Heaven's Prisoners (9 page)

“Wit’ my wife and girl. She all right, you ain’t got to worry, no. You know she talk French, her? We fixing po’-boys, I say
pain
, she know that mean ‘bread,’ yeah. I say
sauce piquante
, she know that mean ‘hot sauce.’ How come she know that, Dave?”

“The Spanish language has a lot of words like ours.”

“Oh,” he said, and was thoughtful a moment. Then, “How come that?”

Annie came through the door and saved me from an impossible discussion. Batist was absolutely obsessive about understanding any information that was foreign to his world, but as a rule he would have to hack and hew it into pieces until it would assimilate into that strange Afro-Creole-Acadian frame of reference that was as natural to him as wearing a dime on a string around his ankle to ward off the
gris-gris
, an evil spell cast by a
traiteur
, or conjuror.

Annie stayed with me through the evening while the light softened on the trees outside and the shadows deepened on the lawn, the western sky turned russet and orange like a chemical flame, and high school kids strolled down the sidewalks to the American Legion baseball game in the park. Through the open window I could smell barbecue fifes and water sprinklers, magnolia blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Then the sky darkened, and the rain clouds in the south pulsated with white streaks of lightning like networks of veins.

Annie lay next to me and rubbed my chest and touched my face with her fingers and kissed me on the eyes.

“Take away the ice bag and push the chair in front of the door,” I said.

“No, Dave.”

“Yes, it’s all right. The doctor said there was no problem.”

She kissed me on the ear, then whispered, “Not tonight, baby love.”

I felt myself swallow.

“Annie, please,” I said.

She raised up on one elbow and looked curiously into my face.

“What is it?” she said.

“I need you. You’re my wife.”

She frowned and her eyes went back and forth into mine.

“Tell me what it is,” she said.

“You want to know?”

“Dave, you’re my whole life. How could I not want to know?”

“Those sonsofbitches put me on my hands and knees and worked me over like they would a dog.”

I could see the pain in her eyes. Her hand went to my cheek, then to my throat.

“Somebody will catch them. You know that,” she said.

“No, they’re hunting on the game reserve. They’re mainline badasses, and they don’t have anybody more serious to deal with than a dry cleaner in a sheriff’s suit.”

“You gave it up. We have a good life now. This is the place you’ve always wanted to come back to. Everybody in town likes you and respects you, and the people up and down the bayou are the best friends anyone could have. Now we have Alafair, too. How can you let a couple of criminals hurt all that?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Yes, it does, if you look at what’s right with your life instead of what’s wrong with it.”

“Are you going to push the chair in front of the door?”

She paused. Her face was quiet and purposeful. She turned off the light on the bedstand and pushed the heavy leather chair until it caught under the doorknob. In the moonlight through the window her curly gold hair looked as if it were flecked with silver. She pulled back the sheet and took away the ice bag, then touched me with her hand. The pain made both my knees jump.

I heard her sigh as she sat back down on the side of the bed.

“Are we going to fight with each other when we have a problem?” she said.

“I’m not fighting with you, kiddo.”

“Yes, you are. You can’t turn loose of the past, Dave. You get hurt, or you see something that’s wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you.”

“I can’t help that.”

“Maybe not. But you don’t live alone anymore.” She took my hand and lay down beside me again. “There’s me, and now there’s Alafair, too.”

“I’ll tell you what it feels like, and I won’t say any more. You remember when I told you about how those North Vietnamese regulars overran us and the captain surrendered to them? They tied our hands around trees with piano wire, then took turns urinating on us. That’s what it feels like.”

She was quiet a long time. I could hear breathing in the dark. Then she took a deep breath and let it out and put her arm across my chest.

“I have a very bad feeling inside me, Dave,” she said.

There was nothing more to say. How could there be? Even the most sympathetic friends and relatives of a battery or assault victim could not understand what that individual experiences. Over the years I had questioned people who had been molested by degenerates, mugged by street punks, shanked and shot by psychopaths, gang-banged and sodomised by outlaw bikers. They all had the same numb expression, the same drowning eyes, the same knowledge that they somehow deserved their fate and that they were absolutely alone in the world. And often we made their grief and humiliation even greater by ascribing the responsibility for their suffering to their own incaution, so that we could remain psychologically invulnerable ourselves.

I wasn’t being fair to Annie. She had paid her share of dues, but there are times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time. This was one of them.

I didn’t sleep that night. But then insomnia and I were old companions.

Two days later the swelling between my legs had gone down and I could walk without looking like I was straddling a fence. The sheriff came out to see me at the boat dock and told me he had talked to the Lafayette city police and Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA. Lafayette had sent a couple of detectives to question Eddie Keats at his bar, but he claimed that he had taken two of his dancers sailing on the day I was beaten up, and the two dancers corroborated his story.

“Are they going to accept that?” I said.

“What are they supposed to do?”

“Do some work and find out where those girls were two days ago.”

“Do you know how many cases those guys probably have?”

“I’m not sympathetic, Sheriff. People like Keats come into our area because they think they have a free pass. What did Minos P. Dautrieve have to say?”

The sheriff’s face colored and the skin at the corner of his mouth tugged slightly in a smile.

“I think he said you’d better get your ass into his office,” the sheriff replied.

“Those were his words?”

“I believe so.”

“Why’s he mad at me?”

“I get the impression he thinks you’re messing around in federal business.”

“Does he know anything about a Haitian named Toot?”

“No. I went through Baton Rouge and the National Crime Information Center in Washington and couldn’t find out anything, either.”

“He’s probably an illegal. There’s no paper on him,” I said.

“That’s what Dautrieve said.”

“He’s a smart cop.”

I saw a look of faint embarrassment in the sheriff’s eyes, and I felt instantly sorry for my remark.

