DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Then shame on you.”

  I felt my face burning. “Will you pass on my message?”

  “Sometimes you strike me as absolutely clueless. It’s Sidney who needs your help. He just called. He’s worried about Marco and Charlie. They went into the Atchafalaya Swamp Saturday and didn’t come back to the motel. They don’t answer their cell phones, either.”

  “What were they doing in the Atchafalaya Swamp, Eunice?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Right, I thought. “Maybe they got lost. Marco Scarlotti and Charlie Weiss probably couldn’t find snow in Antarctica. You want to get straight with me or see Sidney in a box?” I said.

  “They were following Ronald Bledsoe.”

  “I’m at the Iberia Sheriff’s Department. Tell Sidney either to come in or call me. You’re a reasonable person. I want you to think hard about the following question. Don’t answer it, just think about it.”

  Eunice had grown up in the fiefdom of Plaquemines Parish and knew firsthand that justice is indeed blind, at least when it involves political corruption. I let the spring wind itself tight, then I used the interrogator’s classic trick of posing a question that appears based on a premise. “When Bo Wiggins goes down, do you think he’s going to take the bounce by himself? A guy with hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts? When it comes to money and status, Bo Wiggins has the humanity of a feral pit bull. What do you think he’s going to do to Sidney?”

  “I don’t know, Dave. I’ve never met the man. I’m not sure Sidney has, either. I’ll ask him to call you. You don’t need to call here again.”

  My time in the dead zone seemed open-ended.

  BUT SIDNEY did not call and I began to believe that both he and Eunice were much more vulnerable than I had thought. As I mentioned before, I never quite understood Sidney. Historically the men who ran the Mafia rose to power through treachery, betrayal of friends, and assassination of their superiors. Their skill lay in their ability to manipulate others, particularly those who were good “soldiers” and had ferocious levels of physical courage that their leaders lacked.

  This was not the case with Sidney. He wasn’t afraid and I never saw him betray one of his own. Actually I think Sidney had a peculiar kind of secular theology at work in his life that was similar in many ways to those who conflate nationalism and religion and business. For Sidney, “sin” and “failure” and “poverty” were the unholy trinity. If there was a perdition, it was the home on North Villere Street where he had grown up.

  Unfortunately for Sidney and the men who worked for him, evil sometimes comes in a package that has no label on it.

  SIDNEY’S OPPOSITE WAS Clete Purcel, a man who was born and raised in the same privation as Sidney and, worse, exposed at an early age to his father’s rejection and unnecessary cruelty. Why does one man turn out to be a gangster and the other a beer-soaked, blue-collar knight errant? I didn’t know the answer. I was just glad that Clete was my friend.

  As soon as Clete heard about the shoot-out, he had come to my house. He stayed until almost midnight, then, instead of leaving as he said he was, he pulled his Caddy into the driveway and went to sleep in the backseat, determined that Bledsoe wouldn’t have another run at us. We had to argue with him in order to make up a bed for him on the couch.

  He came to my office on Monday morning, shortly after I had talked to Eunice Kovick. “So Sidney hasn’t called you, huh?” he said.

  “He’s not going to admit he’s painted himself into a corner,” I replied.

  It was bright and cool outside, and I lowered the blinds to take the glare out of the office. When I closed my eyes, red rings seemed to recede into my brain and for just a second I thought I could see muzzle flashes from a semi-automatic rifle. I could feel Clete’s eyes following me around the room.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Sidney wants his goods. He probably thinks Bertrand Melancon is still in New Iberia or he thinks Bledsoe can lead him to Melancon.”

  “You don’t think Bledsoe is working for him?”

  “If he was, he isn’t now.”

  “What do you figure is the deal on Bo Diddley Wiggins?”

  “I think he’s mixed up in it. But here’s the rub. Bo Diddley is a businessman. Sidney fancies himself one. Ronald Bledsoe and Bobby Mack Rydel are cut out of different cloth. If I had to take a guess, I think Bo and Sidney probably stepped off a cliff and didn’t know how to get back on it.”

  I could see Clete’s irritation growing. “Guys like Bledsoe and Rydel don’t operate in a vacuum. They do the jobs that guys like Kovick and Wiggins don’t want to dirty their hands on. Like kidnapping and suffocating Courtney Degravelle to death. I got two regrets in all this, Streak. One, that I drug Courtney into it. Two, that it wasn’t me who parked a couple of big ones in Rydel’s brisket.”

  Fortunately my desk phone rang. It was Mack Bertrand, at the Acadiana Crime Lab. “We picked up the letter at Otis Baylor’s place. It was in the trash can, like he said. The biggest problem is the note was printed on low-grade paper that’s been sitting in water. It was almost mush when we lifted it out. Anyway, I’ve done a computer reconstruction of it. What are you looking for in particular?”

  “Directions to some stolen property. How legible is it?”

  “You ever eat alphabet soup when you were a kid?”

  After I hung up, I looked at Clete, my palm still resting on the receiver, unsure what I should do next. Clete was not a welcome presence at the sheriff’s department. At best he was tolerated because he and I were friends. At worst, he was still looked upon as a disgraced cop who hunted down street mutts for hire. “I need to go over to the Crime Lab,” I said.

