DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  But it was the eyes that got your attention; they were absolutely black and they never blinked. And the voice: the accent was Irish Channel, but with a knot tied in it, as though the vocal cords were coated with infected membrane.

  His smile was easy, as relaxed as the matchstick he rolled on his tongue. A fat dark man in a green visor, who smoked a cigar, sat at a card table in the corner, adding up receipts on a calculator.

  "I got some unpaid parking tickets again?" Gouza said.

  I held my badge out for him to see. "No, I'm Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, Mr. Gouza. It's just an informal visit. Do you mind if I sit down?"

  If he recognized my name, it didn't show in his eyes or his smile.

  "Help yourself, if you don't mind me working. We got to get some stuff ready for the tax man."

  "I'm looking for Jack Gates," I said. "Or Eddy Raintree."

  "Who?"

  "How about Jewel Fluck?"

  "Fluck? Is this some kind of put-on?"

  "Let's start with Jack Gates again. You never heard of him?"

  "Nope."

  "That's funny. I heard he fed your brother-in-law into an airplane propeller."

  He took the matchstick out of the corner of his mouth and laughed.

  "It's a great story. I've heard it for years. But it's bullshit," he said. "My brother-in-law was killed in a plane accident on his way to Disneyland. A great family tragedy."

  The man at the other table was grinning and nodding his head up and down without interrupting his count of receipts.

  Then Joey Gouza put the matchstick back in his mouth and leaned his chin on his knuckle. His eyes were filled with an amused light as they moved up and down my person.

  "You say Iberia Parish?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "You guys gave up shaving or something?"

  "We're casual out in the parishes. Let's cut to it, Joey. You're an old-time pete man. Why do you want to give Weldon Sonnier a lot of grief?"

  "Weldon Sonnier?"

  "You don't know him, either?"

  "Everybody in New Orleans knows him. He's a bum and a welsher."

  "Who told you that?"

  "That's the word. He borrows big dough, but he doesn't come up with the vig. That'll get you into trouble in this town. You saying I'm connected with him or something?"

  "You tell me."

  "I know your name from a long time ago. You were at the First District, weren't you?"

  "That's right."

  "So I think maybe you heard stories about me. You probably read my rap sheet before you came here this morning, right? You know I've been up the road a couple of times, you know I burned a box or two. You heard that old bullshit story about how I got this voice, how a yard bitch put a capful of Sani-Flush in my coffee cup. How the yard bitch got his cherry split open in the shower two days later? You heard that one, didn't you?"

  "Sure."

  He smiled and said, "No, you didn't, but I'll give it to you free, anyway. The point is it's not true. I was never a big stripe, I did easy time, I made full trusty in every joint I was in. But the big word there is did. Past tense. I did my time. I've been straight seven years. Look--"

  He bounced his palm on top of a paper spindle and gazed reflectively out the window at some black children skateboarding by under the oaks.

  "I'm a businessman," he continued. "I own a bunch of restaurants, a linen service, a movie theater, a plumbing business, and half a vending-machine company. Are we on the same wavelength here?"

  He flexed his nostrils as though there were an obstruction in them and rubbed the grained skin of his jaw with one finger.

  "I'll try again," he said. "You said it a minute ago, I was a pete man. I punc down for it twice, too. But safecracking became a historical art a long time ago. Today it's all narcotics."

  "Bad stuff?" I smiled back at him.

  He shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms up.

  "Who am I to judge?" he said. "But go out to the welfare projects and see who's running the action. They're all colored kids. They scrape out crack pipes, they call it bazooka or something, and sell it for a buck a hit. Nobody who could think his way out of a wet paper bag is gonna try to compete with that."

  "Maybe my information isn't very good. Or maybe I'm a little bit out of touch. But it's my understanding that you've got connections with Bobby Earl, that Jack Gates is a button man for you."

  He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. He took the matchstick out of his mouth and dropped it in the waste can.

  "I've tried to be polite," he said. "You're from out of town, you had some questions, I tried to answer them. You think maybe you're abusing the situation here?"

  "I came here to pass on a couple of observations, Joey. When you try to get a cop on a pad and you don't know anything about him, get somebody to lend him money, don't leave it in his mailbox."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The two thousand is in the Iberia Parish sheriff's desk drawer. At the end of the year it'll probably be donated to the city park program."

  He was grinning again.

  "You're saying I tried to bribe you? You drove all the way over here to tell me somebody's two thou is wasted on you? That's the big message?"

  "Read it like you want."

  "It's been a lot of fun talking to you. Hey, I didn't tell you I own a couple of goony golf courses. You like goony golf? It's catching on here in New Orleans. Hey, Louis, give him a couple of tickets."

  The man with the cigar and green visor was grinning broadly, nodding his head up and down. He took a thick pack of tickets from his shirt pocket, popped two out from under the rubber band, and placed them on the desk in front of me.

