“Phone’s ringing, Dave,” Alafair said from the kitchen.
“Would you answer it, please?”
Through the doorway I could see her frying eggs and ham slices in a heavy iron skillet, lifting it by its handle without a hot pad, her back to me. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran Indian girl I had pulled from a submerged plane out on the salt many years ago. She clanged the skillet on the stove and picked up the phone, resting her rump against the drain board, giving me a look.
“Is Dave Robicheaux here? Wait a minute. I’ll check,” she said. She lowered the receiver, the mouthpiece uncovered. “Dave, are you here? If you are, a lady would like to speak to you.”
That’s what you get when your kid goes to Reed College and joins kickboxing clubs.
I took the receiver from her hand. “Hello?” I said.
“This is Natalia Ramos, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m here at the shelter, the one you told me to go to. Have you found out where Jude went? I can’t get no information from anybody at the shelter. I thought maybe you had lists of people who was picked up by the Coast Guard.”
“No, ma’am, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Jude’s in pain all the time from his cancer. He went down to the Lower Nine to give his people communion. He’d always been scared to give people communion at Mass.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Ramos, but you’re not making sense.”
“His hands tremble all the time. He thinks he’ll drop the chalice. He’d always let another priest give out Communion at Mass. But this time he was gonna say Mass and give people Communion.”
In the background I could hear voices echoing in a large area, perhaps inside a gymnasium or a National Guard armory. Alafair was setting my breakfast on the kitchen table, placing the plate and knife and fork and coffee cup and saucer carefully on the surface so as not to make any noise. Her hair was long and black on her shoulders, her figure lovely inside her jeans and pink blouse.
I didn’t know what to say to Natalia Ramos. “Where are you?” I asked.
“At the high school in Franklin.”
“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
“Where’s Chula at?” she asked.
“Your brother?”
“Yeah, where’d you put him at?”
“In the Iberia Parish Prison, along with his fall partner.”
I thought her next statement would be an abrasive one. But I was wrong.
“Maybe he can get some help there. Jail is the only place Chula ever did all right. I’ll be waiting for you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
I placed the telephone receiver back in the cradle, already regretting that I had taken the call.
“Who was that?” Alafair said.
“A Central American prostitute and junkie who was shacked up with a Catholic priest.”
I sat down and began eating. I could feel Alafair behind me, like a shadow breaking against the light. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Dave, you have the best heart of any man I’ve ever known,” she said.
I could feel the blood tingle in the back of my neck.
THE HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium in Franklin, down the bayou in St. Mary Parish, was lined with row upon row of army-surplus cots. Children were running everywhere, inside and outside, sailing Frisbees that a local merchant had brought from his store. I found Natalia washing clothes by hand in the lee of the building, her arms deep inside an aluminum tub, the tails of her denim shirt tied under her breasts. I asked her to tell me again of her last moments with Jude LeBlanc.
“He brought the boat to the church roof. He was up there chopping a hole with an ax to get everybody out. Then I heard a fight up there. I didn’t see him again.”
It was warm in the shade, but her face looked cool and dry, her ribs etched against her dusky skin. She wore sandals and baggy men’s khakis and looked like a Third World countrywoman who was washing the clothes of children who were not her own. She did not look like a prostitute or a junkie.
“Did you bring any dope into the shelter?” I said.
“You drove here to ask me that?”
“You were holding when you got busted. I got you off the wrist chain and sent you here. That makes you my responsibility. So that’s why I’m asking you if you brought any dope into the shelter.”
“I been trying to get clean. There’s some people in the gym putting together a Narcotics Anonymous group. I’m gonna start going to meetings again.”
She had managed to answer my question without answering my question. “Ms. Ramos, if I find out you are using or distributing narcotics in this shelter, I’m going to get you kicked out or put in jail.”
She squeezed out a pair of children’s blue jeans and laid them on the side of the tub. “I got to go back to New Orleans.”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
“I keep seeing Jude drowning there in the dark, without no one to help him.”
