DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.
The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”
“Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.
But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.
Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a .25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.
“Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”
Molly hesitated.
“You want to see her brains on the dashboard, Miz Robicheaux?” Bledsoe said.
Molly pulled on the hood release, then leaned over the backseat and opened the rear door. Bledsoe slipped inside, closing the door as quickly as possible to turn off the interior light. Molly was still extended over the seat, and his face and eyes were only inches from hers. His silk shirt rippled like blue ice water. She could smell the dampness on his skin, the dried soap he had used in shaving his head, an odor like soiled kitty litter that rose from his armpits.
The man in the raincoat slammed down the hood.
“Start the car,” Bledsoe said, clicking the switch on the interior light to the “off” position.
“I don’t think I should do that,” Molly said.
The man in the raincoat pulled open the back door and got inside. He struggled a minute with his raincoat before getting the door shut. He would not look directly at either Molly or Alafair.
“Want to be the cause of this little girl’s death?” Bledsoe said. “Want to be the cause of your own, just because you decide to be stubborn? That doesn’t sound like a nun to me. That sounds like pride talking.”
Molly’s hand started to shake as she turned the ignition. “My husband is going to hang you out to dry, buddy boy,” she said.
“He’d like to. But so far, he hasn’t done such a good job of it, has he?” Bledsoe said. He teased the muzzle of the .25 under Alafair’s ear. “Pull onto the street, Miz Robicheaux.”
Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.
“Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might happen. You might come out of this just fine.”
Bledsoe took the yellow legal pad from Alafair’s hand and examined the top page, all the while holding the .25 against Alafair’s head. “Miss Alafair, you just made a bunch of people very happy. Isn’t that something, Tom? It was sitting in your backyard all the time, under that big generator, I bet. It took an educated young woman to figure this out for us. She’s special is what she is. Hear that, darlin’? You special and that’s how I’m gonna treat you. You’ll like it when we get there.”
He picked a piece of glass out of her hair and flicked it out the window. He did not say where “there” was.
They pulled out on the boulevard and drove past a women’s dormitory to a stop sign on the edge of the campus. Then they turned onto University Avenue and headed toward the edge of town.
MOMENTS LATER, a few blocks up the avenue, between a Jewish cemetery that was covered with the deep shadows of cedar and oak trees, and an old icehouse that had been converted into a topless club, a jogger had to dodge a car that had plunged out of the traffic, across the median, and possibly had been hit by another car. The jogger could not see clearly inside the car because of the mist, but when he called 911, he told the dispatcher he had heard a sound like muffled firecrackers and he thought he had seen a series of flashes inside the windows.
space
I CLAMPED THE portable emergency flasher on the roof of my truck and let Clete drive. By the time Clete had driven us through the little town of Broussard, the highway was slick, the sky black, and traffic was backing up because of construction outside Lafayette. We went through a long section of urban sprawl that in my college days had been sugarcane fields and pecan orchards, threaded by a two-lane highway that had been lined on each side with live oaks. But that was all gone.
It was almost 10:00 p.m. I had called Molly’s cell phone three times en route, getting her voice mail each time.
“You’re worrying too much. They’re probably headed home by now,” Clete said.
“She always checks her voice mail. It’s an obsession with her,” I said.
“Think about it a minute, Dave. Nothing has changed since this afternoon, except for the fact we found out Claggart is Asswipe’s half brother. That doesn’t mean Molly and Alafair are in greater danger. You know what I think is bothering you?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“You smoked Rydel and now you want to drink.”
When I didn’t speak, he said, “Remember when we did that bunch of Colombians? I’ve never been so scared in my life. I drank a dozen double Scotches that night and it didn’t make a dent.”
“Clete?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you shut up?”
He looked at me in the glow of the dash, then mashed on the accelerator, swerving across a double stripe to pass a tractor-trailer rig, rocking both of us against the doors.
I punched in 911 and got a Lafayette Parish dispatcher. “What’s the nature of your emergency?” a black woman’s voice said.
“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I’m on my way to the UL campus to find my wife and daughter. They usually park by Cypress Lake, next to Burke Hall. They’re not responding to my calls. I think they may be in jeopardy. Will you send a cruiser to the campus and check out their vehicle, please?”
I gave her the make and model of Molly’s car.
“We have a five-car accident on University, but we’ll get someone over to the campus as soon as possible,” she said. “Do you want me to call Campus Security?”
“Yes, please.”
“You didn’t tell me the nature of the emergency.”
“Some guys tried to kill my family on Sunday. They’re still out there.”
