DR08 - Burning Angel (8 page)

Clete was drinking a beer on a wood bench under the palm tree, his porkpie hat slanted over his forehead.

”You ought to try the hot dogs here,“ Clete said.

”You want to be up on a kidnapping charge?“ I said.

”Hey, Sonny! You gonna dime me?“ Clete yelled at the car. Then he looked back at me. ”See, Sonny's stand-up. He's not complaining.“

He brushed at a fleck of dried blood in one nostril.

”What happened?“ I said.

”He'd rat-holed himself in a room over a pool hall, actually more like a pool hall and hot pillow joint. He said he wasn't coming with me. I started to hook him up and he unloaded on me. So I had to throw him down the stairs.“

He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand unconsciously. ”Why do you have it in for him, Clete?“

”Because he was down in Bongo-Bongo Land for the same reasons as the rest of us. Except he pretends he's got some kind of blue fire radiating around his head or something.“ I walked over to the car. Sonny's left eye was swollen almost shut. He grinned up at me. His sharkskin slacks were torn at the knee. ”How's the man, Streak?“ he said. ”I wish you had come in on your own.“

”Long story.“

”It always is.“

”You going to hold me?“

”Maybe.“ I turned toward Clete. ”Give me your key,“ I called. ”Ask Sonny if I need rabies shots,“ he said, and pitched it at me. ”You're not going to get clever, are you?“ I said to Sonny. ”With you guys? Are you kidding?“

”You're the consummate grifter, Sonny,“ I said, opened the door, and unlocked his wrist. Then I leveled my finger at his face. ”Who were the guys who killed Delia Landry?“

”I'm not sure.“

”Don't you lie to me, Sonny.“

”It could be any number of guys. It depends who they send in. You didn't lift any prints?“

”Don't worry about what we do or don't do. You just answer my questions. Who's theyT “Dave, you're not going to understand this stuff.”

“You're starting to piss me off, Sonny.”

“I don't blame you.”

“Get out of the car.” I patted him down against the fender, then slipped my hand under his arm and turned him toward my truck. “Where we going?” he said. “You're a material witness. You're also an uncooperative material witness. That means we'll be keeping you for a while.”

“Mistake.”

“I'll live with it.”

“Don't count on it, Dave. I'm not being cute, either.”

“He's a sweetheart,” Clete said from the bench. Then he rubbed the knuckles on his right hand and looked at them.

“Sorry I popped you, Cletus,” Sonny said.

“In your ear, Sonny,” Clete said.

We drove past boatyards then some shrimp boats that were knocking against the pilings in their berths. The air was warm and smelled like brass and dead fish.

“Can I stop by my room and pick up some things?” Sonny asked.

“No.”

“Just a shirt.”

“Nope.”

“You're a hard man, Streak.”

“That girl took your fall, Sonny. You want to look at her morgue pictures?”

He was quiet a long time, his face looking straight ahead at the rain striking the windshield.

“Did she suffer?” he said.

“They tore her apart. What do you think?”

His mouth was red against his white skin.

“They were after me, or maybe the notebook I gave you,” he said.

“I've got it. You've written a potential best-seller and people are getting killed over it.”

“Dave, you lock me up, those guys are going to get to me.”

“That's the breaks, partner.”

He was quiet again, his eyes focused inward.

“Are we talking about some kind of CIA involvement?” I said.

“Not directly. But you start sending the wrong stuff through the computer, through your fax machines, these guys will step right into the middle of your life. I guarantee it, Dave.”

“How's the name Emile Pogue sit with you?” I said.

He let out his breath quietly. Under his suspenders his stomach was flat and corded with muscle.

“Another officer ran him all kinds of ways and came up empty,” I said.

He rubbed the ball of his thumb across his lips. Then he said, “I didn't eat yet. What time they serve at the lockup?” Try to read that. Two hours later Clete called me at home. It was raining hard, the water sluicing off the gutters, and the back lawn was full of floating leaves. “What'd you get out of him?” Clete said. “Nothing.”

I could hear country music and people's voices in the background.

“Where are you?”

“In a slop chute outside Morgan City. Dave, this guy bothers me. There's something not natural about him.”

“He's a hustler. He's outrageous by nature.”

“He doesn't get any older. He always looks the same.” I tried to remember Sonny's approximate age. I couldn't. “There's something else,” Clete said. “Where I hit him.

There's a strawberry mark across the backs of my fingers. It's throbbing like I've got blood poisoning or something.”

