DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

“One guy goes, ‘We got this six-pointer last week, but it froze up on us.’

  “I pretended I didn’t know or care what he was talking about. They gave me two gallons of gas and wouldn’t let me pay them for it. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a bullet head and thick mustache came to the door and looked at me. I think it was that Claggart guy.”

  “So maybe Claggart hunts deer or has a camp in the Basin,” I said.

  “There was a laptop opened on the table behind him. I could see it through the doorway. The image on the screen was a bunch of playing cards floating into a black hat, you know, the kind magicians use. I think it’s one of those video games for gamblers. Bledsoe is always playing them.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, he doesn’t just play them. He plays that one,” I said.

  “Say again?”

  “I saw that program running on Bledsoe’s laptop when I was in his cottage.”

  “Oh man, we walked right over it, didn’t we? Where you going?”

  “To apologize to the FBI.”

  I went into the kitchen and called Betsy Mossbacher’s cell phone.

  “Hello, Dave,” she said.

  “Can we deep-six that conversation we had this afternoon? I need your help,” I said.

  “You push me into corners, then you blow hot and cold. I never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box. It can be a drag, Dave.”

  Don’t argue, don’t contend, I heard a voice say.

  “We’ve been looking in the wrong places for information on Ronald Bledsoe. We’ve been looking for a criminal record that doesn’t exist and faulting ourselves for not finding it. The real story on a guy like Bledsoe is in the façade of normalcy.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The reason guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?”

  “I got the point. What do you need?”

  “Everything I can get on a guy by the name of Tom Claggart. He has a house next door to Otis Baylor’s place in New Orleans.”

  “What’s his tie-in?”

  “He’s an export-import man. Baylor said Claggart attended either Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel. The Citadel is in South Carolina. That’s where Bledsoe seems to be from.”

  “How soon do you need this?”

  “Right now.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Betsy, Bledsoe sent Bobby Mack Rydel after my daughter. She came within inches of being killed. We’ve been square with you guys. You owe me.”

  There was a beat. “I think we do,” she replied.

  space

  THE SKY HAD SOFTENED to a dark blue when Molly and Alafair parked their automobile next to Burke Hall, the old drama and arts building hard by a lake that was thick with flooded cypress. Molly had a guest-faculty sticker on her car and almost always used the same parking area when she visited the university because there were no evening classes in Burke Hall and the spot between the building and the lake was secluded and usually empty. She put her purse under the seat and locked the car, then she and Alafair walked across the campus to the library.

  The grass in the quadrangle had just been mowed, and the air smelled like flowers blooming and wet hay, and leaves and pecan husks someone was burning in a damp pile. The roofed walkways that enclosed the quadrangle were full of students, the moss in the live oaks limned by the glow of the lighted windows in classroom buildings and student dorms. A sorority was conducting a bake sale in front of the library entrance, the girls wearing sweaters because of the chill, an aura of innocence about them that one would associate with a 1940s movie. The scene I describe is not one of nostalgia. It’s one that existed. It’s one in which we either believe or disbelieve. It represents I think to all of us the kind of moment that should be inviolate.

  Unfortunately it is not.

  After Molly and Alafair entered the building, a man in a raincoat paused at the bake-sale table and bought a pastry. He wore a rain hat that seemed too large for his head and cupped his ears, like an oversize bowler sitting on a manikin. He also wore a mustache with streaks of white in it. He seemed to be a nervous man, and he gave off a smell that was like a mixture of deodorant and moldy fabric or socks left in a gym locker.

  He paid for the pastry with a five-dollar bill and wanted no change. When he pushed the pastry into his mouth, his eyes were fastened on the interior of the library. The coed who had sold him the pastry offered him a napkin. He took it from her and entered the building, wiping his mouth. In his right hand he still held the napkin the coed had given him and the cellophane the pastry had come wrapped in. A trash receptacle was less than three feet from him. But he balled the cellophane and napkin in his palm and shoved them in his coat pocket. Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the library, his face lifted, like a hunter glancing upward into the canopy of a forest.

  I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but the people on duty were all after-hours personnel and had the same problem I did, namely that all the state offices that could give answers about Tom Claggart were closed.

  Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian. Their salaries are wretched and they receive credit for nothing. Their desks are usually tucked away in the stacks or in a remote corner where they have to shush noisy high school students or put up with street people blowing wine in their faces or snoring in the stuffed chairs. But their ability to find obscure information is remarkable and they persevere like Spartans.

  The tidewater accent of the one I spoke with at the Citadel library in Charleston was a genuine pleasure to listen to. Her name was iris Rosecrans and I had the feeling she could read aloud from the telephone directory and make it sound like a recitation of Shakespearean sonnets. I told her who I was and asked if she could find any record of a past student by the name of Tom Claggart.

  “As you probably have already gathered, Mr. Robicheaux, the registrar’s office is closed until tomorrow morning,” she said. “However, that said, I think I can go back through some of the yearbooks and be of some service to you.”

  “Ms. Rosecrans, I need every bit of information I can get regarding this man. It’s extremely urgent. I don’t want to burden you with my situation or to seem melodramatic, but someone tried to kill my daughter and I think the man responsible is named Ronald Bledsoe. I think Ronald Bledsoe may have some relationship to Tom Claggart.”

  She paused a moment. “Spell ‘Bledsoe’ for me, please.”

  Twenty minutes later she called back. “Thomas S. Claggart was a freshman and sophomore student here in 1977 and ’78. His hometown is listed as Camden. He’s not included in the yearbooks after ’78. Ronald Bledsoe appears never to have been a student here.”

  “Well, I appreciate your—”

  I heard a piece of paper crinkle, like a sheet on a tablet being folded back. “I do have other information, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

  “Please, go ahead.”

