A Stained White Radiance dr-5 Page 4

  I wrote them down on a notepad.

  "Did you make plaster casts of those footprints by the bayou?" he asked.

  "We're a low-budget department, Weldon. Also, plaster casts usually tell us that the suspect wore shoes. Let me explain something to you. There's not a lot of interest down there about your shooter. Why is that? you ask. Because when the intended victim acts like Little Orphan Annie, with wide, empty eyes, it's hard to get other people to bite their nails over that person's fate. If you want to let a hired gumball cancel your ticket, maybe we figure that's your business."

  In my mind's eye I could almost see his hand squeezing on the receiver.

  "What do you mean 'hired gumball'?" he said.

  "People around here usually kill only their friends and relatives. They usually do it in bars and bedrooms. A longrange shooter, a guy probably using a scope, a guy who got in and out without being seen, I think we're talking about a contract killer, Weldon. There was something else I didn't tell you. Our fingerprint man didn't find even a trace of a print on that shell casing. In all probability that means the shooter wiped each shell clean before he loaded the rifle. It sounds pretty professional to me."

  "You're a smart cop."

  I didn't answer and instead waited for him to speak again.

  But he remained silent.

  "You don't want to tell me anything else?" I said.

  "It's a story that involves a lot of players. You couldn't guess at it."

  "When people get into trouble, it's over money, sex, or power. Always. It's not a new script."

  "This one is. It's a real stomach churner."

  I waited again for him to continue, but he didn't.

  "How about it?" I said.

  "That's all I have to say, except I'm not going to do time and I'm not going to get clipped by some gumball. If that doesn't float with somebody, or if they want more information on that, they might try dialing 1-800-EAT SHIT for assistance. How's that sound?"

  "Who said anything about doing time?"

  "Nobody."

  "I see. Have a nice trip to Baton Rouge. Tell me, though, before you hang up, how bad did you and Lyle hurt your father's friend?"

  "What? What did you say?"

  "You heard me."

  "Yeah, I did. You listen to me, Dave. You stay out of my goddamn family's history. It doesn't have anything to do with this. You understand that? — Are we clear on that?"

  "Call back when you have something of value to tell me, Weldon," I said, and softly replaced the receiver in the telephone cradle. I suspected that I left him with knives turning in his chest. But Weldon was one of those who became interested in the cathedral only after you barred its entrance to him.

  Sunday night it rained again, and Bootsie, Alafair, and I drove to New Iberia and had dinner at Del's on East Main, then went to a movie. Later, it stopped raining, and the moon rose over the freshly plowed sugarcane fields in a sky that looked like black ink wash. I was restless and couldn't concentrate on the book I was reading or the movie that Bootsie was watching on television, and I told Bootsie that I was going back into town to drop off some overdue bills at the post office. Then I drove out to Weldon's place.

  Why? I can't say, really — except that I suspected he was involved in something that went way beyond the confines of Iberia Parish. Over the years I had seen all the dark players get to southern Louisiana in one form or another: the oil and chemical companies who drained and polluted the wetlands; the developers who could turn sugarcane acreage and pecan orchards into miles of tract homes and shopping malls that had the aesthetic qualities of a sewer works; and the Mafia, who operated out of New Orleans and brought us prostitution, slot machines, control of at least two big labor unions, and finally narcotics.

  They hunted on the game reserve. They came into an area where large numbers of the people were poor and illiterate, where many were unable to speak English and the politicians were traditionally inept or corrupt, and they took everything that was best from the Cajun world in which I had grown up, treated it cynically and with contempt, and left us with oil sludge in the oyster beds, Levittown, and the abiding knowledge that we had done virtually nothing to stop them.

  I parked my truck on the blacktop in front of Weldon's house and looked at his flood lamps in the mist, the lighted chandelier that he had left on in the living room, the lawn that sloped away toward Bayou Teche, his boathouse, and the dark line of cypress trees along the bank. The shooter had probably come before dawn, maybe in a boat, and had crouched behind the brick retaining wall until he saw Weldon enter the dining room. So the shooter knew something about the layout of Weldon's house and property, I thought, and maybe about Weldon's habits as well; perhaps he even knew Weldon and had been in his house. If not, the person who hired the shooter was probably on familiar terms with Weldon.

