Burning Angel

Chapter 3

Five miles up the old Lafayette highway that led past Spanish Lake, I saw the lights on emergency vehicles flashing in front of a convenience store and traffic backing up in both directions as people slowed to stare at the uniformed cops and paramedics who themselves seemed incredulous at the situation. I drove on the road’s shoulder and pulled into the parking lot, where Sweet Pea and five of his hookers — three white, one black, one Asian — sat amidst a clutter of dirty shovels in a pink Cadillac convertible, their faces bright with sweat as the heat rose from the leather interior. A group of kids were trying to see through the legs of the adults who were gathered around the trunk of the car.

The coffin was oversize, an ax handle across, and had been made of wood and cloth and festooned with what had once been silk roses and angels with a one-foot-square glass viewing window in the lid. The sides were rotted out, the slats held in place by vinyl garbage bags and duct tape. Sweet Pea had wedged a piece of plywood under the bottom to keep it from collapsing and spilling out on the highway, but the head of the coffin protruded out over the bumper. The viewing glass had split cleanly across the middle, exposing the waxen and pinched faces of two corpses and nests of matted hair that had fountained against the coffin’s sides.

A uniformed deputy grinned at me from behind his sunglasses.

“Sweet Pea said he’s giving bargain rates on the broad in the box,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Wally didn’t tell you?”

“No, he was in a comic mood, too.”

The smile went out of the deputy’s face. “He says he’s moving his relatives to another cemetery.”

I walked to the driver’s door. Sweet Pea squinted up at me against the late sun. His eyes were the strangest I had ever seen in a human being. There were webbed with skin in the corners, so that the eyeballs seem to peep out from slits like a baby bird’s.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Believe it,” the woman next to him said, disgusted. Her pink shorts were grimed with dirt. She pulled out the top of her shirt and smelled herself.

“You think it’s Mardi Gras?” I said.

“I don’t got a right to move my stepmother?” Sweet Pea said. His few strands of hair were glued across his scalp.

“Who’s in the coffin with her?”

His mouth made a wet silent O, as though he were thinking. Then he said, “Her first husband. They were a tight couple.”

“Can we get out of the car and get something to eat?” the woman next to him said.

“It’s better you stay where you are for a minute,” I said.

“Robicheaux, cain’t we talk reasonable here? It’s hot. My ladies are uncomfortable.”

“Don’t call me by my last name.”

“Excuse me, but you’re not understanding the situation. My stepmother was buried on the Bertrand plantation ‘cause that’s where she growed up. I hear it’s gonna be sold and I don’t want some cocksucker pouring cement on top of my mother’s grave. So I’m taking them back to Breaux Bridge. I don’t need no permit for that.”

He looked into my eyes and saw something there.

“I don’t get it. I been rude, I did something to insult you?” he said.

“You’re a pimp. You don’t have a lot of fans around here.”

He bounced the heels of his hands lightly on the steering wheel. He smiled at nothing, his white eyebrows heavy with sweat. He cleaned one ear with his little finger.

“We got to wait for the medical examiner?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t want nobody having an accident on my seats. They drunk two cases of beer back at the grave,” he said.

“Step over to my office with me,” I said.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

“Get out of the car.”

He followed me into the shade on the lee side of the store. He wore white slacks and brown shoes and belt and a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest. His teeth looked small and sharp inside his tiny mouth.

“Why the hard-on?” he said.

“I don’t like you.”

“That’s your problem.”

“You got a beef with Sonny Boy Marsallus?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Because you think he’s piecing into your action.”

“You’re on a pad for Marsallus?”

“A woman was beaten to death last night, Sweet Pea. How you’d like to spend tonight in the bag, then answer some questions for us in the morning?”

“The broad was Sonny’s punch or something? Why ‘front me about it?”

“Nine years ago I helped pull a girl out of the Industrial Canal. She’d been set on fire with gasoline. I heard that’s how you made your bones with the Giacanos.” He removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. He shook his head profoundly.

“Nothing around here ever changes. Say, you want a sno’ball?” he said.

“You’re a clever man, Sweet Pea.” I pulled my cuffs from my belt and turned him toward the cinder-block wall.

He waited calmly while I snipped them on each wrist, his chin tilted upward, his slitted eyes smiling at nothing.

“What’s the charge?” he asked.

“Hauling trash without a permit. No offense meant.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. He flexed his knees, grunted, and passed gas softly. “Boy, that’s better. T’anks a lot, podna.”

