James Burke - Burning Angel

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday, you’d make a great actress,” I said.

She was silent, her expression flat and in abeyance, as though my meaning had not quite swum into her ken.

“You had me convinced we were married,” I said.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I talked with a couple of guys I know at NOPD. Tommy Carrol isn’t pressing charges. He’s got a beef pending on an automatic weapons violation.”

“That’s the flash?”

“That’s it.”

She began leafing through some pages in a file folder as though I were not there.

“But I’ve got a personal problem about yesterday’s events,” I said.

“What might that be?” she said, not looking up from the folder.

“We need to take it out of overdrive, Helen.”

She swiveled her chair toward me, her eyes as intense and certain as a drill instructor’s.

“I’ve got two rules,” she said. “Shitbags don’t get treated like churchgoers, and somebody tries to take me, a civilian, or another cop down, he gets neutralized on the spot.”

“Sometimes people get caught in their own syllogism.”

“ What? ”

“Why let your own rules lock you in a corner?”

“You don’t like working with me, Dave, take it to the old man.”

“You’re a good cop. But you’re unrelenting. It’s a mistake.”

“You got anything else on your mind?”

“Nope.”

“I ran this guy Emile Pogue all kinds of ways,” she said, the door already closed on the previous’ subject “There’s no record on him.”

“Hang on a minute.” I went down to my office and came back. “Here’s the diary and notebook Sonny Boy Marsallus gave me. If this is what Delia Landry’s killers were after, its importance is lost on me.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Read it or give it back, Helen, I don’t care.”

She dropped it in her desk drawer.

“You really got your nose out of joint because I took down that gun dealer?” she said.

“I was probably talking about myself.”

“How about getting the corn fritters out of your mouth?”

“I’ve put down five guys in my career. They all dealt the play. But I still see them in my dreams. I wish I didn’t.”

“Try seeing their victims’ faces for a change,” she said, and bent back over the file folder on her desk.

The juke joint run by Luke Fontenot was across the railway tracks and down a dirt road that traversed green fields of sugarcane and eventually ended in a shell cul-de-sac by a coulee and a scattered stand of hackberry and oak trees. The juke joint was a rambling wood shell of a building on top of cinder blocks, the walls layered with a combination of Montgomery Ward brick and clapboard; the cracked and oxidized windows held together with pipe tape, still strung with Christmas lights and red and green crepe paper bells. A rusted JAX sign, with stubs of broken neon tubing on it, hung above the front screen door.

In back were two small dented tin trailers with windows and doors that were both curtained.

Inside, the bar was made of wood planks that had been wrapped and thumbtacked with oilcloth. The air smelled of the cigarette smoke that drifted toward the huge window fan inset in the back wall, spilled beer, okra and shrimp boiling on a butane stove, rum and bourbon, and melted ice and collins mix congealing in the bottom of a drain bin.

All of the women in the bar were black or mulatto, but some of the men were white, unshaved, blue-collar, their expressions between a leer and a smile directed at one another, as though somehow their presence there was part of a collective and private joke, not to be taken seriously or held against them.

Luke Fontenot was loading long-necked bottles of beer in the cooler and didn’t acknowledge me, although I was sure he saw me out of the corner of his eye. Instead, it was his sister, who had the same gold coloring as he, who walked on her cane across the duckboards and asked if she could help me. Her eyes were turquoise, her shiny black hair cut in a pageboy, except it was shaped and curled high up on the cheek, the way a 19205 Hollywood actress might have worn it.

“I think Luke wanted to see me,” I said.

“He’s tied up right now,” she said.

“Tell him to untie himself.”

“Why you want to be bothering him, Mr. Robicheaux? He cain’t do anything about Aim Bertie’s land problems.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Ruthie Jean.”

“Maybe you’ve got things turned around, Ruthie Jean. I think Luke was out at my house at sunrise Saturday morning. Why don’t you ask him?”

She walked with her cane toward the rear of the bar, and spoke to him while he kept lowering the bottles into the cooler, his face turning from side to side in case a hot bottle exploded in his face, her back turned toward me.

He wiped his hands on a towel and picked up an opened soft drink. When he drank from it he kept the left side of his face turned out of the light.

“I’m sorry Batist gave you a bad time out at my dock,” I said.

“Everybody get cranky with age,” he said.

“What’s up, podna?”

“I need me a part-time job. I thought you might could use somebody at your shop.”

“I should have known that. You walked fifteen miles from town, at dawn, to ask me about a job.”

“I got a ride partway.”

A white man in an oil field delivery uniform went out the back screen door with a black woman who wore cutoff Levi’s and a T-shirt without a bra. She took his hand in hers before they went into one of the tin trailers. Luke’s sister glanced at my face, then closed the wood door on the screen and began sweeping behind where the door had been.

“What happened to your face?” I asked Luke.

“It get rough in here sometime. I had to settle a couple of men down.”

“One of them must have had a brick in his hand.”

He leaned on his arms and took a breath through his nostrils. “What you want?” he said.

“Who dozered the cemetery by your house Friday night?”

“I done tole you, I don’t know about no graves on that plantation. I grew up in town.”

“Okay, partner. Here’s my business card. I’ll see you around.”

He slipped it in his shirt pocket and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink.

“I ain’t meant to be unpolite,” he said. “Tell that to that old man work for you, too. I just ain’t no hep in solving nobody’s problems.”

“I pulled your jacket, Luke. You’re a hard man to read.”

He raised his hand, palm outward, toward me.

“No more, suh,” he said. “You want to ax me questions, come back with a warrant and carry me down to the jail.”

When I got into my pickup the sky was steel gray, the air humid and close as a cotton glove. Raindrops were hitting in flat drops on the cane in the fields.

Ruthie Jean came through the side door and limped toward me. She rested one hand on my window jamb. She had full cheeks and a mole by her mouth; her teeth were white against her bright lipstick.

“You saw something out here you gonna use against him?” she said. The curtains were blowing in the windows and doors of the tin trailers in back.

“I was never a vice cop,” I said.

“Then why you out here giving him a bunch of truck?”

“Your brother’s got a ten-year sheet for everything from concealed weapons to first-degree murder.”

“You saw on there he stole something?”

“No.”

“He hurt somebody didn’t bother him first, didn’t try cheat him out of his pay, didn’t take out a gun on him at a bouree table?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“But y’all make it come out like you want.”

“I’d say your brother’s ahead of the game. If Moleen Bertrand hadn’t pulled him out of the death house, with about three hours to spare, Luke would have been yesterday’s toast.”