A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke
“Clete—”
“I didn’t drag you down here just to fire in the well. Take it easy.”
We watched the Chrysler speed down the wet boulevard along the lakefront, then slow and turn through the iron gates of the yacht club. The taillights disappeared down a palm-lined drive that led to an enormous white glass-domed building by a golf course. Clete pulled to the curb and stared glumly through the windshield. The waves out on the lake were dark green and blowing with strips of froth. He breathed loudly through his nose.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“The hell it is. I’m going to take that cocksucker down.”
“We don’t need him to talk to the girl.”
“I don’t know where she is. He meets her in different bars, then they go to a motel.”
“We’ll give it a little while. Maybe he’ll head over to Algiers later.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. His eyes moved over the rolling fairways and oak trees, the parking lot in front of the main building, the sailboats rising and falling in their slips. “There’s two or three exits to this place. We’d better park inside. I’m going to have a talk with Nig later about credibility. That’s the problem with this PI stuff, you’ve got about the same clout as the lowlifes. I always feel like I’m picking up table scraps.”
We drove through the gate and parked at the back of the lot, where we could see the Chrysler two rows away, under a sodium lamp. Clete reached into the back seat for his Styrofoam cooler, pulled out two fried-oyster poor-boy sandwiches, a can of Jax for himself, and a Dr Pepper for me. He kept brushing crumbs off his shirtfront while he ate. When he finished a beer he crushed the can in his huge hand, threw it out onto the parking lot, and snapped open another one. He squinted one eye at me.
“Dave, have you got something else on the agenda?” he said.
“Not really.”
“You’re not going to see Joey Meatballs again and forget to invite your old partner to the party, are you?”
“Gouza doesn’t rattle. We’re going to have to take down somebody around him.”
“It’s been tried before. They’re usually a lot more afraid of Joey than they are of us. I heard he busted out a snitch’s teeth in Angola with a ballpeen hammer. Every punk and addict and pervert in New Orleans knows that story, too.”
“How heavy do you figure he’s into the crack trade?”
“He’s not. It’s pieced off too many times before it gets to the projects. Gouza’s on the other end. Big shipments, pure stuff, out of Florida or South America. I hear his people distribute to maybe four or five guys in Orleans Parish, they make their profit on quantity, then they’re out of the chain with minimum risk. Even the greaseballs won’t go into the welfare projects. I had to go after a jumper for Nig at the St. Thomas. Two kids on the roof filled up a thirty-gallon garbage can with water and dropped it on me, bottom end down. It missed me by a foot and flattened a kid’s tricycle like a half-dollar. . . . But you didn’t really answer my question, noble mon. I think you’ve got something else on the dance card and you’re not cutting ole Cletus in on it.”
“This case has been all dead ends, Clete. When I learn something, I’ll tell you. My big problem is the Sonniers. I feel like locking them all up as material witnesses.”
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea. Taking showers with child molesters and mainline bone smokers helps get your perspective clear sometimes.”
“I couldn’t make it stick. They weren’t actually witness to anything.”
“Then let them live with their own shit.”
“I’m still left with a dead cop.”
We sat for a long time in the rain. The band of cobalt light on the horizon gradually faded under the rim of storm clouds, and the lake grew dark and then glazed with the yellow reflection of ballroom lights in the club. I could taste salt in the wind. I pulled my rainhat down over my eyes and fell asleep.
I see Bootsie when she’s nineteen, her hair as bright as copper on the pillow, her nude body as pink and soft as a newly opened rose. I put my head between her young breasts.
When I awoke the rain had stopped completely, the moon had broken through a rip in the clouds over the lake, and Clete was not in the car. I could hear orchestra music from the ballroom. Then I saw him, in silhouette, his wide back framed in the opened driver’s door of Bobby Earl’s Chrysler, his elbows cocked, both his arms pointed down toward his loins. He rotated his head on his neck as though he were standing indifferently at a public urinal. Even at that distance I could see the spray splashing on the dashboard, the steering wheel, the leather seats. Clete shook himself, flexed his knees, and zipped his fly. He cupped his Zippo in his hands, lit a cigarette, and puffed it in the corner of his mouth as he walked back toward the car and squinted up approvingly at the clearing sky overhead.
“I don’t believe it.”
“You got to let a guy like Bobby know you’re around,” he said, slamming the door behind him. “Ah, lookie there, our man scored after all. I think he’s one of these guys who plans on marrying up and screwing down.”
Bobby Earl walked across the parking lot in a white suit, charcoal shirt, and white-and-black striped tie. A red-headed woman in a sequined evening gown held on to his arm and tried to step across the puddles in her high heels. Both she and Bobby Earl balanced champagne glasses gingerly in their hands. The woman was laughing uncontrollably at something Bobby Earl was telling her.
Earl opened the passenger door for her, then got behind the wheel. The light from the sodium lamp shone through his front window, and I saw his silhouette freeze, then his shoulders stiffen, as though he had just become aware that a geological fissure had opened up below his automobile. Then he got out of the car, staring incredulously at his upturned palms, the wet streaks in his suit, the damp imprints of his shoes.
