DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “What is it?” he would say.

  “Tell me,” she would say.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me you’re the good man I know you are.”

  “I’m a good man at the shop. Other times maybe I’m not so good. It’s just the way I am, Eunice.”

  But maybe she should not ask for more, she told herself, her arm resting on the broadness of his chest, his big heart beating under the palm of her hand.

  She helped him at the store and took as much pleasure and pride as he in the quality of flowers they sold. On Saturday morning she fixed coffee and put out cups and saucers and chocolates wrapped in gold foil for their customers. Eunice’s smile lit up the day and the shop, and hardly a customer came in who was not made better by it. Sidney Kovick was not big on theology, but if ever there was proof of God’s existence, to Sidney it was the presence of Eunice in his life.

  BERTRAND HAD STASHED the .38 from Sidney Kovick’s house behind the Rite Aid where they had holed up to do a few lines of flake before returning to finish the takedown at the house. The car he drove was a new Toyota a friend had boosted from a Winn-Dixie parking lot in Houma. The interior still smelled of coconut-scented air freshener from a car wash. The friend had even given Bertrand a tape of three 6 Mafia to play for the drive into New Orleans. “Just drop my ’sheen at my brother’s house when you’re done wit’ it,” the friend said. But the friend did not know the nature of Bertrand’s mission nor did he know Bertrand’s larger plan, namely, to murder the man who had brought him all this grief and then blow Dodge with a bagful of blood diamonds, whatever blood diamonds were, which Bertrand had still not figured out.

  As he drove into New Orleans, he was amazed at how much of the city was still without power and how many buildings were without roofs and windows, the yards covered with ruined furniture the owners had piled outside. An NOPD cruiser passed him, the cop behind the wheel glancing once in the rearview mirror. Bertrand turned off the avenue and parked behind a pile of downed tree limbs, his ulcers kicking into operatic mode.

  When he was sure the cruiser was gone, he circled the block and slowed his car next to a fat black woman who was pushing a shopping cart across the intersection. The cart was packed solid with mounds of moldy clothes that protruded through the wire basket. “Know where the Rite Aid is at?” he asked.

  “It’s probably under that sign yonder that say ‘Rite Aid,’” she replied.

  “Sure ’nuff, it is. You want to make five dollars?”

  The woman released the cart and fitted her big hands on top of the windowsill. The skin of her forearms was dark and shiny, notched with pink scars, as thick as elephant hide. “What you after, boy?” she asked.

  “Hurt my leg and cain’t walk too good. Maybe you can pick up something for me behind the Rite Aid, there.”

  She looked in the direction of the drugstore. Her breasts were like watermelons hung in cloth sacks, her neck beaded with dirt rings. “You know you ain’t got no license plate on your car?”

  “Sure ’nuff, again. You got a good eye. Must have bounced off.”

  “Load my clothes in the back. Then drive me where it’s at. Then you pay me fifty dol’ars and drive me home,” she said.

  “I can work wit’ that,” he said.

  “You scared shitless, boy. You smell like it, too. Whatever you doin’, you better start doin’ less of it,” she said.

  He drove the woman to a spot fifty yards from the parking lot behind the Rite Aid. He left the engine running as she waddled to a section of sidewalk that had been wedged up by the roots of an enormous oak tree. The tree had been split by either lightning or its own weight, and the crack in the trunk filled with concrete. But the concrete had deteriorated and created an opening behind which Bertrand had stashed the .38 and the bag of blow inside a wadded-up shirt. The fat woman was wheezing for breath and sweating heavily when she got back inside the car. She set the wadded-up shirt on the seat.

  “There’s a gun in there,” she said.

  “That’s just tools for my car.”

  “Give me my fifty dol’ars and take me back to the basket. I don’t need no ride home,” she said.

  She got out at the intersection, the bills crimped in her palm, and pushed her cart down the street, the wheels twisting on the asphalt, fighting against one another. As Bertrand watched her struggling with the balance and weight of the basket, her rear end as big as a washtub inside her green stretch pants, he felt diminished, alone, like someone left behind on a beach, but he did not know why.

