A Stained White Radiance (34 page)

“Cut a deal with the lowlifes and in the long run you always lose.”

“In law enforcement every man's vote doesn't count the same. Wyatt Earp belongs in the movies, Dave.”

“I tried to keep him on the phone so we could trace the call. You lose the edge on these guys as soon as you let them think they have something you want. That's the way it works, sheriff.”

“What else did he say?”

“He believes Gouza's got a five-grand open contract on him. If you want, you can tell NOPD about it, but I don't think they'll wring their hands over the news.”

“It's still Bobby Earl, isn't it?” he said.

“What?”

He scratched his clean-shaven soft cheek with a fingernail.

“Fluck, Gouza, this button man Jack Gates, I think they're all secondary players for you, Dave. It's Bobby Earl who's always on your front burner, isn't it?”

“Fluck frightened my little girl, sheriff. He also threatened me. You figure who's on my mind.”

“You sound a little sharp, podna.”

“This is the second time you've told me maybe it's me who's got a problem.”

“It wasn't my intention to do so.”

“Look, sheriff, we haven't turned the key on one guy in this case, except Gouza, and that was on a bum charge. When something like that happens, everybody gets impatient. Then a guy like Bobby Earl marshals a little pressure and convinces a few political oil cans that he's a victim, a federal agency decides that it's more interesting to throw a net over a mainline wiseguy like Gouza than a termite like Jewel Fluck, we local guys go along with it, and before you know it, half the cast is on the beach in the Virgin Islands and we're trying to figure out why people think we're schmoes.”

“Maybe after this one's over, you should take a little vacation time.”

“It won't change who's out there.”

He did a
rat-a-tat-tat
on his thighs with his palms, then stood up, smiled, and walked out of my office without saying anything else.

I
DROVE TO
Baton Rouge that afternoon to question the burned man who called himself Vic Benson. It wasn't to be the kind of interview that I had planned. I parked my truck at the end of Lyle's brick driveway on Highland and walked up onto the columned porch to lift the brass door knocker that rang a set of musical chimes deep in the interior of the house, when Lyle walked out of the sideyard with a garden rake in his hand, wearing a
T-shirt and jeans that hung off his hips. There were flecks of dirt and leaves in his mussed hair.

“Hey, Dave, what's happening?” he said. “You're just in time to fang down some barbecued pork chops. Come on around back.”

“Thanks anyway, Lyle. I just need to ask Vic Benson a few questions. Is he staying over at your mission?”

“No.”

“He took off?”

“No.” He was smiling now.

“He's here?”

“In the backyard. We just put in some pepper plants. It's a little late but I think they'll take.”

“He's living with you?”

“Out in the garage apartment.”

“I think what you're doing isn't smart.”

“I've never done anything smart in my life, Dave. Like Waylon says, ‘I might be crazy but it's kept me from going insane.' ”

“I'm not sure you want to hear everything I have to say to this man.”

“The words ain't been made that's gonna upset me, son . . . I mean Loot. Come on around back.”

The sweeping expanse of backyard was dotted with live oaks, lime trees, myrtle bushes, and circular weedless beds of roses and purple hydrangeas. Meat smoke from a stone fire pit drifted across the lawn and hung in the trees, and the Saint Augustine grass was so thick, so deeply blue and green in the evening shadows, that you felt you could dive into it as you would a deep pool of water.

Vic Benson was cutting back a clump of banana trees with a pair of garden shears. The blades of the shears were white and gummy with pulp. Each time he snapped the blades on a dead frond, the muscles in his face and neck flexed like snakes under his red scar tissue.

A thick-bodied black woman in a maid's uniform began setting a table on the flagstone patio.

“Let's sit down to eat, then you can ask the old man whatever you want,” Lyle said.

“This isn't what I had in mind, Lyle.”

