DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Maybe it did. I wouldn’t know.”

  “The only occupied houses in immediate proximity to the shooting were yours and your next-door neighbor’s.”

  “I have no argument with other people’s conclusions as to what happened here. I’ve told you what I heard and what I saw.” He looked at his watch. “You want to see the Springfield?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  He went upstairs and returned with the rifle, handing it to me with the bolt open on an empty magazine. “Am I a suspect in the shooting?”

  “Right now, we’re eliminating suspects.”

  “Why didn’t your friends take my firearm? That’s what I would have done.”

  “Because they didn’t have a place to store evidence. Because they didn’t have a warrant. Because the system is broken.”

  But there was another reality at work as well, one I hadn’t shared with him. The round that had struck Eddy Melancon’s throat and emptied Kevin Rochon’s brainpan never slowed down and the metal tracings inside the wounds it inflicted would be of little evidentiary value.

  I lifted the rifle to my face and sniffed at the chamber. “You just oiled it?”

  “I don’t remember exactly when I cleaned it.”

  “Can I see the ammunition that goes with it?”

  “I don’t even know if I have any.”

  “What kind of ammunition do you fire in it?”

  “It’s a thirty-aught-six-caliber rifle. It fires thirty-aught-six-caliber rounds.”

  I was sitting in a burgundy-colored soft leather chair, an autumnal green-gold light filtering through the trees outside. But the comfortable ambience did not coincide with the sense of disquiet that was beginning to grow inside me. “That’s not my point, sir. This is a military weapon. Do you fire metal-jacketed, needle-nosed rounds in it?”

  “I target shoot. I don’t hunt. I shoot whatever ammunition is on sale. What is this?”

  “It’s illegal to hunt with military-type ammunition, because it passes right through the animal and wounds instead of kills. I think the two shooting victims got nailed with a metal-jacketed rather than a soft-nosed round. One other thing. You keep referring to the DOA as a ‘kid.’ You call the other looters ‘guys.’”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “You’re correct, the DOA was a teenager. The wounded man and his brother are both adults. The man who fled was probably a guy by the name of Andre Rochon, also an adult. You speak of these guys with a sense of familiarity, as though you saw them up close.”

  He rolled his eyes. He started to speak, then gave it up. He was sitting in a chair at his desk, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling. His stolid face and square hands and scrubbed manner made me think of a farmer forced to go to church by his wife. I continued to stare at him in the silence. “Listen, Mr. Robicheaux—”

  “It’s Dave.”

  “I’ve told you what I know. Right now there are thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi waiting to hear from their insurance carrier. That’s me. I wish you well, but this conversation is over.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not over.” I closed the manila folder and set it by my foot, as though its contents were no longer relevant. “Years ago I attended a convention of Louisiana and Mississippi police officers at the Evangeline Hotel in Lafayette. That particular weekend the FBI had dragged the Pearl River in search of a lynching victim. They didn’t find the guy they were looking for, but they found three others, one whose body had been sawed in half. I was in the hotel bar when I heard four plainclothesmen laughing in a booth behind me. One of them said, ‘Did you hear about the nigger who stole so many chains he couldn’t swim across the Pearl?’ Another detective said, ‘You know how they found him? They waved a welfare check over the water and this burr-headed boy popped to the surface and yelled out, ‘Here I is, boss.’

  “These guys not only made me ashamed I was a police officer, they made me ashamed I was a white man. I think you’re the same kind of guy I am, Mr. Baylor. I don’t think you’re a racist or a vigilante. I know what happened to your daughter. If my daughter were attacked by degenerates and sadists, I’d be tempted to hand out rough justice, too. In fact, any father who didn’t have those feelings is not a father.”

  His eyes were blue and lidless, his big hands splayed on his knees, the backs as rough as starfish.

  “Get out in front of this, partner,” I said. “The justice system is emblematic and selective. Don’t let some bureaucratic functionaries hang you out to dry.”

  His eyes stayed locked on mine, his thoughts concealed. Then whatever speculation or conclusion they had contained went out of them and he looked toward the doorway.

  “Hi, Melanie. This is Mr. Robicheaux, from New Iberia. He was in the neighborhood and just dropped by to see how we’re doing. I told him we’re doing just fine,” Otis Baylor said.

  “Yes, I remember you. It’s very nice to see you again,” his wife said, extending one hand, an iced drink in the other. “We’re doing quite well, considering.” She looked at the Springfield rifle that was propped by my chair. “This isn’t about the Negroes who were shot, is it? We’ve already told the authorities everything we know. I can’t believe something like that occurred in front of our house.”

  I WALKED NEXT DOOR and looked up the ladder at the bullet-headed man wrestling with a broken oak limb on his roof. Out in the alley, a forklift was unloading a massive generator from the bed of a truck.

