John Raven Beau

by O'Neil De Noux

  “Names,” I tell him. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  I stare into his eyes, giving him the cold, warrior stare. He tries staring back, but blinks eventually, huffs and looks away. I keep staring. He won’t look back now, content to readjust his sheet, then lean back.

  I keep staring. He tucks his free hand behind his head and closes his eyes. “You know,” he says. “I can’t wait to get back in jail. I’m a hero. I’ll be king of Parish Prison. King of the cop killers.”

  “You’re going to die.”

  He laughs at me.

  “You’re going to get the death penalty.”

  When he looks back he sees my face hasn’t changed expression. He sees my eyes still boring into his eyes.

  “Death penalty!” Mullet laughs again. “Yeah, in ten, fifteen years maybe. Hell, I wouldn’t have lasted ten years on the street.”

  I move so fast he doesn’t even see me pull out my ten-inch knife, doesn’t even have time to yell. Grabbing a chuck of greasy hair, I yank it hard and press the edge of my knife against his forehead. The beady-eyes leer at my blade.

  “Know what kind of knife this is? It’s obsidian. A Sioux knife, the same kind that scalped Custer and his men at Little Bighorn.”

  I twist the blade and draw a line of blood.

  “See how it’s sharp on one side only.” Raising the blade swiftly, I slice off a chunk of Mullet’s hair. “Makes scalping easier.”

  Mullet lets out a scream so loud the deputies rush in with Rothman and two doctors. I let go of Mullet’s hair and calmly slip my knife back in its scabbard. On my way out I tell Rothman I should have really scalped him.

  He hands me my Glock and says let’s shoot him.

  I storm away. Behind me my old partner tells the doctors, “He’s part Sioux, you know. A stone, cold killer.”

  •

  Captain Picard does a double-take as I approach the front porch of Mullet’s house at six p.m. sharp. He’s never seen me in a suit.

  “So, how’s it going?”

  He tells me it’s going fine. I can see three agents inside the house, one with a hand-held vacuum, the other taking measurements.

  “By the way, what is your name?”

  “Special Agent Thomas Kirk.”

  I grit my teeth and force myself not to howl in the man’s face. It takes several, teeth-grinding seconds before I can ask, “Come up with anything with the name Clyde on it?”

  Kirk shakes his head.

  I rub my hand across my freshly-shaved chin, pull out my note pad and walk around to the side of the house. The first bike still has blue paint on its rusty gas tank. I jot the serial number in my note pad and move to the next piece of biker junk. By the time I’ve circumnavigated the house, I’ve secured thirteen serial numbers and four license plate numbers.

  “Seriously,” I tell Kirk as I pass him a business card. “If y’all come up with anything with the name Clyde, please let me know.”

  Kirk nods slowly. Stepping away, I spot my partner approaching with Elmer Fudd Channard.

  “I thought you were at the hospital?” Gonzales spreads his arms. In a bright blue shirt over a tee-shirt and jeans, he points to my navy blue suit. “What’s with the get-up?”

  “We wear suits in Homicide, partner.”

  As I turn to leave, Channard calls out, “Have you seen Jodie?”

  •

  A previous owner of the turquoise Harley-Davidson without any wheels, parked behind Mullet’s house, was one Clyde Pailet, Box 11206, Highway 11, New Orleans. I stare at the name on the computer screen. The hair on my arms stands straight up.

  I run Clyde’s name through criminal records. Also known as Swamp Rat, he has arrests for simple battery, aggravated assault, aggravated battery and burglary. He spent six years in Parchman for Auto Theft. He got out six months ago. Jesus, he was arrested three weeks ago for aggravated assault. So much for parole violations, he was released on bail the next day.

  Swamp Rat? I check his place of birth. Pearl River, Louisiana. Right next to the Honey Island Swamp. I run the address in the computer and a vehicle currently registered at the Highway 11 address is a gold Harley Davidson listed to C. L. Pailet.

  I print out Pailet’s record. Five minutes later, a clerk at Criminal Records passes me a color image of forty year old Clyde Pailet who stands six feet tall and weighs one-eighty. His craggy face has sunken cheeks and a jailhouse tattoo of ‘CP’ on his forehead, backwards as done with a mirror. Clyde has medium length salt-and-pepper hair, just like the man seen fleeing from the Cochran murder. I put together a photo line-up and call Darlene Wilson on the radio.

