DR08 - Burning Angel (4 page)

”Who do you believe?“ I said, and smiled. ”It's what the people at the co'rthouse say. You want anything else, suh? I got to be about my work.“

”Thanks for your time.“ He walked off through the dappled light, his face turned innocuously into the breeze blowing across the cane field. Had I been a cop too long? I asked myself. Had I come to dislike someone simply because he'd been up the road?

No, it was the disingenuousness, the hostility that had no handles on it, the use of one's race like the edge of an ax.

But why expect otherwise, I thought. We'd been good teachers.

Five minutes after I walked into my office, Helen Soileau came through the door with a file folder in her hand and sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, her wide-set, unblinking pale eyes staring at my face.

”What is it?“ I said.

”Guess who bailed out Sweet Pea Chaisson?“

I raised my eyebrows.

”Jason Darbonne, over in Lafayette. When did he start representing pimps?“

”Darbonne would hitch his mother to a dogsled if the price was right.“

”Get this. The health officer wouldn't let Sweet Pea transport the coffin back to Breaux Bridge, so he got a guy to haul it for ten bucks in a garbage truck.“

”What's the file folder?“

”You wanted to question Pissant again? Too bad. The Feds picked him up this morning .. . Hey, I thought that'd give your peaches a tug.“

”Helen, could you give a little thought as to how you speak to people sometimes?“

”I'm not the problem. The problem is that black four-eyed fuck at the jail who turned our man over to the FBI.“

”What does the FBI want with a house creep?“

”Here's the paperwork,“ she said, and threw the folder on my desk. ”If you go over to the lockup, tell that stack of whale shit to get his mind off copping somebody' spud at least long enough to give us a phone call before he screws up an investigation.“

”I'm serious, Helen .. . Why not cut people a little .. . Never mind ..

. I'll take care of it.“

After she left my office I went over to see the parish jailer. He was a three-hundred-pound bisexual with glasses as thick as Coke bottles and moles all over his neck.

”I didn't release him. The night man did,“ he said.

”This paperwork is shit, Kelso.“

”Don't hurt my night man's feelings. He didn't get out of the eighth grade for nothing.“

”You have a peculiar sense of humor. Roland Broussard was witness to a murder.“

”So talk to the Feds. Maybe that's why they picked him up. Anyway, they just took him out on loan.“

”Where's it say that? This handwriting looks like a drunk chicken walked across the page.“

”You want anything else?“ he asked, taking a wax paper-wrapped sandwich out of his desk drawer.

”Yeah, the prisoner back in our custody.“

He nodded, bit into his sandwich, and opened the newspaper on his desk blotter.

”I promise you, my man, you'll be the first to know,“ he said, his eyes already deep in a sports story.

Chapter 4

YOU'RE A police officer for a while, you encounter certain temptations.

They come to you as all seductions do, in increments, a teaspoon at a time, until you discover you made an irrevocable hard left turn down the road someplace and you wake up one morning in a moral wasteland'

