DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Sorry, you’re busy. Catch you later,” Clete said. He pointed at the top of Bledsoe’s hole cards. “Stomp ass with that hand.” He gave him a knowing wink that everyone at the table could see.

  Then he went to the bar and ordered a double Jack straight up and a beer back.

  “Slow it down, Cletus,” I said.

  “No, no, big mon. We take it to them with tongs,” he said. “We need Rydel in custody. Just go with the flow.”

  He knocked back the rest of his Jack and finished his glass of beer. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, his face blooming, his eyes lit with a dangerous alcoholic shine.

  He went into the men’s room and minutes later came back out, a paper towel folded in his right hand. He located himself behind Bobby Mack Rydel and the woman with white-gold hair. While the dealer put down the flop, Clete placed the folded paper towel between Rydel and his girlfriend, deliberately dropping the two shiny purple-and-black square packets it contained on the floor.

  “Oh, gee, I’m sorry,” he said. He bent over and picked up the packets, then replaced them under the paper towel, first making sure that everyone saw them. “I think they’re what you wanted—those hard-ribbed ones, right?”

  Rydel used his elbow to rake the two packs of condoms off the table, back onto the floor, never even looking at Clete. Even more dumbfounding was the fact that hardly anyone else at the table paid attention to Clete’s behavior.

  Clete shifted gears and went into another mode. He studied the three communal cards that were faceup on the felt, his thumb and forefinger on his chin. “That’s too bad. You should have gotten out before the flop. Looks like you’re screwed, Bobby Mack,” he said.

  That did it. Rydel removed his hat and hung it by its leather chin cord on the back of his chair. Then he twisted around so he could see Clete more clearly. His eyes were lead-gray, his sideburns neatly etched, the skin around his mouth drained of blood. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “You don’t remember me?” Clete said.

  “No, I never saw you before in my life.”

  “You remember Courtney Degravelle?”

  “No, I don’t. You got me mixed up with someone else.”

  The head of security had walked up behind Clete. He was a retired St. Mary Parish sheriff’s detective by the name of Tim Romero. He had salt-and-pepper hair and was dressed in a blue sports coat, knife-crease gray slacks, and shined loafers. “Is there a problem here?” he said.

  “Not with me,” Clete said. “But this guy here is on the grift. I already reported him at the door. If he hasn’t switched out cards on you yet, he will.”

  “Do you mind stepping over to the bar with me?” Romero asked.

  “No, I don’t mind. But that guy is a griffin and his partner there, the guy with the waxed head, is a pervert.”

  “That’s it, Mr. Purcel, you either come with me or you’ll be escorted from the casino.”

  Clete raised his palms. “You want creeps at your tables, that’s your choice. Tell you what, call your colleagues in Atlantic City or Vegas about these two guys and see what kind of feedback you get.”

  I cupped one hand on Clete’s shoulder and looked at Romero. “He’s okay. We’re going to get a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “If you say so, Dave. But don’t make me regret I took this job,” Romero said.

  Clete and I went to the bar and immediately he ordered a Jack and a beer back.

  “Clete—”

  “Trust me,” he said. “We’re going to nail those guys. We just need to twist the screw a little tighter.”

  “I think we’re firing in the well,” I said.

  “Wrong,” he said.

  He sipped from the shot glass and touched at his mouth with the back of his wrist, his stare riveted on Rydel’s face. Rydel glanced up at him, then back at his cards. Then he looked up again. Clete’s stare stayed on his face. Rydel fitted his hat back on and slanted the brim down like a man keeping the sun’s glare out of his eyes.

  I got out my cell phone and walked to a quiet place at the end of the bar. I scrolled down to Betsy Mossbacher’s cell number and punched the “Call” button.

  Please pick up, Betsy, I thought.

  “Dave?” she said.

  “Can you run a dude by the name of Bobby Mack Rydel? I need it right now.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Come on, Betsy, help me out. I think I’ve got a house fire here.”

  I don’t know how she did it but she did. My suspicion was she or a colleague dipped into an intelligence file. By my watch, it took less than four minutes for her to call back.

