Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  I spent the next half hour in the apartment answering questions asked by a young homicide lieutenant named Magelli. He was tired and his clothes were wilted with perspiration, but he was thorough and he didn't cut corners. His brown eyes seemed sleepy and expressionless, but when he asked a question, they remained engaged with mine until the last word of my answer was out of my mouth, and only then did he write on his clipboard.

  Finally he put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and looked around again at the litter in the kitchen and the buckshot holes in the walls. A drop of perspiration fell out of his hair and spotted the cigarette paper.

  "You say this guy worked for Bubba Rocque?" he said.

  "He did at one time."

  "I wish he'd made enough to buy an air conditioner."

  "Bubba has a way of dumping people after their function is over."

  "Well, you might have a little trouble about jurisdiction and not calling us when you made the guy, but I don't think it'll be serious. Nobody's going to mourn his passing. Come down to the district and make a formal statement, then you're free to go. Does any of his stuff help you out?"

  In the other room the bed was covered with bagged articles of evidence and clothing and personal items taken by the scene investigator from the attic, kitchen, bedroom floor, dressers, and closets: Romero's polyester suits, loud shirts, and colored silk handkerchiefs; the chrome-plated.45 that he had probably used to kill Eddie Keats; a twelve-gauge Remington sawed off at the pump, with a walnut stock that had been cut down, tapered, and sanded until it was almost the size of a pistol grip; the spent shell casings; a whole brick of high-grade reefer; a glass straw with traces of cocaine in it; an Italian stiletto that could cut paper as easily as a razor blade; a cigar box full of pornographic photographs; a bolt-action, scoped.30-06 rifle; a snapshot of him in uniform and two other marines with three Vietnamese bar girls in a nightclub; and finally a plastic bag of human ears, now withered and black, laced together on a GI dogtag chain.

  His life had been used to till a garden of dark and poisonous flowers. But in all his memorabilia of cruelty and death, there wasn't one piece of paper or article of evidence that would connect him with anyone outside his apartment.

  "It looks like a dead end," I said. "I should have called you all."

  "It might have come out the same way, Robicheaux. Except maybe with some of our people hurt. Look, if he'd gotten out on that roof, he'd be in Mississippi by now. You did the right thing."

  "When are you going to pick up his cousin?"

  "Probably in the morning."

  "Are you going to charge him with harboring?"

  "I'll tell him that, but I don't think we can make it stick. Take it easy. You did enough for one night. All this shit eventually gets ironed out one way or another. How do you feel?"

  "All right."

  "I don't believe you, but that's all right," he said, and put his unlit, sweat-spotted cigarette back in his shirt pocket. "Can I buy you a drink later?"

  "No, thanks."

  "Well, all right, then. We'll seal this place, and you can follow us on down to the district." His sleepy brown eyes smiled at me. "What are you looking at?"

  The breakfast table was an old round one with a hard rubber top. Among the streaks of canned food that had been blown off the table by Romero's shotgun blast was a pattern of dried rings that looked as if they had been left there by the wet impressions of glasses or cups. Except one set of rings was larger than the other, and they were both on the same side of the table. The rings were gray and felt crusty under my fingertips.

  "What's the deal?" he said.

  I wet my fingertip, wiped up part of the residue, and touched it to my tongue.

  "What's it taste like to you?" I said.

  "Are you kidding? A guy who collected human ears. I wouldn't drink out of his water tap."

  "Come on, it's important."

  I wet my finger and did it again. He raised his eyebrows, touched a finger to one of the gray rings, then licked it. He made a face.

  "Lemon or lime juice or something," he said. "Is this how you guys do it out in the parishes? We use the lab for this sort of stuff. Remind me to buy some Listerine on the way home."

  He waited. When I didn't speak, the attention sharpened in his face.

  "What's it mean?" he said.

  "Probably nothing."

  "On no, we don't play it that way here, my friend. The game is show-and-tell."

