DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “You Mr. Robicheaux?” a voice said.

  “I am.”

  “These motherfuckers in Baton Rouge ain’t gonna do nothing ’bout my brother.”

  “Would you watch your language?”

  “What, my brother been kidnapped and you bothered ’bout my motherfucking language?”

  “I’m going to take a guess. You’re Bertrand Melancon.”

  “Look, man, I don’t know if them stones got blood on them or what, I just want my brother back.”

  “Stones with blood on them?”

  “You got a hearing problem?”

  My wiring was frayed, my batteries on zero. The behavior of violent and stupid people never varies. The problem in attitude and frame of reference is yours, not theirs. If you’re a pro, you become laconic and impassive and turn their own energies against them. But I wasn’t up for it. “You listen, you idiot, your brother was shot because he asked for it. I don’t know what ‘stones’ you’re talking about and I’m not your brother’s keeper or yours, either.”

  “I tried to tell that fat cracker Purcel, but he wouldn’t listen. I want to wash this city off me, man. I want to take my brother out of here. I want to make up for what we done. I ain’t blowing gas, Jack. You gonna help me or not? If you ain’t, say it now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I got to have your word, man.”

  “You’re not in my jurisdiction. The warrants on you are in Orleans Parish. That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  I could hear him breathing into the phone’s mouthpiece. “You know your way around Jeanerette? I see a cruiser, I see a uniform, I’m a rocket.” Chapter 14

  T HE CLUB WAS constructed of cinder block, with a flat tin roof salvaged from a barn, and was located on a back street in Jeanerette not far from a drawbridge over the Teche. The sky was black, but floodlights illuminated the signs advertising the drive-by window where the owner sold frozen daiquiris to the happy-motoring crowd at five bucks a pop. The outside lights also lit the iron framework of the bridge and the bayou’s surface, which was running high up on the pilings and looked like yellow rust. When I got out of my pickup, the night air was throbbing with the sounds of tree frogs, the wind blowing through a sugarcane field out in the darkness. I didn’t want to enter the club. I didn’t want to breathe the cigarette smoke and bathroom disinfectant and refrigerated sweat, and revisit the world in which I had lived a large part of my teenage and adult life. But that’s what I did.

  The only light inside came from the neon beer signs over the bar and the partially opened doors to the restrooms. The booths were made of wood and red vinyl and were nicked, split, gouged, and cigarette-burned, and reminded me of a row of darkened caves along the wall. Most of the people drinking in the club were either African-American or blue-collar, hard-core coonasses or people who called themselves Creoles and lived on both sides of the color line. It was a place marked by neither joy nor despair and seldom by violence or as a place of inception for romantic trysts. It was a place people went when they wished to set their lives into abeyance, where clocks didn’t matter, and where Fox News assured them the problems in their lives were of other people’s manufacture.

  In a booth at the back of the club I saw a young black man sitting by himself, a beer and a length of microwave white boudin unwrapped from its wax paper in front of him. He was wearing a short-brim fedora, with a tiny red feather in the band, one like John Lee Hooker used to wear. But he had the same haunted, jailhouse look as the kid whose mug shot was in a manila folder in my office file cabinet. His eyes lifted into mine. “You Robicheaux?”

  I sat down across from him. “You called me ‘mister’ on the phone. You can call me ‘mister’ now or ‘Detective’ now.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’ve got a long night ahead of me. What is it you have that might be of interest to us?”

  “Man, you’re reeking of hostility. What’s your fucking problem?”

  “You are.”

  “Me? What I ever done to you?”

  “I have it on fairly good authority you and your brother and your friends are probably rapists.”

  “How about lowering your voice, man?”

  I could feel a tuning fork start to tremble inside me. I once saw American troops who had been hung in trees and skinned alive. The anger I experienced then was of a kind that destroys our humanity and gives false justification for the evil we in turn perpetrate upon others. I had these same feelings toward Bertrand Melancon now.