  “You’ve got a live one,” she said. “Rydel was in Force Recon in the Marine Corps, attended jump school at Benning, and was kicked out with a dishonorable discharge after he was charged with rape in Japan.”

  Clete had walked over to the slot machines, not far from the card tables, and had positioned himself where he could look directly into Rydel’s face. Each time Rydel looked up, Clete was grinning at him, smacking his gum, his big arms folded on his chest.

  “He ran a training school for mercenaries in the Florida Panhandle and was probably mixed up with mercs in Mozambique in the eighties,” Betsy said. “He has a seventh-degree belt in karate. He beat a man to death in Miami and got off because the victim was armed and Rydel was not. Are you getting this?”

  “Yeah, I’m right here,” I said.

  Rydel had just bet heavily into a large pot, trying to ignore Clete and keep his eyes focused on the game, waiting for the final cards to be turned up by the dealer.

  “Rydel is on a watch list in France. Interpol thinks he may be involved with arms smuggling. He may have been with the Contras briefly, but for sure he’s worked all over Africa,” Betsy said.

  Rydel raised the bet, pushing three stacks of chips into the center of the felt. A black man in a purple suit with rings on all his fingers called and raised. Rydel called and raised again, pushing out the last of his chips. The black man shrugged and called the raise, yawning either out of confidence or perhaps acceptance that he had gotten in over his head.

  “Here’s the last of it,” Betsy said. “He’s been a contract security employee for several companies operating in the Mideast. His specialty is thought to be interrogation. Don’t ask me to do this again.”

  The communal cards the dealer had dealt faceup in the center of the felt included an ace of spades and an ace, king, and jack of hearts. Rydel turned over his hole cards, an ace of diamonds and an ace of clubs. The two aces from the flop gave him four of a kind, an almost guaranteed winner.

  The black man grimaced as though he had just bitten down on an abscessed tooth.

  “I catch a hand like that about once every six months,” Rydel said.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Me, too,” the black man said.

  He turned over his hole cards, a ten and queen of hearts. With the ace, jack, and king from the communal cards, he was holding a royal flush, the best hand in poker.

  Clete began wheezing with laughter, his folded arms bouncing up and down on his chest. He passed by Rydel’s chair, slapping him hard on the back. “Tough luck,” he said. “If you need a credit line, forget it. This is a class joint. They don’t take food stamps.”

  You could hear him laughing all the way to the men’s room.

  Rydel sat for about thirty seconds staring into space, his hands splayed on his thighs, perhaps counting up the number of instances his attention had been distracted from the game by Clete’s ridicule.

  He said something in the ear of the woman with the white-gold hair. She wore a white knit dress full of eyelets and her breasts hung as heavy as cantaloupes in her bra. Her eyes were lifted toward the ceiling, fluttering as Rydel spoke. I had a feeling this was not the kind of evening she had bargained for. I also realized I had seen her before.

  Rydel got up from the table and followed Clete into the men’s room.

  “Hello? Are you still there?” Bet
sy said.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “In deep shit,” I replied.

  CLETE WAS READY for Bobby Mack Rydel when he came through the door. Or thought he was.

  “What’s your name, Gordo?” Rydel asked.

  “Clete Purcel, the friend of Courtney Degravelle, the woman you and your friends tortured to death.”

  “No, your name is Gordo Defecado, a guy who’s both nuts and seriously in need of a tune-up. Think of me as your Mr. Good-wrench.”

  “I can see it in your eyes. I can smell it on your skin. You did it to her, you bastard.”

  For a heavy man, Rydel was surprisingly agile. He spun on one foot and nailed Clete in the throat with the other one. Then he kicked Clete in the face and knocked him down in front of the urinals. The men who had been inside the stalls or at the lavatories or about to use the urinals began pushing through the door into the concourse. Clete tried to get up and Rydel kicked him in the ribs, then against the side of the head. He stomped Clete’s hand and raised his foot to drive a blow into the back of Clete’s neck.

  That was his mistake.

  Clete locked his hands behind Rydel’s knees, then came up off the floor, lifting as he did, toppling Rydel backward so that the back of Rydel’s head split on the edge of a lavatory as he went down.

