The Tin Roof Blowdown (25 page)

“He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ What’d he mean by that? I knowed what I was doing. I was saving my life. I was saving Eddy and Kevin and Andre’s life. I knowed what I was doing. I ain’t had no choice. How come he said that to me?”

“What did you do, Bertrand?”

“He started fighting wit’ me. He wasn’t strong at all. His arms was like sticks. He had tracks on them. I couldn’t believe it, man, he was a priest and he was a junkie. I could see his teet’ and smell his breath and he was clawing at my eyes. That’s when I hit him, man, hard, wit’ my fist, right in the face. He went over backward in the water and I heard Eddy say, ‘Hit that motherfucker wit’ the ax. Don’t let him get into the boat.’

“But I ain’t seen him again. The water was dark and it was like he went straight down the wall of the church into the darkness, like a stone statue sinking. How come he said them words to me? I knowed what I was doing, man. I was saving lives in my own way.”

“Are you that stupid? Most of the people in that church attic died because of you. What do you think he meant?” I said.

Bertrand Melancon began to weep, uncontrollably. “I’m going to hell, ain’t i?”

You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself.

CHAPTER
18

THE ARREST WARRANT with Otis Baylor’s name on it was federal, but eventually the storm-impaired processes of the Orleans Parish DA’s office would kick into gear and state charges would be filed against him as well. Ironically, the Feds were busting Otis under a Reconstruction statute that defined murder as a deprivation of a person’s civil rights by the taking of his life, the same kind of orwellian application of law that had been used to prosecute the Klansmen who lynched three civil rights workers in neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Otis had caught his necktie in the garbage grinder. I suspected that when the judicial system was finished with him, he would have to be washed off the grinder with a hose.

On Friday morning I accompanied Betsy Mossbacher’s male colleague and a uniformed state trooper to Otis’s temporary office on Main Street to serve the warrant. The FBI agent was the same agent who had retrieved the Springfield rifle from Otis’s closet. His name was Tisdale and he was all business. We had parked our vehicles by the bayou, directly opposite Victor’s Cafeteria, and were walking down Main under a colonnade when he said, “I’ve got to be back in Baton Rouge in less than ninety minutes. We’ve done all the paperwork on our end. All you’ve got to do is print him and get him into a cell. The transfer of custody will take place in two or three weeks. Don’t fuck it up.”

“Say that last part again?” I said.

“He’s getting warehoused. It’s not nuclear science. Feed him, give him a shower every three days, and don’t lose him in the system like you did Chula Ramos. You got a question about anything, call Mossbacher. Don’t do anything on your own. You got a problem, call us. That’s the key. We’re renting space in your gray-bar hotel. All you got to do is make sure the toilets flush.”

I saw the state trooper look at me from the corner of his eye.

“Tell you what, bub, we’ll arrest Otis for you and you can head back for Baton Rouge,” I said. “Or, if you like, you can stand around as though you’re part of the procedure, but you need to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way.”

“You like Lou’sana?” the trooper said to Tisdale, smiling broadly.

We busted Otis and took him out of his office in handcuffs, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling, his tie blowing in the wind, his big arms pulled tightly behind him.

For most middle-class people, the word “jail” suggests punishment by means of confinement. To a degree, they’re correct. Jails separate miscreants from the rest of us. But “confinement” doesn’t come close to the realities of life inside any kind of serious can. The word “violation” is much more accurate.

It starts in the booking room. Your fingertips are rolled on an ink pad by someone you never saw before. Then you are told to clean your skin with a petroleum gel that looks like a glandular excretion. You are placed against a wall and told to hold a brace of numbers against your chest while you’re photographed front and sideways. Then a polyethylene-gloved screw does a digital probe of your rectum and sprays you for crab lice. Your physical person belongs to people who do not want to know your name or make eye contact with you or have any level of communication with you. Most of them do not like what they do for a living and they do not like you.

You soon discover that jail is not a place but a condition. You defecate in full view of others. Your fellow inmates urinate all over the toilet seat you must use. The food you eat is prepared and served by people who wouldn’t wash their hands at gunpoint. You take showers with men whose eyes linger on your genitalia and others who will shank you from your liver to your lights and that night sleep without dreaming.