  I went to the bar and bought a bottle of carbonated water and sat back down. I drank from the bottle and screwed the cap tight. “What did you take out of Sidney Kovick’s house?”

  He kept trying to read my face, as though he were watching a dangerous animal through the bars of a cage. “A thirty-eight and some cash and silverware and shit. Lookie here, man, before I say anything else—”

  “What are these ‘stones’ you keep talking about?”

  “No, man, you got to clear up this rumor I’m hearing. About this guy Kovick. He cut off somebody’s legs with a chain saw?”

  “Sidney and his wife used to live in Metairie. They had a little boy who was five years old. He was playing on his three-wheeler in the next-door neighbor’s drive. The neighbor came home drunk and drove over him with his car and killed him. About six months later the neighbor disappeared. No one knows what happened to him. But some people say Sidney put on a raincoat and rubber gloves and went down in a basement in Shreveport and committed an awful deed. I don’t know if I’d put a lot of credence in that or not.”

  Bertrand’s face looked stricken and seemed to actually turn gray with fear. He clenched his hands between his thighs and drew air through his teeth. “Man, I don’t want to hear stuff like that.”

  “You mess with Sidney, that’s the way it flushes. Tell me about the stones you took from Sidney’s house.”

  “No fence is gonna touch them. The word’s out. The guy holding these rocks is gonna get hung up in a meat locker, a piece at a time. That ain’t a shuck, man. Three different guys tole me that. That’s why they took Eddy. While we’re sitting here, they’re sweating Eddy. I cain’t stand thinking about it.”

  His breath was sour with funk, his face coated with an oily sheen. He gripped his stomach and shut his eyes.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I got ulcers.”

  “And you’re eating boudin and drinking alcohol?”

  “Lookie, what if I leave most everything for you in a bag, maybe I just hold back a lI’l, and you give it to Mr. Kovick?”

  “Where did the shot come from?”

  He swallowed, disconcerted, angry over his powerlessness and the fact that I kept redirecting the conversation. “I ain’t seen it. I just heard it and saw Eddy go down.”

  “You know what bothers me here, Bertrand? You make no mention of Kevin Rochon. He was seventeen. He was the only one among y’all without a sheet. He got his brains blown out and all you can talk about is yourself and your brother.”

  “We tole Andre not to bring him. It ain’t our fault. Why you keep getting on my case?”

  “You boosted a boat in the Lower Nine, didn’t you?”

  I saw his fingers splay on his stomach again, his mouth hang open as a rush of pain flared into his bowels and rectum. “I cain’t take this. I wish it had been me instead of Kevin or Eddy. I just want to get my brother back. I just want out.”

  He wasn’t acting. I genuinely believed that Bertrand Melancon had taken up residence in a place that does not have geographical boundaries, one that we associate with mythology and outmoded religions.

  “If I were you, I’d ship Kovick’s goods to his flower store in Algiers. With luck, he’ll turn your brother loose and he won’t come after you.”

  I tried to hold my eyes on his and not blink, but he read the lie in them.

  “I’m dead, ain’t I?”

  “Tell me what you did to the priest in the Lower Nine.”
<
br />   “That fat cracker said you was straight up. But you ain’t no different from me. You working the angle, running the con, trying to make me sick and afraid so you can get what you want. The people glowed under the water. That’s what happened out there, man. Won’t nobody believe that. But I seen it. I hope I end up wit’ them. Maybe you gonna feel like that one day, too, motherfucker.”

  He clutched his boudin inside the wax paper it had been heated in and took it with him out the door. I unscrewed the cap from the bottle of carbonated water and drank from the neck. I wondered at the ease with which I had just gone about dismembering an impaired man. The club was stone-quiet. I could hear the carbonation bubbling inside the bottle in my hand.

  MOLLY WAS ASLEEP when I got home, her face turned toward the wall, her hip rounded under the sheet. I lay my shirt and trousers across the back of a chair, but I didn’t get in bed. Instead, I sat on the floor, in my skivvies, inside a box of slatted moonlight, my spine against the bed frame. I sat there for a long time, but I cannot tell you exactly why. Outside, I could hear the drawbridge clanking at Burke Street and the droning of a deep-draft workboat laboring down the bayou.

