The Tin Roof Blowdown

Chapter 19

EARLY TUESDAY I collected Clete Purcel at his motor court and headed for New Orleans. When we drove down I-10 into Orleans Parish, the city was little changed, the ecological and structural wreckage so great and pervasive that it was hard to believe all of this destruction could come to pass in a twenty-four-hour period. I had been on the water when Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957 and in the eye of Hilda in 1964 when the water tower in Delcambre toppled onto City Hall and killed all the Civil Defense volunteers inside. But the damage in New Orleans was of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible, or at least it was for me.

Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be. Maybe I should not have returned. Maybe I expected to see the streets clean, the power back on, crews of carpenters repairing ruined homes. But the sense of loss I felt while driving down St. Charles was worse than I had experienced right after the storm. New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn’t belong to a state; it belonged to a people.

When Clete and I walked a beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out “The Tin Roof Blues” in Preservation Hall. Brass-band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose on Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, coffee and freshly baked beignets in the Café du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.

The grandest ride in America was the St. Charles streetcar. You could catch the old green-painted, lumbering iron car under the colonnade in front of the Pearl and for pocket change travel on the neutral ground down arguably the most beautiful street in the Western world. The canopy of live oaks over the neutral ground created a green-gold tunnel as far as the eye could see. On the corners, black men sold ice cream and sno’balls from carts with parasols on them, and in winter the pink and maroon neon on the Katz amp; Besthoff drugstores glowed like electrified smoke inside the fog.

Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace.

What was its future?

I looked through my windshield and saw fallen trees everywhere, power and phone lines hanging from utility poles, dead traffic lights, gutted downtown buildings so badly damaged the owners had not bothered to cover the blown-out windows with plywood. The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World. I wasn’t sure New Orleans had a future.

I turned off St. Charles and drove into Otis’s old neighborhood. The sun was up in the sky now, and the lawns along the street were stacked with debris and hazed with patches of bright green where blades of St. Augustine grass had grown through the netlike film of dead matter left behind by the receding water. Clete wanted to stop by the home of his new girlfriend. I waited while he knocked on the door. When no one answered, he wrote a note and stuck it in the jamb.

“You told her to meet us?” I said.

“No, I told her I’d call her later. I want to keep her separate from this stuff.”

I pulled away from the curb and continued toward Otis’s house.

“I’ve been giving this guy Bledsoe some thought,” Clete said. “I think he needs a Bobbsey twins invitation to leave the area.”

“I think that’s a bad idea.”

“The guy doesn’t sleep. His lights are on all night. He had a hooker in Saturday night. She left ten minutes later, looking like somebody had scared the shit out of her.”

“Leave him alone, Clete. Helen and I will handle it.”

“The guy’s got ice water in his veins. He’s a psychopath and he’s got a grudge against Alafair. I say we break his wheels before he gets into gear.”

“Why tell me this now?”

“Because this guy bothers me. Because I don’t want Alafair hurt. Because you didn’t see that hooker hauling ass.”

“Were you drinking last night?”

He paused before he spoke again, this time without heat. “I came back to the Big Sleazy to help you look for the stones. But I think this is a mistake. Those are Sidney ’s goods. If he thinks you know where they are…Christ, Dave, use your imagination. Even the greaseballs kiss his ring.”

I had told Otis Baylor almost the same thing but had not followed my own advice. I hoped Clete did not read my face. “I finally hit home with something?” he said.

We probed Otis’s flower beds with sticks and pried up the flagstones in the backyard. We searched the garage rafters and under his back porch and used a ladder to climb on top of the porte cochere in case Bertrand had thrown the stones up there. We shoveled up the bricking in the patio and dismantled the chimney on the stone barbecue pit, broke apart birdhouses, raked out an ancient compost dump thatched with morning glory vine, crunched through the remnants of a greenhouse that had been flattened by a pecan tree, and dumped the impacted dirt in three huge iron sugar kettles that had been used as flower planters.

Nothing.

“What are you all doing over there?” a voice called from next door.

Tom Claggart stood on his back porch, straining to get a clear look through the border of broken bamboo that separated his property from Otis Baylor’s.