Clete started the engine, and the rusted-out muffler thundered off the asphalt and reverberated between the rows of cars. He turned out into the aisle and drove slowly past the Chrysler, the engine and frame clanking like broken glass.
“What’s happenin’, Bob?” he asked, then flipped his cigarette in a high, sparking arc, punched in a rock tape, and gave Bobby Earl the thumbs-up sign.
Bobby Earl’s face slipped by the window like an outraged balloon. The woman in the sequined evening gown walked hurriedly back toward the clubhouse, her spiked heels clicking across the puddles.
ALL MEN HAVE a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident. Eddy Raintree’s votive attempt at metaphysics was just a little more eccentric than most. Both the gunbull in Angola and the biker girl in Algiers had said that Raintree was wired into astronomy and weirdness. In New Orleans, if your interest ran to UFOs (called “ufology” by enthusiasts), Island voodoo, witchcraft, teleportation through the third eye in your forehead, palm reading, the study of ectoplasm, the theory that Atlanteans are living among us in another dimension, and herbal cures for everything from brain cancer to impacted wisdom teeth, you eventually went to Tante Majorie’s occult bookstore on Royal Street in the Quarter.
Tante Majorie was big all over and so black that her skin had a purple sheen to it. She streaked her high cheekbones with rouge and wore gold granny glasses, and her hair, which was pulled back tightly in a bun, had grayed so that it looked like dull gunmetal. She lived over her shop with another lesbian, an elderly white woman, and fifteen cats who sat on the furniture, the bookshelves, and the ancient radiator, and tracked soiled cat litter throughout the apartment.
She served tea on a silver service, then studied the photo of Eddy Raintree. Her French doors were open on the balcony, and I could hear the night noise from the street. I had known her almost twenty years and had never been able to teach her my correct name.
“You say he got a tiger on his arm?” she asked.
“Yes.”
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“Why do you think that?”
“He always want me to read his hand. But when I pick it up in my fingers, it twitch just like a frog. I’d tell him, It ain’t shoe polish, darlin’. It ain’t gonna rub off on you. Why you looking for him?”
“He helped murder a sheriff’s deputy.”
She looked out the French doors at the jungle of potted geraniums, philodendron, and banana trees on her balcony.
“You ain’t got to look for him, Mr. Streak. That boy ain’t got a long way to run,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I told him it ain’t no accident he got that tiger on his arm. I told him tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. Just like in the Bible, glowing out there in the trees. That tiger gonna eat him.”
“I respect your wisdom and your experience, Tante Majorie, but I need to find this man.”
She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers and gazed thoughtfully at a calico cat nursing a half-dozen kittens in a cardboard box.
“Every mont’ I send out astrology readings for people on my list,” she said. “He’s one of them people. But Raintree ain’t the name he give me. I don’t ’member the name he give me. Maybe you ain’t suppose to find him, Mr. Streak.”
“My name’s Dave, Tante Majorie. Could I see your list?”
“It ain’t gonna he’p. His kind come with a face, what they get called don’t matter. They come out of the womb without no name, without no place in the house where they’re born, without no place down at a church, a school, a job down at a grocery sto’, there ain’t a place or a person they belong to in this whole round world. Not till that day they turn and look at somebody at the bus stop, or in the saloon, or sitting next to them in the hot-pillow house, and they see that animal that ain’t been fed in that other person’s eyes. That’s when they know who they always been.”
Then she went into the back of the apartment and returned with several sheets of typing paper in her hand.
“I got maybe two hundred people here,” she said. “They’re spread all over Lou’sana and Miss’sippi, too.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” I said. “You see, Tante Majorie, the interesting thing about these guys is their ego. So when they use an alias they usually keep their initials. Or maybe their aliases have the same sound value as their real names.”
Her list was in alphabetical order. I sorted the pages to the “R’s.”
“How about Elton Rubert?” I asked.
“I don’t ’member it, Mr. Davis. My clerk must have put it down, and he don’t work here anymore.”
“My name is Dave, Tante Majorie. Dave Robicheaux. Where’s your clerk now?”
“He moved up to Ohio, or one of them places up North.”
I wrote down the mailing address of Elton Rubert, a tavern in a small settlement out in the Atchafalaya basin west of Baton Rouge.
“Here’s my business card,” I said. “If the man in the photo shows up here again, read his palm or whatever he wants, then call me later. But don’t question him or try to find out anything about him for me, Tante Majorie. You’ve already been a great help.”
“Give me your hand.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She reached out and took my hand, stared into my palm and kneaded it with her fingers. Then she stroked it as though she were smoothing bread dough.
“There’s something I ain’t told you,” she said. “The last time that man was in here, I read his hand, just like I’m reading yours. He axed me what his lifeline was like. What I didn’t tell him, what he didn’t know, was he didn’t have no lifeline. It was gone.”
I looked at her.
“You ain’t understood me, darlin’,” she said. “When your lifeline’s gone, his kind get it back by stealing somebody else’s.” She folded my thumb and fingers into a fist, then pressed it into a ball with her palms. I could feel the heat and oil in her skin. “You hold on to it real hard, Mr. Streak. That tiger don’t care who it eat.”
