DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I bounced into the alley and headed toward the van. An elderly woman backed a gas-guzzler out of a garage, wedging her vehicle at an angle between the garage and a cast-iron Dumpster. When I blew my horn at her, she responded by staring at me aghast, then taking off her glasses and wiping them with a Kleenex so she could see me more clearly. I hung my badge out the window and waved for her to pull her car out of the way. She stepped on the accelerator and smashed her taillight into the Dumpster.

  I got out of my truck and started walking toward the delivery van. “Hold on there, bubba,” I called, not sure if I was actually looking at Ramos.

  The Hispanic man slammed the driver’s door behind him and drove away.

  “What’s the trouble, Dave?” Eunice said.

  “Who’s your delivery man?”

  “It’s Chula something-or-other. Did he do something?”

  I heard Clete walk up behind me. “How’d you come to know this guy, Eunice?” I asked.

  “Sidney gave him a job. Chula’s sister used to clean Sidney’s office in the Quarter.”

  “Natalia was Sidney’s maid?” I said.

  “Yes, they’re Central American refugees, I think. Sidney wanted to help them. Why?”

  I looked at her face. It was clear of guile or deception. Even though Eunice was a big-boned countrywoman and the butt of jokes among NOPD cops, she seemed possessed of an inner beauty. I tried to keep my eyes and face empty. I did not want Eunice to learn of her husband’s lies from me.

  “Do you have an address or phone number for Chula? I think he might have some information that could be helpful to a federal agent I know.”

  “I doubt it. Chula comes and goes in his spare time. I think he’s working on a FEMA job and living in a bunkhouse. He’ll bring the van back about eight. You want to come back or leave him a message?”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll catch him another time. In fact, forget I was here, will you?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s nice seeing you again, Eunice.”

  “Same here, Dave.” When she smiled, I was convinced, as always, that she had become the most beautiful woman in New Orleans.

  I walked back to the truck with Clete. As I started the engine he took off his hat and combed his hair. He slipped his comb in his shirt pocket and put his hat back on. “Sidney was porking the girl from El Sal?” he said.

  “That’s what it sounds like.”

  “Why would Eunice want to marry a bucket of shit like that?”

  I shrugged and looked at him. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “Pull around in front of the shop,” he said.

  “You’re going to bring him down in front of his wife?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just stay in the truck.”

  “That’s no good, Clete.”

  He opened the passenger door while the truck was moving and got out. He slammed the door and looked back through the window. “You quit judging me, Streak.”

  Kovick was still behind the counter when Clete reentered the store. “Hey, Sidney, I got something to tell you,” he said.

  “What’s that, Purcel?”

  “It’s going to surprise you. But try to live with it and adjust and come out on the sunny side of things. Diggez-vous?”

  “No, I don’t diggez-vous. And I’m not really interested, either.”

  “I bounced your head off a sidewalk when we were kids. I’m sorry I did that. Just keep Bledsoe away from Dave’s daughter. I got no personal beef with you.”

  “That’s the big news flash?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Lock your flopper in a vault while you’re at it.”

  Sidney stuck a matchstick in his mouth and rolled it across his teeth, searching for the design in Clete’s words.

  When Clete got back in the truck, his expression was serene. He clicked the door shut and smiled at me with his eyes.

  “What happened in there?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

  “Nothing. That’s the point,” he said. “Come on, let’s motor, big mon.” Chapter 17

  O N MONDAY MORNING I called Betsy Mossbacher at the FBI and told her that Chula Ramos was probably working part-time as a delivery man for Sidney Kovick.

  “Delivering what?” she said.

  “Maybe just flowers. Look, Clete Purcel and I told Sidney we knew he had been stashing counterfeit in his house. He said something to the effect Clete and I were in over our heads.”

  “What does Purcel have to do with this?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Some counterfeit money showed up in a Morgan City mailbox. The engraving and paper are impressive. Is this the money we’re talking about?”

  “It could be.”

  “You tell Purcel to stay out of federal business.”

  The purpose of my call was slipping away, and I think that’s the way Betsy wanted it. I didn’t take the bait. “Why would Kovick tell us we’re in over our heads?” I asked.

  “I think he’s convinced himself he’s a patriot defending his homeland. Personally I think he’s psychotic. An agent in Mississippi believes Kovick’s goons poured the body of Kovick’s neighbor into the foundation of a casino in Biloxi.”

  “You’re losing me, Betsy.”

  “The Taliban funds al Qaeda with the sale of heroin. You don’t think they’re capable of other criminal enterprises?”

  I still didn’t know what she was talking about and I wasn’t going to guess. “I need a favor from you,” I said. “A guy named Ronald Bledsoe may try to harm my daughter. He claims to be a PI out of Key West, but Tallahassee has almost nothing on him, except the fact he got a license through a bail-bonds office about ten years back. Neither does the NCIC. I’m convinced he’s a dangerous and depraved man, the kind who leaves shit-prints somewhere. But so far I haven’t found them.”

  “Have you run him through AFIS?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Give it a try. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can. What did your daughter do to this guy?”

  “Busted his nose and lips and knocked out one of his teeth.”