  Joey Gouza made a pyramid out of his hands and tapped the end of his fingers together.

  "I heard you were an intelligent man, Joey. But it's my opinion you're a stupid shit," I said.

  His eyes went flat, and his face glazed over.

  "You fucked with Cletus Purcel. That's probably the worst mistake you ever made in your insignificant life," I said. "If you don't believe me, check out what happened to Julio Garcia and his bodyguard a few years back. I think they wished they had stayed in Managua and taken their chances with the Sandinistas."

  "That's supposed to make me rattle? You come in here like you fell out of a dirty-clothes bag, making noise like you got gas or something, and I'm supposed to rattle?" He pointed into his breastbone with four stiff fingers. "You think I give a fuck about what some pissant PI's gonna do? Tell me serious, I'm supposed to get on the rag because he whacked out a spick nobody in New Orleans would spit on?"

  "Clete didn't kill Garcia. His partner did."

  I saw the recognition grow in his eyes.

  "Tell those three clowns they're going down for the murder of a sheriff's deputy," I said. "Stay out of Iberia Parish. Stay away from Purcel. If you fall again, Joey, I'm going to make sure you go down for the bitch. Four-time loser, mandatory life."

  I flipped the goony golf passes on his shirt front. The man in the green visor sat absolutely still with his cigar dead in his mouth.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I got back to New Iberia I showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, and ate lunch with Bootsie in the backyard. I should have felt good about the day; it wasn't hot, like yesterday, the trees were loud with birds, the wind smelled of watermelons, the roses in my garden were as big as fists. But my eye registered all the wrong things: a fire burning in the middle of the marsh, where there should have been none; buzzards humped over a dead rabbit in the field, their beaks hooked and yellow and busy with their work; a little boy with an air rifle on the bank of the bayou, taking careful aim at a robin in an oak tree.

  Why? Because we were on our way back to the specialist in Lafayette. The treatment of lupus, in our case, had not been a matter of finding the right medication but the right balance. Bootsie needed dosages of corticosteroid to control the disease
that fed at her connective tissue, but the wrong dosage resulted in what is called steroid psychosis. For us her treatment had been like trying to spell a word correctly by repeatedly dipping a spoon into alphabet soup.

  There were times I felt angry at her, too. She was supposed to avoid the sun, but I often came home from work and found her weeding the flower beds in shorts and a halter. When we went out on the salt to seine for shrimp, she would break her promise and not only leave the cabin but strip nude, dive off the gunnel, and swim toward a distant sandbar, until she was a small speck and I would have to go after her.

  We got back from Lafayette at 4 Pm. with a half-dozen new prescriptions in her purse. I sat listlessly on the front porch and stared at the smoke still rising into the sky from the cypress trees burning in the marsh. Why had no one put it out, I thought.

  "What's wrong, Dave?" Alafair said.

  "Nothing, little guy. How you doing?" I put my arm around her small waist and pulled her against me. She had been riding her horse, and I could smell the sun in her hair and horse sweat in her clothes.

  "Why's there a fire out there?"

  "Dry lightning probably hit a tree during the night," I said. "It'll burn itself out."

  "Can we go buy some strawberries for dessert?"

  "I have to go by the office a few minutes. Maybe we'll go to town for some ice cream after supper. How's that?"

  "Dave, did the doctor say something bad about Bootsie?"

  "No, she's going to be fine. Why do you think that?"

  "Why did she do that with those, what d'you call them, those things the doctor gives her?"

  "Her prescriptions?"

  "Yeah. I saw her dump her purse all over her bed. Then she wadded up all those 'scriptions. When she saw me she put them all back in her purse and went into the bathroom. She kept running the water a long time. I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn't let me in."

  "Bootsie's sick, little guy. But she'll get better. You just got to do it a day at a time. Hey, hop on my back and let's check up on Batist, then I have to go."

  She walked up on the steps and then climbed like a frog onto my shoulders, and we galloped like horse and rider down to the dock. But it was hard to feign joy or confidence in the moment or the day.

  The wind changed, and I could smell the scorched, hot reek of burnt cypress in the marsh.

  I drove to the office, talked briefly with the sheriff about my visit to New Orleans, my search through biker bars for Eddy Raintree, and my conversation with Joey Gouza.

  "You think he's pulling the strings on this one?" the sheriff said.

  "He's involved one way or another. I'm just not sure how. He controls all the action in that part of Orleans Parish. The guys who beat up Clete wouldn't have done it without Gouza's orders or permission."

  "Dave, I don't want you putting a stick in Gouza's cage again. If we nail him, we'll do it with a warrant and we'll work through New Orleans P.D. He's a dangerous and unpredictable man."

  "The New Orleans families don't go after cops, sheriff. It's an old tradition."

