DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

"Yeah? Tell yourself that the next time you look at your bank account. I owe you one for cutting me loose. Buy yourself something nice and send me the bill. I'll see you around."

  "Don't misunderstand the gesture. If I find out you're connected to my wife's death, God help you, Bubba."

  He chewed his gum, looked off at the swimming pool as though he were preparing to answer, but instead walked away through the oak trees, the soles of his loafers loud on the crisp, dead leaves. Then he stopped and turned around.

  "Hey, Dave, when I straighten out a problem, the person gets to see this face. You give that some thought."

  He walked on farther, then turned again, his spiked hair and tan face mottled with sun and shadow.

  "Hey, you remember when we used to play ball here and yell at each other, 'I got your Dreamsicle hanging'?" he said, grinning, and grabbed his phallus through his slacks. "Those were the days, podna."

  I bought a small bag of crushed ice, took it back to the office with me, and let it melt in a cleanplastic bucket. Every fifteen minutes I soaked a towel in the cold water and kept it pressed to my face while I counted to sixty. It wasn't the most pleasant way to spend the afternoon, but it beat waking up the next day with a face that looked like a lopsided plum.

  Then, just before quitting time, I sat at my desk in my small office, while the late sun beat down on the sugarcane filds across the road, and looked once again at the file the New Orleans police department had sent us on Victor Romero. In his front and side mug shots his black curls hung down on his forehead and ears. As in all police station photography, the black-and-white contrast was severe. His hair glistened as though it were oiled; his skin was the color of bone; his unshaved cheeks and chin looked touched with soot.

  His criminal career wasn't a distinguished one. He had four misdemeanor arrests, including one for contributing to prostitution; he had done one hundred eighty days in the parish jail for possession of burglar tools; he had an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear on a DWI charge. But contrary to popular belief, a rap sheet often tells little about a suspect. It records only the crimes he was charged with, not the hundreds he may have committed. It also offers no explanation of what goes on in the mind of a man like Victor Romero.

  His eyes had no expression in the photographs. He could have been waiting for a bus when the camera lens clicked. Was this the man who had murdered Annie with a shotgun, who had fired point-blank at her with buckshot while she creamed and tried to hide her face behind her arms? Was he made up of the same corpuscle, sinew, and marrow as I? Or was his brain taken hot from a furnace, his parts hammered together in a shower of sparks on a devil's anvil?

  Next morning the call came in from the St. Martin Parish's Sheriff's office. A black man, fishing in his pirogue by the Henderson levee, had looked down into the water and seen a submerged automobile. A police diver had just gone down on it. The automobile was a maroon Toyota and the driver was still in it. The parish coroner and a tow truck were on their way from St. Martinville.

  I called Minos at the DEA in Lafayette and told him to meet me there.

  "This impresses me," he said. "It's professional, it's cooperative. Who said you guys were rural bumblers?"

  "Put the cork in it, Minos."

  Twenty minutes later, Cecil and I were at the levee on the edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. It was already hot, the sun shimmered on the vast expanse of water, and the islands of willow trees looked still and green in the heat. Late-morning fishermen were trying for bluegill and goggle-eye in the pilings of the oil platforms that dotted the bays or in the shade of the long concrete causeway that spanned the entire marsh. Turkey buzzards floated high on the updrafts against the white sky. I could smell dead fish in the lily pads and cattails that grew along the shore. Farther out from the bank, the black heads of water moccasins stuck out of the water like motionless twigs.

  The ground had been wet when the car went off the crown of the levee. The tire tracks ran down at an angle through the grass and buttercups, cut deeply through a slough, and disappeared in the slit beyond a deep-water dropoff. The tow-truck driver, a sweating, barrel-chested man in Levi's with no shirt, fed the hook and cable off the truck to the police driver, who stood in the shallows in a bright yellow bikini with a mask and snorkel strapped to his face. Under the rippling sunlight on the water, I could see the dim outline of the Toyota.

  Minos parked his car and walked down the levee just as the tow-truck driver engaged his winch and the cable clanged taut against the Toyota's frame.

