DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Bet you don’t,” I said.

  “You want to know if I’m gonna file charges against your little girl.”

  “Are you?”

  “No, sir, that’s not my way.”

  “That’s good of you. Can I call you ronald?”

  “Everybody does, ’Cause that’s my name.” his elongated, waxed head gleamed under the electric light. He lifted a coffeepot off the stove and began filling two cups, glancing sideways at me. “You want sugar and cream?”

  “No, nothing,” I said, temporarily distracted by the images on his computer screen.

  “I run different kinds of games on my laptop,” he said. “You like to play cards, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Call me Dave. I used to go to the track a bit. In fact, it became a problem for me, along with a bigger one I already had.”

  “That so?”

  He handed me a demitasse and a saucer with a tiny spoon on it. But I set it on the table without drinking from it. Electronic playing cards were flipping out of a dealer’s shoe and floating across the screen of his laptop. “I thought I could beat the odds, but eventually I got shellacked,” I said.

  “That so?” he repeated.

  “It’s every gambler’s weakness, kind of like a drunk’s. He thinks he can intuit and control the future, but his real mission is to lose.”

  “Why would a man want to lose?”

  “So he can blame the universe for all his problems.”

  “I never thought of it that way. You a smart man, Mr. Robicheaux. This is an impressive town. Southern people are the smartest there is. Your daughter is highly educated and cultured. A man knows that as a natural fact soon as he lays eyes on her.”

  “Thanks, Ronald. Look, I wonder if you can help me with a problem. Somebody broke into our home and vandalized her bedroom. You hear about that?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “So my boss would like to exclude you as a suspect. Could we get a swab from you?”

  “Isn’t that a form of search, Mr. Robicheaux? requiring what they call ‘probable cause’?” his smile never left his face.

  “You’re dead-on right about that.”

  “Well, you got a warrant?” he asked playfully.

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Then you just hold on a minute,” he said. He went into the bath and returned with a Q-tip. He stuck one end deep into his jaw and wet it down, then dropped it into a Ziploc bag and handed it to me. “I don’t want you having trouble with your boss lady on my account. No, sir, that won’t slide down the pipe.”

  “You had a partner when you broke into my house?”

  He clasped the back of his neck and shook his head. “That offends me. Wish you wouldn’t say that.” His eyes went up and down my person. “You carrying a firearm, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  All the while we had spoken, he had allowed me to call him by his first name but had continued to address me formally, in his way both patronizing and outwitting me.

  I pulled back the right side of my sports coat. “Actually I’m supposed to, but this is just a friendly visit. Tell me, do you really believe you can come into a small southern town and wipe your feet on people and go back home without incurring some serious attrition? Do you really believe the South has changed that much?”

  He stepped close to me, still smiling, his teeth shiny with his saliva. “I’ve done every kind of work there is, in every kind of place there is. Love of money is the root of all evil. The Bible says it. People were for sale back then, people are for sale today. This whole town would be a Wal-Mart parking lot if the money was right.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Like hell I am,” he replied.

  “You know what blood stones are, don’t you, Bledsoe?”

  “In the civilized world, gentlemen don’t address one another by their last names, Mr. Robicheaux. But in answer to your question, no, I don’t know much about blood stones.”

  “Children’s arms were lopped off because of those stones. I think they’ll bring you to grief.”

  “I was brought to grief the day I was born. What do you think about that?”

  He was so close to me now I could smell the dried soap on his skin. My gaze broke and I stepped away from him. Then I opened the door to let myself out, my breath short, the Ziploc bag in my hand.

  “You not gonna drink your coffee, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  Outside, his odor seemed to cling to my face. When I started my truck, he was standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his robe, electronic cards flipping into a black satin hat on the screen of his laptop. He was backlit by the interior of the cottage, casting his face in shadow, but there was enough light from a streetlamp to show his teeth shining behind his smile. I backed down the driveway between the two rows of cottages, straight onto Main, the gearshift knob shaking inside my palm.

  BACK HOME, I undressed and got in bed beside Molly. When she felt my weight on the mattress, she woke and rolled against me, her body hot to my touch. Before leaving for the motor court, I had told her I had to go to the office to take care of a situation for the dispatcher. Now I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at me.

  “Everything is okay. Go back to sleep,” I said.

  She brought her knee sharply into my thigh. “Don’t try to put the slide on me, troop,” she said.

  “I confronted Bledsoe.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Clete was close by. I was okay.”

  She placed her hand on my chest. “Your heart is pounding.”

  “I couldn’t be in the same room with him. It’s hard to explain. I had to get away from him.”

  “He admitted he broke into our house? He threatened you?”

  “That’s not the way he operates. The Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman. So are his acolytes.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Dave.”

  “I’m going to nail him. One way or another, I’m going to tack him to the side of the barn.”

  She lay back down, the back of her head cupped by the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then she said something I never believed I would hear her say. “I want to buy a pistol.”

