DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "Don't worry about it."

  "Dave, I know I'm making complications for you. I don't mean to. A girl just gets up against the wall sometimes. You know, it was either hit on you or go back to the T-and-A circuit. I just can't cut that anymore."

  I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulder. I felt her resist at first, then she lay her head under my chin. I touched her cheek and her mouth with my fingers and kissed her forehead. I tried to tell myself that I would be only a friend to her and not her ex-lover whose heart could be so easily activated by a woman's quiet and regular breathing against his chest.

  But my life's history was one of failed promises and resolutions. Alafair, the baby-sitter, Robin, and I ate red beans, rice, and sausage on the kitchen table while it thundered outside and the wind shook the trees against the house and the rain clattered on the roof in sheets and poured off the eaves. Then the skies cleared, and the moon came up over the wet fields and the breeze smelled of earth and flowers and sugar-cane. She came into the living room after midnight. The moonlight fell in ivory squares on the floor, and the outline of her long legs and bare shoulders and arms seemed to glow with a cool light. She sat on the couch, leaned over me, and kissed me on the mouth. I could smell her perfume and the baby powder on her neck. She put her fingers on my face, slipped them through my hair, brushed the white patch above my ear as though she were discovering a curiosity in me for the first time. She wore a short negligee, and her breasts were stiff against the nylon, and when I moved my hands up her sides and along her back, her skin was as hot to the touch as if she had been in the sun all day. I pulled her lengthwise against me, felt her thighs open, felt her hand take me inside her. Then I was lost inside her woman's heat, the sound her mouth made against my ear, the pressure of her calves inside mine, and finally my own confession of need and dependency and my inability to impose order on my life. Once I thought I heard a car on the road, I felt myself jerk inside, as though I were being pulled violently from sleep, but she propped herself up on her elbows over me, looked quietly into my face with her dark eyes, and kissed me on the mouth while her hand pressed me inside her again, as though her love were enough to dispel shadows from the corners of my nocturnal heart.

  The telephone woke me at four a.m. I answered it in the kitchen and closed the door to the hall so as not to wake the rest of the house. The moon was still up, and a soft ivory light fell on the mimosa tree and redwood picnic table in the backyard.

  "I found a bar with an honest-to-God zydeco band," Minos said. "You remember Clifton Chenier? These guys play just like Clifton Chenier used to."

  I could hear a jukebox, then the record stopped and I could hear bottles clinking.

  "Where are you?"

  "I told you. In a bar in Opelousas."

  "It's pretty late for zydeco, Minos."

  "I've got a story for you. Hell, I've got a bunch of them. Did you know I was in army intelligence in Vietnam?"

  "No."

  "Well, it's no big deal. But sometimes we had problems that fell outside the rulebook. There was this French civilian who gave us a lot of trouble."

  "Do you have your car?"

  "Sure."

  "Leave it in the parking lot. Take a cab to a motel. Don't drive back to Lafayette. You understand?"

  "Listen, this French civilian was hooked in with the VC in Saigon. He had whores and some people on our bases reporting to him, and maybe he helped torture one of our agents to death. But we couldn't prove it, and because he had a frog passport, he was a touchy item to deal with."

  "I'm not interested in talking with you about Vietnam."

  "In the meantime the major is looking like a dumb shit that can't handle the action. So we call in a sergeant who did little jobs for us from time to time, like crawl into a ville at night and slit somebody's throat from ear to ear with a barber's razor. He was going to get the frog with a night scope, nail him from fifty yards out and be back at the NCO club for beers before they could blot the guy's brains off the wallpaper. But guess what? He got the wrong fucking house. A Dutch businessman was eating snails with his chopsticks, and our good sergeant blew his face all over his wife's blouse."

  "I've got some advice for you, Minos. Fuck Vietnam. Get it the hell out of your life."

  "I'm not talking about Vietnam. I'm talking about you and me, podna. It's like something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. We serve a vast, vulgar, meretricious enterprise."

  "Look, get something to eat and I'll come up there."

