DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  Then he looked at me quietly, and I saw the pity and concern, in his eyes.

  "You dropped your brains in a jar of alcohol for a few hours," he said. "Big deal. When I worked Vice I got rolled by one of my own snitches. Plus she gave me the gon. What bothers me is I think I knew she had it when I got in the sack with her."

  He grinned and blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the stale refrigerated air.

  That was my old partner before whiskey and uppers and shylocks made him a fugitive from his own police department.

  His face whitened when he tried to sit farther up in bed and reach the water glass and the glass straw on the nightstand.

  "Don't try to move around with broken ribs, Clete," I said, and handed him the glass.

  His green eyes were red along the rims, and they blinked like a bird's while he sucked on the straw with the corner of his mouth. Divots of hair had been shaved out of his head, and his scalp was sewn with butterfly stitches in a half-dozen places.

  "Man, what a drag," he said. "They say I'm supposed to be in here two more days. I don't think I can cut it. You ought to see my night nurse. She looks like the Beast of Buchenwald. She tried to shove a thermometer up my butt while I was asleep."

  "They hit you with pipes?"

  "No, the little guy had brass knuckles, and Jack Gates, the guy I made for sure, had a baton."

  "The cop I talked to said they beat you up with pipes."

  "Then they got it wrong in the report. They sound like the same incompetent guys we used to work with."

  "How'd they get into your apartment?"

  "Picked the lock, I guess. Anyway, Jack Gates was behind the door when I walked in. He caught me right across the ear with the baton. Damn, those things hurt. I crashed right over my new TV set. Then that little fuck was all over me. The last thing I remember I was falling through the furniture, trying to get my piece untangled from my coat, those brass knuckles bouncing off my head, and Gates trying to get a clear swing to take me off at the neck. That's when I grabbed him around the head and tore the stocking off his face. The first thing I saw was all the metal in his teeth. Then it was lights out for Cletus. That sawed-off little fart caught me right at the base of the skull. "It was just like you said, Gates has a scrap yard for a mouth. I should have made the connection before. He was a button man for Joey Gouza, but I heard he moved to Fort Lauderdale or Hallendale two or three years ago and got ice-picked by a chippy or something. But it was Jack Gates, mon, a real barf bucket. I heard Joey Gouza caught his brother-in-law skimming off his whores, so he told Gates to create an object lesson. The brother-in-law was a big, soft mushy guy who couldn't climb a stairs without pulling himself up the banister with both hands. Gates wined and dined him at Copeland's, got him stinking drunk, and kept telling him about these hot-assed Mexican broads over in Galveston. So the tub got his ovaries fired up, and Gates drove them out to a private airport in Kenner, all the time telling the tub what these broads would do for his sex life. Then ole Jack walked him out to the runway, lit a cigar for him, and pushed him into an airplane propeller."

  "You think he's working for Gouza now?"

  "He's got to be. You don't resign from Joey Meatballs. It's a lifetime job."

  "Where'd he get that name?"

  "His old man ran a spaghetti place on Felicity. In fact, Joey still owns three or four Italian restaurants around town. But the story is when he was a kid in the reformatory a redneck guard made Joey cook him meatballs all the time. Except Joey would always spit in them or mash up dead cockroaches in them. Have you ever seen him? His mother must have been knocked up by a street lamp."

  "The little guy with the brass knuckles is probably Fluck, right?"

  "Maybe. But a nylon stocking makes everybody look like Cream of Wheat. All I can tell you is I think he wanted to take my eyes out.... Why are you looking like that?"

  "I got you into this, Clete."

  "No, you didn't. It was my idea to go out to Bobby Earl's and pull on his tallywhacker. But I was right about the connection between Earl and Gouza, won't I? I told you that flunky at the gate used to be a mule for Gouza. I think we've got the ultimate daisy chain of Louisiana buttwipes here-Klansmen, Nazis, and wiseguys."

  "You took the beating for me."

  "Bullshit."

  "You haven't heard it all. I received a bribe attempt earlier today. A couple of grand in my mailbox, a letter suggesting I spend a lot of time around New Iberia."

  "Ah," he said. The streetcar rattled down the tracks on St. Charles. "The carrot and the stick."

  "I think so."

  "And I got the stick."

  "They don't like to beat up cops."

  "They did something else too, Dave, maybe a signal for you about their future potential. After they laid me out, they sprinkled a bagful of rainbows and black beauties all over the room to make it look like a drug deal gone sour. I cleaned them up before I called the First District.... Dave, I don't like what I'm seeing on your face."

  "What's that?"

  "Like you got a piece of barbed wire behind your eyes. You get those thoughts out of your head."

  "You're mistaken."

  "Like hell I am. Ole Streak turns on the Mixmaster and almost drives himself crazy with his own thoughts, then goes out and strikes a match to their balls. You wait till I'm out of here and we'll 'front these guys together. Are we straight on that, podjo?"

  I looked at the square of sunlight on his sheets. The palm trees outside the window lifted and straightened in the breeze.

  "I'm not supposed to be a player?" he said.

