DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “I don’t want to step on your feelings, but legally Bledsoe is the victim, not the perpetrator. Your daughter remodeled his face with her foot. He could have her up on an A and B and sue y’all cross-eyed for good measure. Count your blessings, Pops.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” she replied.

  I WENT HOME for lunch. Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she had said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-spaced typescript.

  She often wrote out her paragraphs in longhand, then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day. I was amazed at how much fine work her system produced.

  In high school she had been given special permission to enroll in a creative writing class taught by Ernest Gaines at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines believed she had an exceptional talent. So did the admissions boards at Reed College in Portland. She was given an academic scholarship and received a degree in English literature last spring. She also earned a graduate fellowship at Stanford University, which she would enter this coming spring. The fact that she had gotten herself into a conflict with an aberration like Ronald Bledsoe was a source of frustration I could barely constrain, particularly when I needed to discuss it with her in a forthright fashion.

  “Got a second, Alf?” I said.

  She rested her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead, trying to conceal her vexation at being disturbed while she was writing. “Sure, what’s going on?” she said.

  I pulled up a chair by her desk. “We’ve run Bledsoe through AFIS and the National Crime Information Center, but he’s a complete blank. In some ways that’s more disturbing than finding a sheet on him. He’s obviously a geek and geeks leave shit-prints. But this guy is the exception.”

  “So what’s that tell you?” she asked.

  “That he’s slick or he has some juice behind him.”

  “He got what he deserved. I say fuck him.”

  “Do you have to talk that way?”

  “He put his hand on me. I could feel his spittle in my ear. Want me to tell you what he said?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Okay, Alf.”

  “Will you stop calling me that stupid name?”

  “Look, one other thing, I may end up putting Otis Baylor in jail. I know you and Thelma are friends, so—”

  “I got the message. How about giving me credit for having more than two brain cells?”

  The years have not brought me much in the way of wisdom. But I have learned that the father of a young woman has to remember only two lessons in caring for his daughter: He must be by her side unreservedly when she needs him, and he must disengage when she doesn’t. The latter, at least for me, has been more difficult than the former.

  “You have more than two brain cells?” I said.

  “Have you ever been hit in the head with a basketful of manuscript paper?” she said.

  I WENT BACK to the department at 1:00 p.m. Wally, our hypertensive, elephantine dispatcher and full-time departmental comedian, stopped me on the way to my office. “I was just about to put these messages in your box,” he said.

  “Thanks, Wally,” I said, taking three pink memo slips from his hand.

  “His first name is Bertrand. He don’t like to give his last name. He also don’t have any manners.”

  “Was this a black kid?”

  “Hard to tell. When a guy says, ‘Pull the Q-tips out of your nose ’cause I cain’t understand what you saying, you honky motherfucker,’ does that mean the guy’s got racial issues?”

  “Could be. Thanks for taking the message, Wally.”

  “Glad to help out. I love this job. T’anks for introducing me to your friends.”

  I went to my office and punched in the cell number that Wally had written down on all three message slips. “Bertrand?” I said.

  “Is that you, Mr. Dave?” a voice said.

  Mr. Dave?

  “Yeah, it is, Bertrand. What’s up?”

  “There’s something weird going on. Somebody’s handing out free cell phones to people that’s in the life. Even people in the shelters, anybody who might know something about them stones. A phone number comes wit’ the cell. I seen Andre wit’ one. They come from Wal-Mart. Andre’s attitude ain’t making me feel real comfortable.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “What you said about me being a rapist was the troot’. I done it wit’ Eddy and Andre—twice. We done it to a young girl in the Lower Nine. I been all over down there looking for her. I been in the shelters, too. Maybe she died in the storm.”

  I didn’t want to be his confessor. In fact, my stomach turned at the image of three grown men sexually assaulting a helpless fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the bad luck to walk home from a street fair by herself.

  “You still there?” Bertrand asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here. You did the crime, stack the time.”

  But he wasn’t listening. “The other girl was sitting in a car that was broke down by the Desire. She was white. She said she’d been at a high school prom. Eddy got pissed off at her and burned her with his cigarette. He burned her on her breasts.”

  “If you’re looking for Valium for your sins, you called up the wrong guy.”

  “Who else I’m gonna tell, man? People all over the city got cell phones waiting to dime me. They say you call this certain number and a guy wit’ this cracker voice tells them he gonna make them rich if they give me up. I walked past a guy in the shelter yesterday and he made these sounds like a chain saw starting up. Everybody t’ought it was funny.”

  “What happened to Father Jude LeBlanc?”

  He paused, then I heard him take a breath. “We’d been at my auntie’s house. A wave smashed right t’rou the picture window and washed us out the back. We swam up on this trash pile, but it was full of them brown recluse spiders, the kind that eat into your tissue and mess you up later. A woman was in the water wit’ them brown spiders all over her face and in her hair. They was biting her and she was screaming and swatting at them and swallowing water at the same time. That’s when we seen the priest pull his boat up to the church roof and start chopping a hole in it wit’ an ax. That’s when Eddy said, ‘it’s that motherfucker or us.’ We all went in the water and headed for him, wit’ them spiders still in our clothes.