“It’s Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Claggart,” I said.

“Where’s Otis?”

“If you need to contact him, you can call his home in New Iberia,” I replied.

“I was just wondering if you had permission to be here,” Claggart said.

“This is police business. Go back inside your house,” Clete said.

“You don’t have to take that attitude,” Claggart said.

“Ease up,” I whispered to Clete.

“Did you catch those guys?” Claggart asked.

“Which guys?” I asked.

“The ones who got away. The ones who should be in a cage. You should be here at night. They’re like rats crawling out of a trash dump.”

“Who is?” I said.

“Who do you think? What’s wrong with you people? This is a tragedy. No one is safe,” he said. “All I did was ask a question and that man with you ordered me back in my house. This isn’t the United States anymore.” he went inside and slammed the door behind him.

“I think I’ve seen that guy before,” Clete said.

“Where?”

“I don’t remember.”

A few minutes later, when we were getting back in my truck, I saw Claggart watching us from the upstairs window. When he saw me look back at him, he pulled the shade.

“What’s with that dude?” Clete said.

“He’s a gun nut with loose wiring.”

“This was a mistake coming here, Streak. But you won’t listen to your old podjo, will you? No sirree, that’s not going to happen.”

“I want to go down to the Lower Nine.”

“Never think of me as the voice of reason. I couldn’t stand it,” he said.

He pulled a silver flask from the pocket of his slacks and unscrewed the cap and let it swing from its tiny chain. He took a sip, then another. I could see the warmth of the brandy spreading through his system, the tension going out of his face. He screwed the cap back on the flask and slipped the flask back into his pocket. He brushed at his nose and grinned.

“You’re not mad at me?” I said.

“Wouldn’t do any good. One day our luck is going to run out. I think you’re pushing that day closer to us than it should be, Dave. But that’s the way it is. You won’t ever change.”

IT WASN’T THE individual destruction of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward that seemed unreal. It was the disconnection of them from their environment that was hard for the eye to accept. They had been lifted from their foundations, twisted from the plumbing that held them to the ground, and redeposited upside down or piled against one another as though they had been dropped from the sky. Some were half buried in hardened rivers of mud that flowed out the windows and the doors. The insides of all of them were black-green with sludge and mold, their exteriors spray-painted with code numbers to indicate they had already been searched for bodies.

But every day more dead were discovered, either by search dogs or returning family members. The bodies were sheathed like mummies in dried nets of organic matter, compacted inside air ducts, and wedged between the rafters of roofs that had filled to the apexes. Sometimes when the wind shifted, an odor would strike the nostrils and cause a person to clear his throat and spit.

Feral dogs prowled the wreckage and so did the few people who were being allowed back into their neighborhoods. Clete and I found the church where Father Jude LeBlanc had probably died. It was made of tan stucco and had a small bell tower and an apse on it and looked like a Spanish mission in the Southwest. Before the storm, bougainvillea had bloomed like drops of blood on the south wall and a life-size replica of Jesus on the Cross had hung in a breezeway that joined the church to an elementary school. But the bougainvillea was gone and the replica of Jesus had floated out to sea.

I could find no one who had any knowledge of Jude LeBlanc’s fate. It was almost evening now, and the sky was purple and threaded with smoke that smelled like burning garbage. On a house lot behind the church I saw an elderly black man pulling boards from what used to be his house. I made my way across a chain-link fence that had been twisted into a corkscrew, my shoes breaking through an oily green crust that had dried on top of mud and untreated sewage.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m a friend of Father Jude LeBlanc,” I said. “He was at this church when the storm hit.”

“I know he was. I was on the roof yonder. I seen a woman dropping children out the attic window into the water,” he said. He had stopped his work to talk with me, one hand grasped on a weathered plank flanged with nails. His face was work-seamed, his eyes an indistinct blue, as though the sun had leached most of the color from them.

“You saw Father LeBlanc? You know what happened to him?”

“Mister, I ain’t had time to do nothing except get my wife out of my house. I ain’t pulled it off, either.”

“Sir?”