with no idea who you are. I'm not talking about going on a pad, ripping off dope from an evidence locker, or taking juice from dealers, either. Those temptations are not inherent in the job; they're in the person. The big trade-off is in one's humanity. The discretionary power of a police officer is enormous, at least in the lower strata of society, where you spend most of your time. You start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You're not welcome in their part of town; you're lied to with regularity, excoriated, your cruiser Molotoved. The most venal bail bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you'll be shot at by snipers. You begin to believe there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman, morally diseased, or, at best, as caricatures whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals. Then maybe you're the first to arrive on the scene after another cop has shot and killed a fleeing suspect. The summer night is hot and boiling with insects, the air already charged with a knowledge you don't want to accept. It was a simple BE, a slashed screen in the back of a house; the dead man is a full-time bumbling loser known to every cop on the beat; the two wounds are three inches apart. ”He was running?“ you say to the other cop, who's wired to the eyes. ”You goddamn right he was. He stopped and turned on me. Look, he had a piece.“ The gun is in the weeds; it's blue-black, the grips wrapped with electrician's tape. The moon is down, the night so dark you wonder how anyone could see the weapon in the hand of a black suspect. ”I'm counting on you, kid,“ the other cop says. ”Just tell people what you saw. There's the fucking gun. Right? It ain't a mushroom.“ And you step across a line. Don't sweat it, a sergeant and drinking buddy tells you later. It's just one more lowlife off the board. Most of these guys wouldn't make good bars of soap. Then something happens that reminds you we all fell out of the same tree. Imagine a man locked in a car trunk, his wrists bound behind him, his nose running from the dust and the thick oily smell of the spare tire. The car's brake lights go on, illuminating the interior of the trunk briefly, then the car turns on a rural road and gravel pings like rifle shot under the fenders. But something changes, a stroke of luck the bound man can't believe-the car bangs over a rut and the latch on the trunk springs loose from the lock, hooking just enough so that the trunk lid doesn't fly up in the driver's rearview mirror. The air that blows through the opening smells of rain and wet trees and flowers; the man can hear hundreds of frogs croaking in unison. He readies himself, presses the sole of his tennis shoe against the latch, eases it free, then rolls over the trunk's lip, tumbles off the bumper, and bounces like a tire in the middle of the road. The breath goes out of his chest in a long wheeze, as though he had been dropped from a great height; rocks scour divots out of his face and grind red circles the size of silver dollars on his elbows. Thirty yards up the car has skidded to a stop, the lid of the trunk flopping in the air. And the bound man splashes through the cattails into a slough by the side of the road, his legs tangling in dead hyacinth vines below the surface, the silt locking around his ankles like soft cement. Ahead he can see the flooded stands of cypress and willow trees, the green layer of algae on the dead water, the shadows that envelop and protect him like a cloak. The hyacinth vines are like wire around his legs; he trips, falls on one knee. A brown cloud of mud mushrooms around him. He stumbles forward again, jerking at the clothesline that binds his wrists, his heart exploding in his chest. His pursuers are directly behind him now; his back twitches as though the skin has been stripped off with pliers. Then he wonders if the scream he hears is his own or that of a nutria out on the lake. They fire only one round. It passes through him like a shaft of ice, right above the kidney. When he opens his eyes, he's on his back, stretched across a cushion of crushed willows on top of a sand spit, his legs in the water. The sound of the pistol report is still ringing in his ears. The man who wades toward him in silhouette is smoking a cigarette. Not twice. It's not fair, Roland Broussard wants to say. I got a meth problem. That's the only reason I was there. I'm a nobody guy, man. You don't need to do this.

The man in silhouette takes another puff off his cigarette, pitches it out into the trees, perhaps moves out of the moon's glow so Roland's face will be better illuminated. Then he sights along the barrel and puts another round from the .357 Magnum right through Roland's eyebrow.

He walks with a heavy step back up the embankment, where a companion has waited for him as though he were watching the rerun of an old film.

Chapter 5

LISTENED, HIS powder blue porkpie hat slanted down on his forehead, his eyes roving out into the hall while I talked. He wore an immaculate pair of white tennis shorts and a print shirt covered with parakeets.

The back of his neck and the tops of his immense arms were flaking with sunburn. ”Kidnapping a guy already in custody is pretty slick. Who do you figure these characters were?“ he said, his eyes leaving two uniformed deputies on the other side of the glass. ”Guys who knew the drill, at least well enough to convince a night jailer they were FBI.“

”The grease balls “Maybe.”

“It's not their normal style. They don't like to stray into federal jurisdiction.” He glanced through the glass partition into the hall again. “Why do I get the feeling I'm some kind of zoo exhibit?”

“It's your imagination,” I said, my face flat. “I bet.” Then he winked and pointed at a deputy with one finger. The deputy looked down at some papers in his hand. “Knock it off, Clete.”

“Why'd you ask me down here?”

“I thought you'd like to go fishing.”

He smiled. His face was round and pink, his green eyes lighted with a private sense of humor. A scar ran through part of his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel.

“Dave, I know what my old Homicide podjo is going to think before he thinks it.”

“I've got two open murder cases. One of the victims may have been Sonny Boy Marsallus's girlfriend.”

“Marsallus, huh?” he said, his face sobering.

