Burning Angel

Chapter 2

The next morning I dropped it in my file cabinet at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department unread and opened my mail while I drank a cup of coffee. There was a telephone message from Sonny Boy Marsallus, but the number was in St. Martinville, not New Orleans. I dialed it and got no answer.

I gazed out the window at the fine morning and the fronds on the palm trees lifting against the windswept sky. He was out of my jurisdiction, I told myself, don’t get mixed up in his grief. Sonny had probably been out of sync with the earth since conception, and it was only a matter of time before someone tore up his ticket.

But finally I did pull the jacket on Sweet Pea Chaisson, which stayed updated, one way or another, because he was one of our own and seemed to make a point of coming back to the Breaux Bridge-St. Martinville-New Iberia area to get in trouble.

I’ve never quite understood why behaviorists spend so much time and federal funding on the study of sociopaths and recidivists, since none of the research ever teaches us anything about them or makes them any better. I’ve often thought it would be more helpful simply to pull a half dozen like Sweet Pea out of our files, give them supervisory jobs in mainstream society, see how everybody likes it, then perhaps consider a more draconian means of redress, such as prison colonies in the Aleutians.

He had been born and abandoned in a Southern Pacific boxcar, and raised by a mulatto woman who operated a zydeco bar and brothel on the Breaux Bridge highway called the House of Joy. His face was shaped like an inverted teardrop, with white eyebrows, eyes that resembled slits in bread dough, strands of hair like vermicelli, a button nose, a small mouth that was always wet.

His race was a mystery, his biscuit-colored body almost hairless, his stomach a water-filled balloon, his pudgy arms and hands those of a boy who never grew out of adolescence. But his comic proportions had always been a deception. When he was seventeen a neighbor’s hog rooted up his mother’s vegetable garden. Sweet Pea picked up the hog, carried it squealing to the highway, and threw it headlong into the grille of a semi truck.

Nineteen arrests for procuring; two convictions; total time served, eighteen months in parish prisons. Somebody had been looking out for Sweet Pea Chaisson, and I doubted that it was a higher power.

In my mail was a pink memo slip I had missed. Written in Wally the dispatcher’s childish scrawl were the words Guess who’s back in the waiting room? The time on the slip was 7:55 A.M.

Oh Lord.

Bertha Fontenot’s skin was indeed black, so deep in hue that the scars on her hands from opening oyster shells in New Iberia and Lafayette restaurants looked like pink worms that had eaten and disfigured the tissue. Her arms jiggled with fat, her buttocks swelled like pillows over the sides of the metal chair she sat on. Her pillbox hat and purple suit were too small for her, and her skirt rode up above her white hose and exposed the knots of varicose veins in her thighs.

On her lap was a white paper towel from which she ate cracklings with her fingers.

“You decide to pry yourself out your chair for a few minutes?” she said, still chewing.

“I apologize. I didn’t know you were out here.”

“You gonna help me with Moleen Bertrand?”

“It’s a civil matter, Bertie.”

“That’s what you say before.”

“Then nothing’s changed.”

“I can get a white-trash lawyer to tell me that.”

“Thank you.”

Two uniformed deputies at the water fountain were grinning in my direction.

“Why don’t you come in my office and have some coffee?” I said.

She wheezed as I helped her up, then wiped at the crumbs on her dress and followed me inside my office, her big lacquered straw bag, with plastic flowers on the side, clutched under her arm. I closed the door behind us and waited for her to sit down.

“This is what you have to understand, Bertie. I investigate criminal cases. If you have a title problem with your land, you need a lawyer to represent you in what’s called a civil proceeding.”

“Moleen Bertrand already a lawyer. Some other lawyer gonna give him trouble back ‘cause of a bunch of black peoples?”

“I have a friend who owns a title company. I’ll ask him to search the courthouse records for you.”

“It won’t do no good. We’re six black families on one strip that’s in arpents. It don’t show in the survey in the co’rthouse. Everything in the co’rthouse is in acres now.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. If that’s your land, it’s your land.”

“What you mean if? Moleen Bertrand’s grandfather give that land to us ninety-five years ago. Everybody knowed it.”

“Somebody didn’t.”

“So what you gonna do about it?”

“I’ll talk to Moleen.”

“Why don’t you talk to your wastebasket while you’re at it?”

