The Tin Roof Blowdown

Chapter 12

BUT I DISCOVERED that Eddy Melancon had been moved to a hospital in Baton Rouge. I headed up I-10 into heavy traffic, the cruiser’s emergency bar flashing. By the time I reached the Baton Rouge city limits, the streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, buses, and utility repair vehicles. Even with the priority status my cruiser allowed me, I didn’t arrive at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital until midafternoon.

I almost wished I hadn’t. I suspected that Eddy Melancon had probably caused irreparable injury to many people in his brief lifespan, but if such a thing as karma exists, it had landed on him with the impact of a spiked wrecking ball.

He looked weightless in the bed, raccoon-eyed, as though the skin around the sockets had been rubbed with coal dust. His body was strung with wires and tubes, his arms dead at his sides. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was. “Do you know who popped you?” I asked.

He focused his gaze on my face but didn’t respond.

“Can you talk, Eddy?”

He pursed his lips but didn’t speak.

“Did the shot come from in front of you?” I said.

His voice made a wet click and a sound that was like air leaking from the ruptured bladder inside a football. “Yeah,” he whispered.

“You saw the muzzle flash?”

“No.”

“You heard the shot but you saw no flash?”

“Yeah. Ain’t seen it.”

“Are you aware you guys ripped off Sidney Kovick’s house?”

“Ain’t been in no house.”

“Right,” I said. I pulled my chair closer to his bed. “Listen to me, Eddy. If people you don’t know come to see you, make sure they’re cops. Don’t let anybody you don’t recognize check you out of this hospital.”

His eyes looked at me quizzically.

“If you made a big score at Sidney ’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”

Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.

“Say that again.”

“We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.

“From Sidney Kovick?”

“In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”

I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.

When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.

AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.

AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.

“I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”

“You don’t think Otis Baylor shot these guys?”

“His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who’s going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people’s homes?”

“All right, let’s move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It’s worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this.”

I couldn’t argue with her. In fact, I didn’t even want to comment.

“What did you think of Lyndon Johnson?” she asked.

“Before or after I got to Vietnam?”

“When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in ’65, Johnson flew into town and went to a shelter full of people who had been evacuated from Algiers. It was dark inside and people were scared and didn’t know what was going to happen to them. He shined a flashlight in his face and said, ‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m your goddamn president and I’m here to tell you my office and the people of the United States are behind you.’ Not bad, huh?”

But I wasn’t listening. There was a detail about the Otis Baylor investigation I hadn’t mentioned to Helen, because she didn’t like complexities and in particular she didn’t like them when they fell outside our jurisdiction.

“I stopped by Sidney Kovick’s house yesterday and had an informal chat with him. The looters ripped the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster from most of his walls and ceilings.”

“Score one for the pukes.”

“I think they took Sidney down in a major way. Sidney has never had an IRS beef. It wouldn’t surprise me if his walls had been loaded with cash.”

“So what?”

“He was trying to find out which hospital the quadriplegic looter is in.”

“And?”

“The quadriplegic is at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. I tried to warn him, but he’s not a listener.”

Helen pulled at an earlobe. “Bwana?”

“What is it?”

“Whatever happens to that bunch is on them. Got it?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

CLETE PURCEL did not lose custody of Bertrand Melancon during the handover at the chain-link jail at the airport. Bertrand got loose farther up the road, by Gonzales, when the prison bus he was riding in pulled into a soaked field that had been created as a holding area during the height of the storm. Hundreds of inmates from jails in two parishes had huddled in the field, along with their guards, while lightning exploded over their heads and the rain almost tore the clothes from their bodies. Many of them, I suspect, went through the most religious moments of their lives. But when Bertrand Melancon arrived and was told to line up at a Porta Potti, the drama that his peers had experienced had already slipped into history and the field was simply a churned and trash-strewn piece of farm acreage where egrets and displaced seagulls competed for litter.

“How long we got to be here, man?” Bertrand asked a guard.