“I tried to have him picked up by NOPD, but he went off the screen.”

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.

“Leave him off the screen,” he said.

“What was he into down in the tropics?” I asked.

“A lot of grief.”

Helen Soileau came through the door, without knocking, and dropped the crime scene report on my desk.

“You want to look it over and sign it?” she said. Her eyes went up and down Clete's body.

“Do y'all know each other?” I said.

“Only by reputation. Didn't he work for Sally Dio?” she said.

Clete fed a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at me.

“I'll go over the report in a few minutes, Helen,” I said.

“We couldn't get a print off the cigarette butt, but the casts on the footprints and tire tracks look good,” she said. “By the way, the .357 rounds were hollow-points.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Clete swiveled around in his chair and watched her go back out the door.

“Who's the muff-driver?” he said.

“Come on, Clete.”

“One look at that broad is enough to drive you to a monastery.”

It was a quarter to five.

“Do you want to pull your car around front and I'll meet you there?” I said. He followed me in his old Cadillac convertible to the Henderson levee outside Breaux Bridge. We put my boat and outboard in the water and fished on the far side of a bay dotted with abandoned oil platforms and dead cypress trees. The rain was falling through shafts of sunlight in the west, and the rain looked like tunnels of spun glass and smoke rising into the sky. Clete took a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer from the cooler and snapped off the top with his pocketknife. The foam slid down the inside of the neck when he removed the bottle from his mouth. Then he drank again, his throat working a long time. His face looked tired, vaguely morose. “Were you bothered by that crack Helen made about Sally Dio?”

“So I ran security for a grease ball I also had two of his goons slam my hand in a car door. Sometime when you have a chance, tell the bride of Frankenstein what happened when Sal and his hired gum balls were flying friendly skies.”

The plane had crashed and exploded in a fireball on a mountainside in western Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said someone had poured sand in the gas tanks. Clete finished his beer and blew out his breath. He pushed his hand down in the ice for another bottle. “You okay, partner?” I said. “I've never dealt real well with that bullshit I got involved with in Central America. Sometimes it comes back in the middle of the night, I mean worse than when I got back from Vietnam. It's like somebody striking a match on my stomach lining.”

There were white lines at the corners of his eyes. He watched his red-and-white bobber move across the water in the shade of an oil platform, dip below the surface and rise quivering again; but he didn't pick up his rod.

“Maybe it's time for the short version of the Serenity Prayer.

Sometimes you just have to say fuck it,” I said. “What's the worst day you had in ”Nam, I mean besides getting nailed by that Bouncing Betty?“

, ”A village chieftain called in the 1055 on his own people.“

”Sonny Boy and I hooked up with the same bunch of gun runners It was like an outdoor mental asylum down there. Half the time I ' didn't know if we were selling to the rebels or the government. I was so strung out on rum and dope and my own troubles I didn't care, either. Then one night we got to see what the government did when they wanted to put the fear of God in the Indians.“ He pinched his mouth with his hand. His calluses made a dry sound like sandpaper against his whiskers. He took a breath and widened his eyes. I ”They went into this one ville and killed everything in sight. Maybe four hundred people. There was an orphanage there, run by some Mennonites. They didn't spare anybody …

all those kids .. . man.“ He watched my face. ;, ”You saw this?“ I asked. ”I heard it, from maybe a half mile away. I'll never forget the sound of those people screaming. Then this captain walked us through the ville. The sonofabitch didn't give it a second thought.“

He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and tried to light it with a Zippo cupped in his hands. The flint scratched dryly and he took the cigarette back out of his mouth and closed his big hand on it. ”Let the past go, Cletus. Haven't you paid enough dues?“ I said. ”You wanted to hear about Sonny Boy? Three weeks later we were with a different bunch of guys, I was so wiped out I still don't know who they were, Cubans maybe and some Belgians working both sides of the street. Anyway, we were on a trail and we walked right into an L-shaped ambush, M-6o's, blookers, serious shit, they must have shredded twelve guys in the first ten seconds. “Sonny was on point … I saw this … I wasn't hallucinating … Two guys next to me saw it, too .. .”