Heaven’s Prisoners Read online

  I had coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde, then gave the neighborhood around the cemetery one more try. By now my face had become so familiar up and down Iberville and St. Louis that grocery and drugstore owners and bartenders looked the other way when they saw me coming. The sun was white in the sky; the elephant ears, philodendron, and banana trees that grew along the back alleys were beaded with moisture; the air had the wet, fecund taste of a hothouse. At noon I was ready to give it up.

  Then I saw two police cars, with their bubble-gum lights on, parked in front of a stucco house one block up North Villere from the yellow house where the frightened man lived. An ambulance was backed up the driveway to the stairway of the garage apartment. I parked my truck by the curb and opened my badge in my hand and walked up to two patrolmen in the drive. One was writing on a clipboard and trying to ignore the sweat that leaked out of his hatband.

  "What have you got?" I said.

  "A guy dead in the bathtub," he said.

  "What from?"

  "Hell if I know. He's been in there two or three days. No air-conditioning either."

  "What's his race?"

  "I don't know. I haven't been up there. Check it out if you want to. Take your handkerchief with you."

  Halfway up the stairs the odor hit me. It was rotten and acrid and sweet at the same time, reeking of salt and decay, fetid and gray as a rat's breath, penetrating and enveloping as the stench of excrement. I gagged and had to press my fist against my mouth.

  Two paramedics with rubber gloves on were waiting patiently with a stretcher in the tiny living room while the scene investigator took flash pictures in the bath. Their faces were pinched and they kept clearing their throats. An overweight plainclothes detective with a florid, dilated face stood in the doorway so that I couldn't see the bathtub clearly. His white shirt was so drenched with sweat that you could see his skin through the cloth. He turned and looked at me, puzzled. I thought I might know him from my years in the First District, but I didn't. I turned up my badge in my palm.

  "I'm Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish sheriff's office," I said. "Who is he?"

  "We don't know yet. The landlord's on vacation, there's nothing in the apartment with a name on it," he said. "A meter reader came up the stairs this morning and tossed his cookies over the railing. It's all over the rosebush. It really rounds out the smell. What are you looking for?"

  "We've got a warrant on a Haitian."

  "Be my guest," he said, and stepped aside.

  I walked into the bathroom with my handkerchief pressed over my mouth and nose. The tub was an old iron, rust-streaked one on short metal legs that looked like animal claws. A man's naked black calves and feet stuck up out of the far end of the tub.

  "He was either a dumb shit that liked to keep his radio on the washbasin, or somebody threw it in there with him," the detective said. "Any way you cut it, it cooked him."

  The water had evaporated out of the tub, and dirty lines of grit were dried around the drain hole. I looked at the powerful hands that were now frozen into talons, the muscles in the big chest that had become flaccid with decomposition, the half-closed eyes that seemed focused on a final private thought, the pink mouth that was still locked wide with a silent scream.

  "It must have been a sonofabitch. He actually clawed paint off the sides," the detective said. "There, look at the white stuff under his nails. You know him?"

  "His name's Toot. He worked with Eddie Keats. Maybe he worked for Bubba Rocque, too."

  "Huh," he said. "Well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, then. What a way to get it. Once over in Algiers I had case like this. A woman was listening to this faith healer while she was washing dishes. So the faith healer told everybody to put their hands on the radio and get healed, and it blew her right out of her panty hose. What'd y'all have on his guy?"

  "Assault and battery, suspicion of murder."

  The scene investigator walked past us with his camera. The detective crooked his finger at the two paramedics.

  "All right, bag him and get him out of here," he said, and turned to me again. "They'll have to burn the stink out of this place with a flamethrower. You got everything you want?"

  "You mind if I look around a minute?"

  "Go ahead. I'll wait for you outside."

