Burning Angel

Chapter 7

It’s probably safe to say the majority of them are self-deluded, uneducated, fearful of women, and defective physically. Their political knowledge, usually gathered from paramilitary magazines, has the moral dimensions of comic books. Some of them have been kicked out of the service on bad conduct and dishonorable discharges; others have neither the physical nor mental capacity to successfully complete traditional basic training in the U.S. Army. After they pay large sums of money to slap mosquitoes at a mere training camp in the piney woods of north Florida, they have themselves tattooed with death heads and grandiloquently toast one another, usually in pecker wood accents, with the classic Legionnaire’s paean to spiritual nihilism, “Vive la guerre, vive la mort.”

Miami is full of them.

If you want to connect with them in the New Orleans area, you cross the river over to Algiers into a neighborhood of pawnshops and Vietnamese-owned grocery stores and low-rent bars, and visit Tommy Carrol’s Gun & Surplus.

It was Sunday evening, and Helen Soileau and I were off the clock and out of our jurisdiction. Tommy Carrol, whom I had never met, was locking up his glass gun cases and about to close. He wore baggy camouflage trousers, polished combat boots, and a wide-necked bright yellow T-shirt, like body builders wear. His shaved head reminded me of an alabaster bowling ball. He chewed and snapped his gum maniacally, his eyes flicking back and forth from his work to Helen and me as we walked in file between the stacks of survival gear, ammunition, inflatable rafts, knife display cases, and chained racks of bolt-action military rifles.

“So I’m stuck again with me goddamn kids, that’s what you’re saying?” Helen said over her shoulder to me. She wore tan slacks, lacquered straw sandals, and a flowered shirt hanging outside her belt. She sipped from a can of beer that was wrapped in a brown bag.

“Did I say that? Did I say that?” I said at her back.

“You need something?” Tommy Carrol said.

“Yeah, a couple of Excedrin,” I said.

“Is there a problem here?” Tommy Carrol asked.

“I’m looking for Sonny Boy Marsallus,” I said.

“Don’t tell us the herpes outpatient clinic, either. We already been there,” Helen said.

“Shut up, Helen,” I said.

“Did I marry Mr. Goodwrench or not?” she said.

“What’s going on?” Tommy asked, his gum snapping in his jaw.

“Doesn’t Sonny hang in here?” I said.

“Sometimes. I mean he used to. Not anymore.”

“Helen, why don’t you go sit in the car?” I said.

“Because I don’t feel like changing diapers on your goddamn kids.”

“I’ve been out of the loop,” I said to Tommy. “I’d like to get back to work.”

“Doing what?”

“Peace Corps. Isn’t this the sign-up place?” I said.

He arched his eyebrows and looked sideways. Then he made a tent on his chest with the fingers of one hand. His eyes were like blue marbles.

“It makes you feel better to jerk my Johnson, be my guest,” he said. “But I’m closing up, I don’t have any contact with Sonny, and I got nothing to do with other people’s family troubles.” He widened his eyes for emphasis.

“This is the guy knows all the meres?” Helen said, and brayed at her own irony. She upended her beer can until it was empty. “I’m driving down to the store on the corner. If you’re not there in five minutes, you can ride the goddamn bus home.”

She let the glass door slam behind her. Tommy stared after her. “For real, that’s your wife?” he said, chewing his gum.

“Yeah.”

“What’s your experience? Maybe I can help.”

“One tour in “Nam. Some diddle-shit stuff with the tomato pickers.”

He pushed a pencil and pad across the glass countertop.

“Write your name and number down there. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“You can’t hook me up with Sonny?”

“Like I say, I don’t see him around, you know what I mean?” His eyes were as bright as blue silk, locked on mine, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw.

“He’s out of town and nobody’s missing him?” I smiled at him.

“You summed it up.”

“How about two guys who look like Mutt and Jeff?”

He began shaking his head noncommittally. “The short guy’s got a fire hydrant for a neck. Maybe he did some work for Idi Amin. Maybe Sonny Boy popped a cap on his brother,” I said.

