A Stained White Radiance dr-5 Page 6

  She took a pitcher of tea out of the icebox, picked up two glasses, and we walked through a dark, cool room that gave onto a side porch. On the wall above her desk were several framed photographs: Weldon in a navy aviator's uniform; Lyle with his zydeco band, the name CATHAHOULA RAMBLERS written in white letters at the bottom; and a cracked black and-white picture of two little boys and a little girl standing in front of a man and woman, with a Ferris wheel in the background. The little girl had a paper windmill in her hand, and the boys were smiling over the tops of their cotton candy. The woman was expressionless and thick-bodied, her shoulders slightly rounded, her straw purse the only ornament or bright thing on her person. The man was dark and had a narrow face and wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat at a slant on his head. He was looking at something outside the picture.

  Drew had stopped in the doorway to the porch.

  "I was just admiring your photographs. Are those your parents?"

  She didn't answer.

  I don't remember them very well," I said.

  "What are you asking me, Dave?"

  "Lyle says your father's alive."

  "My father was a sonofabitch. I don't concern myself thinking about him."

  "His picture's hanging here, Drew."

  She set down the iced tea and the glasses on the porch and came back in the room.

  "I keep it because my brothers and mother are in it," she said. "It's the only one I have of her. the day he drove her out of the house her car went through the railing on the Atchafalaya bridge. She drowned in fifty feet of water, down where it was so dark they had to use electric lights to find her."

  "I don't think your father has any connection with this case. But I had to ask anyway. I'm sorry to bring up bad memories."

  "It's the past. Who cares about it?"

  "But if you thought your father had anything to do with it, you'd tell me, wouldn't you, Drew?" I looked her directly in the eyes. Her stare remained as intent as mine.

  "You should discount most of what Lyle tells you, Dave."

  "And if you knew, you'd also tell me why three guys would tear Weldon's house apart?"

  She pushed her tongue into her cheek and let her eyes rove over my face. No matter what the situation, Drew always gave me the feeling that she was about to step two inches from my face.

  "Come outside and sit down," she said.

  I followed her out onto the porch, and after I had sat down in a canvas chair, she sat on the corner of a wroughtiron table, with her legs apart, and looked down at me. I looked away through the screening at some bluejays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.

  "I'm going to ask you to accept something," she said. "I can't help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That's something I'm not going to do."

  "Maybe it's not yours to decide what degree of involvement you'll have with the law, Drew."

  "You want to put that a little more clearly?"

  I raised my eyes to hers.

  "Earlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn't lost on him."

  "A what?"

  "It's an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area."

  "That was supposed to impress Weldon? Are you serious?"

  I felt the skin of my face tighten.

  "Do you know the kind of life he had growing up?" she said. "I won't even try to describe it to you. But no matter how bad it was, he'd give whatever he had to me and Lyle. And I mean he'd take the food out of his mouth for us."

  I looked out at the lawn again.

  "You've got something to say?" she said.

  "I'm at a loss."

  "We perplex you?"

  "Your family didn't have the patent on hard times."

  She rubbed the heels of her hands idly on her thighs.

  "You'll never get my brother to cooperate with you by pushing him," she said.

  "What's he into, Drew?"

  "Forget the D-ring clown act and maybe one day he'll tell you about it."

  "I should revise my methods? That's the problem?"

  "Stop acting like a simpleton."

  "You always knew how to say it."

  I could have pressed on with my questions, but Drew was not one to be taken prisoner. Or at least that's what I told myself. I put my iced tea back on the table and stood up.

  "See you around," I said.

  "That's it?"

  "Why not? You've been straight with me, haven't you?"

  I walked across the blue-green lawn through the shade trees and could almost feel her troubled, hot eyes on my neck.

  I went back to the office and talked with our fingerprint man, who told me that trying to sort out the prints in Weldon's home was a nightmare. There was no single, significant object, such as a murder weapon, for him to work with, and virtually every inch of space inside the house had been touched, handled, or smeared by family members, house guests, servants, meter readers, and a crew of carpenters that Weldon had evidently hired to refurbish several rooms. The fingerprint man asked me if I would present him with an easier job next time, like recovering prints from the Greyhound bus depot.

  When I got home I found a note from Bootsie on the kitchen table, saying that she had taken Alafair with her to the grocery store in town. The evening was warm, the western sky maroon with low-hanging strips of cloud, and I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou's edge. Gradually I could feel the fatigue and concerns of the day leave me, and at the drawbridge I turned around and hit it hard all the way home, the blood pounding in my neck, the sweat glazing on my chest. The house was in shadow now, the notched and pegged cypress planks as dark and hard-looking as iron, and I went into the backyard, where I could still see the late sun above the duck pond and the roofless barn at the foot of my property, and began alternating six sets of push-ups, leg lifts, and stomach crunches.

  I propped my feet on the bench of the redwood picnic table that we kept under the mimosa tree and did each push-up as slowly as I could, my back straight, touching my forehead lightly against the clipped grass, my muscles tightening across my ribs and through my shoulders and biceps.