“Quit trying to plan everything. What the Man on High plans for you is better than anything you could plan for yourself. Isn't that what y'all learn in AA? Look out yonder.” He pointed across the brick wall and bamboo that bordered his property. “See it, just above the trees out on Highland, my cross, right up there on top of my Bible college. Look, it's silver and pink in the sunlight. Inside all that chrome is a charred wooden cross that was burned by Klansmen to terrorize black folk. Then the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock made it his so me and him could run scams on a bunch of north Miss'sippi country people who didn't have two quarters to rub together in their overalls. Now it's on top of a Bible college where kids go to school free and study for the ministry. You think that's all accident? I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity. That's the way I like to think about that cross up there.”

“I don't like to cut into your sense of religiosity,
Lyle, but how in the name of God do you justify all this?” I gestured at his house, his manicured lawns.

“I don't own it. I'm mortgaged up to my eyeballs. It all went into the college. That ain't a shuck, either, Loot.”

“What do you pay that black woman with?”

He laughed.

“I don't pay her anything. She works three hours a day for room and board. She just got out of St. Gabriel. She did five years for murdering her pimp.”

“What you do is your business, Lyle, but I think you have a dangerous and psychotic man staying at your home.”

“That black gal, Clemmie, might cut my throat, but a good fart would blow ole Vic off the planet like a dandelion. Come on, let's eat. You're too serious about everything, Dave. That's always been your problem. Treat the world seriously and in turn it'll treat you like a clown. You ought to learn that, Loot.”

“How about saving it for a wider audience, Lyle?”

“It's just one guy's opinion,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he waved at the man who called himself Vic Benson and who was now flinging a pile of dried banana fronds into a trash fire by a brick wall at the back of the property. His body was silhouetted like a figure cut from tin against the puffs of sparks and plumes of black smoke. He walked toward us, out of the shade, his eyes red-rimmed, unblinking, welded on mine, his
puckered face as unreal as rubber twisted around a fist.

I didn't look directly at him while the black woman served us plates of black-eyed peas, dirty rice, and barbecued pork chops. But I could smell him, an odor like turpentine, tobacco smoke, wind-dried sweat.

Because part of his lips had been pared away, you could see everything in his mouth when he chewed his food. He reached across the table for a second pork chop, and a patch of black hair on his arm brushed the rim of my iced-tea glass.

“The way I eat, it bothers you?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” I said.

“I seen them a lot worse than me. In an armed service hospital,” he said. “They had to eat their food out of toothpaste tubes.”

He drank from his glass. The iced tea gurgled across his teeth. His splayed fingers looked like gnarled and baked tubers.

“Someone used a piano wire on Weldon Sonnier and tried to remodel him into a stump,” I said. “Do you know anything about that, Vic?”

“About what?”

“You heard me.”

“Piano wire? That's a good one. The last time I seen you, you ax me if I was looking in somebody's windows. Maybe you got a bump on the brain or something.”

The black maid had put on a Walkman headset and was dusting the patio furniture by slapping it with a dish towel, one hand propped on her hip,
while she jiggled to music that no one else could hear. Vic pushed a piece of meat back into his mouth with his thumb and studied her undulating curves.

“I talked with the gentleman who runs the Sally in Lafayette,” I said. “He said you were watching Lyle on TV one time and you mentioned how you'd like to pour lye down his throat.”

Lyle's fork paused over his food a moment, then he continued eating with his eyes askance.

“What a drunk man says don't have no more meaning than horse piss on a rock,” Vic said.

“He says you flipped a hot cigarette into a child's face.”

“Then I say I don't have no recollection of him being there to say what I done and what I ain't done in my life.”

“People sure seem to know when you've been around, though, Vic,” I said.

“How about we ease it down a notch, Dave?” Lyle said.

“It don't bother me none,” Vic said. “One guy like me gives a job to a hunnerd like him. He knows it, too.”

“You're wrong about that, partner,” I said. “You become a job for me when I have to cut a warrant on you. But right now I can't prove that you tried to take your son's head off with a piece of piano wire. That means you have another season to run. If I were you, I'd take advantage of my good fortune and change my ways.
Change ta vie, t'connais que je veux dire?
”

“I'm tired of this. Where'd you put that tobacco at?” he said, and pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand.

