Heaven's Prisoners (23 page)

But he had hidden a paper clip in his mouth. He picked the lock on his handcuffs, ripped the .357 Magnum out of the driver’s shoulder holster, and blew both detectives all over the front windshield.

He was never caught again. The bucket of a Ferris wheel fell on him in Pocatello, Idaho.

I spent the day driving and walking the streets of the neighborhood, from Canal all the way over the Esplanade Avenue. I talked with blacks, Chicanos, and blue-collar white people in shoe-shine stands, seven A.M. bars, and corner grocery stores that smelled of chitlins and smoked carp. Yesterday I had been a small-town businessman. Today I was a cop, and I got the reception that cops usually get in a poor neighborhood. They made me for either a bill collector, a bondsman, a burial insurance man, a process server for a landlord, or Mr. Charlie with his badge (it’s strange how we as white people wonder at minority attitudes towards us, when we send our worst emissaries among them).

Once I thought I might be close. An ex-boxer who owned a bar that had a Confederate flag auto tag nailed in the middle of the front door took the wet end of his cigar out of his mouth, looked at me with a face that was shapeless with scar tissue, and said, “Haitian? You’re talking about a boon from the Islands, right?”

“Right.”

“There’s a bunch of those cannibals over on North Villere. They eat all the dogs in the neighborhood. They even seine the goldfish out of the pond in the park. Don’t stay for supper. You might end up in the pot.”

The yard of the one-story, wood-frame yellow house he directed me to was overgrown with wet weeds and littered with automobile and washing-machine parts. I drove down the alley and tried to see through the back windows, but the shades were pulled against the late-afternoon sun. I could hear a baby crying. Sacks of garbage that smelled of rotting fish were stacked on the back steps, and the diapers that hung on the clothesline were gray and frayed from handwashing. I went around front and knocked on the door.

A small, frightened black man with a face like a cooked apple came to within three feet of the screen and looked at me out of the gloom.

“Where’s Toot?” I said.

He shook his head as though he didn’t understand.

“Toot,” I said.

He held his palms outward and shook them back and forth. His eyes were red in the gloom. Two children were coloring in a book on the floor. A wide-hipped woman with an infant on her shoulder watched me from the kitchen door.

”
Vous connaissez un homme qui s’appelle Toot?”
I said.

He answered me in a polyglot of French and English and perhaps African that was incomprehensible. He was also terrified.

“I’m not from Immigration,” I said. “
Comprenez? Pas Immigration.”

But he wasn’t buying it. I couldn’t reach past his fear nor make him understand my words, and then I made matters worse when I asked again about Toot and used the term
tonton macoute
. The man’s eyes widened, and he swallowed as though he had a pebble in his throat.

But it was hopeless. Good work, Robicheaux, I thought. Now these poor people will probably stay frightened for days, shuddering every time an automobile slows out front. They would never figure out who I was and would simply assume that I was only a prelude of worse things to come. Then I had another thought. Police officers and Immigration officials didn’t give money to illegal immigrants.

I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet, creased it lengthwise, and slipped it through the jamb of the latched screen.

“This is for your baby,” I said ”
Pour vot’ enfant
.”

He stared at me dumbfounded. When I looked back at the screen from my truck, he and his wife were both staring at me.

I bought a block of cheese, a half-pound of sliced ham, an onion, a loaf of French bread, and a quart of milk in a Negro grocery store, parked by the cemetery, and ate supper while the rain began falling out of the purple twilight. Over on Basin I saw a neon Jax signal light over a barroom.

When you don’t nail a guy like Toot in his lair, you look for him in the places that take care of his desires. Most violent men like women. The perverts bust them up; contract hit men use them as both reward for their accomplishment and testimony of their power. I knew almost every black and high-yellow pick-up bar and hot-pillow joint in New Orleans. It was going to be a long night.

I was exhausted when the sun came up in the morning. It had stopped raining at about three a.m., and the pools of water in the street were drying in the hot sunlight, and you could feel the moisture and heat radiate up from the concrete like steam.

