. The house is a mess."

  "You don't get backed into a corner easily, do you?"

  "Like I said, it's been a long day, Mrs. Rocque."

  She made an exaggerated pout with her mouth.

  "And you're not going to call a married lady by her first name. What a proper law officer you are. Do you want a gin rickey?"

  "No, thanks."

  "You're going to hurt my feelings. Has someone told you bad things about me?"

  I watched a sparrow hawk glide on extended wings down the length of the bayou.

  "Did someone tell you I was in St. Gabriel?" she said. Then she smiled and reached out and ticked the skin above my collar with her nail. "Or maybe they told you I wasn't all girl."

  I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face.

  "I've made the officer uncomfortable. I think I even made him blush," she said.

  "How about a little slack, Mrs. Rocque?"

  "Will you have a drink with me, then?"

  "What do you think the odds are of your having a flat tire by my front lane?"

  Her round doll's eyes were bright as she looked at me over her raised drinking cup.

  "He's such a detective," she said. "He's thinking so hard now, wondering what the bad lady is up to." She rubbed her back against the door and flattened her thighs against the truck seat. "Maybe the lady is interested in you. Are you interested in me?"

  "I wouldn't go jerking Bubba around, Mrs. Rocque."

  "Oh my, how direct."

  "You live with him. You know the kind of man he is. If I was in your situation, I'd give some thought to what I was doing."

  "You're being rude, Mr. Robicheaux."

  "Read it like you want. Your husband has black lightning in his brain. Mess around with his pride, embarrass him socially, and I think you'll get to see that same kid who wheeled his crippled cousin into the coulee."

  "I have some news for you, sir," she said. Her voice wasn't coy anymore, and the red tint in her brown eyes seemed to take on a brighter cast. "I did three years in a place where the bull dykes tell you not to come into the shower at night unless you want to lose your cherry. Bubba never did time. I don't think he could. I think he'd last about three days until they had to lock him in a box and put handles on it and carry it out in the middle of an empty field."

  I drove onto the drawbridge. The tires thumped on the metal grid. I saw the bridge tender, a look at Claudette Rocque and me with a quizzical expression on his face.

  "Another thought for you, sir," she said. "Bubba has a couple of sluts he keeps on tap in New Orleans. I'm not supposed to mention them. I'm just his cutie-pie
Cajun girl that's supposed to clean his house and wash his sweat suits. I've got a big flash for you boys. Your jockstrap stinks."

  In the cooling dusk I passed a row of weathered Negro shacks with sagging galleries, a bar and a barbecue joint under a spreading oak, an old brick grocery store with a lighted Dixie beer sign in the window.

  "I'm going to drop you at the cab stand," I said. "Do you have money for cabfare?"

  "Bubba and I own cabs. I don't ride in them."

  "Then it's a good night for a walk."

  "You're a shit," she said.

  "You dealt it."

  "Yeah, you got a point. I thought I could do something for you. Big mistake. You're one of those full-time good losers. You know what it takes to be a good loser? Practice." On East Main she pointed ahead in the dusk. "Drop me at that bar."

  Then she finished the last of her thermos and casually dropped it out the truck window into the street. It sprang end over end on the concrete. A group of men smoking cigars and drinking canned beer in front of the bar turned and stared in our direction.

  "I was going to offer you a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year deal to run Bubba's fish-packing house in Morgan City," she said. "Think about that on your way back to your worm sales."

  I slowed the truck in front of the bar. The neon beer signs made the inside of the cab red. The men outside the bar entrance had stopped talking and were looking at us.

  "Also, I don't want you to drive out of here thinking you've been in control of things tonight," she said, and got up on her knees, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me wetly on the cheek. "You just missed the best lay you'll ever have, pumpkin. Why don't you-try some pocket pool at your AA meetings? It really goes with your personality."

  But I was too tired to care whether she had won the day or not. It was a night of black clouds rolling over the Gulf, of white electricity jumping across the vast, dark dome of sky above me, of the tiger starting to walk around in his cage. I could almost hear his thick, leathery paws scudding against the wire mesh, see his hot orange eyes in the darkness, smell his dung and the fetid odor of rotted meat on his breath.

  I never had an explanation for these moments that would come upon me. A psychologist would probably call it depression. A nihilist might call it philosophical insight. But regardless, it seemed there was nothing for it except the acceptance of another sleepless night. Batist, Alafair, and I took the pickup truck to the drive-in movie in Lafayette, set out deck chairs on the oyster shells, and ate hot dogs and drank lemonade and watched a Walt Disney double feature, but I couldn't rid myself of the dark well I felt my soul descending into.