“I think I set it up on the brick wall. Stay where you're at. I'll get it,” Lyle said, rose from his chair, and walked across the lawn.

Vic Benson stared straight into my face. His thin nose was hooked, like a hawk's beak.

“It looks like you drove up here for nothing, don't it?” he said.

I looked back into his face. His puttylike skin was incapable of wearing an expression, and his surgically devastated mouth was cut back into a keyhole over his teeth; but his eyes, which seemed to water as though they were smarting from smoke, contained a malevolent, jittering light that made me want to look away.

“I've got a feeling about you, partner,” I said. “I think you not only want revenge against your children. I think you want to do something spectacular. A real light show.”

“Go shit in your plate.”

“You might even be thinking about torching Lyle's house, particularly if you could get Weldon and Drew inside with Lyle at the same time. I suspect fire stays on your mind quite a bit.”

His red eyes shifted to the maid, her large breasts, her dress that tightened across her rump as she reached upward to dust cobwebs off a bug lamp. He took a lucifer match out of his shirt pocket and rolled it across his teeth with his tongue.

“Fire don't know no one place. Fire don't know no one man,” he said.

“Are you threatening me, Vic?”

“I don't waste my time on twerps,” he said.

T
HE
MOON WAS
DOWN
that night, but the pecan trees in the yard seemed to shake with a sudden white-green light when the wind blew out of the south and dry lightning trembled in the marsh. I couldn't sleep. I thought of fire, the vortex of flame that had swirled about Vic Benson (or Verise Sonnier) in a Port Arthur chemical plant, the sheets of hot metal that had buried him alive and branded his soul, the hateful energies that he must have carried with him like a burning chain draped around his neck. He was one of those for whom society had no solution. His life was ashes; he was morally insane and knew it; and his thoughts alone could make a normal person weep. The sight of pity in our eyes made him grind his back teeth. Years ago his kind were lobotomized.

He had nothing to lose. He was a living nightmare to hospital employees; prisons didn't want him; psychiatrists considered him pathological and hence untreatable; and even if he was convicted of a capital crime, judges knew that he could turn his own execution into an electronic carnival of world-class proportions.

Would he take an interest in my home and family? I had no answer. But I was convinced that, like Joey Gouza or Bobby Earl, he was one of those
who had gone across a line at some point in his life and had declared war on the rest of us. Whether we elected to recognize that fact or not, Vic would be at work with a penny book of matches or a strand of wire that he would pop musically between his fists. The time of his appearance in our lives would be of his choosing.

I fixed a cup of coffee and walked down the slope of my yard to the dock. The stars looked white and hot in the sky; on the wind I could smell the sour reek of mud and rotted humus in the marsh, and the wet, gray odor of something dead. A white tree of lightning splintered across the southern sky. Sweat ran down my sides. It was going to be a scorching day.

I unlocked the door of the bait shop and went inside and pulled the chain on the electric bulb that hung over the counter. Then I saw the diagonal slash across the back screen window that gave onto the bayou.

But it was too late. He rose up from behind the bait tanks and gently pressed the barrel of a pistol behind my ear.

“No, no, don't turn around, my friend. That'd get both of us in trouble,” he said.

The light threw both of our shadows on the floor. I could see his extended arm, the pistol rounded by his fist, and an object, a sack perhaps, that seemed to dangle from his other hand.

“The till's empty. I've got maybe ten dollars in my wallet,” I said.

“Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Give me a
little credit.” The accent was New Orleans, the voice one I had heard before.

“What do you want, partner?”

“To give you something. You just shouldn't have come to work so early. . . . No, no, don't turn around—”

He shifted his position so that his face was well behind my range of vision. But when he did I saw his distorted silvery reflection on the aluminum side of a horizontal lunchmeat and cold-drink cooler. Or rather I saw the reflected metal caps and fillings in his mouth.