“The Four Seasons is kind of backed up right now. But we told the maids y’all were coming and to prepare your rooms as quick as possible,” the guard replied.

Most of the inmates on the buses had no desire to run. Most were tired, mosquito-bitten, sunburned, and sick from bad food. Most of them wanted to be watching television in an air-conditioned mainline prison that provided clean beds and served hot meals. If most of them had their choice, they would be housed in a building with six-foot-thick walls and a foundation that Noah’s deluge couldn’t disturb.

Bertrand had other plans. At twilight, when the bus pulled out on the highway, he pried the grillwork off a back window and dropped into a rain ditch. His absence was not noticed until the bus was halfway to Shreveport.

Nig Rosewater personally came to Clete’s upstairs apartment on St. Ann to give him the news. Nig could not be described as having a neck like a fireplug. He had no neck. His jowls and chin seem to grow straight down into his shoulders. His starched shirt and gold collar pin did not help his appearance, either. In fact, with his gold necktie, he looked like a hog eating an upright ear of buttered corn.

“Nig, I deliver the freight. I got a signed receipt for transfer of custody. At that point Bertrand Melancon became the property of Orleans Parish,” Clete said. “The other half of your thirty-grand skip is in Our Lady of the Lake. You owe me three grand.”

“You didn’t have nothing to do with catching the vegetable in the hospital. So that makes your fee fifteen hundred at best,” Nig replied. “And that’s not why I’m here, either. I had two of Sidney Kovick’s people banging on my door at seven this morning. I told them I don’t know where Bertrand Melancon and Andre Rochon are, because if I knew that kind of information, I wouldn’t be out over fifteen large right now. So they want to know which hospital the vegetable is in. I tell them I don’t know that, either, since the government don’t consult with me when it’s shipping people all over the country.

“One of these guys says, ‘Your fifteen large is toilet paper. You deliver up the boons who broke into Mr. Kovick’s house or Mr. Kovick is gonna figure whatever they done or they took is on you.’”

Clete’s apartment was located above his office. The day was bright and sunny outside, and the bodies of birds that had been driven by storm wind against the side of his building were piled on his balcony, their feathers fluttering in the wind.

“I don’t see how any of this falls on me, particularly when you’re already trying to stiff me on my recovery fee,” Clete said.

“Buy yourself a better brand of wax removal, Purcel. These guys took Sidney down for something he can’t claim as an insurance or business loss. His guys said my fifteen large is toilet paper. What’s that tell you? These morons blundered into a big score, maybe something they can’t unload. What if it’s bearer bonds or high-tech military stuff? Whose interest would it be in to let a couple of street pukes skate on the bail? Who would have the connections to fence or launder whatever the pukes took from Sidney?”

Clete honked his nose into a handkerchief, concealing his expression. “I say brass it out and tell them to screw themselves. Don’t let Sidney push you around.”

“You’re pissing me off.”

“Gee, I’m sorry about that.”

The power was off in the apartment and Nig was sweating inside his sports coat. “Why don’t you clean the dead birds off your balcony? It stinks in here,” Nig said, the sheen of fear in his eyes unmistakable.

BEFORE THE HURRICANE, Clete had filled his bathtub, lavatory, and sink with tap water. Now he was using it on a daily basis to sponge-bathe, shave, brush his teeth, and to refill his toilet tank. After Nig was gone, Clete put on fresh clothes, combed his hair, and slipped on his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black Smith amp; Wesson revolver. He went downstairs to the courtyard and fired up his latest Cadillac acquisition, a powder-blue vintage convertible that was pocked with paint blisters, the top spotted with mold. As soon as the engine caught, a huge cloud of oil smoke exploded from the tailpipe. His porkpie hat canted on his head, Clete swung out onto the street, chewing on the corner of his lip, wondering how far to push a man whose potential no one in either the New Orleans underworld or New Orleans law enforcement ever accurately assessed.

