James Burke: Burning Angel

What was missing?

A file on Moleen Bertrand.

It existed somewhere, in the Pentagon or at Langley, Virginia, but I would never have access to it. Neither, in all probability, would the FBI.

But there was another clerical conduit into the Bertrand home, a case file I should have looked at a long time ago.

Julia Bertrand’s.

Helen Soileau and I spent the next hour sorting through manila folders and string-tied brown envelopes in a storage room that was stacked from the floor to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. Many were water damaged and tore loose at the bottom when you picked them up.

But we found it.

Halloween of 1983, on a dirt road between two cane fields out in Cade. Three black children, dressed in costumes, carrying trick or treat bags and jack-o’-lanterns, are walking with their grandfather toward the next house on the road. A blue Buick turns off the highway, fishtails in the dirt, scours a cloud of dust into the air. The grandfather hears the engine roar, dry clods of dirt rattling like rocks under the fenders, the tires throbbing across the baked ruts. The headlights spear through him and the children, flare into the cattails in the ditches; the grandfather believes the driver will slow, surely, pull wide toward the other side of the road, somehow abort what cannot be happening.

Instead, the driver accelerates even faster. The Buick flies by in a suck of air, a mushrooming cloud of sound and dust and exhaust fumes. The grandfather tries to close his ears as his grandchild disappears under the Buick’s bumper, sees a still-lighted and grinning jack-o’-lantern tumble crazily into the darkness.

I worked through lunch, read and reread the file and all the spiral notebook pages penciled by the original investigator. Helen came back from lunch at 1 P.M. She leaned on her knuckles on top of my desk and stared at the glossy black-and-white photos taken at the scene. “Poor kid,” she said.

The original accident report was brown and stiffen the edges from water seepage, the ink almost illegible, but you could still make out the name of the deputy who had signed it.

“Check it out,” I said, and inverted the page so Helen could read it.

“Rufus?”

“It gets more interesting,” I said, turning through the pages. “A plainclothes named Mitchell was assigned the investigation. The grandfather remembered three numbers off the license plate, and the plainclothes made a match with Julia’s Buick. Julia admitted she was driving her car out by Cade on Halloween night, but there was no apparent physical damage to link the car to the accident scene. The real hitch is in the old man’s statement, though.”

“What?”

“He said the driver was a man.” She rubbed the corner of her mouth with one finger, her eyes narrowing. “The investigator, this guy Mitchell, was confused, too,” I said. “His last note says, “Something sucks about this.”

“Mitchell was a good cop. I remember, it was about eighty-three he went to work for the Feds,” she said.

“Guess who replaced him on the case?” I said.

She studied my face. “You’re kidding?” she said.

“Our man Rufus again. Tell me, why would a cop who investigated a woman for hit-and-run vehicular homicide end up as her friend and confidant inside the department?”

“Dave, this really stinks.”

“That’s not all. Later the grandfather said he didn’t have on his glasses and wasn’t sure about the numbers on the license plate. End of investigation.”

“You want to haul that sonofabitch in here?”

“Which one?” I said.

“Rufus. Who’d you think I meant?”

“Moleen Bertrand.”

He wasn’t at his office. I drove to his home on Bayou Teche. A crew of black yardmen were mowing the huge lawn in front, raking leaves under the oaks, pruning back the banana trees until they were virtual stubs. I parked by the side garage and knocked. No one seemed to be inside. The speedboat was in the boathouse, snugged down under a tarp, wobbling in the bladed gold light off the water’s surface.

“If you looking for Mr. Moleen, he’s out at Cade,” one of the black men said.

“Where’s Miss Julia?” I asked.

“Ain’t seen her.”

“Y’all look like you’re working hard.”

“Mr. Moleen say do it right. He ain’t gonna be around for a while.”

I took the old highway out to Spanish Lake, past the restored antebellum homes on the shore and the enormous moss-strung oak trees that rippled in the breeze off the water. Then I turned down the corrugated dirt lane, under the rusted iron trellis, into the Bertrand plantation. Whoever Moleen’s business partners were, they had been busy.

Bulldozers had cut swaths through the sugarcane, flattened old corn cribs and stables, splintered wild persimmon trees into torn root systems that lay exposed like pink tubers in the graded soil. I saw Moleen on horseback by the treeline, watching a group of land surveyors drive wood stakes and flagged laths in what appeared to be a roadway that led toward the train tracks.

I drove across the field, through the flattened cane, and got out of my truck. The sun was white in the sky, the air layered with dust.

Moleen wore riding pants and boots and military spurs, a blue polo shirt, a bandanna knotted wetly around his neck, a short-brimmed straw hat with a tropical band. His right hand was curled around a quirt, his face dilated in the heat that rose from the ground.

“A hot day for it,” I said.

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

A man operating a bulldozer shifted into reverse, made a turn by the treeline, and snapped a hackberry off at ground level like a celery stalk.

“I hate looking up at a man on horseback, Moleen,” I said.

“How about just saying what’s on your mind?”

“After all these years, I finally figured you out.”

“With you, it always has to be an unpleasant moment. Why is that, sir?” he said, dismounting. He led his horse into the shade of the trees, turned to face me, a line of clear sweat sliding down his temple. Behind him, in the shadows, was the corn crib, strung with the scales of dead morning glory vines, where he and Ruthie Jean had begun their love affair years ago.

“I think Julia took your weight, Moleen.”

He looked back at me, uncomprehending. “When the child was run down, on Halloween night in eighty-three. You were the driver, not she.”

“I think you’ve lost your sanity, my friend.”

“It was a slick scam,” I said. “A successful lie always has an element of truth in it. In that way, the other side can never figure out what’s true and what’s deception. Julia admitted to having driven the car that night, but y’all knew the witness said the driver was a man. So what appeared to be her honesty threw his account into question.”

“I think you need counseling. I genuinely mean that, Dave.”

“Then you got to Rufus Arceneaux and he twisted some screws on the witness. That’s why you’ve never dumped your wife. She could get you disbarred, even sent up the road.”

His eyebrows were heavy with sweat, his knuckles white as slivers of ice on the quirt.

“I don’t believe I can find adequate words to express my feelings about a man like you,” he said.

“Clean the peanut brittle out of your mouth. That child’s death is on your soul.”

“Your problem is your own, sir. You don’t respect the class you were born into. You look into the mirror and always see what you came from. I feel sorry for you.”

He waited, the quirt poised at his side.

“You’re not worth punching out, Moleen,” I said.

I turned and walked back out into the field toward my truck, into the hot sunlight and the smell of diesel and the drift of dust from the machines that were chewing up the Bertrand plantation. My ears were ringing, my throat constricted as though someone had spit in my mouth. I heard Moleen’s saddle creak as he mounted his horse. He sawed the reins and used his spurs hard at the same time, wheeling his horse and cantering toward the survey crew.