  "It doesn't mean anything. I messed up tonight."

  He took the cigarette back out of his pocket and lit it. He blew the smoke out and tapped his finger in the air at me.

  "You're giving me a bad feeling, Robicheaux. Who'd you say he confessed to killing before he died?"

  "A girl in New Iberia."

  "You knew her?"

  "It's a small town."

  "You knew her personally?"

  "Yes."

  He chewed on the corner of his lips and looked at me with veiled eyes.

  "Don't make me revise my estimation of you," he said. "I think you need to go back to New Iberia tonight. And maybe stay there, unless we call you. New Orleans is a lousy place in the summer, anyway. We're clear about this, aren't we?"

  "Sure."

  "That's good. I aim for simplicity in my work. Clarity of line, you might call it."

  He was quiet, his eyes studying me in the kitchen light. His face softened.

  "Forget what I said. You look a hundred years old," he said. "Stay over in a motel tonight and give us your statement in the morning."

  "That's all right. I'd better be on my way. Thank you for your courtesy," I said, and walked out into the darkness and the wind that blew over the tops of the oak trees. The night sky was full of heat lightning, like the flicker of artillery beyond a distant horizon.

  Three hours later I was halfway across the Atchafalaya basin. My eyes burned with fatigue, and the center line on the highway seemed to drift back and forth under my left front tire. When I thumped across the metal bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River, the truck felt airborne under me.

  My system craved for a drink: four inches of Jim Beam straight up, with a sweating Jax draft on the side, an amber-gold rush that could light my soul for hours and even let me pretend that the serpentarium was closed forever. On both sides of the road were canals and bayous and wind-dimpled bays and islands of willows and gray cypresses that were almost luminous in the moonlight. In the wind and the hum of the truck's engine and tires, I thought I could hear John Fogarty singing:

  Don't come 'round tonight,

  It's bound to take your life,

  A bad moon's on the rise.

  I hear hurricanes a-blowing,

  I know the end is coming soon.

  I feel the river overflowing,

  I can hear the voice of rage and ruin.

  I pulled into a truck stop and bought two hamburgers and a pint of coffee to go. But as I continued down the road, the bread and meat were as dry and tasteless in my mouth as confetti, and I folded the hamburgers in the grease-stained sack and drank the coffee with the nervous energy of a man swallowing whiskey out of a cup with the morning's first light.

  Romero was evil. I had no doubt about that. But I had killed people before, in war and as a member of the New Orleans police department, and I know what it does to you. Like the hunter, you feel an adrenaline surge of pleasure at having usurped the province of God. The person who says otherwise is lying. But the emotional attitude you form later varies greatly among individuals. Some will keep their remorse alive and feed it as they would a living gargoyle, to assure themselves of their own humanity; others will justify it in the name of a hundred causes, and they'll reach back in moments of their own inadequacy and failure and touch again those flaming shapes that somehow made their impoverished lives historically significant.

  But I always feared a worse consequence for myself. One day a curious light dies in the eyes. The unblemished place where God once grasped our souls becomes perma
nently stained. A bird lifts its span of wings and flies forever out of the heart.

  Then I did a self-serving thing that impersonated a charitable act. I pulled off the causeway into a rest area to use the men's room, and saw an elderly Negro man under one of the picnic shelters. Even though it was a summer night, he wore an old suitcoat and a felt hat. By his foot was a desiccated cardboard suitcase tied shut with rope, the words The Great Speckled Bird painted on one side. For some reason he had lighted a fire of twigs under the empty barbecue grill and was staring out at the light rain that had begun to fall on the bay.

  "Did you eat tonight, partner?" I asked.

  "No, suh," he said. His face was covered with thin brown lines, like a tobacco leaf.

  "I think I've got just the thing for us, then," I said, and took my half-eaten hamburger and the untouched one from the truck and heated them on the edge of the grill. I also found two cans of warm Dr. Pepper in my toolbox.