That evening my wife, Bootsie, and I boiled crawfish in a big black pot on the kitchen stove and shelled and ate them on the picnic table in the backyard with our adopted daughter, Alafair. Our house had been built of cypress and oak by my father, a trapper and derrick man, during the Depression, each beam and log notched and drilled and pegged, and the wood had hardened and grown dark with rainwater and smoke from stubble burning in the cane fields, and today a ballpeen hammer would bounce off its exterior and ring in your palm. Down the tree-dotted slope in front of the house were the bayou and dock and bait shop that I operated with an elderly black man named Batist, and on the far side of the bayou was the swamp, filled with gum and willow trees and dead cypress that turned bloodred in the setting sun.

Alafair was almost fourteen now, far removed from the little Salvadoran girl whose bones had seemed as brittle and hollow as a bird’s when I pulled her from a submerged plane out on the salt; nor was she any longer the round, hard-bodied Americanized child who read Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books and wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a Baby Orca T-shirt and red and white tennis shoes embossed with LEFT and RIGHT on each rubber toe. It seemed that one day she had simply stepped across a line, and the baby fat was gone, and her hips and young breasts had taken on the shape of a woman’s. I still remember the morning, with a pang of the heart, when she asked that her father please not call her “little guy” and “Baby Squanto” anymore. She wore her hair in bangs, but it grew to her shoulders now and was black and thick with a light chestnut shine in it. She snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, and peeled the shell off the meat with her thumbnail. “What’s that book you were reading on the gallery, Dave?” she asked. “A diary of sorts.”

“Whose is it?”

“A guy named Sonny Boy.”

“That’s a grown man’s name?” she asked.

“Marsallus?” Bootsie said. She stopped eating. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had brushed it up in swirls and pinned it on her head. “What are you doing with something of his?”

“I ran into him on Canal.”

“He’s back in New Orleans? Does he have a death wish?”

“If he does, someone else may have paid the price for it.”

I saw the question in her eyes.

“The woman who was killed up on the St. Martin line,” I said. “I think she was Sonny’s girlfriend.”

She bit down softly on the corner of her lip. “He’s trying to involve you in something, isn’t he?”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. I knew him before you did, Dave. He’s a manipulator.”

“I never figured him out, I guess. Let’s go into town and get some ice cream,”

I said. “Don’t let Sonny job you, Streak,” she said.

I didn’t want to argue with Bootsie’s knowledge of the New Orleans mob. After she married her previous husband, she had found out he kept the books for the Giacano family and owned half of a vending machine company with them. She also discovered, when he and his mistress were shot gunned to death in the parking lot of Hialeah race track, that he had mortgaged her home on Camp Street, which she had brought free and clear to the marriage.

I didn’t want to talk to Bootsie in front of Alafair about the contents of Sonny’s notebook, either. Much of it made little sense to me — names that I didn’t recognize, mention of a telephone tree, allusions to weapons drops and mules flying dope under U.S. coastal radar. In fact, the concern, the place names, seemed a decade out-of-date, the stuff of congressional inquiry during the mid-Reagan era. But many of the entries were physical descriptions of events that were not characterized by ideology or after-the-fact considerations about legality or illegality:

The inside of the jail is cool and dark and smells of stone and stagnant water. The man in the corner says he’s from Texas but speaks no English. He pried the heels off his boots with a fork and gave the guards seventy American dollars. Through the bars I can see the helicopters going in low across the canopy toward the village on the hillside, firing rockets all the way. I think the guards are going to shoot the man in the corner tomorrow morning. He keeps telling anyone who will listen he’s only a marijuanista...

We found six cane cutters with their thumbs wired behind them in a slough two klicks from the place where we picked up our ammunition. They‘d had no connection with us. They had been executed with machetes while kneeling. We pulled out as the families were coming from the village...

Dysentery... water goes through me like a wet razor... burning with fever last night while the trees shook with rain... I wake in the morning to small-arms fire from the other side of an Indian pyramid that’s gray and green and smoking with mist, my blanket crawling with spiders...

“What are you thinking about?” Bootsie said on our way back from the ice cream parlor.

“You’re right about Sonny. He was born to the hustle.”

“Yes?”

“I just never knew a grifter who deliberately turned his life into a living wound.”

She looked at me curiously in the fading light.

I didn’t go directly to the department in the morning. Instead, I drove out past Spanish Lake to the little community of Cade, which was made up primarily of dirt roads, the old S.P. rail tracks, the dilapidated, paint less shacks of black people, and the seemingly boundless acreage of the Bertrand family sugar plantation.

It had rained earlier that morning, and the new cane was pale green in the fields and egrets were picking insects out of the rows. I drove down a dirt lane past Bertha Fontenot’s weathered cypress home, which had an orange tin roof and a tiny privy in back. A clump of banana trees grew thickly against her south wall, and petunias and impatiens bloomed out of coffee cans and rusted-out buckets all over her gallery. I drove past one more house, one that was painted, and parked by a grove of gum trees, the unofficial cemetery of the Negro families who had worked on the plantation since before the War Between the States.