As the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter cautioned, you don’t study your “great long time.”

The recidivists of years ago have been replaced by a new breed of criminals, eighty-five percent of whom owe their lifestyle to narcotics, either the sale of it or the use of it or both. Some of them got their first hit of cocaine or morphine derivatives through the umbilical cord. Some of them were subjected to forms of child abuse that I will not discuss with anyone, not even fellow officers. Almost all of them will pay out their lives to the state on the installment system.

Otis Baylor thought he would call his lawyer or a bondsman and be back out on the street within a few hours. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he said to me in the booking room. “I get a phone call and then I post bond?”

“I don’t think you understand your situation,” I said. “You’re actually in federal custody, charged with a civil rights violation. In effect, we’re acting as friends of the federal court. That’s because the legal system in southern Louisiana has been in meltdown since Rita and Katrina. My guess is you’re going to be indicted by a state grand jury and prosecuted for murder. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere for a long time.”

“I’m not a flight risk. I own two houses here. I have a family. I’ve been with the same insurance company for over two decades.”

“You’ll be going to court eventually. Explain your situation to the judge.”

He still had cleansing cream on his hands and he didn’t want to touch his clothes with them. He began looking around for something to wipe his hands on.

“There’s a roll of paper towels on the shelf,” I said.

“I want my phone call,” he said.

“You’re going into a holding cell right now, Mr. Baylor. A deputy will escort you to a phone later,” I said.

He couldn’t seem to think. He squeezed at his temples and looked around the booking room, disoriented. “Where did you say the paper towels were?” he asked.

“Behind you, sir.”

But he forgot what he was looking for. “My daughter is home by herself. She meets me for coffee and a doughnut each morning. She shouldn’t be by herself for long periods of time,” he said.

I’ve had prouder moments in my career.

MOLLY WORKED FOR a Catholic mutual-help center on the bayou that assisted poor people in starting up businesses and building their own homes. The charity had been founded by a group of Catholic Worker nuns who had come to southern Louisiana in the 1970s to organize the sugarcane workers. You can take a wild guess as to how they were received. But since that time, they had earned the respect and even the affection of most people in the area. After the death of my wife Bootsie, I met Molly by chance at the center and a short while later we were married. We were an incongruous couple, an Irish-American blue-collar nun who demonstrated regularly at the School of the Americas and a sheriff’s detective with a history of violence and alcoholism. Friends who wanted to be kind wished us well, but I always saw the lights of pity and caution in their eyes.

But we surprised them. Sister Molly Boyle was my grail and I loved her in the same way I loved my church community.

On the Friday I busted Otis Baylor I called her at the center and asked her to meet me for lunch at the Patio Restaurant on Loreauville road. We sat under a fan, in a corner, away from the crowd near the buffet table. I could feel her eyes on my face. “Bad day at Black rock?” she said.

“I had to help the Feds serve an arrest warrant on Otis Baylor,” I said. “He just got moved to the parish prison.”

“Otis?”

“The FBI matched a bullet to a rifle in his house. The bullet has DNA on it from two gunshot victims.”

“That’s too bad. He’s a nice man. I don’t know how many people have told me he approved their insurance claims on the spot and put them up in motels. Some of these companies are sticking it to their clients with a cattle prod.”

“Otis may have killed a seventeen-year-old kid and turned another one into a quadriplegic.”

“I know,” she said.

“I tried to warn him about his legal jeopardy.”

She inched her hand forward and touched my fingertips. “I know that, Dave. This isn’t your fault. Don’t treat this personally.”

“You want to get the buffet?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Dave?”

“Yes?”

I could see the uncertainty in her face, like that of a person about to light a candle in a storage room that smells of gasoline. “Ronald Bledsoe came to the center this morning. He asked the receptionist if we were operating any shelters in St. Mary Parish. He said he was working for the state and looking for two black fugitives. He showed her photos of them.”

“What’d she tell him?”

“She lied. She actually had seen one of them. In a shelter in Morgan City. But she lied. I was standing right behind him. He turned around and asked me my name. Bledsoe is scary, Dave.”