  It wasn't a profound theory, nor was it that helpful. I drove back home with the heat lightning flickering whitely over the southern horizon, then lay in the dark beside Bootsie and tried to fall asleep. Why did I preoccupy myself with Weldon's troubles, I asked myself? The answer was not long in coming. I rubbed my hand lightly over the curve of Bootsie's back, kissed the smooth grain of her skin, stroked the short-cropped stiff hair on her neck, and wondered in awe at how the flush of health in her complexion could be so successful a part of nature's masquerade. I had fantasies in which we changed the blood in her whole vascular system and rinsed disease out of her body; saw faith and prayer drive the red wolf from her like an exercised incubus; or simply awoke one fine morning to discover that a new drug as miraculous as penicillin or the polio vaccine had been invented, and that all our cares and worries about Bootsie had been illusionary and ultimately forgettable.

  So when you have a problem that has no solution and you can no longer drink over it, you get psychologically drunk on somebody else's woe, I thought. And maybe I even resented and envied Weldon for what I thought was the simplicity of his problem.

  The moon made a square of light on Bootsie's sleeping form. Her white silk gown looked almost phosphorescent, her bare shoulders as cool and bloodless as alabaster. I put my arm across her stomach and drew her against me, hooked one leg inside hers, and buried my face in her hair, as though anger and need were enough to hold both of us aloft, safe from the dark spin and pull of the earth beneath us.

  Two days later I would learn that Weldon's problems were not simple ones, either, and my involvement with the Sonnier family would become much more than a dry drunk.

  CHAPTER 2

  After I got home from work the following Tuesday Batist Aand I closed up the bait shop early because of an electrical storm that blew up out of the south. Three hours later the rain was still pouring down, lightning bolts were popping all over the marsh, and the air was heavy with the wet, sulfurous smell of ozone. The thunder reverberated like echoing cannon across the drenched countryside, and I could barely hear the dispatcher's voice when I answered the telephone in the kitchen.

  "Dave, I think I made a mistake," he said.

  "Speak louder. There's a lot of static on the line."

  "I put my foot in something. A little bit ago a black man across the bayou from Weldon Sonnier's called in and said he saw somebody behind Weldon's house with a flashlight. He said he knew Mr. Weldon was out of town, so he thought he ought to call us. I was about to send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux, but Garrett was sitting by the cage and said he'd take it. I told him he wasn't on duty yet. He said he'd take it anyway, that he was helping you with the investigation about the shooting. So I let him go out there."

  "Okay…"

  "Then the old man calls up and wants to know where Garrett is, that he wants to talk with him right now, that there's been another complaint about him. Garrett cuffed a couple of kids and put them in the tank for shooting him the finger. The kids live two houses from the sheriff. That Garrett knows how to do it, doesn't he? Anyway, he doesn't answer his radio now, and I already sent LeBlanc and Thibodeaux somewhere else. You
want to help me out?"

  "All right, but you shouldn't have sent him out there by himself."

  "You ever try to say 'no' to that guy?"

  "Send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux for backup as soon as they're loose."

  "You got it, Dave."

  I put on my raincoat and rain hat, took my army.45 automatic from the dresser drawer in the bedroom, inserted the clip loaded with hollow-points into the magazine, and dropped the automatic and a spare clip in the pocket of my coat. Bootsie was reading under a lamp in the living room, and Alafair was working on a coloring book in front of the television set. The rain was loud on the gallery roof.

  "I have to go out. I'll be back shortly," I said.

  "What is it?" she said, looking up, her honey-colored hair bright under the lamp.

  "It's a prowler report out at Weldon's again."

  "Why do you have to go?"

  "The dispatcher messed it up and sent this new fellow from Houston. Now he doesn't answer his radio, and the dispatcher doesn't have a backup."