“Jude is a stand-up guy. My advice is that you don’t treat him as less.”
“He used to say a special reconciliation Mass on Saturday afternoon for all the whores and junkies and street people. He gave everybody absolution, all at one time, no matter what they done. Somebody attacked him to get his boat. I think they killed him. I got to find out. I just can’t live without knowing what happened to him.”
“Ms. Ramos, tens of thousands of people are missing right now. FEMA is trying to—”
“How come nobody came?”
“Pardon?”
“People were drowning all over the neighborhood and nobody came. A big, fat black woman in a purple dress was standing on top of a car, waving at the sky. Her dress was floating out in the water. She was on the car a half hour, waving, while the water kept rising. I saw her fall off the car. It was over her head.”
I didn’t want to hear more stories about Katrina. The images I had seen during the seven-day period immediately after the storm would never leave me. Nor could I afford the anger they engendered in me. Nor did I wish to deal with the latent racism in our culture that was already beginning to rear its head. According to the Washington Post, a state legislator in Baton Rouge had just told a group of lobbyists in Baton Rouge, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
How do you explain a statement like that to people who are victims of the worst natural disaster in American history? The answer is you don’t. And you don’t try to fix a broken world and you don’t try to put Band-Aids on broken people, I told myself.
“I believe Jude would want you to remain at the shelter. You can do a lot of good here. I promise I’ll do my best to find out what happened to him,” I said.
“I think he talked about you,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Jude said he used to deliver the newspaper to a policeman who owned a bait shop. He said the policeman was a drunk but he was a good man who tried to help people who didn’t have no power. Isn’t that you he was talking about?”
She knew how to set the hook.
AFTER LUNCH I drove to the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and went upstairs to my office. The contrast between the normalcy of my job in Iberia Parish and the seven days I had just spent in New Orleans was like the difference between the bloom and confidence of youth and the mental condition of a man who has been stricken arbitrarily by a fatal illness. The building’s interior was spotless and full of sunshine. Cool air flowed steadily from the wall vents. One of the secretaries had placed flowers on the windowsills. A group of deputies in crisp uniforms and polished gunbelts were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts on the reception counter in front. From my second-story office window I could look out on a canopy of palm and live oak trees that cover a working-class neighborhood, and behind the cathedral I could see a cemetery of whitewashed brick crypts where Confederate dead remind us that Shiloh is not a historical abstraction.
Helen glanced through the glass in my door, then opened the door without knocking. “You look sharp, Pops,” she said.
“I hear that a lot,” I replied.
She walked to my window and gazed at the Sunset Limited passing down the railroad tracks. She wore a pair of tight slacks and a white shirt with the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs. A four-by-seven yellow notepad was stuffed in her back pocket. She hooked her thumbs in the sides of her gunbelt. “You rested up?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. “Say it, Helen.”
“I just got off the phone with FEMA and the FBI. The civil service and governmental structure of New Orleans has been destroyed. We’re about to get hit with a shitload of casework we don’t need.”
“Shouldn’t you be telling this to the entire department?”
“This particular case involves one of Clete Purcel’s bail skips. It also involves a guy you know by the name of Otis Baylor.”
“An insurance man?”
“That’s the guy. The Feds believe a number of homicides may have been committed by vigilantes who decided they’d have some fun during the storm. They think Otis Baylor may have popped some looters who had just gutted Sidney Kovick’s house.”
“Home invaders hit Sidney Kovick?”
“Yeah, evidently four of the dumbest shits in New Orleans. One got his head blown off and one will be a quadriplegic the rest of his life. The Feds believe Baylor had a grudge against blacks for raping his daughter and he probably used the opportunity to take a couple of pukes off the board.”
“It doesn’t sound like him.”
“The Feds are taking heat about going after gangbangers and letting white shooters skate. The Baylor investigation will probably be a lawn ornament for them. Anyway, we’re supposed to do what we can. You okay with that, bwana?”
