The Tin Roof Blowdown Read online

  He pulled Rydel to his feet and drove his fist into Rydel’s stomach. Then he caught him full in the face, putting all his weight into it, smashing his head into the mirror, poking a hole in the center of it. When Rydel bounced off the mirror, Clete hit him again, breaking his lips against his teeth. Then he knocked him backward into a stall, holding on to the sides himself, stomping Rydel in the face and head, gashing open his scalp.

  I grabbed the back of Clete’s shirt collar and tried to pull him out of the stall. He turned on me, his face blotched with color, his eyes lustrous.

  “This is one time you don’t want to get in my way, Streak,” he said. His finger trembled as he pointed it at me.

  He kicked Rydel again and again in the face, his breath wheezing, his tropical shirt split down the back. Then he wrenched the toilet seat off the commode and hung it around Rydel’s neck.

  “How’s it feel, motherfucker? How’s it feel?” he said.

  THE DETECTIVES FROM the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department did a good job and found two witnesses who stated the first blows in the fight had been delivered by Bobby Mack Rydel. Clete was told by the casino management he was permanently eighty-sixed, but he got to go home that night, whereas Rydel was eighty-sixed and went to the hospital on top of it.

  In the morning Clete was in my office, remorseful, hungover, his face swollen on one side, a bruise in the shape of a frog on his throat. “I screwed it up,” he said.

  “No, you didn’t. You mopped up the floor with him,” I said.

  “Dave, when I pulled off Rydel’s tag and sliced his tire valves, I had another plan. It didn’t include you. If he called for a tow truck, I was going to offer him a ride and try to get him alone. I had my own agenda from the jump. I just wanted to get even. I didn’t care how I did it. I tried to convince myself he looked like the guy I shot at in the boat. I’ve been treating these guys like street mutts. It was a mistake. They’re a lot smarter than that.”

  I didn’t reply and tried to hide my concern about his admission of a private agenda.

  “If I hadn’t beaten the crap out of Rydel and turned him into a victim, we could have had him under arrest. I blew our chance to squeeze him.”

  “We’ve got someone else,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Rydel’s girlfriend. I couldn’t remember where I had seen her.”

  He lifted his face, indicating for me to go on.

  “I saw her with Bo Diddley Wiggins. It was from my office window, at a distance, but I’m sure it was her.”

  “Think he’s connected with Rydel and Bledsoe?”

  “We’ll find out. Say, Helen wanted to see me in her office. How about I check with you later?”

  Actually Helen did want to see me, but the real issue was to get Clete out of the office before he factored himself into my workday and brought more trouble down on both our heads.

  “Call me on my cell,” he said.

  “Ten-four, partner.”

  He walked out into the hallway, cocking his porkpie hat on his head, his upper arms like cured hams, the mayhem of yesterday already fading in memory. The deputies he passed in the hallway kept their gaze straight ahead. None of them spoke. If Clete noticed their aversion, he didn’t show it. He had been genuinely contrite, but I had no doubt my best friend would always be out of sync with the rest of the world. That said, our excursion to the casino had been a disaster.

  Helen had just gotten off the phone when I went into her office. She had been in and out of New Orleans repeatedly, flying in the departmental single-engine plane, returning each time more depressed. She, like others, had difficulty assimilating the magnitude of the damage and even greater difficulty in expressing it to others. This weekend she had agreed to accept back four prisoners who had been transferred from our stockade to Orleans Parish right before Katrina hit. The prisoners had been deserted by their jailers and left to wade in their own body waste for three days. They became so frightened they tore the side walls out of their cells and created a corridor all the way to the outside wall. But they couldn’t break through to the outside and remained trapped behind the cell bars until cops from Iberia Parish rescued them.

  One of the Iberia cops was a narc street-named Dog Face. When the Iberia transferees realized who one of their rescuers was, they began whistling and giving him the thumbs-up and shouting at him:

  “Hey, Dog Face, it’s me, Li’l Willie, you busted me on Ann Street.”