  A half hour later, I’m standing in the hall outside Felice’s room with a reluctant Darlene Wilson. “We’ll see if this works,” she says skeptically as she takes the line-up into Felice’s room. When she doesn’t come out right away, I sit. When she doesn’t come out a half hour later, I know we’ve found our Clyde. She has to take a statement.

  An hour after entering, Darlene comes out.

  “I hate to have to ask,” she says, “but how’d you come up with him?”

  I tell her about the motorcycle and add, “I’ll call you in the Bureau with a script of his house.” She’ll need a detailed description of the house for her search warrant.

  “I told you. This is a rape case. I don’t want you involved. And that’s an order.”

  I want to tell her she can stick those fuckin’ sergeant’s stripes up her ass, but I opt for the more diplomatic route. “In case you haven’t figured it, we need each other.”

  There’s a subtle change in her eyes. Maybe she agrees. Maybe.

  Sure, she’s the one who can get an arrest warrant and search warrant for Clyde Pailet, and her rape case is all we have right now. But Cochran and Stevens and James are dead and there’s no way I’m not going to Clyde’s.

  •

  Clyde’s house is a camp suspended on creosote pilings off Highway 11 along the Irish Bayou Canal not fifty yards from eastern Lake Pontchartrain. Set up in my Caprice in a cut back off the two-lane, black-topped highway, I watch the place carefully. There’s a screen porch surrounding the unpainted, wooden house which has a corrugated tin roof. The small shell parking area in front of the house is empty. A long wooden walkway connects the house to the shell lot.

  This semi-wild part of town almost reminds me of home. The camps, the clapboard houses, the occasional brick house lining the highway have absolutely nothing in common with the wrought-iron balconies of the French Quarter, except being within the same city limits. Behind the camps, the wide expanse of the lake, dotted with small cypress islands, could almost pass for Vermilion Bay.

  The smell is different, of course. Highway 11 smells of kerosene and car exhaust and only faintly of marshland. New Orleans East is a vast swampland dotted with the occasional subdivision, dissected by elevated roadways, like Chef Menteur Highway two miles to the south of where I sit. Highway 11 rings the eastern boundary of the city as the Seventeenth Street Canal, where Angie is probably waiting on tables, rings the western edge of town.

  Darlene Wilson’s dark blue Ford Taurus leads the long line of units flying up Highway 11 from the Chef. Blue and red lights flashing, the high-pitched whine of their engines decelerate quickly, followed by the screeching of brakes. Behind Darlene’s Ford is the armored car SWAT unit. I climb out of my car, stretch and casually cross the street.

  Nine black-clad and helmeted SWAT officers bolt from the back of the armored car. They race across the shell lot. The men in front carry large bullet-proof shields. The next two carry a black battering ram.

  Stepping next to Darlene, I fold my arms and watch the spectacle of someone shouting ‘Police!’ and the door crashing beneath the weight of the battering ram, of the SWAT team climbing in and out of doors and windows, buzzing around the porch like killer insects.

  Bob Kay, wearing a SWAT vest outside his suit coat, leads a line of Task Forcers from the cars to Darlene and me. Gonzales, in a
dark green suit, gleeks me. Rothman and Channard and One-L and even Two-L are there, along with two crime lab technicians. Dunn gives us his impersonation of Al Pacino’s “Whoo-ah!” from Scent of a Woman.

  The SWAT teamer with a silver stripe around his helmet gives us the all-clear with a wave and Darlene leads us, single file along the walkway that creaks and moans with our weight. The SWAT team passes us, their heads bowed in disappointment.

  Kay passes out rubber gloves to each of us as we enter. Our search is disciplined and meticulous. Seven minutes after entering, Elmer Fudd Channard calls excitedly from the first bedroom. “I found it!”

  We wait, but all he does is repeat himself. “I found it!”

  “Found what?” Kay replies.

  “The badge.”