  "Then let them mess it up on their own. You're off duty."

  "It's my investigation, Boots. I'll be back in a half hour or so. It's probably nothing."

  I saw her eyes become thoughtful.

  "Dave, this doesn't sound right. What do you mean he doesn't answer his radio? Isn't he supposed to carry one of those portable radios with him?"

  "Garrett's not strong on procedure. Y'all be good. I'll be right back."

  I ran through the rain and the flooded lawn, jumped in the pickup truck, and headed up the dirt road toward town. The oak limbs overhead thrashed in the wind, and a bright web of lightning lit the whole sky over the marsh. The rain on my cab was deafening, the windows swimming with water, the surface of the bayou dancing with a muddy light.

  When I pulled into Weldon's drive, the night was so black and rain-whipped I could barely see his house. I hit my bright lights and drove slowly toward the house in second gear. Leaves were shredding out of the oak trees in front of the porch and cascading across the lawn, and I could hear a boat pitching and knocking loudly against its mooring inside the boathouse on the bayou. Then I saw Garrett's patrol car parked at an angle by one corner of the house. I flipped on my spotlight and played it over his car, then across the side of the house, the windows and the hedges along the walls, and finally the telephone box that was fastened into the white brick by the back entrance.

  There was a line of dull silver-green footprints pressed into the lawn from the patrol car to the telephone box.

  Smart man, Garrett, I thought. You know a professional second-story creep always hits the phone box first. But you shouldn't have gone in by yourself.

  I left my spotlight burning, took a six-battery flashlight from under the seat, pulled back the receiver on my.45, eased a round into the chamber, and stepped out into the rain.

  I stopped in a crouch until I was at the back of the house and past the side windows. The wiring at the bottom of the telephone box had been sliced neatly in half. I looked over my shoulder at the blacktop road, which was empty of cars and glazed with a pool of pink light from a neon bar sign.

  Where in the hell were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

  I went up the steps to the back entrance to try the door, but two panes of glass, one by the handle and one by the night chain, had been covered with pipe tape and knocked out of the molding, and the door was open. I eased it back and stepped inside. My flashlight reflected off enamel, brass, and glass surfaces and made rings of yellow-green light all over the kitchen, which was immaculately clean and squared away, but already I could see the disarray that existed deeper in the house.

  "Garrett?" I said into the darkness. "It's Dave Robicheaux."

  But there was no answer. Outside, I could hear the rain pelting the bamboo that grew along the gravel drive. I moved into the dining room, with the.45 extended in my right hand, and swung the flashlight around the room. All the drawers were pulled out of the cabinets and emptied on the floor, the paintings on the wall were knocked down or askew, and the crystalware had been raked off a shelf and ground into the rug.

  The front rooms were even worse. The divans and antique upholstered chairs were slashed and gutted, a secretary bookcase overturned on its face and its back smashed in, the marble mantelpiece pried out of the wall, an enormous grandfather's clock shattered into kindling and pieces of glinting brass. A sheet of lightning trembled on the front yard, and in my mind's eye I saw myself silhouetted against the window just as I heard a foot depress a board in the hardwood floor somewhere behind or above me.

  I clicked off my flashlight and went back through the dining room to the stairway. There was a closed door at the top of it, but I could see a faint glow at the bottom of the jamb.

  The stairs were carpeted, and I moved as quietly as I could, a step at a time, toward the door and the rim of light at the bottom, my palm sweating on the grips of the.45, my pulse racing in my neck. I turned the doorknob, pushed it lightly with my fingers, and let the door drift back on its hinges.

  The hallway was strewn with sheets, mattress stuffing, clothes, and shoes that had been thrown out of the doorways to the bedrooms. The only light came from behind a partially closed door at the end of the hall. Through the opening I could see a desk, a word processor, a black leather chair whose back had been split in a large X. I moved along the wall with the.45 at an upward angle, past two demolished bedrooms, a linen closet, a darkened bathroom, an overturned dirty-clothes hamper, a dumbwaiter, until I reached the last bedroom, which was only ten feet from the lighted room that Weldon probably used as a home office.