  "What do you figure happened?" Minos said.

  "You got me."

  "You think you parked one in him, after all?"

  "Who knows? Even if I did, why would he drive out here?"

  "Maybe he went away to die. Even a piece of shit like this guy probably knows that's one thing you got to do by yourself."

  He saw me look at the side of his face. He bit off a hangnail, spit it off the end of his tongue, and looked at the wrecker cable quivering against the surface of the water.

  "Sorry," he said.

  A cloud of yellow sand mushroomed under the water, and suddenly the rear end of the Toyota burst through a tangle of lily pads and uprooted cattails into the sunlight. The tow-truck driver dragged the car clear of the water's edge and bounced it on the bank, the broken back window gaping like a ragged mouth. Two St. Martin Parish sheriff's deputies opened the side doors, and a flood of water, silt, moss, yellowed vegetation, and fish-eels cascaded out on the ground. The eels were long and fat, with bright silver scales and red gills, and they writhed and snapped among the buttercups like tangles of snakes. The man in the front seat had fallen sideways so that his head hung out the passenger's door. His head was strung with dead vines and covered with mud and leeches. Minos tried to see over my shoulder as I looked down at the dead man.

  "Jesus Christ, half his face is eaten off," he said.

  "Yep."

  "Well, maybe Victor wanted to be part of the bayou country."

  "It's not Victor Romero," I said. "It's Eddie Keats."

  * * *

  9

  A DEPUTY STARTED to pull him by his wrists onto the grass, then wiped his palms on his pants and found a piece of newspaper in the weeds. He wrapped it around Keats's arm and jerked him out on the ground. The water sloshed out of Keats's suede cowboy boots, and his shirt was unbuttoned and pulled up on his chest. There was a black, puffed hole the size of my thumb in his right ribcage, with a seared area around the skin flap, and an exit wound under the left arm pit. The deputy nudged Keats's arm with his shoe to expose the wound better.

  "It looks like somebody scooped it out with a tablespoon, don't it?" he said.

  The coroner motioned to two paramedics who stood by the back of an ambulance parked at the top of the levee. They pulled the gurney out of the ambulance and started down the slope with it. A black body bag was folded under one of the canvas straps.

  "How long has he been in the water?" I asked the coroner.

  "Two or three days," he said. He was a big, fat, bald man, with a shirt pocket full of cigars. His buttocks looked like watermelons. He squinted in the brightness of the sun's reflection off the water. "They turn white and ripen pretty fast in this weather. He hasn't gotten mushy yet, but he was working on it. Y'all know him?"

  "He was a low-level button man," I said.

  "A what?"

  "A contract killer. The bargain-basement variety," Minos said.

  "Well, somebody sure stirred his hash for him," the coroner said.

  "What kind of gun are we talking about?" Minos said.

  "It's going to be guesswork because there's no bullet. Maybe some fragments, but they won't help much. Offhand, I'd rule out a rifle. The muzzle flash burned his skin, so it was pressed right up against him. But the angle was upward, which would mean the shooter would have to hold the rifle low and depress the stock he fired, which wouldn't make much sense. So I'd say he was killed with a pistol, a big one, maybe a .44 Magnum or a .
45 loaded with soft-nosed shells or hollowpoints. He must have thought somebody stuffed a hand grenade down his throat. Y'all look perplexed."

  "You might say that," Minos said.

  "What's the problem?" the coroner said.

  "The wrong guy's in the car," I said.

  "He sounds like the right guy to me. Count your blessings," the coroner said. "You want to look through his pockets before we bag him up?"

  "I'll be over to St. Martinville later," I said. "I'd like a copy of the autopsy report, too."

  "Hell, come on over and watch. I'll have him apart in ten minutes." His eyes were bright and a smile worked around the corners of his mouth. "Relax. I just like to have a little fun with you guys sometimes. I'll have a copy ready for you by tonight."