  "You want me to bring you anything?"

  "Don't go up against Gouza on your own. An Iberia sheriff's badge is puppy shit to these guys."

  "What do you want me to bring you?"

  "My piece. It's in a little sock drawer under my bed." He took his keys off the nightstand and dropped them in my palm. "There's also a fifth of vodka and a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter."

  "I'll be back in a little while."

  "Dave?"

  "Yes?"

  "Gouza's a weird combo. He's got an ice cube in the center of his head when it comes to business, but he's also a sadistic paranoid. A lot of the greaseballs in this town are scared shitless of him."

  I drove to Clete's apartment on Dumaine in the Quarter, put his.38 revolver and shoulder holster, his vodka and cigarettes in a paper bag and was walking back down the balcony when I saw the apartment manager sweeping dust out his doorway through the railing into the courtyard below.

  He was a dark-skinned, black-haired man with bad teeth and turquoise eyes. I opened my badge and asked him if he had seen the men who had beaten Clete.

  "Yeah, sho' I seen them. I seen them run down the stairs," he said. He had a heavy Cajun accent.

  I asked him what they looked like.

  "One man, I didn't see him too good, no, he walked on down Dumaine. I didn't pay him no mind 'cause I didn't know nothing was wrong, me. But there was a little one, a blond-haired fella, he pushed by me on the stair and run out on the street and got on a motorcycle wit' another fella."

  "What did this fellow on the motorcycle look like?"

  "Big," he said. Then he tapped on his biceps with one finger. "He had a tattoo. A tiger. It was yellow and red. I seen it real good 'cause I didn't like that little fella pushing me on the stair."

  "Who'd you tell this to?"

  "I ain't said nothing to nobody."

  "Why not?"

  "Ain't nobody ax me."

  After I dropped off the paper sack with Clete's gun, cigarettes, and vodka at the hospital, the sun was low in the sky, red through the oak trees on St. Charles Avenue, and swallows were circling in the dusk. I checked into an inexpensive guesthouse on Prytania, just two blocks off St. Charles, and called Bootsie and told her that I would have to stay over and that I would be home tomorrow afternoon.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "I have to run down a couple of things. It's grunt w
ork mostly. Will you be all right?"

  "Yes. Of course."

  "Are you all right, Boots?"

  "Yes. Everything's fine this evening. It was hot today, but it's cooling off this evening. It might rain tonight. There's lightning out over the marsh."

  I could feel the day's fatigue in my body. I closed and widened my eyes. The long-distance hum in the telephone receiver was like wet sand in my ear.

  "Would you call the dispatcher for me?" I said.

  "All right. Don't worry about anything, Dave. We're just fine."

  After I hung up I said a prayer to my Higher Power to watch over my home in my absence, then I called Clarise, an elderly mulatto woman who had worked for my family since I was a child, and asked her to look in on Bootsie that evening and to return in the morning to do house chores.

  I showered in a tin stall with water that was so cold it left me breathless, put back on the same clothes I had worn all day, ate a plate of rice, red beans, and sausage at Fat Al bert's on St. Charles, then began a neon-lit odyssey through the biker bars of Jefferson and Orleans parishes.

  It's a strange, atavistic, and tribal world to visit. Individually its members are usually hapless, bumbling creatures who were born out of luck and whose largest successes usually consist of staying out of jail, paying off their bondsmen, and keeping their appointments with their probation officers and welfare workers. It's probably not coincidence that most of them are ugly and stupid. But collectively they are both frightening and a source of fascination for those who wonder what it might be like if they traded off their routine and predictable lives for a real fling out on the ragged edge.

  The first bar I hit was one out on Airline Highway. Think of a shale parking lot covered with chopped-down Harleys whose chrome and lacquered-black surfaces seem to glow with a nocturrial iridescence; a leather jackboot stomping down on a starter pedal, the ear-splitting roar of straight exhaust pipes, the tinkle of a beer bottle flung through the limbs of an oak tree, a man urinating loudly on the shale in front of a pickup truck's headlights, his muscular, blue-jeanclad legs spread with the visceral self-satisfaction of a gladiator; the inside of a clapboard building crowded with men in sleeveless Levi jackets, boots sheathed with metal plates, black leather cutouts that etch the genitals and flap on the legs like a gunfighter's chaps; bodies strung with chains and iron crosses, covered with hair and tattoos of swastikas and snakes with human skulls inserted between the fangs; an odor of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigarette smoke rubbed like wet nicotine into the clothes, grease and motor oil, reefer, and a faint hint of testosterone and dried semen.

  I was sure that the man with the tiger tattoo who had ridden away from Clete's apartment was Eddy Raintree, but he was not the same biker who had put the bribe money in my mailbox. Which meant that in all probability there was a connection between bikers, the Aryan Brotherhood, exconvicts, and Bobby Earl or Joey Gouza. It made sense.

  Most outlaw bikers I had known were sexual fascists, and they were always seeking new and defenseless targets for the anger and dark blood that were trapped in their loins like throbbing birds.

