James Burke: Burning Angel

“I ain’t got the right words. Too many bad gigs, chief. I apologize for the Dutchie,” he whispered.

When his hand fell from my chain, his breath mushroomed out of his mouth and struck against my face like a fist. A bottle fly crawled across his eyes.

Clete clicked off the dial on the shortwave set. The dead radio tubes crackled in the silence.

The next morning Helen Soileau walked with me into Clete’s office on Main. The front and back doors were open, and the papers in Clete’s wire baskets lifted and ruffled in the breeze. Helen looked around the office.

“Where’s Avon’s answer to the Beast of Buchenwald?” she said.

“What’s the problem?” Clete said from behind his desk, trying to smile.

“They knew we were coming, that’s the problem,” she said.

“Terry? Come on,” he said.

“Where is she?” Helen said.

“Getting some stuff photocopied.”

“Does she have any scratches on her?” I said.

“You want me to strip-search my secretary?”

“It’s not funny, Clete,” I said.

“She wasn’t in the office when Pogue called,” he said.

“You’re sure?” I said.

“She was across the street at the doughnut place.”

“You didn’t tell her about it?” I asked.

“No...” His eyes looked into space. “No, I’m sure of it. I never mentioned Pogue’s name, never mentioned a place.”

Helen looked at me and made a sucking sound with her teeth. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe the hit was already on him. There’s Marsallus to think about, too.”

“Not with a knife. We’re talking about one of Pogue’s buddies from the Phoenix Program,” Clete said. He leaned over in his chair and clicked on a floor fan, clamped his hand on top of a yellow legal pad by his telephone. The pages blew and rattled in the gust of air.

“Why would anyone try to take a guy like Pogue with a knife? Unless the killer knew we were in the vicinity?” I said.

Clete scratched at the scar that ran through his eyebrow, rested his chin on his knuckles.

“I guess you’re right, you got a leak. How about that butt wipe who was in the Crotch?” he said.

“Rufus Arceneaux?” Helen said.

Clete and I drove to New Orleans at dawn, turned off I-10 onto St. Charles Avenue, and went uptown toward the Garden District, past the lovely old Pontchartrain Hotel and rows of antebellum and early Victorian homes with their narrow pillared galleries and oak-canopied yards that stayed black with shadow even in summer. We turned left across the neutral ground and the streetcar tracks and crossed Prytania, the street where Lillian Hellman grew up, then headed up Magazine, the old line of disembarkation into the Irish Channel, toward the levee and a different New Orleans, one of late-nineteenth-century paint less frame houses with ventilated shutters and hardpan dirt yards and tiny galleries propped up on bricks, clapboard corner bars that never closed or took down their Christmas lights, matchbox barbecue joints that smelled of hickory and ribs by 9 A.M. and graffiti-scrolled liquor stores whose windows were barred like jails.

I parked in front of the address Luke Fontenot had given me. A thundershower had just passed through the neighborhood and the air was gray and wet and steam rose from the roofs like smoke in winter. Clete rolled down the window and squinted at the rows of almost identical, weathered, coffee-colored houses, a ramshackle tin-roofed juke joint overgrown with banana trees on the corner, an elderly black man in a frayed suit and sneakers and baseball cap riding a bicycle with fat tires aimlessly up and down the street. I could see shadows and lights in Clete’s face, like reflections that cling inside frost on a window.

“They say if you’re ever black on Saturday night, you’ll never want to be white again,” he said.

“You usually hear white people say that after they shortchange the yardman,” I said.

“Our house was one block over.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

“You want to come in?” I said.

“No, it’s your show. I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

“Something on your mind?”

He laughed down in his chest, rubbed a knuckle against his nose. “My old man knocked me into next week because I dropped his bucket of beer in front of that juke joint. He was quite a guy. I was never big on nostalgia, Streak.”

I watched him walk toward the levee, his porkpie hat slanted on the crown of his head, his face lifted into the breeze off the river, his feelings walled up inside a private place where I never transgressed.

Ruthie Jean’s address was a two-story house with a fire escape for an upstairs entrance and wash strung across the veranda and a single paint-blistered trellis that was spoked with red roses.

A police cruiser with the NOPD crescent on the door and a white cop in a sky blue shirt behind the wheel slowed by my pickup as I was locking the door behind me.

“Can I help you?” he said.

I opened my badge holder in my palm.

“On the job,” I said, and smiled.

“Work on your tan if you’re coming back after sunset,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, and felt conspiratorial and slightly ashamed at my own response.

A moment later Ruthie Jean opened the door at the head of the fire escape. She wore a pair of new blue jeans with a silver-tipped western belt and white tennis shoes and a burnt orange blouse and gold hoop earrings. This time there was no anger or recrimination in her face; in fact, I had the sense she expected me.

“I need to talk to you about Moleen,” I said.

“You surely don’t give it up.”

“You don’t have to talk to me, Ruthie Jean.”

“I know that. Come in, if you like.”

The living room was airy and cool, the upholstered couch and chairs patterned with flowers and decorated with doilies. The curtains puffed and twisted in the breeze, and you could see the top of the levee and hear boats with horns out on the river.

“Can I give you some coffee?” she said.

“That’d be nice.”

I sat in a deep chair while she fixed a tray in the kitchen. A steamer trunk lay opened by the couch. In a removable top compartment, which she had set at an angle to the sides in order to pack the bottom, was a clear plastic bag with folded blue and pink baby clothes inside. A withered camellia was pressed between the fabric and the plastic.

She limped into the living room with the tray; her eyes followed mine to the trunk. She lowered the tray down on the coffee table, then reset the wood compartment inside the trunk and closed the lid.

“Why you dislike Moleen so much?” she said.

“He thinks it’s natural for other people to pay for his mistakes.”

“If you’re talking about the abortion, it was me went over to Texas. Moleen didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Moleen ran down and killed the little boy out by Cade, not his wife.”

“I don’t believe that.”

I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs and rubbed my palm idly on my knuckles.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said. “But I believe Julia Bertrand may try to do you grave injury. Maybe with Moleen’s consent.”

“You cain’t forgive him for the world he comes from, Mr. Robicheaux. It’s not his fault who he was born.”

I was at a loss.

“Do you have a gun?” I asked.

“No.”

Her face made me think of a newly opened dark flower about to be burned by a severe light.

“You’re an admirable lady, Ruthie Jean. I hope you’re going to be all right. Call me if I can ever help you in any way.”

“That’s why you sent that other man?”

“Excuse me?”

“The one with the red hair and the skin look like milk. He was standing outside in the rain. I axed him what he was doing in this neighborhood at night. He said he was your friend and you were worried about me. He’s your friend, isn’t he?”