  He waited.

  “Want to come?” I said.

  The Crime Lab was outside the city limits, in a quasi-rural area. On the way there, a small deer ran across the road. It sprang across a rain ditch and ran through a sodden field of sugarcane that had been ruined by flooding and high wind. We were in my truck, and Clete turned in the passenger seat and strained to see out the back window as the deer bounced over a fence into a grove of water oaks. Then he stared straight ahead at the road.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking about something you said. The reason this case doesn’t hang together is because we’ve got a mixture of business types and greaseballs and sociopaths all in the same blender. It’s the amateurs who stay under the radar. They’re not predictable. They do business in Iran and get blow jobs in Nigeria, then take their families to First Baptist back in Big D. You think you’re hunting down Charlie Manson and instead you end up dealing with Beaver Cleaver.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We don’t have the juice to take these guys down. I’m glad you capped Rydel when you had the chance.”

  “He dealt it.”

  “That’s not my point. The guy was protected. He was a killing machine for years and always had somebody with juice covering his butt.”

  “You think that’s how Bledsoe has stayed off the computer?”

  “No, that’s where it doesn’t make sense. Bledsoe is no mercenary. He’s a serial predator, a guy who doesn’t like to take orders. Maybe somebody brought him in for a short gig. That’s all I can figure. This whole bunch should have been in soap dispensers a long time ago.” he was quiet the rest of the way to the Crime Lab.

  TECHNICALLY I WAS still on the desk, but technically again my desk extended to the Lab. The head forensic technician there was Mack Bertrand. He was a slender, nice-looking family man, always well groomed, who carried his pipe in a leather case on his belt. Wherever he went, he trailed a fragrance of apple-spiked pipe tobacco. I could tell he wasn’t entirely comfortable with Clete’s presence inside the Lab. Clete sensed it, too, and went outside.

  “Did I say something?” Mack asked.

  “It’s all right. What have you got?” I said.

 
Mack had created virtual images on a computer screen from the dissolved texture of the paper towel on which Bertrand Melancon had written his letter of amends. In our earlier conversation on the telephone, Mack had made use of a metaphor involving alphabet soup. The metaphor could not have been more appropriate.

  I could make out several words in the body of the letter, but toward the bottom of the page, only a few letters, re-created from both the ink and the pressure of the ballpoint pen, were discernible:

  Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an.

  “Does that help you?” Mack asked.

  “Not right offhand. But maybe it’ll make sense down the line.”

  “Tell Purcel I’ve got nothing against him. But it’s supposed to be only authorized personnel. I always thought he was a pretty decent guy.”

  “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought him in,” I said.

  “You okay from yesterday?”

  “No problem.”

  “That’s the way. When they deal it, we slam the door on it, case closed. Right? Don’t think about it,” he said, knowing a lie when he heard one, both mine and his.

  THE NEXT DAY, in the Atchafalaya Basin, a black man was bobber-fishing with a cane pole inside a grove of flooded trees. It wasn’t the abandoned rental car on the levee that caught his eye. It was the gray cloud of gnats that hovered above the boxlike remains of a cabin at the foot of the levee. The cabin had been built of plywood and tarpaper and had been blown or floated there years ago by a hurricane. On several occasions, during an electrical storm, the black man had taken shelter inside the cabin, and he knew it to be a dry, empty place that was clean of any dead animals or discarded food.

  He paddled his pirogue through the trees, dropping his baited hook and cork bobber into the dark pools that were unruffled by the wind out on the channel. Then he heard flies buzzing and saw shadows swooping across the grassy slope of the levee. When he looked up into the sky, he saw three turkey buzzards gliding in a circle.

  He turned his back toward the levee and lifted his pole in the air, swinging the line back toward the channel, dropping the worm next to a cypress trunk. The wind changed direction, blowing down the slope of the levee. An odor that made him gag struck his nostrils.

  He rolled his line up on his pole and paddled through the flooded trees onto the mudflat, sufficiently upwind now. He dragged the pirogue onto the grass and climbed the levee, then descended again so the wind was firmly at his back. The door to the cabin hung partially open. He picked up a stick to open it the rest of the way, then felt foolish at his fearful behavior. He put his hand on the edge of the door and dragged it open, scraping the bottom across the ground.

  “Oh Lord,” he said under his breath.

  WHEN HELEN SOILEAU and I arrived, the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department had already strung yellow crime scene tape from the flooded trees to the top of the levee, sealing off access to the cabin. The St. Mary sheriff was out of town and the investigation was being run by a lead detective named Lamar Fuselier. His blond hair was cut short and boxed on his neck, and he wore a blue windbreaker and starched khakis and spit-shined black shoes. I used to see him at Red’s Gym sometimes in Lafayette, dead-lifting three hundred pounds on the bar. That’s when he was taking courses in criminal justice at the university. That was where I also saw him pay a student in the locker room for an examination that had been stored in a fraternity file.

  “What’s the haps, Lamar?” I said.

  He was writing on a clipboard, his brow furrowed with concentration. He looked up and away from me, then huffed air out his nose. “Smell it?” he said.