  “I talked to the reference librarian in Camden. She checked the old telephone directories and found a T. S. Claggart listed during the years ’76 to ’79. I called the police station there, but no one had heard of a Claggart family. The officer I spoke with was kind enough to give me the number of the man who was police chief at the time. So I called him at his house. Would you like his name?”

  “No, no, what did he tell you?”

  “He remembered the senior Claggart quite well. He said he was a United States Army sergeant stationed at Fort Jackson. His wife had died s
everal years earlier, but he had a son named Tom Junior, and perhaps a stepson. The stepson was named Ronald.”

  “Bledsoe?”

  “The retired police chief wasn’t sure of the last name. But it was not Claggart. He said the boy was peculiar-looking and strange in his behavior. He had the feeling the boy had been in foster homes or a place for disturbed children.

  “That’s all I was able to gather. We’re about to close. Would you like for me to search a little bit more tomorrow? I don’t mind.”

  “What I would like, Ms. Rosecrans, is to buy you an island in the Caribbean. Or perhaps to ask the Vatican to grant you early canonization.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” she said.

  I told Clete what I had just learned from Ms. Rosecrans. He was eating a sandwich in the living room, watching the History Channel.

  “You think Claggart has been covering Bledsoe’s ass all these years?” he said.

  “Probably. Or maybe they work as a team. You remember the Hillside Strangler case in California? The perps were cousins. Explain how one family can have two guys like that in it.”

  He started to reply, but I opened my cell phone and began punching in numbers.

  “Who you calling?” he asked.

  “Molly.”

  “Relax, they’re at the university. I mean it, noble mon, you’re giving me the shingles just watching you.”

  I got Molly’s voice mail and realized she had probably left her cell phone in the automobile or turned it off when she entered the library. I tried Alafair’s number and got the same result, then I remembered Alafair had left her purse at the house.

  The phone rang in the kitchen.

  ALAFAIR HAD SPREAD her note cards on a table that was not far from shelves of books that dealt with the flora and fauna of the American Northwest. She was writing down the names of trees and types of rock that characterized the escarpment along the Columbia River Gorge just south of Mount Hood. Then her eyes began to burn from the fatigue of the day and the sleepless nights she had experienced since Bobby Mack Rydel, a man she had never seen before, had tried to kill her.

  In her earliest attempts at fiction, she had learned that there are many things a person can do well when he or she is tired, but imagining plots and creating dialogue and envisioning fictional characters and writing well are not among them.

  She gathered up her note cards and placed them in her book bag, then took out the yellow legal pad on which I had written down the remnants of the words at the bottom of Bertrand Melancon’s letter to the Baylor family.

  In the stacks, a man with a raincoat over his arm and an oversize hat on his head was gazing curiously at the titles of the books arrayed along the shelf. He lifted a heavy volume off the shelf and seated himself on the opposite side of Alafair’s table, three chairs down from her. He did not glance in her direction and seemed intent upon the content of his book, a collection of photographic plates of scenes in Colorado. Then, as an afterthought, he seemed to remember that he was still wearing his hat. He removed it and set it crown-down on the table. His scalp was bone-white under the freshly shaved roots of his hair.

  “How do you do?” he said, and nodded.

  “Fine, how are you?” Alafair replied.

  He opened his book and began reading, his forehead knitted. Alafair went back to work on Bertrand Melancon’s water-diluted directions to Sidney Kovick’s diamonds. Molly returned from the restroom and looked over her shoulder. The original letters had been Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an. Alafair had spaced them out ten times on ten lines, trying different combinations with them on each line. By the tenth line, she had created a statement that seemed to make syntactical and visual sense.

  “You should have been a cryptographer,” Molly said.

  “Spelling is the challenge,” Alafair said. “He probably spells most polysyllabic words phonetically. So if the first word is ‘The’ and we create ‘dymines’ out of ‘dym,’ we’ve got a running start on the whole sentence. If the third word doesn’t agree in number with ‘dymines’ and we substitute ‘is’ for ‘are,’ it begins to come together pretty quickly.”

  The man with the mustache and shaved head paused in his reading, stifling a yawn, his head turning in the opposite direction from Molly and Alafair. His eyes scanned the high windows for a flicker of lightning in the sky. He watched a tall black kid in a basketball letter sweater walk by, then resumed reading.

  “We turn ‘un’ into ‘under’ and let ‘the’ stand. Put a ‘b’ in front of ‘ri’ and add a ‘k’ and you get ‘bricks.’ ‘On’ stands by itself and ‘ot’ becomes ‘other.’ ‘Of’ stands alone and we turn ‘h’ into ‘the.’ So we’ve got ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the…’ It’s the ‘an’ I haven’t worked out.”

  Molly thought about it. “Put a ‘c’ in front and an ‘e’ behind.”

  “‘Cane,’ that’s it. ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the cane.’ How about that?” Alafair said.

  The man staring at alpine scenes in the large picture book he gripped by both covers, the spine resting on the table, looked at his watch and yawned again. He got up from the table and replaced his book on the shelf. Then he walked over to a periodicals rack and began thumbing through a magazine, occasionally glancing out the window at the darkness in the sky.

  At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.

  It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

  “I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”

  “Yeah, I’ve already got that.”

  “You’ve got that? From where?” she said.

  “A reference librarian at the Citadel.”

  “A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”

  “Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”

  “Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”

  “I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.

  “Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”

  When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.

  “Let’s take a ride,” I said.

  MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightnin
g, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.

  Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.

  “Fine with me,” Molly said.

  Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.

  “I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.

  “Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.

  A gust of wind and rain blew across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.

  She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.

  “I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.

  “I know. What is it you want?”

  “It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”

  “Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.

  “Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.

  “But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.

  “I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.

  The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.