A Stained White Radiance

CHAPTER 14

The sheriff learned of Fluck's phone call early Monday from the dispatcher. As soon as I walked into my office, he tapped on the doorjamb and followed me in.

"Jewel Fluck called you at your house?" he said.

"That's right." I opened the blinds and sat down behind my desk.

"Why do I have to hear that from the dispatcher?"

"I didn't see any point in disturbing you on the weekend."

"What'd he say?"

"Most of it was douche water. His clock's running out."

"Come on, Dave, why'd he call you?"

"He wanted to give up Joey Gouza for immunity on Garrett and Eddy Raintree. I told him the store's closed."

"You did what?"

"I indicated that cop killers don't get any slack, sheriff."

He sat down in the chair across from me and brushed one hand across the top of the other. He puffed out his cheeks.

"Maybe that's not yours to decide, Dave. There're a halfdozen agencies that want Joey Gouza salted away. The DEA, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-"

"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 ratatat-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 side yard 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 Mississippi 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 redrimmed, 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?"

"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 is 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."

"Men 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 upwards 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.

The 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.

Then he stooped, set something on the floor, and nudged me toward the counter.

"Lean on it, Mr. Robicheaux. You probably don't pack when you come down to your bait shop, but a guy can't take things for granted," he said, and moved his free hand down my hips and pockets and over my ankles.

"Look, a black man who works for me is going to be here soon. I don't want him to walk in on this. How about telling me what's on your mind and getting out of here?"

"Your ovaries don't get heated up too easy, do they?" He clicked off the light. "What time's the colored man get here?"

"Anytime now."

"That sure would change your luck in a bad way, believe me." Then he said, "Listen, the man I work for has fixations. Right now you're one of them. Why? Because you keep bugging the shit out of him. It's time you lay off, man.

This is an important guy. There's people up in Chicago don't want him puking blood all over New Orleans because of nervous anxiety…. No, no, eyes forward-" He rubbed the pistol barrel along my jawbone.

"Is that it?" I said.

"No, that's not it, man. Look, nobody's got a beef with you, Mr. Robicheaux. Nobody had a beef with that cop who walked into Sonnier's house, either. That dumb fuck Fluck went out of control. We don't whack cops, you know that, man. So we're making it right.

"But it doesn't have to end here. You're a bright guy and you can have a lot of good things. Nothing illegal, no strings, just good business. Like maybe a nightclub down in Grand Isle. It's yours for the asking. All you got to do is call the right Italian restaurant on Esplanade. You know the place I'm talking about."

Through the slashed screen I could see the false dawn lighting the gray tops of the cypress trees in the marsh. I heard a fish flop loudly in the lily pads.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"Good… good. Now-"

I felt him shift his weight, felt the dangling object in his hand brush against my pants leg.

"What?" I said.

"I got to figure what to do with you. You keep walking in on me at the wrong time. Nothing personal but you've really fucked up my plans twice now."

"Like you say, so far it's not personal…. Don't do the wrong thing, partner."

I could hear him breathing in the dark. The back of my neck and head felt naked, as though the skin had been peeled away from all the nerve endings.

"What's inside that door, the one with the lock on it?" he said.

"It's just a storage room."

"Well, that's where you're going."

From behind, he put his left hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the door. I felt the sacked object bump back and forth below my shoulder blade.

"Unlock it," he said.

I found the key on my ring and snapped open the long U-shaped shaft on the lock. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with the back of my wrist.

"Come on, get inside, man," he said.

"I want to give you something to think about when you leave me."

"You're gonna give me something to think about? I think you've got it turned around." He started to push me inside.

"No, I don't. I didn't see your face, so I can't identify you. That means you're home free on this one. But I know who you are, Jack. Don't go near my house. God help you if you get anywhere near my house."

"You don't know who your friends are. Hey, the man in New Orleans sent you a present. You'll like it. He's not a bad guy. He's got his own problems. How'd you like to have boils all over the lining of your stomach? Why don't you have a little compassion?"

With his knuckles he shoved me into the storage room, then snapped the lock shut. I heard him go out the front door, then moments later a car engine start out on the road.