  “Hard not to,” I said.

  “We’re still waiting on the coroner. The old black guy over there called it in. How come y’all are down here?”

  “We’re looking for a couple of guys who might be missing,” I said.

  “If I had to bet, I’d say these guys had been at the casino. Maybe somebody followed them or got in their car and forced them to drive down the levee.”

  “To rob them?” I said.

  “Yeah, they got no wallet or ID on them. We found four ejected twelve-gauge shells inside.”

  “What did you find in the rental?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Somebody emptied the glove box. I thought that was strange. Why would the shooter take the paperwork out of the glove box?”

  “Probably to make our jobs harder.”

  “If you see puke inside, that’s from the old guy. He got sick when he went inside.” He laughed under his breath.

  “Mind if we take a look?” Helen said.

  “Be my guest,” he replied, finally taking notice of her. His eyes traveled up and down her person. “We got barf bags in one of our cruisers if you need one.”

  “Give mine to your wife,” she said.

  The door to the cabin had been pried back onto the levee’s incline, allowing the sunlight inside. I took out a handkerchief and held it to my nose. The odor of decomposition was exacerbated by the nature of the wounds. Both men had been shot at close range, in the stomach and in the face. Their viscera were exposed, their facial features hardly recognizable. Their brain matter was splattered all over one wall. Both men wore sports coats, silk shirts, and expensive Italian shoes with tassels on them. Both of them lay on their side, the remnants of their eyes glistening.

  I stepped back out in the sunlight and blew out my breath. Helen looked at me.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s Charlie Weiss and Marco Scarlotti,” I said.

  “Kovick’s gumballs?”

  “What’s left of them.”

  “You see Bledsoe for this?”

  “I see Ronald Bledsoe for anything,” I replied.

  Then I looked up on the levee and saw Clete Purcel watching us. He must have used his police radio scanner to find the location of the double homicide. Lamar Fusilier looked up and saw him, too.

  “You got no business at this crime scene, Purcel. Haul your fat ass out of here,” he said.

  Clete lit a cigarette in the wind and flipped the dead match down the levee, never moving from his position, smoke leaking out of his mouth. Chapter 30

  I F YOU HAVE stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely complex and not subject to easy categorization. I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from his bones. I guess the word I’m looking for is “Empathy.” We find it in people who have none of the apparent characteristics of light-bearers.

  I had gone directly home from the levee in St. Mary Parish, primarily because I feared what Ronald Bledsoe would do next. The lead detective at the crime scene would lift all the prints he could from the shotgun shells and the tarpaper shack, but I doubted if his investigation would come up with anything of value. In my opinion, Bledsoe had been the shooter and Bledsoe wasn’t about to get nailed by a detective who had to pay for a copy of an examination in order to pass a criminal justice course.

  At 4:41 p.m. Sidney and Eunice Kovick pulled into my driveway, Sidney behind the wheel, both of them looking like people who had just discovered the enormity of their own miscalculations. Sidney got out of his vehicle and rested one hand on the roof. “I heard two guys got it in the Atchafalaya,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Who were they?”

  “They didn’t have any ID on them. I suspect by tonight or tomorrow the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department will have some definite information.”

  “I heard about it on the radio. I went by your office. Nobody would tell me anything. They said you were over here.”

  “I’ve t
old you what I know, Sidney,” I said.

  “Dave,” Eunice said softly. She was still belted in the passenger seat, her face turned up toward mine.

  “These guys were driving a rental Avalon,” I said.

  “You saw the bodies?” Sidney said.

  “The shooter used a twelve-gauge shotgun. The features were hard to recognize. But the victims looked like Charlie and Marco,” I said.

  Sidney clenched his fist on top of the roof. “Where’s Ronald Bledsoe?”

  “I’m supposed to know that? You’ve been jerking me around from the jump, Sidney. Maybe it’s time you develop a little clarity in your life.”

  “You don’t understand, Dave. You’ve never understood what’s going on,” Eunice said.

  “How can I? You don’t share information. Sidney believes the function of cops is to return property to him that he stole from somebody else.”

  “Here’s your news bulletin of the day. I didn’t steal anything from anybody. I made a deal to bring certain goods into the country. I paid for them. Then I found out these goods were being handled by some guys who wipe their ass on their bare hand. So I blew the deal out of the water and confiscated my goods and maybe left a couple of guys with some bad memories to take back to Crap-a-stan.”

  “Bo Wiggins was your partner in this?”

  “Bo who?” he said.

  “We’re done here, Sidney. You want to make your bullshit a matter of record, come into the office tomorrow.”

  “You listen to me, Dave. Marco took a shank in the arm for me when we were kids in the project. Charlie Weiss’s daddy fought on five-buck-a-pop fight cards with my old man during the Depression. Charlie did thirty-eight months on Camp J rather than give me up.”

  “Why were they following Bledsoe into the Atchafalaya Basin?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. They were following him all over. We wanted to find the black kid who looted my house. We figured Bledsoe had a lead on him. I feel to blame.”

  Sidney’s face was covered with shadow, and leaves were drifting out of the trees onto the waxed surface of his car, further obscuring his expression. I believe his eyes were actually glistening.