His eyes stayed fixed on mine, but I saw his hand tic on the countertop, heard his heavy ring click on the glass. He picked up the notepad from the countertop and tossed it on a littered desk behind him.

“You shouldn’t job me, man,” he said. His eyes were unblinking, his gum rolling on his teeth.

“You think I’m a cop?”

“You got it, Jack.”

“You’re right.” I opened my badge holder on the countertop. “You know who the guy with the sawed-off neck is, don’t you?”

He dropped his ring of keys in his pocket and called out to a man sweeping the wood floors in front, “Lock it up, Mack. I’m gonna see what the old woman’s got for supper. The fun guy here is a cop. But you don’t have to talk to him, you don’t want.” Then he spat his chewing gum neatly into a trash bag and clanged through a metal door into the back alley.

I went through the door after him. He began to walk rapidly toward his car, his keys ringing in the pocket of his camouflage trousers.

“Hold on, Tommy,” I said.

Helen had parked her car by the end of the alley, next to a Dumpster and a stand of banana trees that grew along a brick wall. She got out of her car with her baton in her hand.

“Right there, motherfucker!” she said, breaking into a run. “Freeze! Did you hear me? I said freeze, goddamn it!”

But Tommy Carrol was not a good listener and tried to make his automobile. She whipped the baton behind his knee, and his leg folded under him as though she had severed a tendon. He crashed into the side of his car door, his knee held up before him with both hands, his mouth open as though he were trying to blow the fire out of a burn.

“Damn it, Helen,” I said between my teeth.

“He shouldn’t have run,” she said. “Right, Tommy? You got nothing to hide, you don’t need to run. Tell me I’m right, Tommy.”

“Lay off him, Helen. I mean it.” I helped him up by one arm, opened his car door, and sat him down in the seat. An elderly black woman, pulling a child’s wagon, with a blue rag tired around her head, came off the side street and began rooting in the Dumpster.

“I’m going to file charges on you people,” Tommy said.

“That’s your right. Who’s the short guy, Tommy?” I said.

“You know what? I’m gonna tell you. It’s Emile Pogue. Send the mutt here after him. She’ll make a great stuffed head.”

I heard Helen move behind me, gravel scrape under her shoes. “No,” I said, and held up my hand in front of her.

Tommy kneaded the back of his leg with both hands. A thick blue vein pulsed in his shaved scalp.

“Here’s something else to take with you, too,” he said. “Emile didn’t work for Idi Amin. Emile trained him at an Israeli jump school. You jack-offs don’t have any idea of what you’re fooling with, do you?”

Monday morning I went to the Iberia Parish Court House and began researching the records on the Bertrand plantation out by Cade. Bertie Fontenot maintained that Moleen Bertrand’s grandfather had given a strip of land to several black tenants, her ancestors included, ninety-five years ago, but I could find no record of the transfer. Neither could the clerk of court. The early surveys of the Bertrand property were crude, in French arpents, and made use of coulees and dirt roads as boundaries; the last survey had been done ten years ago for an oil company, and the legal descriptions were clear and the unit designations now in acres. But no matter — there had been no apparent subdivision of the plantation granting Bertie and her neighbors title to the land on which they lived.

The secretary at Moleen’s law office told me he had gone out to the country club to join his wife for lunch. I found them by the putting green, he on a wood bench, only enough bourbon in his glass to stain the water the color of oak, she in a short white pleated skirt and magenta blouse that crinkled with light, her bleached hair and deeply tanned and lined face a deceptive and electric illusion of middle-aged health down in the Sunbelt.

For Julia Bertrand was at the club every day, played a mean eighteen as well as game of bridge, was always charming, and was often the only woman remaining among the male crowd who stayed at the bar through supper time. Her capacity was awesome; she never slurred her words or used profane or coarse language; but her driver’s license had been suspended twice, and years ago, before I was with the sheriff’s department, a Negro child had been killed in a hit-and-run accident out in the parish. Julia Bertrand had been held briefly in custody. But later a witness changed his story, and the parents dropped charges and moved out of state.

