James Burke: Heaven’s Prisoners

"Is that right?"

"You just haven't figured out how to pull it off yet," he said. His face was covered with the sun's last red light. "Eventually, you'll try to hang them up in a meat market."

HE WAS WRONG. I had already quit trying to figure out how to pull it off. Instead, I had spent the entire day brooding on an essential mistake I had made in the investigation, a failure to act upon a foregone conclusion about how Bubba and his wife operated-namely, that they used people. They used them in a cynical and ruthless fashion and then threw them away like soiled Kleenex. Johnny Dartez muled for Bubba and drowned in the plane at Southwest Pass; Eddie Keats kept Bubba's whores in line and Toot trimmed ears for him, and now one had been dumped in a swamp and the other had been cooked in his own bathtub; and finally in my pride and single-mindedness I had stumbled into the role of Victor Romero's executioner.

The board was swept clean. I had always thought of myself as a fairly smart cop, an outsider within the department, a one-eyed existentialist in the country of the blind, but I could not help comparing my situation with the way cops everywhere treat major crimes. We unconsciously target the most available and inept in that myriad army of metropolitan low-lifes: addicts, street dealers, petty thieves, hookers and a few of their Johns, storefront fences, and the obviously deranged and violent. With the exception of the hookers, most of these people are stupid and ugly and easy to convict. Check out the residents in any city or county jail. In the meantime the people who would market the Grand Canyon as a gravel pit or sell the Constitution at an Arab rug bazaar remain as socially sound as a silver dollar dropped into a church basket.

But you don't surrender the ballpark to the other team, even when your best pitch is a letter-high floater that they drill into your breastbone. Also, there are certain advantages in situations in which you have nothing to lose: you become justified in throwing a bucketful of monkey shit through the ventilator fan. It might not alter the outcome of things, but it certainly gives the other side pause.

I found Bubba the next morning at his fish-packing house south of Avery Island, a marsh and salt-dome area that eventually bleeds into Vermilion Bay and the Gulf. The packing house was made of tin and built up on pilings over the bayou, and the docks were painted silver so that the whole structure looked as bright and glittering as tinfoil in a sea of sawgrass, dead cypress, and meandering canals. His oyster and shrimp boats were out, but a waxed yellow cigarette boat floated in the gasoline-stained water by the dock.

I parked my truck in the oyster-shell lot and walked up a ramp onto the dock. The sun was hot, reflecting off the water, and the air smelled of dead shrimp, oil, tar, and the salt breeze off the Gulf. Bubba was filling an ice chest with bottles of Dixie beer. He was bare-chested and sweating, and his denims hung low on his narrow hips so that the elastic of his undershorts showed. There wasn't a half-inch of fat on his hips or flat stomach. His shoulders were covered with fine brown hair, and across his deeply tanned back were chains of tiny scars.

Behind him, two pale men with oiled dark hair, who wore print shirts, slacks, tassel loafers, and sunglasses, were leaning over the dock rail and shooting pigeons and egrets with a pellet rifle. The dead egrets looked like melting snow below the water's surface. I thought I recognised one of the men as an ex-driver for a notorious, now-deceased New Orleans gangster by the name of Didoni Giacano.

Bubba smiled up at me from where he squatted by the ice chest. There were drops of sweat in his eyebrows and his spiked hair.

"Take a ride with us," he said. "That baby there can eat a trench all the way across the lake."

"What are you doing with the spaghetti-and-meatball crowd?"

One of the pale-skinned, dark-haired men looked over his shoulder at me. The sun clicked on his dark glasses.

"Friends from New Orleans," Bubba said. "You want a beer?"

"They're shooting protected birds."

"I'm tired of pigeons shitting on my shrimp. But I don't argue. Tell them." He smiled at me again.

The other man at the rail looked at me now, too. Then he leaned the pellet rifle against the rail, unwrapped a candy bar, and dropped the paper into the water.

"How big is the mob into you, Bubba?"

"Come on, man. That's movie stuff."

"You pay big dues with that crowd."

"No, you got it wrong. People pay me dues. I win, they lose. That's why I got these businesses. That's why I'm offering you a beer. That's why I'm inviting you out on my boat. I don't bear grudges. I don't have to."

"You remember Jimmy Hoffa? There was none tougher. Then he thought he could make deals with the Mob. I bet they licked their teeth when they saw him coming."

"Listen to this guy," he said, and laughed. He opened a bottle on the side of the ice chest, and the foam boiled over the top and dripped flatly on the dock.

"Here," he said, and offered me the bottle, the beer glistening on the back of his brown hand.

"No, thanks," I said.

"Suit yourself," he said, and raised the bottle to his mouth and drank. Then he blew air out through his nose and looked at his cigarette boat. The scars on his back were like broken necklaces spread across his skin. He shifted his weight on his feet.

"Well, it's a beautiful day, and I'm about to go," he said. "You got something you want to tell me, 'cause I want to get out before it rains."

"I just had a couple of speculations. About who's making decisions for you these days."

"Oh yeah?" he said. He drank from the beer with one hand on his hip and looked away at the marsh, where some blue herons were lifting into the sky.

"Maybe I'm all wet."

"Maybe you got a brain disease, too."

"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not taking away from your accomplishment. I just have a feeling that Claudette has turned out to be an ambitious girl. She's been hard to keep in the kitchen, hasn't she?"

"You're starting to piss me off, Dave. I don't like that. I got guests here, I got a morning planned. You want to come along, that's cool. Don't be messing with me no more, podna."

"That is the way I figure it. Tell me if I'm wrong. Johnny Dartez wasn't a stand-up guy, was he? He was a dumb lowlife, a street dip not to be trusted. You knew that one day he'd trade your butt to the feds, so either you or Claudette told Victor Romero to take him out. Except he killed everybody in the plane, including a priest.

"Then I stumble into the middle of things and complicated matters even more. You should have left me alone, Bubba. I wasn't any threat to you. I'd already disengaged when your monkeys started coming around my house."

"What's all this about?" one of the Italians said.

"Stay out of it," Bubba said. Then he looked back at me. His thick hand was tight around the beer bottle. "I'll tell you something, and I'll tell you only once, and you can accept it or stick it sideways up your ass. I'm one guy. I'm not a crime wave. You're supposed to be a smart college guy, but you always talk like you don't understand anything. When you mess with the action out of New Orleans, you fuck with hundreds of people. You wouldn't leave it alone, they slammed the door on your nose. Stop laying your shit off on me."

"Claudette was in Romero's apartment."

"What are you talking about?"

"You heard me."

"She don't go anyplace I don't know about."

"She had her thermos of gin rickeys with her. She left wet prints all over his kitchen table."

His gray-blue eyes stared at me as though they had no lids. His face was frozen, his jaw hooked sideways like a barracuda's.