“I ain’t never found her. Whole house caved in under us. Water come squirting right out of the chimney, boiling up around us just like we was on a ship going down.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I come back looking for our t’ings. Po-lice said I ain’t s’ppose to be back here. If I ain’t s’ppose to be back here, who is? Two t’ings I don’t understand. How come nobody come for us and what was them lights in the water?”

“Pardon?”

“It was dark and a helicopter went by, high up. I seen the lights in the water and at first I t’ought it was a searchlight from the helicopter and the blades of the helicopters was blowing the water. But that wasn’t it. The lights was swimming around, like fish that could glow in the dark, except it was much brighter and these wasn’t no fish. I t’ink maybe my wife was down there.”

He stared into my face, waiting, as though somehow I possessed knowledge that he did not.

AT NOON WEDNESDAY Clete came by the office and asked me to have lunch with him. But something besides lunch was obviously on his mind. I asked him what it was.

“It’s Courtney,” he said.

“Who?”

“Come in, Earth. Courtney Degravelle, the lady who lives down the street from Otis Baylor. The lady whose house I left a note at yesterday.”

“Maybe she didn’t see it.”

“I left her three voice mails.”

“I’ll ask NOPD to send somebody by her place.”

“I already did that. They don’t even know where a third of their department is. Come on, let’s go to Victor’s.”

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. My intuitions proved correct. At the cafeteria, Clete remained agitated and distracted and hardly touched his food.

“Better eat up,” I said.

“Last night Ronald Bledsoe came to my cottage and asked me to split a six-pack with him. This morning he invited me to breakfast. He said PIs need to network because Google is driving us out of business. I told him I didn’t have that problem, also that I lived in the motor court because of the privacy it gave me.”

“What do you think he’s up to?”

“He wanted me to know he was at the motor court late last night and early this morning. I tell you, Dave, we need to take this cocksucker out in a swamp and smoke him. That’s not a metaphor, either.”

The people at the next table stopped eating and looked at one another.

“I’ll get a box to go,” I said.

BUT MY CONCERNS with Clete’s use of profanity in a hometown restaurant should have been the least of my worries. The next morning, at sunrise, a game warden trying to save a stranded cow in a marshy area not far from the Gulf saw the bodies of two people lying on the edge of a sandbar in the middle of a deepwater lake. Cinder blocks were roped around their waists, and waves rippled across their legs and backs. Both bodies should have sunk to the bottom of the lake, but whoever threw them into the water probably did so in the dark, assuming his boat was in a deepwater channel. The game warden cut the motor of his outboard and let the keel scrape onto the sand.

He jumped into the shallows and grabbed the rope that held both bodies together and pulled them onto the sand. His hands were shaking when he called 911. “I’ve got two homicide victims here,” he said. “One is gunshot, one looks to have died from suffocation. Wait a minute. Jesus Christ, one of them is alive.”

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER, Andre Rochon had awakened in his latest girlfriend’s FEMA trailer outside Baton Rouge, the free cell phone a man had given him resting on his sternum. All he had to do was punch in the number the man had written on a slip of paper for him. What had the dude said? “Provide a li’l information and make yourself rich, my brother.” What did Andre owe Bertrand, anyway? If Bertrand hadn’t gone into that garage after gas, if they had all just climbed out of the boat and waded back to St. Charles Avenue, Kevin and Eddy never would have been shot.

But Bertrand had to show he was in charge, that the rest of them were punks, while all the time he was ripping off their share of the loot.

Andre got up from the small bed on which he had been sleeping and sat down across the breakfast table from his girlfriend. He wore only a pair of slacks and flip-flops, and he kept fingering his navel, pinching his abs and love handles, staring out the window at the rows of tiny white trailers in the FEMA park.

“You fixing to call somebody about a job?” his girlfriend said.

“There ain’t no jobs, girl,” he replied.

“I thought that’s why the man give you the phone. He was gonna give you a job. That’s what you tole me last night.”

Actually, Andre couldn’t remember what he had said the previous night. He’d drunk some wine and smoked a lot of weed, and at some point in the middle of a conversation a switch had clicked off in his head, then had clicked back on about nine this morning. “You ever dime a sister?” he asked.