  "There's some government people who want to cut a deal with Romero."

  "What?"

  "He's got a lot of shit on a lot of people. He's valuable to us. Or at least to somebody."

  I felt my hand clench on the telephone receiver. The wooden chair I sat on felt hard against my bare thighs and back.

  "Is this straight?" I said. "Your people are talking with Romero? They know where he is?"

  "Don't say 'my people.' He got word to some other federal agents in New Orleans. They don't know where he is, but he says he'll come in for the right deal. You know what I told them?"

  I could hear my breath against the holes in the telephone.

  "I told them, 'Cut all the fucking deals you want. Robicheaux ain't going to play,'" he said. "I have to say that made me feel kind of good."

  "Which bar are you in?"

  "Forget about me. I was right, though, wasn't I? You're not going to bargain?"

  "I want to talk with you tomorrow."

  "Hell, no. What you hear now is all you get. Now I want you to tell me something fair and square. You don't have to admit anything. Just tell me I'm wrong. You found the Toyota, you rounded up Keats, you took him out to the levee and put that .45 of yours between his ribs and blew his lungs out his mouth, Right?"

  "Wrong."

  "Come on, Robicheaux. You showed up at the Haitian's in New Orleans right after the cops did. What are the odds of you just blundering into a situation like that? Then another guy you truly hate, somebody whose nose you crushed into marmalade with a pool cue, shows up dead by the Henderson levee. Keats was from Brooklyn. He didn't know anything about that area. Neither does Romero. But you've been fishing that swamp all your life. If anybody else but a bunch of coonass cops were handling this case, you'd be in jail."

  "Take two vitamin B's and four aspirins before you go to bed," I said. "You won't run the four-minute mile tomorrow, but at least the snakes won't be crawling."

  "I'm all wet, huh?"

  "You've got it. I'm going to sign off now. I hope they don't put you through the wringer. For a government man, you're a pretty good guy, Dunkenstein."

  He was still talking when I eased the phone receiver back into the cradle. Outside, I could hear night birds calling to each other in the fields.

  After work that day, I took Robin and Alafair down to Cypremort Point for dinner. We ate boiled shrimp and blue-point crabs in a ramshackle, screened-in restaurant by the bay, and in the mauve twilight the water looked flat and gray, rippled in places by a slight breeze, like wrinkles in a skim of paint, and in the west the distant islands of sawgrass were edged with the sun's last red glow on the horizon. Behind us I could see the long, two-lane road that led down through the Point, the dead cypress trees that were covered with shadows now, the fishing shacks built up on stilts above the flooded woods, the pirogues tied to the cabin pilings, the carpet of blooming lily pads on the canals, the herons that lifted on extended wings into the lavender sky like a whispered poem.

  The big electric fans in the restaurant vibrated with their own energy; the wood tables were littered with crab shells; bugs beat against the screen as the light went out of the sky; and somebody played "La Jolie Blonde" on the jukebox. Robin's dark hair moved in the breeze, and her eyes were bright and happy, and there was a smear of sauce piquante on the corner of her mouth. With all her hard mileage, she was a good girl inside and she took hold of my affections in a funny way. You fall in love with women for different reasons, I guess.
Sometimes they are simply beautiful and you have no more control over your desire for them than you do in choosing your nocturnal dreams. Then there are others who earn their way into your soul, who are kind and loyal and loving in the way that your mother was or should have been. Then there's that strange girl who walks unexpectedly off a side street into the middle of your life, the one who is nothing like the indistinct and warm presence who has lived with you for so long on the soft edge of sleep. Instead, her clothes are all wrong, her lipstick mismatched, her handbag clutched like a shield, her eyes wide and bright, as though the Greek Furies were calling to her from the stage wings.

