James Burke: Heaven’s Prisoners

Her hands were motionless on the sink, and she gazed out the window into the backyard.

"Who were they?" she said.

"I don't know," I said, and went into the front room and tried to concentrate on the newspaper.

A few minutes later she stood behind my chair, her hands on my shoulders. Then I felt her bend down and kiss me in the hair.

After lunch I got a telephone call at the dock from the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette. He said his name was Minos P. Dautrieve. He said he was the resident agent in charge, or "RAC," as he called it. He also said he wanted to talk with me.

"Go ahead," I said.

"No. In my office. Can you come in?"

"I have to work, Mr. Dautrieve."

"Well, we can do it two or three ways," he said. "I can drive over there, which I don't have time for. Also, we don't usually interview people in bait shops. Or you can drive over here at your convenience, since it's a beautiful day for that sort of thing. Or we can have you picked up."

I paused a moment and looked across the bayou at the Negroes fishing in the shallows.

"I'll be there in about an hour," I said.

"Hey, that's great. I'm looking forward to it."

"Were your people out at my place this morning?"

"Nope. Did you see somebody who looked like us?"

"Not unless you guys are driving Corvettes."

"Come in and let's talk about it. Hell, you're quite a guy."

"What is this bullshit, Mr. Dautrieve?"

The receiver went dead in my hand.

I went out on the dock where Batist was cleaning a string of mudcat in a pan of water. Each morning he ran a trotline in his pirogue, then brought his fish back to the dock, gutted them with a double-edged knife he had made from a file, ripped the skin and spiked fins from their flesh with a pair of pliers, and washed the fillets clean in the pan of red water. He was fifty, as hairless as a cannonball, coal black, and looked as though he'd been hammered together out of angle iron. When I looked at him with his shirt off and the sweat streaming off his bald head and enormous black shoulders, the flecks of blood and membrane on his arms, his knife slicing through vertebrae and lopping the heads of catfish into the water like wood blocks, I wondered how southern whites had ever been able to keep his kind in bondage. Our only problem with Batist was that Annie often could not understand what he was saying. Once when she had gone with him to feed the livestock in a pasture I rented, he had told her, " Mais t'row them t'ree cow over the fence some hay, you."

"I have to go to Lafayette for a couple of hours," I said. "I want you to watch for a couple of men in a Corvette. If they come around here, call the sheriff's department. Then go up to the house and stay with Annie."

" Qui c'est une Corvette , Dave?" he said, his eyes squinting at me in the sun.

"It's a sports car, a white one."

"What they do, them?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing."

"What you want I do to them, me?"

"You do nothing to them. You understand that? You call the sheriff and then you stay with Annie."

" Qui c'est ti vas faire si le sheriff pas vient pour un neg , Dave. Dites Batist fait plus rien ?" He laughed loudly at his own joke: "What are you going to do if the sheriff doesn't come for a Negro, Dave? Tell Batist to do more nothing?"

"I'm serious. Don't mess with them."

He grinned at me again and went back to cleaning his fish.

I told Annie where I was going, and a half-hour later I parked in front of the federal building in downtown Lafayette where the DEA kept its office. It was a big, modern building, constructed during the Kennedy-Johnson era, filled with big glass doors and tinted windows and marble floors; but right down the street was the old Lafayette police station and jail, a squat, gray cement building with barred windows on the second floor, an ugly sentinel out of the past, a reminder that yesterday was only a flick of the eye away from the seeming tranquillity of the present. My point is that I remember an execution that took place in the jail in the early 1950s. The electric chair was brought in from Angola; two big generators on a flatbed truck hummed on a side street behind the building; thick, black cables ran from the generators through a barred window on the second story. At nine o'clock on a balmy summer night, people in the restaurant across the street heard a man scream once just before an arc light seemed to jump off the bars of the window. Later, townspeople did not like to talk about it. Eventually that part of the jail was closed off and was used to house a civil defense siren. Finally, few people even remembered that an execution had taken place there.

But on this hazy May afternoon that smelled of flowers and rain, I was looking up at an open window on the second story of the federal building, through which flew a paper airplane. It slid in a long glide across the street and bounced off the windshield of a moving car. I had a strong feeling about where it had come from.

Sure enough, when I walked through the open door of Minos P. Dautrieve's office I saw a tall, crewcut man tilted back in his chair, his knit tie pulled loose, his collar unbuttoned, one foot on the desk, the other in the wastebasket, one huge hand poised in the air, about to sail another paper plane out the window. His blond hair was cut so short that light reflected off his scalp; in fact, lights seemed to reflect all over his lean, close-shaved, scrubbed, smiling face. On his desk blotter was an open manila folder with several telex sheets clipped inside. He dropped the airplane on the desk, clanged his foot out of the wastebasket, and shook hands with such energy that he almost pulled me off balance. I thought I had seen him somewhere before.

"I'm sorry to drag you in here," he said, "but that's the breaks, right? Hey, I've been reading your history. It's fascinating stuff. Sit down. Did you really do all this bullshit?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Come on, anybody with a sheet like this is genuinely into rock'n'roll. Wounded twice in Vietnam, the second time on a mine. Then fourteen years with the New Orleans police department, where you did some very serious things to a few people. Why's a guy with a teacher's certificate in English go into police work?"

"Is this a shake?"

"Be serious. We don't get to have that kind of fun. Most of the time we just run around and prepare cases for the U.S. attorney. You know that. But your file's intriguing, you've got to admit. It says here you blew away three people, one of whom was the numero uno greaseball, drug pusher, and pimp in New Orleans. But he was also on tap as a federal witness, at least until you scrambled his eggs for him." He laughed out loud. "How'd you manage to snuff a government witness? That's hard to pull off. We usually keep them on the game reserve."

"You really want to know?"

"Hell, yes. This is socko stuff."

"His bodyguard pulled a gun on my partner and took a shot at him. It was a routine possession bust, and the pair of them would have been out on bond in an hour. So it was a dumb thing for the bodyguard to do. It was dumb because it was unnecessary and it provoked a bad situation. A professional doesn't do dumb things like that and provoke people unnecessarily. You get my drift?"

"Oh, I get it. We federal agents shouldn't act like dumb guys and provoke you, huh? Let me try this one on you, Mr. Robicheaux. What are the odds of anybody being out on the Gulf of Mexico and witnessing a plane crash? Come on, your file says you've spent lots of time at racetracks. Figure the odds for me."

"What are you saying, podna?"

"We know a guy named Johnny Dartez was on that plane. Johnny Dartez's name means one thing-narcotics. He was a transporter for Bubba Rocque. His specialty was throwing it out in big rubber balloons over water."