The Tin Roof Blowdown (26 page)

Nigger-knocking became a Saturday-night sport that local police departments generally ignored. White high school kids shot people of color with BB guns and threw firecrackers at them at bus stops. Most of the kids who did this came from homes where the morning sunlight filtered through the dust like the ugly stain of failure. One of those kids was my college roommate at Southwestern Louisiana institute, James Boyd “Bo Diddley” Wiggins.

His father had been a deputy sheriff in a North Louisiana parish and was forced to resign after he was arrested in a prostitution sting in New Orleans. The father died in penury, and his wife and children moved onto a corporate plantation, where they picked cotton and broke corn alongside people of color. But Bo Diddley possessed a talent his siblings did not. High school football may have been a sport to others; for Bo it was a magic doorway that opened onto a world his family would never enter.

He attended SLI on an athletic scholarship, tore holes in the opposing team’s defensive line with a ferocity that bothered even his coach, and refused to sit near Negro students in his classes. He got into serious barroom fights out on the highway and would come back to the dorm stinking of whiskey and cigarettes, his clothes torn, his mowed head lacerated with broken glass, his nostrils clotted with blood. I genuinely believed Bo was at peace only when he inflicted so much pain on himself he could not hear his own thoughts.

He was expelled from college and given a BCD from the army for busting up a couple of MPs in Honolulu. But the army had done something for Bo Diddley no one else had—they taught him arc welding and gave him a trade. He burned stringer-bead rods on pipelines all over Louisiana and Texas, then opened his own welding shop in Lake Charles and within five years was operating a dozen more in three states.

But Bo was just getting started. He entered the twenty-first century as the owner of six shipyards located along the southern rim of the United States. He also managed to reinvent himself. He got reborn at the Assembly of God Church and posed for Christmas card photographs with evangelical television preachers in front of Third World orphanages. Immediately following 9/11, he was among a Louisiana political delegation that flew to New York City to attend a memorial ceremony at the Twin Towers with the president of the United States. He was still jug-eared and flat-topped, with recessed buckshot eyes and half-moon scars on his knuckles and a voice that sounded like he had swallowed a clot of Red Man, but he and his bovine wife appeared regularly in the society pages of the Baton Rouge and Lafayette newspapers and each year hosted a charity golf tournament and entertained aging television celebrities.

For reasons I never quite understood, he had kept in touch with me over the years. Maybe, like me, Bo Diddley heard time’s winged chariot at his door. Maybe he wanted to revise his youth and pretend that he, too, had been part of the innocence that seemed to have characterized our era. I couldn’t say. Bo Diddley had paid hard dues. His tragedy, I think, lay in the fact he had learned nothing from them.

He was waiting by my office door when I came to work Monday morning, his rough hand extended, the square tautness of his face glowing with aftershave. “I know you’re busy. I won’t take up your time,” he said. “I got a lot of resources, Dave. I think I can hep you with a case you’re on.”

My intake basket was overflowing, my caseload more than I could handle, my own troubles with Ronald Bledsoe without apparent solution. It was not a good time to deal with someone who believes his destiny is to meddle in police business. He followed me into my office.

“Is that fat boy in the dispatcher’s cage your local funny man?” he said.

“Wally?”

“He asked me if I bought my cigar in a tire factory. He said he wanted to get some that smelled just like it.”

I glanced at my watch and tried to shine him on. “I have a meeting with the sheriff in a few minutes. You mentioned something about a case I’m working on.”

“About a priest who went missing in the Lower Ninth Ward, a guy from New Iberia.”

“That’s Jude LeBlanc. How’d you know I was looking for him?”

“My wife and I been doing some volunteer work in the shelters. We met this El Salvadoran woman, Natalia something-or-other. I guess she was getting it on with this priest just before New Orleans went into the shitter.”

Bo may have acquired the trappings of a reborn and successful businessman, but his language and his mind-set still bore the sharp edges of the boy I had known years ago. For Bo, nuance did not exist. The world and the people in it were one-dimensional. Imposing complexity on them was the pastime of a group he called “pointy-headed professors.”