She bent over the ball, the breeze ruffling her pleated skirt against her muscular thighs, and putted a ten-footer, plunk, neatly into the cup. From the wood bench she picked up her drink, which was filled with fruit and shaved ice and wrapped with a paper napkin and rubber band, and walked toward me with her hand extended. Her smile was dazzling, her tinted contacts a chemical blue-green.

“How are you, Dave? I hope we’re not in trouble,” she said. Her voice was husky and playful, her breath heavy with nicotine.

“Not with me. How you doing, Julia?”

“I’m afraid Dave’s doing pro bono for Bertie Fontenot,” Moleen said.

“Dave, not really?” she said.

“It’s gone a little bit beyond that,” I said. “Some peculiar things seem to be happening out at your plantation, Moleen.”

“Oh?” he said.

“I went jogging on your place Friday night. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Anytime,” he said.

“Somebody dropped a rusted leg iron on my truck seat.”

“A leg iron? Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Moleen said, and drank from his glass. His long legs were crossed, his eyes impossible to read behind his sunglasses.

“Somebody was running a dozer blade through that grove of gum trees at the end of Bertie Fontenot’s lane. It looks to me like there might have been some old graves in there.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re telling me or why, but I can tell you, with some degree of certainty, what was in there. My great grandfather leased convicts as laborers after the Civil War. Supposedly there was a prison stockade right where those gum trees are today.”

“No kidding?” I said.

“A bad chapter in the family history, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, it was not. You liberals love collective guilt,” Julia said.

“Why would somebody want to put a leg iron in my truck?”

“Search me.” He took off his sunglasses, folded them on his knee, yawned, and looked at a distant, moss-hung oak by the fairway. “It was probably just my night for strange memorabilia. Somebody left a dog tag on the windowsill of my bait shop. It belonged to a guy who flew a slick into a hot LZ when I was wounded.”

“That’s quite a story,” he said.

He gazed down the fairway, seemingly uninterested in my conversation, but for just a moment there had been a brightening of color in his hazel eyes, a hidden thought working behind the iris like a busy insect.

“This guy got left behind in Laos,” I said.

“You know what, Dave?” he said. “I wish I’d behaved badly toward people of color. Been a member of the Klan or a white citizens council, something like that. Then somehow this conversation would seem more warranted.”

“Dave’s not out here for any personal reason, Moleen,” his wife said, smiling. “Are you, Dave?”

“Dave’s a serious man. He doesn’t expend his workday casually with the idle rich,” Moleen said.

He put a cigar in his mouth and picked a match out of a thin box from the Pontchartrain Hotel.

“Police officers ask questions, Moleen,” I said.

“I’m sorry we have no answers for you.”

“Thanks for your time. Say, your man Luke is stand-up, isn’t he?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bertie Fontenot’s nephew. He’s loyal. I’d swear he was willing to see his sister and aunt and himself evicted rather than have you lose title to a strip of disputed land.”

The skin of Moleen’s forehead stretched against the bone. The humor and goodwill had gone out of his wife’s face.

“What’s he talking about, Moleen?” she said.

“I haven’t any idea.”

“What does that black man have to do with this?” she asked.

“Who knows? I believe Dave has a talent for manufacturing his own frame of reference.”

“My, you certainly have managed to leave your mark on our morning,” she said to me.

“A police investigation isn’t preempted by a ‘members only’ sign at a country club,” I said.

“Ah, now we get to it,” Moleen said.

“You know a dude named Emile Pogue?” I said.

He took his cigar out of his mouth and laughed to himself. “No, I don’t,” he said. “Good-bye, Dave. The matinee’s over. Give our best to your wife. Let’s bust some skeet before duck season.” He put his arm around his wife’s waist and walked her toward the club dining room. She waved good-bye over her shoulder with her fingers, smiling like a little girl who did not want to offend.

Later that afternoon I went into Helen Soileau’s office and sat down while she finished typing a page that was in her typewriter. Outside, the sky was blue, the azaleas and myrtle bushes in full bloom.