  “He’s pissed over that?”

  But jokes about Ronald Bledsoe weren’t funny.

  THREE DAYS EARLIER a Guatemalan illegal had been stripping cypress planks off a wall inside the entranceway of a historic New Orleans home. The workman made eight dollars an hour and feared civil authority in this country and his own. But he feared losing his job even more. The contractor who had hired him specialized in the restoration of historical properties. The contractor also made a sizable income by salvaging colonial-era brick, heart-pine floors, brass hinges and door knockers, square-head nails, milk-glass doorknobs, claw-foot bathtubs, iron wall hooks for cook pots, and grapeshot and .58-caliber minié balls embedded in housefronts during the White League takeover of New Orleans in 1874. Every item with possible resale value at a teardown or refurbish job went into a pile.

  The workman from Guatemala sank his crowbar into a strip of rotten cypress and peeled it and a shower of Formosa termites onto the floor. Amid the sawdust and insects and spongelike wood he saw a blunted and bent metal-jacketed bullet, no bigger than half the size of his little finger. He blew the dust off it and examined its torn surfaces. “Hey, boss, what you wanta do wit’ dis?” he asked.

  space

  HELEN CALLED ME into her office just before quitting time. Raindrops had started to fall on her window and I could see trees bending in the wind by the cemetery. She was leaning forward on her desk, her chin propped on her fist. It was the kind of body English and opaque manner she used when she was preparing to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  “I just got off the phone with Betsy Mossbacher. She’ll be here in an hour and a half,” she said. “She has a federal warrant on Otis Baylor’s house.”

  “I talked to her this morning. She didn’t say anything about coming to New Iberia.”

 
; “She just got the warrant. Last week some repairmen working across the street from Baylor’s house in New Orleans dug a rifle slug out of a wall. The contractor had heard about the Melancon-Rochon shooting and called NOPD. They passed it on to the FBI. The round is a thirty-aught-six. It came through a ventilated shutter and a glass pane behind it and embedded between two planks. She says it’s in real good shape, considering the fact it may have gone through two people. Anyway, the Feds are jumping on it before word gets back to Baylor.”

  “So?”

  “You need to be there when they serve the warrant.”

  “They don’t need me to serve a search warrant.”

  “This is our parish. We cooperate with outside agencies, but we don’t abandon our own jurisdiction to them. Get with the program, Streak.”

  I ATE A SANDWICH in my office and met Betsy and another agent in the parking lot at 7:00 p.m. The sky was bright with rain in the west, the live oaks along Main a dark green as we drove out of town toward Jeanerette. I was sitting in the back of their vehicle, feeling like a hangnail, a perfunctory witness to the scapegoating of a man who had been caught up in events that were either beyond his control or his ability to bear them.

  Betsy was quiet most of the way. I had the feeling she was not comfortable with her assignment that evening, either. Betsy was always the odd piece in the puzzle box, a straight arrow whose clumsiness and cowgirl manners gave her an unjustified reputation as an eccentric. As in the case of Helen Soileau, her male colleagues often made jokes about her behind her back. The truth was most of them weren’t worth the parings of her fingernails.

  “You say he’s still got the Springfield?” the man behind the wheel said.

  “That was the last indication he gave me,” I replied.

  The agent driving wore his hair boxed on his neck. He kept his hands in the ten-two position on the wheel, his eyes always on the road, never glancing in the rearview mirror when he spoke to me.

  “Why wouldn’t he dump the Springfield?” he said.

  “Because he knows that’s the first thing a guilty man would do.”

  “You’re saying he’s dirty for this?”

  “No, I’m saying Otis is smart. I’m also saying he’s probably taking somebody else’s weight,” I replied.

  “Oh yeah? How did you arrive at that?” he asked.

  “Hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans residents drowned who didn’t have to. I suspect that’s because some of the guys in Washington you work for couldn’t care less. So a guy who sells insurance gets a chain saw up his ass. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”

  This time his eyes shifted into the rearview mirror. “You guys down here have issues about something?”

  “Not us. We’re happy as clams,” I replied.

  Betsy gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.

  The grounds and trees outside Otis’s house were dark with shadow when we arrived, the inside brightly lit, the air cool and filled with a fragrance of flowers and freshly baked bread in the kitchen and rainwater leaching out of the oaks into the leaves. His home was the picture of a family at peace with the world. But nothing could have been further from the truth, particularly after our arrival.

  Betsy walked up on the screened-in gallery and knocked hard on the door, her mouth crimped, her ID in her hand. In the gloaming of the day, her hair had the bright yellow color of straw. She glanced at her watch and hit on the door again, this time harder, with the flat of her fist.

  Otis answered, wearing a white shirt and tie, a piece of fried chicken in his hand.

  “Are you Mr. Baylor?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, his eyes going from Betsy to me, as though somehow I were his betrayer.

  “I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. We have a warrant to search your house. I want you and your family to sit in the living room while we do. Where is your rifle, Mr. Baylor?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Otis replied.

  “No, you won’t. You and your wife and daughter and anyone else who is in the house will sit down in the living room, then you’ll tell me where it is,” she said.

  “What the hell is this?” he said.

