The Tin Roof Blowdown (27 page)

EARLY TUESDAY I collected Clete Purcel at his motor court and headed for New Orleans. When we drove down I-10 into Orleans Parish, the city was little changed, the ecological and structural wreckage so great and pervasive that it was hard to believe all of this destruction could come to pass in a twenty-four-hour period. I had been on the water when Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957 and in the eye of Hilda in 1964 when the water tower in Delcambre toppled onto City Hall and killed all the Civil Defense volunteers inside. But the damage in New Orleans was of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible, or at least it was for me.

Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be. Maybe I should not have returned. Maybe I expected to see the streets clean, the power back on, crews of carpenters repairing ruined homes. But the sense of loss I felt while driving down St. Charles was worse than I had experienced right after the storm. New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn’t belong to a state; it belonged to a people.

When Clete and I walked a beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out “The Tin Roof Blues” in Preservation Hall. Brass-band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose on Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, coffee and freshly baked beignets in the Café du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.

The grandest ride in America was the St. Charles streetcar. You could catch the old green-painted, lumbering iron car under the colonnade in front of the Pearl and for pocket change travel on the neutral ground down arguably the most beautiful street in the Western world. The canopy of live oaks over the neutral ground created a green-gold tunnel as far as the eye could see. On the corners, black men sold ice cream and sno’balls from carts with parasols on them, and in winter the pink and maroon neon on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glowed like electrified smoke inside the fog.

Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace.

What was its future?

I looked through my windshield and saw fallen trees everywhere, power and phone lines hanging from utility poles, dead traffic lights, gutted downtown buildings so badly damaged the owners had not bothered to cover the blown-out windows with plywood. The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World. I wasn’t sure New Orleans had a future.

I turned off St. Charles and drove into Otis’s old neighborhood. The sun was up in the sky now, and the lawns along the street were stacked with debris and hazed with patches of bright green where blades of St. Augustine grass had grown through the netlike film of dead matter left behind by the receding water. Clete wanted to stop by the home of his new girlfriend. I waited while he knocked on the door. When no one answered, he wrote a note and stuck it in the jamb.

“You told her to meet us?” I said.

“No, I told her I’d call her later. I want to keep her separate from this stuff.”

I pulled away from the curb and continued toward Otis’s house.

“I’ve been giving this guy Bledsoe some thought,” Clete said. “I think he needs a Bobbsey twins invitation to leave the area.”

“I think that’s a bad idea.”

“The guy doesn’t sleep. His lights are on all night. He had a hooker in Saturday night. She left ten minutes later, looking like somebody had scared the shit out of her.”

“Leave him alone, Clete. Helen and I will handle it.”

“The guy’s got ice water in his veins. He’s a psychopath and he’s got a grudge against Alafair. I say we break his wheels before he gets into gear.”

“Why tell me this now?”

“Because this guy bothers me. Because I don’t want Alafair hurt. Because you didn’t see that hooker hauling ass.”

“Were you drinking last night?”

He paused before he spoke again, this time without heat. “I came back to the Big Sleazy to help you look for the stones. But I think this is a mistake. Those are Sidney’s goods. If he thinks you know where they are…Christ, Dave, use your imagination. Even the greaseballs kiss his ring.”

I had told Otis Baylor almost the same thing but had not followed my own advice. I hoped Clete did not read my face. “I finally hit home with something?” he said.

We probed Otis’s flower beds with sticks and pried up the flagstones in the backyard. We searched the garage rafters and under his back porch and used a ladder to climb on top of the porte cochere in case Bertrand had thrown the stones up there. We shoveled up the bricking in the patio and dismantled the chimney on the stone barbecue pit, broke apart birdhouses, raked out an ancient compost dump thatched with morning glory vine, crunched through the remnants of a greenhouse that had been flattened by a pecan tree, and dumped the impacted dirt in three huge iron sugar kettles that had been used as flower planters.

Nothing.

“What are you all doing over there?” a voice called from next door.

Tom Claggart stood on his back porch, straining to get a clear look through the border of broken bamboo that separated his property from Otis Baylor’s.

“It’s Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Claggart,” I said.

“Where’s Otis?”

“If you need to contact him, you can call his home in New Iberia,” I replied.

“I was just wondering if you had permission to be here,” Claggart said.

“This is police business. Go back inside your house,” Clete said.

“You don’t have to take that attitude,” Claggart said.

“Ease up,” I whispered to Clete.

“Did you catch those guys?” Claggart asked.

“Which guys?” I asked.

“The ones who got away. The ones who should be in a cage. You should be here at night. They’re like rats crawling out of a trash dump.”

“Who is?” I said.

“Who do you think? What’s wrong with you people? This is a tragedy. No one is safe,” he said. “All I did was ask a question and that man with you ordered me back in my house. This isn’t the United States anymore.” he went inside and slammed the door behind him.

“I think I’ve seen that guy before,” Clete said.

“Where?”

“I don’t remember.”

A few minutes later, when we were getting back in my truck, I saw Claggart watching us from the upstairs window. When he saw me look back at him, he pulled the shade.

“What’s with that dude?” Clete said.

“He’s a gun nut with loose wiring.”

“This was a mistake coming here, Streak. But you won’t listen to your old podjo, will you? No sirree, that’s not going to happen.”

“I want to go down to the Lower Nine.”

