The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  The bar was at a rural intersection where the stoplight and the cable it hung on had been wrapped by storm winds around a telephone pole. Most of the bar’s metal roof was gone and had been replaced with plywood and canvas and blue felt. The rain ditches along the two intersecting roads were compacted with dead trees and detritus from a tidal surge that had wiped the coastal end of the parish off the map.

  The inside of the club was dark, creaking with heat, the only power from a gas-operated generator chugging in back. Clete sat at a round table in the corner, his shoulder-holstered.38 strapped in plain sight across a Hawaiian shirt that stuck to his skin like wet Kleenex. A bottle of tequila, a salt shaker, a shot glass, and a saucer of sliced limes were on the table. So was a sweating can of Bud, which he picked up and sipped from without expression when he saw me and Bo Diddley enter the club.

  Two sun-browned men in khaki clothes were drinking coffee at the bar. They nodded at Bo, then returned to their conversation.

  “Trying to stoke up the locals?” I said to Clete.

  “Who’s he?” he said, indicating Bo.

  “Bo Wiggins,” Bo said, extending his hand.

  “Those guys at the bar work for you?” Clete replied, either ignoring or not seeing Bo’s hand.

  “They said you had some trouble at an old drill location on my lease. They said they heard a couple of pops in the wind and saw a guy roaring down the canal in a boat. They thought maybe this guy tried to rob you. So I called Dave and we drove out.”

  Clete’s face was oily and dilated, his eyes bleary with fatigue and early-morning booze. “See, that’s not what happened. The guy in the boat is a guy I’ve been chasing through three parishes. See, he’s a guy who maybe tortured a lady friend of mine to death. They tortured her for a long time, and they put a plastic bag over her head and dumped her over the gunnels down by the salt. They did this because that’s the kind of guys they are, guys who get off working out their fantasies on a woman who can’t fight back.

  “But right now the problem I got is your friends moved my Caddy somewhere and they don’t want to tell me where it is. So it would be really good if you would ask them to bring my Caddy around and to put the keys in my hand. Because if they don’t, it’s really going to mess up my day.” Clete held up the face of his watch for Bo to look at. “See, I’m already late for church.”

  Bo listened with a half-smile on his face, his forearm on the table, his buzz haircut and jug ears silhouetted against a window. The back of his neck was red and pocked with acne scars and greasy with sweat. “No problem, Mr. Purcel. Your car will be here in five minutes,” he said.

  Bo went to the bar and spoke to his employees, who kept their attention on him and did not look again in Clete’s direction.

  “You don’t know those two guys?” I said.

  “No, why?”

  “You didn’t know one of them served in Vietnam?”

  “No, I never saw either one of them. Who’s that guy with you?”

  “Forget about him. You actually shot at somebody?”

  “It’s a long story, but three separate people told me they saw that boat in the bay where Courtney’s body was found. I hired an airboat and chased the guy all along the coastline. I gave up, then a guy at a dock told me he’d seen the boat down by an oil platform. I drove my car down the levee and almost had him. When he took off, I figured he had to be dirty. I let off two rounds at the waterline. Then those two dudes at the bar showed up and said I was trespassing.”

  “When’s the last time you slept?”

  “I think sleep is highly overrated.”

  “You never saw those guys at the bar?”

  He blew out his breath. “I melted my head. I identified Courtney’s body from a photograph. The facial shot was taken close up. The plastic bag was only part of it. I’m going to cool those guys out, Dave. Don’t try to stop me. It’s a done deal.”

  He picked up his jigger of tequila and drank it half empty, his eyes never leaving mine.

  THAT EVENING I put Clete to bed in his cottage at the motor court, and in the morning I brought him a boxed breakfast from Victor’s.

  “Is there any chance you hit the guy you shot at?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see any feathers fly, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What’d the guy look like?”

  “He looked guilty.”

  He got into the shower, the water drumming on the tin walls. I couldn’t take any more of his booze-soaked craziness.

  I went to the office and told Helen what had happened, her face clouding as she listened, her hand opening and closing on a wadded-up piece of paper. “You give this to the FBI,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

  “You do it and you do it now, Dave. Now, get out of here.” I couldn’t blame her.

  OTIS BAYLOR got out of jail on bond and was promptly fired by his insurance company. On the same day he was fired, he became a self-appointed peripatetic counselor to anyone filing a storm-damage claim against his former employer or, for that matter, against any insurance company. He held meetings with home owners in a coffee shop and taught them how to phrase the language in their claims and how to file suit when their claims were unfairly denied. Trees were blown down by wind, not floated against a house by a tidal surge. Structural collapse was caused by twisters, not by flooding. Mold was caused by driving rain after wind had blown out the windows. Lightning exploded the electrical system and curled the walls and split the foundation, not water.

  The words “water,” “flood,” “tidal,” and “surge” did not exist.

  On Wednesday I saw him on the street, down by Clete’s office, his manner strangely composed for a man whose life was hanging in shreds. His shirt pocket was full of ballpoint pens, his upper torso broad and solid inside his clothes. “You find what you were looking for at my house?” he asked.

  We were in the shade of a live oak that grew out of the sidewalk, and the wind was blowing leaves along the concrete. “No, we didn’t, but other people may give it a try,” I said.

  “They can have at it,” he said.

  “Courtney Degravelle probably had the same kind of casual attitude.”

  “The lady down the street?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “She was murdered. So was Andre Rochon. They were both abducted, tortured, and murdered.”

  He was absolutely still, his tie fluttering slightly against the pin that held it to his shirt.

  “Who did it?”

  “Maybe Sidney Kovick’s people. Maybe some international guys. Whoever they are, they’re well organized.”

  He looked ashen. “I knew Ms. Degravelle. She was a nice lady. She was tortured to death?”

  “She died of a coronary. But, yes, she was tortured terribly.”

  “My family is at risk, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t say that for sure.”

  “I’ve seen this man Bledsoe, the private investigator, around town. He’s involved in this, isn’t he?”

  “You’ve seen him in the last few days?”

  “I saw him on the street before I was arrested. You think he’s involved in Ms. Degravelle’s death?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “This never ends, does it?”

  “I’m going to say something of a personal nature to you, Mr. Baylor. You’re a believer. As such, you know it’s us against them. The contest is never over, the field never quite ours.”

  I guess my statement was grandiloquent, perhaps foolish. He looked at me with an expression that was as flat as a painting on a signboard. Then he walked away without saying good-bye, crossing the street through traffic that had to swerve around him.

  But unbeknown to Otis, he had just done something that convinced me he was not a killer. He had shown no interest in the death of Andre Rochon, a man who had probably raped his daughter. Those who seek vengeance will accept the state’s invitation to wit
ness the execution of their tormentors, in the old days by electrocution, today by lethal injection, but they get no rest and to the end of their days are haunted by the specter of an enemy who is ironically now safe and beyond their grasp.

  For good or bad, Otis Baylor was not one of these.

  IN A NUMBER of well-written movie scripts, a forensic psychologist undoes the maniacal workings of a serial killer by somehow placing himself inside the killer’s head. As a consequence, the forensic psychologist goes a bit mad himself.

  This makes for great entertainment. But I don’t think it has anything to do with reality. What goes on in the mind of a sociopath? No one knows. Without exception, they take their secrets to the grave and lie about their deeds and the whereabouts of their victims, even when they have nothing to gain. The only group I know to be as secretive are conjurors or, in South Louisiana, what we call “traiteurs.” They claim to be healers who receive their power from the forces of good. If you press them on the question, they’ll add that a traiteur can pass on his power at the hour of his death to a member of the opposite sex and only to a member of the opposite sex. Press them further and you will probably get a lesson in buried hostility. Why are they defensive? They never say. And that is what’s most disturbing about them.

  On Thursday morning Alafair walked to her volunteer job at the evacuee shelter in City Park and Molly drove to her job at the Catholic self-help foundation on the bayou, and because the day was such a fine one, I walked the few blocks from my house to the sheriff’s department. At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove it home for lunch. As I pulled into the driveway behind Molly’s car, I saw Molly come around the back side of the house. She had just gotten home.

  “Dave, come look at this,” she said.

  I got out of the cruiser and followed her into the backyard. “What’s up?”

  She pointed at the screen door. We usually latched it when we were gone to prevent Snuggs or Tripod from pawing it open and entering the house through the pet flap in the hard door. The screen had been cut and the latch unhooked from the eyelet screwed into the jamb. The lock on the hard door had been pried loose with a flat-bladed screwdriver.

  “Have you been inside?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Wait here,” I said, and unsnapped the leather strap on my.45.

  I went through the kitchen into the living room and main bedroom, the.45 still holstered, my palm resting on the butt. Then I looked into the bathroom and walked down the hall and into Alafair’s room.

  Her manuscript had been torn into long strips and scattered on the floor and on her bedspread. The screen on the monitor had been broken in the center with what I suspected was a ball-peen hammer. The keyboard hung in two pieces by its connection wire on the back of her chair. The metal housing on the computer had been punched with holes, peeled back from the frame, and the innards torn out and stomped into the wood floor. Her laser printer, which she had bought in Portland with money she had made working in the college bookstore, had been crushed flat, probably by someone standing on top of it.

  Her backup floppy disks had been scissored into small pieces. Her two notebooks and the hundreds of pages of blue calligraphy on them floated in a half inch of dark yellow urine at the bottom of a waste can. I opened my cell and punched in 911. When I finished the call, Molly was standing in the doorway.

  “Ronald Bledsoe?” she said.

  “Take it to the bank,” I replied.

  I PARKED UNDER the live oaks in front of the recreation building in City Park and went inside. The floor of the basketball court was lined with cots, many of them piled with personal belongings, as though the cot itself had become a residence. Alafair was reading a book to a group of children who were sitting in a circle on the floor. I tried to seem relaxed as I walked toward her.

  “Got a minute?” I said.

  She put a marker in her book and went outside with me. I told her what had happened, my hand touching her arm. While I spoke, she stared down the slope at our house on the far side of the bayou, her face never changing expression.

  “He destroyed everything?” she said.

  “That’s the way it looks,” I replied.

  “But there’s no evidence it’s Bledsoe? nobody saw him?”

  “I talked with the neighbors. Nobody saw anything.”

  “He urinated on my notebooks?”

  “He’s a sick man. Why even talk about him?”

  “You don’t have to tell me what he is.”

  “We’re going to Lafayette this evening and buy a new computer and printer. In the meantime, the crime lab is at the house.”

  “This guy’s a jerk, Dave. I send my work-in-progress file every day to a friend in Portland. I also send one to Ernest Gaines. My notebooks are in a floppy disk on top of my bookshelf. Did he get into my bookshelf?”

  “No.”

  “Like I said, he’s a jerk.”

  “You’re quite a gal, Alf.”

  “Don’t call me that name. Seriously, I hate that name,” she replied.

  A TECHNICIAN FROM the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted full and partial prints from Alafair’s desk and computer but found none that matched the thumbprint Bledsoe had left on Clete’s license tag. Just before quitting time, Clete called me at the office.

  “You won’t believe this. Bledsoe is back at his cottage,” he said.

  “I believe it. Did you talk to him?”

  “He invited me to dinner. He’s barbecuing on a grill under the trees. Jesus Christ, he just waved at me.”

  I heard Clete pull the curtains.

  “Somebody broke in our house today and tore up Alafair’s computer,” I said. “The perp also destroyed her work materials and put her notebooks in a waste can and urinated on them.”

  “This guy is overdue for a home call.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I heard him fooling with the cell phone, as though he had walked from the window and was trying to organize his thoughts. “I got something real bad on my conscience, Streak. It’s eating my lunch,” he said.

  “Courtney Degravelle’s death is not your fault, partner.”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you. We put all the insurance money in a mailbox like you suggested. I mean, almost all of it.”

  He paused, waiting for my reaction. But this time I refused to fill in the blanks for him.

  “See, Courtney was broke. Her insurance company was screwing her on her claim. She was already two months behind on her mortgage. She wanted to hold back a grand and wash it at a casino in Shreveport. I didn’t see the harm.”

  I rubbed one temple and stared wanly out the window, stupefied by his lack of judgment.

  “So that’s what she did. She and her sister drove up to Shreveport and unloaded the grand and won about seven hundred on top of it,” he said.

  I didn’t want to hear it. Also, I didn’t want to fall into my old role as Clete’s enabler, either. But what do you do when your best friend is bleeding inside?

  “Tommy the Whale dimed you with Sidney Kovick. Then Sidney ’s goons found out you and Courtney were an item. It was easier to take her down than come after you. Washing the money didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.

  “We both know better.”

  I let it go. Courtney Degravelle had fallen into the hands of men who of their own volition dwell in the Abyss. Perhaps Clete had contributed to her fate. I was his friend. She was dead and so was Andre Rochon. With luck, we or someone else would nail the guys who killed them. What else was there to say?

  I HAD OTHER problems to deal with, and choices to make that no cop on the square wants to make. Ronald Bledsoe had remained untouchable. Now he had invaded my home and left his ugly stain on my daughter’s life. We could roust and threaten him, but our best efforts would be of no value. Bledsoe was in our midst for the long haul, taunting us, pressing the stone deeper into the bruise with each passing day. Is it dishonorable to fight a war under a black fl
ag in defense of those who cannot protect themselves? I thought not. Or at least that’s what I told myself as I considered my options regarding Ronald Bledsoe.

  Chapter 21

  IT WAS RAINING Friday night and Alafair and Molly were at a movie when Otis Baylor parked his car in front of our house and knocked on my door.

  “You busy, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.

  “No, sir, come in,” I said.

  He sat down in a stuffed chair in our living room and looked out the window at the rain falling in the light on top of our philodendron. “I’ve given some thought to a few things I’ve said to you. My manner has been abrasive and uncalled for. I think you were trying to be as forthright as you could. I should have given you a little more credit.”

  “You were under pressure-” I said.

  He interrupted me. “Your daughter told Thelma about the scrape she had with this fellow Bledsoe. She also told Thelma about the break-in at your house. It was him, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s my belief.”

  “Alafair says you can’t do much about it.”

  “No, so far I haven’t been able to.”

  “I’ve been in your shoes and I know the kind of thoughts you’re having.”

  “I was never that good on going into other people’s heads, Mr. Baylor, so in turn I ask that they not tell me what my own thoughts are.”

  “My family has a violent history. My father and his brother did things I’m ashamed of. Some of their violent tendencies have lived on in me. That means I can recognize it when I see it in others. I think you and I are cut out of the same burlap. If you go after Bledsoe on your own, you’ll be playing his game.”

  “Oh?”

  “In the insurance business all policies are written in terms of risk and percentages. It’s not guesswork, either. The only other industry as good at calculating profit and loss is the gambling industry. That’s why it’s not a ‘gambling’ industry. The player loses, the house wins. There’s no exception to the rule. You following me?”