  The paramedics unzipped the body bag and lifted Eddie Keats into it. A fish-eel fell out of his pants leg and flipped in the weeds as though its back were broken.

  A few minutes later, Minos and I watched the ambulance, the coroner's car, and the two St. Martin parish sheriff's cars disappear down the levee. The two-truck driver was having trouble with his winch, and he and Cecil were trying to fix it. A hot wind blew across the marsh and ruffled the water and flattened the buttercups around our feet. I could smell the schools of bluegill that were feeding on the mosquitoes on the shade of the willow islands.

  Minos walked down to the Toyota and rubbed his thumb over one of my .45 holes in the trunk. The hole was smooth and silver around the edges, as though it had been cut by a machinist's punch.

  "Are you sure Keats wasn't in the car when Romero shot at you?" he said.

  "Not unless he was hiding on the floor."

  "Then how did he get into the Toyota, and what did somebody have to gain by blowing up his shit and then dumping him with a car we were bound to find?"

  "I don't know."

  "Give me your speculations."

  "I told you, I don't know."

  "Come on, how many people had reason to snuff him?"

  "About half the earth."

  "Around here, how many people?"

  "What are you getting at?"

  "I'm not sure. I just know I want Bubba Rocque, and the people who could help me put him away keep showing up dead. That pisses me off."

  "It probably pissed Keats off a lot worse."

  "I don't think that's clever."

  "I've got a revelation for you, Minos. Homicide isn't like narcotics. Your clientele breaks the law for one reason—money. But people kill each other for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes the reasons aren't logical ones. Particularly when you're talking about Keats and his crowd."

  "You know, you always give me the feeling you tell other people only what you think they should know. Why is it that I always have that feeling about you?"

  "Search me."

  "I also have the feeling that you don't care how these guys get scratched, as long as they're off the board."

  I walked down to the Toyota's open passenger door, rested my arm on top, and looked inside again. There wasn't much of significance to see: shards of glass on the floorboards, two exit holes in the cloth of the passenger's seat, pieces of splintered lead embedded in the dashboard, a long furrow in the headliner. A warm, wet odor rose from the upholstery.

  "I think Romero drove the Toyota out here to dump it," I said. "I think Keats was supposed to meet him with another car. Then for some reason Romero blew him away. Maybe it was just an argument between the two of them. Maybe Keats was supposed to whack him and it didn't go right."

  "Why would Keats want to whack Romero?"

  "How the hell should I know? Look, we shouldn't even be talking about Romero. He should have been sent up the road when he first got busted. Why don't you turn the screws on your colleagues?"

  "Maybe I have. Maybe they're not happy with the situation, either. Sometimes these assholes get off their leashes. One time we put a street dealer in the protected-witness program and he paid us back by shooting a liquor store clerk. It works out like that sometimes."

  "I'm not sympathetic. Come on, Cecil. See you around, Minos."

  Cecil and I headed down the levee past boat rentals, the bait shops and beer joints, the fish camps set up on stilts. Out in the water, the strips of moss on the dead cypress trees lifted and fell in the wind. I bought Cecil a catfish plate in a Negro café in Breaux Bridge, then we drove back to New Iberia while the heat danced on the road in front of us.

  I spent the next two hours doing paperwork at the office, but I couldn't concentrate on the forms and folders that were spread around my desktop. I was never good at administration or clerical tasks, primarily because I always felt they had little to do with the job at hand and were created for people who made careers of running in place. And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.

  I fixed a cup of coffee and stared out the window at the trees in the sunlight. I called home to check on Alafair, then called Batist at the dock. I went to the rest room when I really didn't have to go. Then once again I looked at my uncompleted mileage report, my time and activity report, my arrest reports on local characters who had already bonded out and would probably be cut loose altogether before court appearance. I opened the largest drawer in my desk and dropped all my paperwork into it, eased the drawer shut with my shoe, signed out of the office, and went home just in time to see a taxicab leave Robin Gaddis with her suitcase on my front porch.

