Burning Angel dr-8

by James Lee Burke

  “You got cement around your head? I ain't a bad guy. We went into Laos twice to get your friend back. You know anybody else who gave a shit about him?”

  “You frightened my daughter. One way or another, that's going to get squared, Emile.”

  “Me? Marsallus was there. She didn't tell you?”

  “Your wheel man, Jerry Jeff Hooker, is in custody. He gave you up. Come in and maybe we can get you into a federal hospital.”

  “I could smell Marsallus's breath, it was like the stink when you pop a body bag. The Dutchie turned him loose on me. Laos, Guatemala, colored town out there on the highway, it's all part of the same geography. Hell don't have boundaries, man. Don't you understand that?”

  The phone was silent a long time. In the moonlight I saw an owl sink its razored beak into a wood rabbit in my neighbor's field. Then Emile Pogue quietly hung up.

  CHAPTER 31

  The sheriff had been moved out of Intensive Care into an ordinary room at Iberia General, one that was filled with flowers and slatted sunlight. But his new environment was a deception. His whiskers were white against his flaccid skin, and his eyes had a peculiar cast in them, what we used to call the thousand-yard stare, as though he could not quite detach himself from old events that were still aborning for him on frozen hilltops that rang with bugles.

  “Can you hand me my orange juice, please?” he said.

  I lifted the glass straw to his lips, watched him draw the juice and melting ice into his mouth.

  “I dreamed about roses under the snow. But then I saw they weren't roses. They were drops of blood where we marched out of the Chosin. It's funny how your dreams mix up things,” he said.

  “It's better to let old wars go, skipper.”

  “New Iberia is a good place.”

  “It sure is.”

  “We need to get these bastards out of here, Dave,” he said.

  “We will.”

  “Your daughter ID-ed Marsallus from his mug shot?”

  “I shouldn't have told you that story,” I said.

  “They couldn't pull him across the Styx. That's a good story to hear… Dave?”

  “Yes?”

  “I never told this to anyone except a marine chaplain. I sent three North Korean POW's to the rear once with a BAR man who escorted them as far as one hill. In my heart I knew better, because the BAR man was one of those rare guys who enjoyed what he did…”

  I tried to interrupt, but he raised two fingers off the sheet to silence me.

  “That's why I always sit on you, always try to keep the net over all of us … so we don't take people off behind a hill.”

  “That's a good way to be,” I said.

  “You don't understand. It's the rules get us killed sometimes. You got too many bad people circling you.”

  His voice became weaker, and I saw the light in his eyes change, his chest swell, as he breathed more deeply.

  “I'd better go now. I'll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Don't leave yet.” His hand moved across my wrist. “I don't want to fall asleep. During the day I dream about trench rats. It was twenty below and they'd eat their way inside the dead. That's how they live, Dave … By eating their way inside us.”

  * * *

  I went home for lunch, then walked down to the dock to talk to Alafair, who had just gotten out of school for the summer. Sitting under an umbrella at one of the spool tables was Terry Serrett, Clete's secretary. She wore pale blue shorts and a halter and her skin looked as white as a fish's belly. She read a magazine behind a pair of dark glasses while she idly rubbed suntan lotion on her thighs. When she heard my footsteps, she looked up at me and smiled. Her cheeks were roughed with orange circles like makeup on a circus clown.

  “You're not working today?” I said.

  “There's not much to do, I'm afraid. It looks like Clete is going to move back to New Orleans in a couple of weeks.”

  “Can I bring you something?”

  “Well, no, but… Can you sit down a moment?”

  The wind was warm off the water, and I was sweating inside my shirt even in the umbrella's shade.

  “Clete's told me a little bit about this man Sonny Marsallus,” she said. “Is it true he knows something about POW's in Southeast Asia?”

  “It's hard to say, Ms. Serrett.”

  “It's Terry… We think my brother got left behind in Cambodia. But the government denies he was even there.”