Finally, she turned and stared at me, waiting for me to speak first. Her pale adversarial eyes, as always, seemed to be weighing the choice between a momentary suspension of her ongoing anger with the world and verbal attack.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday, you’d make a great actress,” I said.

She was silent, her expression flat and in abeyance, as though my meaning had not quite swum into her ken.

“You had me convinced we were married,” I said.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I talked with a couple of guys I know at NOPD. Tommy Carrol isn’t pressing charges. He’s got a beef pending on an automatic weapons violation.”

“That’s the flash?”

“That’s it.”

She began leafing through some pages in a file folder as though I were not there.

“But I’ve got a personal problem about yesterday’s events,” I said.

“What might that be?” she said, not looking up from the folder.

“We need to take it out of overdrive, Helen.”

She swiveled her chair toward me, her eyes as intense and certain as a drill instructor’s.

“I’ve got two rules,” she said. “Shitbags don’t get treated like churchgoers, and somebody tries to take me, a civilian, or another cop down, he gets neutralized on the spot.”

“Sometimes people get caught in their own syllogism.”

“What?”

“Why let your own rules lock you in a corner?”

“You don’t like working with me, Dave, take it to the old man.”

“You’re a good cop. But you’re unrelenting. It’s a mistake.”

“You got anything else on your mind?”

“Nope.”

“I ran this guy Emile Pogue all kinds of ways,” she said, the door already closed on the previous’ subject “There’s no record on him.”

“Hang on a minute.” I went down to my office and came back. “Here’s the diary and notebook Sonny Boy Marsallus gave me. If this is what Delia Landry’s killers were after, its importance is lost on me.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Read it or give it back, Helen, I don’t care.”

She dropped it in her desk drawer.

“You really got your nose out of joint because I took down that gun dealer?” she said.

“I was probably talking about myself.”

“How about getting the corn fritters out of your mouth?”

“I’ve put down five guys in my career. They all dealt the play. But I still see them in my dreams. I wish I didn’t.”

“Try seeing their victims’ faces for a change,” she said, and bent back over the file folder on her desk.

The juke joint run by Luke Fontenot was across the railway tracks and down a dirt road that traversed green fields of sugarcane and eventually ended in a shell cul-de-sac by a coulee and a scattered stand of hackberry and oak trees. The juke joint was a rambling wood shell of a building on top of cinder blocks, the walls layered with a combination of Montgomery Ward brick and clapboard; the cracked and oxidized windows held together with pipe tape, still strung with Christmas lights and red and green crepe paper bells. A rusted JAX sign, with stubs of broken neon tubing on it, hung above the front screen door.

In back were two small dented tin trailers with windows and doors that were both curtained.

Inside, the bar was made of wood planks that had been wrapped and thumbtacked with oilcloth. The air smelled of the cigarette smoke that drifted toward the huge window fan inset in the back wall, spilled beer, okra and shrimp boiling on a butane stove, rum and bourbon, and melted ice and collins mix congealing in the bottom of a drain bin.

All of the women in the bar were black or mulatto, but some of the men were white, unshaved, blue-collar, their expressions between a leer and a smile directed at one another, as though somehow their presence there was part of a collective and private joke, not to be taken seriously or held against them.

Luke Fontenot was loading long-necked bottles of beer in the cooler and didn’t acknowledge me, although I was sure he saw me out of the corner of his eye. Instead, it was his sister, who had the same gold coloring as he, who walked on her cane across the duckboards and asked if she could help me. Her eyes were turquoise, her shiny black hair cut in a pageboy, except it was shaped and curled high up on the cheek, the way a 19205 Hollywood actress might have worn it.

“I think Luke wanted to see me,” I said.

“He’s tied up right now,” she said.

“Tell him to untie himself.”

“Why you want to be bothering him, Mr. Robicheaux? He cain’t do anything about Aim Bertie’s land problems.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Ruthie Jean.”

“Maybe you’ve got things turned around, Ruthie Jean. I think Luke was out at my house at sunrise Saturday morning. Why don’t you ask him?”