  The rain slanted in the firelight. The old man ate without speaking. Occasionally his eyes looked at me.

  "Where are you going?" I said.

  "Lafayette. Or Lake Charles. I might go to Beaumont, too." His few teeth were long and purple with rot.

  "I can take you to the Salvation Army in Lafayette."

  "I don't like it there."

  "It might storm tonight. You don't want to be out here in an electrical storm, do you?"

  "What chu doing this for?" His eyes were red, the lines in his face as intricate as cobwebs.

  "I can't leave you out here at night. It's not good for you. Sometimes bad people are out at night."

  He made a sound as though a great philosophical weariness were escaping from his lungs.

  "I don't want no truck with them kind. No, suh," he said, and allowed me to pick up his suitcase and walk him to the pickup.

  It started raining hard outside of Lafayette. The sugarcane fields were green and thrashing in the wind, and the oak trees along the road trembled whitely in the explosions of lightning on the horizon. The old man fell asleep against the far door, and I was left alone in the drumming of the rain against the cab, in the sulfurous smell of the air through the wind vane, in the sulfurous smell that was as acrid as cordite.

  When I awoke in the morning, the house was cool from the window fans, and the sunlight looked like smoke in the pecan trees outside the window. I walked barefoot in my undershorts to the bathroom, then started toward the kitchen to make coffee. Robin opened her door in her pajamas and motioned me inside with her fingers. I still slept on the couch and she in the back room, in part because of Alafair and in part, perhaps, because of a basic dishonesty in myself about the nature of our relationship. She bit down quietly on her lip with a conspiratorial smile.

  I sat on the edge of the bed with her and looked out the window into the backyard. It was covered in blue shadow and dripping with dew. She put her hands on my neck and face, rubbed them down my back and chest.

  "You came in late," she said.

  "I had to take an old man to the Sally in Lafayette."

  She kissed my shoulder and traced her hand down my chest. Her body was still warm from sleep.

  "It sounds like somebody didn't sleep too well," she said.

  "I guess not."

  "I know a good way to wake up in the morning," she said, and touched me with her hand.

  She felt me jerk involuntarily.

  "You got your chastity belt on this morning?" she said. "Scruples about mommy again?"

  "I blew away Victor Romero last night."

  I felt her go quiet and stiff next to me. Then she said in a hushed voice, "You killed Victor Romero?"

  "He dealt it."

  Then she was quiet again. She might have been a tough girl raised in a welfare project, but she was no different from anyone else in her reaction to being in proximity to someone who has recently killed another human being.

  "It comes with the fucking territory, Robin."

  "I know that. I wasn't judging you." She placed her hand on my back.

  I stared out the window at the yard, my hands on my knees. The redwood picnic table was dark with moisture.

  "You want me to fix breakfast for you?" she said finally.

  "Not now."

  "I'll make toast in a pan, the way you like it."

  "I don't want anything to eat right now."

  She put her arms around me and squeezed me. I could feel her cheek and her hair on my shoulder.

  "Do you love me, Dave?" she said.

  I didn't answer.

  "Come on, Streak. Fair and square. Do you love me?"

  "Yes."

  "No, you don't. You love things about me. There's a difference. It's a big one."

  "I'm not up to this today, Robin."

  "What I'm telling you is I understand and I got no complaint. You were decent to me when nobody else was. You know what it meant to me when you took me to midnight Mass at the Cathedral? I never had a man treat me with that kind of respect before. Mommy thought she had Cinderella's glass slippers on."

  She picked up my hand in hers and kissed it on the back. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, "I'll always be your friend. Anytime, anywhere, for anything."

