DR08 - Burning Angel (16 page)

”He keeps smiling at me. I go, “The truth is I got tired of being a meter maid.”

He thought that was pretty funny.“ I waited for her to go on. ”That's the end of the story. I never went back,“ she said. ”Why not?“

”You know why.“

”It still beats selling shoes,“ I said. She combed her hair with a comb from the back pocket of her Levi's. Her breasts stood out against her shirt like softballs. ”Fix your tie, cutie. You're about to be geek of the week on the evening news,“ she said. ”Helen, would you please stop that?“

”Lighten up, Streak.“

”That's exactly what Clete Purcel says.“

”Cluster fuck? No kidding?“ she said, and grinned. Twenty minutes later two divers, wearing wet suits and air tanks and surgical gloves over their hands, sawed loose the tangle of mono-filament fish line that had been wrapped around and crisscrossed over the submerged body and threaded through a daisy chain of junkyard iron. They held the body by the arms and dragged it heavily onto the bank, the decomposed buttocks sliding through the reeds like a collapsed putty-colored balloon.

A young television newsman, his camera whirring, suddenly took his face away from his viewer and gagged.

”Excuse me,“ he said, embarrassed, his hand pinched over his mouth.

Then he turned aside and vomited.

The divers laid the body front-down on a black plastic sheet. The backs of the thighs were pulsating with leeches. One of the divers walked away, took a cigarette from a uniformed deputy's mouth, and smoked it, his back turned toward us.

The pathologist was a tall white-haired man who wore a bow tie, suspenders, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a thin black ribbon around the crown.

”I wonder why they didn't eviscerate him while they were at it,“ he said.

The body was nude. The fingers and thumbs of both hands had been snipped off cleanly at the joints, perhaps with bolt cutters. The head had been sawed off an inch above the collarbones.

Helen bit a hangnail off her thumb. ”What do you think?“ she said.

”Look at the size. How many guys that big end up as floaters?“ I said.

Even in death and the gray stages of decomposition that take place under water in the tropics, the network of muscles in the shoulders and back and hips was that of a powerful, sinewy man, someone whose frame was wired together by years of calisthenics, humping ninety-pound packs in the bush, jolting against a parachute harness while the steel pot razors down on the nose.

I stretched a pair of white surgical gloves over my hands and knelt by the body. I tried to hold my breath, but the odor seemed to cling to my skin like damp wool, an all-enveloping hybrid stench that's like a salty tangle of seaweed and fish eggs drying on hot sand and pork gone green with putrefaction.

”You don't have to do that, Dave,“ the pathologist said. ”I'll have him apart by five o'clock.“

”I'm just checking for a bullet wound, Doc,“ I said.

I fitted both hands under the torso and flipped the body on its back

”Oh shit,“ a newsman said.

”Maybe the guy was having a female implant put in,“ a uniformed deputy said.

”Shut up, asshole,“ Helen said.

There was a single wound above the groin area. It had been cored out by a fish eel, whose head was embedded deep in the flesh while the tail flipped in the air like a silver whip.

”You might look for a nine-millimeter, Doc,“ I said.

”You know this guy?“ he asked.

”My guess is his name was Jack,“ I said.

Helen brushed at his thigh with a piece of folded cardboard. ”Here's a tattoo his friends missed,“ she said.

It was a faded green, red, and gold Marine Corps globe and anchor imposed upon a cone-shaped open parachute.

”The poor dumb fuck didn't even know who he was on a skivvy run,“ Helen said.

Helen's therapist had asked her one of those questions for which an honest answer is seemingly disingenuous or so self-revealing that you don't wish to inhabit your own skin for a while.

My dreams seemed continuous, beginning with the first moments of sleep and ending at dawn, but the props and central characters always remained the same.

I stand at a brass-railed mahogany bar on a pink evening in the Philippines, the palm fronds in the courtyard waving slightly in the breeze. I knock back a shot glass of Beam and chase it with San Miguel on the side, rest my forearms on the coolness of the wood and wait for the rush, which, like an old friend, never disappoints, which always lasers straight to the nerve endings at the base of the brain and fills the glands and loins and the sealed corridors of memory with light and finally gives ease to the constricted and fearful heart.

