James Burke: Burning Angel

It was March and already warm, but Moleen Bertrand wore a long-sleeve candy-striped shirt with ruby cuff links and a rolled white collar. He was over six feet and could not be called a soft man, but at the same time there was no muscular tone or definition to his body, as though in growing up he had simply bypassed physical labor and conventional sports as a matter of calling.

He had been born to an exclusionary world of wealth and private schools, membership in the town’s one country club, and Christmas vacations in places the rest of us knew of only from books, but no one could accuse him of not having improved upon what he had been given. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Springhill and a major in the air force toward the end of the Vietnam War. He made the Law Review at Tulane and became a senior partner at his firm in less than five years. He was also a champion skeet shooter. Any number of demagogic politicians who were famous for their largess sought his endorsement and that of his family name. They didn’t receive it. But he never gave offense or was known to be unkind.

We walked under the trees in his backyard. His face was cool and pleasant as he sipped his iced tea and looked at a motorboat and a water-skier hammering down the bayou on pillows of yellow foam.

“Bertie can come to my office if she wants. I don’t know what else to tell you, Dave,” he said. His short salt-and-pepper hair was wet and freshly combed, the part a razor-straight pink line in his scalp.

“She says your grandfather gave her family the land.”

“The truth is we haven’t charged her any rent. She’s interpreted that to mean she owns the land.”

“Are you selling it?”

“It’s a matter of time until it gets developed by someone.”

“Those black people have lived there a long time, Moleen.”

“Tell me about it.” Then the brief moment of impatience went out of his face. “Look, here’s the reality, and I don’t mean it as a complaint. There’re six or seven nigra families in there we’ve taken care of for fifty years. I’m talking about doctor and dentist bills, schooling, extra money for June Teenth, getting people out of jail. Bertie tends to forget some things.”

“She mentioned something about gold being buried on the property.”

“Good heavens. I don’t want to offend you, but don’t y’all have something better to do?”

“She took care of me when I was little. It’s hard to chase her out of my office.”

He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. His nails were immaculate, his touch as soft as a woman’s. “Send her back to me,” he said.

“What’s this stuff about gold?”

“Who knows? I always heard Jean Lafitte buried his treasure right across the bayou there, right over by those two big cypress trees.” Then his smile became a question mark. “Why are you frowning?”

“You’re the second person to mention Lafitte to me in the last couple of days.”

“Hmmm,” he said, blowing air out his nostrils.

“Thanks for your time, Moleen.”

“My pleasure.” I walked toward my truck, which was parked on the gravel cul-de-sac by his boathouse. I rubbed the back of my neck, as though a half-forgotten thought were trying to burrow its way out of my skin.

“Excuse me, didn’t you represent Bertie’s nephew once?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“His name’s Luke, you got him out of the death house?”

“That’s the man.”

I nodded and waved good-bye again.

He had mentioned getting people out of jail but nothing as dramatic as saving somebody from the electric chair hours before an electrocution.

Why not?

Maybe he was just humble, I said in response to my own question.

When I backed out of the drive, he was idly pouring his iced tea into the inverted cone at the top of an anthill.

I drove out on the St. Martinville highway to the lime green duplex set back among pine trees where Delia Landry had suddenly been thrust through a door into an envelope of pain that most of us can imagine only in nightmares. The killers had virtually destroyed the interior. The mattresses, pillows, and stuffed chairs were slashed open, dishes and books raked off the shelves, dresser drawers dumped on the floors, plaster and lathes stripped out of the walls with either a crowbar or claw hammer; even the top of the toilet tank was broken in half across the bowl.

Her most personal items from the bathroom’s cabinets were strewn across the floor, cracked and ground into the imitation tile by heavy shoes. The sliding shower glass that extended across the tub had been shattered out of the frame. On the opposite side of the tub was a dried red streak that could have been painted there by a heavily soaked paintbrush.

When a homicide victim’s life can be traced backward to a nether world of pickup bars, pimps, and nickel-and-dime hustlers and street dealers, the search for a likely perpetrator isn’t a long one. But Delia Landry was a social worker who had graduated in political science from LSU only three years ago; she attended a Catholic church in St. Martinville, came from a middle-class family in Slidell, taught a catechism class to the children of migrant farm workers.

She had a boyfriend in New Orleans who sometimes stayed with her on the weekends, but no one knew his name, and there seemed to be nothing remarkable about the relationship.

What could she have done, owned, or possessed that would invite such a violent intrusion into her young life?

The killers could have made a mistake, I thought, targeted the wrong person, come to the wrong address. Why not? Cops did it.

But the previous tenants in the duplex had been a husband and wife who operated a convenience store. The next-door neighbors were Social Security recipients. The rest of the semirural neighborhood was made up of ordinary lower-middle-income people who would never have enough money to buy a home of their own.

A small wire book stand by the television set had been knocked over on the carpet. The titles of the books were unexceptional and indicated nothing other than a general reading interest. But among the splay of pages was a small newspaper, titled The Catholic Worker , with a shoe print crushed across it.

Then for some reason my eyes settled not on the telephone, which had been pulled loose from the wall jack, but on the number pasted across the telephone’s base.

I inserted the terminal back in the jack and dialed the department.

“Wally, would you go down to my office for me and look at a pink message slip stuck in the corner of my blotter?”

“Sure. Hey, I’m glad you called. The sheriff was looking for you.”

“First things first, okay?”

“Hang on.”

He put me on hold, then picked up the receiver on my desk.

“All right, Dave.”

I asked him to read me the telephone number on the message slip. After he had finished, he said, “That’s the number Sonny Marsallus left.”

“It’s also the number of the phone I’m using right now, Delia Landry’s.”

“What’s going on? Sonny decide to track his shit into Iberia Parish?”

“I think you’ve got your hand on it.”

“Look, the sheriff wants you to head out by Spanish Lake. Sweet Pea Chaisson and a carload of his broads are causing a little hysteria in front of the convenience store.”

“Then send a cruiser out there.”

“It isn’t a traffic situation.” He began to laugh in a cigar-choked wheeze. “Sweet Pea’s got his mother’s body sticking out of the car trunk. See what you can do, Dave.”

Five miles up the old Lafayette highway that led past Spanish Lake, I saw the lights on emergency vehicles flashing in front of a convenience store and traffic backing up in both directions as people slowed to stare at the uniformed cops and paramedics who themselves seemed incredulous at the situation. I drove on the road’s shoulder and pulled into the parking lot, where Sweet Pea and five of his hookers — three white, one black, one Asian — sat amidst a clutter of dirty shovels in a pink Cadillac convertible, their faces bright with sweat as the heat rose from the leather interior. A group of kids were trying to see through the legs of the adults who were gathered around the trunk of the car.