  “Could I speak with you, sir?” I called, lifting up my badge holder.

  The bullet-headed man climbed down from the ladder, his face ruddy from his work. I told him who I was and why I was in the neighborhood. “Tom Claggart,” he said, his meaty hand gripping mine warmly.

  “Has the FBI or the city police talked with you?”

  “Hang on a minute.”

  He walked out to the alley and told the forklift operator where to set the generator in his yard. Then he returned, looking back over his shoulder to make sure the generator ended up in the right place, on an old brick patio half sunk in mud.

  “Got a friend who’s a shipbuilder. He gave me one of his generators,” he said. “I should have put one in before the storm, like Otis did. What was that you were saying?”

  “Has the FBI or the city police been out?”

  “No, I wish they had.”

  “You heard the shot?”

  “I didn’t hear anything. I was sound asleep. I’d been chasing those bastards all over the neighborhood.”

  “I see. Why do you wish the FBI or NOPD had talked with you?”

  “To tell them to clean up the goddamn city, that’s why.”

  I nodded, my expression pleasant, my eyes focused on his flower bed. “You own firearms, sir?”

  “You bet your ass I do.”

  “Think any of your neighbors might have gotten sick and tired of being robbed and intimidated the other night?”

  “Can you spell that out a little more clearly?”

  “People get fed up. Or sometimes fed up and scared. A housewife picks up a thumb-buster and blows an intruder through a glass window. The guy turns out to be a serial rapist. At most police stations, there’s usually a round of applause at morning roll call.”

  He looked at me blankly, his mouth a tight seam.

  “The Second Amendment gives us the right to bear arms to protect our homes and our loved ones,” I said. “During a time of social anarchy, the good guys sometimes feel a need to use extreme measures. I think their point of view is understandable. You hearing me on this, Mr. Claggart?”

  “Otis has had a big cross to carry,” he replied.

  “I’m aware of that.” I kept my eyes fastened on his.

  He huffed air out of his nose and looked at Otis Baylor’s house. For just a moment I thought I saw a cloud slip across his face, the stain of resentment or envy take hold in his expression. “He said something about hanging black ivory on the wall.”

  “Mr. Baylor said this?�
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  “Earlier in the evening, when some guys were breaking into houses on the other side of the street.”

  “Did others hear him say this?”

  “A couple of friends were in the yard with me. Otis had been outside with his rifle. Listen, I don’t blame him. We offered to help him, in fact.”

  “Would you write down the names of your friends and their addresses, please?”

  “I hope I’m not getting anybody in trouble. I just want to do the right thing,” he said, taking my pen and notepad from my hand.

  With neighbors like Tom Claggart, Otis Baylor didn’t need enemies.

  BUT THERE WAS an ancillary player not far away I could not resist interviewing. Sidney Kovick was an enigmatic man whose personality was that of either a sociopath or a master thespian. He was tall, well built, with dark hair, close-set eyes, and a knurled forehead, and he wore fine clothes and shined oxblood loafers with tassels on them. When he walked he seemed to jingle with the invisible sound of money and power. When he entered a room, most people, even those who did not know who he was, automatically dialed down their voices.

  He had grown up on North Villere Street and worked as a UPS driver before he joined the Airborne and went to Vietnam. He came home with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart but seemed to have no interest in his own heroism. Sidney had liked the army because he understood it and appreciated its consistency and predictability. He also appreciated the number of rackets it afforded him. He lent money at twenty percent interest to fellow enlisted men, had ties with pimps in Saigon’s Bring-Cash Alley, and sold truckloads of PX goods on the Vietnamese black market. Sidney didn’t believe in setting geographical limits on his talents.

  Whenever someone asked Sidney’s advice about a problem of any kind, his admonition was always the same: “Don’t never let people know what you’re thinking.”

  He owned a flower shop, loved movies, and always wore a carnation in his lapel. His favorite quote was a paraphrase of a line spoken by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind: “Great fortunes are made during the rise and fall of nations.” Sidney was invited to the governor’s inauguration ball, rode on the floats during Mardi Gras, and performed once on the wing of a biplane at an aerial show over Lake Pontchartrain. Longtime cops looked upon him as a refreshing change from the street detritus they normally dealt with. The only problem with romanticizing Sidney Kovick was the fact he could snuff your wick and sip a glass of burgundy while he did it.

  Workmen were going in and out of his front door. I stepped inside without knocking. The interior looked like an army of Norsemen had marched through it. Sidney stood in his dining room, looking up at a chandelier that someone had shredded into tangled strips with an iron garden rake.

  “They hit you pretty hard, huh?” I said.