  Robin and I made an agreement. I would discharge the baby-sitter, and she would help me take care of Alafair and work at the bait shop. She promised me she was off the booze and the dope, and I believed her, although I didn't know how long her resolution would last. I don't understand alcoholism, and I cannot tell you for sure what an alcoholic is. I've known some people who quit on their own, then became white-knucklers who boiled with a metabolic and psychological misery that finally caused them to blow out their doors and come into AA on their kneecaps. I've known others who simply stopped drinking one day and lived out their lives in a gray, neutral area like people who had clipped all the sharp edges off their souls until they seemed to be operating on the spiritual energies of a moth. The only absolute conclusion I ever made about alcoholics was that I was one of them. What others did with booze had no application to my life, as long as they didn't press it on Dave Robicheaux, who was altogether too willing a victim.

  We drove back through the long corridor of dead cypress trees, the fireflies lighting in the dark, and rented a VCR and a Walt Disney movie at the video store in New Iberia. Later, Batist came by the house with some fresh boudin, and we heated it in the oven and made lemonade with cracked ice and mint leaves in the glasses and watched the movie in the living room under the wood-bladed fan. When I got up to fill the lemonade pitcher again, I looked at the flicker of the screen on Robin's and Alafair's and Batist's faces and felt a strange sense of family belonging that I hadn't felt since Annie's death.

  I went home for lunch the next day and was eating a ham-and-onion sandwich at the kitchen table when the phone rang. It was a beautiful, sunny day, the sky a clear blue above the trees, and through the back window I could see Alafair playing with one of my calico cats in the backyard. She wore her left and right pink tennis shoes, a pair of denim pedal pushers, and the yellow Donald Duck T-shirt that Annie had bought for her, and she swung a piece of kite twine back and forth in front of the cat's churning paws. I chewed on the ham and bread in my mouth and placed the telephone receiver idly against my ear. I could hear the dull whirring of a long-distance connection, like wind blowing in a conch shell.

  "Is this Robicheaux?"

  "Yes. Who's this?"

  "The cop, right?" His voice sounded as if it were strained through wet sand.

  "That's right. You want to tell me who this is?"

  "It's Victor Romero. I got a lot of people on my case, and I'm hearing a lot of stuff I don't like to hear. Most of it's got your name in it."

  The piece of sandwich felt stiff and dead in my jaw. I pushed my plate away and felt myself sit up straight in my chair.

  "You still there?" he said. I heard a peculiar thump, then a hissing sound in the background.

  "Yes."

  "Everybody wants to cut a slice out of my ass, like I'm responsible for every crime in Louisiana. They got the word on the street that maybe I'm going away for thirty years. They're talking that maybe I killed some people in a plane, that maybe they'll turn me over to the locals and get me fried in Angola. So everybody in New Orleans hears the feds got a big hard-on for me, that don't nobody touch me because I'm like the stink on shit and they better not get it on their hands, either. You listening to me?"

  "Yes."

  "So I told them I'd deal. They want these big fuckers, and I get some slack. I tell them I'll come in for three. No more than three, that's it. Except what do I hear? This cat Robicheaux is a hardtail and he don't play. So you're fucking me, man."

  I could feel my heart beating, feel the blood in the back of my neck and in my temples.

  "Do you want to meet somewhere and talk?" I said.

  "You must be out of your goddamn mind."

  Then I heard the thump again, followed by the hissing sound.

  "I want you to talk to those cocksuckers at the DEA," he said. "I want you to tell them no charges because you thought somebody shot at you. You get the fuck off my back. I get that message from the right guy, and maybe I deliver something you want."

  "I don't think you've got anything to bargain with, Romero. I think you're a nickel-and-dime mule that everybody's tired of. Why don't you write all this bullshit on a postcard and I'll read it when I don't have anything else to do."

  "Yeah?"

  I didn't answer. He was quiet a moment, then he spoke again.

  "You want to know who set up the whack on your wife?"

  I was breathing deeply now, and wires were trembling inside my chest. I swallowed and kept my voice as flat as possible.

  "All I hear from you is noise. You got something to trade, get it out of your mouth or stop bothering me," I said.

  "You think I'm talking noise, huh? Try this, motherfucker. You had a fan in your bedroom window. You had a telephone in your hall, except somebody tore it out of the wall for you. And while they did your old lady, you were hiding outside in the dark."