  “Sonny was never in the service. Anything he … knew was conjecture, probably.”

  “Oh … I got the impression he had evidence of some kind.”

  Her sunglasses were tinted almost black, and the rest of her face was like an orange and white mask.

  “I'm sorry about your brother,” I said.

  “Well, I hope I haven't bothered you,” she said, and touched my elbow softly.

  “No, not at all.”

  “I guess I'd better go before I burn up in this sun.”

  “It's a hot one,” I said.

  I watched her walk up the dock on her flats toward her car, a drawstring beach bag hanging from her wrist. The line of soft fat that protruded from her waistband was already pink with sunburn.

  I went inside the bait shop. Alafair was stocking lunch meat and cold drinks in the wall cooler.

  “Hi, Dave,” she said. “Who was that lady?”

  “Clete s secretary.”

  She made a face.

  “What's wrong?” I said.

  She looked out the window screen. “Where's Batist?” she said.

  “Out on the ramp.”

  “She was sitting inside a half hour ago, smoking one cigarette after another, smelling the whole place up. Batist gave me his Pepsi because he had to go put some man's boat in. After he went out, she said, ‘Better bring that over here, honey.’ I didn't know what she meant. I walked over to her table and she took the can out of my hand and got a bunch of napkins out of the holder and started wiping the top. She said, ‘You shouldn't drink after other people.’ Then she put it back in my hand and said, ‘There… Maybe now you won't have to scrub your gums with disinfectant. But I'd still pour it down the drain if I were you.’ What's she doing here, Dave?”

  * * *

  Rufus Arceneaux lived in a wood frame house on Bayou Teche just outside St. Martinville. He had a gas light in his front yard, a new aluminum boat shed under his oak trees, an electric bug killer that snapped and hissed on his gallery. He did not resent his black neighbors because he considered himself superior to them and simply did not recognize their existence. Nor did he envy the rich, as he believed them the recipients of luck passed out by a society that was meant to be inequitable and often blessed the bumbling and the effete. His wary eye, instead, was directed at his peers and those among them who succeeded, he was sure, through stealth and design, and always at his expense.

  He brought back a Japanese wife from Okinawa, a small, shy woman with bad teeth who worked briefly in a bakery and who lowered her eyes and covered her mouth when she grinned. One night the neighbors made a 911 call on Rufus's house, but the wife told the responding sheriff's deputies her television set had been tuned too loud, there was certainly no problem in the home.

  One morning she did not report to work at the bakery. Rufus called the owner later and said she had mumps. When people saw her in town, her face was heavily made up, marbled with discolorations.

  She left town on a Greyhound bus the following year. A Catholic priest who worked with Vietnamese refugees drove her to the depot in Lafayette and refused to tell anyone her destination.

  For a while Rufus lived with a topless dancer from Morgan City, then a woman who had been fired from her position as a juvenile probation officer in Lake Charles. There were others, too, who came and went, all out of that seemingly endless supply of impaired or abused women who find temporary solace in the approval of a man who will eventually degrade and reject them. As an ex-NCO, Rufus was not one to argue with long-established systems. Th
e only constants in Rufus's life were his two hunting dogs and his squared-away, freshly painted frame house.

  It was twilight when I drove up his dirt drive and parked my truck in the trees and walked behind his house. He was drinking bottled beer in his undershirt on the cement pad that served as a back porch, his knees crossed, a pork roast hissing on a rotisserie barbecue pit. Rufus's shoulders were as smooth as stone, olive with tan, a gold and red Marine Corps emblem tattooed on his right arm. At the foot of his sloping yard a half-flooded pirogue lay in the shadows, its sides soft with green mold.

  As was his way, he was neither friendly nor unfriendly. My presence in his life, off the clock, had no more significance than the whir of cars out on the state highway. A brunette woman with unbrushed hair, in cutoff blue jeans, came outside, set a small table with wood salad bowls and plates, and never looked at me. Nor did he attempt to introduce her.