  “What it be, Big Dog Face? You kick ass, man.”

  “You the Man, Face. You bring any eats wit’ you?”

  But humorous stories about events that occurred in Katrina’s wake were not on Helen’s mind. The St. Mary Parish sheriff had just faxed her his investigators’ report on last night’s incident at the casino.

  She placed her fingers on each side of her head and rubbed at her temples, massaging them slowly, as though interdicting a large migraine in the making. “Here’s the way I see it, Pops. Ronald Bledsoe may have broken into your house and vandalized Alafair’s room. But we have no evidence to prove that. To our knowledge, he has never been charged with a crime anywhere. His friend, this man Rydel, has no warrant on him and to our knowledge is not involved in any form of unlawful activity. But the resources and time of the department are being committed to investigating and surveilling these people. How do I justify that to the taxpayers?”

  “I was off the clock last night,” I said disingenuously.

  She glanced down at the fax sheets on her desk. “One of the St. Mary detectives said Rydel’s car tag was stolen and his tires slashed in the parking lot. If the tires were slashed by a vandal, why would he bother to take the tag?”

  “Maybe his tag fell off somewhere else.”

  “The Phillips screws were on the ground. The tag was stolen in the parking lot, obviously by the same guy who cut the tires. If that’s Clete’s work, doesn’t it seem just a little bit adolescent to you?”

  I gave her the background on Bobby Mack Rydel I had gotten from Betsy Mossbacher. I put in every detail I could remember, including the fact he had been charged with rape in Japan and had beaten a man to death in Miami. I also mentioned his specialty was interrogation, which often in the bureaucratic language of governmental agencies is a synonym for torture. I also mentioned that his girlfriend was Bo Wiggins’s secretary.

  “So that means Rydel is connected with a guy who builds steel ships?”

  “Maybe.”

  It was obvious I was overloading her with information that she didn’t have time for.

  “Look, the guy is a seven-degree black belt,” I said. “Alafair took out one of Bledsoe’s front teeth with a karate kick. Maybe Bledsoe hooked up with Rydel for a specific purpose.”

  “To hurt Alafair?”

  “The possibility crossed my mind.”

  She let my tone pass. “I think we need to have an understanding-”

  I interrupted her. “I’ll be up-front with you. I’m glad Clete busted up Rydel. I hope he stays in the hospital for a long time. If either Rydel or Bledsoe comes after my daughter, I’ll do much worse to him.”

  “Finish your statement,” she said.

  “I’ll kill either one of them or I’ll kill both of them.”

  She folded her hands on her desk blotter. There was a wan look in her eyes, the kind people get when they know their best words are of no value. “A conversation like this will never occur in this office again. You’d better get back to work, Dave.”

  I started to speak.

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said.

  Chapter 24

  BERTRAND MELANCON HAD moved in with his grandmother in what was called the Loreauville “Quarters,” up Bayou Teche, nine miles from New Iberia. Tucked between sugarcane acreage and mist-shrouded horse farms, the Quarters was a neighborhood of nineteenth-century tenant cabins that looked like yellow boxcars with peaked tin roofs and small galleries nailed on to them as an afterthought. Some of them were deserted and boarded up wi
th plywood, but his grandmother’s place was neat and clean and had fresh paint on it, and she kept tin cans planted with begonias and geraniums on the front gallery and on the windowsills.

  Bertrand’s grandmother fixed good meals, but her talents were wasted on her grandson. He could not eat anything with cayenne or black pepper or gumbo filet in it. Once or twice, when he was spitting off the gallery, he had noticed a pink tinge in his saliva but had dismissed it. Then this morning he had gotten the dry heaves. When he looked into the toilet bowl, there was no question about what he saw there. Bertrand was fairly certain his insides were coming apart, like wet cardboard, one piece at a time.

