ON MONDAY MORNING I called Betsy Mossbacher at the FBI and told her that Chula Ramos was probably working part-time as a delivery man for Sidney Kovick.
“Delivering what?” she said.
“Maybe just flowers. Look, Clete Purcel and I told Sidney we knew he had been stashing counterfeit in his house. He said something to the effect Clete and I were in over our heads.”
“What does Purcel have to do with this?”
“Not a lot.”
“Some counterfeit money showed up in a Morgan City mailbox. The engraving and paper are impressive. Is this the money we’re talking about?”
“It could be.”
“You tell Purcel to stay out of federal business.”
The purpose of my call was slipping away, and I think that’s the way Betsy wanted it. I didn’t take the bait. “Why would Kovick tell us we’re in over our heads?” I asked.
“I think he’s convinced himself he’s a patriot defending his homeland. Personally I think he’s psychotic. An agent in Mississippi believes Kovick’s goons poured the body of Kovick’s neighbor into the foundation of a casino in Biloxi.”
“You’re losing me, Betsy.”
“The Taliban funds al Qaeda with the sale of heroin. You don’t think they’re capable of other criminal enterprises?”
I still didn’t know what she was talking about and I wasn’t going to guess. “I need a favor from you,” I said. “A guy named Ronald Bledsoe may try to harm my daughter. He claims to be a PI out of Key West, but Tallahassee has almost nothing on him, except the fact he got a license through a bail-bonds office about ten years back. Neither does the NCIC. I’m convinced he’s a dangerous and depraved man, the kind who leaves shit-prints somewhere. But so far I haven’t found them.”
“Have you run him through AFIS?”
“Not yet.”
“Give it a try. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can. What did your daughter do to this guy?”
“Busted his nose and lips and knocked out one of his teeth.”
“He’s pissed over that?”
But jokes about Ronald Bledsoe weren’t funny.
THREE DAYS EARLIER a Guatemalan illegal had been stripping cypress planks off a wall inside the entranceway of a historic New Orleans home. The workman made eight dollars an hour and feared civil authority in this country and his own. But he feared losing his job even more. The contractor who had hired him specialized in the restoration of historical properties. The contractor also made a sizable income by salvaging colonial-era brick, heart-pine floors, brass hinges and door knockers, square-head nails, milk-glass doorknobs, claw-foot bathtubs, iron wall hooks for cook pots, and grapeshot and.58-caliber minié balls embedded in housefronts during the White League takeover of New Orleans in 1874. Every item with possible resale value at a teardown or refurbish job went into a pile.
The workman from Guatemala sank his crowbar into a strip of rotten cypress and peeled it and a shower of Formosa termites onto the floor. Amid the sawdust and insects and spongelike wood he saw a blunted and bent metal-jacketed bullet, no bigger than half the size of his little finger. He blew the dust off it and examined its torn surfaces. “Hey, boss, what you wanta do wit’ dis?” he asked.
HELEN CALLED ME into her office just before quitting time. Raindrops had started to fall on her window and I could see trees bending in the wind by the cemetery. She was leaning forward on her desk, her chin propped on her fist. It was the kind of body English and opaque manner she used when she was preparing to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
“I just got off the phone with Betsy Mossbacher. She’ll be here in an hour and a half,” she said. “She has a federal warrant on Otis Baylor’s house.”
“I talked to her this morning. She didn’t say anything about coming to New Iberia.”
“She just got the warrant. Last week some repairmen working across the street from Baylor’s house in New Orleans dug a rifle slug out of a wall. The contractor had heard about the Melancon-Rochon shooting and called NOPD. They passed it on to the FBI. The round is a thirty-aught-six. It came through a ventilated shutter and a glass pane behind it and embedded between two planks. She says it’s in real good shape, considering the fact it may have gone through two people. Anyway, the Feds are jumping on it before word gets back to Baylor.”
“So?”
“You need to be there when they serve the warrant.”
“They don’t need me to serve a search warrant.”
