DR08 - Burning Angel (14 page)

”I'm saying this was a bad idea,“ Clete said. ”Look, I was there.

Patsy Dap violated my friend's person, you know what I'm saying? That's not acceptable anywhere, not with your people, not with ours. He got what he deserved. You don't see it that way, Johnny, it's because you're fifty-two cards short of a deck. And don't ever put your fucking hand on me again.“

Five minutes later, under the porch, we watched Johnny Carp in drive his Lincoln through the light rain toward the parking lot exit. He had rolled down the tinted windows to let in the cool air, and we could see Patsy Dapolito in the passenger seat, his face and shaved head like a bleached-out muskmelon laced with barbed wire.

”Hey, Patsy, it's an improvement. I ain't putting you on,“ Clete yelled.

”You're a terrific intermediary, Clete,“ I said.

”The Giacanos are scum, anyway. Blow it off. Come on, let's go out under the shed and throw a line in. Wow, feel that breeze,“ he said, inhaling deeply, his eyes filling with pleasure at the soft twilit perfection of the day.

Clete was probably the best investigative cop I ever knew, but he treated his relationships with the lowlifes like playful encounters with zoo creatures. As a result, his attitudes about them were often facile.

The Giacanos never did anything unless money and personal gain were involved. The family name had been linked repeatedly to both a presidential assassination and the murder of a famous civil rights leader, and although I believed them capable of committing either one or both of those crimes, I didn't see how the Giacanos could have benefited financially from them and for that reason alone doubted their involvement.

But Johnny didn't do a sit-down with a rural sheriff's detective to prevent a meltdown like Patsy Dapolito from getting off his leash.

Dapolito was morally insane but not stupid. When his kind stopped taking orders and started carrying oujt personal vendettas, they were shredded into fish churn and sprinkled around Barataria Bay.

Johnny Carp'd had another agenda when he came down to Morgan City. I didn't know what it was, but I was sure of one thing-one way or another, Johnny had become a player in Iberia Parish.

Jason Darbonne was known as the best criminal lawyer in Lafayette. He had the hard, grizzled body of a weight lifter and daily handball player, with thick upper arms and tendons like ropes in his shoulders.

But it was his peculiar bald head that you remembered; it had the shape and color of an egg that had been hard-boiled in brown tea, and because he had virtually no neck, the head seemed to perch on his high collar like Humpty-Dumpty's. A cold front had gone through the area early Wednesday morning, and the air was brisk and sunny when I ran into him and Sweet Pea Chaisson on the courthouse steps. ”Hey, Dave,“ Sweet Pea said. ”Wait a minute, I forgot. Is it your first name or your last name I ain't suppose to use?“

”What's your problem this morning?“ I said. ”Don't talk to him,“ Darbonne said to Sweet Pea. ”I didn't even know y'all sliced up my top till I went through the car wash. The whole inside of my car got flooded. Then the female attendant picks up this rubber that floats out from under the seat. I felt like two cents.“

”What's your point?“ I said. ”I forgot to pay my State Farm.

I'm gonna be out four t'ousand dollars. It ain't my way to go around suing people.“ He brushed off Darbonne's hand. ”Just give me the money for the top and we'll forget it.“

”You'll forget it? You're telling me I'm being sued?“ I said. ”Yeah, I want my goddamn money.

The inside of my car's ruined. It's like riding around inside a sponge.“ I started inside the courthouse. ”What's the matter, there's something wrong with the words I use you don't understand?“ he said.

His webbed, birdlike eyes focused earnestly on my face. ”I had nothing to do with damaging your car. Stay away from me, Sweet Pea,“ I said.

He pressed the few stands of hair on his head flat with the palm of his hand and squinted at me as though he were looking through a dense haze, his mouth flexing in disbelief. Darbonne put his hand on Sweet Pea's arm. ”Is that a threat, sir?“ he asked. ”No, it's just a request.“

”If you didn't do it, that fat fuck did,“ Sweet Pea said.

”I'll pass on your remarks to Purcel,“ I said.

”You're a public menace hiding behind a badge,“ Darbonne said. ”If you come near my client again, you're going to wish your name was Job.“

Two women and a man passing by turned and looked at us, then glanced away. Darbonfie and Sweet Pea walked out to a white Chrysler parked by the curb. The sun reflected hotly off the tinted back window like a cluster of gold needles. Darbonne was poised by the driver's door, waiting for an opportunity to open it in the traffic, his nostrils dilating at something in the breeze.