  "Tell that to Garrett."

  "Garrett stumbled into it. In 1890 the Black Hand murdered the New Orleans police chief. A mob broke eleven of them out of the parish prison, hanged two from street lamps, and clubbed and shot the other nine to death. So cops like me get bribe offers and guys like Clete get brass knuckles."

  "Don't start a new precedent."

  I went to check my mailbox next to the dispatcher's office. It was five-fifteen. All I had to do was glance at my mail and thumb through my telephone messages and make one phone call, and I was sure that when Drew picked up the phone she would be calm, perhaps even apologetic for her distraught behavior of yesterday, and I would be on my way home to dinner.

  Wrong.

  The dispatcher had written Drew's message in blue ink across the first pink slip on the stack: Dave, don't you give a damn?

  Her house was only two blocks from the drawbridge that I would cross on my way home, I told myself. I would give myself fifteen minutes there. Friendship and the past required a certain degree of obligation, even if it was only a ritualistic act of assurance or kindness, and it had nothing to do with marital fidelity. Nothing, I told myself.

  She was barbecuing in the backyard. She was barefoot, and she wore white tennis shorts and a striped blue cotton shirt. Her face looked hot in the smoke, and the back of her tan neck was beaded with perspiration. The picnic table was covered with a flowered tablecloth, and in the middle of it was a washtub filled with crushed ice and long-neck bottles of Jax. The oaks and myrtle trees in the yard were full of fireflies, and through the gray trunks of the cypresses along the bank I could see some kids waterskiing behind a motorboat on Bayou Teche.

  "Maybe I dropped by at the wrong time," I said.

  "No, no, it's fine. I'm glad you're here," she said, waving the smoke away from her face. "Weldon and Bama are coming over at eight. Stay for supper if you like."

  "Thanks. I have to be getting on in a minute. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but I had to go to New Orleans. Did a uniformed deputy come out yesterday?"

  "Yes, he read magazines in my living room for three hours."

  She picked up an opened bottle of beer from the table and drank out of it. The bottle was beaded with moisture, and I watched the foam run down inside the neck into her mouth.

  "There's some soda in the refrigerator," she said.

  "That's all right."

  She put the bottle in her mouth again and looked at me.

  I glanced away from her, then picked up a fork and flipped one of the chickens on the grill. The sauce piquante flared in the fire and steamed off in the breeze.

  "Why didn't you report the break-in, Drew?"

  "I don't know who it was. What good would it do?"

  "Was it your father?"

  "If he's alive, he'd have no interest in me."

  "Do you think it was one of Joey Gouza's people?"

  "That gangster in New Orleans?"

  "That's right. I have a feeling he and Weldon are on a first-name basis."

  "If I knew who it was, I'd tell you."

  "Cut it out, Drew. You can't get strung out one day, then the next day go back to the deaf-and-dumb routine."

  "I don't like you talking to me like that, Dave,"

  "You made a point of relaying your feelings through the dispatcher. It's a small department, Drew. It's a small town."

  "I don't have those kinds of concerns, thank God. I'm sorry if you do."

  She took a bandana from her pocket and wiped the perspiration off the back of her neck. Her face suddenly looked soft and cool in the mauve-colored light off the bayou.

  "I wasn't doing very well yesterday," she said. "Maybe I shouldn't have called you. I shouldn't have made it so personal, either."

  "Look, when somebody creeps your house, it's for one of two reasons: either to steal from you or do you bodily harm, or perhaps both. When it happens, it frightens you. You feel violated. You want to take everything out of your closets and dresser drawers and wash them."

  She unsnapped the cap on another bottle of Jax and sat down on the picnic bench. But she didn't drink from the bottle. She just kept drawing a line down through the moisture with her finger.

  "I was in northern Nicaragua," she said. "When the contras 'violated' someone, they cut the person up in pieces."

  "I was just trying to say that your reaction was understandable, Drew."

  "I bought a pistol this morning. The next time someone breaks into my house, I'm going to kill the sonofabitch."

  "That's not going to make the bigger problem go away. You're protecting Weldon from something, and at the same time you know if he doesn't get help, he's going to take a fall. I think you've got another problem, too. Weldon's done something that goes against your conscience, and somehow he's pulled you into it."

  "I wish I could be omniscient. It must be wonderful to have that gift."

  "Has he been mixed up
with the contras?"

  "No."

  I looked her steadily in the eyes.

  "I said no," she repeated.

  "I'm going to say something you probably won't like. Weldon worked for the CIA. Air America flew in and out the Golden Triangle. Sometimes they ferried around warlords, who were in reality transporting narcotics. The station chiefs knew it, the pilots knew it. Weldon's been involved in some nasty stuff. Maybe it's time he took his own fall. I think he's a chickenshit for hiding behind his sister."