  “I was the first one on the roof. I said, ‘We need the boat. There’s four of us and ain’t but one of you. You can come wit’ us, maybe, but we taking the boat.’

  “He stops chopping and says, ‘The attic is full of people. They gonna drown. You guys got to help me.’

  “Help him? How I’m gonna help him, wit’ Eddy and Andre and Kevin all looking at me to do something, like it’s on me, like ain’t nobody shooting off their mouth now, like I gotta do something, Eddy ain’t such big shit no more? So I grabbed the ax. What was I suppose to do? Maybe he was gonna hit me wit’ it. I seen a man shove a boy off an air mattress, just stuck his hand out and shoved him in the face, a boy wasn’t more than ten years old. That’s what it was like down there, man. You wasn’t ther
e.”

  “What did you do to Father LeBlanc?” I said, my heart beating, my palm clammy on the phone receiver.

  “He wouldn’t give up the ax. He was standing between me and the boat, on the edge of the roof. I went toward him and he just stood there and wouldn’t get out of the way. I say, ‘Man, we gonna get that boat one way or the other. Don’t get fucked up for something you cain’t change.’

  “He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ What’d he mean by that? I knowed what I was doing. I was saving my life. I was saving Eddy and Kevin and Andre’s life. I knowed what I was doing. I ain’t had no choice. How come he said that to me?”

  “What did you do, Bertrand?”

  “He started fighting wit’ me. He wasn’t strong at all. His arms was like sticks. He had tracks on them. I couldn’t believe it, man, he was a priest and he was a junkie. I could see his teet’ and smell his breath and he was clawing at my eyes. That’s when I hit him, man, hard, wit’ my fist, right in the face. He went over backward in the water and I heard Eddy say, ‘Hit that motherfucker wit’ the ax. Don’t let him get into the boat.’

  “But I ain’t seen him again. The water was dark and it was like he went straight down the wall of the church into the darkness, like a stone statue sinking. How come he said them words to me? I knowed what I was doing, man. I was saving lives in my own way.”

  “Are you that stupid? Most of the people in that church attic died because of you. What do you think he meant?” I said.

  Bertrand Melancon began to weep, uncontrollably. “I’m going to hell, ain’t i?”

  You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself. Chapter 18

  T HE ARREST WARRANT with Otis Baylor’s name on it was federal, but eventually the storm-impaired processes of the Orleans Parish DA’s office would kick into gear and state charges would be filed against him as well. Ironically, the Feds were busting Otis under a Reconstruction statute that defined murder as a deprivation of a person’s civil rights by the taking of his life, the same kind of orwellian application of law that had been used to prosecute the Klansmen who lynched three civil rights workers in neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Otis had caught his necktie in the garbage grinder. I suspected that when the judicial system was finished with him, he would have to be washed off the grinder with a hose.

  On Friday morning I accompanied Betsy Mossbacher’s male colleague and a uniformed state trooper to Otis’s temporary office on Main Street to serve the warrant. The FBI agent was the same agent who had retrieved the Springfield rifle from Otis’s closet. His name was Tisdale and he was all business. We had parked our vehicles by the bayou, directly opposite Victor’s Cafeteria, and were walking down Main under a colonnade when he said, “I’ve got to be back in Baton Rouge in less than ninety minutes. We’ve done all the paperwork on our end. All you’ve got to do is print him and get him into a cell. The transfer of custody will take place in two or three weeks. Don’t fuck it up.”

  “Say that last part again?” I said.

  “He’s getting warehoused. It’s not nuclear science. Feed him, give him a shower every three days, and don’t lose him in the system like you did Chula Ramos. You got a question about anything, call Mossbacher. Don’t do anything on your own. You got a problem, call us. That’s the key. We’re renting space in your gray-bar hotel. All you got to do is make sure the toilets flush.”

  I saw the state trooper look at me from the corner of his eye.

  “Tell you what, bub, we’ll arrest Otis for you and you can head back for Baton Rouge,” I said. “Or, if you like, you can stand around as though you’re part of the procedure, but you need to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way.”

  “You like Lou’sana?” the trooper said to Tisdale, smiling broadly.

  We busted Otis and took him out of his office in handcuffs, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling, his tie blowing in the wind, his big arms pulled tightly behind him.

  For most middle-class people, the word “jail” suggests punishment by means of confinement. To a degree, they’re correct. Jails separate miscreants from the rest of us. But “confinement” doesn’t come close to the realities of life inside any kind of serious can. The word “violation” is much more accurate.