For a while.

The bartender's face is pale yellow, the skin tight against the skull, the skin stretched into cat's whiskers, the mouth a stitched slit. The evening air is filled with the rustle of bead curtains and the silky whisper of the Oriental women who move through them; redolent with the thick, sweet smell of opium, like honey and brown sugar burned in a spoon, and the smoky scent of whiskey aged in charcoal barrels, the black cherries and sliced oranges and limes that you squeeze between your back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure, as though somehow they connect you with tropical gardens rather than places under the earth.

The dream always ends in the same way, but I never know if the scene is emblematic or an accurate recall of events that took place during a blackout. I see myself lifted from a floor by men with no faces who pitch me through a door into a stone-paved alley that reverberates with a clatter of metal cans and crones who scavenge through garbage. A pimp and a whore rifle my pockets while I stare up at them, as helpless as if my spine were severed; my hands are cuffed behind me in a chair in a. Third World police station while I shake with delirium tremens and sweat as big as flattened marbles slides down my face. When I wake from the dream my breath shudders in my throat, the air in the room seems poisoned with exhaled and rebreathed alcohol, and I sit on the edge o f my bed and begin to rework the first three steps of the AA recovery program. But there are other images in my mind now, more disturbing than the ones from my sleep. It's like a red bubble rising out of a heated place just beyond the limits of vision; then it bursts in the back of the brain and I can see tracers lacing the night like strips of barroom neon and taste the bitterness of cordite on my tongue. The rush is just like the whiskey that cauterizes memory and transforms electrified tigers into figures trapped harmlessly inside oil and canvas. My shield and my i9ii-model army-issue .45 automatic sit on top of my dresser in the moonlight. I think it's not an accident they found their way into my life. An hour after I got home thatt evening the phone rang in the kitchen.

”We dug out two rounds,“ the medical examiner said. ”One of them's in good shape. But I'd say both are either nine-millimeter or .38 caliber.“

”Two?“ I said.

”There was a second entry wound below the right armpit. It did the most damage. It flattened against something and toppled before it entered the chest cavity. Anyway, it pierced both his lungs. You still think this was the guy out at your house?“

”Yeah, the guy was carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge under his right arm. One of the rounds probably deflected off it.“

”I suspect he was wrapped awful tight, then.“

”I don't understand,“ I said.

”He jacked a lot of adrenaline into his heart before he got hit.

Otherwise, I don't know how he made it out of there. Anyway, tomorrow we'll see if we can match his blood to the specimens you gave me from Cade and the bushes in front of your house.“

”Thanks for your help, Doc.“

”Keep me posted on this one, will you?“

”Sure.“

”I wasn't passing on an idle thought about the adrenaline in this man's heart. I've read medical papers about the deaths of royalty who were executed during the French Revolution. Sometimes they were told if the headsman's blow was off the mark and they were able to get up and run, their lives would be spared. Some of them actually rose headless from the block and ran several yards before they collapsed.“

”Pretty grim stuff.“

”You're missing my point. I believe the man I took apart today was absolutely terrified. What could put that level of fear in a soldier of fortune?“

Not bad, podna, I thought.

After supper I sat on the gallery and watched Alafair currying her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out in the railed lot by the shed we had built for him. Tripod was off his chain and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch, his tail hanging down the side of the wire like a ringed banner. My neighbor had moved out of his house and put it up for sale, but each evening he returned to turn on his soak hoses and water sprinklers, filling the air with an iridescent mist that drifted across his hydrangeas onto our lawn. The sun had descended into a flattened red orb on the western horizon, and in the scarlet wash of the afterglow the flooded tree trunks in the swamp seemed suffused with firelight, and you could see an empty rowboat tied up in the black stillness of the bayou's far bank, the wood as dry and white as bone.

Bertie Fontenot's dinged and virtually paint less pickup truck bounced through the ruts in the road and turned into our drive. She got out, slammed the truck door, and labored up the incline, her elephantine hips rolling inside her print-cotton dress, her big lacquered straw bag with the plastic flowers on it gripped under her arm like an ammunition box.