Across the river in Algiers, whole neighborhoods had survived the storm with no flooding and only a temporary loss of power. From the bridge, with his convertible top down, Clete could look back and see the glassy shine of brown water that still covered most of New Orleans and the miles of roofless houses and the rivers of mud that had filled automobiles like concrete. The image was so stark and irrevocably sad he involuntarily mashed on the accelerator and almost rear-ended a gasoline truck.

In Algiers, he parked in front of a flower shop that was tucked neatly inside a purple-brick building on a residential street. Two of Sidney Kovick’s employees were playing gin rummy at a table in the shade of a green-and-white-striped canopy that extended from the top of the display window. The two men were leftovers from the old Giacano crime family and for a brief time had thought their day in the sun had come and gone, until 9/11 landed on them like a gift from heaven and the governmental bête noire shifted from pukes dealing crack in the projects to Mideastern young males loading up with cell phones at the local Wal-Mart.

Clete got out on the sidewalk, opened his coat, and lifted his.38 from his shoulder holster with the ends of his fingers. He held it up in the air so the two men could see it, then dropped it on the passenger seat of the Caddy. “Keep an eye on that for me, will you, Marco?” he said.

“No problem,” Marco said.

“Hey, Purcel, your convertible looks like it’s got herpes,” the other man said.

“Yeah, I know. I told your sister not to sit on it. But what are you gonna do?” Clete replied as he entered the shop, a bell ringing over his head.

The temperature inside was frigid, the glass lockers smoky with cold. The tall man behind the counter was dressed in seersucker slacks and a long-sleeved blue shirt open at the collar, exposing the thick curls of black hair on his chest.

“What’s the haps, Sidney?” Clete said.

Sidney began placing roses a stem at a time into a green vase. “Nig Rosewater sent you here?”

“Nig says you want the pukes who took you down. That’s understandable. But that makes four of us-you, me, Nig, and Wee Willie Bimstine. What I need to explain to you is we got no idea where these guys are.”

“Don’t lie to me. You already found one guy at the hospital. But he’s not there anymore.”

“That’s right, I did find him and he got moved to ‘whereabouts unknown.’ So don’t be telling me I’m lying.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because your messengers evidently made an implied threat when they visited Nig this morning. I thought that showed a lack of class.”

“Lack of class?”

“Is there an echo in your store?”

Sidney nodded toward a table that was set against a side wall. “Sit down. I’m about to eat. You want a coffee?”

“I wouldn’t touch a chair that Charlie Weiss or Marco Scarlotti sat in unless it was sprayed for crab lice.”

Sidney put his hand inside his shirt and scratched an insect bite on his shoulder and looked at the tips of his fingers. “It’s true you smoked a federal informant when you were with NOPD? A guy who never saw it coming?” he said.

“What about it?” Clete said, his eyes slipping off Sidney ’s face.

“Nothing. You’re just an unusual guy, Purcel.”

Clete cleared an obstruction in his throat and let the moment pass. “Here’s what it is. One way or another, I’m going to put Andre Rochon and Bertrand Melancon back in the system. That’s because I have a personal beef with these guys and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do business. If I recover cash or goods from your house, you pay me a twenty percent finder’s fee. If that’s not cool, see what you can get from your insurance carrier.

“In the meantime, you leave Nig and Willie and me alone. I know all about that chain-saw story and the guy in Metairie. Personally I think it’s Mafia bullshit. Regardless, I take care of the pukes, and Heckle and Jeckle out there stay out of it. Sound reasonable, Sidney?”

“Ten percent on the recovery.”

“Fifteen.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“Screw you,” Clete said.

Sidney ’s gaze drifted out the front window, where his two men were playing cards in the shade. “What makes you think you can deliver?”

“It’s like prayer, what do you got to lose?”

One at a time, Sidney placed three more rose stems in the vase. “Don’t mess it up,” he said. He fixed his eyes on Clete’s, a blade of sunlight slicing like a knife across his face.

“ARE YOU CRAZY?” I said to Clete after he telephoned and told me what he had done.

“What was I supposed to do? Let an animal like Kovick threaten me and my employer?” he said.

