The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “No.”

  “Bledsoe didn’t file charges against Alafair, did he?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he put his hand on her person. Because he made offensive sexual remarks to her.”

  “That’s right. And in a local court his potential for a successful prosecution would be at about thirty percent. But what happens if Alafair’s father decides to take the law in his own hands? My guess is Bledsoe’s chances for prevailing in court go up to about eighty percent. His chances of winning a civil suit would probably be over ninety.”

  I was sitting across the coffee table from him. The windows were open and through the screen I could hear the rain clicking on the plants in the flower bed.

  “Who shot the looters, Mr. Baylor?”

  “Put it this way. The DNA evidence from my daughter’s rape kit was lost in the storm, so I’ll never know for sure those guys were the ones who attacked her. But if they were, they got what was coming to them and I’m glad they’re not around to hurt anyone else. I hope the one on the loose gets his comeuppance, too.”

  “That might be poor consolation for an innocent man hoeing soybeans in the shadow of a mounted gunbull,” I said.

  “Don’t let me regret I came here, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  And don’t argue with people who are uneducable, I thought to myself. “Not for the world, sir. Thanks for coming by,” I said.

  Most people who stack time make a series of decisions that ensure their eventual confinement, just like dry drunks finding ways to get back inside saloons. I wondered what tragedy or violent event or reservoir of anger was compelling a good-hearted rotary club man to wend his way into the belly of the beast.

  As I watched his car drive away, his back tires spinning on a layer of blackened leaves in the gutter, I said a brief prayer for Otis Baylor. I had a feeling he would need all the help he could get.

  BERTRAND MELANCON could not remember a time when he was not afraid. He feared his mother for the men she brought home and he feared even more her unpredictable mood changes. She would strike him in the face as easily as she would place a bowl of breakfast cereal in front of him, or perhaps do both within a ten-second time frame. Conversely, most of the men were not mean or violent and in fact would sometimes take him to ball games or give him money to pick up cigarettes or beer for them at the corner package store. But often his mother and the man with her would tell him and Eddy to stay out in the yard until they were called in for dinner. As Bertrand watched them drop the blinds, he knew his house did not belong to him and neither did his mother, and the realization of that fact was worse than his mother’s hand across his face.

  Bertrand woke each morning with a nameless fear that was like a hungry animal eating a hole through his stomach. The images from his dreams followed him into the day, ill defined, without origin, like the reflection at night of faces in a streetcar window that told him he was of no value.

  Eddy said he worried too much. But Eddy started getting drunk on short-dogs in the fourth grade, sometimes on the school bus at 7:30 a.m. Eddy got wiped out on glue in the boys’ bathroom and set fire to a girl’s locker. When he was twelve he was carrying a shank and claimed he had used it on a kid who had tried to take his tennis shoes at the park.

  Bertrand and Eddy pulled their first armed robbery when they were in middle school. An old Vietnamese man was closing up his register in the tiny grocery store he operated when Eddy shot him in the face with a paintball gun. Not only did they clean out the register, Eddy threw canned goods through the glass windows in the wall coolers. Later Bertrand asked his brother why he had taken time to start throwing cans at the coolers when the old man was about to punch in numbers on the telephone. Eddy frowned and said, “Don’t know. Just felt like it.”

  They never planned their scores or their strong-arm takedowns. The events seemed to present themselves of their own accord and were not of anyone’s manufacture, in the same way a storm can blow through a house or a match can turn a pool of gasoline into a whoosh of flame under a parked car. Stuff happened, that’s all. The hands trembling on the money drawer, the averted eyes, the broken mouth, the gashed scalp, these were images that receded into memory, like tiny bits of paper drifting to the bottom of a well, unplanned, undirected, ultimately inconsequential.

  Eddy was never bothered by what they did. In the St. John the Baptist Parish jail it was Eddy who paid a cook four decks of smokes to put roach paste in the food of a wolf who bragged he was going to turn out both Eddy and his brother. It was Eddy who got Andre to pull the van up to the curb and talk to the young girl who was walking home from a street fair with a stuffed animal clutched to her breast. It was Eddy who tied her up in back. It was always Eddy who started it but who somehow got Bertrand to finish it or clean it up. Eddy thrived. Bertrand’s stomach stayed on fire. The two of them were joined at the hip, one incomplete without the other, each serving compulsions and insatiable desires neither could explain to himself.

  Now, in the wake of Katrina, Bertrand’s nameless fear had a face on it. In a shelter in Des Allemands, someone had left a copy of the Times-Picayune scattered on the floor of a toilet stall. On the society page was a photograph of Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Kovick repairing the damage done to their historical home by both looters and the hurricane. The cutline contained no mention of the bullet that plowed through Eddy’s throat and Kevin’s skull.

  Bertrand could not take his eyes off Sidney Kovick’s face. It made something shrivel inside him. Silently it told him of his insignificance, his failure, the disdain in his mother’s eyes, the loathing and disgust in the face of the white girl he had raped and tormented.

  When he left the toilet stall, he was convinced there was only one way to end the fear and self-hatred that roiled his stomach and poisoned his blood: He had to destroy the face that hid like a reflection in a darkened window glass wherever he went. He had to kill Sidney Kovick.

  SIDNEY LOVED GOING to work at his flower store. The interior of the shop was snug and full of color and fragrance, and the people who came into the shop respected him for his knowledge of flowers and his ability to select or create the right bouquet for the occasion. He always dressed formally when he went to the shop, and he always stood while he worked and only sat down at lunchtime or when he had to use his desk. He believed a good salesman was a good listener, and usually it did not take him long to divine what his customers needed. Few seemed to care about his reputation outside the shop. When a customer wrote a check, Sidney never asked for ID. His product and his prices were good, and so were his customers. Sidney was a gentleman.

  Sidney also loved his wife, Eunice. When they first began dating, he showed her his home in Metairie, his yacht at Des Allemands, and his fishing camp in the Florida Keys. He told her he was in the life, but he didn’t deal in dope or pornography. When Eunice asked what he did deal in, he replied, “Anything that’s consensual and that makes money. End of story.” Eunice had grown up in a culture of corruption. Sidney ’s explanation about his business affairs was enough.

  Then their little boy was run over and killed by a drunken neighbor. Through use of an attorney, the neighbor managed to avoid a sobriety test until the next day. He pleaded no contest to reckless endangerment and was required to drive with a restricted license for one year. He did not attend the little boy’s funeral and he did not apologize for running over and killing him. Some said he was afraid; others said he believed the problem was legal in nature and had been resolved in the court. But everyone agreed that the neighbor’s decision to do nothing was a bad choice.

  When the neighbor disappeared six months later, his wife put her house on the market and moved to Omaha. She had not been a person of means, but she bought a condo with cash and lived comfortably on the money she realized from the sale of her house in Metairie. She never complained to either the FBI or local authorities about their inability to find her husband.

  Eunice never asked Sidney if the rumors
about the neighbor’s fate were true. But sometimes when they were alone in the darkness, after making love in their upstairs bedroom, she would raise herself up on one elbow and look directly into his eyes.

  “What is it?” he would say.

  “Tell me,” she would say.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me you’re the good man I know you are.”

  “I’m a good man at the shop. Other times maybe I’m not so good. It’s just the way I am, Eunice.”

  But maybe she should not ask for more, she told herself, her arm resting on the broadness of his chest, his big heart beating under the palm of her hand.

  She helped him at the store and took as much pleasure and pride as he in the quality of flowers they sold. On Saturday morning she fixed coffee and put out cups and saucers and chocolates wrapped in gold foil for their customers. Eunice’s smile lit up the day and the shop, and hardly a customer came in who was not made better by it. Sidney Kovick was not big on theology, but if ever there was proof of God’s existence, to Sidney it was the presence of Eunice in his life.

  BERTRAND HAD STASHED the.38 from Sidney Kovick’s house behind the Rite Aid where they had holed up to do a few lines of flake before returning to finish the takedown at the house. The car he drove was a new Toyota a friend had boosted from a Winn-Dixie parking lot in Houma. The interior still smelled of coconut-scented air freshener from a car wash. The friend had even given Bertrand a tape of three 6 Mafia to play for the drive into New Orleans. “Just drop my ’sheen at my brother’s house when you’re done wit’ it,” the friend said. But the friend did not know the nature of Bertrand’s mission nor did he know Bertrand’s larger plan, namely, to murder the man who had brought him all this grief and then blow Dodge with a bagful of blood diamonds, whatever blood diamonds were, which Bertrand had still not figured out.

  As he drove into New Orleans, he was amazed at how much of the city was still without power and how many buildings were without roofs and windows, the yards covered with ruined furniture the owners had piled outside. An NOPD cruiser passed him, the cop behind the wheel glancing once in the rearview mirror. Bertrand turned off the avenue and parked behind a pile of downed tree limbs, his ulcers kicking into operatic mode.

  When he was sure the cruiser was gone, he circled the block and slowed his car next to a fat black woman who was pushing a shopping cart across the intersection. The cart was packed solid with mounds of moldy clothes that protruded through the wire basket. “Know where the Rite Aid is at?” he asked.

  “It’s probably under that sign yonder that say ‘Rite Aid,’” she replied.

  “Sure ’nuff, it is. You want to make five dollars?”

  The woman released the cart and fitted her big hands on top of the windowsill. The skin of her forearms was dark and shiny, notched with pink scars, as thick as elephant hide. “What you after, boy?” she asked.

  “Hurt my leg and cain’t walk too good. Maybe you can pick up something for me behind the Rite Aid, there.”

  She looked in the direction of the drugstore. Her breasts were like watermelons hung in cloth sacks, her neck beaded with dirt rings. “You know you ain’t got no license plate on your car?”

  “Sure ’nuff, again. You got a good eye. Must have bounced off.”

  “Load my clothes in the back. Then drive me where it’s at. Then you pay me fifty dol’ars and drive me home,” she said.

  “I can work wit’ that,” he said.

  “You scared shitless, boy. You smell like it, too. Whatever you doin’, you better start doin’ less of it,” she said.

  He drove the woman to a spot fifty yards from the parking lot behind the Rite Aid. He left the engine running as she waddled to a section of sidewalk that had been wedged up by the roots of an enormous oak tree. The tree had been split by either lightning or its own weight, and the crack in the trunk filled with concrete. But the concrete had deteriorated and created an opening behind which Bertrand had stashed the.38 and the bag of blow inside a wadded-up shirt. The fat woman was wheezing for breath and sweating heavily when she got back inside the car. She set the wadded-up shirt on the seat.

  “There’s a gun in there,” she said.

  “That’s just tools for my car.”

  “Give me my fifty dol’ars and take me back to the basket. I don’t need no ride home,” she said.

  She got out at the intersection, the bills crimped in her palm, and pushed her cart down the street, the wheels twisting on the asphalt, fighting against one another. As Bertrand watched her struggling with the balance and weight of the basket, her rear end as big as a washtub inside her green stretch pants, he felt diminished, alone, like someone left behind on a beach, but he did not know why.

  He stuck the blow down in his pants and the.38 under the seat, and headed for Algiers, across the wide sweep of the Mississippi. The windows were down, the wind blowing as he crossed the river, but sweat ran down his chest and a stench rose from his armpits. He pulled the bag of blow from his pants, dipped a finger inside, and rubbed the crystals in his nostrils and on his gums.

  But Kovick’s flake wasn’t working for him, either because it had been stepped on too many times or because Bertrand was so wired he could slam a gram and still not extinguish the fire in his stomach or stop the racing in his heart. When he came down the exit ramp into Algiers, he felt like he had stepped into an elevator shaft. A truck swerved around him, blowing its horn. A stop sign flew by him as though it had been suddenly planted on the edge of his vision. He reached again into the bag of blow and knocked it on the floor. Up ahead, a cop was waving cars past an accident scene. By the time he reached the street where Kovick’s flower shop was located, he was hyperventilating and thought he was going to pass out.

  He parked at the end of the block. He could not remember when he had been this afraid. He tried to think of credible reasons for not going into the store. Two guys who looked like greaseballs were eating lunch at a table under an awning that extended out from the display window. How could he be expected to take on guys who killed people for a living? He could catch Kovick somewhere else, on an even playing field. It didn’t have to be here, it didn’t have to be today. There wasn’t any shame in using his head.

  Secretly he knew the real enemy in his life was not Kovick but the fear that had been his companion in the darkness of his room and at every sunrise and at the breakfast table with his mother and on the school bus and in the school yard and in the crack house where he first got seriously wiped out and on the mattresses where he had screwed girls and performed acts that made him wonder if he was a degenerate. Fear was a gray balloon that floated from place to place, object to object, and each time he tried to confront it, it moved someplace else, transforming the most innocuous of situations into dilemmas that he would never confess to anyone else, lest they know him for the frightened man he was.

  Now he was trying to run from the guy who had turned his life into a nightmare. Which was worse? he asked himself. To die here or to be chased and laughed at until Kovick’s people finally caught him and taped his mouth and carried him into a basement where Kovick would be waiting for him in a raincoat and rubber boots.

  But the greaseballs stuffing their faces with sandwiches under the awning weren’t products of his imagination, he told himself. He’d never get past them. Even trying was like spitting in the lion’s mouth.

  When he had almost convinced himself he had a legitimate reason for postponing his appointment in Samarra, the greaseballs finished eating, put their lunch trash in a paper sack, and drove away in a convertible.

  Bertrand drove around the block twice, hoping a flood of customers would enter the shop, giving him a viable reason to head back to Houma. Instead, the sidewalk remained empty and no cars pulled to the curb. In fact, the flower shop seemed to have been created brick by brick without any tangential association to the world around it, like an island where Bertrand Melancon was destined to confront the face that had looked upon him with dis
dain and contempt all his life.

  He stuck the.38 snub down in his belt, pulled his shirt over the checkered grips, and got out of the car. He thought he could feel the earth tilt sideways.

  Then he realized he had no plan. All the time he had been driving from Houma, his mind had been on recovering the.38 and the flake. When that was out of the way, he had immediately started figuring out ways to avoid confronting Kovick. Now he was in front of Kovick’s shop with his pud in his hand and no plan. What was he supposed to do? Go through the front door shooting? What if he missed? What if Kovick had a gun under the counter?

  He walked to the end of the block and entered the alleyway that led behind the shop. Garbage cans lay on their sides on the asphalt and clusters of untrimmed banana trees rustled in the wind. The back door to the flower store was ajar. Bertrand could feel his chest constricting, his lungs burning as though someone had poured battery acid in them. He kept his right hand on his shirtfront so the wind wouldn’t expose the.38 and used his other hand to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He never thought anyone could be this afraid.

  He pulled back the metal door and looked into the rear of the shop. A tall woman was standing at a worktable, talking on the phone. She smiled at him and motioned him inside by cupping her fingers at him.

  He stared at her, befuddled. She must have thought he was a delivery man. Then another realization started to dawn on him: She was Kovick’s wife. She had been in the photograph with him in the Times-Picayune.

  What better way to get even with Kovick than to cap his wife, he thought. That’s what Eddy would say, at least if Eddy had a mind to think with, if Eddy wasn’t just a sack of viscera attached to a feeding tube.

  The woman replaced the phone receiver in the cradle. She was wearing a sundress and had broad shoulders that were tanned and strong-looking, like a countrywoman’s. “Are you here to pull the tile in the bathroom?”