  He slid a metal chair toward me with his foot.

  “There's some cold drinks in the cooler,” he said.

  “I understand you drove Ruthie Jean Fontenot to the airport.”

  He put a cigarette in his mouth, worked his lighter out of the watch pocket of his Levi's. It had a bronze globe and anchor soldered on its side.

  “What's the problem on that, Dave?” he said.

  “Are you working for the Bertrands?” I tried to smile.

  “Not really.”

  “I got you.”

  “Just doing somebody a favor,” he said.

  “I see. You think Ruthie Jean's getting set up?”

  “For what?”

  “The Bertrands have their own way of doing business.”

  He drank from his beer, a slow, steady sip that showed neither need nor particular pleasure. He blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into the violet air.

  “We're going to eat in a minute,” he said.

  “I'm going to try to reopen the vehicular homicide case on Julia and Moleen.”

  “Be my guest. They weren't involved.”

  I looked at his rugged profile, the blond crewcut, the lump of cartilage in the jaw, the green eyes that were often filled with the lights of envy, and felt the peculiar sensation I was looking at an innocent who had no awareness of the lines he had stepped across.

  “Moleen's mixed up with people who don't take prisoners, Roof,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? He's a needle dick. His wife slides up and down the banister all morning to keep his lunch warm.”

  “See you around,” I said.

  * * *

  I woke early the next morning and drove out to the Bertrand plantation.

  Why?

  I really didn't know. The cement trucks, graders, and bulldozers were all idle and unattended now, sitting quietly among the swaths of destruction they had cut from the highway back to the treeline. Why had a company called Blue Sky Electric chosen this spot for its location? Access to the railroad? That was part of it, obviously. But there were a lot of train tracks in the state of Louisiana.

  Maybe the answer lay in who lived here.

  They were by and large disenfranchised and uneducated, with no political or monetary power. You did not have to be a longtime resident of Louisiana to understand their historical relationship to corporate industries.

  Those who worked in the canneries were laid off at the end of the season, then told at the state of employment office that their unemployment claims were invalid because their trade was exclusively that of professional canners; and since the canneries were closed for the season, the workers were not available for work, and hence ineligible for the benefits that had been paid into their fund.

  This was the Orwellian language used to people who had to sign their names with an X. For years the rice and sugar mills fired anyone who used the word union and paid minimum wage only because of their participation in interstate commerce. During the civil rights era, oil men used to joke about having “a jig on every rig.” But the racial invective was secondary to the real logos, which was to ensure the availability of a huge labor pool, both black and white, that would work for any wage that was offered them.

  The stakes today, however, were geographical. The natural habitat's worst enemies, the chemical plants and oil refineries, had located themselves in a corridor along the Mississippi known as Toxic Alley, running from Baton Rouge down to St. Gabriel.

  Almost without exception the adjacent communities were made up of blacks and poor whites.

  * * *

  I drove down the dirt road and stopped in front of Luke Fontenot's house. I saw his face at the window, then he opened the screen and walked out on the gallery, shirtless, barefoot, a jelly glass full of hot coffee in his hand.

  “Something happen?” he said.

  “No, I was just killing time. How you doing, Luke?”

  “Ain't doing bad… You just driving around?”

  “That's about it.”

  He inserted a thumbnail in his teeth, then folded his fingers and looked at the tops of his nails. “I need legal advice about something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Got to have your promise it ain't going nowhere.”

  “I'm a police officer, Luke.”

  “You a police officer when you feel like being one, Mr. Dave.”

  “I'd better get to the office.”

  He craned out over the railing, looked down the dirt road, measured the sun's height in the sky.

  “Come on out back,” he said.

  I followed him around the side of the house. He paused by the back porch, slipped a pair of toe less canvas shoes over his feet, and pulled a cane sickle out of a tree stump where chickens had been butchered.