“Get out of the bar, Clete.”

“You always knoW how to say it.” I couldn't sleep that night. The rain stopped and a heavy mist settled in the trees outside our bedroom window, and I could hear night-feeding bass flopping back in the swamp. I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the curtains puffing in the breeze. “What is it, Dave?” Bootsie said behind me in the dark. “I had a bad dream, that's all.”

“About what?” She put her hand on my spine. “A captain I knew in Vietnam. He was a stubborn and inflexible man. He sent a bunch of guys across a rice field under a full moon. They didn't come back.”

“It's been thirty years, Dave.”

“The dream was about myself. I'm going into town. I'll call you later,” I said. I took two paper bags from the kitchen pantry, put a clean shirt in one of them, stopped by the bait shop, then drove up the dirt road through the tunnel of oak trees and over the drawbridge toward New Iberia.

It was still dark when I reached the parish jail. Kelso was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a comic book behind his desk. His face looked like a walrus's in the shadows from his desk lamp, the moles on his neck as big as raisins.

“I want to check Marsallus out,” I said.

“Check him out? Like a book from the library, you're saying?”

“It's the middle of the night. Why make an issue out of everything?”

He stretched and yawned. His thick glasses were full of light. “The guy's a twenty-four kick-out, anyway, isn't he?”

“Maybe.”

“I think you ought to take him to a shrink.”

“What'd he do?”

“He's been having a conversation in his cell.”

((C V

So?

“There ain't anybody else in it, Robicheaux.”

“How about bringing him out, Kelso, then you can get back to your reading.”

“Hey, Robicheaux, you take him to the wig mechanic, make an appointment for yourself, too.”

A few minutes later Sonny and I got in my truck and drove down East Main. He was dressed in his sharkskin slacks and a jailhouse denim shirt. There were low pink clouds in the east now and the live oaks along the street were gray and hazy with mist.

“There's a shirt in that bag by the door,” I said.

“What's this in the other one? You carrying around a junkyard, Dave?”

He lifted the rusted chain and ankle cuff out of the bag.

I didn't answer his question. “I thought you might enjoy some takeout from Victor's rather than eat at the slam,” I said, parking in front of a small cafeteria on Main across from the bayou. “You want to go get it?”

“You're not afraid I'll go out the back door?”

“There isn't one.” I put eight one-dollar bills in his hand. “Make mine scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, and coffee.”

I watched him walk inside, tucking my borrowed tropical shirt inside his rumpled slacks. He was grinning when he came back out and got in the truck.

“There is a back door, Streak. You didn't know that?” he said.

“Huh,” I said, and drove us across the drawbridge, over the Teche, into City Park. The bayou was high and yellow with mud, and the wake from a tug with green and red running lights washed over the banks into the grass. We ate at a picnic table under a tree that was alive with mockingbirds.

“You ever see a leg iron like that before, Sonny?”

“Yeah, in the museum at Jackson Square.”

“Why would you make it your business to know that Jean Lafitte operated a barracoon outside New Iberia?”

“Delia told me. She was into stuff like that.” Then he wiped his face with his hand. “It's already getting hot.”

“I read your notebook. It doesn't seem to have any great illumination in it, Sonny.”

“Maybe I'm a lousy writer.”

“Why do these bozos want to kill people over your notebook?”

“They're called cleanup guys. They hose a guy and everything around him right off the planet.”

“I'll put it to you, partner, that girl died a miserable death. You want to help me nail them or not?”

A pinched light came into his face. His hand tightened on the edge of the table. He looked out toward the bayou.

“I don't know who they were,” he said. “Look, what I can tell you won't help. But you're a cop and you'll end up putting it in a federal computer. You might as well swallow a piece of broken glass.”

I took Roy Bumgartner's dog tag out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the table beside Sonny's Styrofoam coffee cup.

“What's that mean to you?” I asked. He stared at the name. “Nothing,”

he said.

“He flew a slick in Vietnam and disappeared in Laos. Somebody left this in my bait shop for me to find.”

“The guy was an MIA or POW?”

“Yeah, and a friend of mine.”

“There's a network, Dave, old-time intelligence guys, meres, cowboys, shitheads, whatever you want to call them. They were mixed up with opium growers in the Golden Triangle.

Some people believe that's why our guys were left behind over there.