  Propped against the back corner of the closet, behind the racked tropical shirts, the white slacks, the flowered silk vests, I found a twelve-gauge pump shotgun. I opened the breech. It had been cleaned and oiled and the cordite wiped out of the chamber with a rag. Then I unscrewed the mechanism to the pump action itself and saw the sportsman's plug had been taken out so the magazine could hold five rather than three rounds. On the floor was a half-empty box of red double-nought shotgun shells of the same manufacture as the ones that had littered the floor of Annie's and my bedroom. I rolled one of the shells back and forth in my palm and then put it back in the box.

  The detective lit a cigarette as he walked down the stairs into the yard. Afternoon rain clouds had moved across the sun, and he wiped the sweat out of his eyebrows with the flat of his hand and widened his eyes in the breeze that had sprung up from the south.

  "I'd like for you to come down to the District and file a report on your man," he said.

  "All right."

  "Who's this guy supposed to have killed?"

  "My wife."

  He stopped in the middle of the yard, a dead palm tree rattling over his head, and looked at me with his mouth open. The wind blew his cigarette ashes on his tie.

  I decided I had one more stop to make before I headed back to New Iberia. Because of my concern for Alafair, I had given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a wide berth. But as that Negro janitor had told me in high school, you never let the batter know you're afraid of him. When he spreads his feet in the box and gives you that mean squint from under his cap, as though he's sighting on your throat, you spit on the ball and wipe his letters off with it. He'll probably have a change in attitude toward your relationship.

  But Mr. Monroe was to surprise me.

  I parked the truck in the shade of a spreading oak off Loyola and walked back in the hot sunlight to the INS office. His desk was out on the floor, among several others, and when he looked up from a file folder in his hands and saw me, the skin around his ears actually stretched across the bone. His black hair, which was combed like wires across his pate, gleamed dully in the fluorescent light. I saw his throat swallow under his bow tie.

  "I'm here officially," I said, easing my badge out of my side pants pocket. "I'm a detective with the Iberia sheriff's office now. Do you mind if I sit down?"

  He didn't answer. He took a cigarette out of a pack on his desk and lit it. His eyes were straight ahead. I sat down in the straight-backed chair next to his desk and looked at the side of his face. By his desk blotter in a silver frame was a picture of him and his wife and three children. A clear vase with two yellow roses in it sat next to the picture.

  "What do you want?" he said.

  "I'm on a murder investigation."

  He held his cigarette to his mouth between two fingers and smoked it without ever really detaching it from his lips. His eyes were focused painfully into space.

  "I think you guys have a string on somebody I want," I said.

  Finally he looked at me. His face was as tight as paper.

  "Mr. Robicheaux, I'm sorry," he said.

  "Sorry for what?"

  "For… about your wife. I'm truly sorry."

  "How did you know about my wife?"

  "It was in the area section of the Picayune."

  "Where's Victor Romero?"

  "I don't know this man."

  "Listen, this is a murder investigation. I'm a police officer. Don't you jerk me around."

  He lowered his cigarette toward the desk blotter and let out his breath. People at the other desks were obviously listening now.

  "You have to understand something. I do field work with illegal immigrants in the work
place. I check green cards. I make sure people have work permits. I've done that for seven years."

  "I don't care what you do. You answer me about Victor Romero."

  "I can't tell you anything."

  "You think carefully about your words, Mr. Monroe. You're on the edge of obstruction."

  His fingers went to his temple. I saw his bottom lip flutter.

  "You have to believe this," he said. "I'm very sorry about what's happened to you. There's no way I can express how I feel."

  I paused before I spoke again.

  "When somebody's dead, apologies have as much value as beating off in a paper bag," I said. "I think you need to learn that, maybe go down to the courthouse and listen to one of the guys on his way up to Angola. Are you following me? Because this is what I believe you guys did: you planted Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero inside the sanctuary movement, and four people ended up dead at Southwest Pass. I think a bomb brought that plane down. I think Romero had something to do with it, too. He's also hooked up with Bubba Rocque, and maybe Bubba had my wife killed. You shield this guy and I'm going to turn the key on you."