I braced my back against a stack of beer cases and kicked as hard as I could against the door; but it was sheathed in tin, and the lock and hasp were solid. Then in the dark I tripped over an old twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude engine. I balanced it over my head by the shaft and the housing and hurled it against the slat wall next to the door. Two slats burst from the studs, and I splintered the others loose until I could squeeze through a hole back into the shop. I could hear the diminishing sound of Gates's car on the dirt road that led to the drawbridge over the bayou. I pulled the chain on the light bulb over the counter and started punching the office number on the phone. Both my hands were shaking.

"Sheriff's Department-"

"This is Dave…. Jack Gates just tore out of my bait shop…. He's armed and dangerous…. Call the bridge tender and tell him to lift the bridge…. I'll meet you guys at the-" Then I stopped.

"What is it, Dave?"

I looked at the weighted clear plastic bag hanging from a nail on a post in the center of my shop.

"I'll meet you guys at the bayou," I said.

"What's wrong, Dave? Are you hurt?"

"No, I'm all right. Get hold of the bridge tender and seal the whole area off. Don't let this guy get out of town."

I put the receiver back in the cradle and stared numbly at the severed head inside the plastic bag. The eyes were rolled, the tongue lolled out of the mouth, the nose was mashed against the folds of plastic, and the blond hair was matted with congealed blood; but even in death the face looked like it belonged to a toy man. And to preclude the possibility that I could ever mistake Jewel Fluck for someone else, one of his fingers had been inserted in the thick, purple residue at the bottom of the bag.

I ran to the house, through the front door and into the bedroom, and grabbed the.45 out of the dresser drawer.

Bootsie sat up in bed and clicked on the table lamp.

"What is it?" she said.

"Jack Gates was in the shop. I'm going after him. Don't go in the shop, Boots. Call Batist and tell him not to come to work right now."

"What is it? What did he-"

"We might have to dust for prints. Let's just keep people out of there for a while."

I saw her eyes trying to read my expression.

"Everything's all right," I said. "Just don't go out of the house, Boots, till we get this guy in custody."

Then I was out the front door and in the truck, banging over the chuckholes in the dirt road that led to the drawbridge over the bayou, the.45 bouncing on the seat beside me, the early red sun edging the marsh with fire.

I could hear sirens in the distance now. I rounded a corner in second, where the bayou made a wide bend, and through the oak trees which lined the road I could see the drawbridge extended high in the air, a quarter of a mile away.

Jack, I think you're about to be hung out to dry, I thought, and this time Joey the Neck is going down with you. Welcome to Iberia Parish, podjo.

Vanity, vanity, vanity. Jack Gates was an old-time Mafia soldier and thriving button man in a state whose system of capital punishment involved as much charity as you would expect in the deep-frying of pork rinds. Jack was not one you would simply drive into a bottleneck and cork inside the glass and put on display like a light bug.

I heard his car before I saw it: the transmission wound up full-bore, the engine roaring through a defective muffler like a garbage truck, gravel exploding like grapeshot under the fenders. Then the TransAm skidded around the corner in a cloud of yellow dust, low on the springs, streaked and ugly with dried mud, ripping a green gash out of a canebrake.

I looked full into his face through his windshield-into his regret that he didn't take me out when he had the chance, his rage at the cosmic conspiracy that had made him the long-suffering soldier of an ulcer-ridden paranoid like Joey Gee.

I pulled the truck diagonally across the road, leaped from the seat, and aimed the.45 across the hood, straight at Jack Gates's face. He stomped on the brakes, and the TransAm bucked sideways in a chuckhole and fishtailed against the trunk of an oak tree, pinwheeling a hubcap down the center of the road. He stared at me momentarily through the open passenger's window, a blue revolver balanced in one hand on top of the steering wheel, his metal-capped teeth glinting in the sun's hot early light, the engine throttling open and subsiding and then throttling open again under the hood.

"Give it up, Jack," I said. "Gouza's a psychotic sack of shit. Let him take his own fall for a change."