  “Do what she says, Mr. Baylor,” I told him.

  He went back in the kitchen and returned with Thelma and Mrs. Baylor. After they sat down, the three of them looked up at us expectantly, as children might, caught between their inveterate American desire to obey the law and the fact that strangers who were basically no different or more powerful than themselves could walk into their home, during dinner, and treat them like livestock.

  “The rifle is in the closet of the master bedroom,” Otis said. “A box of shells is on the shelf. That’s the only firearm in the house.”

  “Why are you doing this now? I thought all this was settled,” Mrs. Baylor said. She had brought her drink from the table. It was tea-colored but had no ice in it. She was trying to appear poised, her back straight, her drink resting on her knee, but somehow she made me think of a china plate threaded with hairline cracks. “Is this being given to the media? Do you know what that will do to my husband’s business?”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t report to the media,” Betsy said. “We try to treat you in a respectful fashion. We try to be as unobtrusive as possible.”

  “Then why do you keep bothering us? This is where our tax money goes? For God’s sakes, Otis, say something.”

  “The men who were shot in front of your house were shot in cold blood, Ms. Baylor. By anyone’s definition, that’s capital murder,” Betsy said. “The seventeen-year-old had no criminal record and lost his life for committing a burglary. Vigilantes were hunting people of color in uptown New Orleans. My boss isn’t going to let that stand.”

  “I’d like to contact my attorney. At this point I don’t think we should have any further conversation with you,” Otis said.

  “That’s your right, sir. But we’re not your enemies,” Betsy said.

  “Stop lying,” Thelma said.

  “Say that again?” Betsy replied.

  “You’re here to put my father in prison. Stop pretending you’re his friend. My father never hurt anybody in his life. You’re scum, all of you,” Thelma said.

  “That’s enough, Thelma,” Otis said.

  Betsy’s colleague came from the back of the house with the Springfield looped upside down over his shoulder, the bolt open on the magazine. He carried a carton of .30–06 shells in his left hand. “The marine sniper’s dream,” he said.

  Betsy looked down at Thelma. “Did you see the faces of those black dudes?” she said.

  “Yes,” Thelma said.

  “Where?” Betsy said, surprised.

  “Mr. Robicheaux showed me pictures of them the other day.”

  “Did you ever see them before the night they came to your house?” Betsy asked.

  “No.”

  “Nobody in your family would have any reason to shoot them, huh?” Betsy said.

  Thelma’s mind was working fast now, her eyes locked on Betsy’s, her expression as flat as paint on canvas. “You know that I was raped by black men, don’t you? You’re using what happened to me to build a case against my father.”

  “From what I know of your father, he wouldn’t arbitrarily shoot someone. What about that, Thelma?” Betsy said.

  “That’s it. You have what you came for. Now please leave our home,” Otis said.

  “Give it some thought, Mr. Baylor. You’re an intelligent man. We have a reason for taking your rifle. By noon tomorrow we may have evidence that can send you or a member of your family away for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”

  His eyes were glistening, his jaws locked tight.

  Outside, I got in the back of the vehicle, glad to be gone from the Baylor home and the fear and angst we had just sowed inside it. The sky was dark now, the lights of houses reflecting off the surface of Bayou Teche. I could see Betsy’s face in the glow of the dashboard. “You were
pretty quiet inside, Dave,” she said.

  “It’s like using a speargun on fish in a swimming pool,” I said.

  “Funny attitude for a cop,” the man behind the wheel said.

  Betsy was half turned in her seat, her eyes searching my face. “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “We’re on the same side, aren’t we, buddy? How about losing the role of the laconic man from Shitsville?” the driver said, looking in the rearview.

  “Thelma Baylor looked stricken when I showed her mug shots of the looters. I think they’re the guys who raped and tortured her. I think she wanted to conceal that fact from me because it would drive the nail in her dad’s coffin.”

  “You just now decided to tell us that?” the driver said.

  I leaned forward against my safety restraint. There were small pits in the back of the driver’s neck, just below his boxed hairline. His jowls had a wrinkled sag in them, like those of a man whose face doesn’t belong on his youthful body. “My conclusions are speculative in nature. In fact, they’re based entirely on personal perception and have no prosecutorial value,” I said.

  The moon was bright overhead and the cane in the fields that had been mashed flat by Rita looked dry and hard on the ground, like thousands of discarded broom handles. The driver glanced at a row of Negro shacks speeding past us. Several of them had lost their tin roofs, and plywood and blue felt had been nailed across the exposed joists. Up ahead, a drunk man was walking unsteadily along the side of the road, his body silhouetted by the neon beer sign on a rusted house trailer that served as a bar. “This is quite a place,” the driver said. “A person needs to visit it to get the full bouquet.”

  THE NEXT MORNING a technician from the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted a print off Clete’s car tag in the spot where Ronald Bledsoe had rubbed off the mud to see a number more clearly. We ran the print through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System and came up with nothing.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Helen. “Guys like this get in trouble.”

  “Maybe he’s slicker than we think he is,” she said. “Maybe that neurotic personality is manufactured. Maybe he works for the G.”

  “How about I figure a way to bring him in?”