Burning Angel dr-8

by James Lee Burke

  “No.”

  “If we have it, they know we've read it, maybe made copies of it ourselves. So that means the notebook contains something indispensable to them that makes sense only to themselves.”

  “This guy you met jogging yesterday, you think he's this mercenary, what's his name, Pogue?”

  “He knew the year I was in Vietnam. He even knew how many times I'd been wounded.”

  The sheriff looked at the blowing rain and a mimosa branch flattening against the window.

  “I see only one way through this,” he said. “We find Marsallus again and charge him with shooting the man in front of your house. Then he can talk to us or take up soybean farming at Angola.”

  “We don't have a shooting victim.”

  “Find him.”

  “I need a warrant on Sweet Pea's Cadillac.”

  “You're not going to get it. Why aren't you sweating that black woman out at the Bertrand plantation on this?”

  “That's a hard word,” I said.

  “She's involved, she's dirty. Sorry to offend your sensibilities.”

  “It's the way we've always done it,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  The air-conditioning was turned up high, but the room was humid and close, like a wet cotton glove on the skin.

  “Rounding up people who're vulnerable and turning dials on them. Should we kick a board up Moleen Bertrand's butt while we're at it? I think he's dirty, too. I just don't know how,” I said.

  “Do whatever you have to,” the sheriff said. He stood up and straightened his back, his eyes empty.

  But no urgency about Moleen, I thought.

  He read it in my face.

  “We have two open murder cases, one involving a victim kidnapped from our own jail,” he said. “In part we have shit smeared on our faces because you and Purcel acted on your own and queered a solid investigative lead. Your remarks are genuinely testing my level of tolerance.”

  “If you want to stick it to Moleen, there's a way to do it,” I said.

  The sheriff waited, his face narrow and cheerless. “Create some serious man-hours and reactivate the vehicular homicide file on his wife.”

  “You'd do that?” he asked.

  “No, I wouldn't. But when you sweat people, that's the kind of furnace you kick open in their face, Sheriff. It's just easier when the name's not Bertrand.”

  “I don't have anything else to say to you, sir,” he said, and walked out.

  * * *

  Sometimes you get lucky.

  In this case it was a call from an elderly Creole man who had been fishing with a treble hook, using a steel bolt for weight and chicken guts for bait, in a slough down by Vermilion Bay.

  Helen and I drove atop a levee through a long plain of flooded saw grass and got there ahead of the divers and the medical examiner. It had stopped raining and the sun was high and white in the sky and water was dripping out of the cypress trees the elderly man had been fishing under.

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  “All the way across, right past them cattails,” he said. His skin was the color of dusty brick, his turquoise eyes dim with cataracts.

  “My line went bump, and I thought I hooked me a gar. I started to yank on it, then I knew it wasn't no gar. That's when I drove back up to the sto' and called y'all.”

  His throw line, which was stained dark green with silt and algae, was tied to a cypress knee and stretched across the slough. It had disappeared beneath the surface by a cluster of lily pads and reeds.

  Helen squatted down and hooked her index finger under it to feel the tension. The line was snagged on an object that was tugging in the current by the slough's mouth.

  “Tell us again what you saw,” she said.

  “I done tole the man answered the phone,” he said. “It come up out of the water. It liked to made my heart stop.”

  “You saw a hand?” I said.

  “I didn't say that. It looked like a flipper. Or the foot on a big gator. But it wasn't no gator,” he said.

  “You didn't walk over to the other side?” Helen said.

  “I ain't lost nothing there,” he said.

  “A flipper?” I said.

  “It was like a stub, it didn't have no fingers, how else I'm gonna say it to y'all?” he said.

  Helen and I walked around the end of the slough and back down the far side to the opening that gave onto a canal. The current in the canal was flowing southward into the bay as the tide went out. The sun's heat rose like steam from the water's surface and smelled of stagnant mud and dead vegetation.