“Give me your phone number.”

“You got to call up at the sto’. You know why Moleen Bertrand want that land, don’t you?”

“No.”

“They’s a bunch of gold buried on it.”

“That’s nonsense, Bertie.”

“Then why he want to bulldoze out our li’l houses?”

“I’ll ask him that.”

“When?”

“Today. Is that soon enough?”

“We’ll see what we gonna see.”

My phone rang and I used the call, which I put on hold, as an excuse to walk her to the door and say good-bye. But as I watched her walk with labored dignity toward her car in the parking lot, I wondered if I, too, had yielded to that old white pretense of impatient charity with people of color, as though somehow they were incapable of understanding our efforts on their behalf.

It was two days later, at five in the morning, when a cruiser pulled a man over for speeding on the St. Martinville highway.

On the backseat and floor were a television set, a portable stereo, a box of women’s shoes, bottles of liquor, canned goods, a suitcase full of women’s clothes and purses.

“There’s a drag ball I haven’t been invited to?” the deputy said.

“I’m helping my girlfriend move,” the driver said.

“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“You seem a little nervous.”

“You’ve got a gun in your hand.”

“I don’t think that’s the problem. What’s that fragrance in the air? Is it dark roast coffee? Would you step out of the car, please?”

The deputy had already run the plates. The car belonged to a woman named Delia Landry, whose address was on the St. Martin-Iberia Parish line. The driver’s name was Roland Broussard. At noon the same day he was brought into our interrogation room by Detective Helen Soileau, a dressing taped high up on his forehead.

He wore dark jeans, running shoes, a green pullover smock from the hospital. His black hair was thick and curly, his jaws unshaved, his nails bitten to the quick; a sour smell rose from his armpits. We stared at him without speaking.

The room was windowless and bare except for a wood table and three chairs. He opened and closed his hands on top of the table and kept scuffing his shoes under the chair. I took his left wrist and turned up his forearm.

“How often do you fix, Roland?” I asked.

“I’ve been selling at the blood bank.”

“I see.”

“You got an aspirin?” He glanced at Helen Soileau. She had a broad face whose expression you never wanted to misread. Her blonde hair looked like a lacquered wig, her figure a sack of potatoes. She wore a pair of blue slacks and a starched short-sleeve white shirt, her badge above her left breast; her handcuffs were stuck through the back of her gunbelt.

“Where’s your shirt?” I said.

“It had blood all over it. Mine.”

“The report says you tried to run,” Helen said.

“Look, I asked for a lawyer. I don’t have to say anything else, right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “But you already told us you boosted the car. So we can ask you about that, can’t we?”

“Yeah, I boosted it. So what else you want? Big fucking deal.”

“Would you watch your language, please?” I said.

“What is this, a crazy house? You got a clown making fun of me out on the road, then beating the shit out of me, and I’m supposed to worry about my fucking language.”

“Did the owner of the car load all her possessions in it and give you the keys so you wouldn’t have to wire it? That’s a strange story, Roland,” I said.

“It was parked like that in the driveway. I know what you’re trying to do... Why’s she keep staring at me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I took the car. I was smoking dope in it, too. I ain’t saying anything else... Hey, look, she’s got some kind of problem?” He held his finger close to his chest when he pointed at Helen, as though she couldn’t see it.

“You want some slack, Roland? Now’s the time,” I said.

Before he could answer, Helen Soileau picked up the wastebasket by the rim and swung it with both hands across the side of his face. He crashed sideways to the floor, his mouth open, his eyes out of focus. Then she hit him again, hard, across the back of the head, before I could grab her arms. Her muscles were like rocks.

She shook my hands off and hurled the can and its contents of cigarette butts, ashes, and candy wrappers caroming off his shoulders.

“You little pissant,” she said. “You think two homicide detectives are wasting their time with a fart like you over a car theft. Look at me when I talk to you!”

“Helen—” I said softly.

“Go outside and leave us alone,” she said.

“Nope,” I said, and helped Roland Broussard back into his chair. “Tell Detective Soileau you’re sorry, Roland.”

“For what?”

“For being a wiseass. For treating us like we’re stupid.”

“I apologize.”

“Helen—” I looked at her.

“I’m going to the John. I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said.

“You’re the good guy now?” he said, after she closed the door behind her.