“Never think of me as the voice of reason. I couldn’t stand it,” he said.

He pulled a silver flask from the pocket of his slacks and unscrewed the cap and let it swing from its tiny chain. He took a sip, then another. I could see the warmth of the brandy spreading through his system, the tension going out of his face. He screwed the cap back on the flask and slipped the flask back into his pocket. He brushed at his nose and grinned.

“You’re not mad at me?” I said.

“Wouldn’t do any good. One day our luck is going to run out. I think you’re pushing that day closer to us than it should be, Dave. But that’s the way it is. You won’t ever change.”

IT WASN’T THE individual destruction of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward that seemed unreal. It was the disconnection of them from their environment that was hard for the eye to accept. They had been lifted from their foundations, twisted from the plumbing that held them to the ground, and redeposited upside down or piled against one another as though they had been dropped from the sky. Some were half buried in hardened rivers of mud that flowed out the windows and the doors. The insides of all of them were black-green with sludge and mold, their exteriors spray-painted with code numbers to indicate they had already been searched for bodies.

But every day more dead were discovered, either by search dogs or returning family members. The bodies were sheathed like mummies in dried nets of organic matter, compacted inside air ducts, and wedged between the rafters of roofs that had filled to the apexes. Sometimes when the wind shifted, an odor would strike the nostrils and cause a person to clear his throat and spit.

Feral dogs prowled the wreckage and so did the few people who were being allowed back into their neighborhoods. Clete and I found the church where Father Jude LeBlanc had probably died. It was made of tan stucco and had a small bell tower and an apse on it and looked like a Spanish mission in the Southwest. Before the storm, bougainvillea had bloomed like drops of blood on the south wall and a life-size replica of Jesus on the Cross had hung in a breezeway that joined the church to an elementary school. But the bougainvillea was gone and the replica of Jesus had floated out to sea.

I could find no one who had any knowledge of Jude LeBlanc’s fate. It was almost evening now, and the sky was purple and threaded with smoke that smelled like burning garbage. On a house lot behind the church I saw an elderly black man pulling boards from what used to be his house. I made my way across a chain-link fence that had been twisted into a corkscrew, my shoes breaking through an oily green crust that had dried on top of mud and untreated sewage.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m a friend of Father Jude LeBlanc,” I said. “He was at this church when the storm hit.”

“I know he was. I was on the roof yonder. I seen a woman dropping children out the attic window into the water,” he said. He had stopped his work to talk with me, one hand grasped on a weathered plank flanged with nails. His face was work-seamed, his eyes an indistinct blue, as though the sun had leached most of the color from them.

“You saw Father LeBlanc? You know what happened to him?”

“Mister, I ain’t had time to do nothing except get my wife out of my house. I ain’t pulled it off, either.”

“Sir?”

“I ain’t never found her. Whole house caved in under us. Water come squirting right out of the chimney, boiling up around us just like we was on a ship going down.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I come back looking for our t’ings. Po-lice said I ain’t s’ppose to be back here. If I ain’t s’ppose to be back here, who is? Two t’ings I don’t understand. How come nobody come for us and what was them lights in the water?”

“Pardon?”

“It was dark and a helicopter went by, high up. I seen the lights in the water and at first I t’ought it was a searchlight from the helicopter and the blades of the helicopters was blowing the water. But that wasn’t it. The lights was swimming around, like fish that could glow in the dark, except it was much brighter and these wasn’t no fish. I t’ink maybe my wife was down there.”

He stared into my face, waiting, as though somehow I possessed knowledge that he did not.

AT NOON WEDNESDAY Clete came by the office and asked me to have lunch with him. But something besides lunch was obviously on his mind. I asked him what it was.

“It’s Courtney,” he said.

“Who?”

“Come in, Earth. Courtney Degravelle, the lady who lives down the street from Otis Baylor. The lady whose house I left a note at yesterday.”

“Maybe she didn’t see it.”

“I left her three voice mails.”

“I’ll ask NOPD to send somebody by her place.”

“I already did that. They don’t even know where a third of their department is. Come on, let’s go to Victor’s.”

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. My intuitions proved correct. At the cafeteria, Clete remained agitated and distracted and hardly touched his food.

“Better eat up,” I said.

“Last night Ronald Bledsoe came to my cottage and asked me to split a six-pack with him. This morning he invited me to breakfast. He said PIs need to network because Google is driving us out of business. I told him I didn’t have that problem, also that I lived in the motor court because of the privacy it gave me.”

“What do you think he’s up to?”

“He wanted me to know he was at the motor court late last night and early this morning. I tell you, Dave, we need to take this cocksucker out in a swamp and smoke him. That’s not a metaphor, either.”

The people at the next table stopped eating and looked at one another.

“I’ll get a box to go,” I said.

BUT MY CONCERNS with Clete’s use of profanity in a hometown restaurant should have been the least of my worries. The next morning, at sunrise, a game warden trying to save a stranded cow in a marshy area not far from the Gulf saw the bodies of two people lying on the edge of a sandbar in the middle of a deepwater lake. Cinder blocks were roped around their waists, and waves rippled across their legs and backs. Both bodies should have sunk to the bottom of the lake, but whoever threw them into the water probably did so in the dark, assuming his boat was in a deepwater channel. The game warden cut the motor of his outboard and let the keel scrape onto the sand.