I brushed my teeth and shaved in a filling station rest room. My eyes were red around the rims, my face lined with fatigue. I had gone into a dozen lowlife Negro bars during the night, had been propositioned, threatened, and even ignored, but no one knew a Haitian by the name of Toot.

I had coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde, then gave the neighborhood around the cemetery one more try. By now my face had become so familiar up and down Iberville and St. Louis that grocery and drugstore owners and bartenders looked the other way when they saw me coming. The sun was white in the sky; the elephant ears, philodendron, and banana trees that grew along the back alleys were beaded with moisture; the air had the wet, fecund taste of a hothouse. At noon I was ready to give it up.

Then I saw two police cars, with their bubble-gum lights on, parked in front of a stucco house one block up North Villere from the yellow house where the frightened man lived. An ambulance was backed up the driveway to the stairway of the garage apartment. I parked my truck by the curb and opened my badge in my hand and walked up to two patrolmen in the drive. One was writing on a clipboard and trying to ignore the sweat that leaked out of his hatband.

“What have you got?” I said.

“A guy dead in the bathtub,” he said.

“What from?”

“Hell if I know. He’s been in there two or three days. No air-conditioning either.”

“What’s his race?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been up there. Check it out if you want to. Take your handkerchief with you.”

Halfway up the stairs the odor hit me. It was rotten and acrid and sweet at the same time, reeking of salt and decay, fetid and gray as a rat’s breath, penetrating and enveloping as the stench of excrement. I gagged and had to press my fist against my mouth.

Two paramedics with rubber gloves on were waiting patiently with a stretcher in the tiny living room while the scene investigator took flash pictures in the bath. Their faces were pinched and they kept clearing their throats. An overweight plainclothes detective with a florid, dilated face stood in the doorway so that I couldn’t see the bathtub clearly. His white shirt was so drenched with sweat that you could see his skin through the cloth. He turned and looked at me, puzzled. I thought I might know him from my years in the First District, but I didn’t. I turned up my badge in my palm.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish sheriff’s office,” I said. “Who is he?”

“We don’t know yet. The landlord’s on vacation, there’s nothing in the apartment with a name on it,” he said. “A meter reader came up the stairs this morning and tossed his cookies over the railing. It’s all over the rosebush. It really rounds out the smell. What are you looking for?”

“We’ve got a warrant on a Haitian.”

“Be my guest,” he said, and stepped aside.

I walked into the bathroom with my handkerchief pressed over my mouth and nose. The tub was an old iron, rust-streaked one on short metal legs that looked like animal claws. A man’s naked black calves and feet stuck up out of the far end of the tub.

“He was either a dumb shit that liked to keep his radio on the washbasin, or somebody threw it in there with him,” the detective said. “Any way you cut it, it cooked him.”

The water had evaporated out of the tub, and dirty lines of grit were dried around the drain hole. I looked at the powerful hands that were now frozen into talons, the muscles in the big chest that had become flaccid with decomposition, the half-closed eyes that seemed focused on a final private thought, the pink mouth that was still locked wide with a silent scream.

“It must have been a sonofabitch. He actually clawed paint off the sides,” the detective said. “There, look at the white stuff under his nails. You know him?”

“His name’s Toot. He worked with Eddie Keats. Maybe he worked for Bubba Rocque, too.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, then. What a way to get it. Once over in Algiers I had case like this. A woman was listening to this faith healer while she was washing dishes. So the faith healer told everybody to put their hands on the radio and get healed, and it blew her right out of her panty hose. What’d y’all have on his guy?”

“Assault and battery, suspicion of murder.”

The scene investigator walked past us with his camera. The detective crooked his finger at the two paramedics.

“All right, bag him and get him out of here,” he said, and turned to me again. “They’ll have to burn the stink out of this place with a flamethrower. You got everything you want?”

“You mind if I look around a minute?”