  IN THE MORNING, while I was still off the clock, I drove down to the south end of Lafourche Parish and parked in front of the crossroads bar where Bo Diddley Wiggins and I had gone to pick up Clete after Clete had shot at a man fleeing down a canal in an outboard boat. The bartender was alone in the bar, in a strap undershirt, sitting in front of a fan, trying to read a newspaper in the half-light. I opened my badge holder on the bar and asked him about the two men who had been there when I had come to collect Clete. There was a pad of body hair on the bartender’s shoulders and his eyebrows were laced with scar tissue, pinching his eyes at the corners so that they looked Asian rather than occidental.

  “You know the guys who brought my friend in here?”

  “They work for Mr. Wiggins. They drink beer here sometimes,” he said.

  “I knew that when I came in. I need to know where they are now.”

  “On Sunday, it’s hard to say.”

  “I’m investigating a double torture-homicide. Would you like to answer my questions at the parish jail?”

  He folded his newspaper over on itself and pushed it away. “There’s a fuel dock four miles down the road. You might find one of them there.”

  “Thank you,” I said, scooping my badge holder off the bar.

  “Hey!” he said when I was almost out the door.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I drive thirty-four miles on bad roads to get to this job. I make six bucks an hour and tips. FEMA says in another mont’ I may get a trailer. How far you drive to work? Your house got a roof on it?”

  I drove south to a fuel dock that was located at the junction of a brackish bay and a freshwater canal an oil company had cut into living marsh. Disintegrating pools of diesel oil floated on the water. A rusted barge la
y half submerged in the sawgrass. I could see a man in khaki clothes moving about in a small office that had been built on the end of the dock. He was watching an airboat roaring across the bay and he did not hear me walk up behind him.

  “Whoa, you scared me!” he said when he turned around. Then he recognized me and reintroduced himself. He said his name was tolliver and that he was originally from Arkansas and had worked for Bo Wiggins for thirteen years.

  “Your friend had a snootful, didn’t he?” he said. “Did he get home okay?”

  “Did you see him shoot at somebody, Mr. Tolliver?”

  “No, I heard a couple of distant pops, the way a shotgun sounds in the wind. A guy was taking off in an outboard and I thought this guy Purcel maybe was a robbery victim. That’s the only reason I got involved.”

  He was a pleasant-looking man, his stomach and love handles protruding over his belt. His forearms were big and brown and on the tops they were covered with reddish hair. He smiled a lot. In fact, he was too pleasant and smiled much more than he should have.

  “You don’t know who the man in the boat was?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How long have you been working on this dock?”

  “A couple of years, maybe.”

  “A lot of strangers come through here?”

  “I just fuel up Mr. Wiggins’s boats. I don’t pay much mind to what-all goes on around here, I mean, folks fishing and that sort of thing.”

  “You ever hear of a guy named Ronald Bledsoe?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “He’s a strange-looking guy. His head and face look like the end of a dildo.”

  He coughed out a laugh and looked sideways onto the bay. He removed a pair of yellow-tinted aviator glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, even though the sun had gone behind clouds and the marshland surrounding us had dropped into shadow. He spread his arms on the dock railing behind him and kept shaking his head, as though mulling over a question, although I had not asked one.

  “Can you look at me, Mr. Tolliver?”

  “I’m telling you all I can, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t know any more.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on his face until he had to look at me. “Ronald Bledsoe is an unforgettable person, Mr. Tolliver. I also think he’s a man of great cruelty. If you shake his hand, you’ll feel a piece of black electricity go right up your arm. Tell me again you don’t know this man.”

  “I’m not familiar with the gentleman. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But I saw the tic under his left eye, just like a bee had walked across the skin.

  I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him. “You look like a man of some wisdom. Be forewarned, Mr. Tolliver. Ronald Bledsoe is an evil man. Serve his cause and he’ll consume you.”

  Tolliver tried to keep his face blank, but when he swallowed he looked like he had a walnut in his throat.

  THAT EVENING I dug out an old .22 ruger semiautomatic from my trunk and took Molly to the police firing range and showed her how to thumb-load the individual cartridges into the magazine and how to chamber a round. Then I taught her the use of the safety and how to dump the magazine from the gun butt and to pull back the slide to ensure a round was not still in the chamber. I did these things methodically and without joy. I did them with both reservation and a sense of depression.

  The sky was mauve-colored, the trees along the state road dark with shadows and pulsing with birds. It felt strange watching Molly take a shooting position, her arms extended, one eye closed, the foam-rubber ear guards clamped on her head. It was hard to accept the fact that my wife, a former nun and a member of Pax Christi, was popping away at a paper target with a human silhouette printed on it. When she fired the last round in the magazine, the slide locked open and a tiny tongue of smoke rose from the empty chamber.

  “You look unhappy,” she said.

  “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

  “Are you disappointed in me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You believe we’re giving power away to Ronald Bledsoe, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re good at lots of things, Dave, but lying isn’t one of them.”