THAT NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. I dreamed of Ronald Bledsoe and Father Jude LeBlanc and the confession of Bertrand Melancon. I dreamed of dark water closing over Jude’s head and I dreamed of people in an attic fitting their fingers through the ax gashes in the roof Jude had started when he had been attacked by Bertrand. I heard the people in the attic calling for help on their cell phones and I heard the sound of a motorboat disappearing in the distance, the Melancon brothers and the Rochons snugly on board.

I hated what they had done to Jude LeBlanc and his parishioners. Personally they filled me with disgust and loathing. But I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of hate. I couldn’t allow it as a lawman or as a recovering alcoholic. AA teaches that those who vex us most are sick, not totally unlike ourselves. Sometimes that’s a hard precept to buy into. Unfortunately, recovering drunks are not allowed latitude with their emotions. My favorite passage from ernest Hemingway will always remain his suggestion in Death in the Afternoon that the world’s ills could be corrected by a three-day open season on people. Less heartening is his addendum that the first group he would wipe out would be police officers everywhere.

I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of milk in the dark. The oak trees were black-green in the moonlight, the bayou swollen and yellow from the massive amounts of rain in the last few weeks. I tried to sort out all the images from my dreams, to somehow compartmentalize and rid myself of them, but one element in them would not go away: Bertrand Melancon not only kept calling me, trying to justify or expiate his sins, but he had not fled the area. The last part didn’t make sense.

The Kovick score had been the realization of the house creep’s wet dream. Was he so attached to his brother Eddy that he would run from shelter to shelter or rat hole to rat hole in the vain hope that he could spirit Eddy away from the hospital and take over his personal care, a man whose brain for all practical purposes was now as lifeless as his body?

Why not just disappear into the urban vastness of Los Angeles and start over? People did it every day. Bertrand could fence the blood stones there and wash the queer in Vegas and Reno. Unless he wasn’t actually in possession of either one of them.

Clete and his girlfriend had found over seventeen grand of counterfeit that had probably floated out of a garage in the alley. The rest of it may have gone down storm drains or been picked up from hedges and flower beds by neighbors who didn’t bother to report the find to NOPD. But how about the blood stones? Their worth was incalculable. Bertrand could unload one or two of them, buy a storm-damaged or hot car for chump change, and catch a flight out of Dallas or Jackson. Why didn’t he do that?

Because he’s a thief, I thought, and like all thieves he decided at one point that he deserved more than his fellow house creeps. He hid the stones and he hasn’t been able to get back to them.

Where?

I tried to reconstruct his flight from Sidney’s house after he and Eddy and the Rochons had torn it apart. What if he had found the stones while looting the house and had decided not to tell the others? What if he had decided, while stealing gasoline from Otis’s garage, to hide the stones rather than risk having them discovered by Eddy and the Rochons? He realized he was probably in possession of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in hot jewels. It was the score of a lifetime. Why let his lamebrain companions screw it up?

But ultimately Bertrand had screwed himself. He had stashed the stones a few houses down the street from the most dangerous gangster in New Orleans, a man whose house they had not only robbed but systematically demolished, even ripping the chandeliers from the ceiling with an iron garden rake and urinating on the stove and in the seasoning drawers and the icebox.

I went back to bed and lay on top of the sheet, my arm across my eyes. I could hear the easy sweep of the trees across our tin roof and occasionally the ping of a pecan striking the metal. I said a silent prayer for Father Jude LeBlanc, and when I fell asleep I thought I heard his voice rise inside a bubble and burst on the surface of a black lake that was splintered with light.

I LIKE TO REMEMBER the era in which I grew up as one of duck-hunting dawns and summer-afternoon crab boils in a shady pavilion and college dances on Spanish Lake under oak trees that were strung with Japanese lanterns. The springtime of our lives seemed eternal, the coming of fall a mild interlude before flowers bloomed again. But there was a harsh side to the Louisiana of my youth, too, one that isn’t always convenient to remember. The majority of people were poor, and for generations the oligarchy that ruled the state exerted every effort in its power to ensure they stayed that way. The Negro was the scapegoat for our problems, the trade unions the agents of northern troublemakers. With the coming of integration, every demagogue in the state could not wait to stoke up the fires of racial fear and hatred. Many of their constituents rose to the occasion.