  I was old enough to know that most of it was a narcissistic vanity, but at a certain age you're given the luxury of no longer having to be an apologist for yourself. Sometimes it feels good to be over a half-century old and to still be a player, a bit scarred perhaps, but still out there on the mound, messing them up with sliders and spitters when your fastball won't hum anymore. I had a round scar the diameter of a cigar on both sides of my left shoulder, where a psychopath had cored a hole right below my collarbone with a.38 round; a pungi-stick scar on my stomach that looked like a flattened gray worm; and a spray of raised welts across my thigh, like Indian arrowheads wedged under the tissue, a lover's kiss from a bouncing Betty that lighted me on a night trail in Vietnam with such a heated brilliance that I believed my soul left my breast and I could look down and count my bones inside my skin.

  But I was all right, I thought. I no longer had dreams about the murder of my wife Annie, and the nocturnal film strips from Vietnam had become less and less distinct, as though the flattening elephant grass under the whirling helicopter blades, the grunts piling out of the Hueys and racing for the cover of the banyan trees, their pots clamped on their heads with one hand, the thump of mortars in a ville across the rice paddy, were all now part of someone else's experience, not really mine anymore or maybe I had finally come to realize that I was only a small part of an army made up of blacks and slum kids and poor-whites from cotton-gin and lumber towns who had a collective cross dropped on them that no one should have to bear. But at least I knew now that it wasn't mine to bear alone anymore, and so maybe I didn't have to bear it at all.

  As always in my moments of self-indulgent reverie I had failed to notice an aluminum pot that w
as sitting in the middle of the redwood table. It was filled with shelled shrimp and an okra and tomato roux, and a red line of ants went from a crack in the table, up one side of the pot and down inside. I picked it up, took a spade from the tool shed, cleaned out the spoiled food in the vegetable garden by the coulee, and buried it.

  The doctors at Baylor in Houston and the specialist we used in Lafayette had tried to explain in their best way (and, like most physicians, they were inept with language, even though the compassion was obviously there in their voices) that there was no one answer for lupus. The steroids and medicines that we used to control it, to alleviate its symptoms, to knock it into remission, to protect the connective tissue and the kidneys, were hard to put into perfect balance, and sometimes an imbalance caused moments of hallucination, even temporary periods of psychosis.

  I had seen her sway once to music that was not there and had dismissed it; then on a second occasion she told me that perhaps in fact dead people had called me up on the phone when I was having delirium tremens years ago, because just minutes earlier the phone had rung and she had picked up the receiver and had heard the voice of her dead sister.

  An hour later she was fine and laughing at her own imagination.

  Tomorrow I would call the specialist in Lafayette and make another appointment. it was dusk now, and the purple air was thick with birds. I walked down to the dock to help Batist close up. He wore cutoff Levi's, a tank top, and canvas boat shoes with no socks. His black body looked so hard and muscular you could break barrel slats across it. He was in the back of the bait shop, flinging cases of Jax and Dixie beer into a stack against the wall, an unlit cigar shoved back in his jaw like a stick.

  I seined some dead shiners out of the bait tank, then began restocking one of the coolers with long-necked bottles of beer.

  "Somet'ing wrong, Dave?" he asked.

  "No, not really."

  I could feel his eyes on me.

  "Too much work at the office, I suppose," I said.

  "That's funny. It don't usually bother you."

  "It's just one of those days, Batist."

  "When I got some trouble at home, sometimes trouble with my wife, my kids, I don't like to tell nobody about it. So I just study on it. It ain't smart, no."

  "I worry about Bootsie, But there's nothing for it."

  "Don't pretend you be knowing that. You don't know that at all."

  I didn't say anything more. I pushed the bottles of beer deep into the crushed ice. The bare electric bulb overhead glinted dully off the smooth metal caps and filled the inside of the bottles with a trembling gold-brown light. My hands were numb up to my wrists.

  "We don't need to ice down no more. We got enough for tomorrow," Batist said.

  "I'll finish closing up. Why don't you go on home?"

  "I got to sweep out."

  "I'll do it."

  "I ain't in no hurry, me."

  I took another case of Jax off the wall and laid the bottles flat on the ice, between the necks of the bottles I had already loaded horizontally into the cooler. I slid the aluminum top shut with the heel of my hand.

  Batist was still watching me. Then he lit his cigar, flipped the match out the window into the dark, and began sweeping the plank floor. He was a good and kind man, and even though it might be a cliche for a southern white man to talk about the loyalty of a black person, I was convinced that if need be he would open his veins for me.

  I said goodnight to him and walked back up to the house.

  In the kitchen Bootsie and Alafair were taking pieces of pizza out of a box and putting them on plates.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next morning I left early for New Orleans and spent Two hours looking through mug books at my former place of employment, First District headquarters just outside the French Quarter, but I did not see any of the three men who had been inside Weldon's house. Most of the men I used to work with were gone-burnt-out, transferred, retired, or dead-and the two detectives I talked with were Of no help. One was a new man from Jefferson Parish, and the other was bored and uninterested by a case that had nothing to do with his workload. In fact, he kept yawning and playing with his empty coffee cup while I described the intruders to him. Finally I said, "They don't sound like local talent, hub?"