  It starts in the booking room. Your fingertips are rolled on an ink pad by someone you never saw before. Then you are told to clean your skin with a petroleum gel that looks like a glandular excretion. You are placed against a wall and told to hold a brace of numbers against your chest while you’re photographed front and sideways. Then a polyethylene-gloved screw does a digital probe of your rectum and sprays you for crab lice. Your physical person belongs to people who do not want to know your name or make eye contact with you or have any level of communication with you. Most of them do not like what they do for a living and they do not like you.

  You soon discover that jail is not a place but a condition. You defecate in full view of others. Your fellow inmates urinate all over the toilet seat you must use. The food you eat is prepared and served by people who wouldn’t wash their hands at gunpoint. You take showers with men whose eyes linger on your genitalia and others who will shank you from your liver to your lights and that night sleep without dreaming.

  As the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter cautioned, you don’t study your “great long time.”

  The recidivists of years ago have been replaced by a new breed of criminals, eighty-five percent of whom owe their lifestyle to narcotics, either the sale of it or the use of it or both. Some of them got their first hit of cocaine or morphine derivatives through the umbilical cord. Some of them were subjected to forms of child abuse that I will not discuss with anyone, not even fellow officers. Almost all of them will pay out their lives to the state on the installment system.

  Otis Baylor thought he would call his lawyer or a bondsman and be back out on the street within a few hours. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he said to me in the booking room. “I get a phone call and then I post bond?”

  “I don’t think you understand your situation,” I said. “You’re actually in federal custody, charged with a civil rights violation. In effect, we’re acting as friends of the federal court. That’s because the legal system in southern Louisiana has been in meltdown since Rita and Katrina. My guess is you’re going to be indicted by a state grand jury and prosecuted for murder. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere for a long time.”

  “I’m not a flight risk. I own two houses here. I have a family. I’ve been with the same insurance company for over two decades.”

  “You’ll be going to court eventually. Explain your situation to the judge.”

  He still had cleansing cream on his hands and he didn’t want to touch his clothes with them. He began looking around for something to wipe his hands on.

  “There’s a roll of paper towels on the shelf,” I said.

  “I want my phone call,” he said.

  “You’re going into a holding cell right now, Mr. Baylor. A deputy will escort you to a phone later,” I said.

  He couldn’t seem to think. He squeezed at his temples and looked around the booking room, disoriented. “Where did you say the paper towels were?” he asked.

  “Behind you, sir.”

  But he forgot what he was looking for. “My daughter is home by herself. She meets me for coffee and a doughnut each morning. She shouldn’t be by herself for long periods of time,” he said.

  I’ve had prouder moments in my career.

  MOLLY WORKED FOR a Catholic mutual-help center on the bayou that assisted poor people in starting up businesses and building their own homes. The charity had been founded by a group of Catholic Worker nuns who had come to southern Louisiana in the 1970s to organize the sugarcane workers. You can take a wild guess as to how they were received. But since that time, they had earned the respect and even the affection of most people in the area. After the death of my wife Bootsie, I met M
olly by chance at the center and a short while later we were married. We were an incongruous couple, an Irish-American blue-collar nun who demonstrated regularly at the School of the Americas and a sheriff’s detective with a history of violence and alcoholism. Friends who wanted to be kind wished us well, but I always saw the lights of pity and caution in their eyes.

  But we surprised them. Sister Molly Boyle was my grail and I loved her in the same way I loved my church community.

  On the Friday I busted Otis Baylor I called her at the center and asked her to meet me for lunch at the Patio Restaurant on Loreauville road. We sat under a fan, in a corner, away from the crowd near the buffet table. I could feel her eyes on my face. “Bad day at Black rock?” she said.

  “I had to help the Feds serve an arrest warrant on Otis Baylor,” I said. “He just got moved to the parish prison.”

  “Otis?”

  “The FBI matched a bullet to a rifle in his house. The bullet has DNA on it from two gunshot victims.”

  “That’s too bad. He’s a nice man. I don’t know how many people have told me he approved their insurance claims on the spot and put them up in motels. Some of these companies are sticking it to their clients with a cattle prod.”

  “Otis may have killed a seventeen-year-old kid and turned another one into a quadriplegic.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I tried to warn him about his legal jeopardy.”

  She inched her hand forward and touched my fingertips. “I know that, Dave. This isn’t your fault. Don’t treat this personally.”

  “You want to get the buffet?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Dave?”

  “Yes?”

  I could see the uncertainty in her face, like that of a person about to light a candle in a storage room that smells of gasoline. “Ronald Bledsoe came to the center this morning. He asked the receptionist if we were operating any shelters in St. Mary Parish. He said he was working for the state and looking for two black fugitives. He showed her photos of them.”

  “What’d she tell him?”

  “She lied. She actually had seen one of them. In a shelter in Morgan City. But she lied. I was standing right behind him. He turned around and asked me my name. Bledsoe is scary, Dave.”