“This is our parish. We cooperate with outside agencies, but we don’t abandon our own jurisdiction to them. Get with the program, Streak.”
I ATE A SANDWICH in my office and met Betsy and another agent in the parking lot at 7:00 p.m. The sky was bright with rain in the west, the live oaks along Main a dark green as we drove out of town toward Jeanerette. I was sitting in the back of their vehicle, feeling like a hangnail, a perfunctory witness to the scapegoating of a man who had been caught up in events that were either beyond his control or his ability to bear them.
Betsy was quiet most of the way. I had the feeling she was not comfortable with her assignment that evening, either. Betsy was always the odd piece in the puzzle box, a straight arrow whose clumsiness and cowgirl manners gave her an unjustified reputation as an eccentric. As in the case of Helen Soileau, her male colleagues often made jokes about her behind her back. The truth was most of them weren’t worth the parings of her fingernails.
“You say he’s still got the Springfield?” the man behind the wheel said.
“That was the last indication he gave me,” I replied.
The agent driving wore his hair boxed on his neck. He kept his hands in the ten-two position on the wheel, his eyes always on the road, never glancing in the rearview mirror when he spoke to me.
“Why wouldn’t he dump the Springfield?” he said.
“Because he knows that’s the first thing a guilty man would do.”
“You’re saying he’s dirty for this?”
“No, I’m saying Otis is smart. I’m also saying he’s probably taking somebody else’s weight,” I replied.
“Oh yeah? How did you arrive at that?” he asked.
“Hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans residents drowned who didn’t have to. I suspect that’s because some of the guys in Washington you work for couldn’t care less. So a guy who sells insurance gets a chain saw up his ass. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”
This time his eyes shifted into the rearview mirror. “You guys down here have issues about something?”
“Not us. We’re happy as clams,” I replied.
Betsy gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.
The grounds and trees outside Otis’s house were dark with shadow when we arrived, the inside brightly lit, the air cool and filled with a fragrance of flowers and freshly baked bread in the kitchen and rainwater leaching out of the oaks into the leaves. His home was the picture of a family at peace with the world. But nothing could have been further from the truth, particularly after our arrival.
Betsy walked up on the screened-in gallery and knocked hard on the door, her mouth crimped, her ID in her hand. In the gloaming of the day, her hair had the bright yellow color of straw. She glanced at her watch and hit on the door again, this time harder, with the flat of her fist.
Otis answered, wearing a white shirt and tie, a piece of fried chicken in his hand.
“Are you Mr. Baylor?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, his eyes going from Betsy to me, as though somehow I were his betrayer.
“I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. We have a warrant to search your house. I want you and your family to sit in the living room while we do. Where is your rifle, Mr. Baylor?”
“I’ll get it for you,” Otis replied.
“No, you won’t. You and your wife and daughter and anyone else who is in the house will sit down in the living room, then you’ll tell me where it is,” she said.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
“Do what she says, Mr. Baylor,” I told him.
He went back in the kitchen and returned with Thelma and Mrs. Baylor. After they sat down, the three of them looked up at us expectantly, as children might, caught between their inveterate American desire to obey the law and the fact that strangers who were basically no different or more powerful than themselves could walk into their home, during dinner, and treat them like livestock.
“The rifle is in the closet of the master bedroom,” Otis said. “A box of shells is on the shelf. That’s the only firearm in the house.”
“Why are you doing this now? I thought all this was settled,” Mrs. Baylor said. She had brought her drink from the table. It was tea-colored but had no ice in it. She was trying to appear poised, her back straight, her drink resting on her knee, but somehow she made me think of a china plate threaded with hairline cracks. “Is this being given to the media? Do you know what that will do to my husband’s business?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t report to the media,” Betsy said. “We try to treat you in a respectful fashion. We try to be as unobtrusive as possible.”
“Then why do you keep bothering us? This is where our tax money goes? For God’s sakes, Otis, say something.”
