The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I could find no one who had any knowledge of Jude LeBlanc’s fate. It was almost evening now, and the sky was purple and threaded with smoke that smelled like burning garbage. On a house lot behind the church I saw an elderly black man pulling boards from what used to be his house. I made my way across a chain-link fence that had been twisted into a corkscrew, my shoes breaking through an oily green crust that had dried on top of mud and untreated sewage.

  I opened my badge holder. “I’m a friend of Father Jude LeBlanc,” I said. “He was at this church when the storm hit.”

  “I know he was. I was on the roof yonder. I seen a woman dropping children out the attic window into the water,” he said. He had stopped his work to talk with me, one hand grasped on a weathered plank flanged with nails. His face was work-seamed, his eyes an indistinct blue, as though the sun had leached most of the color from them.

  “You saw Father LeBlanc? You know what happened to him?”

  “Mister, I ain’t had time to do nothing except get my wife out of my house. I ain’t pulled it off, either.”

  “Sir?”

  “I ain’t never found her. Whole house caved in under us. Water come squirting right out of the chimney, boiling up around us just like we was on a ship going down.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I come back looking for our t’ings. Po-lice said I ain’t s’ppose to be back here. If I ain’t s’ppose to be back here, who is? Two t’ings I don’t understand. How come nobody come for us and what was them lights in the water?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It was dark and a helicopter went by, high up. I seen the lights in the water and at first I t’ought it was a searchlight from the helicopter and the blades of the helicopters was blowing the water. But that wasn’t it. The lights was swimming around, like fish that could glow in the dark, except it was much brighter and these wasn’t no fish. I t’ink maybe my wife was down there.”

  He stared into my face, waiting, as though somehow I possessed knowledge that he did not.

  AT NOON WEDNESDAY Clete came by the office and asked me to have lunch with him. But something besides lunch was obviously on his mind. I asked him what it was.

  “It’s Courtney,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Come in, Earth. Courtney Degravelle, the lady who lives down the street from Otis Baylor. The lady whose house I left a note at yesterday.”

  “Maybe she didn’t see it.”

  “I left her three voice mails.”

  “I’ll ask NOPD to send somebody by her place.”

  “I already did that. They don’t even know where a third of their department is. Come on, let’s go to Victor’s.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. My intuitions proved correct. At the cafeteria, Clete remained agitated and distracted and hardly touched his food.

  “Better eat up,” I said.

  “Last night Ronald Bledsoe came to my cottage and asked me to split a six-pack with him. This morning he invited me to breakfast. He said PIs need to network because Google is driving us out of business. I told him I didn’t have that problem, also that I lived in the motor court because of the privacy it gave me.”

  “What do you think he’s up to?”

  “He wanted me to know he was at the motor court late last night and early this morning. I tell you, Dave, we need to take this cocksucker out in a swamp and smoke him. That’s not a metaphor, either.”

  The people at the next table stopped eating and looked at one another.

  “I’ll get a box to go,” I said.

  BUT MY CONCERNS with Clete’s use of profanity in a hometown restaurant should have been the least of my worries. The next morning, at sunrise, a game warden trying to save a stranded cow in a marshy area not far from the Gulf saw the bodies of two people lying on the edge of a sandbar in the middle of a deepwater lake. Cinder blocks were roped around their waists, and waves rippled across their legs and backs. Both bodies should have sunk to the bottom of the lake, but whoever threw them into the water probably did so in the dark, assuming his boat was in a deepwater channel. The game warden cut the motor of his outboard and let the keel scrape onto the sand.

  He jumped into the shallows and grabbed the rope that held both bodies together and pulled them onto the sand. His hands were shaking when he called 911. “I’ve got two homicide victims here,” he said. “One is gunshot, one looks to have died from suffocation. Wait a minute. Jesus Christ, one of them is alive.”

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER, Andre Rochon had awakened in his latest girlfriend’s FEMA trailer outside Baton Rouge, the free cell phone a man had given him resting on his sternum. All he had to do was punch in the number the man had written on a slip of paper for him. What had the dude said? “Provide a li’l information and make yourself rich, my brother.” What did Andre owe Bertrand, anyway? If Bertrand hadn’t gone into that garage after gas, if they had all just climbed out of the boat and waded back to St. Charles Avenue, Kevin and Eddy never would have been shot.

  But Bertrand had to show he was in charge, that the rest of them were punks, while all the time he was ripping off their share of the loot.

  Andre got up from the small bed on which he had been sleeping and sat down across the breakfast table from his girlfriend. He wore only a pair of slacks and flip-flops, and he kept fingering his navel, pinching his abs and love handles, staring out the window at the rows of tiny white trailers in the FEMA park.

  “You fixing to call somebody about a job?” his girlfriend said.

  “There ain’t no jobs, girl,” he replied.

  “I thought that’s why the man give you the phone. He was gonna give you a job. That’s what you tole me last night.”

  Actually, Andre couldn’t remember what he had said the previous night. He’d drunk some wine and smoked a lot of weed, and at some point in the middle of a conversation a switch had clicked off in his head, then had clicked back on about nine this morning. “You ever dime a sister?” he asked.

  “I ain’t never dimed nobody, Andre. I don’t like it when you talk like a criminal, either.”

  The diapered infant who slept on his stomach in the bassinet on the far side of the tiny bathroom began to make gurgling sounds. This was bad timing for Andre, who wanted his girlfriend back in the sack, not changing diapers and feeding a baby.

  “Give him a bottle. That’ll keep him quiet for a while,” he said. “Here, I’ll do it. Come on, lie down and get a li’l more sleep.”

  “Cain’t you never think of anybody but yourself?” she said.

  He stared reflectively into space, his fingers glazing the tautness of his stomach muscles. Andre’s new girlfriend was getting to be a drag. “Think I’ll go outside and make a phone call, check out a couple of sit’ations. Get some coffee started, will you, baby? maybe some eggs and li’l toast, too,” he said.

  The man who answered Andre’s call told him to walk down to the highway and wait for an automobile to pick him up. One hour later, Andre Rochon was swallowed up by a black SUV with charcoal-tinted windows and deep leather seats and a destination finder that would take him to a place and an experience he never could have imagined.

  His newly acquired friends did not waste time. They taped him to a chair that was bolted to the floor, gave him ten seconds to answer their first question, then drove their fists directly into his face. The blows seemed delivered with more force and energy than he thought human beings were capable of and were like red fire inside his head. In minutes, his mouth and eyes were filled with blood, the expanse of sawgrass and lagoons and saltwater channels outside the window part of a dreamscape that had nothing to do with Andre Rochon or the person who had been Andre Rochon only that morning.

  Somehow he had thought betrayal of his friend would be all that was required of him. How could he know where the stones were? Bertrand had ripped him off as well as Sidney Kovick. He was a victim, just as these guys were. No, he didn’t know where Bertrand was, but he could find out.
They were all working together, right?

  When he passed out, they poured a bucket of water over his head. Then they wrapped his face in a towel, stretched his head back, and poured water in his nose and mouth.

  After dark, he heard them drive away on the shale road atop the levee. When they returned, they smelled of hamburger and onions and coffee. Then they did things to him they had not done before. When he wept, they went outside and talked among themselves. Their voices were devoid of emotion, like football coaches discussing a game plan. Finally one of them said, “It can’t hurt. We put too much time into this guy just to throw him away.”

  What did they mean? He had already told them everything he knew about Bertrand and the shooting and the looting at Kovick’s house. He had even told them he was a rapist and a meth dealer and a strong-arm robber, that he had too much on his own sheet to ever turn his abductors in. Maybe they were going to keep him around, use him in some way, give him a job as an inside man. Yeah, that was it. Just stay cool, he told himself. They’d send him after Bertrand, find the motherfucker who’d started all this, fix his black ass for bringing all this grief down on everybody.

  They allowed him to use the privy in back, then taped him to the chair again. One of them tied the wet towel around his eyes. “Take it easy, kid,” he said. “We’ll be done pretty soon.”

  Done with what?

  Through the screen windows he could hear the wind in the sawgrass and fish flopping in the lagoons and the drone of a workboat out on the bay. Then car doors slammed and he heard the muffled voice of a woman as she was dragged into the room and thrown into a chair.

  “Lady, we got no beef with you,” one of the men said. “But you found some money that wasn’t yours and didn’t return it. So we want to know what else you found. Don’t lie. That’s the worst thing you can do, worse than anything you’ve ever done. You hearing me on this, Ms. Degravelle? Just nod your head. Okay, we got that out of the way.

  “You see this black kid here? By his own admission, he’s a rapist and a seller of narcotics to his own people. But worse than that, he lied to us after he promised to tell us the truth. So he’s got to pay the price. If he don’t, he’s making liars out of us, too. What’s about to happen isn’t cruel, it’s not undeserved. It’s just part of the deal. Don’t look away, Ms. Degravelle. You keep your eyes on him.”

  There was a pause and a silence of no more than three seconds, but those three seconds were the longest in Andre Rochon’s life.

  The pistol shots were loud and sharp inside the room, like shots fired from a.22 revolver. Andre took one round in the neck and two in the head, both of them as hot as wasp strings.

  Later that night, his body roped to another person’s and a chain of cinder blocks, he awoke to starlight just as someone rolled him over a gunwale into water that smelled of diesel fuel and fish spawn. When he rose from the darkness of the water and walked up the slope of the sandbar, dragging the cinder blocks and the body of the woman with him, he remembered a priest chopping a hole in a church roof and he wondered why he would recall such a bizarre image at this particular moment in his life.

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON betsy Mossbacher finished her account about Andre Rochon in my office. “He lived about six hours,” she said. “The woman was dead when she went into the water. She still had the plastic bag over her head. Our pathologist says she died of a coronary probably brought on by near suffocation.”

  “Clete knows all this?”

  “Yes. But he dummied up on us. How close were he and the woman?”

  “They were seeing each other.”

  “Too bad. Ronald Bledsoe is using Purcel as his alibi. That must be hard to take. Can you explain to me how Purcel can insert himself into every problem in this area?”

  “Lay off him, Betsy.”

  “That woman went through hell before she died. Save your brother-in-arms stuff for somebody else,” she replied.

  I could hear the traffic out on the street. Betsy formed a pocket of air in one jaw, then got up from her chair and walked to the window. She was wearing jeans, a cotton shirt, cowboy boots, and a wide belt. One of the qualities I admired most in Betsy was the fact her eyes were always clear and she focused them on yours when she spoke. She turned around and looked at me. “Interpol thinks Sidney Kovick may have taken both the blood stones and the counterfeit currency off some al Qaeda operatives in South America. The fact is we’re not that interested in the blood stones. But we are interested in how Sidney Kovick got inside al Qaeda.”

  “What does Sidney say?”

  “Nothing. I tried to appeal to his patriotism. You knew he was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade?”

  “John Ehrlichman was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying cross. Who cares?”

  “You haven’t talked to Purcel?”

  “No.”

  “He was handling it okay.”

  “You don’t know Clete. He doesn’t handle anything okay.”

  “Regardless, he needs to stay out of this investigation. Your friend has a serious problem about minding his own business.”

  “His neighbor is Ronald Bledsoe. His girlfriend was tortured to death. His City drowned while the most powerful politicians in the country sat on their asses. If these things aren’t his business, what is?”

  On her way out of the office, she trailed a finger across the back of my neck. “People use me for a dartboard only once, Dave.”

  THAT EVENING I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court, but he was not there and he didn’t return my calls to his cell phone. I stopped in the bar at Clementine’s and at an outdoor place on Bayou Teche where he sometimes drank, but no one had seen him.

  Perhaps I had been rude to Betsy Mossbacher. But few people understood the complexity of Clete Purcel. He didn’t show pain or injury; he absorbed it in the way I imagine an elephant absorbs a rock splinter in its foot. While the wound heals and scars over on the surface, the splinter works its way deeper into the tissue, until infection forms and the inflammation swells upward through the joints into the chest and shoulders and spine, until the elephant’s entire connective system throbs with the lightest of burdens placed on its back. Perhaps the latter was not true of an elephant. But it was of Clete.

  I stood on the drawbridge overlooking the bayou at Burke Street and thought about the account Betsy had given me of Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle’s ordeal. I suppose a person could say Rochon had invited his fate, but certainly Ms. Degravelle had not. I thought about the kind of men who would bind and torture their fellow human beings for money or for any other reason. Over the years I had known a few. Some hid in a uniform, some did not. But all of them sought causes and all of them needed banners over their heads. None of them, except those who were obviously psychopathic, ever acted alone or without sanction.

  In the twilight Bayou Teche was swollen and wide between its tree-shrouded banks, the backs of garfish roiling the surface next to the lily pads. The sun had burned into a tiny red cinder. The air was suddenly cool, the lawns along the bayou lit by gas-fed lanterns and sometimes by chains of white lights in the oak trees. William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, its slat-tern breath and the quickness of its step only seconds away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.

  I walked home and began baking an apple pie in the kitchen oven, insisting that Molly and Alafair sit with me and talk while I did.

  Chapter 20

  BY SUNDAY MORNING Clete had still not shown up. I heard the pet flap on the door swing back and forth, then saw Snuggs walk into the kitchen, jump up on the windowsill, and look back outside. I walked out on the porch. Bo Diddley Wiggins was in my backyard, admiring the bayou, wearing a pair of slacks and a short-sleeved print shirt unbuttoned at the top, the lapels ironed out on his shoulders.

  “Didn’t know if y’all
were still sleeping,” he said. “How old is that coon?”

  “He’s old. Like me,” I said.

  “He took a wet dump all over his papers. That’s what I fear most in life. Sitting in a wheelchair, my pecker shriveled up, downloading in adult Pampers while a nigra woman sticks gruel in my mouth.”

  I heard Molly close the kitchen window. Bo looked at the trees overhead, the sunlight breaking through the branches, a squirrel swinging on a bird feeder. He waited for me to invite him in.

  “We’re about to head out to Lafayette, Bo. Otherwise I’d offer you coffee,” I said.

  “I don’t have time, anyway. Look, I don’t like to meddle. But we go back and I couldn’t just blow off your friend’s situation. What’s his-name, the rhino who’s always getting into trouble around here?”

  “Clete Purcel?”

  “A couple of my employees are taking care of him right now. They don’t want to see him hurt. But the guy went ape-shit out by an old oil platform on my lease and shot at somebody. If it hadn’t been for my superintendent, your friend would be in the Lafourche Parish Jail.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Shit-faced in a bar, with a thirty-eight in a holster strapped on his chest. Why you looking at me like that?”

  “Why are your employees going out of their way for Clete Purcel?”

  “Because he fishes down there and they know him. Because one of my employees was in Vietnam, just like your friend. Excuse me, Dave, but did I do something wrong in coming here, because I’m definitely getting that feeling.”

  “No, you didn’t, Bo. I appreciate it. If you’ll give me directions, I’ll go get him.”

  “I’ll take you. Get in my truck. Wait till you see what this baby can do in four-wheel drive on a board road.”

  Bo drove his vehicle just like he did everything else-full-throttle, not taking prisoners, as though the rest of the world had become his enemy simply because it was on the other side of his windshield. We passed through miles of sawgrass, all of it yellowed by submersion, water and mud splashing above the hood, Bo driving with one hand on a road that was hardly a road, the frame bouncing on the springs.