“It’s no act, podna. I don’t get along with Helen. Few people do. She smoked two perps in three years.” His eyes looked up into mine.

“Here’s the lay of the land,” I said. “I believe you creeped that woman’s duplex and stole her car, but you didn’t have anything to do with the rest of it. That’s what I believe. That doesn’t mean you won’t take the fall for what happened in there. You get my drift?”

He pinched his temples with his fingers, as though a piece of rusty wire were twisting inside his head.

“So?” I opened my palms inquisitively.

“Nobody was home when I went through the window. I cleaned out the place and had it all loaded in her car. That’s when some other broad dropped her off in front, so I hid in the hedge. I’m thinking, What am I gonna do? I start the car, she’ll know I’m stealing it. I wait around, she turns on the light, she knows the place’s been ripped off. Then two guys roar up out of nowhere, come up the sidewalk real fast, and push her inside.

“What they done, I don’t like remembering it, I closed my eyes, that’s the truth, she was whimpering, I’m not kidding you, man, I wanted to stop it. What was I gonna do?”

“Call for help.”

“I was strung out, I got a serious meth problem, it’s easy to say what you ought to do when you’re not there. Look, what’s-your-name, I’ve been down twice but I never hurt anybody. Those guys, they were tearing her apart, I was scared, I never saw anything like that before.”

“What did they look like, Roland?”

“Gimmie a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“I didn’t see their faces. I didn’t want to. Why didn’t her neighbors help?”

“They weren’t home.”

“I felt sorry for her. I wish I’d done something.”

“Detective Soileau is going to take your statement, Roland. I’ll probably be talking to you again.”

“How’d you know I didn’t do it?”

“The ME says her neck was broken in the bathroom. That’s the only room you didn’t track mud all over.”

I passed Helen Soileau on my way out. Her eyes were hot and focused like BB’s on the apprehensive face of Roland Broussard.

“He’s been cooperative,” I said.

The door clicked shut behind me. I might as well have addressed myself to the drain in the water fountain.

Moleen Bertrand lived in an enormous white-columned home on Bayou Teche, just east of City Park, and from his glassed-in back porch you could look down the slope of his lawn, through the widely spaced live oak trees, and see the brown current of the bayou drifting by, the flooded cane brakes on the far side, the gazebos of his neighbors clustered with trumpet and passion vine, and finally the stiff, block like outline of the old drawbridge and tender house off Burke Street.

It was March and already warm, but Moleen Bertrand wore a long-sleeve candy-striped shirt with ruby cuff links and a rolled white collar. He was over six feet and could not be called a soft man, but at the same time there was no muscular tone or definition to his body, as though in growing up he had simply bypassed physical labor and conventional sports as a matter of calling.

He had been born to an exclusionary world of wealth and private schools, membership in the town’s one country club, and Christmas vacations in places the rest of us knew of only from books, but no one could accuse him of not having improved upon what he had been given. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Springhill and a major in the air force toward the end of the Vietnam War. He made the Law Review at Tulane and became a senior partner at his firm in less than five years. He was also a champion skeet shooter. Any number of demagogic politicians who were famous for their largess sought his endorsement and that of his family name. They didn’t receive it. But he never gave offense or was known to be unkind.

We walked under the trees in his backyard. His face was cool and pleasant as he sipped his iced tea and looked at a motorboat and a water-skier hammering down the bayou on pillows of yellow foam.

“Bertie can come to my office if she wants. I don’t know what else to tell you, Dave,” he said. His short salt-and-pepper hair was wet and freshly combed, the part a razor-straight pink line in his scalp.

“She says your grandfather gave her family the land.”

“The truth is we haven’t charged her any rent. She’s interpreted that to mean she owns the land.”

“Are you selling it?”

“It’s a matter of time until it gets developed by someone.”

“Those black people have lived there a long time, Moleen.”

“Tell me about it.” Then the brief moment of impatience went out of his face. “Look, here’s the reality, and I don’t mean it as a complaint. There’re six or seven nigra families in there we’ve taken care of for fifty years. I’m talking about doctor and dentist bills, schooling, extra money for June Teenth, getting people out of jail. Bertie tends to forget some things.”

“She mentioned something about gold being buried on the property.”

“Good heavens. I don’t want to offend you, but don’t y’all have something better to do?”