  I felt my hand slide up and down my flexed thigh. I had to wet my lips before I could speak again. I should have been silent, said nothing, but the control was now gone.

  "I'll find you," I said hoarsely.

  "Find me and you find nothing. I got all this from the boon. You want the rest of the story, you come up with a deal that don't leave me in the barrel. You got a guilty conscience, man, and I ain't taking your fall."

  "Listen—"

  "No, I talk, you listen. You get together with that bunch of farts at the Federal Building and decide what you want to do. You come up with the right numbers—and I'm talking three years max, in a minimum-security joint—then you run an ad in the Times-Picayune that says, 'Victor, your situation is approved.' I see that ad, maybe a lawyer's gonna call up the DEA and see about a meet."

  "Eddie Keats tried to dust you. They're going to take you out just like they did the Haitian. You're running out of ratholes."

  "Kiss my ass. I ate bugs and lizards for thirty-eight days and came back with eleven gook ears on a stick. I'm buying the paper Sunday morning. After that, forget it. Clean up your own shit."

  Before he hung up I thought I heard a streetcar bell clang.

  The rest of the afternoon I tried to recreate his voice in my mind. Had I heard it once before, in a rumble of thunder, on my front porch? I couldn't be sure. But the thought that I had held a conversation about plea-bargaining with one of Annie's murderers worked and twisted in my brain like an obscene finger.

  Sometime after midnight, I woke with a thick, numb feeling in my head, the kind you have after you've been out in a cold wind a long time by yourself. I sat quietly on the edge of the couch, my bare feet resting in a square of moonlight on the floor, and opened and closed my hands as though I were seeing them for the first time. Then I unlocked Annie's and my bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.

  The bloody sheets and bedspread had been carried off in a vinyl evidence bag, but the mattress and the wooden bedstead were filled with holes that I could fit my fingers into as though I were probing the wounds in Our Lord's hands. The brown patterns all over the bedstead and the flowered wallpaper could have been slung there by a paintbrush. I rubbed my hand across the wall and felt the stiff, torn edges of the paper where the buckshot and deer slugs had torn through the wood. The moon shone through the pecan tree outside and made an oval of light in my lap. I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver
cloud floating by against a dark sky.

  I thought about my father and wished he were there with me. He couldn't read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey. He drank too much and he'd fistfight two or three men in a bar at the same time, with the enthusiasm of a boy hitting baseballs, but inside he had a gentle heart, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tragic sense about the cruelty and violence that the world sometimes imposes upon the innocent.

  He told me a story once about a killing that he'd seen as a young man. In my father's mind, the victim's death was emblematic of all the unjust and brutal behavior that people are capable of in groups, although in reality the victim was not an innocent man. It was the winter of 1935, and a criminal who had robbed banks with John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter had been flushed out of Margaret's whorehouse in Opelousas, a brothel that had been operating since the War Between the States. Cops chased him all the way to Iberia Parish, and when his car slid into a ditch, he struck out across a frozen field of sugarcane stubble. My father and a Negro were pulling stumps with a mule and trace chains and burning them in big heaps when the robber ran past them toward the old barn by our windmill. My father said he wore a white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie, with no coat, and he gripped a straw boater in his hand as though it were his last possession on earth.

  A cop fired a rifle from the road, and one of the robber's legs collapsed and he went down in the middle of the stubble.

  The cops all wore suits and fedoras, and they walked in a line across the field as though they were flushing quail. They formed a half-circle around the wounded man, while he sat with his legs straight out before him and begged for his life. My father said that when they started shooting with their revolvers and automatic pistols, the man's shirt exploded with crimson flowers.

  With crimson flowers that turned brown, that can be bruised into the grain of wood, that flake and shale away under the touch of my fingers. Because they impaled her upon this bedstead and this wall, drove her screams and her fear and her agony deep into this wood, translated these cypress boards, hewn by my father, into her crucifix.