  I slipped my hand up her back, under her pajama top, and kissed the corner of her eye. Then I drew her against me, felt her breath on my chest, felt her fingers on my thighs and stomach, and I lay down next to her and looked at her eyes, the tanned smoothness of her skin, the way her lips parted when I touched her; then she pressed hard against me for a brief moment, got up from the bed and slid the bolt on the door, and took off her pajamas. She sat beside me, leaned over my face and kissed me, her mouth smiling as though she were looking at a little boy. I pulled off my undershorts, and she sat on top of me, her eyes closing, her mouth opening silently, as she took me inside her. She put her hands in my hair, kissed my ear, then stretched herself out against my body and tucked her feet inside my calves.

  A moment later she felt me tense and try to hold back before I gave in to that old male desire that simply wants to complete that bursting moment of fulfillment, whether the other person gets to participate or not. But she raised herself on her arms and knees and smiled at me and never stopped her motion, and when I went weak inside and felt sweat break out on my forehead and felt my loins heat like a flame burning in a circle through paper, she leaned down on my chest again and kissed my mouth and neck and forced her hands under my back as though some part of me might elude her in that final, heart-twisting moment.

  Later we lay on top of the sheets under the fan while the sunlight grew brighter in the tree limbs outside. She turned on her side, looking at my profile, and took my fingers in hers.

  "Dave, I don't think you should be troubled like this," she said. "You tried to arrest him, and he tried to kill you for it."

  I looked at the shadows of the wood-bladed fan turning on the ceiling.

  "Look, I know New Orleans cops who would have just killed the guy and never given him a chance. Then they'd plant a gun on him. They've got a name for it. What do they call it?"

  "A 'drop' or a 'throwaway'."

  "You're not that kind of cop. You're a good man. Why do you want to carry this guilt around?"

  "You don't understand, Robin. I think maybe I'm going to do it again."

  Later I called the office and told them I wouldn't be in that day, then I put on my running shorts and shoes, lifted weights under the mimosa tree in the backyard, and ran three miles along the bayou road. Wisps of fog still hung around the flooded roots of the cypress trees. I went inside the paintless wood-frame general store at the four-corners, drank a carton of orange juice and talked French with the elderly owner of the store, then jogged back along the road while the sun climbed higher into the sky and dragonflies dipped and hovered over the cattails.

  When I came through the front screen, hot and running with sweat, I saw the door of Annie's and my bedroom wide open, the lock and hasp pried loose from the jamb, the torn wood like
a ragged dental incision. Sunlight streamed through the windows into the room, and Robin was on her hands and knees, in a white sun halter and a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts, dipping a scrub brush into a bucket of soapy water and scouring the grain in the cypress floor. The buckshot-pocked walls and the headboard of the bed were wet and gleaming, and by a bottle of Clorox on the floor was another bucket filled with soaking rags, and the rags and the water were the color of rust.

  "What are you doing?" I said.

  She glanced at me, then continued to scrub the grain without replying. The stiff bristles of the brush sounded like sandpaper against the wood. The muscles of her tan back rippled with her motion.

  "Damn you, Robin. Who gave you the fucking right to go into my bedroom?"

  "I couldn't find your keys, so I pried the lock off with a screwdriver. I'm sorry about the damage."

  "You get the fuck out of this room."

  She paused and sat back on her heels. There were white indentations on her knees. She brushed the perspiration out of her hairline with the back of her wrist.

  "Is this your church where you go every day to suffer?" she said.

  "It's none of your business what it is. It's not a part of your life."

  "Then tell me to get out of your life. Say it and I'll do it."

  "I'm asking you to leave this room."

  "I have a hard time buying your attitude, Streak. You wear guilt like a big net over your head. You ever know guys who are always getting the clap? They're not happy unless some broad has dosed them from their toenails to their eyes. Is that the kind of gig you want for yourself?"

  The sweat was dripping off my hands onto the floor. I breathed slowly and pushed my wet hair back over my head.

  "I'm sorry for being profane at you. I truly am. But come outside now," I said.

  She dipped the brush in the bucket again and began to enlarge the scrubbed circle on the floor.