  “What are you doing down there?” Molly said above me.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  I could hear her moving herself across the mattress so she could see me better. “You’re not going crazy on me, are you?”

  She meant it as a joke.

  “I have memories I can’t get rid of, no matter what I do,” I replied. “It’s like trying to self-exorcise a succubus. I don’t have your degree of spiritual conviction, Molly. I remember events that happened either yesterday or years ago, and I remember the bastards who caused them, and I want to go back in time and do them great injury. That’s not honest. I want to paint the wall with them.”

  She lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her head hanging down close to mine. “You can’t confide in me? You don’t think we’re a partnership in dealing with whatever problems come down the road? Is that where we are in our marriage?”

  She tapped a finger on my neck. “I asked you a question, trooper.”

  “I just put the screws to a black kid in Jeanerette. He’s a street puke and meth dealer and maybe a rapist. But you don’t rip out their spokes when their wheels are already broken.”

  Her face hovered on the side of my vision. I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “You never deliberately hurt an innocent person in your life, Dave,” she said. “You take on other people’s suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness.”

  I turned my head and looked into her face. Her mouth was pink, her skin shiny in the moonlight. She’d had her hair cut short so that it was thick and even on the ends where it hung down on her cheeks. One of her nightgown straps had pulled loose and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulder. She walked her fingers through my hair. “Will you get off the floor, please?” she said.

  I lay down beside her and pulled her against me. I could feel her breath against my ear. Her hands pressed me hard in the small of my back. She hooked a thumb in the elastic of my underwear and began to work the fabric down on my hip. Then she gave it up and let me undress by myself while she pulled off her panties and nightgown. I started to get on top of her, but she pushed me back and sat on my thighs, her arms propped by my shoulders. She stared down at me in a way I didn’t understand. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you, Dave. I never thought I would feel that way about a man. But I do about you,” she said.

  “Molly—” I began.

  “No, that’s the way it is. Anyone who tries to hurt you will have to kill me first.”

  She lowered her hand and pressed me inside her. When it was over, I placed my head against the dampness of her breast and could hear her heart beating as loud and full as a drum.

  THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, a homeless man was rooting in a Dumpster behind a Baton Rouge veterinary clinic, spearing cans out of it with a stick that he had mounted a nail on. All the animals had been removed from the clinic in advance of Hurricane Rita and the veterinary had not returned to reopen his business. The bar next door had opened at 7:00 a.m., but the only movement inside was the swamper airing out the building and sweeping trash through the back door into the alley. The homeless man filled his vinyl bag with cans and was tying the top when he heard a sound that did not fit into the normal routine of his morning.

  He set his bag down gingerly on the asphalt and let the cans settle inside the vinyl. He listened for the sound to repeat itself but heard nothing except the wind blowing through the trees in the cemetery at the end of the block. He walked down to one end of the alley and looked both ways, then went to the other end and did the same. The swamper, a black man, paused in his work. “Something wrong?” he said.

  “You ain’t heard that sound?” the homeless man asked.

  “What sound?” the swamper said.

  “A sound like an animal trapped in the wall or something.”

  “There ain’t no animals in that building. Owners came and got ’em all. Lightning burned out the air-conditioning. Ain’t no animal in the wall, either.”

  The swamper went back in the bar, but the homeless man continued to stand in the middle of the alley, turning his head one way, then another, as the wind gusted and died. He picked up his bag of cans and flung it over his shoulder, the heavy load of it hitting him solidly in the back. Then he heard the sound again. This time there was no doubt where it came from. The homeless man set down his bag and pulled open a heavy metal door that gave onto a foyer and the delivery entrance to the clinic.