  But I got virtually nowhere at the bar on Airline Highway or at any of the other bars I cruised until 3 A.M. No one knew Eddy Raintree, had ever heard of him, or even thought his photograph vaguely familiar. But at the last place I visited, a narrow brick poolroom that used to be run by blacks between two warehouses across the river in Algiers, a drunk woman at the bar let me buy her a bowl of chili, and in her sad way she tried to be helpful.

  Her hair was platinum, dark at the scalp, and the number 69 was tattooed on her arm. She wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with no bra, and a pair of Clorox-faded Levi's that hung as low as a bikini on her hips. (I had never been able to understand the women who hung with outlaw bikers, because with some regularity they were gang-raped, chainwhipped, and had their hands nailed to trees, but they came back for more, obedient, anesthetized, and bored, like spectators at their own dismemberment.)

  She kept lifting spoonfuls of chili to her mouth, then forgetting to eat them, her eyes trying to focus on my face and the photograph of Eddy Raintree I held in my palm.

  "What do you want with that dumb shit?" she asked. Her words were phlegmatic, like dialogue in a slow-motion film.

  "Could you tell me where he is?"

  "In jail, probably. Or out fucking goats or something."

  "When did you see him last?"

  She drew in on her cigarette and held the smoke down like she was taking a hit off a reefer.

  "You don't want to waste your time with a dumb shit like that," she said.

  "I'd really like to talk with Eddy. I'd really appreciate it if you could help me."

  "He's into astronomy or something. He's weird. I've got enough weirdness in my life without a dumb fuck like that."

  Then her boyfriend came back from the men's room. He was huge, with a wild beard, and he wore striped overalls with no shirt. His massive shoulders were ridged with hair; his odor was incredible.

  "What do you think you're doing, man?" he said.

  "Just finishing my conversation with this lady."

  "It's finished. Good-bye."

  I left two dollars on the bar for the chili and walked back out into the night. The heat of the day had finally lifted from the streets and the cement buildings, the wind was cool blowing from across the river, and I could see the red and green running lights of the oil barges on the water, and the glow of New Orleans against the clouds.

  I slept until nine the next morning, had coffee and beignets at a cool table under the pavilion at the Cafe du Monde, and watched the water from the sprinklers click against the piked fence around the park in Jackson Square and drift in a rainbow haze through the myrtle and banana trees. Then I went over to First District headquarters a few blocks away and read Joey Gouza's file. It was another study in institutional failure, the kind of document that makes you doubt your own convictions and conclude that perhaps the rightwing simpletons are correct when they advocate going at social complexities with a chainsaw.

  Since age thirteen, he'd had forty-three arrests. He was in the Louisiana reformatory when he was seventeen, he went up the road twice to Angola, and he did a federal three-bit in Lewisburg. He had been arrested for breaking-andentering, auto theft, assault and battery, possession of burglar tools, armed robbery, strong-arm robbery, sale of stolen food stamps, possession of counterfeit money, procuring, tax fraud, and murder. He was one of those career criminals who early on had gone about investigating and participating in every kind of illegal activity that a city offered. But, unlike most petty thieves, pimps, smalltime fences, and smashand-grab artists, Joey had gravitated steadily upward in the New Orleans mob and had developed a skill that was at one time revered in the underworld, that of the safecracker. Evidently he had peeled and cut up safes with burnbars in four states, although he had fallen on only one job, a box in a Baton Rouge pawnshop that netted him eighty-six dollars and a two-year jolt in Angola.

  He wasn't hard to find. He owned a small Italian cafd and delicatessen in an old brick, iron-scrolled building shaded by oak trees on Esplanade. The inside smelled of oregano and meat sauce, crab-boil, sautded shrimp, cheese and salami, the fried oysters and sliced tomatoes and onions that went into the poor-boy sandwiches on the counter, the steamed coffee from the espresso machines. The cafe was empty except for a black cook, the counterman, and a couple having breakfast at one of the checkercloth tables.

  I asked for Joey Gouza.

  "He's back in the office. What's the name?" the counterman said.

  "Dave Robicheaux."

  "Just a minute." He walked to the end of the counter and spoke through a half-opened door.

  "Who's the guy?" a peculiar thick voice inside said.

  "I don't know. Just a guy." The counterman looked back at me.

  "Then ask him who he is," the voice said, The counterman looked back at me again. I opened up my badge.

  "He's a cop, Joey," the count
erman said.

  "Then tell him to come in, for Christ's sake."

  I walked around the counter and through the door. Joey Gouza looked up at me from behind his desk. He was deeply tanned, tall, his face elongated, almost jug-shaped, his salt-and-pepper hair cut military style and brushed up stiffly on his scalp, his eyes as black as wet paint. He wore pleated gray slacks, a lavender polo shirt, oxblood loafers; a cream-colored panama hat sat crown down on the corner of his desk. His neck was unnaturally long, like a swan's, hung with gold chains and medallions, and his open shirt exposed the web of veins and tendons in his shoulders and chest, like those in a long-distance runner or javelin thrower.