  Helen shoved a stick into the lily pads and moved something soft under it. A cloud of mud mushroomed to the surface. She poked the stick into the mud again, and this time she retrieved a taut web of monofilament fishing line that was looped through a corroded yellow chunk of pipe casing. She let it slide off the stick into the water again. Then an oval pie of wrinkled skin rolled against the surface and disappeared.

  “Why do we always get the floaters?” she said.

  “People here throw everything else in the water,” I said.

  “You ever see a shrink?”

  “Not in a while, anyway,” I said. In the distance I could see two emergency vehicles and a TV news van coming down the levee.

  “I went to one in New Orleans. I was ready for him to ask me about my father playing with his weenie in front of the kids. Instead, he asked me why I wanted to be a homicide detective. I told him it's us against the bad guys, I want to make a difference, it bothers me when I pull a child's body out of a sewer pipe after a sex predator has gotten through with him. All the while he's smiling at me, with this face that looks like bread pudding with raisins all over it. I go, ‘Look, Doc, the bad guys torture and rape and kill innocent people. If we don't send them in for fifty or seventy-five or ship them off for the Big Sleep, they come back for encores.’ He keeps smiling at me. I go, ‘The truth is I got tired of being a meter maid.’ He thought that was pretty funny.“

  I waited for her to go on.

  ”That's the end of the story. I never went back,“ she said.

  ”Why not?“

  ”You know why.“

  ”It still beats selling shoes,“ I said.

  She combed her hair with a comb from the back pocket of her Levi's. Her breasts stood out against her shirt like softballs. ”Fix your tie, cutie. You're about to be geek of the week on the evening news,“ she said.

  ”Helen, would you please stop that?“

  ”Lighten up, Streak.“

  ”That's exactly what Clete Purcel says.“

  ”Cluster fuck? No kidding?“ she said, and grinned.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later two divers, wearing wet suits and air tanks and surgical gloves over their hands, sawed loose the tangle of mono-filament fish line that had been wrapped around and crisscrossed over the submerged body and threaded through a daisy chain of junkyard iron. They held the body by the arms and dragged it heavily onto the bank, the decomposed buttocks sliding through the reeds like a collapsed putty-colored balloon.

  A young television newsman, his camera whirring, suddenly took his face away from his viewer and gagged.

  ”Excuse me,“ he said, embarrassed, his hand pinched over his mouth. Then he turned aside and vomited.

  The divers laid the body front-down on a black plastic sheet. The backs of the thighs were pulsating with leeches. One of the divers walked away, took a cigarette from a uniformed deputy's mouth, and smoked it, his back turned toward us.

  The pathologist was a tall white-haired man who wore a bow tie, suspenders, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a thin black ribbon around the crown.

  ”I wonder why they didn't eviscerate him while they were at it,“ he said.

  The body was nude. The fingers and thumbs of both hands had been snipped off cleanly at the joints, perhaps with bolt cutters. The head had been sawed off an inch above the collarbones.

  Helen bit a hangnail off
her thumb.

  ”What do you think?“ she said.

  ”Look at the size. How many guys that big end up as floaters?“ I said.

  Even in death and the gray stages of decomposition that take place under water in the tropics, the network of muscles in the shoulders and back and hips was that of a powerful, sinewy man, someone whose frame was wired together by years of calisthenics, humping ninety-pound packs in the bush, jolting against a parachute harness while the steel pot razors down on the nose.

  I stretched a pair of white surgical gloves over my hands and knelt by the body. I tried to hold my breath, but the odor seemed to cling to my skin like damp wool, an all-enveloping hybrid stench that's like a salty tangle of seaweed and fish eggs drying on hot sand and pork gone green with putrefaction.

  ”You don't have to do that, Dave,“ the pathologist said. ”I'll have him apart by five o'clock.“

  ”I'm just checking for a bullet wound, Doc,“ I said.

  I fitted both hands under the torso and flipped the body on its back.

  ”Oh shit,“ a newsman said.