  “See where the coulee go, out back of the old privy?” he said, walking ahead of me. “Yesterday they was running the grader along the edge of the coulee. The bank started caving, and the guy turned the grader out in the field and didn't do no more work here. Last night the moon was up and I seen something bright in the dirt.”

  The coulee ran like a ragged wound in the earth to the edge of a cane field, where it had been filled in years ago so the cultivated acreage would not be dissected by a water drainage. The sides were eaten and scrolled with crawfish holes, the bottom thick with cattails and reeds, webs of dead algae, cane husks, and through the cattails a chain of stagnant pools that trembled with insects.

  Luke looked back over his shoulder at the dirt road, then slid down the side of the coulee and stepped across a pool to the opposite bank.

  “See where the machine crushed down the dirt?” he said. “It look like a bottom lip hanging down, don't it?” He smiled up at me. “Mr. Dave, you gonna tell this to somebody?”

  I squatted down on my haunches and didn't answer. He smiled again, blew out his breath, as though he were making an irrevocable commitment for both of us, then began working the tip of the sickle into the bank, scaling it away, watching each dirt clod that rolled down to his feet.

  “What I found last night I stuck back in them holes,” he said. He sliced at the bank, and a curtain of dirt cascaded across his canvas shoes. “Lookie there,” he said, his fingers grabbing at three dull pieces of metal that toppled and bounced into the water.

  He stooped, his knees splayed wide, shoved his wrists into the reeds and the water that was clouding with gray puffs of mud, worked his fingers deeper into the silt, then held up an oblong, coin like piece of silver and dropped it into my palm.

  “What you call that?” he said.

  I rubbed my thumb across the slick surface, the embossed cross and archaic numbers and lettering on it.

  “It's Spanish or Portuguese, Luke. I think these were minted in Latin America, then shipped back to Europe,” I said.

  “Aint Bertie been right all along. Jean Lafitte buried his treasure here.”

  “Somebody did. What was the advice you wanted?”

  “The wall of this coulee's probably full of them coins. But we talked Aint Bertie into giving up her claim.”

  “This
whole area is going to be covered with cement and buildings,”

  I said. “The guys doing it don't care about the dead people buried here. Why should they care about the coins?”

  “That's what I been thinking. No point bothering them.”

  “I couldn't argue with that. How about I buy you some breakfast up on the highway, Luke?”

  “I'd like that real fine. Yes, suh, I was fixing to ax you the same thing.”

  * * *

  Clete came into the office right after lunch. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks low on his hips and a dark blue short-sleeve silk shirt. He kept glancing back toward the glass partition into the hallway.

  “Do I need a passport to get into this place?” he said. He got up, opened the door, and looked into a uniformed deputy's face. “Can I help you with something?” He returned to his chair, looked hard at the glass again, his face flushed.

  “Ease up, Clete,” I said.

  “I don't like people staring at me.” The soles of his loafers tapped up and down on the floor.

  “You want to tell me what it is?”

  “Erru'le Pogue's trying to set you up.”

  “Oh?”

  “You're going to step right into it, too.” He paced in front of my desk and kept snapping his fingers and hitting his hands together. “I shouldn't have come in here.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “He called my office. He said he wants to give himself up.”

  “Why didn't he call me?”

  “He thinks you're tapped.”

  “Where is he, Clete?”

  “I knew it.”

  CHAPTER 32

  It was late afternoon when we put my boat into the Atchafalaya River and headed east into the basin and the huge network of bayous, bays, sandbars, and flooded stands of trees that constitute the alluvial system of the river. The sun was hot and bloodred above the willow islands behind us and you could see gray sheets of rain curving out of the sky in the south and waves starting to cap in the bay. I opened up both engines full throttle and felt the water split across the bow, hiss along the hull like wet string, then flatten behind us in a long bronze trough dimpled with flying fish that glided on the wind like birds.