James Burke - A Stained White Radiance

"Thanks, doctor. I'd appreciate it if you'd send me a copy of the autopsy report as soon as it's ready."

"You're sure you're all right? It got pretty close in there, didn't it?"

"The bottom line is I should have figured someone was in that bedroom. He'd just started to toss it when he heard me in the hallway. I'm lucky I didn't get my eggs scrambled."

"If it's any consolation, the guy you wounded probably has a sizable slice of wood in his neck or face. He might show up at a hospital. My experience has been that most of these guys are crybabies when it comes to pain."

"Maybe so. Goodnight, doctor."

"Goodnight, Dave. Drive carefully."

The fields were white with mist as I drove back toward New Iberia. My collarbone throbbed and felt swollen and hot when I touched it. The pink neon sign over the roadside bar gleamed softly on the oyster-shell parking lot. In my mind I kept repeating something told me by a platoon sergeant during my first week in Vietnam: don't think about it before it happens, and never think about it afterward. Yes, that was the trick. Just put one logical foot after the other.

I yawned and my ears popped like firecrackers.

Back at the office, I called Weldon at his mother-in-law's home in Baton Rouge. I had waked him up, and he kept asking me to repeat myself.

"Look, I think it's better that you drive back to New Iberia in the morning and then we'll have a long talk."

"About what?"

"I don't think you listen well. The inside of your home is virtually destroyed. Three guys tore it apart because they were looking for something that's obviously important to them. Meanwhile they murdered a sheriff's deputy. Do you want to know how they did it?"

He was silent.

"They shot him through the back, probably when he came down the basement stairs," I said. "Then they put one under his chin, one through his temple, and one through the back of his head. Do you know any low-rent wiseguys named Eddy or Jewel?"

I heard him cough in the back of his throat.

"I'm tied up here with some business for the next few days," he said. "I'm going to send some repair people out to the house. You've got this number if you need me."

"Maybe it's about time you plug into reality, Weldon. You don't make the rules in a murder investigation. That means you'll be in this office before noon tomorrow."

"I don't want to leave Barnaby by herself, and I don't want to bring her back there, either."

"That's a problem you're going to have to work out. We're either going to be talking in my office tomorrow morning, or you're going to be in custody as a material witness."

"Sounds like legalese doodah to me."

"It's easy to find out."

"Yeah, well, I'll check my schedule. You want to have lunch?"

"No."

"You've sure got a dark view of things, Dave. Lighten UP."

"The warrant gets cut one minute after twelve noon," I said, and hung up.

As was typical of Weldon, which was to do everything possible in a contrary and unpredictable fashion, he came up the front walk of the sheriff's department at eight o'clock sharp, dressed in a pair of khakis, sandals without socks, a green-and-red-flowered shirt hanging outside his trousers, and a yellow panama hat at a jaunty angle on his head. His jaws were clean and red with a fresh shave.

He helped himself to a Styrofoarn cup of coffee from the outer office, then sat in a chair across the desk from me, folded one leg over the other, and played with his hat on his knee. My shoulder still throbbed, down in the bone, like a dull toothache.

"What were they after, Weldon?" I asked.

"Search me."

"You have no idea?"

"Nope." He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and turned it in circles with his fingers.

"It wasn't money or jewelry. They left that scattered all over the place."

"There're a lot of weird guys around these days. I think it's got something to do with the times. The country has weirded out on us, Dave."

"I haven't had to talk with any of Deputy Garrett's family yet. It's something I don't want to do, either. But I hope I have something more to offer them than a statement about the country weirding out on us."

He looked momentarily shamefaced.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked.

"Who are these guys?"

"You tell me. You saw them. I didn't."

"Eddy and Jewel. What do those names mean to you?"

"Who's the guy with a mouthful of metal?"

"I'm sorry about your friend in the basement. I wish he hadn't gone in there."

"It was his job."

He gazed out the window at a cloud that hung on the edge of the early sun. His face became melancholy.

"Do you believe in karma? I do. Or at least I came to believe in it when I was in the Orient," he said. His eyes wandered around the room.

"What's the point?"

"I don't know what's the point. You ever hear of a flyer named Earthquake McGoon? His real name was Ed McGovern, from New Jersey. He was kind of a legend among certain people in the Orient. He was a huge fat guy, and one time he and his copilot, this Chinese kid, got locked up in a Chinese jail. Earthquake kept yelling at the guards, 'Goddamn it, you haven't fed me. Give me some goddamn food.' They told him he'd already had his rice bowl and to shut his mouth. That night when the guards went home Earthquake bent the bars apart and told his copilot to beat it, then he pushed the bars back into shape. The guards came back in the morning and said, 'Where's the other guy?' Earthquake said, 'I told you to feed me, and you wouldn't do it, so I ate the sonofabitch.' "

"He was one of those indestructible guys. Except he was doing a supply drop for the French at Dien Bien Phu and he got hit by some ground fire. He tried to get his parachute on but he was too fat. He told his kickers to jump and he was going to set it down on Highway One going into Hanoi.

They said if he was going to ride it down, they would, too.

He came in like a powder puff. It looked like they were home free, then his wing tipped a telephone pole, and they flipped and burned."

He looked at me as though I should find meaning in his face or his story.

"That's what karma is," he said. "Highway One outside of Hanoi is waiting for us. It's all part of a piece. I'm sorry about your friend."

"Have you ever been in jail?" I said.

"No. Why?"

I walked around the side of the desk.

"Let me see your hand," I said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Let me see your hand."

"Which hand?"

"It doesn't matter." I lifted his right hand off the chair arm and snipped one end of my handcuffs around his wrist.

Then I locked the other end to the D-ring on the floor.

"What do you think you're doing, Dave?"

"I'm going to have some breakfast. I'm not sure when I'll be back. Do you want me to bring you anything?"

"You listen-"

"You can start yelling or banging around in here if you want and somebody'll move you to the tank. I think today they have spaghetti for lunch. It's not bad."

He looked simian in the chair, with one shoulder and taut arm stretched down toward the floor, his square face discolored with anger. Before he could speak again I closed the door behind me.

I walked across the street in the sunshine and bought four doughnuts at a caM, then returned to the office. I wasn't gone more than ten minutes. I unlocked the handcuff from his wrist.

"That's what it's like," I said. "Except it's twenty-four hours a day. You want to eat now?"

He opened and closed his right hand and rubbed his wrist.

His eyes measured me as though he were looking down a gun barrel.

"You want a doughnut?" I repeated.

"Yeah, why not?"

"You don't trust people, Weldon. And maybe I can understand that. But it's not a private beef anymore."

"I guess it's not."