“Give me your number and I’ll call you every ten minutes until we know they’re safe.”
“Thank you,” I said.
As I said, it’s the most humble members of the human family who remind us of the Orwellian admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
Clete hit a clear stretch of four-lane road and floored my truck. We went through a brightly lit shopping district, then entered the old part of Lafayette, where live oak trees hung with moss still form canopies over the streets. We turned left on University Avenue and passed the five-car pileup the 911 dispatcher had mentioned. The mist was gray, floating across the trees and shrubbery and hedges in the university district. A church bus passed us in the opposite direction, then a tanker truck and a stretch limo and a small car barely visible on the other side of the limo.
The roof of the car had the same rusty tin
“Was that Molly and Alafair?” Clete said.
“I’m not sure.”
“Want me to turn around?”
I thought about it. “No, check Burke Hall first,” I said.
“You got it, noble mon,” Clete said.
space
AS THEY DROVE DOWN University Avenue past a five-car pileup, Ronald Bledsoe propped both his arms on the back of Alafair’s seat to conceal the .25 automatic he had wedged against her spine. He smelled her hair again and ticked the back of her neck with his fingernail. When she tried to lean forward, he hooked his finger in her collar.
“Why’d you kick me in the park?” he asked.
“Where are we going?” Molly said.
“Straight ahead. I’ll tell you what to do. You don’t talk anymore until I tell you to,” he replied. He nudged Alafair with the automatic. “You didn’t answer my question, darlin’.”
“I kicked you in the mouth because you asked for it,” she said.
“I did no such thing. You shouldn’t lie.”
Alafair’s face was growing more intense, her features sharpening. He put his lips on the nape of her neck, then mussed her hair with his free hand.
“Do you believe we let this sick fuck take over our car?” she said to Molly.
“Miss, don’t talk like that to Ronald,” Tom Claggart said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“What else can you do to us? You’re going to kill us. Look at you, you’re pathetic. You both have heads that look like foreskin. Who was your mother? She must have been inseminated by a yeast infection.”
The effect of her words on the two men was different from what she had expected. Bledsoe cupped his hand under her chin and drew her head close to his mouth. Then he bit her hair. But it was Claggart who seemed to be losing control, as though he were witnessing a prelude to events he had seen before and did not want to see again. He became agitated, his eyes twitching. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. Then he realized his raincoat was caught in the door. He began jerking at it, as though he were happy to have something to distract him.
“Pull over. My coat is caught,” he said.
“There’s a semi going fifty miles an hour on my bumper,” Molly said.
“I don’t care. Pull over right now. Make her pull over, Ronald,” Claggart said.
Then Claggart opened the door while the car was still moving. Molly swerved the wheel and he lurched sideways. Bledsoe wasn’t sure what was happening. In seconds, the environment he had imposed total control on was coming apart. He spit Alafair’s hair out of his mouth and grabbed Claggart’s arm, just as the open door was hit by a car traveling in the opposite direction.
Alafair reached down on the floor. All in one motion, she pulled Molly’s .22 Ruger from her purse, worked the slide, and brought up the barrel into Ronald Bledsoe’s face. His eyes were filled with disbelief. But his bigger problem was the fact he was twisted in the seat, his own brother fighting with him over a raincoat, his shoulder jammed against the seat so he couldn’t get off a shot at Alafair. The next second was probably the longest in Ronald Bledsoe’s life.
“Suck on this, you freak,” Alafair said.
She pulled the trigger four times. The first round went into his mouth and punched through his cheek. The second embedded in his forearm when he lifted it in front of him, the third clipped off the end of a finger, and the fourth shattered his chin, slinging blood and saliva across the seat and the back window.
Molly’s ears were deaf in the blowback of the Ruger. In the rearview mirror she saw Bledsoe staring back at her, his ruined mouth twisted like soft rubber, his concave face like a cartoon that was incapable of understanding the damage it had just incurred.
Molly’s car struck the curb and came to a stop, cars swerving around her in the mist, their horns blowing. Alafair jumped from the car and pulled Bledsoe out the back door onto the concrete. She reached down and picked up his gun from the floor and threw it into the shrubbery on the edge of the cemetery. Tom Claggart sat frozen in the seat, his raincoat and shirt whipsawed with blood.
Bledsoe stared up at her from the gutter, waiting, his eyes genuinely puzzled, as a child might look up from its crib at the looming presence of its mother. Alafair extended the Ruger with both hands, aiming it into the center of his forehead.
“Alafair—” Molly said, almost in a whisper.