  ”Maybe the guy was having a female implant put in,“ a uniformed deputy said.

  ”Shut up, asshole,“ Helen said.

  There was a single wound above the groin area. It had been cored out by a fish eel, whose head was embedded deep in the flesh while the tail flipped in the air like a silver whip.

  ”You might look for a nine-millimeter, Doc,“ I said.

  ”You know this guy?“ he asked.

  ”My guess is his name was Jack,“ I said.

  Helen brushed at his thigh with a piece of folded cardboard. ”Here's a tattoo his friends missed,“ she said.

  It was a faded green, red, and gold Marine Corps globe and anchor imposed upon a cone-shaped open parachute.

  ”The poor dumb fuck didn't even know who he was on a skivvy run,“ Helen said.

  Helen's therapist had asked her one of those questions for which an honest answer is seemingly disingenuous or so self-revealing that you don't wish to inhabit your own skin for a while.

  * * *

  My dreams seemed continuous, beginning with the first moments of sleep and ending at dawn, but the props and central characters always remained the same.

  I stand at a brass-railed mahogany bar on a pink evening in the Philippines, the palm fronds in the courtyard waving slightly in the breeze. I knock back a shot glass of Beam and chase it with San Miguel on the side, rest my forearms on the coolness of the wood and wait for the rush, which, like an old friend, never disappoints, which always lasers straight to the nerve endings at the base of the brain and fills the glands and loins and the sealed corridors of memory with light and finally gives ease to the constricted and fearful heart.

  For a while.

  The bartender's face is pale yellow, the skin tight against the skull, the skin stretched into cat's whiskers, the mouth a stitched slit. The evening air is filled with the rustle of bead curtains and the silky whisper of the Oriental women who move through them; redolent with the thick, sweet smell of opium, like honey and brown sugar burned in a spoon, and the smoky scent of whiskey aged in charcoal barrels, the black cherries and sliced oranges and limes that you squeeze between your back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure, as though somehow they connect you with tropical gardens rather than places under the earth.

  The dream always ends in the same way, but I never know if the scene is emblematic or an accurate recall of events that took place during a blackout. I see myself lifted from a floor by men with no faces who pitch me through a door into a stone-paved alley that reverberates with a clatter of metal cans and crones who scavenge through garbage. A pimp and a whore rifle my pockets while I stare up at them, as helpless as if my spine were severed; my hands are cuffed behind me in a chair in a. Third World police station while I shake with delirium tremens and sweat as big as flattened marbles slides down my face. When I wake from the dream my breath shudders in my throat, the air in the room seems poisoned with exhaled and rebreathed alcohol, and I sit on the edge o f my bed and begin to rework the first three steps of the AA recovery program. But there are other images in my mind now, more disturbing than the ones from my sleep. It's like a red bubble rising out of a heated place just beyond the limits of vision; then it bursts in the back of the brain and I can see tracers lacing the night like strips of barroom neon and taste the bitterness of cordite on my tongue. The rush is just like the whiskey that cauterizes memory and transforms electrified tigers into figures trapped harmlessly inside oil and canvas. My shield and my army-issue .45 automatic sit on top of my dresser in the moonlight. I think it's not an accident they found their way into my life.

  * * *

  An hour after I got home that evening the phone rang in the kitchen.

  ”We dug out two rounds,“ the medical examiner said. ”One of them's in good shape. But I'd say both are either nine-millimeter or .38 caliber.“

  ”Two?“ I said.

  ”There was a second entry wound below the right armpit. It did the most damage. It flattened against something and toppled before it entered the chest cavity. Anyway, it pierced both his lungs. You still think this was the guy out at your house?“

  ”Yeah, the guy was carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge under his right arm. One of the rounds probably deflected off it.“

  ”I suspect he was wrapped awful tight, then.“

  ”I don't understand,“ I said.

