A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke
“Don’t fool yourself. You’ll never stop being a cop, Dave.”
I looked into her eyes again, and they were suddenly clear, as though the breeze had blown a dark object away from her line of vision.
I squeezed her hand, rose from the wood bench, and went around behind her and kissed her hair and hugged her against me. I could feel her heart beating under my arms.
AT THE OFFICE I gave the sheriff the envelope containing the two thousand dollars and the unsigned letter.
“It must be a cheap outfit,” he said. “You’d think they’d pay a little more to get a cop on the pad.”
He had run a dry-cleaning business before he became sheriff. He was also a Boy Scout master and belonged to the Lions Club, not for political reasons but because he thoroughly enjoyed being a Scoutmaster and belonging to the Lions Club. He was a thoughtful and considerate man, and I always hated to correct him or to suggest that his career as an elected police officer would probably always consist of on-the-job training.
“Seduction usually comes a teaspoon at a time,” I said. “Sometimes a cop who won’t take fifty grand will take two. Then one day you find yourself way down the road and you don’t remember where you made a hard left turn.”
He wore large rimless glasses, and his stomach swelled over his gunbelt. Through the window behind his desk I could see two black trusties from the parish jail washing patrol cars in the parking lot. He scratched the blue and red veins in his soft cheek with his fingernail.
“Who do you think it came from?” he asked.
“Somebody with long-range plans, somebody who’s always looking around to buy a cop. Probably the mob or somebody in it.”
“Not from Bobby Earl?”
“His kind only pay out money when you catch them sodomizing sheep. I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with the wiseguys now.”
“What do you think they’ll do next?”
“If I stay out of New Orleans, there will probably be another envelope. Then they’ll offer me a job providing security in one of their nightclubs or in a counting room at the track.”
He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and rotated it with his fingers.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about all this,” he said. “I surely do.”
“Why?”
“Don’t underestimate Bobby Earl’s potential. I met him a couple of times ten or twelve years ago, when he was still appearing in Klan robes. This guy could make the ovens sing and grin while he was doing it.”
“Maybe. But I never met one of those guys who wasn’t a physical and moral coward.”
“I saw Garrett’s body before the autopsy. It was hard to look at, and I was in Korea. Watch your butt, Dave.”
His eyes were unblinking over his rimless glasses.
BY TWO P.M. it was ninety-five degrees outside; the sunlight off the cement was as bright as a white flame; the palm trees looked dry and desiccated in the hot wind; and my own day was just warming up.
I called Drew again and this time she answered. I was ready to argue with her, to lecture her about her and Weldon’s lack of cooperation in the case, even blame her for my difficulties with Bootsie at lunch. In fact, my opening statement was “Who was this guy in your kitchen, Drew, and why didn’t you report it?”
I could hear her breathing in the receiver.
“Lyle told you?” she said.
“As well as Lyle can tell me anything, without trying to sell glow-in-the-dark Bibles at the same time. I’ll tell you the truth, Drew, I’ve pretty well had it with your family’s attitude. I don’t want to be unkind, but the three of you behave like y’all have been shooting up with liquid Drano.”
She was quiet again, then I heard her begin to weep.
“Drew?”
But she continued to cry without answering, the kind of unrelieved and subdued sobbing that comes from deep down in the breast.
“Drew, I apologize. I’ve had some bad concerns on my mind and I was taking them out on you. I’m truly sorry for what I said. It was thoughtless and stupid.”
I squeezed my temples with my thumb and forefinger.
“Drew?”
I heard her swallow and take a deep breath.
“Sometimes I’m not very smart,” I said. “You know I’ve always admired you. You have more political courage than anybody I’ve ever known.”
“I don’t know what to do. I’ve always had choices before. Now I don’t. I can’t deal with that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes you get caught. Sometimes there’s no way out. I’ve never let that happen to me.”
“Do you want to come into the office? Do you want me to come out there? Tell me what you want to do.”
“I don’t know what I want to do.”
“I’m going to come over there now. Is that all right?”
“I have to take the maid home, and I promised to stop by the market with her. Can you come out about four?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, of course not.”
“It doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”
“No, not at all. That’s silly. Don’t think that way.”
After I had hung up the phone, I looked wanly at the damp imprint of my hand on the receiver. Were her tears for her brother or herself, I wondered. But then what right had I to be judgmental?
Oh Lord, I thought.
I was almost out the door when the dispatcher caught me in the hallway.
“Pick up your line,” he said. “A sergeant in the First District in New Orleans has been holding for you.”
“Take a message. I’ll call him back.”
“You’d better get it, Dave. He says somebody stomped the shit out of Cletus Purcel.”
AFTER I HAD finished talking with the sergeant in New Orleans, who had not been the investigative officer and who couldn’t tell me much other than Clete’s room number in the hospital off St. Charles and the fact that Clete wanted to see me, that somebody had worked him over bad with a piece of pipe, I told the dispatcher to send a uniformed deputy out to Drew’s house and to call Bootsie and tell her that I would be home late and would call her from New Orleans.