  He stared at me as though he were sorting through faces on a rolodex wheel. “Yeah, the puke population is definitely out of control. I think we need a massive airdrop of birth-control devices on two thirds of the city. What are you doing here, Dave?”

  “Investigating the shooting of the guys who creeped your house.”

  “House creeps don’t piss in your oven and refrigerator.”

  “You’re right,” I said, plaster crunching under my shoes. “Looks like they tore out all your walls and part of your ceilings. Think they were after anything in particular?”

  “Yeah, the secrets to the Da Vinci Code. You still off the sauce?”

  “I’m still in AA, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Get your nose out of the stratosphere. I was going to offer you a couple of fingers of Beam, because that’s all I’ve got. But I didn’t want to offend you. I hear one of those black guys was turned into an earth slug.”

  “That’s the word. I haven’t interviewed him yet.”

  “Yeah?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was listening or if he was asking me to repeat what I had just said. He told a workman to get a ladder and pull down the wrecked chandelier. Then he touched the ruined surface of his dining table and brushed off his fingers. “Which hospital is the human slug in?” he said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I feel sorry for him. Anybody who could do this to people’s homes must have a mother who was inseminated by leakage from a colostomy bag.”

  “You always knew how to say it, Sidney.”

  “Hey, I was born in New Orleans. This used to be a fine city. Remember the music and the amusement park out at Lake Pontchartrain? How about the sno’ball carts on the street corners and families sitting on their porches? When’s the last time you walked down a street at night in New Orleans and felt safe?”

  When I didn’t answer, he cocked a finger at me. “Got you,” he said.

  On my way out I saw Sidney’s wife in the yard. She came from a fishing hamlet down in Plaquemines Parish, a geological aberration that extends like an umbilical cord into the Gulf of Mexico. She was as tall as her husband and had a lantern face, cavernous eyes, and shoulders like a man. For decades her family had been the political allies of a notorious racist judge who had run Plaquemines Parish as a personal fiefdom, even padlocking a Catholic church when the bishop appointed a black priest to serve as its pastor.

  But she appeared to have little in common with her family, at least that I could see. In fact, Eunice Kovick’s father once said of his daughter, “The poor girl’s face would make a train turn on a dirt road, but she’s got a decent heart and feeds every stray dog and nigra in the parish.”

  Why she had married Sidney Kovick was beyond me.

  “How you doing, Eunice?” I said.

  “Just fine. How are you, Dave?”

  “Sorry about your house. Y’all have pretty good insurance?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “Do you have any idea why those guys would rip your walls and ceilings out?”

  “What did Sidney say?”

  “He didn’t speculate.”

  “No kidding?”

  She had one of the sweetest smiles I ever saw on a woman’s face.

  “See you, Eunice,” I said.

  “Anytime,” she said.

  MY LAST STOP was at the hospital where Bertrand Melancon had dropped his gun-shot brother. Chapter 12

  B UT I DISCOVERED that Eddy Melancon had been moved to a hospital in Baton Rouge. I headed up I-10 into heavy traffic, the cruiser’s emergency bar flashing. By the time I reached the Baton Rouge city limits, the streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, buses, and utility repair vehicles. Even with the priority status my cruiser allowed me, I didn’t arrive at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital until midafternoon.

  I almost wished I hadn’t. I suspected that Eddy Melancon had probably caused irreparable injury to many people in his brief lifespan, but if such a thing as karma exists, it had landed on him with the impact of a spiked wrecking ball.

  He looked weightless in the bed, raccoon-eyed, as though the skin around the sockets had been rubbed with coal dust. His body was strung with wires and tubes, his arms dead at his sides. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was. “Do you know who popped you?” I asked.

  He focused his gaze on my face but didn’t respond.

  “Can you talk, Eddy?”

  He pursed his lips but didn’t speak.

  “Did the shot come from in front of you?” I said.

  His voice made a wet click and a sound that was like air leaking from the ruptured bladder inside a football. “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “You saw the muzzle flash?”

  “No.”

  “You heard the shot but you saw no flash?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t seen it.”

  “Are you aware you guys ripped off Sidney Kovick’s house?”

  “Ain’t been in no house.”

  “Right,” I said. I pulled my chair closer to his bed. “Listen to me, Eddy. If people you don’t know come to see you, make sure they’re cops. Don’t let anybody you don’t recognize check you out of this hospital.”

&nbs
p; His eyes looked at me quizzically.

  “If you made a big score at Sidney’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”

  Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.

  “Say that again.”

  “We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.

  “From Sidney Kovick?”

  “In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”

  I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.

  When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.

  AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.

  “Really?” I said.

  She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.

  AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.

  “I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”

  “You don’t think Otis Baylor shot these guys?”

  “His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who’s going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people’s homes?”

  “All right, let’s move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It’s worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this.”