“The men who were shot in front of your house were shot in cold blood, Ms. Baylor. By anyone’s definition, that’s capital murder,” Betsy said. “The seventeen-year-old had no criminal record and lost his life for committing a burglary. Vigilantes were hunting people of color in uptown New Orleans. My boss isn’t going to let that stand.”
“I’d like to contact my attorney. At this point I don’t think we should have any further conversation with you,” Otis said.
“That’s your right, sir. But we’re not your enemies,” Betsy said.
“Stop lying,” Thelma said.
“Say that again?” Betsy replied.
“You’re here to put my father in prison. Stop pretending you’re his friend. My father never hurt anybody in his life. You’re scum, all of you,” Thelma said.
“That’s enough, Thelma,” Otis said.
Betsy’s colleague came from the back of the house with the Springfield looped upside down over his shoulder, the bolt open on the magazine. He carried a carton of.30-06 shells in his left hand. “The marine sniper’s dream,” he said.
Betsy looked down at Thelma. “Did you see the faces of those black dudes?” she said.
“Yes,” Thelma said.
“Where?” Betsy said, surprised.
“Mr. Robicheaux showed me pictures of them the other day.”
“Did you ever see them before the night they came to your house?” Betsy asked.
“No.”
“Nobody in your family would have any reason to shoot them, huh?” Betsy said.
Thelma’s mind was working fast now, her eyes locked on Betsy’s, her expression as flat as paint on canvas. “You know that I was raped by black men, don’t you? You’re using what happened to me to build a case against my father.”
“From what I know of your father, he wouldn’t arbitrarily shoot someone. What about that, Thelma?” Betsy said.
“That’s it. You have what you came for. Now please leave our home,” Otis said.
“Give it some thought, Mr. Baylor. You’re an intelligent man. We have a reason for taking your rifle. By noon tomorrow we may have evidence that can send you or a member of your family away for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”
His eyes were glistening, his jaws locked tight.
Outside, I got in the back of the vehicle, glad to be gone from the Baylor home and the fear and angst we had just sowed inside it. The sky was dark now, the lights of houses reflecting off the surface of Bayou Teche. I could see Betsy’s face in the glow of the dashboard. “You were pretty quiet inside, Dave,” she said.
“It’s like using a speargun on fish in a swimming pool,” I said.
“Funny attitude for a cop,” the man behind the wheel said.
Betsy was half turned in her seat, her eyes searching my face. “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“We’re on the same side, aren’t we, buddy? How about losing the role of the laconic man from Shitsville?” the driver said, looking in the rearview.
“Thelma Baylor looked stricken when I showed her mug shots of the looters. I think they’re the guys who raped and tortured her. I think she wanted to conceal that fact from me because it would drive the nail in her dad’s coffin.”
“You just now decided to tell us that?” the driver said.
I leaned forward against my safety restraint. There were small pits in the back of the driver’s neck, just below his boxed hairline. His jowls had a wrinkled sag in them, like those of a man whose face doesn’t belong on his youthful body. “My conclusions are speculative in nature. In fact, they’re based entirely on personal perception and have no prosecutorial value,” I said.
The moon was bright overhead and the cane in the fields that had been mashed flat by Rita looked dry and hard on the ground, like thousands of discarded broom handles. The driver glanced at a row of Negro shacks speeding past us. Several of them had lost their tin roofs, and plywood and blue felt had been nailed across the exposed joists. Up ahead, a drunk man was walking unsteadily along the side of the road, his body silhouetted by the neon beer sign on a rusted house trailer that served as a bar. “This is quite a place,” the driver said. “A person needs to visit it to get the full bouquet.”
THE NEXT MORNING a technician from the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted a print off Clete’s car tag in the spot where Ronald Bledsoe had rubbed off the mud to see a number more clearly. We ran the print through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System and came up with nothing.
“I don’t get it,” I said to Helen. “Guys like this get in trouble.”
“Maybe he’s slicker than we think he is,” she said. “Maybe that neurotic personality is manufactured. Maybe he works for the G.”
“How about I figure a way to bring him in?”