Alafair’s knuckles whitened on the Ruger’s grips.
“Hey, kiddo,” Molly said.
“What?” Alafair said angrily.
“We never give them power.”
“He’ll be back.”
“I doubt it. But if he does, we still don’t give them power.”
Alafair widened her eyes, releasing her breath, and stepped backward, clicking on the Ruger’s safety with her thumb. She swallowed and looked at Molly, her eyes filming.
By the time Clete and I arrived at the scene, Alafair and Molly were sitting in the back of a cruiser, talking to a detective in the front seat. Tom Claggart was in handcuffs behind the wire-mesh grille of a second cruiser, and two paramedics were loading Ronald Bledsoe into an Acadiana ambulance.
Alafair got out of the cruiser when she saw me walking toward her from the truck. The detective had given her a roll of paper towels and she was scrubbing her hair with them, lifting her chin, flipping a strand out of her eyes. She looked absolutely beautiful, like a young girl emerging from a sun shower. “What’s the haps, Streak?” she said.
“No haps, Alf,” I said.
“Don’t call me that stupid name,” she said.
Molly leaned forward in the backseat of the cruiser, beaming. She gave me the thumbs-up sign with both hands. “What kept you?” she said. Epilogue
I HAVE LONG SUBSCRIBED to the belief that the dead lay strong claim on the quick, that indeed their spirits wander and manifest themselves in the middle of our waking day and whisper to us when we least expect it. Many years ago, during a very bad time in my life, my murdered wife would talk to me out of the rain. Members of my platoon who I knew were KIA would call me up long-distance during an electric storm. Inside the static, I could hear their voices—cacophonous, sometimes frightened and nonsensical, sometimes breaking apart, like a walkie-talkie transmission when the sender is too far away.
A psychotherapist told me I was experiencing a psychotic episode. I didn’t argue with him.
But if these experiences have ever happened to you, I’m sure you have come to the same conclusion about them as I. You know what you heard and you know what you saw, and you no more doubt the validity of your experience than you doubt the existence of the sunrise. A great change has occurred in you, and the change lies in the fact you no longer have to convince others about your vision of the world, not of this one or the next.
New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea. In it, green-painted iron streetcars made in the year 1910 still lumber down the neutral ground through the Garden District, past block upon block of Victorian and antebellum homes, past the windmill palms and the gigantic live oaks, past guesthouses and the outdoor cafés and art deco restaurants whose scrolled purple and pink and green neon burn in the mist like smoke from marker grenades.
Every hotel on Canal still features an orchestra on the roof, where people dance under the stars and convince one another that the mildness of the season is eternal and was created especially for them. In the distance, Lake Pontchartrain is wine-dark, flanged with palm trees, and pelicans skim above the chop, the rides at the waterside amusement park glowing whitely against the sky. Irving Fazola is playing at the Famous Door and Pete Fountain at his own joint off Bourbon. Jackson Square is a medieval plaza where jugglers, mimes, string bands, and unicyclists with umbrellas strapped on top of their heads perform in front of St. Louis Cathedral. No one is concerned with clocks. The city is as syb
Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves, the sun never harsh, filtered through the green tint of the ocean so that neither rust nor moth nor decay ever touches its face.
That’s the dream that I have. But the reality is otherwise. Category 5 hurricanes don’t take prisoners and the sow that eats its farrow doesn’t surrender self-interest in the cause of mercy.
New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the City and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levees before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I’ll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American City turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it’s lost on me.
Ronald Bledsoe was sentenced to twenty years in Angola Prison for the abduction of my wife and daughter. I believe he and Bobby Mack Rydel and probably others murdered Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle and Sidney Kovick’s hirelings, but Bledsoe gave nobody up.
I do not believe Bledsoe qualifies as a “solid” or “stand-up” con. Ronald Bledsoe belongs to that group who take their secrets to the grave. They never reveal the nature of their compulsion, their motivations, or the methods they use. Paradoxically, psychiatrists and prison administrators and journalists eventually create a composite explanation for sociopathic behavior that gives them a human personality and works in their interests. My own belief is that people like Bledsoe pose theological questions to us that psychologists cannot answer.
My only fear is that one day Ronald Bledsoe will be released from prison. If that happens, I’ll be waiting for him. I would like to say the last statement brings me consolation. But it doesn’t. Sometimes I have a disturbing dream about Bledsoe and I wake before dawn and go out into the yard and drink coffee at our redwood table until the darkness leaves the sky. Then the day takes on its ordinary shape and I go about doing all the ordinary things that ordinary people do.