They knew too much about ties between narcotics and the American government.” I looked at him for a long time. “What?” he said. “You remind me of myself when I was on the grog, Sonny. I didn't trust anyone. So I seriously fucked up my life as well as other people's.”

“Yeah, well, this breakfast has started to get expensive.”

“I've got a few things to do in town. Can you take yourself back to the jail?”

“Take myself back to-”

“Yeah, check yourself in. Kelso's got a sense of humor. Tell him you heard the Iberia Parish lockup is run like the public library.” I stuck my business card in his shirt pocket. “When you get tired of grandiose dog shit, give me a call.” I picked up my coffee cup and walked back toward my truck. “Hey, Dave, this isn't right,” he said behind me. “You want to hang from a cross. Do it without me, partner,” I said. At one that afternoon I called Kelso at the lockup. “Did Marsallus make it back there?” I asked. “Yeah, we're putting in a special cell with a turnstile for him. You're a laugh a minute,” he said. “Kick him loose.”

“You know what kind of paperwork you make for me?”

“You were right, Kelso, the prosecutor says we can't hold him. He wasn't a witness to anything. Sorry to inconvenience you.”

“You know your problem, Robicheaux? You don't like doing the peon work like everybody else-filling out forms, punching clocks, going to coffee at ten A.M. instead of when you feel like it. So you're always figuring out ways to work a finger in somebody's crack.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, keep that punk out of here.”

“What's he done now?”

“Giving speeches to the wet-brains in the tank. I don't need that kind of shit in my jail. Wait a minute, I wrote the names down he was talking about to these guys. Who's Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie?”

“Guys from another era, Kelso.”

“Yeah, well, two or three like your redheaded friend could have this town in flames. The wet-brains and stew-bums are all trying to talk and walk like him now, like they're all hipsters who grew up on Canal Street. It's fucking pathetic.”

Two days later Helen Soileau called in sick. An hour later, the phone on my desk rang.

“Can you come out to my house?” she said.

“What is it?”

“Can you come out?”

“Yeah, if you want me to. Are you all right?”

“Hurry up, Dave.”

I could hear her breath against the receiver, heated, dry, suddenly jerking in the back of her throat.

Chapter 9

LIVED ALONE in a racially mixed neighborhood in a one-story frame house with a screened-in gallery that she had inherited from her mother. The house was Spartan and neat, with a new tin roof and a fresh coat of metallic gray paint, the cement steps and pilings whitewashed, the flower beds bursting with pink and blue hydrangeas in the shade of a chinaberry tree.

To my knowledge, she never entertained, joined a club, or attended a church. Once a year she left the area on a vacation; except for the sheriff, she never told anyone where she was going, and no one ever asked. Her only interest, other than law enforcement, seemed to lie in the care of animals.

She wore no makeup when she opened the door. Her eyes went past me, out to the street. Her face looked as hard and shiny as ceramic.

“Come inside,” she said.

Her nine-millimeter automatic was in a checkered leather holster on the couch next to an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. The interior of the house was immaculate, slatted with sunlight, and smelled of burnt toast and coffee that had boiled over on the stove.

“You had me worried a little bit, Helen,” I said.

“I had visitors during the night,” she said. “You mean a break-in?”

“They didn't come inside.” Then her mouth twitched. She turned her face away and curled one finger at me. I followed her through the kitchen and into the backyard, which was shaded by a neighbor's oak whose limbs grew across her fence. At the back of the lawn was a row of elevated screened pens where Helen kept rabbits, possums, armadillos, fighting cocks, or any kind of wounded or sick animal or bird that the humane society or neighborhood children brought her. The tarps were pulled back on top of all the pens. “It was warm with no rain in the forecast last night, so I left them uncovered,” she said.

“When I went out this morning, the tarps were down. That's when I saw that bucket on the ground.” I picked it up and smelled it. The inside was coated with a white powder. My head jerked back involuntarily from the odor, my nasal passages burning, as though a rubber band had snapped behind my eyes. “They sprinkled it through the wire, then pulled the canvas down,” she said. The birds lay in lumps in the bottom of the pens, the way birds look after they've been shot in flight, their feathers puffing in the breeze. But the type of death the birds and animals died alike was more obvious in the stiffened bodies of the possums and coons. Their mouths were wide, their necks and spines twisted from convulsions, their claws extended as though they were defending themselves against invisible enemies. “I'm sorry, Helen. It took a real sonofabitch to do something like this,” I said. “Two of them. Look at the footprints. One of them must wear lead shoes.”