The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Yeah, the secrets to the Da Vinci Code. You still off the sauce?”

  “I’m still in AA, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Get your nose out of the stratosphere. I was going to offer you a couple of fingers of Beam, because that’s all I’ve got. But I didn’t want to offend you. I hear one of those black guys was turned into an earth slug.”

  “That’s the word. I haven’t interviewed him yet.”

  “Yeah?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was listening or if he was asking me to repeat what I had just said. He told a workman to get a ladder and pull down the wrecked chandelier. Then he touched the ruined surface of his dining table and brushed off his fingers. “Which hospital is the human slug in?” he said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I feel sorry for him. Anybody who could do this to people’s homes must have a mother who was inseminated by leakage from a colostomy bag.”

  “You always knew how to say it, Sidney.”

  “Hey, I was born in New Orleans. This used to be a fine city. Remember the music and the amusement park out at Lake Pontchartrain? How about the sno’ball carts on the street corners and families sitting on their porches? When’s the last time you walked down a street at night in New Orleans and felt safe?”

  When I didn’t answer, he cocked a finger at me. “Got you,” he said.

  On my way out I saw Sidney ’s wife in the yard. She came from a fishing hamlet down in Plaquemines Parish, a geological aberration that extends like an umbilical cord into the Gulf of Mexico. She was as tall as her husband and had a lantern face, cavernous eyes, and shoulders like a man. For decades her family had been the political allies of a notorious racist judge who had run Plaquemines Parish as a personal fiefdom, even padlocking a Catholic church when the bishop appointed a black priest to serve as its pastor.

  But she appeared to have little in common with her family, at least that I could see. In fact, Eunice Kovick’s father once said of his daughter, “The poor girl’s face would make a train turn on a dirt road, but she’s got a decent heart and feeds every stray dog and nigra in the parish.”

  Why she had married Sidney Kovick was beyond me.

  “How you doing, Eunice?” I said.

  “Just fine. How are you, Dave?”

  “Sorry about your house. Y’all have pretty good insurance?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “Do you have any idea why those guys would rip your walls and ceilings out?”

  “What did Sidney say?”

  “He didn’t speculate.”

  “No kidding?”

  She had one of the sweetest smiles I ever saw on a woman’s face.

  “See you, Eunice,” I said.

  “Anytime,” she said.

  MY LAST STOP was at the hospital where Bertrand Melancon had dropped his gun-shot brother.

  Chapter 12

  BUT I DISCOVERED that Eddy Melancon had been moved to a hospital in Baton Rouge. I headed up I-10 into heavy traffic, the cruiser’s emergency bar flashing. By the time I reached the Baton Rouge city limits, the streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, buses, and utility repair vehicles. Even with the priority status my cruiser allowed me, I didn’t arrive at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital until midafternoon.

  I almost wished I hadn’t. I suspected that Eddy Melancon had probably caused irreparable injury to many people in his brief lifespan, but if such a thing as karma exists, it had landed on him with the impact of a spiked wrecking ball.

  He looked weightless in the bed, raccoon-eyed, as though the skin around the sockets had been rubbed with coal dust. His body was strung with wires and tubes, his arms dead at his sides. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was. “Do you know who popped you?” I asked.

  He focused his gaze on my face but didn’t respond.

  “Can you talk, Eddy?”

  He pursed his lips but didn’t speak.

  “Did the shot come from in front of you?” I said.

  His voice made a wet click and a sound that was like air leaking from the ruptured bladder inside a football. “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “You saw the muzzle flash?”

  “No.”

  “You heard the shot but you saw no flash?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t seen it.”

  “Are you aware you guys ripped off Sidney Kovick’s house?”

  “Ain’t been in no house.”

  “Right,” I said. I pulled my chair closer to his bed. “Listen to me, Eddy. If people you don’t know come to see you, make sure they’re cops. Don’t let anybody you don’t recognize check you out of this hospital.”

  His eyes looked at me quizzically.

  “If you made a big score at Sidney ’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”

  Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.

  “Say that again.”

  “We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.

  “From Sidney Kovick?”

  “In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”

  I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.

  When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.

  AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.

  “Really?” I said.

  She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.

  AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.

  “I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”

  “You don’t think Otis Baylor shot these guys?”

  “His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who’s going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people’s homes?”

  “All right, let’s move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It’s worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this.”

  I couldn’t argue with her. In fact, I didn’t even want to comment.

  “What did you think of Lyndon Johnson?” she asked.

  “Before or after I got to Vietnam?”

  “When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in ’65, Johnson flew into town and went to a shelter full of people who had been evacuated from Algiers. It was dark inside and people were scared and didn’t know what was going to happen to them. He shined a flashlight in his face and said, ‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m your goddamn president and I’m here to tell you my office and the people of the United States are behind you.’ Not bad, huh?”

  But I wasn’t listening. There was a detail about the Otis Baylor investigation I hadn’t mentioned to Helen, because she didn’t like complexities and in particular she didn’t like them when they fell outside our jurisdiction.

  “I stopped by Sidney Kovick’s house yesterday and had an informal chat with him. The looter
s ripped the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster from most of his walls and ceilings.”

  “Score one for the pukes.”

  “I think they took Sidney down in a major way. Sidney has never had an IRS beef. It wouldn’t surprise me if his walls had been loaded with cash.”

  “So what?”

  “He was trying to find out which hospital the quadriplegic looter is in.”

  “And?”

  “The quadriplegic is at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. I tried to warn him, but he’s not a listener.”

  Helen pulled at an earlobe. “Bwana?”

  “What is it?”

  “Whatever happens to that bunch is on them. Got it?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  CLETE PURCEL did not lose custody of Bertrand Melancon during the handover at the chain-link jail at the airport. Bertrand got loose farther up the road, by Gonzales, when the prison bus he was riding in pulled into a soaked field that had been created as a holding area during the height of the storm. Hundreds of inmates from jails in two parishes had huddled in the field, along with their guards, while lightning exploded over their heads and the rain almost tore the clothes from their bodies. Many of them, I suspect, went through the most religious moments of their lives. But when Bertrand Melancon arrived and was told to line up at a Porta Potti, the drama that his peers had experienced had already slipped into history and the field was simply a churned and trash-strewn piece of farm acreage where egrets and displaced seagulls competed for litter.

  “How long we got to be here, man?” Bertrand asked a guard.

  “The Four Seasons is kind of backed up right now. But we told the maids y’all were coming and to prepare your rooms as quick as possible,” the guard replied.

  Most of the inmates on the buses had no desire to run. Most were tired, mosquito-bitten, sunburned, and sick from bad food. Most of them wanted to be watching television in an air-conditioned mainline prison that provided clean beds and served hot meals. If most of them had their choice, they would be housed in a building with six-foot-thick walls and a foundation that Noah’s deluge couldn’t disturb.

  Bertrand had other plans. At twilight, when the bus pulled out on the highway, he pried the grillwork off a back window and dropped into a rain ditch. His absence was not noticed until the bus was halfway to Shreveport.

  Nig Rosewater personally came to Clete’s upstairs apartment on St. Ann to give him the news. Nig could not be described as having a neck like a fireplug. He had no neck. His jowls and chin seem to grow straight down into his shoulders. His starched shirt and gold collar pin did not help his appearance, either. In fact, with his gold necktie, he looked like a hog eating an upright ear of buttered corn.

  “Nig, I deliver the freight. I got a signed receipt for transfer of custody. At that point Bertrand Melancon became the property of Orleans Parish,” Clete said. “The other half of your thirty-grand skip is in Our Lady of the Lake. You owe me three grand.”

  “You didn’t have nothing to do with catching the vegetable in the hospital. So that makes your fee fifteen hundred at best,” Nig replied. “And that’s not why I’m here, either. I had two of Sidney Kovick’s people banging on my door at seven this morning. I told them I don’t know where Bertrand Melancon and Andre Rochon are, because if I knew that kind of information, I wouldn’t be out over fifteen large right now. So they want to know which hospital the vegetable is in. I tell them I don’t know that, either, since the government don’t consult with me when it’s shipping people all over the country.

  “One of these guys says, ‘Your fifteen large is toilet paper. You deliver up the boons who broke into Mr. Kovick’s house or Mr. Kovick is gonna figure whatever they done or they took is on you.’”

  Clete’s apartment was located above his office. The day was bright and sunny outside, and the bodies of birds that had been driven by storm wind against the side of his building were piled on his balcony, their feathers fluttering in the wind.

  “I don’t see how any of this falls on me, particularly when you’re already trying to stiff me on my recovery fee,” Clete said.

  “Buy yourself a better brand of wax removal, Purcel. These guys took Sidney down for something he can’t claim as an insurance or business loss. His guys said my fifteen large is toilet paper. What’s that tell you? These morons blundered into a big score, maybe something they can’t unload. What if it’s bearer bonds or high-tech military stuff? Whose interest would it be in to let a couple of street pukes skate on the bail? Who would have the connections to fence or launder whatever the pukes took from Sidney?”

  Clete honked his nose into a handkerchief, concealing his expression. “I say brass it out and tell them to screw themselves. Don’t let Sidney push you around.”

  “You’re pissing me off.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry about that.”

  The power was off in the apartment and Nig was sweating inside his sports coat. “Why don’t you clean the dead birds off your balcony? It stinks in here,” Nig said, the sheen of fear in his eyes unmistakable.

  BEFORE THE HURRICANE, Clete had filled his bathtub, lavatory, and sink with tap water. Now he was using it on a daily basis to sponge-bathe, shave, brush his teeth, and to refill his toilet tank. After Nig was gone, Clete put on fresh clothes, combed his hair, and slipped on his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black Smith amp; Wesson revolver. He went downstairs to the courtyard and fired up his latest Cadillac acquisition, a powder-blue vintage convertible that was pocked with paint blisters, the top spotted with mold. As soon as the engine caught, a huge cloud of oil smoke exploded from the tailpipe. His porkpie hat canted on his head, Clete swung out onto the street, chewing on the corner of his lip, wondering how far to push a man whose potential no one in either the New Orleans underworld or New Orleans law enforcement ever accurately assessed.

  Across the river in Algiers, whole neighborhoods had survived the storm with no flooding and only a temporary loss of power. From the bridge, with his convertible top down, Clete could look back and see the glassy shine of brown water that still covered most of New Orleans and the miles of roofless houses and the rivers of mud that had filled automobiles like concrete. The image was so stark and irrevocably sad he involuntarily mashed on the accelerator and almost rear-ended a gasoline truck.

  In Algiers, he parked in front of a flower shop that was tucked neatly inside a purple-brick building on a residential street. Two of Sidney Kovick’s employees were playing gin rummy at a table in the shade of a green-and-white-striped canopy that extended from the top of the display window. The two men were leftovers from the old Giacano crime family and for a brief time had thought their day in the sun had come and gone, until 9/11 landed on them like a gift from heaven and the governmental bête noire shifted from pukes dealing crack in the projects to Mideastern young males loading up with cell phones at the local Wal-Mart.

  Clete got out on the sidewalk, opened his coat, and lifted his.38 from his shoulder holster with the ends of his fingers. He held it up in the air so the two men could see it, then dropped it on the passenger seat of the Caddy. “Keep an eye on that for me, will you, Marco?” he said.

  “No problem,” Marco said.

  “Hey, Purcel, your convertible looks like it’s got herpes,” the other man said.

  “Yeah, I know. I told your sister not to sit on it. But what are you gonna do?” Clete replied as he entered the shop, a bell ringing over his head.

  The temperature inside was frigid, the glass lockers smoky with cold. The tall man behind the counter was dressed in seersucker slacks and a long-sleeved blue shirt open at the collar, exposing the thick curls of black hair on his chest.

  “What’s the haps, Sidney?” Clete said.

  Sidney began placing roses a stem at a time into a green vase. “Nig Rosewater sent you here?”

  “Nig says you want the pukes who took you down. That’s understandable. But that makes four of us-you, me, Nig, and Wee Willie Bimstine.
What I need to explain to you is we got no idea where these guys are.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You already found one guy at the hospital. But he’s not there anymore.”

  “That’s right, I did find him and he got moved to ‘whereabouts unknown.’ So don’t be telling me I’m lying.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Because your messengers evidently made an implied threat when they visited Nig this morning. I thought that showed a lack of class.”

  “Lack of class?”

  “Is there an echo in your store?”

  Sidney nodded toward a table that was set against a side wall. “Sit down. I’m about to eat. You want a coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t touch a chair that Charlie Weiss or Marco Scarlotti sat in unless it was sprayed for crab lice.”

  Sidney put his hand inside his shirt and scratched an insect bite on his shoulder and looked at the tips of his fingers. “It’s true you smoked a federal informant when you were with NOPD? A guy who never saw it coming?” he said.

  “What about it?” Clete said, his eyes slipping off Sidney ’s face.

  “Nothing. You’re just an unusual guy, Purcel.”

  Clete cleared an obstruction in his throat and let the moment pass. “Here’s what it is. One way or another, I’m going to put Andre Rochon and Bertrand Melancon back in the system. That’s because I have a personal beef with these guys and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do business. If I recover cash or goods from your house, you pay me a twenty percent finder’s fee. If that’s not cool, see what you can get from your insurance carrier.

  “In the meantime, you leave Nig and Willie and me alone. I know all about that chain-saw story and the guy in Metairie. Personally I think it’s Mafia bullshit. Regardless, I take care of the pukes, and Heckle and Jeckle out there stay out of it. Sound reasonable, Sidney?”