  ”He jacked a lot of adrenaline into his heart before he got hit. Otherwise, I don't know how he made it out of there. Anyway, tomorrow we'll see if we can match his blood to the specimens you gave me from Cade and the bushes in front of your house.“

  ”Thanks for your help, Doc.“

  ”Keep me posted on this one, will you?“

  ”Sure.“

  ”I wasn't passing on an idle thought about the adrenaline in this man's heart. I've read medical papers about the deaths of royalty who were executed during the French Revolution. Sometimes they were told if the headsman's blow was off the mark and they were able to get up and run, their lives would be spared. Some of them actually rose headless from the block and ran several yards before they collapsed.“

  ”Pretty grim stuff.“

  ”You're missing my point. I believe the man I took apart today was absolutely terrified. What could put that level of fear in a soldier of fortune?“

  Not bad, podna, I thought.

  * * *

  After supper I sat on the gallery and watched Alafair currying her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out in the railed lot by the shed we had built for him. Tripod was off his chain and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch, his tail hanging down the side of the wire like a ringed banner. My neighbor had moved out of his house and put it up for sale, but each evening he returned to turn on his soak hoses and water sprinklers, filling the air with an iridescent mist that drifted across his hydrangeas onto our lawn. The sun had descended into a flattened red orb on the western horizon, and in the scarlet wash of the afterglow the flooded tree trunks in the swamp seemed suffused with firelight, and you could see an empty rowboat tied up in the black stillness of the bayou's far bank, the wood as dry and white as bone.

  Bertie Fontenot's dinged and virtually paint less pickup truck bounced through the ruts in the road and turned into our drive. She got out, slammed the truck door, and labored up the incline, her elephantine hips rolling inside her print-cotton dress, her big lacquered straw bag with the plastic flowers on it gripped under her arm like an ammunition box.

  ”What you done about my title?“ she said.

  ”Nothing.“

  ”That's all you got to say?“

  ”You don't seem to accept my word, Bertie. So I've given up explaining myself.“

  She looked away at the horse lot.

  ”I seen you at Ruthie Jean's house. I thought maybe you was working on my title,“ she said.

  ”A murder investigation.“

  ”Ruthie Jean don't know nothing
about a murder. What you talking about?“

  ”You want to sit down, Bertie?“

  ”You finally axed,“ she said.

  I helped her up the steps into the swing. She wrapped one hand around the support chain and pushed herself back and forth in a slowly oscillating arc.

  ”This is a nice place for your li'l girl to grow up in, ain't it?“ she said.

  ”Yes, it is.“

  ”How long your family own this?“

  ”The land was part of my grandfather's farm. My father built the house in nineteen thirty.“

  ”How'd you like it if somebody just took it away from you, say you ain't got no proof it was part of your gran'daddy's farm? Run a dozer through the walls and scrape away the ground just like none of y'all was ever here?“

  ”You've got to give me some time, Bertie. I'm doing the best I can.”

  She snapped open the big clasp on her bag and reached inside. “You don't believe Moleen after some treasure on our land, so I brought you something,” she said. “I dug these out of my li'l garden early this spring.”

  One at a time she removed a series of thin eight- or nine-inch objects individually wrapped in tissue paper and bound with rubber bands. Then she rolled the rubber bands off one and peeled back the paper and flattened it against the swing.

  “What you think of that?” she said.

  The spoon was black as a scorched pot with tarnish, but she had obviously rubbed the metal smooth and free of dirt with rags so you could clearly see the coat of arms and the letter S embossed on the flanged head of the handle.

  “That's pretty impressive,” I said. “How deep was this in the soil?”

  “From my elbow to the tip of my finger.”

  “Have you shown this to anybody else?”

  “No, and I ain't going to. Not till I get a piece of paper that say that's my land.”

  “There's an antique gun and coin store in New Orleans, Cohen's, it's on Royal Street. Can I take one of these spoons there if I don't tell them where I got it?”

  “You give me your word on that?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “How long that gonna take?” she said, fanning herself with a flowered handkerchief.