“I don’t want to step on your feelings, but legally Bledsoe is the victim, not the perpetrator. Your daughter remodeled his face with her foot. He could have her up on an A and B and sue y’all cross-eyed for good measure. Count your blessings, Pops.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“I didn’t think you would,” she replied.
I WENT HOME for lunch. Alafair was in her room, working on her first attempt at a novel, tapping away on a computer she had bought at a yard sale. I had offered to buy her a better one, but she had said a more expensive computer would not help her write better. She kept a notebook on her nightstand and wrote in it before going to sleep. She had already filled two hundred pages with notes and experimental lines for her book. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down the dreams she had just had. When she awoke in the morning two scenes had already written themselves in her imagination and during the next few hours she would translate them into one thousand words of double-spaced typescript.
She often wrote out her paragraphs in longhand, then edited each paragraph before typing it on manuscript paper. She edited each typed page with a blue pencil and placed it facedown in a wire basket and began composing another one. If she caught me reading over her shoulder, she would hit me in the stomach with her elbow. The next morning she would revise everything she had written the previous day and then start in on the one thousand words she required of herself for the present day. I was amazed at how much fine work her system produced.
In high school she had been given special permission to enroll in a creative writing class taught by Ernest Gaines at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines believed she had an exceptional talent. So did the admissions boards at Reed College in Portland. She was given an academic scholarship and received a degree in English literature last spring. She also earned a graduate fellowship at Stanford University, which she would enter this coming spring. The fact that she had gotten herself into a conflict with an aberration like Ronald Bledsoe was a source of frustration I could barely constrain, particularly when I needed to discuss it with her in a forthright fashion.
“Got a second, Alf?” I said.
She rested her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead, trying to conceal her vexation at being disturbed while she was writing. “Sure, what’s going on?” she said.
I pulled up a chair by her desk. “We’ve run Bledsoe through AFIS and the National Crime Information Center, but he’s a complete blank. In some ways that’s more disturbing than finding a sheet on him. He’s obviously a geek and geeks leave shit-prints. But this guy is the exception.”
“So what’s that tell you?” she asked.
“That he’s slick or he has some juice behind him.”
“He got what he deserved. I say fuck him.”
“Do you have to talk that way?”
“He put his hand on me. I could feel his spittle in my ear. Want me to tell you what he said?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Okay, Alf.”
“Will you stop calling me that stupid name?”
“Look, one other thing, I may end up putting Otis Baylor in jail. I know you and Thelma are friends, so-”
“I got the message. How about giving me credit for having more than two brain cells?”
The years have not brought me much in the way of wisdom. But I have learned that the father of a young woman has to remember only two lessons in caring for his daughter: He must be by her side unreservedly when she needs him, and he must disengage when she doesn’t. The latter, at least for me, has been more difficult than the former.
“You have more than two brain cells?” I said.
“Have you ever been hit in the head with a basketful of manuscript paper?” she said.
I WENT BACK to the department at 1:00 p.m. Wally, our hypertensive, elephantine dispatcher and full-time departmental comedian, stopped me on the way to my office. “I was just about to put these messages in your box,” he said.
“Thanks, Wally,” I said, taking three pink memo slips from his hand.
“His first name is Bertrand. He don’t like to give his last name. He also don’t have any manners.”
“Was this a black kid?”
“Hard to tell. When a guy says, ‘Pull the Q-tips out of your nose ’cause I cain’t understand what you saying, you honky motherfucker,’ does that mean the guy’s got racial issues?”
“Could be. Thanks for taking the message, Wally.”
“Glad to help out. I love this job. T’anks for introducing me to your friends.”
I went to my office and punched in the cell number that Wally had written down on all three message slips. “Bertrand?” I said.
“Is that you, Mr. Dave?” a voice said.
Mr. Dave?
“Yeah, it is, Bertrand. What’s up?”
“There’s something weird going on. Somebody’s handing out free cell phones to people that’s in the life. Even people in the shelters, anybody who might know something about them stones. A phone number comes wit’ the cell. I seen Andre wit’ one. They come from Wal-Mart. Andre’s attitude ain’t making me feel real comfortable.”
