A Stained White Radiance (7 page)

“Have you ever seen one like that before?” the medical examiner said. He was a thin elderly man who wore gold-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie and carried a pocket watch on a chain. His sleeves were rolled, and he kept brushing at his wrist with a piece of wet paper towel.

“In New Orleans. When I was at the First District,” I said.

He wadded up the towel and threw it into the flower bed. His face looked disgusted.

“It's a first for me,” he said. “Maybe that's why I'll stay in New Iberia. Does he have family here?”

“I think he was single. I don't know if he has relatives back in Houston or not.”

“If you have to talk with any of them, you can tell them he was probably out of it with the first shot.”

“Is it true?”

“It's what you can tell them, Dave.”

“I see.”

“His eyes were open when he got the next one. He probably saw it coming. But where's the law say that relatives need to know everything?” A fingerprint man went out the door, and a deputy locked it behind him. They both got in their cars. “So you figure the shooter's from the mob?” the examiner said.

“Who knows? It's their signature.”

“Why do they do it that way? Just to be thorough?”

“More likely because most of them are degenerates and sadists. But maybe I say that just because I'm tired.” I tried to smile.

“How's your shoulder?”

“All right. I'll put some ice on it.”

“I scraped a blood specimen off the corner of the garage. It might help you later.”

“Thanks, doctor. I'd appreciate it if you'd send
me a copy of the autopsy report as soon as it's ready.”

“You're sure you're all right? It got pretty close in there, didn't it?”

“The bottom line is I should have figured someone was in that bedroom. He'd just started to toss it when he heard me in the hallway. I'm lucky I didn't get my eggs scrambled.”

“If it's any consolation, the guy you wounded probably has a sizable slice of wood in his neck or face. He might show up at a hospital. My experience has been that most of these guys are crybabies when it comes to pain.”

“Maybe so. Goodnight, doctor.”

“Goodnight, Dave. Drive carefully.”

The fields were white with mist as I drove back toward New Iberia. My collarbone throbbed and felt swollen and hot when I touched it. The pink neon sign over the roadside bar gleamed softly on the oyster-shell parking lot. In my mind I kept repeating something told me by a platoon sergeant during my first week in Vietnam: don't think about it before it happens, and never think about it afterward. Yes, that was the trick. Just put one logical foot after the other. I yawned and my ears popped like firecrackers.

B
ACK AT THE OFFICE
, I called Weldon at his mother-in-law's home in Baton Rouge. I had woken him up, and he kept asking me to repeat myself.

“Look, I think it's better that you drive back to
New Iberia in the morning and then we'll have a long talk.”

“About what?”

“I don't think you listen well. The inside of your home is virtually destroyed. Three guys tore it apart because they were looking for something that's obviously important to them. Meanwhile they murdered a sheriff's deputy. Do you want to know how they did it?”

He was silent.

“They shot him through the back, probably when he came down the basement stairs,” I said. “Then they put one under his chin, one through his temple, and one through the back of his head. Do you know any low-rent wiseguys named Eddy or Jewel?”

I heard him cough in the back of his throat.

“I'm tied up here with some business for the next few days,” he said. “I'm going to send some repair people out to the house. You've got this number if you need me.”

“Maybe it's about time you plug into reality, Weldon. You don't make the rules in a murder investigation. That means you'll be in this office before noon tomorrow.”

“I don't want to leave Bama by herself, and I don't want to bring her back there, either.”

“That's a problem you're going to have to work out. We're either going to be talking in my office tomorrow morning, or you're going to be in custody as a material witness.”

“Sounds like legalese doodah to me.”

“It's easy to find out.”

“Yeah, well, I'll check my schedule. You want to have lunch?”

“No.”

“You've sure got a dark view of things, Dave. Lighten up.”

“The warrant gets cut one minute after twelve noon,” I said, and hung up.

As was typical of Weldon, which was to do everything possible in a contrary and unpredictable fashion, he came up the front walk of the sheriff's department at eight o'clock sharp, dressed in a pair of khakis, sandals without socks, a green-and-red-flowered shirt hanging outside his trousers, and a yellow panama hat at a jaunty angle on his head. His jaws were clean and red with a fresh shave.

He helped himself to a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the outer office, then sat in a chair across the desk from me, folded one leg over the other, and played with his hat on his knee. My shoulder still throbbed, down in the bone, like a dull toothache.

“What were they after, Weldon?” I asked.

“Search me.”

“You have no idea?”

“Nope.” He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and turned it in circles with his fingers.

“It wasn't money or jewelry. They left that scattered all over the place.”

“There're a lot of weird guys around these days. I think it's got something to do with the times. The country has weirded out on us, Dave.”

“I haven't had to talk with
any of Deputy Garrett's family yet. It's something I don't want to do, either. But I hope I have something more to offer them than a statement about the country weirding out on us.”

He looked momentarily shamefaced.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked.

“Who are these guys?”

“You tell me. You saw them. I didn't.”

“Eddy and Jewel. What do those names mean to you? Who's the guy with a mouthful of metal?”

“I'm sorry about your friend in the basement. I wish he hadn't gone in there.”

“It was his job.”

He gazed out the window at a cloud that hung on the edge of the early sun. His face became melancholy.

“Do you believe in karma? I do. Or at least I came to believe in it when I was in the Orient,” he said. His eyes wandered around the room.

“What's the point?”

“I don't know what's the point. You ever hear of a flyer named Earthquake McGoon? His real name was Ed McGovern, from New Jersey. He was kind of a legend among certain people in the Orient. He was a huge fat guy, and one time he and his copilot, this Chinese kid, got locked up in a Chinese jail. Earthquake kept yelling at the guards, ‘Goddamn it, you haven't fed me. Give me some goddamn food.' They told him he'd already had his rice bowl and to shut his mouth. That night when the guards went home Earthquake bent the bars apart and told his copilot to beat it, then he pushed
the bars back into shape. The guards came back in the morning and said, ‘Where's the other guy?' Earthquake said, ‘I told you to feed me, and you wouldn't do it, so I ate the sonofabitch.'