  I took the ruger from her hand and dropped it in the canvas rucksack in which I kept all my shooting equipment. I put my arm over her shoulders and we walked to where my truck was parked in the trees. Hundreds of birds were throbbing in the shadows, and in the west the sun had become a red pool tucked inside a bank of rain clouds. I had the same heavy feeling in my chest that I experienced as a child when my parents set about destroying their home and family. The feeling is related to what psychiatrists call a “world destruction fantasy.” I lived with it in my dreams before I went to Vietnam and long after I returned. I addressed it with both Jim Beam and VA dope, and when they didn’t work, I addressed it with the heart-pounding adrenaline that comes with the recoil of a pistol in your palm and the smell of gunpowder in your nostrils and the whirring sound that a tumbling round makes when it flies past your ear.

  I felt that something irreplaceable was about to go out of my life, but I could not tell you why. Was it just the pull of the earth that you feel at a certain age? There are times when the scrape of a shovel pushed deep into dirt can become a sliver of glass in the ear. Was I more afraid of death than I was willing to admit? Or was Ronald Bledsoe causing my family to remake itself in his image?

  When we got home, Molly oiled and cleaned the ruger and did not return it to me.

  AT 9:17 MONDAY MORNING my desk phone rang. “Mr. Robicheaux?” a familiar voice said.

  “What do you want, Bertrand?” I replied.

  “I come here for some help. I cain’t take it no more.”

  “You’ve come where?”

  “I rode a boxcar to New Iberia. I ain’t had no sleep.”

  “You’re in New Iberia?”

  “Yeah, I cain’t take it anymore.”

  “You can’t take what anymore?”

  “Everything. People hunting me. People treating me like I’m the stink on shit. Kovick fixed it so everybody in the FEMA camps know who I am. I ain’t got no place to hide. I was gonna cap him. Or I was gonna cap his wife. But I couldn’t do nothing except stand there shaking.”

  “You tried to clip Sidney Kovick?”

  “I ain’t no killer. I learned that Saturday. I might be a coward, but I ain’t no killer.”

  He described the scene in the flower shop, the fear that fed like weevil worms at his heart, the bitch slaps across the face, the .38 cartridges poured on his genitals, the vicious kick that drew blood from his rectum. His self-pity and victimhood were hard to listen to. But I didn’t doubt the level of his emotional pain. I suspected that, under it all, Bertrand Melancon was probably about seven years old.

  “Give me your location.”

  There was a beat. “That ain’t why I called. You got to explain something. I went to the evacuee shelter in the park ’cause I ain’t had nothing to eat since yesterday. The white girl I seen in the car wit’ the dead batt’ry by the Desire was there.”

  “You mean the white girl you raped?”

  “Yeah, that one, she was there, man, serving meals at the shelter. I tole myself that wasn’t possible. I axed a guy who she was and he said she was from New Orleans, her name is Thelma Baylor. That’s the name of the people in the house where the shot come from, the one that hit Eddy and killed Kevin.”

  I realized what had happened. Thelma had probably gone to the shelter with Alafair to help out, and Bertrand had blundered inside and had seen her. I tried to concentrate, to prevent his accidental discovery from becoming a catalyst for events I didn’t even want to think about.

  “She lost weight, she look a lI’l older, but it’s her, ain’t it?”

  The idea that he was taking the physical inventory of a young woman he had assaulted and asking me to confirm it seemed to invade the moral senses on more levels than I could count. “She’s not your
business, partner.”

  “I got to make it right.”

  “You stay away from the Baylors.”

  “I got a plan. I’ll get back to you.”

  He broke the connection.

  I checked out a cruiser and drove to the recreation building in City Park. Alafair was stacking the cots of a family that was relocating to Dallas. She seemed preoccupied, not quite focused. A kid was dribbling a basketball in the background, smacking it loudly on the floor.

  “Where’s Thelma?” I asked.

  “Her father picked her up. I think they were going home,” she replied. She hefted a load of folded bedclothes and looked at me.

  “Was a black guy in his early twenties hanging around? Somebody you haven’t seen before?”

  “If he was, I didn’t notice.”

  “His name is Bertrand Melancon. He’s one of the guys who raped Thelma.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Guilt, fear, opportunism. I doubt if even he knows. Maybe he’s nuts.”

  “Is this related to Ronald Bledsoe?”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s related to blood diamonds, too. We need to get Melancon into a cage, for his own good as well as everyone else’s.”

  “I’m sick of this.”

  “Of what?”

  “Ronald Bledsoe was here this morning. He told the room supervisor he’d like to be a volunteer. But his eyes were on me the whole time. He had that sick grin on his face.”

  Outside the front door, children were playing on swing sets and seesaws under the oak trees. I could remember when Alafair was their age and doing the same kinds of things. “Have lunch with me,” I said.

  “What are we going to do about this asshole, Dave?” she replied.

  I returned to the department and knocked on Helen’s door. She wasn’t happy to hear the latest on Bertrand Melancon.

  “Tell me if I missed anything? He raped the Baylor girl and another girl in the Lower Nine and tried to kill Sidney Kovick, and he’s in New Iberia, calling you with his problems of conscience.”

  “I guess that about says it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get ahold of Otis Baylor and his daughter. Tell them Melancon is in the area and that we plan on picking him up. But make sure Baylor understands that Melancon belongs to us.”