  Images that Clete believed he had dealt with long ago seemed to release themselves like red blisters popping on a black screen in his head. He heard a razor strop whooshing down on his naked buttocks. He saw a grass hooch shrink to nothing inside the flame of a Zippo track. He saw a black woman clutching a baby to her breast, standing on top of a flooded church bus, screaming for help that didn’t come. He saw a white woman taped in a chair, a plastic bag cinched over her head, her eyes terrified, her lungs sucking the plastic into her mouth.

  He pulled Rydel to his feet and drove his fist into Rydel’s stomach. Then he caught him full in the face, putting all his weight into it, smashing his head into the mirror, poking a hole in the center of it. When Rydel bounced off the mirror, Clete hit him again, breaking his lips against his teeth. Then he knocked him backward into a stall, holding on to the sides himself, stomping Rydel in the face and head, gashing open his scalp.

  I grabbed the back of Clete’s shirt collar and tried to pull him out of the stall. He turned on me, his face blotched with color, his eyes lustrous.

  “This is one time you don’t want to get in my way, Streak,” he said. His finger trembled as he pointed it at me.

  He kicked Rydel again and again in the face, his breath wheezing, his tropical shirt split down the back. Then he wrenched the toilet seat off the commode and hung it around Rydel’s neck.

  “How’s it feel, motherfucker? How’s it feel?” he said.

  THE DETECTIVES FROM the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department did a good job and found two witnesses who stated the first blows in the fight had been delivered by Bobby Mack Rydel. Clete was told by the casino management he was permanently eighty-sixed, but he got to go home that night, whereas Rydel was eighty-sixed and went to the hospital on top of it.

  In the morning Clete was in my office, remorseful, hungover, his face swollen on one side, a bruise in the shape of a frog on his throat. “I screwed it up,” he said.

  “No, you didn’t. You mopped up the floor with him,” I said.

  “Dave, when I pulled off Rydel’s tag and sliced his tire valves, I had another plan. It didn’t include you. If he called for a tow truck, I was going to offer him a ride and try to get him alone. I had my own agenda from the jump. I just wanted to get even. I didn’t care how I did it. I tried to convince myself he looked like the guy I shot at in the boat. I’ve been treating these guys like street mutts. It was a mistake. They’re a lot smarter than that.”

  I didn’t reply and tried to hide my concern about his admission of a private agenda.

  “If I hadn’t beaten the crap out of Rydel and turned him into a victim, we could have had him under arrest. I blew our chance to squeeze him.”

  “We’ve got someone else,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Rydel’s girlfriend. I couldn’t remember where I had seen her.”

  He lifted his face, indicating for me to go on.

  “I saw her with Bo Diddley Wiggins. It was from my office window, at a distance, but I’m sure it was her.”

  “Think he’s connected with Rydel and Bledsoe?”

  “We’ll find out. Say, Helen wanted to see me in her office. How about I check with you later?”

  Actually Helen did want to see me, but the real issue was to get Clete out of the office before he factored himself into my workday and brought more trouble down on both our heads.

  “Call me on my cell,” he said.

  “Ten-four, partner.”

  He walked out into the hallway, cocking his porkpie hat on his head, his upper arms like cured hams, the mayhem of yesterday already fading in memory. The deputies he passed in the hallway kept their gaze straight ahead. None of them spoke. If Clete noticed their aversion, he didn’t show it. He had been genuinely contrite, but I had no doubt my best friend would always be out of sync with the rest of the world. That said, our excursion to the casino had been a disaster.

  Helen had just gotten off the phone when I went into her office. She had been in and out of New Orleans repeatedly, flying in the departmental single-engine plane, returning each time more depressed. She, like others, had difficulty assimilating the magnitude of the damage and even greater difficulty in expressing it to others. This weekend she had agreed to accept back four prisoners who had been transferred from our stockade to Orleans Parish right before Katrina hit. The prisoners had been deserted by their jailers and left to wade in their own body waste for three days. They became so frightened they tore the side walls out of their cells and created a corridor all the way to the outside wall. But they couldn’t break through to the outside and remained trapped behind the cell bars until cops from Iberia Parish rescued them.