I walked toward him, looked across the Chrysler's roof into his surprised face.

”When I was a patrolman in New Orleans, you were a prosecutor for the United States attorney's office,“ I said.

His hand was poised in midair, his sunglasses hanging from his fingers.

”What happened to you, sir?“ I said.

He turned his face away from me and slipped his sunglasses on his nose, but not before I saw a level of injury in his eyes that I had not anticipated.

Helen Soileau sat on the corner of my desk. She wore a pair of tan slacks and a pink short-sleeve shirt.

”I took Marsallus's diary home last night and read it till two this morning,“ she said. ”He's pretty good with words.“

”Sonny's not easy to put in one shoe box,“ I said.

”Have you got all the paperwork on him?“

”Pretty much. None of it's very helpful, though. I got his family's welfare file if you want to look at it.“

”What for?“

”No reason, really.“

She picked up the folder from my blotter and began glancing through it.

”His mother was a prostitute?“ she said. ”Yeah, she died of tuberculosis when he was a kid. His father was a blind man who sharpened knives and scissors on a grinder he used to wheel up and down Villere Street.“ Helen put the folder down. ”In the diary he talks about some songwriters. He quotes a bunch of their lyrics,“ she said.

”Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie. Is Woody Guthrie related to Arlo?“

”Woody was his dad. Woody and Joe Hill wrote songs about farm migrants, the early unions, that sort of thing.“

”I don't get it,“ she said. ”What?“

”Marsallus, he's not a wise guy He doesn't think like one. The stuff in that diary, it bothers me.“

”You mean the massacres in those villages?“

”Was that really going on down there?“ she said. ”Everyone who was there tells the same story.“

”Marsallus said something about the nature of memory that I couldn't stop thinking about. “My cell partner told me today my head's like a bad neighborhood that I shouldn't go into by myself.” There was a time in my life when I was the same way. I just didn't know how to say it.“

”I see,“ I said, focusing my eyes at a point mid distance between us. She bounced her fingertips on the file folder. ”You want to go to lunch?“ I said. ”No, thanks. Say, where's the portable cluster fuck these days?“

”I beg your pardon?“

”Clete Purcel.“

”Oh, he's around .. . Did you want me to tell him something?“

”I was just curious.“ I nodded, my face empty. She stood up from the corner of the desk, straightened her shoulders and flattened her stomach, tucked her shirt under her gunbelt with her thumbs. ”You looking at something?“ she said.

”Not me.“

”I was too hard on the guy, that's all. I mean when he was in your office that time,“ she said.

”He's probably forgotten about it, Helen.“

”Tall go fishing a lot?“

”Once in a while. Would you like to join us?“

”I'm not much on it. But you're a cutie,“ she said, walked her fingers across my shoulders, and went out the door.

Moleen Bertrand's camp was located down in the wetlands on a chenier, a plateau of dry ground formed like a barrier island by the tides from water-pulverized seashells. Except for the site of his camp, a four-bedroom frame building with a tin roof and screened-in gallery, the chenier was pristine, the black topsoil bursting with mushrooms and buttercups and blue bonnets, no different than it had been when the first Spanish and French explorers came to Louisiana. The woods were park like the trees widely spaced, the branches and trunks hung and wrapped with vines that had the girth of boa constrictors, the moss-covered canopy of live oaks hundreds of feet above the ground, which was dotted with palmettos and layered with rotting pecan husks.

At the edge of the chenier were bogs and alligator grass and blue herons lifting above the gum trees and acres of blooming hyacinths that were impassable with a boat, and, to the south, you could see the long, slate green, wind-capped roll of the Gulf and the lightning that danced over the water like electricity trapped in a steel box.

Moleen and his wife, Julia, were flawless hosts. Their guests were all congenial people, attorneys, the owner of a sugar mill, an executive from a hot sauce company, their wives and children. Moleen fixed drinks at a bar on the gallery, kept a huge ice chest filled with soda and imported beer, barbecued a pig on a spit under a tin shed and roasted trays of wild ducks from the freezer. We busted skeet with his shotguns; the children played volleyball and sailed Frisbees; the air smelled of wildflowers and salt spray and the hot brassy odor of a distant storm. It was a perfect spring day for friends to gather on an untouched strip of the Old South that somehow had eluded the twentieth century.