The graves were no more than faint depressions among the drifting leaves, the occasional wooden cross or board marker inscribed with crude lettering and numbers knocked down and cracked apart by tractors and cane wagons, except for one yawning pit whose broken stone tablet lay half buried with fallen dirt at the bottom.

But even in the deep shade I could make out the name Chaisson cut into the surface.

“I can hep you with something?” a black man said behind me. He was tall, with a bladed face, eyes like bluefish scale, hair shaved close to the scalp, his skin the dull gold cast of worn saddle leather. He wore a grass-stained pink golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes without socks.

“Not really,” I said.

“You ax Mr. Moleen you can come on the property?” he said.

“I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff’s department,” I said, and opened my badge holder in my palm. He nodded without replying, his face deliberately simple and empty of any emotion he thought I might read there. “Aren’t you Bertie’s nephew?”

“Yes, suh, that’s right.”

“Your name’s Luke, you run the juke joint south of the highway?”

“Sometimes. I don’t own it, though. You know lots of things.” When he smiled his eyes became veiled. Behind him, I saw a young black woman watching us from the gallery. She wore white shorts and a flowered blouse, and her skin had the same gold cast as his. She walked with a cane, although I could see no infirmity in her legs.

“How many people do you think are buried in this grove?” I asked.

“They ain’t been burying round here for a long time. I ain’t sure it was even in here.”

“Is that an armadillo hole we’re looking at?”

“Miz Chaisson and her husband buried there. But that’s the only marker I ever seen here.”

“Maybe those depressions are all Indian graves. What do you think?”

“I grew up in town, suh. I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”

“You don’t have to call me sir.”

He nodded again, his eyes looking at nothing.

“You own your house, podna?” I said.

“Aint Bertie say she own it since her mother died. She let me and my sister stay there.”

“She says she owns it, huh?”

“Mr. Moleen say different.”

“Who do you believe?” I said, and smiled.

“It’s what the people at the co’rthouse say. You want anything else, suh? I got to be about my work.”

“Thanks for your time.” He walked off through the dappled light, his face turned innocuously into the breeze blowing across the cane field. Had I been a cop too long? I asked myself. Had I come to dislike someone simply because he’d been up the road?

No, it was the disingenuousness, the hostility that had no handles on it, the use of one’s race like the edge of an ax.

But why expect otherwise, I thought. We’d been good teachers.

Five minutes after I walked into my office, Helen Soileau came through the door with a file folder in her hand and sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, her wide-set, unblinking pale eyes staring at my face.

“What is it?” I said.

“Guess who bailed out Sweet Pea Chaisson?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Jason Darbonne, over in Lafayette. When did he start representing pimps?”

“Darbonne would hitch his mother to a dogsled if the price was right.”

“Get this. The health officer wouldn’t let Sweet Pea transport the coffin back to Breaux Bridge, so he got a guy to haul it for ten bucks in a garbage truck.”

“What’s the file folder?”

“You wanted to question Pissant again? Too bad. The Feds picked him up this morning... Hey, I thought that’d give your peaches a tug.”

“Helen, could you give a little thought as to how you speak to people sometimes?”

“I’m not the problem. The problem is that black four-eyed fuck at the jail who turned our man over to the FBI.”

“What does the FBI want with a house creep?”

“Here’s the paperwork,” she said, and threw the folder on my desk. “If you go over to the lockup, tell that stack of whale shit to get his mind off copping somebody’ spud at least long enough to give us a phone call before he screws up an investigation.”

“I’m serious, Helen... Why not cut people a little... Never mind... I’ll take care of it.”

After she left my office I went over to see the parish jailer. He was a three-hundred-pound bisexual with glasses as thick as Coke bottles and moles all over his neck.

“I didn’t release him. The night man did,” he said.

“This paperwork is shit, Kelso.”

“Don’t hurt my night man’s feelings. He didn’t get out of the eighth grade for nothing.”

“You have a peculiar sense of humor. Roland Broussard was witness to a murder.”

“So talk to the Feds. Maybe that’s why they picked him up. Anyway, they just took him out on loan.”

“Where’s it say that? This handwriting looks like a drunk chicken walked across the page.”

“You want anything else?” he asked, taking a wax paper-wrapped sandwich out of his desk drawer.

“Yeah, the prisoner back in our custody.”

He nodded, bit into his sandwich, and opened the newspaper on his desk blotter.

“I promise you, my man, you’ll be the first to know,” he said, his eyes already deep in a sports story.