“You know something about Father Jude’s fate, Bo?”

“I’ve got a clean-up contract for the Lower Nine. I’m also setting up FEMA trailer villages anywhere we can house these poor devils. But I tell you, the real challenge is making these sonsofbitches go to work.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

The grin died on his mouth. “Don’t turn serious on me, son. A lot of those boys would choke to death on their own spit unless you swabbed their throats out for them. Dave, I sent emissaries to shelters all over the country, offering good jobs at good pay in the rebuilding of New Orleans. I didn’t get one goddamn taker.”

“I heard you say that in a television interview. I thought it was bullshit then. I think it’s bullshit now,” I said.

He shook his head. “I ain’t knocking nobody, just telling you what happened. There’s a big difference between telling the truth and knocking somebody.”

I glanced again at my watch. “It’s always good seeing you, Bo.”

He raised his eyebrows and I thought his latent aggression and his desire to control those around him was about to surface. But I was wrong. “My secretary is waiting on me, so I gotta haul ass. I didn’t mean to be a busybody. I just thought I’d hep out if I could,” he said.

Maybe I hadn’t given Bo the credit he deserved, I thought.

Through my window, I saw him walk toward a Lexus parked across the street from St. Peter’s Cemetery. The day was still cool, the automobile blanketed with shade. A statuesque woman with white-gold hair, wearing sunglasses, a brief skirt, and a tight blouse, was smoking a cigarette outside the passenger door. When Bo Diddley clicked his door opener, she exhaled cigarette smoke at an upward angle and got inside, dropping her cigarette into the gutter, her skirt drawing up on her thigh.

I didn’t know what his secretary’s talents might be, but I doubted if they had ever included breaking corn or picking cotton.

AFTER LUNCH I drove out to the parish prison to talk with Otis Baylor, whose obstinacy, in my opinion, was becoming more symptomatic of pride than virtue.

Most jailhouse or mainline inmates don’t want trouble. They do their time and avoid the wolves and stay out of racial beefs. They don’t sass hacks and they don’t wise off to guys with tear-duct tats. Like the Japanese, they create their own space and don’t violate the space of others. But unfortunately the genes of our simian progenitors are alive and well inside those walls, and the strong prey on the weak, nakedly, and with relish.

Consensual jailhouse romance is a given and so is jailhouse dope, raisin-jack, prune-o, and white slavery. Yard bitches are treated with the same contempt as snitches and survive only by attaching themselves to a powerful caretaker, one who in turn requires complete obedience and loyalty. A juvenile offender thrown in with the general population is usually cannibalized. If you’re con-wise, you develop tunnel vision, particularly when it comes to sexual conduct or the in-house drug trade. Defending your own person is imperative, but defending the weak is the province of fools and those seeking martyrdom.

The shift supervisor gave me an account of Otis Baylor’s first three days in the can. At first he was treated as an oddity, a man who didn’t belong, the kind who gets drunk and plows his car through a pedestrian crosswalk and cannot believe the grief he has brought upon himself and others.

Wiseasses told him to sign up for the nightly movies or off-grounds church services a hack would escort him to. Then they looked into his face and decided there were other places in the jail they wanted to be. Otis ate by himself and refused to speak to others, even to ask a question. He moved about like a silent behemoth whose eyes were always turned inward. When he went into the shower, the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his upper arms, and the soft patina of body hair on his skin exuded warning signs that all primitive people are immediately aware of.

Saturday afternoon a mulatto kid by the name of Ciro Goula from St. Martin Parish was stoned on a pipeload of Afghan skunk his “old man” had given him. Ciro was one of those damaged human beings who was not a criminal by nature but who would always be in the company of criminals and inside a criminal environment, because he could not function anywhere else. He was registered with the state health department as a carrier of venereal diseases and had been confined in a state mental hospital once and Angola twice. He was a prostitute and an addict, vain about his person, neurotic as a corkscrew, and indifferent about his ultimate fate. He was doing six months for possession, and during his first week in the main population he had attached himself to Walter Lantier, a white man with two homicides in his jacket. Walter rented Ciro out for dope, cash, or decks of smokes.