The wind was hot through my truck windows as I drove across the causeway over the Atchafalaya marsh. The air tasted like brass, like it was full of ozone, and I could smell dead fish on the banks of the willow islands and the odor of brine off the Gulf. The willows looked wilted in the heat, and the few fishermen who were out had pulled their boats into the warm shade of the oil platforms that dotted the bays.
I thought of an event, a low moment in my life, that had occurred almost fifteen years ago. I had been sent to Las Vegas to pick up a prisoner at the county jail and escort him back to New Orleans. But the paperwork and the court clearance had taken almost two days, and I walked in disgust from the courthouse down a palm-lined boulevard in 115-degree heat to a casino and cool bar, where I began drinking a series of vodka collinses as though they were soda pop. Then I had a blackout and seven hours disappeared from my day. I woke up in a rented car out on the desert about 10 P.M., my head and body as numb and devoid of feeling and connection with the day as if I had been stunned from crown to sole with novocaine, the distant neon city blazing in the purple cup of mountains.
There was blood on my shirt and my knuckles, and a woman’s compact was on the floor. My wallet was gone, along with my money, traveler’s checks, credit cards, identification, and finally my shield and my .38 special. I remembered nothing except walking from the bar to a twenty-one table with my drink in my hand and sitting among a polite group of players from Ocala, Florida.
I drove trembling back to the hotel and tried to drink myself sober with room-service Jim Beam. By midnight I went into the DTs and believed that the red message light on my phone meant that once again I had received a long-distance call from the dead members of my platoon. When I finally became rational enough to pick up the receiver and talk to the desk clerk,
I had to use both hands to dial his number, while the sweat slid out of my hair and down the sides of my face. Six hours later he was standing in my hotel room in his Budweiser shorts, sandals, porkpie hat, and cutoff LSU T-shirt that looked like a tank top on a hippo.
He sat on the side of the bed and listened to my story again, chewing gum, nodding, looking between his knees at the floor; then he left and didn’t come back until three in the afternoon. When he did, he dropped a paper sack on the dresser and said, smiling, “Time to pick up our prisoner and boogie on down the road. The Chinese broad got away with your traveler’s checks, but I got your money, credit cards, your shield, and your piece back. The American guy working with her is heading back to the Coast by Greyhound to make some long-range dental plans. He’s looking forward to it, he said. There’s no paperwork on this one, mon.”
“What Chinese? What are you talking about?”
“She and her pimp picked you up in a parking lot outside a bar at the end of the Strip. You were too drunk to start your car. They said they’d drive you back to the hotel. You’re lucky he didn’t put a shank in you. I took a gut ripper off him that must have been eight inches long.”
“I don’t remember any of it.” My hands still felt thick and wooden when I tried to open and close them.
“Sometimes you lose. Forget it. Come on, let’s eat a steak and blow this shithole. I think they got the architects for this place out of a detox center.”
Then he looked at me quietly, and I saw the pity and concern in his eyes.
“You dropped your brains in a jar of alcohol for a few hours,” he said. “Big deal. When I worked Vice I got rolled by one of my own snitches. Plus she gave me the gon. What bothers me is I think I knew she had it when I got in the sack with her.”
He grinned and blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the stale refrigerated air.
That was my old partner before whiskey and uppers and shylocks made him a fugitive from his own police department.
HIS FACE WHITENED when he tried to sit farther up in bed and reach the water glass and the glass straw on the nightstand.
“Don’t try to move around with broken ribs, Clete,” I said, and handed him the glass.
His green eyes were red along the rims, and they blinked like a bird’s while he sucked on the straw with the corner of his mouth. Divots of hair had been shaved out of his head, and his scalp was sewn with butterfly stitches in a half-dozen places.
“Man, what a drag,” he said. “They say I’m supposed to be in here two more days. I don’t think I can cut it. You ought to see my night nurse. She looks like the Beast of Buchenwald. She tried to shove a thermometer up my butt while I was asleep.”
“They hit you with pipes?”
“No, the little guy had brass knuckles, and Jack Gates, the guy I made for sure, had a baton.”
“The cop I talked to said they beat you up with pipes.”
“Then they got it wrong in the report. They sound like the same incompetent guys we used to work with.”
“How’d they get into your apartment?”
“Picked the lock, I guess. Anyway, Jack Gates was behind the door when I walked in. He caught me right across the ear with the baton. Damn, those things hurt. I crashed right over my new TV set. Then that little fuck was all over me. The last thing I remember I was falling through the furniture, trying to get my piece untangled from my coat, those brass knuckles bouncing off my head, and Gates trying to get a clear swing to take me off at the neck. That’s when I grabbed him around the head and tore the stocking off his face. The first thing I saw was all the metal in his teeth. Then it was lights out for Cletus. That sawed-off little fart caught me right at the base of the skull.
