Burning Angel

CHAPTER 12

Clete called me from his office the next day.

“I'll buy you dinner in Morgan City after work,” he said.

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“I'm taking a day off from the colostomy bags. It's not a plot. Come on down and eat some crabs.”

“Is Johnny Carp involved in this?”

“I know a couple of guys who used to mule dope out of Panama and Belize. They told me some interesting stuff about fuckhead.”

“Who?”

“Marsallus. I don't want to tell you over the phone. There're clicking sounds on my line sometimes.”

“You're tapped?”

“Remember when we had to smoke that greaser and his bodyguard in the back of their car? I know IAD had a tap on me then. Sounds just like it. You coming down?”

“Clete-”

“Lighten up.”

He told me the name of the restaurant.

It was on the far side of Morgan City, just off the highway by a boat basin lined with docks, boat slips, and tin-roofed sheds that extended out over the water. Clete was at a linen-covered table set with flowers by the window. On the horizon you could see rain falling out of the sunlight like a cloud of purple smoke. He had a small pitcher of draft beer and an ice-filmed schooner and plate of stuffed mushrooms in front of him. His face was glowing with alcohol and a fresh sunburn.

“Dig in, noble mon. I've got some fried soft-shells on the way,” he said.

“What's the gen on Sonny?” I left my coat on to cover my .45.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, as though he had forgotten the reason for our meeting. “These two mules, I know them because they're bondsmen now and handle a lot of the pukes dealing crack in the St. Bernard where I run down about three skips a week. They were flying reefer and coke out of Belize, which was some kind of stop-off place for a whole bunch of runs going in and out of Colombia and Panama. These guys say there were a lot of weird connections down there, CIA, military people, maybe some guys hooked into the White House. Anyway, they knew assswipe and say everybody had him made for DEA.”

“Sonny Boy?“

”Asswipe is Sonny Boy?“ His eyes fluttered. ”No, I'm talking about a Maryknoll missionary. Come on, Dave, stop letting this guy job you. His parents should have been sterilized or given a lifetime supply of industrial-strength rubbers.“

”You buy what these bondsmen say?“

”Not really. Marsallus never finished high school. The DEA hires college graduates, Notre Dame jocks with brains, not street mutts with tattoos and rap sheets.“

”Then why'd you have me come down here?“ I asked. But even as his eyes were drifting toward the door of the restaurant, I already knew the answer. John Polycarp Giacano had just come through the carpeted foyer, a raincoat draped on his shoulders as a movie actor might wear it. He was talking to a man behind him whom I couldn't see.

”Wait in the car. It's all right,“ he said, his palms raised in a placating way. ”Fix yourself a drink. Then we'll catch some more fish.“

He slipped his coat off his shoulders and handed it to a waitress to hang up, never speaking, as though his intention should automatically be understood. He wore white boating shoes, pleated slacks that were the color of French vanilla ice cream, and a navy blue tropical shirt that was ablaze with big red flowers. He walked toward us, smiling, his close-set eyes, thick brows, nose, and mouth all gathered together like a facial caricature in the center of a cake.

”You shouldn't have done this, Clete,“ I said.

”It's got to be cleared up, Streak. Patsy Dap listens to only one man. Just let me do the talking and everything's going to be cool.“

”How you doin', fellas?“ Johnny Carp said, and sat down.

”What's the haps, John?“ I said.

He picked up a stuffed mushroom with his fingers and plopped it in his mouth, his eyes smiling at me while he chewed.

”He asks me what's the haps,“ he said. ”Dave, I love you, you fucking wild man.“

”Glad you could make it, Johnny,“ Clete said.

”I love to fish,“ he said. ”It don't matter redfish, gaff top specs, white trout, it's the fresh air, the waves flopping against the boat, Dave, you're a fucking zonk, we ain't living in the days of the O.K. Corral no more, know what I'm saying?“

”I don't know what to tell you, Johnny,“ I said.

”Hey, Clete, get us some drinks over here, some snapper fingers, some oysters on the half shell, make sure they're fresh, I got to talk to this crazy guy,“ Johnny said.