In the background I could hear a sound like a rack of bowling pins exploding. “Why don’t you just sprinkle broken glass in your breakfast food? Save yourself the time and effort of fooling with Kovick?” I said.

“What’s that line in Machiavelli about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer?”

“Yeah, it’s Machiavelli and it’s crap,” I replied.

“Look, I need a place to stay. My power is still off and something with black tendrils on it is growing out my drains.”

“What about your room at the motor court?”

“It got rented to some evacuees.”

“Stay with us,” I said, trying to keep my voice flat, imagining any number of nightmarish events associated with Clete as houseguest.

“Molly won’t mind?”

“No, she’ll be happy.”

“I’m at the bowling alley on East Main. I’ll motor on over. Tell Molly not to fix anything. I’ve got it covered. Everything is copacetic, big mon.”

And motor over he did, at 6:00 p.m. Sharp, with a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits and a big carton of fried oysters and dirty rice. He also brought a separate bag of paper plates, plastic forks and knives, paper napkins, and a six-pack of Dr Pepper. He went about setting the table while Molly and Alafair tried to hide their smiles.

“Clete, we have plates and silverware,” I said.

“No need to dirty things up,” he said.

Molly shook her head behind his back to stop me from admonishing him. Alafair wasn’t as diplomatic. “You have any salad in there, Clete?” she said.

“You bet,” he replied, and proudly lifted a quart of potato salad from the sack.

But Clete’s gay mood was often an indicator of worries and memories that he shared with few people. To the world he was the trickster and irresponsible hedonist, sowing mayhem and destruction wherever he went. But in his sleep he still dreamed of two adults fighting in their bedroom late at night and of kneeling in short pants on grains of rice his father sprinkled on the floor, and of liquid flame arching into a village of straw hooches. If sometimes he looked disconcerted, he would never admit he had just glanced out a window into the darkness and had seen a dead mamasan staring back at him.

After we ate, he took a long walk into City Park by himself, then returned to the house and went to bed early in our guest bedroom. Shortly after 4:00 a.m., I heard Tripod running up and down on the clothesline where we hooked his chain. I put on my khakis without waking Molly and opened the back door. Clete was sitting at our redwood table in his skivvies, his skin netted with moonlight. When he heard the screen open, he removed a pint bottle of bourbon from the tabletop and set it by his thigh.

“You don’t have to hide that,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I heard thunder. But the sky is clear.”

I sat down next to him. “What’s eating you, podna?”

“I went back to my old neighborhood in the Irish Channel. I always hated the house where I grew up. I hated my old man. But I went back there and saw what the storm had done, and I had feelings I’ve never had before. I missed my old man and the rattling sounds his milk truck made when he drove off at four in the morning. I missed my mom cooking pancakes in the kitchen. It was like everything in my childhood was finally over, but I didn’t want it to be over. It was like I had died and nobody had told me about it.”

He picked up the pint bottle from the bench and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was wrapped in a brown paper bag and the moonlight glinted on the neck. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and tilted it up to drink. I could smell the bourbon as it rolled back over his tongue. I envisioned its amber color inside the yellow staves of the curing barrel, the bead it made inside the bottle’s neck when it was air-locked under the cork, the splash it made when it was released again and poured over ice and mint leaves inside a glass. Unconsciously I swallowed and touched at my brow as though a vein were tightening in my head.

“It’s called a vision of mortality,” I said.

“What is?”

“The feelings you experienced when you went back to your old house.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to die?”

“You saw the Big Sleazy die, Clete. It’s like having an affair with the Great Whore of Babylon. When you finally come to your senses and get her out of your life, you find out she was the only woman you ever loved.”

Clete upended the bottle again, his throat working rhythmically, watching me with one eye, as though someone had spoken to him from one of his dreams.

BUT CLETE WAS not the only friend or acquaintance from New Orleans seeking refuge in Iberia Parish. Two weeks after I had been sent to help investigate the shooting death of Kevin Rochon and the crippling of Eddy Melancon, Helen Soileau called me into her office. She spit a piece of her thumbnail off her tongue. “Otis Baylor just moved back to town with his family. Evidently they still own a home on Old Jeanerette Road,” she said.

I waited for her to go on.

“You think he dropped those two looters or not?” she said.

“You mean is he that kind of guy? No, I don’t think he is. But-”

“What?”

“His daughter had a terrible experience at the hands of three street pukes. I don’t know what I would do if I were in his shoes.”

“I didn’t hear that last sentence.”

“Maybe Baylor thought they were going to break into his house. Maybe his nerves were fried.”

“If this guy is dirty on a homicide, he’s not going to use our parish as a sanctuary. Talk to his wife and daughter.”

“I’d rather drop this one.”

“I’d rather not be present at my own death. Get out of here.”

Baylor’s home was a dark green nineteenth-century one-story house with tall windows and high ceilings and a peaked tin roof streaked with rust that had a purple cast in the shadows, not unlike my own. It had a wide screened-in gallery and was set back from Bayou Teche under pecan and palm trees and a solitary live oak dripping with Spanish moss. A glider hung on chains from one of the oak limbs, and a tan Honda was parked in the shale driveway, its paint spotted with bird droppings. A girl of about nineteen answered the door.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the sheriff’s department,” I said, opening my badge. “Is Mr. Baylor here?”

“He’s at work,” she said.

She wore black sweatpants and a white T-shirt that was flecked with tiny pieces of leaves. “I was cleaning up the backyard when you rang the bell.”

“Are you Otis Baylor’s daughter?”

“I’m Thelma Baylor.”

“Is your mother here?”

“My stepmother is at the grocery store.”

“Could I talk with you? I’m investigating the shooting of the looters in front of your home in New Orleans. We have a lead or two, but I still can’t quite picture where these guys were when they were shot.”

“What does it matter? They were shot.”

“That’s true, isn’t it? Could I come in?”

“You can watch me rake leaves if you want.”

I followed her through the kitchen into the backyard. On both sides of her simple house were antebellum plantation homes of the kind one normally sees only on postcards. One hundred yards farther down the bayou, across the drawbridge, was a trailer slum where every form of social decay imaginable was a way of life. “You like New Iberia?” I asked.

“Are there always traffic jams at the Wal-Mart, or is that just because of the storm?” she said, drawing a bamboo rake through leaves that were black with mold.

I figured this one was going to be a long haul. I sat down on the back steps. “Did you hear the shots?”

Her eyes looked into neutral space, her rake missing a beat. “I heard a shot. It woke me up.”

“Just one shot?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you sleeping?”

Her face looked pale and round in the shade, devoid of expression, her lipstick glossy and unnatural, her bangs as precise as a nun’s wimple. “In my room.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yes, my room is upstairs. Do you want to talk to my father? I don’t see how any of this is helpful.”

“Do you think your next-door neighbor, Tom Claggart, is capable of popping a couple of looters?”

“Mr. Claggart is an upended penis with arms and legs and a face drawn on it. I don’t know what he’s capable of.”

Time to take a chance, I told myself. “I know about the attack on your person two years ago, Miss Thelma. I have a daughter a little older than you. If I thought she was in danger, particularly from the kind of men who hurt you, I’d take them off at the neck.”

Her rake slowed in the leaves, her chest rising and falling.

“I lost my mother and a wife to violent men,” I continued. “I think men who abuse women are invariably physical and moral cowards. I think a man who rapes a woman should be first in line at the injection table.”

She became motionless. Grains of dirt were stuck to the side of her mouth.

“I think you saw and know more than you’re telling me,” I said.

“I saw a guy floating facedown in the water. Another guy was wounded. A third guy started running through the water. A fourth guy was trying to hold the wounded guy in the boat.”

“That’s very detailed. I appreciate it.” I made a note on a pad and put away my pen, as though we were finished. “Where was your father?”

“In his bedroom.”

“Where was your mother?”

“She’s my stepmother. My real mother is dead.”

“Where was your stepmother?”

“In the bedroom with my father.”

“Did your old man shoot those guys?”

“If you won’t believe him, you won’t believe me. Why bother asking?”

“I think you carry a big burden, Miss Thelma. I’m not here to add to it.”

“You need to shut up, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Pardon me?”

“Why do you assume you know what happened to me? Why do you assume my family wants revenge on people we have nothing against? I can’t stand people like you. You don’t have any idea of what it’s like to be a rape victim. If you did, you wouldn’t be patronizing and trying to manipulate me.”

“I apologize if I gave that impression.”

“It’s not an impression.”

I stood up from the steps and brushed off the seat of my trousers. “I’m sorry just the same.”

“Fuck you.”

As I left the yard, I glanced back over my shoulder. Her body seemed to float inside a nimbus of light particles and dust and smoke and bits of desiccated leaves. For just a moment, as she resumed her work, stroking the rake hard across the ground, the bamboo tines splintering on the root system of a cypress tree, the intensity of her concentration and anger gave her a kind of integrity that I always associated with Alafair.

THE FOLLOWING DAY I called the Baylor house and asked Mrs. Baylor to come into the department for an interview.

“More about the looters who were shot?” she said.

“That’s correct.”

“Is this absolutely necessary?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” I said.

“We’re out on Old Jeanerette Road, just past Alice Plantation. Why don’t you come here if you want to talk?”

I realized Thelma had not told her stepmother of my visit. “I’d be happy to.”

“Mr. Robicheaux, let’s do this on another basis. I seriously believe you’re wasting your time with us, but nonetheless we’d like to be your friend. Can we take you and your family to dinner? I think you’ll see we’re truthful people and want to assist you in any way we can. But the reality is we’re bystanders who have no idea who shot those men.”

“That’s kind of you. But there’s a protocol I have to pursue. Will you be home in the next half hour?”

“No, I have a doctor’s appointment.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure. May I call you?”

“I need to make an appointment with you right now, Mrs. Baylor.”

“Unfortunately that’s not possible. I’ve tried to be cooperative, Mr. Robicheaux. But this is starting to get a little tiresome. I’d better say good-bye now. I wish you success in your investigation.”

The line went dead.

Wrong move, Mrs. Baylor.

I WENT INTO Helen’s office. “I interviewed Otis Baylor’s daughter yesterday and just got an Academy Award nose-in-the-air performance from his wife,” I said.

“Slow it down, Pops,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair.

“They’re lying,” I said, spreading my notes on Helen’s desk. “Look, both Otis and his daughter say they heard a single shot. Both use the same language. They say ‘It woke me up.’ When I mentioned multiple shots to the daughter, she even corrected me. I was bothered from the get-go by Baylor’s statement that he heard a single shot. That’s not what people say when they’re awakened by gunfire. All they know is that a frightening sound shook them out of their sleep. They don’t count shots.”

I saw Helen’s attention sharpen.

“Both Otis and Thelma described what they saw in the same sequence. Each of them began by mentioning a man floating in the water. There were four guys in or around the boat. But Otis and Thelma mention the kid who was floating in the water first. Why not the guy hemorrhaging blood out of his mouth? I think they had their story prepackaged.”

Helen rubbed at the back of her neck. Whenever she was pensive, her face always went through an androgynous transformation that was both lovely and mysterious to watch. I believed that several different people lived inside her, but I never told her that. Her lovers had included many men and women over the years, including Clete Purcel. Sometimes she looked at me in a way that made me feel sexually uncomfortable, as though one of the women who lived inside her had decided to stray.

“Have you heard any more from the Feds or NOPD?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Write up what you just told me and fax it to Baton Rouge. Tell them to clean up their own shit while you’re at it. I want this stuff out of our hair.”

“Why the change in attitude?”

“Have you looked at The Weather Channel?”

“No,” I said.

“That new hurricane, what’s-its-name, the one that was supposed to smack Texas?”

“Rita?”

“It’s not.”

IS THERE A DESIGN in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junkyard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?

If you have ever invested with regularity in the pari-mutuel arts, or shot craps in a game that made your hand sweat on the dice, or allowed yourself to believe you had the psychic power to intuit the next card out of the shoe at a blackjack table, you have probably crossed the wrong Rubicon on many occasions and are familiar with the following experience:

There is magic in your hands and your walk. The magenta sky above the track and the flamingos lifting out of a grassy pond in the center ground are indicators that your perfecta wheel cannot lose. Inside the casino, the dice are as hard-edged and solid as rubies in your palm, and you double your bets on the pass line each time you bounce the dice down the felt into the backboard. The plunging neckline of the young woman dealing out of the shoe at the blackjack table cannot compare in its allure to the thrill of receiving a low number on the fifth card of a five-card Johnny.

You know that you cannot lose, that it is God’s will that you not lose. Others draw close to you in the same way that candle moths surround an incandescent light burning inside a crystal container. They gasp in awe at both your recklessness and the vindication of your faith in yourself. They want to brush against you and absorb your power into their bodies.

Then things start to go south. Your horse is disqualified because the jockey has bumped another rider’s horse on the far turn. The dice turn to lumps of lead in your hand and come up treys, boxcars, and snake eyes. The young female dealer blackjacks on you and deals you every high card in the deck, busting you again and again, stifling a yawn, her cleavage hovering like a withdrawn invitation only inches from your face.

Welcome to “the dead zone.” It’s a special place that, unbeknown to himself, every degenerate gambler seeks. Check out the bar at the track after the seventh race. The people there are as happy as satiated hogs. They have lost the grocery money, the rent, the mortgage and car payment, even the vig they owe a Shylock. But they’re safe now because they have nothing else to lose. They also have the empirical evidence to prove once and for all time that the universe has conspired to cheat and injure them. Their personal failure is God’s, not theirs. The soul is packed in dry ice now, the battle over.

When I went into the coffee room at the department, several uniformed deputies were watching CNN. Their collective expression and posture reminded me of helicopter pilots I had seen many years ago in a predawn briefing room backdropped by the China Sea. Most of these pilots were warrant officers not over twenty years in age. But I could never forget the suppressed tension in their faces, the deliberate restraint in their voices, the self-imposed solipsism in their eyes that told you the dawn was indeed about to come up like thunder from China across the bay.

Hurricane Rita contained winds of 185 miles an hour and originally had been projected to make landfall somewhere around Matagorda Bay, northeast of Corpus Christi. Then its direction shifted farther to the east. Officials in Houston, fearing a repeat of Katrina in their own city, effected a massive evacuation, choking highways all the way to San Antonio and Dallas. Then the hurricane shifted direction again, this time almost certainly zeroing in on Beaumont and Port Arthur.

Texas was going to take the hit. Our exposure would be marginal, nothing more than minor wind damage, trees knocked down, a temporary power outage. We breathed a sigh of relief. Providence had given us a free pass.

Then the National Hurricane Center in Miami disabused us of our hubris. In fact, the forecast was unbelievable. Louisiana was about to get pounded full-force, with twenty-foot tidal surges and wind that would rip off roofs from Sabine Pass to the other side of the Atchafalaya River. More unbelievably, we were being told the storm would probably make landfall in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, the same place the eye of Audrey swept through in 1957. The tidal wave that preceded the ’57 storm curled over the courthouse and downtown area like a giant hammer and crushed it into rubble, killing close to five hundred people.

“Weren’t you around when Audrey hit?” a deputy asked as I stared up at the television screen.

“Yeah, I was,” I replied.

“On an oil rig?”

“On a seismograph barge,” I said.

“It was pretty bad, huh?”

“We got through it okay,” I said.

He was a crew-cut, martial-looking man, with too much starch in his uniform and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He removed the toothpick and dropped it in a waste can and focused his attention on the television screen. I could hear a wet sound in his throat when he swallowed.

No one wants to go to the same war twice. You pay your dues in order to enter the dead zone and you’re supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.