  I could hear him breathing now. His pate was slick with oil and perspiration under the light. His eyes clicked back and forth.

  "I don't care who hears this, and you can make of it what you want," he said. "I'm a career civil servant. I don't make policy or decisions. I try to keep illegals from taking American jobs. That's all I do here."

  "They made you a player. You take their money, you take their orders, you take their fall."

  "I'm not an articulate man. I've tried to tell you my feelings, but you won't accept that. I don't blame you. I'm just sorry. I don't have anything else to say, Mr. Robicheaux."

  "Where's your supervisor?"

  "He's gone to Washington."

  I looked at the picture of his family on the desk.

  "My wife's casket had to be kept closed at the funeral," I said. "You think about that a minute. Also, you tell your supervisor I'm going to run that heroin mule to ground. When I do, I'm going to squeeze him. You better hope none of y'all's names come out of his mouth."

  When I walked out the door the only sound in the room was the telex machine clacking.

  It was evening when I got home, and Alafair and the babysitter had already had their supper. I was hungry and too wired to sleep, so I heated up some dirty rice, shelled crawfish, and cornbread, wrapped it in foil, and packed it in my canvas rucksack with my army mess kit and walked down the road in the flaming sunset to a spot of the bayou where my father and little brother and I used to dig for minie balls when I was a boy.

  A sugar planter's home had been built there in the 1830s, but the second story had been torched by General Banks's soldiers in 1863 and the roof and the blackened cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick shell. Over the years the access road had filled with pine seedlings and undergrowth, vandals had prized up the flagstones in the fireplaces, looking for gold coins, and the grave markers had been knocked down in the family burial ground and the graves themselves were recognisable only because of their dark green color and the blanket of mushrooms that grew across them.

  Four-o'clocks and wild rosebushes grew along the rim of a small coulee that flowed through the edge of the clearing, past a rotted-out cistern by the side of the house and a blacksmith's forge that was now only a rusty smear in the wet soil. The breeze off the bayou was still strong enough to push the mosquitoes back into the trees, and I sat on a dead cypress stump in the last wash of red sunlight and ate supper from my mess kit. The water was clear, copper-colored, flowering over the rocks in the bottom of the coulee, and I could see small bream hiding under the moss that swung in the current. Along these same banks my father, my brother, and I had dug out a bucket full of minie balls as well as cannister and grapeshot, bits of chain, and chopped-up horseshoes fired by union cannon into the Confederate rearguard. We used rakes to clear the vines and damp layers of dead leaves from the coulee walls, and the minie balls would drop from the loam like white teeth. They were conical-shaped on one end, with a hollow indentation and three grooved rings on the other, and they always felt heavy and smooth and round in your palm.

  In our innocence we didn't think about them as objects that blew muscle away from bone, ripped through linkage and webs of vein, tore the jaw and tongue from a face. I had to become a new colonial and journey across the seas to learn that simple fact. I had to feel a shotgun shell touched by the long black fingers of a man whose mission was to create and capture human misery on Polaroid film.

  I put aside my mess kit and tore the petals from a pink rose and watched them drift down onto the water, float along the riffle through the ferns and out into the sunlight. I had more to think about than I wanted to. True, I was sober; the physical pain of my last bender was gone, and the tiger seemed to be in his cage; but I had a lot of tomorrows to face, and in the past the long-distance view of my life had a way of getting me drunk again. Tomorrow at noon I would go to an AA meeting and confess my slip in front of the group, which was not an easy thing to do. I had once again failed not only myself and my Higher Power, but I had betrayed the trust of my friends as well.

  I knocked out my mess kit on the cypress stump, and put it away in my rucksack. I thought I heard a car door open and close on the road, but I paid it little attention. The shadows had fallen across the clearing now, and the mosquitoes were lifting in clouds from the trees and undergrowth. I flipped one of the rucksack straps over my shoulder and walked through the pine seedlings toward the sun's last red glare above the main road.