Except for the unnatural brightness and confidence in Julia's face, the wired click in her eyes when she did not assimilate words or meaning right away, and Moleen's ongoing anecdotal rhetoric that seemed intended to distract from his wife's affliction. Each time she returned to the bar she poured four fingers of Jack Daniel's into her glass, with no water or soda, added a half cup of ice, a teaspoon of sugar, and a sprig of mint. We were eating in the main room when she said, out of no apparent context, ”Can any of y'all explain to me why this black congresswoman got away with refusing the Daughters of the Confederacy the renewal of their logo?“

”She didn't do it by herself,“ Moleen said quietly, and touched his lips with his napkin.

”They went along with her“, but she was behind it. That's what I meant, Moleen. I think it's ridiculous,” Julia said.

The other people at the table smiled, unsure of what was being said, perhaps faintly remembering a news article.

“Julia's talking about the Daughters of the Confederacy trying to renew the patent on their emblem,” Moleen said. “The application was denied because the emblem has the Confederate flag on it.”

“That woman's a demagogue. I don't know why people can't see that,”

Julia said.

“I think it's our fault,” a woman down the table said, leaning out over her plate to speak. “We've let the Confederate flag become identified with all kinds of vile groups. I can't blame people of color for their feelings.”

“I didn't say I blamed people of color,” Julia said. “I was talking about this particular black woman.”

“Julia makes a point,” Moleen said. “The DOC's hardly a Fifth Column.”

“Well, I think we should do something about it,” Julia said. She drank from her glass, and the light intensified behind her chemical-green contact lenses.

“Oh, it gives them something to do in Washington,” Moleen said. “It's not a joke, Moleen,” Julia said. “Let me tell you something she did once,” Moleen said, spreading his napkin and replacing it on his lap.

“When she was a cheerleader at LSU. She and these other kids, they hooked up Mike the Tiger's empty cage to a pickup truck, with the back door flopping open, and drove all over nigger town on Saturday afternoon.” He blew a laugh out of his mouth. “They'd stop in front of a bar or barbecue stand and say, ”Excuse me, we don't want to alarm anyone but have y'all seen a tiger around here?“ There were darkies climbing trees all over Baton Rouge.” I stared at him. “Don't tell that story. I didn't have anything to do with that,” Julia said, obviously pleased at the account. “It's a campus legend. People make too much about race today,” he said. “Moleen, that doesn't change what that woman has done. That's what I'm trying to say, which y'all don't seem to understand,” she said. “For God's sakes, Julia, let's change the subject,” he said. The table was quiet. Someone coughed, a knife scraped against a plate. The whites of Julia's eyes were threaded with tiny red veins, the lashes stuck together with mascara. I thought of a face painted on a wind-blown pink balloon that was quivering against its string, about to burst. Later, outside, Moleen asked me to walk with him to the edge of the marsh, where his shotguns and skeet trap rested on top of a weathered picnic table. He wore laced boots, khaki trousers with snap pockets up and down the legs, a shooter's vest with twelve-gauge shells inserted in the cloth loops. He cracked open his double-barrel and plopped two shells in the chambers. “Were you ever stationed in Thailand, Moleen?” I said. “For a little while. Why do you ask?”

“A lot of intelligence people were there. I was just curious.”

He scratched at the corner of his mouth with a fingernail. “You want to bust a couple?” he said.

“No thanks.”

“You looked a little steely-eyed at the table.”

I watched a nutria drop off a log and swim into a cluster of hyacinths.

“That little anecdote about Julia's cheerleading days bother you?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Come on, Dave, I was talking about a college prank. It's innocent stuff.”

“Not from you it isn't.”

“You have an irritating habit. You're always suggesting an unstated conclusion for other people to guess at,” he said. He waited. “Would you care to explain yourself, Dave?”

“The problem isn't mine to explain, sir.” In the distance, out by the access road, I could see a heavyset man jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel looped around his glistening neck.

“I think the role of human enigma would become kind of tiresome,” he said. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder, tracked the flight of a seagull with it, then at the last second blew the head off a clump of pampas grass. He cracked open the breech, picked the empty casing out, and flung it smoking into the mud.