”I don't think you do, John,“ I said.

”What's he saying, Clete?“

”Streak doesn't like to bother people with his trouble, that's all, Johnny.“

”His trouble's my trouble. So let's work it out. I got a guy out in the car gonna have to have plastic surgery over in Houston. This is a guy nobody needs to have pissed off at him. I'm talking about a face looks like a basketball with stitches all over it. This guy couldn't get laid down at the Braille school. This ain't something you just blow out your ass because you happen to be a cop, Dave.“

”You're a generous man with your time, Johnny,“ I said. ”But I didn't ask for a sit-down.“

”What, I'm here to play with my dick under the table?“

A family sitting close to us got up and left.

”Your man went across the line,“ I said.

”I think we got a problem with pride here, Dave. It ain't good.“

”There're cops in New Orleans who would have blown out his candle, Johnny,“ I said.

”You ain't in New Orleans. You degraded the man. He works for me. I got to square it, I'm being up-front here.“

”I don't think you're hearing me. I was off my turf. So your man's not down on an assault charge. End of subject, Johnny,“ I said.

”You're burning up a lot of goodwill, Dave. That's the oil makes all the wheels turn. You're educated, I ain't got to tell you that,“

Johnny said. ”The guy I got out in the car never had your advantages, he don't operate on goodwill, he operates out of respect for me. I don't honor that respect, then I don't get it from nobody else, either.“

”What do you think you're going to get here today?“ I asked.

”I got an envelope with ten large in it. You give it to the guy for his hospital bill, just say you got no hard feelings. You ain't even got to say you're sorry. The money don't matter 'cause I'm paying his hospital bill anyway and he'll have to give me the ten back. So everybody wins, everybody feels better, and we don't have no problems later.“

”Are you serious?“ I said.

”I throw a net over a guy makes some people wake up with cold sweats, pump him full of Demerol so he don't kick out my fucking windows, just so I can get him off your back, you have the fucking nerve to ask me if I'm serious?“

He took a comb out of his shirt pocket and ran it through his hair, touching the waves with his fingers simultaneously, his knurled forehead furrowing as his eyes bored into my face. The teeth of his comb were bright with oil.

”Come on, Johnny, Dave's not trying to dis anybody. The situation just got out of control. It happens.“

”He's not trying to what?“ Johnny said.

”Dis anybody. He doesn't mean any disrespect.“

”I know what it means, why you using nigger language to me?“

Clete eased out his breath and lifted his shirt off his collarbone with his thumb. ”I got fried out in my boat today, Johnny,“ he said.

”Sometimes I don't say things very well. I apologize.“

”I accept your invitation to dinner, you talk to me like I'm a goddamn nigger?“

The waiter set down a Scotch and milk in front of Johnny, another pitcher of beer for Clete, an iced tea for me, and a round tray of freshly opened oysters flecked with ice. Johnny reached across the table and popped Clete on top of the hand.

”You deaf and dumb?“ he said.

Clete's green eyes roved around the room, as though he were appraising the fish nets and ship's life preservers hung on the wall. He picked up a oyster, sucked it out of the shell, and winked at Johnny Carp.

”What the fuck's that supposed to mean?“ Johnny said.

”You're a lot of fun, John,“ Clete said.

Johnny took a deep drink out of his Scotch and milk, his eyes like black marbles that had rolled together above the glass. He rubbed a knuckle hard across his mouth, then pursed his lips like a tropical fish staring out of an aquarium. ”I'm asking you in a nice way, you're giving me some kind of queer-bait signals here, you're ridiculing me, you just being a wiseass 'cause we're in public, what?“ he said.

”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. Darbonne 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.

“I believe I'll go back inside,” I said.

“I think you've made an unpleasant implication, Dave. I insist we clear it up.”

“I went back out to your plantation this week. I'm not sure what's going on out there, but part of it has to do with Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”

He looked into my eyes. “You want to spell that out?” he said.

“You know damn well what I'm talking about. If you want to hide a personal relationship, that's your business. But you're hiding something else, too, Moleen, about that plantation. I just don't know what it is.”