  One of the Iberia cops was a narc street-named Dog Face. When the Iberia transferees realized who one of their rescuers was, they began whistling and giving him the thumbs-up and shouting at him:

  “Hey, Dog Face, it’s me, Li’l Willie, you busted me on Ann Street.”

  “What it be, Big Dog Face? You kick ass, man.”

  “You the Man, Face. You bring any eats wit’ you?”

  But humorous stories about events that occurred in Katrina’s wake were not on Helen’s mind. The St. Mary Parish sheriff had just faxed her his investigators’ report on last night’s incident at the casino.

  She placed her fingers on each side of her head and rubbed at her temples, massaging them slowly, as though interdicting a large migraine in the making. “Here’s the way I see it, Pops. Ronald Bledsoe may have broken into your house and vandalized Alafair’s room. But we have no evidence to prove that. To our knowledge, he has never been charged with a crime anywhere. His friend, this man Rydel, has no warrant on him and to our knowledge is not involved in any form of unlawful activity. But the resources and time of the department are being committed to investigating and surveilling these people. How do I justify that to the taxpayers?”

  “I was off the clock last night,” I said disingenuously.

  She glanced down at the fax sheets on her desk. “One of the St. Mary detectives said Rydel’s car tag was stolen and his tires slashed in the parking lot. If the tires were slashed by a vandal, why would he bother to take the tag?”

  “Maybe his tag fell off somewhere else.”

  “The Phillips screws were on the ground. The tag was stolen in the parking lot, obviously by the same guy who cut the tires. If that’s Clete’s work, doesn’t it seem just a little bit adolescent to you?”

  I gave her the background on Bobby Mack Rydel I had gotten from Betsy Mossbacher. I put in every detail I could remember, including the fact he had been charged with rape in Japan and had beaten a man to dea
th in Miami. I also mentioned his specialty was interrogation, which often in the bureaucratic language of governmental agencies is a synonym for torture. I also mentioned that his girlfriend was Bo Wiggins’s secretary.

  “So that means Rydel is connected with a guy who builds steel ships?”

  “Maybe.”

  It was obvious I was overloading her with information that she didn’t have time for.

  “Look, the guy is a seven-degree black belt,” I said. “Alafair took out one of Bledsoe’s front teeth with a karate kick. Maybe Bledsoe hooked up with Rydel for a specific purpose.”

  “To hurt Alafair?”

  “The possibility crossed my mind.”

  She let my tone pass. “I think we need to have an understanding—”

  I interrupted her. “I’ll be up-front with you. I’m glad Clete busted up Rydel. I hope he stays in the hospital for a long time. If either Rydel or Bledsoe comes after my daughter, I’ll do much worse to him.”

  “Finish your statement,” she said.

  “I’ll kill either one of them or I’ll kill both of them.”

  She folded her hands on her desk blotter. There was a wan look in her eyes, the kind people get when they know their best words are of no value. “A conversation like this will never occur in this office again. You’d better get back to work, Dave.”

  I started to speak.

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said. Chapter 24

  B ERTRAND MELANCON HAD moved in with his grandmother in what was called the Loreauville “Quarters,” up Bayou Teche, nine miles from New Iberia. Tucked between sugarcane acreage and mist-shrouded horse farms, the Quarters was a neighborhood of nineteenth-century tenant cabins that looked like yellow boxcars with peaked tin roofs and small galleries nailed on to them as an afterthought. Some of them were deserted and boarded up with plywood, but his grandmother’s place was neat and clean and had fresh paint on it, and she kept tin cans planted with begonias and geraniums on the front gallery and on the windowsills.

  Bertrand’s grandmother fixed good meals, but her talents were wasted on her grandson. He could not eat anything with cayenne or black pepper or gumbo filet in it. Once or twice, when he was spitting off the gallery, he had noticed a pink tinge in his saliva but had dismissed it. Then this morning he had gotten the dry heaves. When he looked into the toilet bowl, there was no question about what he saw there. Bertrand was fairly certain his insides were coming apart, like wet cardboard, one piece at a time.