  It’s lying in the top drawer of an end table next to a double bed with yellowed sheets and a headboard featuring several bullet holes. We take turns peeking at it, see it has James’s badge number, before a crime lab tech moves forward to take pictures and secure it.

  After seeing the badge with dried blood still on it, we continue our search in complete silence. We find two Colt .38 revolvers, a Taurus .22 revolver, a sawed-off Winchester 12 gauge shotgun and two pounds of marijuana wrapped in aluminum foil. We also find nine Polaroids of Clyde and his compadres. Mullet is in two of the pictures, which were taken on the porch of this house.

  As the technicians start dusting for fingerprints, we move to the porch. The sky is purple and green, the clouds above the tree-line across the highway are blood red. Behind us the lake is already in darkness.

  Bob Kay taps me on the shoulder and asks me to follow him down the walkway. I spot Merten leaning against Darlene Wilson’s car. When we arrive, he unfolds his arms and tries to smile at me. His face doesn’t crack, but if that’s a smile, I’m a fuckin’ astronaut.

  “We want you to take a week off.” Kay says this looking up at the sky.

  Merten nods and the smile fades back into the familiar scowl. “And when you come back, you come back to our platoon.” He blinks at me, as if he’s just realized I’m in a suit.

  “Am I suspended?”

  The both say no in unison. Emphatically. Kay leans against the car and tells me I’ve done a helluva job on this case. Hell, I solved it, he says. I’ll get a commendation. I’m the one who put it all together, he says, his voice rising. Without you, he says, he doesn’t know when we’d have solved this damn thing.

  He pauses for a breath and Merten cuts in. “We don’t want you shooting this last ass-hole.” He folds his arms. “You haven’t taken a vacation in nine months. Take a week.”

  Merten’s eyes reveal there’s no way I’m talking my way out of this. Even if I remind him it’s my fault, it’ll do no good. Probably do a lot of harm.

  “We have the whole department looking for this guy,” Kay says. He won’t look me in the eye.

  Merten does as he says, “Take a goddamn week off. That’s an order.”

  Guess you got a lot of girls

  Nine o’clock the next morning I’m out on the deck of Sad Lisa with Buck who’s giving me a curious, blue-eyed stare.

  “A week,” I tell him. “What the hell do I do with a week?”

  Buck leans forward, his butt up in the air, and barks twice.

  “Am I pathetic, or what?”

  I move to the gate and look over at the green tarpaulin covering my old car as it sits parked next to the dock at the bow of my houseboat. Turning, I almost trip over Buck on my way to the engine room where I pull out one of the spare car batteries.

  “Come on,” I tell Buck as I lead the way out to the car.

  I pull the tarp off my ’79 dark green Thunderbird, open the hood and replace the battery. It grinds a little when I start it, sputters, then cranks up smoothly. I let it idle.

  “It’s about time you see a swamp,” I tell Buck as I climb out.

  He’s too busy sniffing tires to answer. I wash up quickly and pull down a bowl, filling it with ice to put on the floorboard for Buck. Slipping the Glock into the waistband of my black jeans at the small of my back, I grab a shirt to cover my weapon and my knife on my way out with the bowl.

  “You’re going to love this,” I tell Buck who goes down on his back, flailing his paws at me as I pass. “You’re a swamp dog.”

  “John?” A feminine voice calls out behind me.

  I turn and Angie is there, arms behind her back. She has her hair in barrettes again and wears a pink sleeveless top and jeans.

  “Are you all right?” She twists her head to the side.

  “Sure.” Then I realize. “You’ve been reading the paper again.”

  Her face reddens slightly and she steps forward, focusing those aquamarines at me.

  “You weren’t at work last night.”

  “I took a couple days off. Exams.”

  Buck bounces over to her, yips, then sniffs her white tennis shoes. She bends over to pet him and he rolls on his back.

  “Watch it. He’ll pee on you.”

  She yanks her hand back and laughs in that deep, Bacall voice. “He’s sure cute.” She looks past me at the car. “Going somewhere?”

  “Cannes Bruleé.”

  “Where?”

  “Little village where I grew up. By Vermilion Bay. South of Abbeville.”

  Angie shakes her head.

  “South of Lafayette.”

  “Oh.” She takes in a deep breath and says, “Can I come?”