  She wore patent leather spiked heels with Levi's, and a loose blouse that looked as if it was touched with pink and gray shades from a watercolor brush. I turned off the truck's engine and walked toward her across the dead pecan leaves in the yard. She smiled and lighted a cigarette, blowing the smoke up into the air, and tried to look relaxed and pleasant, but her eyes were bright and her face tight with anxiety.

  "Wow, this is really out among the pelicans and the alligators," she said. "You got snakes and nutrias and all that stuff crawling around under your house?"

  "How you doing, Robin?"

  "Ask me after I'm sure I'm back on earth. I flew on one of those greaseball airlines where the pilot's got a three-day beard and blows garlic and Boone's Farm all over the place. We were dropping through the air pockets so fast you couldn't hear the engines, and all the time they're playing mambo music on the loudspeakers and I'm smelling reefer out of the front of the plane."

  I took her hand, then felt as awkward as she. I put my arms lightly around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. Her hair was warm and there were fine drops of perspiration behind her neck. Her stomach brushed against me, and I felt my loins quiver and the muscles in my back stiffen.

  "I guess it's not your day for Cro-Magnon bear hugs," she said. "That's cool, Streak. Don't worry about it. I'm copacetic. Don't worry about what you might have to tell me, either. Mommy's been taking care of herself a long time. I just got this urge to get on a thirty-nine-dollar flight with Kamikaze Airlines and couldn't resist."

  "What happened in Key West?"

  "I made a change that didn't work out."

  "Like what?"

  Her eyes went away from me and looked out into the hot shade of the pecan trees.

  "I couldn't take serving corn fritters to the Howdy Doody crowd from Des Moines any longer. I met this guy who owns a disco on the other side of the island. It's supposed to be a high-class joint, full of big tippers. Except guess what? I find out it's full of queers, and the guy and his head bartender are running a clever late-hour scam on these guys. A tourist comes in, some guy who's not out of the closet yet, who's probably got a wife and kiddies in Meridian, and when he's good and shitfaced and trying to cop some kid's bread, they use his MasterCard to run off a half-dozen charges for thirty-dollar magnum bottles of champagne and trace his signature on them later. When he gets the bill a month later in Meridian, he's not going to holler about it because he either doesn't remember what he did or he doesn't
want anybody to know he was hanging around with Maneaters Incorporated.

  "So one night just after closing I told the owner and his bartender I thought they were a couple of pricks. The owner sits on the stool next to me, with a kindly smile on his face like I just walked off the cattle truck, and slides his hand up my leg. All the time he's looking me in the eyes because he knows that mommy doesn't have any money, that mommy doesn't have another job, that mommy doesn't have any friends. Except I'm drinking a cup of coffee that's hot enough to take the paint off a battleship, and I pour it right on his oysters.

  "I heard the next day he was walking around like he had a mousetrap hanging off his equipment. But"—she clicked her tongue and tossed back her hair—"I've got a hundred and twelve bucks, Streak, and no compo because the guy and his bartender told the state employment office I was fired for not ringing up drinks and pocketing the money."

  I rubbed the back of her neck with my hand and picked up her suitcase.

  "We have a big house here. It gets hot during the day sometimes, but it's cool at night. I think you'll like it," I said, and opened the screen for her. "I need somebody to help me at the dock, too."

  And I thought, Oh Lord.

  "You mean sell worms and that stuff?" she said.

  "Sure."

  "Wow, Worms. Out of sight, Streak."

  "I have a little girl and a baby-sitter who live with me, too. But we have a room in back we don't use. I'll put a fold-out bed in it and a fan in the window."

  "Oh."

  "I sleep out here on the couch, Robin."

  "Yeah, I see."

  "Insomnia and all that bullshit. I watch the late show every night until I fall asleep."

  I saw her eyes stray to the lock and hasp on my bedroom door.

  "It looks like a great place. Did you grow up here?" she said.

  "Yes."

  She sat down on the couch and I saw the fatigue come into her face. She put out her cigarette in the empty candy dish on my coffee table.

  "You don't smoke, do you? I'm probably polluting your house," she said.