  He was also fairly certain he was going to die unless he did something to rid himself of the guilt that waited for him each dawn like a carrion bird perched on the foot of his bed. He couldn’t undo what he had done to the priest on the church house roof, and he couldn’t find the young black girl he and Eddy and Andre had raped in the Lower Nine. But somehow Fate had caused his path to intersect with Thelma Baylor’s, not once but twice, in New Orleans and now in New Iberia.

  Making it up to Thelma Baylor and her family was the way out, he told himself. He had the power to make her family rich. Maybe they would never forgive him and still despise him, but they would be rich just the same and he would be free and the pain would go out of his stomach and he could start over again in California.

  Fate was giving Bertrand a second chance. At least that was what he told himself. If his intuitions were not true, he knew he would die soon. That thought caused him a spasm of pain that made him grip his stomach muscles and close his eyes.

  There was only one hitch in his desire to redeem himself: how was he supposed to do it?

  He could write a letter of apology and tell the Baylors where to find the stones and leave it in their mailbox or under a door. But even as he started composing the sentences in his mind, he knew his prescription for his own redemption was too easy. He was going to have to look Thelma Baylor and her family in the face. That image, particularly when it came to looking the father in the face, made sweat break on his brow.

  Why was everything so hard?

  His first morning in the Loreauville Quarters he borrowed his grandmother’s car, a rusted-out hulk that oozed oil smoke from under the frame, and headed down the bayou toward New Iberia. The cane fields were wet and fog rolled off the bayou on the horse barns and spacious homes and oak-lined driveways of the people who were actually his neighbors, although they would never look upon him as such. He continued on down the state road into New Iberia and turned toward Jeanerette and the house where Thelma Baylor lived. He passed through both rural slums and immaculate acreage owned by the Louisiana State University agricultural school. He drove alongside rain ditches that were layered with trash and clumps of simple homes inside pecan trees. He passed a graveyard filled with crypts that reminded him of the cemeteries across from the New Orleans French Quarter.

  But no matter what he looked at, he could not escape the fear that was like a cancerous tuber rooted in his chest. He tried every way possible to rationalize not confronting Thelma or her family directly. Wasn’t it enough simply to give them an amount of money that was probably beyond their wildest dreams? Wasn’t it enough that he was sorry, that his own health had been ruined, perhaps even his life made forfeit? How much was one guy supposed to suffer?

  But besides his guilt over Thelma Baylor and the priest on the church roof and the young girl in the Lower Nine, he had another burden to carry. He had not only been slapped in Sidney Kovick’s flower store and had his pistol taken away from him by an unarmed man, he had proved himself a coward and had been treated as such, kicked between the buttocks, like a punk or a yard bitch, in view of passersby at the end of the alley.

  He passed an eighteenth-century plantation home built of brick and saw a modest green house with a screened-in gallery ensconced inside shade trees. The numbers on the mailbox were the same as the ones he had gotten out of his grandmother’s directory. He drove to the drawbridge over the bayou, looking straight ahead in case anyone was watching. He rumbled across the bridge and turned his car around so he could have a full view of the Baylor house without anyone taking note of his interest. A light was on in the kitchen and steam was rising from the tin roof where the sunlight touched it. What if he just knocked on the door and announced who he was? If they wanted to shoot him, they could shoot him. If they wanted to have him busted, they could dial 911. What could be worse than watching his insides transformed into dissolving red clots in the toilet bowl?

  He stayed parked for perhaps five minutes on the road’s shoulder, just on the other side of the bridge, blue oil smoke seeping through the floorboards. There was little traffic across the bridge this time of day. But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw a white man who had an elongated, waxed head and indented face standing in front of a café, looking about innocuously, as a tourist might. When Bertrand glanced in the mirror a second time, the man was gone.

  He shifted his grandmother’s car into gear and crawled across the bridge, turning back onto the state road that led past enormous plantation homes and the green one-story house of the girl he had raped and tormented. He slowed his car in the shadows across from the house and shifted the transmission into park. His head was spinning, either from his fear or the oil smoke rising through the floor. Then he had an idea. What if he wrote out the words he needed to say, and walked up to the door and knocked? In his mind, he saw Thelma Baylor and her father and mother answer his knock in unison, anxious for his apology, as though it were what they had waited for ever since the night she was taken into the hospital by paramedics.

  Yeah, man, just read the statement and put the piece of paper in their hands and get in my grandmother’s lI’l car and rocket on down the road, he told himself.

  He found a brown paper hand towel on the floor and a magazine on the seat. He flattened the hand towel on the magazine, propped the magazine on the steering wheel, and began to print with a ballpoint pen:

  To Miss Thelma and the family of Miss Thelma,

  I am sorrie for what I have did to her. I wasn’t alweys that kind of person. Or maybe I was. I am not sure. But I want to make it right even tho I know it is not going to ever be right with her or anybody who was hurt like she been hurt.

  He paused, his heart beating, and looked at what he had written. For some reason, the words made him feel better than he had felt in a long time. Behind him, he heard the sound of tires rumbling over the drawbridge and automatically he looked in the rearview mirror. A truck had just crossed the bridge and turned down the bayou, in the opposite direction from Bertrand. But it was not the truck that got his attention. The white man with the long head and indented face had parked a gleaming blue Mercury under shade trees in front of a historical plantation house on the corner. The man was standing on the shoulder, the driver’s door open between him and Bertrand, his forearms propped on the car’s roof, evidently admiring the huge white facade and stone columns of the building.

  Definitely a weird-looking motherfucker, Bertrand thought.

  He went back to his letter. Suddenly the front door of the Baylor home opened, and Thelma and a heavyset man and a blond, sun-browned woman stepped out into their yard, their faces turned up like flowers into the sunlight.

  Bertrand was petrified. He had bathed last night in his grandmother’s claw-footed tub, but a vinegary smell rose from his armpits. He wanted to get out of the car, to wave his unfinished letter at them, to make them listen to his offer of restitution. It couldn’t be that hard. Just do it, he told himself.

  Then the Baylor family backed out of the driveway, into the road, and drove away as though he were not there.

  Bertrand opened his car door and spit on the ground. The wind blew in his face and puffed his shirt, but he knew that once again there would be no respite from his fear and that failure and self-loathing would lay claim to every moment of his day. He wanted to weep.

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bsp; He got out of his car and wandered down the slope by the bayou, his legs almost caving. The man who had been studying the antebellum home under the oaks roared down the asphalt toward New Iberia, glancing once at Bertrand as he passed.

  The man’s face looked exactly like the back of a thumb, a pale white thumb, Bertrand thought. He could not remember ever seeing anyone who looked as strange. Then he sat down in the leaves and put his face in his hands.

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I drove to Bo Wiggins’s office in the old Lafayette Oil Center. Actually it was more than an office. He had purchased the entire building and had placed a sign that read “James Boyd Wiggins Industries” over the front entrance. He was not there and neither was his statuesque secretary with the white-gold hair. The receptionist was talking on the phone. A magazine lay open on her lap and she kept looking down at it while she spoke, shifting her legs so the page wouldn’t flip over and cause her to lose her place. After she hung up, I asked her where I might find Bo and his secretary. She bit on a nail and developed a faraway look in her eyes. “ Houston?” she said.

  “You’re asking me?” I said.

  “No, it’s Miami. They went on his private jet. With some other guys.”

  “Which guys?”

  “Some contractors.”

  “Which contractors?”

  “The ones who’re hauling all that storm junk out of New Orleans?”

  She had turned a declarative sentence into a question again.

  “When will they be back?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow, I think.”

  I decided this was a conversation to exit as soon as possible. I gave her my business card and drove back to Lafayette in a downpour that left hailstones smoking on the highway.

  THURSDAY MORNING Helen Soileau called me back into her office. “What I said to you yesterday about departmental resources was straight up. But that doesn’t change the fact Bledsoe is a dangerous man and has no business in our parish.”