“I ain’t never dimed nobody, Andre. I don’t like it when you talk like a criminal, either.”

The diapered infant who slept on his stomach in the bassinet on the far side of the tiny bathroom began to make gurgling sounds. This was bad timing for Andre, who wanted his girlfriend back in the sack, not changing diapers and feeding a baby.

“Give him a bottle. That’ll keep him quiet for a while,” he said. “Here, I’ll do it. Come on, lie down and get a li’l more sleep.”

“Cain’t you never think of anybody but yourself?” she said.

He stared reflectively into space, his fingers glazing the tautness of his stomach muscles. Andre’s new girlfriend was getting to be a drag. “Think I’ll go outside and make a phone call, check out a couple of sit’ations. Get some coffee started, will you, baby? maybe some eggs and li’l toast, too,” he said.

The man who answered Andre’s call told him to walk down to the highway and wait for an automobile to pick him up. One hour later, Andre Rochon was swallowed up by a black SUV with charcoal-tinted windows and deep leather seats and a destination finder that would take him to a place and an experience he never could have imagined.

His newly acquired friends did not waste time. They taped him to a chair that was bolted to the floor, gave him ten seconds to answer their first question, then drove their fists directly into his face. The blows seemed delivered with more force and energy than he thought human beings were capable of and were like red fire inside his head. In minutes, his mouth and eyes were filled with blood, the expanse of sawgrass and lagoons and saltwater channels outside the window part of a dreamscape that had nothing to do with Andre Rochon or the person who had been Andre Rochon only that morning.

Somehow he had thought betrayal of his friend would be all that was required of him. How could he know where the stones were? Bertrand had ripped him off as well as Sidney Kovick. He was a victim, just as these guys were. No, he didn’t know where Bertrand was, but he could find out. They were all working together, right?

When he passed out, they poured a bucket of water over his head. Then they wrapped his face in a towel, stretched his head back, and poured water in his nose and mouth.

After dark, he heard them drive away on the shale road atop the levee. When they returned, they smelled of hamburger and onions and coffee. Then they did things to him they had not done before. When he wept, they went outside and talked among themselves. Their voices were devoid of emotion, like football coaches discussing a game plan. Finally one of them said, “It can’t hurt. We put too much time into this guy just to throw him away.”

What did they mean? He had already told them everything he knew about Bertrand and the shooting and the looting at Kovick’s house. He had even told them he was a rapist and a meth dealer and a strong-arm robber, that he had too much on his own sheet to ever turn his abductors in. Maybe they were going to keep him around, use him in some way, give him a job as an inside man. Yeah, that was it. Just stay cool, he told himself. They’d send him after Bertrand, find the motherfucker who’d started all this, fix his black ass for bringing all this grief down on everybody.

They allowed him to use the privy in back, then taped him to the chair again. One of them tied the wet towel around his eyes. “Take it easy, kid,” he said. “We’ll be done pretty soon.”

Done with what?

Through the screen windows he could hear the wind in the sawgrass and fish flopping in the lagoons and the drone of a workboat out on the bay. Then car doors slammed and he heard the muffled voice of a woman as she was dragged into the room and thrown into a chair.

“Lady, we got no beef with you,” one of the men said. “But you found some money that wasn’t yours and didn’t return it. So we want to know what else you found. Don’t lie. That’s the worst thing you can do, worse than anything you’ve ever done. You hearing me on this, Ms. Degravelle? Just nod your head. Okay, we got that out of the way.

“You see this black kid here? By his own admission, he’s a rapist and a seller of narcotics to his own people. But worse than that, he lied to us after he promised to tell us the truth. So he’s got to pay the price. If he don’t, he’s making liars out of us, too. What’s about to happen isn’t cruel, it’s not undeserved. It’s just part of the deal. Don’t look away, Ms. Degravelle. You keep your eyes on him.”

There was a pause and a silence of no more than three seconds, but those three seconds were the longest in Andre Rochon’s life.

The pistol shots were loud and sharp inside the room, like shots fired from a.22 revolver. Andre took one round in the neck and two in the head, both of them as hot as wasp strings.