“It was just like you said, Gates has a scrap yard for a mouth. I should have made the connection before. He was a button man for Joey Gouza, but I heard he moved to Fort Lauderdale or Hallendale two or three years ago and got ice-picked by a chippy or something. But it was Jack Gates, mon, a real barf bucket. I heard Joey Gouza caught his brother-in-law skimming off his whores, so he told Gates to create an object lesson. The brother-in-law was a big, soft mushy guy who couldn’t climb a stairs without pulling himself up the banister with both hands. Gates wined and dined him at Copeland’s, got him stinking drunk, and kept telling him about these hot-assed Mexican broads over in Galveston. So the tub got his ovaries fired up, and Gates drove them out to a private airport in Kenner, all the time telling the tub what these broads would do for his sex life. Then ole Jack walked him out to the runway, lit a cigar for him, and pushed him into an airplane propeller.”
“You think he’s working for Gouza now?”
“He’s got to be. You don’t resign from Joey Meatballs. It’s a lifetime job.”
“Where’d he get that name?”
“His old man ran a spaghetti place on Felicity. In fact, Joey still owns three or four Italian restaurants around town. But the story is when he was a kid in the reformatory a redneck guard made Joey cook him meatballs all the time. Except Joey would always spit in them or mash up dead cockroaches in them. Have you ever seen him? His mother must have been knocked up by a street lamp.”
“The little guy with the brass knuckles is probably Fluck, right?”
“Maybe. But a nylon stocking makes everybody look like Cream of Wheat. All I can tell you is I think he wanted to take my eyes out. . . . Why are you looking like that?”
“I got you into this, Clete.”
“No, you didn’t. It was my idea to go out to Bobby Earl’s and pull on his tallywhacker. But I was right about the connection between Earl and Gouza, wasn’t I? I told you that flunky at the gate used to be a mule for Gouza. I think we’ve got the ultimate daisy chain of Louisiana buttwipes here—Klansmen, Nazis, and wiseguys.”
“You took the beating for me.”
“Bullshit.”
“You haven’t heard it all. I received a bribe attempt earlier today. A couple of grand in my mailbox, a letter suggesting I spend a lot of time around New Iberia.”
“Ah,” he said. The streetcar rattled down the tracks on St. Charles. “The carrot and the stick.”
“I think so.”
“And I got the stick.”
“They don’t like to beat up cops.”
“They did something else too, Dave, maybe a signal for you about their future potential. After they laid me out, they sprinkled a bagful of rainbows and black beauties all over the room to make it look like a drug deal gone sour. I cleaned them up before I called the First District. . . . Dave, I don’t like what I’m seeing on your face.”
“What’s that?”
“Like you got a piece of barbed wire behind your eyes. You get those thoughts out of your head.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“Like hell I am. Ole Streak turns on the Mixmaster and almost drives himself crazy with his own thoughts, then goes out and strikes a match to their balls. You wait till I’m out of here and we’ll ’front these guys together. Are we straight on that, podjo?”
I looked at the square of sunlight on his sheets. The palm trees outside the window lifted and straightened in the breeze.
“I’m not supposed to be a player?” he said.
“You want me to bring you anything?”
“Don’t go up against Gouza on your own. An Iberia sheriff’s badge is puppy shit to these guys.”
“What do you want me to bring you?”
“My piece. It’s in a little sock drawer under my bed.” He took his keys off the nightstand and dropped them in my palm. “There’s also a fifth of vodka and a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter.”
“I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Dave?”
“Yes.”
“Gouza’s a weird combo. He’s got an ice cube in the center of his head when it comes to business, but he’s also a sadistic paranoid. A lot of the greaseballs in this town are scared shitl
I DROVE TO Clete’s apartment on Dumaine in the Quarter, put his .38 revolver and shoulder holster, his vodka and cigarettes in a paper bag and was walking back down the balcony when I saw the apartment manager sweeping dust out his doorway through the railing into the courtyard below. He was a dark-skinned, black-haired man with bad teeth and turquoise eyes. I opened my badge and asked him if he had seen the men who had beaten Clete.
“Yeah, sho’ I seen them. I seen them run down the stairs,” he said. He had a heavy Cajun accent.
I asked him what they looked like.
“One man, I didn’t see him too good, no, he walked on down Dumaine. I didn’t pay him no mind ’cause I didn’t know nothing was wrong, me. But there was a little one, a blond-haired fella, he pushed by me on the stair and run out on the street and got on a motorcycle wit’ another fella.”
“What did this fellow on the motorcycle look like?”
“Big,” he said. Then he tapped on his biceps with one finger. “He had a tattoo. A tiger. It was yellow and red. I seen it real good ’cause I didn’t like that little fella pushing me on the stair.”
“Who’d you tell this to?”
“I ain’t said nothing to nobody.”
“Why not?”
“Ain’t nobody ax me.”
After I dropped off the paper sack with Clete’s gun, cigarettes, and vodka at the hospital, the sun was low in the sky, red through the oak trees on St. Charles Avenue, and swallows were circling in the dusk. I checked into an inexpensive guesthouse on Prytania, just two blocks off St. Charles, and called Bootsie and told her that I would have to stay over and that I would be home tomorrow afternoon.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I have to run down a couple of things. It’s grunt work mostly. Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Are you all right, Boots?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine this evening. It was hot today, but it’s cooling off this evening. It might rain tonight. There’s lightning out over the marsh.”