A Stained White Radiance Read online

  “Yeah,” she said, and grinned again.

  “Batist says you brought Tripod down to the bait shop yesterday and he got into the hard-boiled eggs.”

  Her face became vague and quizzical.

  “Tripod did that?” she said.

  “Do you know anyone else who would wash a hard-boiled egg in the bait tank?”

  She looked across the bayou speculatively, as though the answer to a profound mystery lay among the branches of the cypress trees. Tripod zigzagged back and forth on his chain, sniffing the smell of fish in the dock.

  I rubbed the top of Alafair’s head. Her hair was already warm from the sunlight.

  “How about a fried pie, little guy?” I said, and winked at her. “But you and Tripod show some discretion with Batist.”

  “Show what?”

  “Keep that coon away from Batist.”

  I brought a tray of seasoned and oiled chickens out of the shop and began laying them on the barbecue grill. The hickory wood I used for fuel had burned into hot, white coal, and the oil from the chickens dripped into the ash and steamed away in the wind. I could feel Alafair’s eyes on the side of my face.

  “Dave?”

  “What is it, Alf?”

  “Bootsie told me not to tell you something.”

  “Maybe you’d better not tell me, then.” I turned my head to smile at her, but her dark eyes were veiled and troubled.

  “Bootsie dropped a fork on the floor,” she said. “When she picked it up her face got all white and she sat down real hard in a chair.”

  “Was that this morning?”

  “Yesterday, when I came home from school. She started to cry, then she saw me looking at her. She made me say I wouldn’t tell.”

  “It’s not bad to tell those kinds of things, Alf.”

  “Is Bootsie sick again, Dave?”

  “I think maybe we need to change her medicine again. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s going to be all right, little guy. Let me finish up here, and we’ll get Boots and go to Mulate’s for crawfish.”

  She nodded her head silently. I hoisted her up on my hip. Tripod ran in circles at our feet, his chain clanking on the wood.

  “Hey, let’s buy you some new Baby Squanto books today,” I said.

  “I’m too old to read Baby Squanto.”

  I pressed her against me and looked over the top of her head at the shadowed front of my house and thought I could feel my pulse beating in my throat with the urgency of a damaged watch that was about to run out of time.

  I WASN’T ABLE to keep our weekend entirely free of the Sonniers after all. That afternoon, after we drove back from Mulate’s in a rain shower, the phone was ringing as we ran from the truck through the pecan trees onto the gallery. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen and blotted the rainwater out of my eyes with the back of my wrist.

  “I thought I’d check in with you before we left town,” the voice said.

  “Weldon?”

  “Yeah. Bama and I are going to visit her mother in Baton Rouge. We’ll probably be gone a week or so. I thought I should tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re part of a case, aren’t you? Check in with the authorities, that sort of thing?”

  “You weren’t cooperative yesterday, Weldon. I think you have information you’re not giving me. I have my doubts about our level of sincerity here.”

  “I get the feeling I shouldn’t have bothered you today.”

  “Your brother Lyle paid me a visit. He told me a long story about your father.”

  “Lyle’s a great entertainer. Did you know he had a zydeco band before he got hit with a bolt of religion?”

  “He said the prowler your wife saw was your father. He said he’s seen the man in his TV audience in Baton Rouge.”

  “Years ago Lyle put so many chemicals in his head it glows in the dark. He has hallucinations.”

  “Was Bama hallucinating?”

  “You’re poking a stick in the wrong place, Dave.”

  Before I spoke again I waited a moment and looked out the screen at the rain falling through the limbs of the mimosa tree in my backyard.

  “So there’s nothing to Lyle’s story, then?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, there is. But it’s not anything you might be interested in. The truth is that Lyle takes money from a lot of pitiful nigras and po’ white trash who think heat lightning is a sign out of Revelation. But after the television cameras are off and the audience goes home, my brother has problems with his conscience. Instead of dealing with it, he’s developed this obsession that our old man is back from the dead and is trying to thread our souls on a fish stringer.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A week or so.”

  “Give me your mother-in-law’s address and phone number.”

  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 long-range 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 bla
ck 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 exorcised 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 and 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 ch
amber, 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.