Later that night, his body roped to another person’s and a chain of cinder blocks, he awoke to starlight just as someone rolled him over a gunwale into water that smelled of diesel fuel and fish spawn. When he rose from the darkness of the water and walked up the slope of the sandbar, dragging the cinder blocks and the body of the woman with him, he remembered a priest chopping a hole in a church roof and he wondered why he would recall such a bizarre image at this particular moment in his life.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON betsy Mossbacher finished her account about Andre Rochon in my office. “He lived about six hours,” she said. “The woman was dead when she went into the water. She still had the plastic bag over her head. Our pathologist says she died of a coronary probably brought on by near suffocation.”

“Clete knows all this?”

“Yes. But he dummied up on us. How close were he and the woman?”

“They were seeing each other.”

“Too bad. Ronald Bledsoe is using Purcel as his alibi. That must be hard to take. Can you explain to me how Purcel can insert himself into every problem in this area?”

“Lay off him, Betsy.”

“That woman went through hell before she died. Save your brother-in-arms stuff for somebody else,” she replied.

I could hear the traffic out on the street. Betsy formed a pocket of air in one jaw, then got up from her chair and walked to the window. She was wearing jeans, a cotton shirt, cowboy boots, and a wide belt. One of the qualities I admired most in Betsy was the fact her eyes were always clear and she focused them on yours when she spoke. She turned around and looked at me. “Interpol thinks Sidney Kovick may have taken both the blood stones and the counterfeit currency off some al Qaeda operatives in South America. The fact is we’re not that interested in the blood stones. But we are interested in how Sidney Kovick got inside al Qaeda.”

“What does Sidney say?”

“Nothing. I tried to appeal to his patriotism. You knew he was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade?”

“John Ehrlichman was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying cross. Who cares?”

“You haven’t talked to Purcel?”

“No.”

“He was handling it okay.”

“You don’t know Clete. He doesn’t handle anything okay.”

“Regardless, he needs to stay out of this investigation. Your friend has a serious problem about minding his own business.”

“His neighbor is Ronald Bledsoe. His girlfriend was tortured to death. His City drowned while the most powerful politicians in the country sat on their asses. If these things aren’t his business, what is?”

On her way out of the office, she trailed a finger across the back of my neck. “People use me for a dartboard only once, Dave.”

THAT EVENING I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court, but he was not there and he didn’t return my calls to his cell phone. I stopped in the bar at Clementine’s and at an outdoor place on Bayou Teche where he sometimes drank, but no one had seen him.

Perhaps I had been rude to Betsy Mossbacher. But few people understood the complexity of Clete Purcel. He didn’t show pain or injury; he absorbed it in the way I imagine an elephant absorbs a rock splinter in its foot. While the wound heals and scars over on the surface, the splinter works its way deeper into the tissue, until infection forms and the inflammation swells upward through the joints into the chest and shoulders and spine, until the elephant’s entire connective system throbs with the lightest of burdens placed on its back. Perhaps the latter was not true of an elephant. But it was of Clete.

I stood on the drawbridge overlooking the bayou at Burke Street and thought about the account Betsy had given me of Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle’s ordeal. I suppose a person could say Rochon had invited his fate, but certainly Ms. Degravelle had not. I thought about the kind of men who would bind and torture their fellow human beings for money or for any other reason. Over the years I had known a few. Some hid in a uniform, some did not. But all of them sought causes and all of them needed banners over their heads. None of them, except those who were obviously psychopathic, ever acted alone or without sanction.

In the twilight Bayou Teche was swollen and wide between its tree-shrouded banks, the backs of garfish roiling the surface next to the lily pads. The sun had burned into a tiny red cinder. The air was suddenly cool, the lawns along the bayou lit by gas-fed lanterns and sometimes by chains of white lights in the oak trees. William Blake described evil as an electrified tiger prowling the forests of the night. I wondered if Blake’s tiger was out there now, burning brightly in the trees, the pads of its feet walking softly across a lawn, its slat-tern breath and the quickness of its step only seconds away from the place where children played and our loved ones dwelled.

I walked home and began baking an apple pie in the kitchen oven, insisting that Molly and Alafair sit with me and talk while I did.