“What do you want from me?”
“What you said about me being a rapist was the troot’. I done it wit’ Eddy and Andre-twice. We done it to a young girl in the Lower Nine. I been all over down there looking for her. I been in the shelters, too. Maybe she died in the storm.”
I didn’t want to be his confessor. In fact, my stomach turned at the image of three grown men sexually assaulting a helpless fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the bad luck to walk home from a street fair by herself.
“You still there?” Bertrand asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. You did the crime, stack the time.”
But he wasn’t listening. “The other girl was sitting in a car that was broke down by the Desire. She was white. She said she’d been at a high school prom. Eddy got pissed off at her and burned her with his cigarette. He burned her on her breasts.”
“If you’re looking for Valium for your sins, you called up the wrong guy.”
“Who else I’m gonna tell, man? People all over the city got cell phones waiting to dime me. They say you call this certain number and a guy wit’ this cracker voice tells them he gonna make them rich if they give me up. I walked past a guy in the shelter yesterday and he made these sounds like a chain saw starting up. Everybody t’ought it was funny.”
“What happened to Father Jude LeBlanc?”
He paused, then I heard him take a breath. “We’d been at my auntie’s house. A wave smashed right t’rou the picture window and washed us out the back. We swam up on this trash pile, but it was full of them brown recluse spiders, the kind that eat into your tissue and mess you up later. A woman was in the water wit’ them brown spiders all over her face and in her hair. They was biting her and she was screaming and swatting at them and swallowing water at the same time. That’s when we seen the priest pull his boat up to the church roof and start chopping a hole in it wit’ an ax. That’s when Eddy said, ‘it’s that motherfucker or us.’ We all went in the water and headed for him, wit’ them spiders still in our clothes.
“I was the first one on the roof. I said, ‘We need the boat. There’s four of us and ain’t but one of you. You can come wit’ us, maybe, but we taking the boat.’
“He stops chopping and says, ‘The attic is full of people. They gonna drown. You guys got to help me.’
“Help him? How I’m gonna help him, wit’ Eddy and Andre and Kevin all looking at me to do something, like it’s on me, like ain’t nobody shooting off their mouth now, like I gotta do something, Eddy ain’t such big shit no more? So I grabbed the ax. What was I suppose to do? Maybe he was gonna hit me wit’ it. I seen a man shove a boy off an air mattress, just stuck his hand out and shoved him in the face, a boy wasn’t more than ten years old. That’s what it was like down there, man. You wasn’t there.”
“What did you do to Father LeBlanc?” I said, my heart beating, my palm clammy on the phone receiver.
“He wouldn’t give up the ax. He was standing between me and the boat, on the edge of the roof. I went toward him and he just stood there and wouldn’t get out of the way. I say, ‘Man, we gonna get that boat one way or the other. Don’t get fucked up for something you cain’t change.’
“He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ What’d he mean by that? I knowed what I was doing. I was saving my life. I was saving Eddy and Kevin and Andre’s life. I knowed what I was doing. I ain’t had no choice. How come he said that to me?”
“What did you do, Bertrand?”
“He started fighting wit’ me. He wasn’t strong at all. His arms was like sticks. He had tracks on them. I couldn’t believe it, man, he was a priest and he was a junkie. I could see his teet’ and smell his breath and he was clawing at my eyes. That’s when I hit him, man, hard, wit’ my fist, right in the face. He went over backward in the water and I heard Eddy say, ‘Hit that motherfucker wit’ the ax. Don’t let him get into the boat.’
“But I ain’t seen him again. The water was dark and it was like he went straight down the wall of the church into the darkness, like a stone statue sinking. How come he said them words to me? I knowed what I was doing, man. I was saving lives in my own way.”
“Are you that stupid? Most of the people in that church attic died because of you. What do you think he meant?” I said.
Bertrand Melancon began to weep, uncontrollably. “I’m going to hell, ain’t i?”
You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself.