The Tin Roof Blowdown Read online

  “You think Claggart has been covering Bledsoe’s ass all these years?” he said.

  “Probably. Or maybe they work as a team. You remember the Hillside Strangler case in California? The perps were cousins. Explain how one family can have two guys like that in it.”

  He started to reply, but I opened my cell phone and began punching in numbers.

  “Who you calling?” he asked.

  “Molly.”

  “Relax, they’re at the university. I mean it, noble mon, you’re giving me the shingles just watching you.”

  I got Molly’s voice mail and realized she had probably left her cell phone in the automobile or turned it off when she entered the library. I tried Alafair’s number and got the same result, then I remembered Alafair had left her purse at the house.

  The phone rang in the kitchen.

  ALAFAIR HAD SPREAD her note cards on a table that was not far from shelves of books that dealt with the flora and fauna of the American Northwest. She was writing down the names of trees and types of rock that characterized the escarpment along the Columbia River Gorge just south of Mount Hood. Then her eyes began to burn from the fatigue of the day and the sleepless nights she had experienced since Bobby Mack Rydel, a man she had never seen before, had tried to kill her.

  In her earliest attempts at fiction, she had learned that there are many things a person can do well when he or she is tired, but imagining plots and creating dialogue and envisioning fictional characters and writing well are not among them.

  She gathered up her note cards and placed them in her book bag, then took out the yellow legal pad on which I had written down the remnants of the words at the bottom of Bertrand Melancon’s letter to the Baylor family.

  In the stacks, a man with a raincoat over his arm and an oversize hat on his head was gazing curiously at the titles of the books arrayed along the shelf. He lifted a heavy volume off the shelf and seated himself on the opposite side of Alafair’s table, three chairs down from her. He did not glance in her direction and seemed intent upon the content of his book, a collection of photographic plates of scenes in Colorado. Then, as an afterthought, he seemed to remember that he was still wearing his hat. He removed it and set it crown-down on the table. His scalp was bone-white under the freshly shaved roots of his hair.

  “How do you do?” he said, and nodded.

  “Fine, how are you?” Alafair replied.

  He opened his book and began reading, his forehead knitted. Alafair went back to work on Bertrand Melancon’s water-diluted directions to Sidney Kovick’s diamonds. Molly returned from the restroom and looked over her shoulder. The original letters had been Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an. Alafair had spaced them out ten times on ten lines, trying different combinations with them on each line. By the tenth line, she had created a statement that seemed to make syntactical and visual sense.

  “You should have been a cryptographer,” Molly said.

  “Spelling is the challenge,” Alafair said. “He probably spells most polysyllabic words phonetically. So if the first word is ‘The’ and we create ‘dymines’ out of ‘dym,’ we’ve got a running start on the whole sentence. If the third word doesn’t agree in number with ‘dymines’ and we substitute ‘is’ for ‘are,’ it begins to come together pretty quickly.”

  The man with the mustache and shaved head paused in his reading, stifling a yawn, his head turning in the opposite direction from Molly and Alafair. His eyes scanned the high windows for a flicker of lightning in the sky. He watched a tall black kid in a basketball letter sweater walk by, then resumed reading.

  “We turn ‘un’ into ‘under’ and let ‘the’ stand. Put a ‘b’ in front of ‘ri’ and add a ‘k’ and you get ‘bricks.’ ‘On’ stands by itself and ‘ot’ becomes ‘other.’ ‘Of’ stands alone and we turn ‘h’ into ‘the.’ So we’ve got ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the…’ It’s the ‘an’ I haven’t worked out.”

  Molly thought about it. “Put a ‘c’ in front and an ‘e’ behind.”

  “‘Cane,’ that’s it. ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the cane.’ How about that?” Alafair said.

  The man staring at alpine scenes in the large picture book he gripped by both covers, the spine resting on the table, looked at his watch and yawned again. He got up from the table and replaced his book on the shelf. Then he walked over to a periodicals rack and began thumbing through a magazine, occasionally glancing out the window at the darkness in the sky.

  At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.

  It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

  “I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”

  “Yeah, I’ve already got that.”

  “You’ve got that? From where?” she said.

  “A reference librarian at the Citadel.”

  “A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”

  “Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”

  “Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”

  “I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.

  “Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”

  When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.

  “Let’s take a ride,” I said.

  MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightning, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.

  Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.

  “Fine with me,” Molly said.

  Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.

  “I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.

  “Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.

  A gust of wind and rain blew
across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.

  She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.

  “I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.

  “I know. What is it you want?”

  “It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”

  “Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.

  “Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.

  “But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.

  “I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.

  The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.

  Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.

  The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”

  “Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.

  But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.

  Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a.25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.

  “Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”

  Molly hesitated.

  “You want to see her brains on the dashboard, Miz Robicheaux?” Bledsoe said.

  Molly pulled on the hood release, then leaned over the backseat and opened the rear door. Bledsoe slipped inside, closing the door as quickly as possible to turn off the interior light. Molly was still extended over the seat, and his face and eyes were only inches from hers. His silk shirt rippled like blue ice water. She could smell the dampness on his skin, the dried soap he had used in shaving his head, an odor like soiled kitty litter that rose from his armpits.

  The man in the raincoat slammed down the hood.

  “Start the car,” Bledsoe said, clicking the switch on the interior light to the “off” position.

  “I don’t think I should do that,” Molly said.

  The man in the raincoat pulled open the back door and got inside. He struggled a minute with his raincoat before getting the door shut. He would not look directly at either Molly or Alafair.

  “Want to be the cause of this little girl’s death?” Bledsoe said. “Want to be the cause of your own, just because you decide to be stubborn? That doesn’t sound like a nun to me. That sounds like pride talking.”

  Molly’s hand started to shake as she turned the ignition. “My husband is going to hang you out to dry, buddy boy,” she said.

  “He’d like to. But so far, he hasn’t done such a good job of it, has he?” Bledsoe said. He teased the muzzle of the.25 under Alafair’s ear. “Pull onto the street, Miz Robicheaux.”

  Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.

  “Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might happen. You might come out of this just fine.”

  Bledsoe took the yellow legal pad from Alafair’s hand and examined the top page, all the while holding the.25 against Alafair’s head. “Miss Alafair, you just made a bunch of people very happy. Isn’t that something, Tom? It was sitting in your backyard all the time, under that big generator, I bet. It took an educated young woman to figure this out for us. She’s special is what she is. Hear that, darlin’? You special and that’s how I’m gonna treat you. You’ll like it when we get there.”

  He picked a piece of glass out of her hair and flicked it out the window. He did not say where “there” was.

  They pulled out on the boulevard and drove past a women’s dormitory to a stop sign on the edge of the campus. Then they turned onto University Avenue and headed toward the edge of town.

  MOMENTS LATER, a few blocks up the avenue, between a Jewish cemetery that was covered with the deep shadows of cedar and oak trees, and an old icehouse that had been converted into a topless club, a jogger had to dodge a car that had plunged out of the traffic, across the median, and possibly had been hit by another car. The jogger could not see clearly inside the car because of the mist, but when he called 911, he told the dispatcher he had heard a sound like muffled firecrackers and he thought he had seen a series of flashes inside the windows.

  I CLAMPED THE portable emergency flasher on the roof of my truck and let Clete drive. By the time Clete had driven us through the little town of Broussard, the highway was slick, the sky black, and traffic was backing up because of construction outside Lafayette. We went through a long section of urban sprawl that in my college days had been sugarcane fields and pecan orchards, threaded by a two-lane highway that had been lined on each side with live oaks. But that was all gone.

  It was almost 10:00 p.m. I had called Molly’s cell phone three times en route, getting her voice mail each time.

  “You’re worrying too much. They’re probably headed home by now,” Clete said.

  “She always checks her voice mail. It’s an obsession with her,” I said.

  “Think about it a minute, Dave. Nothing has changed since this afternoon, except for the fact we found out Claggart is Asswipe’s half brother. That doesn’t mean Molly and Alafair are in greater danger. You know what I think is bothering you?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “You smoked Rydel and now you want to drink.”

  When I didn’t speak, he said, “Remember when we did that bunch of Colombians? I’ve never been so scared in my life. I drank a dozen double Scotches that night and it didn’t make a dent.”

  “Clete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you shut up?”

  He looked at me in the glow of the dash, then mashed on the accelerator, swerving across a double stripe to pass a tractor-trailer rig, rocking both of us against the doors.

  I punched in 911 and got a Lafayette Parish dispatcher. “What’s the nature of your emergency?” a black woman’s voice said.

  “This is Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I’m on my way to the UL campus to find my wife and daughter. They usually park by Cypress Lake, next to Burke Hall. They’re not responding to my calls. I think they may be in jeopardy. Will you send a cruiser to the campus and check out the
ir vehicle, please?”

  I gave her the make and model of Molly’s car.

  “We have a five-car accident on University, but we’ll get someone over to the campus as soon as possible,” she said. “Do you want me to call Campus Security?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You didn’t tell me the nature of the emergency.”

  “Some guys tried to kill my family on Sunday. They’re still out there.”

  “Give me your number and I’ll call you every ten minutes until we know they’re safe.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  As I said, it’s the most humble members of the human family who remind us of the Orwellian admonition that people are always better than we think they are.

  Clete hit a clear stretch of four-lane road and floored my truck. We went through a brightly lit shopping district, then entered the old part of Lafayette, where live oak trees hung with moss still form canopies over the streets. We turned left on University Avenue and passed the five-car pileup the 911 dispatcher had mentioned. The mist was gray, floating across the trees and shrubbery and hedges in the university district. A church bus passed us in the opposite direction, then a tanker truck and a stretch limo and a small car barely visible on the other side of the limo.

  The roof of the car had the same rusty tint as Molly’s. I turned around in the seat and looked through the back window, but I had lost sight of the car.

  “Was that Molly and Alafair?” Clete said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Want me to turn around?”

  I thought about it. “No, check Burke Hall first,” I said.

  “You got it, noble mon,” Clete said.

  AS THEY DROVE DOWN University Avenue past a five-car pileup, Ronald Bledsoe propped both his arms on the back of Alafair’s seat to conceal the.25 automatic he had wedged against her spine. He smelled her hair again and ticked the back of her neck with his fingernail. When she tried to lean forward, he hooked his finger in her collar.