  Through the tree trunks I saw the dark outline of a man standing by a maroon Toyota parked on the road. He stood on the far side of the hood, looking at me, his face covered with shadow, motionless, as though he were taking a leak by his tire. For a moment I couldn't see him at all because of a big spreading oak, then the trees thinned and I saw him suddenly swing a bolt-action rifle to his shoulder, the leather sling already wrapped tight around his left forearm, saw the lens of the telescopic sight glint as dark as firelight in a whisky glass, saw his chest and elbows lean across the low roof of the car with the quick grace of an infantry marksman who never cants his sights and delivers the mail somewhere between your breastbone and throat.

  I jumped sideways and rolled through the underbrush just as the rifle roared and a bullet popped leaves off a half-dozen limbs and splintered the side of a pine trunk as though it had been touched lightly with a chainsaw. I heard him work the bolt, even heard the empty shell casing clink off the car metal, but I was running now, zigzagging through the woods, pine branches whipping back across my face and chest, the carpet of dead leaves an explosion of sound under my feet I had the canvas straps of the rucksack bunched in my left hand, and when his second round went off and tore through the undergrowth and pinged away off the brick of the plantation ruin, I dove on my chest, ripped the sack flap loose from its leather thong, and got my hand around the butt of my.45 automatic.

  I think he knew it had turned around on him. I heard him work the bolt, but I also heard the barrel knock against the car roof or windshield and I could hear him shaking the bolt as though he had tried to jam a shell too fast into the chamber. I was up and running again, this time at an angle toward the road so I would exit the woods behind his car.

  The trees were thickly spaced here, and he fired at my sound rather than shape, and the bullet thropped through a briar patch fifteen feet behind me.

  I crashed through the undergrowth and came out onto the lighted edge of the woods just as he threw his rifle across the car. He was a dark, small man, in jeans and running shoes and a purple T-shirt, with black hair that hung in curls. But I was running so fast and breathlessly that I slipped to my knees on the side of the drainage ditch and almost filled the.45's barrel with dirt. He floored his car, popped the clutch, and spun water out of a muddy pool. I fell forward on my elbows, my arms extended, my left palm cupped under the.45's butt, and began firing.

&nb
sp; The roar was deafening. I whanged the first round off his bumper, punched two holes in the trunk, went high once, then blew out the back window with such force that it looked as if it had been gutted by a baseball bat. I rose to my knees and kept firing, the recoil knocking my arm higher with each explosion. His car slid sideways at the bend of the road, smashed against an oak trunk before he righted the front wheels, and I saw my last round blow his tailight into a tangle of wires and broken red plastic. But I didn't hit his gas tank or a tire, or punch through his firewall into the engine block, and I heard him winding up his gearbox until it almost screamed as he disappeared beyond a flooded cane-break on the side of the road.

  8

  AFTER I HAD called in a description of the shooter and his Toyota at the boat dock, I went back out on the road with a flashlight and hunted for the shells he had ejected from his rifle. Two fully loaded gravel trucks had passed on the road and crushed one of the.30-06 shells flat in the dirt and half buried the other in a muddy depression, but I prised each of them out with the awl of my Swiss army knife and dropped them in a plastic bag. They were wet and muddy and scoured from being ground under the truck's tires, but a spent cartridge thrown from a bolt-action rifle is always a good one to recover a print from, because usually the shooter presses each load down with his thumb and leaves a nice spread across the brass surface.

  The next morning I listened quietly while the sheriff shared his feelings about my going to New Orleans for two days without authorisation. His face was flushed, his tie pulled loose and he talked with his hands folded on his desk in order to conceal his anger. I couldn't blame him for the way he felt, and the fact that I didn't answer him only made him more frustrated. Finally he stopped, shifted his weight in the chair, and looked at me as though he had just abandoned everything he had said.

  "Forget that bullshit about procedure. What bothers me is the feeling I've been used," he said.