  Deep inside the gloom, he could make out a gurney that had been left by the clinic door. On top of it was an oblong shape someone had wrapped with a sheet and strapped down against a rubber pad that smelled of urine. The homeless man lifted up the sheet, revealing the crown of a black man’s head. He peeled back the sheet farther and saw the black man’s eyes and unshaved jaws and a bandaged wound in his throat. But it was the eyes and the expression in the black man’s face that caused the homeless man’s hands to shake.

  “I’ll get help. I’m coming back. I promise,” he said.

  He tripped over his bag of cans as he ran for the back door of the bar, waving his arms.

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON I received a call from Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher in Baton Rouge. She had grown up in Chugwater, Wyoming, and wore jeans and boots and on one occasion tracked horse-shit into Helen Soileau’s office and to Helen’s face referred to her as a member of “the tongue-and-groove club.” oddly, they became the best of friends.

  “How’s it going, Dave? I’m taking over the shooting of Eddy Melancon and Kevin Rochon. I thought I should update you.”

  Betsy Mossbacher was an in-your-face cowgirl, probably the most socially inept federal law officer at the Bureau, and the worst nondrunk automobile driver I ever worked with. But her level of integrity and courage was unquestionable. I had previously thought that the investigation into the shooting of Melancon and Rochon would either die as a result of investigative dead ends or simple bureaucratic inertia. Betsy’s assignment as the new case officer was not good news for whoever had pulled the trigger.

  “I’m only involved in the Melancon-Rochon investigation in a tangential way,” I said.

  “I love your vocabulary. But cut the crap. A homeless guy found Eddy Melancon behind an animal hospital early this morning.”

  “Melancon is dead?”

  “That would be one way of describing him. He has sensation from the neck up, but there’s no way to know about his brain. There were adhesive traces over his mouth and nose. I suspect he was tortured in some fashion involving air deprivation. My guess is he didn’t have anything to give up and it took a long time for his abductors to accept that.”

  She paused to let the implications sink in. “What have you got on your end?”

  “Not much. It star
ted as a lend-lease investigation following Katrina,” I said. “I talked with Bertrand Melancon in a bar in Jeanerette last night. I think he’s holding goods he stole from Sidney Kovick’s house and is afraid to keep them and even more afraid to give them back.”

  “You were with Bertrand Melancon and didn’t bust him?”

  “Our Ritz-carlton is full-up. How about yours?”

  I could hear her frustration building. “Listen, Dave, this case would go away except for the fact somebody put a bullet through the brain of a seventeen-year-old black kid with no record. Too many white swinging dicks were having a fine time shooting black ass in uptown New Orleans. Or at least that’s what my boss thinks. Secondly, Sidney Kovick is a person of ongoing great interest to the Bureau. When you interview perps who are in my caseload, I want to know about it.”

  “Bertrand told me he’s holding stones of some kind from Kovick’s house. He was talking about stones that have blood on them.”

  This time it was my turn to let the implications sink in.

  “Blood diamonds?” she said.

  “That’s what it sounds like.”

  “You mean a street puke may have scored millions on a simple B and E?”

  “I think right now Bertrand would trade them for a bus ticket to Saskatoon.”

  I WANTED TO forget about the Melancon brothers and the Rochons and Sidney Kovick, but I couldn’t get Father Jude LeBlanc off my mind. Regardless, I hadn’t brought up his name with Betsy Mossbacher. Why? Because the honest-to-God truth is law enforcement is not even law “enforcement.” We deal with problems after the fact. We catch criminals by chance and accident, either during the commission of crimes or through snitches. Because of forensic and evidentiary problems, most of the crimes recidivists commit are not even prosecutable. Most inmates currently in the slams spend lifetimes figuring out ways to come to the attention of the system. Ultimately, jail is the only place they feel safe from their own failure.

  Unfortunately, the last people on our minds are the victims of crime. They become an addendum to both the investigation and the prosecution of the case, adverbs instead of nouns. Ask rape victims or people who have been beaten with gun butts or metal pipes or tied to chairs and tortured how they felt toward the system after they learned that their assailants were released on bond without the victims being notified.