  He stuck the blow down in his pants and the .38 under the seat, and headed for Algiers, across the wide sweep of the Mississippi. The windows were down, the wind blowing as he crossed the river, but sweat ran down his chest and a stench rose from his armpits. He pulled the bag of blow from his pants, dipped a finger inside, and rubbed the crystals in his nostrils and on his gums.

  But Kovick’s flake wasn’t working for him, either because it had been stepped on too many times or because Bertrand was so wired he could slam a gram and still not extinguish the fire in his stomach or stop the racing in his heart. When he came down the exit ramp into Algiers, he felt like he had stepped into an elevator shaft. A truck swerved around him, blowing its horn. A stop sign flew by him as though it had been suddenly planted on the edge of his vision. He reached again into the bag of blow and knocked it on the floor. Up ahead, a cop was waving cars past an accident scene. By the time he reached the street where Kovick’s flower shop was located, he was hyperventilating and thought he was going to pass out.

  He parked at the end of the block. He could not remember when he had been this afraid. He tried to think of credible reasons for not going into the store. Two guys who looked like greaseballs were eating lunch at a table under an awning that extended out from the display window. How could he be expected to take on guys who killed people for a living? He could catch Kovick somewhere else, on an even playing field. It didn’t have to be here, it didn’t have to be today. There wasn’t any shame in using his head.

  Secretly he knew the real enemy in his life was not Kovick but the fear that had been his companion in the darkness of his room and at every sunrise and at the breakfast table with his mother and on the school bus and in the school yard and in the crack house where he first got seriously wiped out and on the mattresses where he had screwed girls and performed acts that made him wonder if he was a degenerate. Fear was a gray balloon that floated from place to place, object to object, and each time he tried to confront it, it moved someplace else, transforming the most innocuous of situations into dilemmas that he would never confess to anyone else, lest they know him for the frightened man he was.

  Now he was trying to run from the guy who had turned his life into a nightmare. Which was worse? he asked himself. To die here or to be chased and laughed at until Kovick’s people finally caught him and taped his mouth and carried him into a basement where Kovick would be waiting for him in a raincoat and rubber boots.

  But the greaseballs stuffing their faces with sandwiches under the awning weren’t products of his imagination, he told himself. He’d never get past them. Even trying was like spitting in the lion’s mouth.

  When he had almost convinced himself he had a legitimate reason for postponing his appointment in Samarra, the greaseballs finished eating, put their lunch trash in a paper sack, and drove away in a convertible.

  Bertrand drove around the block twice, hoping a flood of customers would enter the shop, giving him a viable reason to head back to Houma. Instead, the sidewalk remained empty and no cars pulled to the curb. In fact, the flower shop seemed to have been created brick by brick without any tangential association to the world around it, like an island where Bertrand Melancon was destined to confront the face that had looked upon him with disdain and contempt all his life.

  He stuck the .38 snub down in his belt, pulled his shirt over the checkered grips, and got out of the car. He thought he could feel the earth tilt sideways
.

  Then he realized he had no plan. All the time he had been driving from Houma, his mind had been on recovering the .38 and the flake. When that was out of the way, he had immediately started figuring out ways to avoid confronting Kovick. Now he was in front of Kovick’s shop with his pud in his hand and no plan. What was he supposed to do? Go through the front door shooting? What if he missed? What if Kovick had a gun under the counter?

  He walked to the end of the block and entered the alleyway that led behind the shop. Garbage cans lay on their sides on the asphalt and clusters of untrimmed banana trees rustled in the wind. The back door to the flower store was ajar. Bertrand could feel his chest constricting, his lungs burning as though someone had poured battery acid in them. He kept his right hand on his shirtfront so the wind wouldn’t expose the .38 and used his other hand to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He never thought anyone could be this afraid.