But Saturday afternoon Ciro got stoned and in Walter’s face because Walter had sold him for an extra dessert to a retarded man who had the worst body odor in the stockade.

“You don’t like it, you? You t’ink you better than other people? You t’ink you got a say in what I do?” Walter said. “Tell me how you feel about that in a couple of days, you li’l bitch.”

Walter put out the word. For the next twenty-four hours, Ciro was anybody’s punch.

On Sunday evening an inmate in the Aryan Brotherhood picked up Ciro in a bear hug and carried him into a shower room. There, he was made to put on panties and a bra and perform in front of three other men tattooed with SS lightning bolts and blue teardrops at the corners of their eyes. Inside the AB, tear-duct tats indicate the bearer has canceled someone’s ticket. Membership in the Brotherhood is for life. In terms of effectiveness, their cruelty and violence have no peer. Ciro Goula had always believed, in a bizarre fashion, that his profligacy would protect him from wolves. But Walter Lantier had just volunteered him for duty inside a concrete mixer.

The four AB members in the shower room laughed at him, then sodomized him and plunged his head in a toilet bowl. When he screamed for help, they plunged his head into the water again and flushed the toilet. That’s when Otis Baylor strayed into their midst.

“What the hell is the matter with you fellows? What kind of men are you?” he said, gathering up Ciro from a puddle of water on the floor. “Shame on the bunch of you.”

“Where do you think you are, Jack?” one of the inmates said.

“You watch your manners, my friend. Or I’ll be back for you,” Otis said.

The inmate who had addressed Otis looked at him in disbelief, a matchstick frozen in the corner of his mouth. He tried to hold Otis’s stare but his eyes broke and he lowered his head. His friends remained motionless, as cave dwellers might if a stranger entered their cave and kicked their food into a communal fire. Otis hefted Ciro to his feet and half carried him down a corridor, past a row of cells, to a barred security gate, on the other side of which two uniformed guards looked at him openmouthed.

“This man needs to be in a hospital. Y’all have a serious discipline problem in here,” he said.

OTIS WAS WEARING jailhouse denims and a waist chain when the turnkey brought him to the interview room. Through the window I could see the coils of razor wire on the security fence outside and empty fields in the distance and a rural road that was lined with trash. I asked the turnkey if he could remove the chains. He shook his head and closed the door behind him.

“They got you in segregation?” I said.

“Is that what they call it?” Otis replied.

“Believe it or not, it’s for your own protection.”

“Then why am I in chains?”

Because a jail is not an adjustable institution, I thought. But Otis was a hardhead and I knew my words would be wasted on him. “I need your permission to go on your property in New Orleans,” I said.

“What for?”

“I think Bertrand Melancon may have stashed stolen goods in your carriage house or your yard.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The day you understand why these guys do anything is the day you stick a gun in your mouth,” I replied.

I thought he might lighten up. But he didn’t. “Get a warrant. That’s how you guys do it, don’t you?”

I leaned forward on the table. His wrists were cuffed to the chain that cinched his waist, and made me think of fins on the sides of a beached fish. “Listen to me. The stolen property I’m talking about belongs to your neighbor Sidney Kovick. You know what kind of man he is. If I’m correct, namely that Bertrand Melancon did stash Sidney’s goods on your property, how long do you think it will take Sidney to come to the same conclusion? Furthermore, ask yourself what Sidney is capable of if he thinks you or a member of your family found them.”

He looked out the window at the sun shining on the spools of razor wire above the fence. “Do whatever you want, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“I admire your standing up for Ciro Goula. But he chose the life he lives and you can’t take his weight.”

“Have you ever been locked up in a place like this?”

“What if I have?”

“Then you know you don’t give an inch.”

“George Patton once told his men that wars are not won by giving your life for your country. You win wars by making the other poor bastard give his life for his.”

“I’m ready to go back to lockdown.”

“You got it,” I said. Then I opened the door and yelled down the corridor at the turnkey, “On the gate, here!”

CHAPTER
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