DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  One of the cops used his radio, and moments later city police cars, with emergency lights flashing, poured into the block. They parked sideways in the street and blocked both driveway entrances; then uniformed cops swarmed across lawns and through hedges, shined their flashlights into cars, wrote down the numbers on every license tag in the neighborhood, arrived with more leashed dogs, and turned a quiet residential lakefront street into a carnival.

  Two plain-clothes detectives walked up to the rear of the limo and inserted a crowbar in the jamb of the trunk. By now the guests at the lawn party had started drifting out toward the curb, led by Joey Gouza and, behind him, a baldheaded barrel of a man in a white sports coat with a carnation, dark trousers, and white shoes.

  "How you enjoying it so far?" the sheriff said.

  "It's great stuff."

  He paused the VCR.

  "You recognize the guy in the sports coat?" he said.

  "No."

  "That's Dominic the Pipe Gabelli. He got his name from bashing a fellow inmate at Lewisberg. He's also a member of the Chicago commission. What do you think those cops are going to find in the trunk?"

  I didn't answer.

  "It's not a body," he said.

  "You asked me down here to watch this, sheriff. If you want to make an implication about my involvement in the events in a surveillance film, then you should go ahead and do that. But you're going to have to get somebody else to listen to it."

  "That's a little strong, don't you think?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Well, let's see what happens."

  He started the tape again and increased the volume. The two plain-clothes cops leaned their weight down on the EMIL crow an you could hear the tip biting into metal, peeling back the lip of the trunk from the latch, snapping bolts loose from a welded surface. Gouza tried to grab one of the plain-clothes cops and was shoved backward by a patrolman.

  The audio wasn't the best; the voices of the crowd, the cops, the squawk of radios, the beating of helicopter blades overhead, a peal of thunder out on the lake, sounded like apples rolling around in a deep barrel. But Joey Gouza's furious, artn-waving outrage came through the television set with the painful clarity of a rupturing ulcer. "What the fuck you guys think you're doing?" he said. "You got to have a warrant to do that. You got to have probable cause. You get that fucking dog away from me. Hey, I said get him away!"

  The trunk sprang open, and the faces of the two plain-clothes cops blanched and snapped back as though they had been slapped. A woman in an evening dress vomited on the grass.

  "Jesus Christ, I don't believe it," somebody said.

  "Get a shovel or a broom or something. I ain't picking that up with my hands."

  "What the fuck you guys talking about?" the man in the white sports coat said, pushing his way, along with Gouza, to get a better view of the trunk. Then he pressed his hand over his mouth and nose.

  "Put in a call for the ME," one of the plain-clothes cops said.

  A uniformed sergeant, his hands inside a vinyl evidence bag, reached into the trunk of the car, took out Jewel Fluck's head, and laid it on the grass. Joey Gouza's face was stunned, his mouth dropped open; he stared speechless at the man in the white sports coat. He gestured emptily with both hands at the air.

  "I don't know what it's doing there, Dom," he said. "It's a setup. These fuckheads are working with some pisspot cops over in Iberia Parish. I swear it, Dom. They been trying to put an iron hook through my stomach and tear my insides out."

  "Shut up, Joey. You're under arrest," one of the plain clothes cops said. "Put your hands on the car and spread your legs. You know the drill. The rest of you people go back to your lasagne."

  The uniformed sergeant shoved Joey face-forward against the side of the Cadillac and hit him under both arms. Joey's face went livid with rage, and he whirled and drove his elbow into the sergeant's nose.

  Then NOPD went to work with the subtlety of method for which they're famous. While the sergeant tried to cup his hands over the blood that fountained from his nose, two other uniformed cops rained their batons down on Joey's back.

  "We got a perp on dust," somebody yelled.

  Then as though that one declaration justified any means of restraint, another cop ran from the far side of the street with a Taser gun. The cops flailing with their batons jumped back just as he fired.

  But Joey had seen what was coming, too, and he drove sideways and the dart embedded in the thick, fat neck of the man in the white sports coat. He went down as though he had been bludgeoned with an ax, his body convulsing, his arms writhing in the damp grass with the electric shock.

  Then a cop garroted Joey across the throat with his baton and lifted him, strangling, to his feet while two other cops cuffed his wrists behind him. The last frames in the film showed Joey being stuffed behind the wire screen of a patrol car, one foot kicking wildly at the window glass.

  The sheriff put the VCR on rewind.

  "The anonymous call was traced to the Acme Oyster Bar on lberville," he said. "When the arresting plain-clothes got there, they ran into none other than Cletus Purcel, bombed on boilermakers with seven dozen empty oyster shells piled on his table. The plain-clothes don't think it's coincidence that Purcel was sitting in the Acme."

  "But they didn't take him in, did they?"