The rooster tail of dust from behind the car drifted across his window, and in the second it took for me to lose eye contact with him, he aimed the revolver quickly out the window and popped off two rounds. The first one was low and kicked up dirt three feet in front of the truck, but the second one whanged off the hood and showered leaves out of the tree behind me.

Then he dropped the transmission into reverse and floored the TransAm back down the road, the tires burning into the dirt, spinning with circles of black smoke. He veered from side to side, clipping bark out of the tree trunks, bursting a taillight, ripping loose his bumper. But evidently he had an eye for detail and had remembered passing a collapsed wire gate and a faint trace of a side road that led through a sugarcane field, because he slammed on his brakes, slid in a half circle, then roared over the downed gate — cedar posts, barbed wire, and all.

I ran up the incline by the far side of the road, through a stand of pine trees, splashed across a coulee, and came out on the edge of the field just as the TransAm spun around the corner, rippled back a fender on a parked tractor, and mowed through the short cane toward a flat-topped levee that led back to the main parish road.

He hadn't expected to see me on foot in the field. He started to cut the steering wheel toward me, to drive me back into the trees or the coulee, then he changed his mind, spinning the wheel in the opposite direction with one hand and firing blindly out the window with the other. In the instant that the TransAm flashed by me, his face looked white and round and small through the window, like a spectator's in a theater, as though he had suddenly become aware that he was witnessing his own denouement.

I went to one knee in the wet grass and began firing. I tried to keep the sights below the level of his window jamb to allow for the elevation caused by the recoil, but in reality it was unnecessary. The eight hollow-point rounds, which flattened to the size of quarters with impact, destroyed his automobile. They pocked silvery holes in the doors, spiderwebbed the windows, blew divots of upholstery into the air, exploded a tire off the rim, gashed a geyser of steam out of the radiator, and whipped a single streak of blood across the front windshield.

His foot must have locked down on the accelerator, because the TransAm was almost airborne when it roared along the lip of an irrigation ditch and sliced through the fence surrounding a Gulf States Power Company substation.

The front end crashed right into the transformers, and the tiers of transmission wires and ceramic insulators crumpled in a crackling net on the car's roof.

But he was still alive. He let the revolver drop outside the window, then started to push open the door with the palms of his hands like a man trying to extricate himself from the rubble of a collapsed building.

"Don't get out, Jack! Don't touch the ground!"

He sat back down on the seat, his face bloodless and exhausted, then the sole of one shoe came to rest on the damp earth.

The voltage contorted his face as if he were having an epileptic seizure. His body stiffened, shook, and jerked; spittle flew from his mouth; electricity seemed to leap and dance off his capped teeth. Then his car horn and radio began blaring simultaneously, and a scorched odor, like hair and feces burning in an incinerator, rose from his clothes and head in dirty strings of smoke.

I turned and walked back to the road. The grass was wet against my trouser legs and swarming with insects, the sun hot and yellow above the treeline in the marsh. The drawbridge was down now, and ambulances, firetrucks, and sheriff's cars were careening toward me, emergency lights blazing, under the long canopy of oaks. My saliva tasted like copper pennies; my right ear was a block of wood. The.45, the receiver locked open on the empty clip, felt like a silly appendage hanging from my hand.

Paramedics, cops, and firemen were rushing past me now.

I kept walking down the road, by the bayou's edge, toward my house. Bream were feeding close into the lily pads, denting the water in circles like raindrops. The cypress roots along the far bank were gnarled and wet among the shadows and ferns, and I could see the delicate prints of egrets in the damp sand. I pulled the clip from the automatic, stuck it in my back pocket, and let the receiver slam back on the empty chamber. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my right ear, but it felt like it was full of warm water that would not drain.

The sheriff came up behind me and gently put his hand inside my arm.

"When they deal the hand, we shut down their game," he said. "If it comes out any different, we did something wrong. You know where I learned that?"

"It sounds familiar."

"It should."

"We could have used Gates to get Joey Gee."

"Yeah, so we'll catch up with Fluck and use him. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

I nodded silently.

"Right?" he said.

"sure."

"It's just a matter of time."

"Yeah, that's all it is," I agreed, and looked away into the distance, where I could almost feel the sun's heat cooking the tin roof on the bait shop.