Burning Angel

CHAPTER 37

I believe Moleen Bertram was like many of my generation with whom I grew up along Bayou Teche. We found ourselves caught inside a historical envelope that we never understood, borne along on wind currents that marked our ending, not our beginning, first as provincial remnants of a dying Acadian culture, later as part of that excoriated neo-colonial army who would go off to a war whose origins were as arcane to us as the economics of French poppy growers.

When we finally made a plan for ourselves, it was to tear a hole in the middle of our lives.

I don't know why Moleen chose to do it in an apartment off Rampart, near the edge of the Quarter, not far from the one-time quadroon brothels of Storyville and the Iberville Project where Sonny Boy grew up. Perhaps it was because the ambiance of palm fronds, rusting grillwork, and garish pastels that tried to cover the cracked plaster and crumbling brick was ultimately the signature of Moleen's world-jaded, alluring in its decay, seemingly reborn daily amidst tropical flowers and Gulf rainstorms, inextricably linked to a corrupt past that we secretly admired.

At five in the morning I got the call from an alcoholic ex-Homicide partner at First District Headquarters.

“The coroner won't be able to bag it up till after eight, in case you want to come down and check it out,” he said,

“How'd you know to call me?” I said.

“Your business card was on his nightstand. That and his driver's license were about all he had on him. The place got creeped before we arrived.” He yawned into the phone.

“What was he, a pimp?”

The flight in the department's single-engine plane was only a half hour, but the day was already warm, the streets dense with humidity, when Helen Soileau and I walked through the brick-paved courtyard of the building, into the small apartment whose walls were painted an arterial red and hung with black velvet curtains that covered no windows. Moleen and Ruthie Jean lay fully clothed on top of the double bed, their heads wrapped in clear plastic bags. A crime scene photographer was taking their picture from several angles; each time his flash went off their faces seemed to leap to life inside the folds of the plastic.

“He was a lawyer, huh? Who was the broad?” my ex-partner said. He wore a hat and was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

“Just a farm girl,” I said.

“Some farm girl. She did both of them.”

“She did what?” I said.

“His bag was tied from behind, hers in front. I hope she was a good piece of ass,” he said.

“Shut up,” Helen said. “Did you hear me? Just shut the fuck up.”

Later, Helen and I turned down an offer of a ride to the airport and instead walked up to Canal to catch a cab. The street was loud with traffic and car horns, the air stifling, the muted sun as unrelenting and eye-watering as a hangover. The crowds of people on the sidewalks moved through the heat, their faces expressionless, the gaze in their eyes introspective and dead, preset on destinations that held neither joy nor pain, neither loss nor victory.

“What are you doing, Streak?” Helen said.

I took her by the hand and crossed to the neutral ground, drew her with me into the belly of the great iron streetcar from the year 1910 that creaked on curved tracks past the Pearl, with its scrolled black colonnade on the corner of Canal and St. Charles, where Sonny Boy used to put together deals under a wood-bladed fan, on up the avenue, clattering past sidewalks cracked by oak roots as thick as swollen fire hoses, into a long tunnel of trees and heliographic light that was like tumbling through the bottom of a green well, to a place where, perhaps, the confines of reason and predictability had little application.