  I stepped quickly inside the bedroom door and swept my.45 back and forth in the darkness. The room was still intact, except for the fact that the box springs had been shoved halfway off the frame of the canopy bed, a warning that I didn't heed.

  I caught my breath, squatted down at the base of the door, wiped the sweat and rainwater out of my eyes with my knuckle, then aimed the.45 along the wall at the lighted opening of the office.

  "This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. You're under arrest. Throw your weapons out in the hall. Don't think about it. Do it."

  But there was no sound from inside.

  "Right now it's breaking and entering," I said. "You can be smart and come out on your own. If we have to come in after you, we'll paint the walls with you. I guarantee it."

  Beyond the opening in the door I saw a shadow break across Weldon's desk. I could feel the veins tightening in my head, the sweat dripping out of my hair. It wasn't going to go down right, I thought. When they think about it, they either freeze or become cunning. And my situation was all wrong. I had been forced to take up a position on the right hand side of the hallway, so that I had to extend my right arm at an awkward angle around the doorjamb. I was getting a charley horse in my leg and a muscle twitch in my back. Where were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

  "Last chance, partner. We're about to shift up into the dirty boogie," I said. But it was hard-guy flimflam. All I could do was contain whoever was in there and wait for backup.

  Then the shadow broke across the desk again, a shoe scraped against a piece of furniture, and I straightened my back, stiffened my right arm, and aimed the.45 in the middle of the door, my eyes burning with salt.

  But I'd forgotten that old admonition from Vietnam: Don't let them get behind you, Robicheaux.

  He came out of the bedroom closet like a spring exploding from a broken clock, a short crowbar raised above his head. His head was huge, his face full of bone, his torso knotted with muscle under his wet T-shirt. I tried to pivot, swing the.45 clear of the doorjamb and aim it at his chest, or simply stand erect and get away from the arch of the crowbar, but my knees popped and burned and seemed to have all the resilience of cobweb. The crowbar thudded into my shoulder and raked down my arm and sent the.45 bouncing across the carpet.

  Then he was on me in earnest and I was rolling away from him, toward the canopy
bed, my arms wrapped around my head. He hit me once in the back, a blow that felt just like a wild inside pitch that catches you flat and hard in the spine as you try to twist away from it in the batter's box, and I kicked at him with one foot, tripped backward over the box springs, and saw the bone-plated, muddy-eyed resolution in his face as he came toward me again.

  "Get away, Eddy! I'm gonna blow up his shit!" a voice behind him said.

  A toy of a man stood in the doorway. He looked like a racehorse jockey, except his little body had the rigid lines of a weight lifter's. In his diminutive hand was a blue revolver.

  But they had intervened in each other's script and hesitated too long. I saw the.45 on the carpet, next to the hanging box springs, and I grabbed it and tumbled sideways into a half bathroom just as the toy man started firing.

  I saw the sparks of gunpowder fly out into the darkness, heard two rounds whock into the tile wall and a third whang off the toilet bowl and blow the tank apart in a cascade of water and splintered ceramic; then he tried to change his angle of fire, and a fourth round ricocheted off a chrome towel rack and collapsed the shower door in a pile of frosted glass.

  I was flat on the floor, in a spreading pool of water, my back and hair covered with bits of glass and tile caulking.

  But it had turned around on him, and he knew it, because he was already backing fast into the hallway when I raised up and started firing.

  The roar of the.45 was deafening, the recoil as powerful and palm-numbing and disconnected as the kick of an air hammer; then the.45 felt suddenly weightless in my hand just before I pulled the trigger again. I fired four times at the bedroom entrance, then stood erect in a tinkle of glass at my feet, opening and closing my mouth to clear my eyes. The bedroom doorway was empty, the layered smoke motionless in the air. Out in the hall, an oil painting lay face down on the carpet, with three holes cored through the back of the canvas.

  I could hear them on the stairway, but one of them obviously wanted the game to go into extra innings. He had the high-pitched, metallic voice of a midget.