“Well, I promise you I’ll give it my best, Dave,” he said.

“I appreciate what you’ve done.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t done very much.”

“Look, these guys are hard to put away,” I said. “I worked two years on the case of a syndicate hit man who pushed his wife off a fourth-floor balcony into a dry swimming pool. He even told me he did it. He walked right out of it because we took her diary out of the condo without a warrant. How about that for first-rate detective work? Every time I’d see him in a bar, he’d send a drink over to my table. It really felt good.”

He smiled and shook hands.

“One more thing before I go,” he said. “A man named Monroe from Immigration was in my office yesterday. He was asking questions about you.”

The sunlight was bright on the bayou. The oaks and cypress on the far side made deep shadows on the bank.

“He was out here the day after that plane went down at Southwest Pass,” I said.

“He asked if you had a little girl staying with you.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him I didn’t know. I also told him it wasn’t my business. But I got the feeling he wasn’t really interested in some little girl. You bother him for some reason.”

“I gave him a bad time.”

“I don’t know those federal people that well, but I don’t think they drive up from New Orleans just because a man with a fish dock gives them a bad time. What’s that fellow after, Dave?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but if you and Annie are helping out a little girl that doesn’t have any parents, why don’t you let other folks help you, too? People around here aren’t going to let anybody take her away.”

“My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he’d never go into a hollow leg he couldn’t turn around in. I don’t trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you’ll lose.”

“I think maybe you got a dark view sometimes, Dave.”

“You better believe it,” I said.

I watched him drive away on the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees. I clicked my fingers on the warm board rail that edged my dock, then walked up to the house and had lunch with Annie and Alafair.

An hour later I took the .45 automatic and the full clip of hollow-points from the dresser drawer and walked with them inside the folded towel to the pickup truck and put them in the glove box. Annie watched me from the front porch, her arm leaned against a paintless wood post. I could see her breasts rise and fall under her denim shirt.

“I’m going to New Orleans. I’ll be back tonight,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“It’s not going to take care of itself,” I said. “The sheriff is a nice guy who should be cleaning stains out of somebody’s sports coat. The feds don’t have jurisdiction in an assault case. The Lafayette cops don’t have time to solve crimes in Iberia Parish. That means we fall through the cracks. Screw that.”

“I’m sure that somehow that makes sense. You know, rah, rah for the penis and all that. But I wonder if Dave is giving Dave a shuck so we can march off to the wars again.”

Her face was cheerless and empty.

I watched the wind flatten the leaves in the pecan trees, then I opened the door of the pickup.

“I need to take some money out of savings to help somebody,” I said. “I’ll put it back next month.”

“What can I say? Like your first wife told you, ‘Keep it high and hard, podjo,” she said, and went back inside the house.

The sweep of wind in the pecan trees seemed deafening.

I gassed up the truck at the dock, then as an afterthought I went inside the bait shop, sat at the wooden counter with a Dr. Pepper, and called Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette. While the phone rang I gazed out the window at the green leaves floating on the bayou.

“I understand you want my ass in your office,” I said.

“Yeah, what the fuck’s going on over there?”

“Why don’t you drive over and find out?”

“You sound funny.”

“I have stitches in my mouth.”

“They bounced you around pretty good, huh?”

“What’s this about you wanting my ass in your office?”

“I’m curious. Why are a bunch of farts who deal dope and whores so interested in you? I think maybe you’re on to something we don’t know about.”

“I’m not.”

“I think also you may have the delusion you’re still a police officer.”

“You’ve got things turned around a little bit. When a guy gets his
cojones
and his face kicked in, he becomes the victim. The guys who kick in his
cojones
and face are the criminals. These are the guys you get mad at. The object is to put them in jail.”

“The sheriff said you can’t identify Keats.”

“I didn’t see his face.”

“And you never saw the Zulu before?”

“Keats, or whoever the white guy was, said he was one of Baby Doc’s
tontons macoute
.”

“What do you want us to do, then?”

“If I remember our earlier conversation right, y’all were going to handle it.”

“It’s after the fact now. And I don’t have authority in this kind of assault case. You know that.”

I looked out the window at the leaves floating on the brown current.

“Do you all ever salt the mine shaft?” I said.

“You mean plant dope on a suspect? Are you serious?”

“Save the Boy Scout stuff. I’ve got a wife and another person in my home who are in jeopardy. You said you were going to handle things. You’re not handling anything. Instead I get this ongoing lecture that somehow I’m the problem in this situation.”

“I never said that.”

“You don’t have to. A collection of moral retards runs millions in drugs through the bayous, and you probably don’t nail one of them in fifty. It’s frustrating. It looks bad on the monthly report. You wonder if you’re going to be transferred to Fargo soon. So you make noise about civilians meddling in your business.”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking to me, Robicheaux.”

“Too bad. I’m the guy with the stitches. If you want to do something for me, figure out a way to pick up Keats.”

“I’m sorry you got beat up. I’m sorry we can’t do more. I understand your anger. But you were a cop and you know our limits. So how about easing off the Purple Heart routine?”

“You told me Keats’s bars have hookers in them. Get the local heat to park patrol cars in front of his bars a few nights. You’ll bring his own people down on him.”

“We don’t operate that way.”

“I had a feeling you’d say that. See you around, partner. Don’t hang on the rim too long. Everybody will forget you’re in the game.”

“You think that’s clever?”

I hung up on him, finished my Dr. Pepper, and drove down the dirt road in the warm wind that thrashed the tree limbs overhead. The bayou was covered with leaves now, and back in the shadows on the far bank I could see cottonmouths sleeping on the lower branches of the willow trees, just above the water’s languid surface. I rumbled across the drawbridge into town, withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank, then took the back road through the sugarcane fields to St. Martinville and caught the interstate to New Orleans.