“Go ahead. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Propped against the back corner of the closet, behind the racked tropical shirts, the white slacks, the flowered silk vests, I found a twelve-gauge pump shotgun. I opened the breech. It had been cleaned and oiled and the cordite wiped out of the chamber with a rag. Then I unscrewed the mechanism to the pump action itself and saw the sportsman’s plug had been taken out so the magazine could hold five rather than three rounds. On the floor was a half-empty box of red double-nought shotgun shells of the same manufacture as the ones that had littered the floor of Annie’s and my bedroom. I rolled one of the shells back and forth in my palm and then put it back in the box.

The detective lit a cigarette as he walked down the stairs into the yard. Afternoon rain clouds had moved across the sun, and he wiped the sweat out of his eyebrows with the flat of his hand and widened his eyes in the breeze that had sprung up from the south.

“I’d like for you to come down to the District and file a report on your man,” he said.

“All right.”

“Who’s this guy supposed to have killed?”

“My wife.”

He stopped in the middle of the yard, a dead palm tree rattling over his head, and looked at me with his mouth open. The wind blew his cigarette ashes on his tie.

I decided I had one more stop to make before I headed back to New Iberia. Because of my concern for Alafair, I had given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a wide berth. But as that Negro janitor had told me in high school, you never let the batter know you’re afraid of him. When he spreads his feet in the box and gives you that mean squint from under his cap, as though he’s sighting on your throat, you spit on the ball and wipe his letters off with it. He’ll probably have a change in attitude toward your relationship.

But Mr. Monroe was to surprise me.

I parked the truck in the shade of a spreading oak off Loyola and walked back in the hot sunlight to the INS office. His desk was out on the floor, among several others, and when he looked up from a file folder in his hands and saw me, the skin around his ears actually stretched across the bone. His black hair, which was combed like wires across his pate, gleamed dully in the fluorescent light. I saw his throat swallow under his bow tie.

“I’m here officially,” I said, easing my badge out of my side pants pocket. “I’m a detective with the Iberia sheriff’s office now. Do you mind if I sit down?”

He didn’t answer. He took a cigarette out of a pack on his desk and lit it. His eyes were straight ahead. I sat down in the straight-backed chair next to his desk and looked at the side of his face. By his desk blotter in a silver frame was a picture of him and his wife and three children. A clear vase with two yellow roses in it sat next to the picture.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I’m on a murder investigation.”

He held his cigarette to his mouth between two fingers and smoked it without ever really detaching it from his lips. His eyes were focused painfully into space.

“I think you guys have a string on somebody I want,” I said.

Finally he looked at me. His face was as tight as paper.

“Mr. Robicheaux, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“For… about your wife. I’m truly sorry.”

“How did you know about my wife?”

“It was in the area section of the
Picayune
.”

“Where’s Victor Romero?”

“I don’t know this man.”

“Listen, this is a murder investigation. I’m a police officer. Don’t you jerk me around.”

He lowered his cigarette toward the desk blotter and let out his breath. People at the other desks were obviously listening now.

“You have to understand something. I do field work with illegal immigrants in the workplace. I check green cards. I make sure people have work permits. I’ve done that for seven years.”

“I don’t care what you do. You answer me about Victor Romero.”

“I can’t tell you anything.”

“You think carefully about your words, Mr. Monroe. You’re on the edge of obstruction.”

His fingers went to his temple. I saw his bottom lip flutter.

“You have to believe this,” he said. “I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you. There’s no way I can express how I feel.”

I paused before I spoke again.

“When somebody’s dead, apologies have as much value as beating off in a paper bag,” I said. “I think you need to learn that, maybe go down to the courthouse and listen to one of the guys on his way up to Angola. Are you following me? Because this is what I believe you guys did: you planted Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero inside the sanctuary movement, and four people ended up dead at Southwest Pass. I think a bomb brought that plane down. I think Romero had something to do with it, too. He’s also hooked up with Bubba Rocque, and maybe Bubba had my wife killed. You shield this guy and I’m going to turn the key on you.”