  "They don't clang any bells for me."

  I had given him my business card. His cup had already made a half-moon coffee print on it.

  "But you'll rack your memory, won't you?" I said.

  "What?"

  "If I wanted to have somebody whacked out in New Orleans, who would I have to see?"

  "His face began to grow attentive with the suggestion of the insult.

  "What are you getting at?" he asked.

  "There are at least four guys in the Quarter who can arrange a contract hit for five hundred dollars. Do you know who they are?"

  "I don't care for your tone."

  "Maybe it's just one of those off days. Thanks for the use of your mug books. I'd appreciate your keeping my card in your desk in case you need to call me."

  I drove on over to Decatur by the river and parked my truck down the street from Jackson Square and walked into the French Quarter. The narrow streets were still cool with morning shadow, and I could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the cafes, strawberries and plums from the crates set out on the sidewalks in front of small grocery stores, the dank, cool odor of old brick in the courtyards. It had rained just before dawn, and water leaked out of the green window shutters on the pastel sides of the buildings and dripped from the rows of potted plants on the balconies or hanging from the ironwork.

  I walked down St. Ann in the shadow of the cathedral to a one-story stucco building with a piked gate and a domed brick walkway that led to an office just off a flagstone courtyard. The courtyard was bordered with tight clumps of untrimmed banana trees. Painted on the frosted glass office window were the words CLETus PURCEL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES.

  He had been my partner in the First District and one of the best cops I ever knew. Among the lowlifes, the wiseguys, the psychopaths, even the contract hit men out of Houston and Miami, he'd had a reputation that was notorious even by the standards of the New Orleans Police Department. Hard-nosed, mainline recidivists who laughed at the threat of ten-year jolts in Angola would swallow with apprehension and reconsider their point of view when they were told that Clete had taken an interest in their situations.

  Once a recently discharged convict from Parchman, a man who had shot out his wife's eye with a BB gun and whom I busted in a hot-pillow joint on Airline Highway, said he was coming back to New Orleans to cool out the cop who was responsible for his grief. Clete met him at the Greyhound depot, walked him into the restroom, and poured a container of liquid soap down his mouth. We never heard from him again.

  But his marriage went bad, and eventually he got into trouble with whiskey, prostitutes, and shylocks, and a teaspoon at a time he began to serve the forces and people he had hated all his life. Finally he took ten thousand dollars to get rid of a witness in a federal investigation and barely made the flight to Guatemala, three minutes before his fellow detectives were racing down the concourse behind him with a murder warrant. Later the murder charge was dropped and he became head of security at two casinos in Las Vegas and Reno and the bodyguard of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio. I had marked Clete off as a turncoat, a pitiful facsimile of the friend I'd once had, but I came to learn that his loyalty and courage went far deeper into his character than his personal problems. His resignation from the mob came in the form of Sally Dio's private plane exploding all over a mountaintop in western Montana. Sally Dio and his entourage had to be combed out of the ponderosa trees with garden rakes. The National Transportation Safety Board said they suspected that someone had put sand in the fuel tanks.

  "How's it hanging, noble mon?" he said from behind his desk when I opened his office door.

  He wore a candy-striped shirt that looked like it was about to burst on his
huge shoulders, a tie pulled loose at the throat, a blue-black.38 revolver in a nylon shoulder holster, and a powder-blue porkpie hat pushed down low on his forehead. His eyes were green and intelligent, his hair sandy, and his face always had a flush to it because of his weight and high blood pressure. A scar the texture and color of a bicycle patch ran down through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he'd been bashed with a length of pipe when he was a kid.

  I had already called him and told him about my problems with the Sonnier investigation.

  "How'd you make out down at the First?" he said.

  "I didn't recognize anyone in the mug books. I didn't get any help from anyone, either. I got the feeling I was a tourist from the provinces."

  "Let's face it, Union. They didn't hold a going-away party when either one of us hung it up."

  "How do you like the PI business?" I sat down across from him in a straw and deer-hide swayback chair. The walls of his office were decorated with bullfight posters, wine bags, and festooned banderillas. Through the back window I could see the courtyard and Clete's barbells and weight bench next to a stone well that leaked water at the top.

  "It's good," he said. "Well, maybe the word's easy. You don't get rich at it, but the competition isn't exactly the first team. You know, ex-cops who majored in stupid, redneck jocks from Mississippi who think the big score is working security at Walmart. I'm clearing around five hundred a week after the overhead. It beats running a nightclub for greaseballs, I guess."

  "Sounds all right."

  He took a cigarette out of his package of Camels and held it for a moment in his big hand, then he set it down on the desk blotter and put a stick of gum in his mouth. His eyes smiled at me while he chewed.

  "The problem is that a lot of it's a drag," he said. "Discovery investigations for lawyers, stuff like that. It's not like the old days in Homicide when we used to really make them wince. You remember when we-"