Heaven's Prisoners (6 page)

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.”

“And you figure maybe I was the pickup man.”

“You tell me.”

“I think you spend too much time folding paper airplanes.”

“Oh, I should be out developing some better leads? Is that it? Some of us are hotdog ball handlers, some of us are meant for the bench. I got it.”

“I remember now. Forward for LSU, fifteen years or so ago. Dr. Dunkenstein. You were All-American.”

“Honorable Mention. Answer my question, Mr. Robicheaux. What are the odds of a guy like you being out on the salt when a plane goes down right by his boat? A guy who happened to have a scuba tank so he could be the first one down on the wreck?”

“Listen, the pilot was a priest. Use your head a minute.”

“Yeah, a priest who did time in Danbury,” he said.

“Danbury?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What for?”

“Breaking and entering.”

“I think I’m getting the abridged version here.”

“He and some nuns and other priests broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised some missile components.”

“And you think he was involved with drug smugglers?”

He wadded up the paper airplane on his desk and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“No, I don’t,” he said, his eyes focused on the clouds outside the window.

“What does Immigration tell you?”

He shrugged his shoulders and clicked his nails on the desk blotter. His fingers were so long and thin and his nails so pink and clean that his hands looked like those of a surgeon rather than of an ex-basketball player.

“According to them, there was no Johnny Dartez on that plane,” I said.

“They have their areas of concern, we have ours.”

“They’re stonewalling you, aren’t they?”

“Look, I’m not interested in Immigration’s business. I want Bubba Rocque off the board. Johnny Dartez was a guy we spent a lot of money and time on, him and another dimwit from New Orleans named Victor Romero. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“They both disappeared from their usual haunts about two months ago, just before we were going to pick them up. Since Johnny has done the big gargle out at Southwest Pass, Victor’s value has appreciated immensely.”

“You won’t get Bubba by squeezing his people.”

He pushed his large shoe against the wall so that his chair spun around in a complete circle, like a child playing in the barber’s chair.

“How is it that you have this omniscient knowledge?” he said.

“In high school he’d put on different kinds of shows for us. Sometimes he’d eat a lightbulb. Or he might open a bottle of RC Cola on his teeth or push thumbtacks into his kneecaps. It was always a memorable exhibition.”

“Yeah, we see a lot of that kind of psychotic charisma these days. I think it’s in fashion with the wiseguys. That’s why we have a special lockdown section in Atlanta where they can yodel to each other.”

“Good luck.”

“You don’t think we can put him away?”

“Who cares what I think? What’s the National Transportation Safety Board say about the crash?”

“A fire in the hold. They’re not sure. It was murky when their divers went down. The plane slipped down a trench of some kind and it’s half covered in mud now.”

“You believe it was just a fire?”

“It happens.”

“You better send them down again. I dove that wreck twice. I think an explosion blew out the side.”

He looked at me carefully.

“I think maybe I ought to caution you about involving yourself in a federal investigation,” he said.

“I’m not one of your problems, Mr. Dautrieve. You’ve got another federal agency trespassing on your turf, maybe tainting your witnesses, maybe stealing bodies. Anyway, they’re jerking you around and for some reason you’re not doing anything about it. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to lay off your situation on me.”

I saw the bone flex against the clean line of his jaw. Then he began to play with a rubber band on his long fingers.

“You’ll have to make allowances for us government employees who have to labor with bureaucratic manacles on,” he said. “We’ve never been able to use the simple, direct methods you people have been so good at. You remember a few years back when a New Orleans cop got killed and some of his friends squared it on their own? I think they went into the guy’s house, it was a black guy, of course, and blew him and his wife away in the bathtub. Then there were those black revolutionaries that stuck up an armored car in Boston and killed a guard and hid out in Louisiana and Mississippi. We worked two years preparing that case, then your people grabbed one of them and tortured a statement out of him and flushed everything we’d done right down the shithole. You guys sure knew how to let everybody know you were in town.”

“I guess I’ll go now. You want to ask me anything else?”

“Not a thing,” he said, and fired a paper clip at a file cabinet across the room.

I stood up to leave. His attention was concentrated on finding another target for his rubber band and paper clip.

“Does a white Corvette with the letters
ELK
on the door bring any of your clientele to mind?” I said.

“Were these the guys out at your place?” His eyes still avoided me.

“Yes.”

“How should I know? We’re lucky to keep tabs on two or three of these assholes.” He was looking straight at me now, his eyes flat, the skin of his face tight. “Maybe it’s somebody you sold some bad fish to.”

I walked outside in the sunshine and the wind blowing through the mimosa trees on the lawn. A Negro gardener was sprinkling the flower beds and the freshly cut grass with a hose, and I could smell the damp earth and the green clippings that were raked in piles under the trees. I looked back up at the office window of Minos P. Dautrieve. I opened and closed my hands and took a breath and felt the anger go out of my chest.

Well, you asked for it, I told myself. Why poke a stick at a man who’s already in a cage? He probably gets one conviction out of ten arrests, spends half his time with his butt in a bureaucratic paper shredder, and on a good day negotiates a one-to-three possessions plea on a dealer who’s probably robbed hundreds of people of their souls.

Just as I was pulling out into the traffic, I saw him come out of the building waving his arm at me. He was almost hit by a car crossing the street.

“Park it a minute. You want a snowcone? It’s on me,” he said.

“I have to get back to work.”

“Park it,” he said, and bought two snowcones from a Negro boy who operated a stand under an umbrella on the corner. He got in the passenger side of my truck, almost losing the door on a passing car whose horn reverberated down the street, and handed me one of the snowcones.

“Maybe the Corvette is Eddie Keats’s,” he said. “He used to run a nickel-and-dime book in Brooklyn. Now he’s a Sunbelter, he likes our climate so much. He lives here part of the time, part of the time in New Orleans. He’s got a couple of bars, a few whores working for him, and he thinks he’s a big button man. Is there any reason for a guy like that to be hanging around your place?”

“You got me. I never heard of him.”

“Try this—Eddie Keats likes to do favors for important people. He jobs out for Bubba Rocque sometimes, for free or whatever Bubba wants to give him. He’s that kind of swell guy. We heard he set fire to one of Bubba’s hookers in New Orleans.”