The Tin Roof Blowdown Read online

  “I heard you say that in a television interview. I thought it was bullshit then. I think it’s bullshit now,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I ain’t knocking nobody, just telling you what happened. There’s a big difference between telling the truth and knocking somebody.”

  I glanced again at my watch. “It’s always good seeing you, Bo.”

  He raised his eyebrows and I thought his latent aggression and his desire to control those around him was about to surface. But I was wrong. “My secretary is waiting on me, so I gotta haul ass. I didn’t mean to be a busybody. I just thought I’d hep out if I could,” he said.

  Maybe I hadn’t given Bo the credit he deserved, I thought.

  Through my window, I saw him walk toward a Lexus parked across the street from St. Peter’s Cemetery. The day was still cool, the automobile blanketed with shade. A statuesque woman with white-gold hair, wearing sunglasses, a brief skirt, and a tight blouse, was smoking a cigarette outside the passenger door. When Bo Diddley clicked his door opener, she exhaled cigarette smoke at an upward angle and got inside, dropping her cigarette into the gutter, her skirt drawing up on her thigh.

  I didn’t know what his secretary’s talents might be, but I doubted if they had ever included breaking corn or picking cotton.

  AFTER LUNCH I drove out to the parish prison to talk with Otis Baylor, whose obstinacy, in my opinion, was becoming more symptomatic of pride than virtue.

  Most jailhouse or mainline inmates don’t want trouble. They do their time and avoid the wolves and stay out of racial beefs. They don’t sass hacks and they don’t wise off to guys with tear-duct tats. Like the Japanese, they create their own space and don’t violate the space of others. But unfortunately the genes of our simian progenitors are alive and well inside those walls, and the strong prey on the weak, nakedly, and with relish.

  Consensual jailhouse romance is a given and so is jailhouse dope, raisin-jack, prune-o, and white slavery. Yard bitches are treated with the same contempt as snitches and survive only by attaching themselves to a powerful caretaker, one who in turn requires complete obedience and loyalty. A juvenile offender thrown in with the general population is usually cannibalized. If you’re con-wise, you develop tunnel vision, particularly when it comes to sexual conduct or the in-house drug trade. Defending your own person is imperative, but defending the weak is the province of fools and those seeking martyrdom.

  The shift supervisor gave me an account of Otis Baylor’s first three days in the can. At first he was treated as an oddity, a man who didn’t belong, the kind who gets drunk and plows his car through a pedestrian crosswalk and cannot believe the grief he has brought upon himself and others.

  Wiseasses told him to sign up for the nightly movies or off-grounds church services a hack would escort him to. Then they looked into his face and decided there were other places in the jail they wanted to be. Otis ate by himself and refused to speak to others, even to ask a question. He moved about like a silent behemoth whose eyes were always turned inward. When he went into the shower, the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his upper arms, and the soft patina of body hair on his skin exuded warning signs that all primitive people are immediately aware of.

  Saturday afternoon a mulatto kid by the name of Ciro Goula from St. Martin Parish was stoned on a pipeload of Afghan skunk his “old man” had given him. Ciro was one of those damaged human beings who was not a criminal by nature but who would always be in the company of criminals and inside a criminal environment, because he could not function anywhere else. He was registered with the state health department as a carrier of venereal diseases and had been confined in a state mental hospital once and Angola twice. He was a prostitute and an addict, vain about his person, neurotic as a corkscrew, and indifferent about his ultimate fate. He was doing six months for possession, and during his first week in the main population he had attached himself to Walter Lantier, a white man with two homicides in his jacket. Walter rented Ciro out for dope, cash, or decks of smokes.

  But Saturday afternoon Ciro got stoned and in Walter’s face because Walter had sold him for an extra dessert to a retarded man who had the worst body odor in the stockade.

  “You don’t like it, you? You t’ink you better than other people? You t’ink you got a say in what I do?” Walter said. “Tell me how you feel about that in a couple of days, you li’l bitch.”

  Walter put out the word. For the next twenty-four hours, Ciro was anybody’s punch.

  On Sunday evening an inmate in the Aryan Brotherhood picked up Ciro in a bear hug and carried him into a shower room. There, he was made to put on panties and a bra and perform in front of three other men tattooed with SS lightning bolts and blue teardrops at the corners of their eyes. Inside the AB, tear-duct tats indicate the bearer has canceled someone’s ticket. Membership in the Brotherhood is for life. In terms of effectiveness, their cruelty and violence have no peer. Ciro Goula had always believed, in a bizarre fashion, that his profligacy would protect him from wolves. But Walter Lantier had just volunteered him for duty inside a concrete mixer.

  The four AB members in the shower room laughed at him, then sodomized him and plunged his head in a toilet bowl. When he screamed for help, they plunged his head into the water again and flushed the toilet. That’s when Otis Baylor strayed into their midst.

  “What the hell is the matter with you fellows? What kind of men are you?” he said, gathering up Ciro from a puddle of water on the floor. “Shame on the bunch of you.”

  “Where do you think you are, Jack?” one of the inmates said.

  “You watch your manners, my friend. Or I’ll be back for you,” Otis said.

  The inmate who had addressed Otis looked at him in disbelief, a matchstick frozen in the corner of his mouth. He tried to hold Otis’s stare but his eyes broke and he lowered his head. His friends remained motionless, as cave dwellers might if a stranger entered their cave and kicked their food into a communal fire. Otis hefted Ciro to his feet and half carried him down a corridor, past a row of cells, to a barred security gate, on the other side of which two uniformed guards looked at him openmouthed.

  “This man needs to be in a hospital. Y’all have a serious discipline problem in here,” he said.

  OTIS WAS WEARING jailhouse denims and a waist chain when the turnkey brought him to the interview room. Through the window I could see the coils of razor wire on the security fence outside and empty fields in the distance and a rural road that was lined with trash. I asked the turnkey if he could remove the chains. He shook his head and closed the door behind him.

  “They got you in segregation?” I said.

  “Is that what they call it?” Otis replied.

  “Believe it or not, it’s for your own protection.”

  “Then why am I in chains?”

  Because a jail is not an adjustable institution, I thought. But Otis was a hardhead and I knew my words would be wasted on him. “I need your permission to go on your property in New Orleans,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “I think Bertrand Melancon may have stashed stolen goods in your carriage house or your yard.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “The day you understand why these guys do anything is the day you stick a gun in your mouth,” I replied.

  I thought he might lighten up. But he didn’t. “Get a warrant. That’s how you guys do it, don’t you?”

  I leaned forward on the table. His wrists were cuffed to the chain that cinched his waist, and made me think of fins on the sides of a beached fish. “Listen to me. The stolen property I’m talking about belongs to your neighbor Sidney Kovick. You know what kind of man he is. If I’m correct, namely that Bertrand Melancon did stash Sidney ’s goods on your property, how long do you think it will take Sidney to come to the same conclusion? Furthermore, ask yourself what Sidney is capable of if he thinks you or a member of your family found them.”

  He looked out the window at the sun shining on
the spools of razor wire above the fence. “Do whatever you want, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “I admire your standing up for Ciro Goula. But he chose the life he lives and you can’t take his weight.”

  “Have you ever been locked up in a place like this?”

  “What if I have?”

  “Then you know you don’t give an inch.”

  “George Patton once told his men that wars are not won by giving your life for your country. You win wars by making the other poor bastard give his life for his.”

  “I’m ready to go back to lockdown.”

  “You got it,” I said. Then I opened the door and yelled down the corridor at the turnkey, “On the gate, here!”

  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 l
et 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.