  "No."

  "They won't, either."

  "Why not?"

  "Because they don't care, sheriff. Gouza won't go down on a murder beef, but they'll put him away for resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. The court considers him a habitual. That means this time he goes into lockdown with the big stripes at Angola and they weld the door shut on him. Why should they worry about Clete?"

  "You misunderstand me, Dave. I don't care about Purcel. I'm bothered by the possibility that one of my men shaved the dice. You know that was Jewel Fluck's head, don't you?"

  "Maybe."

  "You want to tell me what really happened with you and Jack Gates?"

  I rubbed my palms together between my legs. The sunlight outside was white and hot through the cracks in the blinds.

  "The evidence was found on the right person, sheriff. There's no way around that conclusion. You have my word on it."

  He picked at his thumbnail, then raised his eyes to mine.

  "That's about all I'm going to get from you, huh?" he said.

  "Yeah, I guess that's about it."

  "Well, maybe it's time I talk to Garrett's family again over in Houston."

  I studied his face and waited.

  "I think you wrote your signature on this case with a baseball bat, Dave. But anyway we're closing the file on it. The three men who killed Garrett are dead. The man they worked for is in the New Orleans city prison under a two million-dollar bond. I think the slate's wiped clean." He gave me a measured look. "For everybody, you got my drift?"

  "That's for other people to decide."

  "I figured you might say that. Pride can be a sonofabitch sometimes, can't it?"

  He pulled up the blinds. The hot, white radiance off the cement outside and the violent green of the trees and shrubs grass made my eyes water. As I walked out of the office, I heard him pull the cassette from the VCR and drop it carelessly into a metal file drawer, then slam the drawer shut.

  CHAPTER 16

  I took a vacation day from work the next day. Alafair and I packed a lunch, iced down some soft drinks, paddled a pirogue deep into the green light of the marsh, and fished with red worms and spinners for bluegill and goggle-eye.

  The morning air was moist and cool among the flooded trees, and in the shadows and mist rising off the water you could hear big-mouth bass flopping on the edge of the lily pads, hear a heron lift and flap his wings as he flew down a canal through a long corridor of trees and disappeared like a black cipher in a cone of sunlight at the end.

  But as I pulled the paddle through dark water, heard it knock against a wet cypress knee, watched the earnestness in Alafair'
s face as she cast her baited spinner next to the water lilies and slowly retrieved it through a nest of bream, I knew that something else was taking hold of me, too. Age had finally taught me that there was a time to go with the season, to let go of the world's seriousness, to leave the terrible obligation of defining both yourself and the world to others.

  Yesterday at the dock I had told Batist that Lyle Sonnier had invited him to the crab boil in Baton Rouge.

  "What for he ax a black man?" he said.

  "Because he likes you, because he'd like us all to come over."

  He cocked one eye at me. "sure he want me there, Dave?"

  "Yeah, or I wouldn't ask you, Batist."

  He looked at me and reflected a moment.

  "All right, that sounds nice. I'd like to go wit' y'all," he said. Then, when I turned to go back up to the house, he added, "Dave, why you want to go? I had the feeling for a while you might want to put all them Sonniers in a tote sack with some bricks and Vrow it in the bayou."

  I smiled at his joke and didn't reply.

  Did I indeed still feel guilt for letting Lyle go down a VC tunnel when we could have blown it and passed it by? Or did I feel obligated to Drew because of our young impetuosity in the back seat of my convertible on a summer night years ago? Was I so self-destructively flawed that I had taken on Weldon's problems only because I saw myself mirrored in him?

  No, that wasn't it.

  A therapist once told me that we're born alone and we die alone.

  It's not true.

  We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup. They're the walking wounded, the ones to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to define, the ones with the messianic glaze in their eyes, or the oblique glance, as though an M-1 tank is about to burst through their mental fortifications. They drive their convertibles into automatic carwashes with the tops down, cause psychiatrists and priests to sigh helplessly, leave IRS auditors speechless, turn town meetings into free-fire zones, and even frighten themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night and think they've left the light on, and then realize that perhaps their heads simply glow in the dark.

  But they save us from ourselves. Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. Then I realize that the rhetoric would have no effect on them, because for those who were most deeply injured as children, words of moral purpose too often masked acts of cruelty.

  So that's when you let go of reason and slip deep into the wobbling, refracted green light of a marsh, with a child as your guide, and let the season have its way with your heart.

  Alafair decided to go to a movie with the neighbor's children that evening and spend the night at their house. So Bootsie fixed her an early supper, and just as the heat began to go out of the day, Bootsie, Batist, and I got in her car and, in the lengthening shadows, took the back road along the Teche, through St. Martinville, to the interstate and Baton Rouge.