  It’s not often I’m at a lost for words, but I recover quickly with, “Sure. If you’re brave enough to travel in this.” I nod to the T-Bird.

  “Can I help you load up anything?”

  I put the bowl on the floorboard on the passenger side, explaining Buck might overheat in the car and the ice will melt and he’ll have something cool to lap.

  “AC doesn’t work in the old car.”

  “May I use your phone?”

  “Sure.” I lead her on to Sad Lisa and watch her curious stares as she looks around. She leaves a message for her father, telling him where’s she’s off to. She’s careful. I like that.

  “You always carry that?” she asks as I pick up my knife.

  “My Daddy told me to never go in the swamp without a knife.” I pat the Glock. “And we have to eat, don’t we?”

  She laughs again. Good, she gets my bad jokes. As soon as we get in the T-Bird, Buck scrambles on my lap, puts his paws up on the steering wheel and busies himself looking out the windshield. I crack the windows and the warm breeze flows over us as we drive away from Bucktown for the interstate.

  Angie pets Buck head. “Is he really a swamp dog?”

  “Catahoula. It’s the state dog. An Indian dog.”

  I tell her how the word catahoula means clear water or beloved lake in Choctaw. “Because they have blue eyes.”

  Accessing the interstate, I give the T-Bird’s eight cylinders the gas and she slips smoothly into traffic. One of the big, later Thunderbirds, my car is heavy with a nice comfortable ride. With the windows cracked, a fresh breeze floats around us.

  “How far is it?”

  I start laughing at that, which makes Angie laugh back at me.

  “About three hours, if we’re lucky.”

  “Good,” she says, crossing her legs. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk.”

  It occurs to me this is our first time alone, except for Buck. We glide through Metairie and Kenner and slip into St. Charles Parish. Buck finally settles between us as we cross the Bonnet Carré Spillway, riding the concrete bridge over a vast swampland along the southern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, which lies nearly motionless to our right.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Angie nods to the moss-covered cypress trees.

  “Wait ‘till you see Vermilion Bay.”

  I ask about her classes and learn some of the differences between UNO, The University of New Orleans and LSU, Louisiana State University, where we had an active campus life. A commuter university, UNO sounds more impersonal
. When I mention the differences, Angie is very curious about my time and LSU.

  “I hear about the drinking and wild parties.”

  “I only went there two years. On a football scholarship.” I explain how I tore up my knee. Dropped out and meandered down to New Orleans.

  “To most of us Cajuns, New Orleans is Paris.”

  She tells me her father went to LSU for a couple years. Her parents divorced ten years ago. Her mother re-married and lives in Tennessee. She doesn’t volunteer and I don’t ask why she lives with her father. We transverse Ascension Parish in silence and I’m amazed how natural it feels just having her there. We don’t have to make small talk. I feel my heart beating and recognize that tell-tale sign.

  We cross the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and she starts talking about LaSalle and DeSoto and vast American forest-swampland that once covered as far as we could see. I tell her about the fierce war dogs DeSoto brought with him, dogs used to ward off Indian attacks. Some of the dogs escaped captivity, some captured by the Choctaw.

  “Ever see a red wolf?”

  “At the Audubon Zoo,” she says. “Small for a wolf, aren’t they?”

  “Apparently DeSoto’s war dogs mated with the red wolf, which produced the mottled spots, muscular shoulders, and blue eyes of the Catahoula.”

  Buck raises his head as if he knows we’re talking about him, licks my hand then nuzzles his face against Angie’s leg. She strokes his fur softly. “Hard to imagine this little guy being fierce.”

  I finish the thought, “Or able to move silently through the swamp with the cunning of a wolf.”

  “He doesn’t look very cunning.”

  “If you look at his face closely, you’ll see a close resemblance to Disney’s Goofy.”

  She laughs again.

  We pass cotton fields and corn fields as we cross the long flat land. Turning off the interstate at Lafayette we eventually ride past rice paddies and wide fields of sugar cane.

  “My Daddy worked the cane.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  I tell her he was a sugar boiler by profession. Worked from one sugar mill to another each season. Godchaux’s. Domino’s. He was also a pipe-fitter for the mills.