He fitted the shotgun's stock to his shoulder, fired at a nutria that was swimming behind a half-submerged log, and blew a pattern of bird shot all over the pond. The nutria ducked under the water and surfaced again but it was hurt and swimming erratically. Moleen snapped open the breech and flung the casing out into the water.

“I don't take kindly to people insulting me on my own property,” he said.

“The insult is to that woman on the plantation. You didn't even have the decency to inscribe her name on the photograph you gave her.”

“You're beyond your limits, my friend.”

“And you're cruel to animals as well as to people. Fuck you,” I said, and walked back toward the camp.

I found Bootsie on the gallery.

“We have to go,” I said.

“Dave, we just ate.”

“I already said our good-byes. I have some work to do at the dock.”

“No! It's rude.”

Three women drinking coffee nearby tried not to hear our conversation.

“Okay, I'm going to put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jog a couple of miles. Pick me up out on the road.”

She looked at me with a strangled expression on her face.

“I'll explain it later.”

We had come in Bootsie's Toyota. I unlocked the trunk, took out my running shoes and gym shorts, and changed in the lee of the car. Then I jogged across a glade full of buttercups, past a stand of persimmon trees that fringed the woods, and out onto the hard-packed dirt road that led off the chenier.

The wind was warm and the afternoon sky marbled with yellow and maroon clouds. I turned my face into the breeze, kept a steady pace for a quarter mile, then poured it on, the sweat popping on my forehead, the blood singing in my chest until Moleen Bertrand's words, his supercilious arrogance, became more and more distant in my mind.

I passed a clump of pecan trees that were in deep shadow, the ground under them thick with palmettos. Then in the corner of my vision I saw another jogger step out into the spangled light and fall in beside me.

I smelled him before I saw him. His odor was like a fog, gray, visceral, secreted out of glands that could have been transplanted from animals. His head was a tan cannonball, the shoulders ax-handle wide, the hips tapering down to a small butt that a woman could probably cover with both her hands. His T-shirt was rotted into cheesecloth, the armpits dark and sopping, the flat chest a nest of wet black hair. His teeth were like tombstones when he grinned.

“You do it in bursts, don't you?” he said. His voice was low, full of grit, like a man with throat cancer. “Me, too.”

His shoulder was inches away, the steady pat-pat-pat-pat of his tennis shoes in rhythm with mine, even the steady intake and exhalation of his breath now part of mine. He wrapped his towel over his head and knotted it under his chin.

“How you doin'?” I said.

“Great. You ever run on the grinder at Quantico?” He turned his face to me. The eyes were cavernous, like chunks of lead shot.

“No, I wasn't in the Corps,” I said.

“I knew a guy looked like you. That's why I asked.”

I didn't answer. Out over the salt a single-engine plane was flying out of the sun, its wings tilting and bouncing hard in the wind.

“Were you at Benning?” the man said.

“Nope.”

“I know you from somewhere.”

“I don't think so.”

“Maybe it was Bragg. No, I remember you now. Saigon, sixty-five. Bring Cash Alley. You could get on the pipe and laid for twenty bucks. Fucking A, I never forget a face.”

I slowed to a walk, breathing hard, my chest running with sweat. He slowed with me.

“What's the game, partner?” I said.

“It's a small club. No game. A guy with two Hearts is a charter member in my view.”

He pulled his towel off his head and mopped his face with it, then offered it to me. I saw Bootsie's Toyota headed down the road toward us.

I backed away from him, my eyes locked on his.

“You take it easy, now,” I said.

“You too, chief. Try a liquid protein malt. It's like wrapping copper wire around your nuts, really puts an edge on your run.”

I heard Bootsie brake behind me. I got in the passenger seat beside her. My bare back left a dark wet stain on the seat.

“Dave, put on your shirt,” she said.

“Let's go.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She glanced in the rearview mirror. The man with the tan cannon-ball head was mopping the inside of his thighs with the towel.

“Yuck,” she said. “Who's that?”

“I have a feeling I just met Mr. Emile Pogue,” I answered.