  He pulled back the metal door and looked into the rear of the shop. A tall woman was standing at a worktable, talking on the phone. She smiled at him and motioned him inside by cupping her fingers at him.

  He stared at her, befuddled. She must have thought he was a delivery man. Then another realization started to dawn on him: She was Kovick’s wife. She had been in the photograph with him in the Times-Picayune.

  What better way to get even with Kovick than to cap his wife, he thought. That’s what Eddy would say, at least if Eddy had a mind to think with, if Eddy wasn’t just a sack of viscera attached to a feeding tube.

  The woman replaced the phone receiver in the cradle. She was wearing a sundress and had broad shoulders that were tanned and strong-looking, like a countrywoman’s. “Are you here to pull the tile in the bathroom?”

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  “You’re not with the plumber?”

  “I was looking for an address. I ain’t sure I got the right one.”

  “What’s the address?”

  He couldn’t think. The sound of his own blood roared in his ears. “The address where Mr. Kovick is at,” he said.

  God, what had he just said?

  “He’s out front. I’ll tell him you’re here. What’s your name?”

  “You ain’t got to bother him. I’ll get my tools. They’re in the truck.”

  “Wait just a minute,” she said. Then she was gone into the front of the shop.

  He couldn’t decide whether to flee or to pull the .38 from his belt before Kovick came through the heavy felt curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back. A truck rattled past the back door onto the side street, and he almost jumped out of his skin. Then, like an apparition in a dream, Kovick pulled back the curtain and stared into his face. Kovick looked like the biggest man Bertrand had ever seen. “What’s the problem?” he said.

  Bertrand’s mouth was so dry he almost swallowed his tongue when he tried to speak. “Ain’t no problem, suh,” he said, frozen in place, the thumb of his right hand hitched in his trouser pocket.

  Kovick wore a beige suit with pale purple stripes in it and a lavender shirt and a tie that was the color of a pomegranate. His eyes contained a dark light, like obsidian, the focus in them unrelenting. “You here about the bathroom? Some of the pipes are right under the tiles, so you got to be careful how you pry them up. They’re old and it won’t take much to bust them.”

  “I ain’t here about no bat’room,” Bertrand said.

  “Then what do you want?” Sidney looked at him sideways as he lifted an empty vase out of a carton on the floor and partially filled it from a wall tap. He set the vase on the worktable and began sorting through an order book. “Did you hear me? What do you want, kid?”

  Nothing, except your life, motherfucker, Bertrand heard a voice inside him say.

  “What’d you just say?” Sidney asked.

  “Nothing. I ain’t said nothing.”

  “You called me a motherfucker?”

  “No, suh, I ain’t said that.”

  “I think you did.” Sidney’s eyes dropped to Bertrand’s belt. “What have you got there?”

  “Nothing,” Bertrand said, backing away.

  “Yeah?” Sidney said. He slapped Bertrand across the face, hard, coming around with his shoulder when he did it. “I asked you a question. What’s down there?”

  “Suh, I ain’t did nothing. I’ll go away. You ain’t never gonna see me again. I promise.”

  Sidney reached down and jerked the .38 from Bertrand’s belt, the steel sight tearing Bertrand’s skin. “You little shit,” he said. “You came in here packing, with my wife in the store?”

  “No, suh. I was just lost.”

  “Don’t lie,” Sidney said. He slapped Bertrand full in the face again, knocking spittle from his mouth.

  “I thought it was an easy score, man,” Bertrand said, his nose full of needles, his eyes brimming with water.

  “I got the reputation as an easy score? I got the reputation as anybody’s punch? That’s what you’re telling me in my own shop?”

  Bertrand opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sidney flipped open the cylinder of the .38 and dumped the shells in his palm. “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Shreveport,” Bertrand said.

  Sidney dropped the .38 in his coat pocket and fitted his hand inside Bertrand’s shorts and pulled them and his trousers out from his stomach. He poured the six rounds down into Bertrand’s genitalia, then walked him to the door. “This is what it is, kid. You made a mistake. Come around again and I’ll tear up your whole ticket.”