  We went over the wide sweep of the Mississippi at Port Allen, looked out over the crimson-yellow wash of sunlight on the capitol building and the parks and green trees in the center of Baton Rouge, and passed the old brick warehouses on the river that had been refurbished into restaurants and shops and named Catfish Town by the Chamber of Commerce (one block away from a black neighborhood of paintless cypress shacks, with sagging galleries and dirt yards, where emancipated slaves had lived during Reconstruction).

  Then we turned out onto Highland, toward the LSU campus, and began to see more and more posters advertising Bobby Earl's barbecue and political rally.

  I slowed the car at a congested intersection where directional signs had been nailed to telephone posts pointing to the site of the rally at a public park two blocks away. Many of the cars around us had yellow ribbons tied on their radio aerials and Bobby Earl stickers plastered on their bumpers.

  I felt Bootsie's eyes on my face.

  "What?" I said.

  "Don't be bothered by them," she said. "It's just Louisiana. Think about the Longs."

  "It's not the same thing, -Boots. The Longs weren't racists. They didn't sponsor legislation that would make it a twenty-five-dollar fine to beat up flag burners."

  "Well, I'm just not going to let a person like that affect me.

  "Yeah, I guess that's why you told Alafair that Bobby Earl was a shit."

  My window was down. So was the window of the pickup truck next to me. The man in the passenger seat, whose chewing tobacco in his jaw looked as stiff as a biscuit, glanced directly into my face.

  "You got a problem, partner?" I asked.

  He rolled up his window and looked directly ahead.

  "Dave..." Bootsie said.

  "All right, I'm sorry. Sometimes I'm just not sure that democracy is the right idea."

  "Talk about narrow attitudes," she said.

  "Hey, Dave, that man Bobby Earl ain't been all bad," Batist said from the back seat.

  "What?" I said.

  "Mais black folk wasn't votin' for a long time. Now they is. I bet you ain't Vought about that, no."

  Bootsie smiled and punched me in one of my love handles, then reached across the seat and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. How do you argue with that kind of company?

  Lyle had tried to do it right. He had strung bunting in the trees, laid out a wonderful hors d'oeuvre and salad table, hired a professional bartender, piped music out onto the patio, and hung baskets of petunias from the ironwork on the upstairs veranda. The lawn had just been mowed, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass and the wood smoke curling around the iron caldron on the brick barbecue pit.

  He wore a pair of cream-colored pleated slacks, shined brown loafers, and a Hawaiian shirt outside his belt; his hair was wet and combed back on his collar, his cheeks still glowing from a fresh shave. His smile was electric when he greeted us in the side yard and shook hands and walked us to the patio, where Weldon, his wife Barna, Drew, and several people whom I didn't know stood around the drink table. The deference, the unrelenting smile, the nervous light in Lyle's eyes made me feel almost as though he were trying to rearrange all the elements in his life in front of a camera so he could freeze-frame the moment and correct the inadequacies of a past, a childhood, that would never be acceptable to him or finally to anyone who had had a similar one imposed upon him.

  But I didn't see Vic Benson, and while we fixed paper plates of chilled shrimp and popcorn crawfish and tried to be convivial, as though we had not all been brought together by a violent event, my eyes kept wandering to the garage apartment where he lived. Clemmie, the black maid who had done time in St. Gabriel, picked up a washtub filled with live bluepoint crabs and poured them skittering into the caldron on the fire pit.

  "My, that surely smells good," Bama said. Her ash-blond hair was brushed out thick on her shoulders, and she wore a yellow sundress, gold earrings, and a tiny gold cross and chain around her neck. I never saw anyone with skin so white. You could see her blue veins as though they had been painted on her with the fine point of a watercolor brush.

  "I'm real glad y'all could make it," Weldon said. He had already put out a cigarette in his plate and was drinking a beer out of the bottle, his eyes, like mine, glancing sideways unconsciously at the garage apartment. "I'm glad you brought Batist, too. It looks like he's making friends with Clerninie. I hope she doesn't pull a razor on him."

  "Lyle is very good to people of color," Barna said.

  "Lyle's known Batist since he was knee-high to a tree frog," Weldon said.

  "I was speaking of Lyle's kindness to the woman, Weldon." />
  "Oh."

  She turned toward me. Her face was as small as a child's.

  Her mouth made a red button before she spoke. There was a steady, serene blue light in her eyes, and I wondered how many downers she had dropped before her first highball.

  "Weldon is overly conscious about who my brother is," she said.

  "Dave gets a little upset on the subject of Bobby's politics," Weldon said.

  "I don't subscribe to everything my brother stands for, but I don't deny that he's my brother, either," she said.

  "I see," I said.

  "He has many fine qualities of which the press is not aware or which they seem to have no interest in writing about."