“She took care of me when I was little. It’s hard to chase her out of my office.”

He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. His nails were immaculate, his touch as soft as a woman’s. “Send her back to me,” he said.

“What’s this stuff about gold?”

“Who knows? I always heard Jean Lafitte buried his treasure right across the bayou there, right over by those two big cypress trees.” Then his smile became a question mark. “Why are you frowning?”

“You’re the second person to mention Lafitte to me in the last couple of days.”

“Hmmm,” he said, blowing air out his nostrils.

“Thanks for your time, Moleen.”

“My pleasure.” I walked toward my truck, which was parked on the gravel cul-de-sac by his boathouse. I rubbed the back of my neck, as though a half-forgotten thought were trying to burrow its way out of my skin.

“Excuse me, didn’t you represent Bertie’s nephew once?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“His name’s Luke, you got him out of the death house?”

“That’s the man.”

I nodded and waved good-bye again.

He had mentioned getting people out of jail but nothing as dramatic as saving somebody from the electric chair hours before an electrocution.

Why not?

Maybe he was just humble, I said in response to my own question.

When I backed out of the drive, he was idly pouring his iced tea into the inverted cone at the top of an anthill.

I drove out on the St. Martinville highway to the lime green duplex set back among pine trees where Delia Landry had suddenly been thrust through a door into an envelope of pain that most of us can imagine only in nightmares. The killers had virtually destroyed the interior. The mattresses, pillows, and stuffed chairs were slashed open, dishes and books raked off the shelves, dresser drawers dumped on the floors, plaster and lathes stripped out of the walls with either a crowbar or claw hammer; even the top of the toilet tank was broken in half across the bowl.

Her most personal items from the bathroom’s cabinets were strewn across the floor, cracked and ground into the imitation tile by heavy shoes. The sliding shower glass that extended across the tub had been shattered out of the frame. On the opposite side of the tub was a dried red streak that could have been painted there by a heavily soaked paintbrush.

When a homicide victim’s life can be traced backward to a nether world of pickup bars, pimps, and nickel-and-dime hustlers and street dealers, the search for a likely perpetrator isn’t a long one. But Delia Landry was a social worker who had graduated in political science from LSU only three years ago; she attended a Catholic church in St. Martinville, came from a middle-class family in Slidell, taught a catechism class to the children of migrant farm workers.

She had a boyfriend in New Orleans who sometimes stayed with her on the weekends, but no one knew his name, and there seemed to be nothing remarkable about the relationship.

What could she have done, owned, or possessed that would invite such a violent intrusion into her young life?

The killers could have made a mistake, I thought, targeted the wrong person, come to the wrong address. Why not? Cops did it.

But the previous tenants in the duplex had been a husband and wife who operated a convenience store. The next-door neighbors were Social Security recipients. The rest of the semirural neighborhood was made up of ordinary lower-middle-income people who would never have enough money to buy a home of their own.

A small wire book stand by the television set had been knocked over on the carpet. The titles of the books were unexceptional and indicated nothing other than a general reading interest. But among the splay of pages was a small newspaper, titled The Catholic Worker, with a shoe print crushed across it.

Then for some reason my eyes settled not on the telephone, which had been pulled loose from the wall jack, but on the number pasted across the telephone’s base.

I inserted the terminal back in the jack and dialed the department.

“Wally, would you go down to my office for me and look at a pink message slip stuck in the corner of my blotter?”

“Sure. Hey, I’m glad you called. The sheriff was looking for you.”

“First things first, okay?”

“Hang on.”

He put me on hold, then picked up the receiver on my desk.

“All right, Dave.”

I asked him to read me the telephone number on the message slip. After he had finished, he said, “That’s the number Sonny Marsallus left.”

“It’s also the number of the phone I’m using right now, Delia Landry’s.”

“What’s going on? Sonny decide to track his shit into Iberia Parish?”

“I think you’ve got your hand on it.”

“Look, the sheriff wants you to head out by Spanish Lake. Sweet Pea Chaisson and a carload of his broads are causing a little hysteria in front of the convenience store.”

“Then send a cruiser out there.”

“It isn’t a traffic situation.” He began to laugh in a cigar-choked wheeze. “Sweet Pea’s got his mother’s body sticking out of the car trunk. See what you can do, Dave.”