She walked with her cane toward the rear of the bar, and spoke to him while he kept lowering the bottles into the cooler, his face turning from side to side in case a hot bottle exploded in his face, her back turned toward me.

He wiped his hands on a towel and picked up an opened soft drink. When he drank from it he kept the left side of his face turned out of the light.

“I’m sorry Batist gave you a bad time out at my dock,” I said.

“Everybody get cranky with age,” he said.

“What’s up, podna?”

“I need me a part-time job. I thought you might could use somebody at your shop.”

“I should have known that. You walked fifteen miles from town, at dawn, to ask me about a job.”

“I got a ride partway.”

A white man in an oil field delivery uniform went out the back screen door with a black woman who wore cutoff Levi’s and a T-shirt without a bra. She took his hand in hers before they went into one of the tin trailers. Luke’s sister glanced at my face, then closed the wood door on the screen and began sweeping behind where the door had been.

“What happened to your face?” I asked Luke.

“It get rough in here sometime. I had to settle a couple of men down.”

“One of them must have had a brick in his hand.”

He leaned on his arms and took a breath through his nostrils. “What you want?” he said.

“Who dozered the cemetery by your house Friday night?”

“I done tole you, I don’t know about no graves on that plantation. I grew up in town.”

“Okay, partner. Here’s my business card. I’ll see you around.”

He slipped it in his shirt pocket and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink.

“I ain’t meant to be unpolite,” he said. “Tell that to that old man work for you, too. I just ain’t no hep in solving nobody’s problems.”

“I pulled your jacket, Luke. You’re a hard man to read.”

He raised his hand, palm outward, toward me.

“No more, suh,” he said. “You want to ax me questions, come back with a warrant and carry me down to the jail.”

When I got into my pickup the sky was steel gray, the air humid and close as a cotton glove. Raindrops were hitting in flat drops on the cane in the fields.

Ruthie Jean came through the side door and limped toward me. She rested one hand on my window jamb. She had full cheeks and a mole by her mouth; her teeth were white against her bright lipstick.

“You saw something out here you gonna use against him?” she said. The curtains were blowing in the windows and doors of the tin trailers in back.

“I was never a vice cop,” I said.

“Then why you out here giving him a bunch of truck?”

“Your brother’s got a ten-year sheet for everything from concealed weapons to first-degree murder.”

“You saw on there he stole something?”

“No.”

“He hurt somebody didn’t bother him first, didn’t try cheat him out of his pay, didn’t take out a gun on him at a bouree table?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“But y’all make it come out like you want.”

“I’d say your brother’s ahead of the game. If Moleen Bertrand hadn’t pulled him out of the death house, with about three hours to spare, Luke would have been yesterday’s toast.”

I felt myself blink inside with the severity of my own words.

“Y’all always know, always got the smart word,” she said.

“You’re angry at the wrong person.”

“When y’all cain’t get at the people who really did something, y’all go down into the quarters, find the little people to get your hands on, put inside your reports and send up to Angola.”

I started my truck engine. Her hand didn’t move from the window jamb.

“I’m not telling the troot, no?” she said.

Her gold skin was smooth and damp in the blowing mist, her hair thick and jet black and full of little lights.

“Who supplies your girls?” I said.

Her eyes roved over my face. “You’re not very good at this, if you ax me,” she said, and limped back toward the front door of the juke.

That afternoon, just before five, I received a call from Clete Purcel. I could hear seagulls squeaking in the background.

“Where are you?” I said.

“By the shrimp docks in Morgan City. You know where a cop’s best information is, Streak? The lowly bail bondsman. In this case, with a fat little guy named Butterbean Reaux.”

“Yeah, I know him.”

“Good. Drive on down, noble mon. We’ll drink some mash and talk some trash. Or I’ll drink the mash while you talk to your buddy Sonny Boy Marsallus.”

“You know where he is?”

“Right now, handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat of my automobile. So much for all that brother-in-arms bullshit.”