“What’s Clete Purcel’s role in all this?”
She pulled the yellow notepad from her back pocket and looked at it. “The brother of the quadriplegic is named Bertrand Melancon. Clete had him in custody but lost him in the handover at the chain-link jail. Here’s the irony in all this, Dave. Clete told the Feds he thinks the Melancon brothers and a friend of theirs named Andre Rochon might actually be rapists.”
“Based on what?”
“Clete says Rochon’s panel truck contained evidence that might link Rochon and possibly the Melancons to an abduction and rape in the Lower Nine.”
“Yeah, he told me about these guys. They’re the ones who ran over him right before the storm. You want me to see Baylor?”
“You mind?”
I once knew a door gunner in Vietnam who wouldn’t go on R & R out-of-country for fear he would desert and not return to duty. So he stayed stoned in the door of his Huey, stoned in the bush, and stoned in Saigon, and finished his tour without ever leaving the fresh-air mental asylum of Indochina. As Helen waited for my answer, my friend’s point of view seemed much more reasonable than I had previously thought.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I checked out a cruiser and drove back to New Orleans. The sky over the wetlands was still filled with birds that seemed to have no destination or home. After four days, members of the 82nd Airborne had arrived in the city and most of the looting and violence had stopped. But eighty percent of the city was still underwater, and tens of thousands of people still had nowhere to go.
I turned off St. Charles and threaded my way through piles of downed trees on several side streets in the general direction of Otis Baylor’s house. Finally I parked my pickup and either waded or walked across people’s lawns the rest of the way.
The front porch of Otis Baylor’s house was rounded, with a half-circle roof on it supported by Doric columns. I raised the brass ring on the door and knocked. The water had receded on his street, exposing the neutral ground. Down the street, on the opposite side, I could see the home of Sidney Kovick. A repair crew was pulling plywood off the picture windows.
Otis Baylor opened the front door. His face was round and empty, like that of a man who had just returned from a funeral. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Baylor,” I said. “I’ve been assigned to help in the investigation of a double shooting that took place in front of your house. You might remember me from New Iberia.”
He did not extend his hand. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a little problem here. A high school kid got his brains blown out in front of your house, and a full-time loser with him took a round through his spinal cord. The Feds think vigilantes may have done it. Frankly, I don’t think this investigation is going anywhere, but our department is on lend-lease with the City of New Orleans and we need to do what we can.”
There was a beat, a microsecond pause in which his eyes went away from mine.
“Come in,” he said, holding open the door. “You’re lucky you caught me at home. I’m using the house as my office now, but I’m usually in the field with my adjusters. Would you like some tea? I still have ice in my freezer.”
“No, thanks. I’ll make this as quick as I can, sir.”
He invited me to sit down with him in his den. The books on his shelves were largely referential or encyclopedic in nature, or had been purchased from book clubs that specialize in popular history and biography. His desk was overflowing with paper. Through the side window I could see a bullet-headed man on a ladder trying to free a splintered oak limb from his roof.
“An FBI investigator said you heard a single shot but you don’t know where it came from,” I said.
“I was asleep. The shot woke me up. I looked out the dormer window and saw a kid floating in the water and another guy lying half inside the front of the boat.”
“You own a firearm, Mr. Baylor?”
“It’s Otis. Yes, a 1903-model Springfield bolt-action rifle. You want to see it?”
“Not right now. Thanks for offering. After you saw the kid in the water and the one half inside the boat, did you go outside?”
“By the time I got my clothes on, one guy had loaded the wounded one all the way into the boat and was already down to the corner. Another guy was running.”
“They were all black?”
“As far as I could tell. It was dark.”
“And you saw nobody else on the street or on a porch or in a house window?”
“No, I didn’t.”
I opened the manila folder in my hand and read from the notes given to me over the phone by an FBI agent working out of Baton Rouge. “The Feds and the guys from NOPD believe the shot had to come from this side of the street.”