I HAD HAD TROUBLE finding a parking place earlier and had left my pickup over by Rampart Street, not far from the Iberville welfare project. When I rounded the corner I saw the passenger door agape, the window smashed out on the pavement, the flannel-wrapped brick still in the gutter. The glove box had been rifled and the stereo ripped out of the panel, as well as most of the ignition wires, which hung below the dashboard like broken spaghetti ends.
Because First District headquarters was only two blocks away, it took only an hour to get a uniformed officer there to make out the theft report that my insurance company would require. Then I walked to a drugstore on Canal, called Triple A for a wrecker, and called Bootsie and told her that I wouldn’t be home as I had promised, that with any luck I could have the truck repaired by late tomorrow.
“Where will you stay tonight?” she asked.
“At Clete’s.”
“Dave, if the truck isn’t fixed tomorrow, take the bus back home and we’ll go get the truck later. Tomorrow’s Friday. Let’s have a nice weekend.”
“I may have to check out a lead on the way back. It might be a dud, but I can’t let it hang.”
“Does this have to do with Drew?”
“No, not at all.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to interfere.”
“This may be the guy who tried to take my head off with a crowbar.”
“Oh God, Dave, give it up, at least for a while.”
“It doesn’t work that way. The other side doesn’t do pit stops.”
“How clever,” she said. “I’ll leave the answering machine on in case we’re in town.”
“Come on, Boots, don’t sign off like that.”
“It’s been a long day. I’m just tired. I don’t mean what I say.”
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. I’ll call in the morning. Tell Alafair we’ll go crabbing on the bay Saturday.”
I was ready to say goodnight, then she said, as though she were speaking out of a mist, “Remember what they used to teach us in Catholic school about virginity? They said it was better to remain a virgin until you married so you wouldn’t make comparisons. Do you ever make comparisons, Dave?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed as a man might if he looked up one sunny day and felt the cold outer envelope of a glacier sliding unalterably into his life.
WHEN I WAS recuperating from the bouncing Betty that sent me home from Vietnam, and I began my long courtship with insomnia, I used to muse sometimes on what were the worst images or degrees of fear that my dreams could present me with. In my innocence, I thought that if I could face them in the light of day, imagine them perhaps as friendly gargoyles sitting at the foot of my bed, even hold a reasonable conversation with them, I wouldn’t have to drink and drug myself nightly into another dimension where the monsters were transformed into pink zebras and prancing giraffes. But every third or fourth night I was back with my platoon, outside an empty ville that stunk of duck shit and unburied water buffalo; then as we lay pressed against a broken dike in the heated, breathless air, we suddenly realized that somebody back at the firebase had screwed up bad, and that the 105 rounds were coming in short.
The dream about an artillery barrage can be as real as the experience. You want to burrow into the ground like an insect; your knees are pulled up in a fetal position, your arms squeezed over your pot. Your fear is so great that you think the marrow in your skull will split, the arteries in your brain will rupture from their own dilation, blood will fountain from your nose. You will promise God anything in order to be spared. Right behind you, geysers of mud explode in the air, and the bodies of North Vietnamese regulars are blown out of their graves, their bodies luminescent with green slime and dancing with maggots.
I had seen Vietnamese civilians who had survived B-52 raids. They were beyond speech; they trembled all o
As I slept on Clete’s couch that night, I had to deal with another creation of my unconscious, one that was no less difficult than the old grainy filmstrips from Vietnam. In my dream I would feel Bootsie next to me, her nude body warm and smooth under the sheet. I would put my face in her hair, kiss her nipples, stroke her stomach and thighs, and she would smile in her sleep, take me in her hand, and place me inside her. I would kiss the tops of her breasts and try to touch her all over while we made love, wishing in my lust that she were two instead of one. Then as it built inside of me like a tree cracking loose from a riverbank, rearing upward in the warm current, she would smile with drowsy expectation and close her eyes, and her face would grow small and soft and her mouth become as vulnerable as a flower.
But her eyes would open again and they would be as sightless as milk glass. A scaled deformity like the red wings of a butterfly would mask her face, her body would stiffen and ridge with bone, and her womb would be filled with death.
I sat up in the darkness of Clete’s living room, the blood beating in my wrists, and opened and closed my mouth as though I had been pulled from beneath the ocean’s surface. I stared through the window and across the courtyard at a lamp on a table behind a curtain that was lifting in the breeze from a fan. I could see someone’s shadow moving behind the curtain. I wanted to believe that it was the shadow of a nice person, perhaps a man preparing to go to work or an elderly woman fixing breakfast before going to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. But it was 4 A.M.; the sky overhead was black, with no hint of the false dawn; the night still belonged to the gargoyles, and the person across the courtyard was probably a hooker or somebody on the downside of an all-night drunk.
I put on my shirt and slacks and slipped on my loafers. I could see Clete’s massive form in his bed, a pillow over his face, his porkpie hat on the bedpost. I closed the door softly behind me. The air in the courtyard was electric with the smell of magnolia.