  Sidney pushed him into the alley and kicked him so hard between his buttocks that Bertrand felt like glass had been shoved up his rectum. He limped to the end of the alley, convinced that blood was running down his thighs. When he got out to the street, when he did not think any more humiliation or misery could come into his life, he saw a wrecker hoisting the front end of his Toyota into the air.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, the phone rang on my kitchen counter. “Either you or Purcel are behind this, Dave,” a voice said.

  “Sidney?” I said.

  “You surprised I’m alive?”

  “You lost me.”

  “I’m holding a thirty-eight one-inch in my hand. Guess where it came from? It was stolen from my own house. I just took it off a black kid with breath like somebody broke wind. The black kid came in my shop with my own gun and was going to cap me with it. You think that’s just coincidence?”

  “Where’s the black kid now?”

  “I don’t know. I kicked his ass down the alley before I realized he was one of the guys who tore my house apart. But if I get my hands on him, I’m going to pull all his parts off and bring them to you.”

  “Bad statement to make to a cop, Sidney.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  He paused, evaluating my response. “You’re saying you didn’t sic that kid on me?”

  “No, and neither did Clete Purcel.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. Purcel has got a long-standing beef with me. There was a rumble at the bottom of Magazine when we were kids. He thinks I was behind the guy who bashed him across the eye with a pipe. He’s a dumb mick. You know how you can tell a dumb mick? They think and act and look like Purcel.”

  “Lay off Clete. He cut you slack when he could have destroyed you in front of your wife.”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I had waded out into deep water, but I figured Sidney had asked for it. “Clete knew you had gotten it on with Natalia Ramos. He could have shown you up for the sorry-ass sack of shit you are, but he’s too much of a gentleman to do something like that.”

  “I guess the lesson here is wet-brains hang together. Let me try to line it out for you. I met Natalia Ramos at the video store. She loves movies, like I do. I gave her a job cleaning my office. I also tried to help the junkie priest she was shacked up with. He was a good man, but his cancer kept him on the spike. Tell Purcel he’s even
dumber than I thought he was.”

  “You knew Father Jude LeBlanc?”

  “You and Dumbo flap your ears down to the state mental hygiene clinic and see if they do brain transplants.”

  “Ronald Bledsoe broke into my house. That’s on you, Sidney.”

  But he hung up while the words were only half out of my mouth.

  The tops of the oak trees in the backyard were denting in the wind, and leaves were tumbling onto the surface of the bayou. I could see children playing with a Frisbee on the green slope of City Park and hear their voices carrying across the water. It was a fine evening, one that should not have been stained by thoughts about men like Ronald Bledsoe. But evil is evil, and it does not depart from our lives because we wish for it to leave. Otis Baylor’s advice about not empowering Bledsoe was right on target, but that did not mean I had to play Bledsoe’s game.

  I called Clete on his cell phone. “Bledsoe doesn’t sleep at night?” I said.

  “No.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Scares the hell out of hookers or plays card games.”

  “Cards?”

  “On his laptop. There’s a bumper sticker from the casino on his car. Maybe that’s his jones. All these guys got one. Why?” Chapter 22

  I DROVE TO CLETE’S motor court at two o’Clock Sunday morning. The sky was dark, the trees alive with wind, the lights burning inside Ronald Bledsoe’s cottage. When I knocked, he pulled aside the blinds and looked outside, then dropped the night chain and opened the door. He was dressed in a navy blue robe and fluffy white slippers. He was smiling, his missing tooth replaced by a bridge.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bledsoe. But I saw your light and didn’t think you’d mind,” I said.

  “Not in the least. What a treat.” He looked at his watch. “You’re just like me. A night owl is what you are. Come in.”

  The interior of his cottage was immaculate, the bed still made, an open laptop on the breakfast table. “Bet I know what you’re gonna ask me,” he said.