”What you done about my title?“ she said.

”Nothing.“

”That's all you got to say?“

”You don't seem to accept my word, Bertie. So I've given up explaining myself.“

She looked away at the horse lot.

”I seen you at Ruthie Jean's house. I thought maybe you was working on my title,“ she said.

”A murder investigation.“

”Ruthie Jean don't know nothing about a murder. What you talking about?“

”You want to sit down, Bertie?“

”You finally axed,“ she said.

I helped her up the steps into the swing. She wrapped one hand around the support chain and pushed herself back and forth in a slowly oscillating arc.

”This is a nice place for your li'l girl to grow up in, ain't it?“ she said.

”Yes, it is.“

”How long your family own this?“

”The land was part of my grandfather's farm. My father built the house in nineteen thirty.“

”How'd you like it if somebody just took it away from you, say you ain't got no proof it was part of your gran'daddy's farm? Run a dozer through the walls and scrape away the ground just like none of y'all was ever here?“

”You've got to give me some time, Bertie. I'm doing the best I

can.

She snapped open the big clasp on her bag and reached inside.

“You don't believe Moleen after some treasure on our land, so I brought you something,” she said. “I dug these out of my li'l garden early this spring.”

One at a time she removed a series of thin eight- or nine-inch objects individually wrapped in tissue paper and bound with rubber bands. Then she rolled the rubber bands off one and peeled back the paper and flattened it against the swing.

“What you think of that?” she said.

The spoon was black as a scorched pot with tarnish, but she had obviously rubbed the metal smooth and free of dirt with rags so you could clearly see the coat of arms and the letter S embossed on the flanged head of the handle.

“That's pretty impressive,” I said. “How deep was this in the soil?”

“From my elbow to the tip of my finger.”

“Have you shown this to anybody else?”

“No, and I ain't going to. Not till I get a piece of paper that say that's my land.”

“There's an antique gun and coin store in New Orleans, Cohen's, it's on Royal Street. Can I take one of these spoons there if I don't tell them where I got it?”

“You give me your word on that?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“How long that gonna take?” she said, fanning herself with a flowered handkerchief.

Chapter 14

I CHECKED OUT of the office early Tuesday afternoon and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin through Baton Rouge into New Orleans. I went first to Cohen's on Royal, whose collection of antique guns and coins and Civil War ordnance could match a museum's, then I met Clete at his office on St. Ann and we walked through Jackson Square to a small Italian restaurant down from Tujague's on Decatur.

We sat in back at a table with a checkered cloth and ordered, then Clete went to the bar and came back with a shot glass of bourbon and a schooner of draft. He lowered the shot into the schooner with his fingertips and watched it slide and clink down the side to the bottom, the whiskey corkscrewing upward in an amber cloud.

“Why don't you pour some liquid Drano in there while you're at it?” I said.

He took a deep hit and wiped his mouth with his hand.

“I had to pull a bail jumper out of a motel on the Airline Highway this afternoon. He had both his kids with him. I got to lose this PI gig,”

he said.

“You did it when you had your shield.”

“It doesn't work the same way, mon. Bondsmen dime one guy just to bring in another. The shit bags are just money on the hoof.”

'35

He took another drink from his boilermaker and the light began to change in his eyes. “Your ME matched up the blood on the floater?” he asked.

“Yeah, it's the guy named Jack. We got the media to sit on the story, though.” He reached across the table and pulled the tissue-paper-wrapped spoon given me by Bertie Fontenot from my shirt pocket. He worked the paper off the embossed tip of the handle.

“What'd they tell you at Cohen's?” he said.

“It's eighteenth-century silverware, probably cast in Spain or France.”

He rubbed the ball of his thumb on the coat of arms, then stuck the spoon back in my pocket. “This came off the Bertrand plantation, you say?” he said.

“yep;”

“I think you're pissing up a flagpole, Streak.”

“Thanks.”

“You don't see it.”

“See what?”

“I think you've got a hard-on for this guy Bertrand.”