“He was one of those indestructible guys. Except he was doing a supply drop for the French at Dien Bien Phu and he got hit by some ground fire. He tried to get his parachute on but he was too fat. He told his kickers to jump and he was going to set it down on Highway One going into Hanoi. They said if he was going to ride it down, they would, too. He came in like a powder puff. It looked like they were home free, then his wing tipped a telephone pole, and they flipped and burned.”

He looked at me as though I should find meaning in his face or his story.

“That's what karma is,” he said. “Highway One outside of Hanoi is waiting for us. It's all part of a piece. I'm sorry about your friend.”

“Have you ever been in jail?” I said.

“No. Why?”

I walked around the side of the desk.

“Let me see your hand,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me see your hand.”

“Which hand?”

“It doesn't matter.” I lifted his right hand off the chair arm and snipped one end of my handcuffs around his wrist. Then I locked the other end to the D-ring on the floor.

“What do you think you're doing, Dave?”

“I'm going to have some breakfast. I'm not sure when I'll be back. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

“You listen—”

“You can start yelling or banging around in here if you want and somebody'll move you to the tank. I think today they have spaghetti for lunch. It's not bad.”

He looked simian in the chair, with one shoulder and taut arm stretched down toward the floor, his square face discolored with anger. Before he could speak again I closed the door behind me.

I walked across the street in the sunshine and bought four doughnuts at a café, then returned to the office. I wasn't gone more than ten minutes. I unlocked the handcuff from his wrist.

“That's what it's like,” I said. “Except it's twenty-four hours a day. You want to eat now?”

He opened and closed his right hand and rubbed his wrist. His eyes measured me as though he were looking down a gun barrel.

“You want a doughnut?” I repeated.

“Yeah, why not?”

“You don't trust people, Weldon. And maybe I can understand that. But it's not a private beef anymore.”

“I guess it's not.”

“Who are the three guys?”

“I've heard the name Jewel before. In New Orleans.”

“In connection with what?”

“I flew for some people. Down in the tropics.
A lot of different kinds of stuff goes in and out of there, you get my drift?” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I never saw the guy. But you get in bad with the wrong people and guys like that get turned loose on you sometimes.”

“Which people?”

One tooth made a white mark on the corner of his lip.

“I can't tell you any more, Dave. If you want to lock me up, that's the breaks. I'm living in a dark place, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get out of it.”

His face looked as flat and empty as melted tallow.

T
HAT SAME AFTERNOON
I drove out to his sister Drew's place on East Main. East Main in New Iberia is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South or perhaps in the whole country. It runs parallel with Bayou Teche and begins at the old brick post office and the Shadows, an 1831 plantation home that you often see on calendars and in motion pictures set in the antebellum South, and runs through a long corridor of spreading live oaks, whose trunks and root systems are so enormous that the city has long given up trying to contain them with cement and brick. The yards are filled with hibiscus and flaming azaleas, hydrangeas, bamboo, blooming myrtle trees, and trellises covered with roses and bugle vine and purple clumps of wisteria. In the twilight, smoke from crab boils and fish fries drifts across the lawns and
through the trees, and across the bayou you can hear a band or kids playing baseball in the city park.

Like the other Sonnier children, Drew had never been one to live a predictable life. She had used her share of Weldon's oil strike on her father's farm to buy a rambling one-story white house, surrounded with screened-in galleries, on a rolling, tree-shaded lot next to the old Burke home. She had been divorced twice, and any number of other men had drifted in and out of her life, usually to be cut loose unexpectedly and sent back to wherever they came from. She never did anything in moderation. Her love affairs were always public knowledge; she took indigent people of color into her home; she was inflexible in matters of principle and never gave an inch in an argument. She was robust and merry and big-shouldered, and sometimes I'd see her at the health club in Lafayette, clanking the weights up and down on the Nautilus machines, her shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face hot and bright with purpose, a red bandana tied in her wet black hair.

But she did surprise us once, at least until we thought about it. She gave up men for a while and became a lay missionary with the Maryknolls in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then she almost died of dysentery. When she returned home she formed the first chapter of Amnesty International in New Iberia.

I found her behind her house, trimming back the grapevines on the gazebo with two black children.
She was barefoot and wore dirty pink shorts and a white T-shirt, and there were twigs and flecks of dead leaves in her hair.

She had a pair of hedge trimmers extended high up on the vine when she turned her head and saw me.

“Hi, Dave,” she said.

“Hello, Drew. How've you been?”

“Pretty good. How's it with you?”

“I've been kind of busy of late.”

“I guess you have.”

I looked down at the two black children, both of whom were about five or six years old. “I have a six-pack of Dr Pepper on the seat of my truck. Why don't you guys go get it for us?” I said.

They looked at Drew for approval.

“Y'all go ahead,” she said.

“You know a sheriff's deputy was murdered last night at Weldon's house?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why would some people want to kill your brother, Drew?”

“Isn't he the one to ask?”

“He seems to think that being a standup guy is the same thing as allowing someone to blow his head off. Except now an innocent man is dead.”

She wiped the sweat out of her eyebrows with the back of her hand. The sun winked brightly off the bayou.

“Come inside and I'll give you some iced tea,” she said, wiped both of her hands on her rump, and walked ahead of me into the shade at the rear of her house. She pulled her damp T-shirt off her
breasts with her fingers and shook the cloth as she opened the screen door. There was something too cavalier about her attitude, and I had the feeling that she had anticipated my visit and had already made a private decision about the outcome of our conversation.