Heaven's Prisoners (29 page)

He was still talking when I eased the phone receiver back into the cradle. Outside, I could hear night birds calling to each other in the fields.

After work that day, I took Robin and Alafair down to Cypremort Point for dinner. We ate boiled shrimp and blue-point crabs in a ramshackle, screened-in restaurant by the bay, and in the mauve twilight the water looked flat and gray, rippled in places by a slight breeze, like wrinkles in a skim of paint, and in the west the distant islands of sawgrass were edged with the sun’s last red glow on the horizon. Behind us I could see the long, two-lane road that led down through the Point, the dead cypress trees that were covered with shadows now, the fishing shacks built up on stilts above the flooded woods, the pirogues tied to the cabin pilings, the carpet of blooming lily pads on the canals, the herons that lifted on extended wings into the lavender sky like a whispered poem.

The big electric fans in the restaurant vibrated with their own energy; the wood tables were littered with crab shells; bugs beat against the screen as the light went out of the sky; and somebody played “La Jolie Blonde” on the jukebox. Robin’s dark hair moved in the breeze, and her eyes were bright and happy, and there was a smear of
sauce piquante
on the corner of her mouth. With all her hard mileage, she was a good girl inside and she took hold of my affections in a funny way. You fall in love with women for different reasons, I guess. Sometimes they are simply beautiful and you have no more control over your desire for them than you do in choosing your nocturnal dreams. Then there are others who earn their way into your soul, who are kind and loyal and loving in the way that your mother was or should have been. Then there’s that strange girl who walks unexpectedly off a side street into the middle of your life, the one who is nothing like the indistinct and warm presence who has lived with you for so long on the soft edge of sleep. Instead, her clothes are all wrong, her lipstick mismatched, her handbag clutched like a shield, her eyes wide and bright, as though the Greek Furies were calling to her from the stage wings.

Robin and I made an agreement. I would discharge the baby-sitter, and she would help me take care of Alafair and work at the bait shop. She promised me she was off the booze and the dope, and I believed her, although I didn’t know how long her resolution would last. I don’t understand alcoholism, and I cannot tell you for sure what an alcoholic is. I’ve known some people who quit on their own, then became white-knucklers who boiled with a metabolic and psychological misery that finally caused them to blow out their doors and come into AA on their kneecaps. I’ve known others who simply stopped drinking one day and lived out their lives in a gray, neutral area like people who had clipped all the sharp edges off their souls until they seemed to be operating on the spiritual energies of a moth. The only absolute conclusion I ever made about alcoholics was that I was one of them. What others did with booze had no application to my life, as long as they didn’t press it on Dave Robicheaux, who was altogether too willing a victim.

We drove back through the long corridor of dead cypress trees, the fireflies lighting in the dark, and rented a VCR and a Walt Disney movie at the video store in New Iberia. Later, Batist came by the house with some fresh
boudin
, and we heated it in the oven and made lemonade with cracked ice and mint leaves in the glasses and watched the movie in the living room under the wood-bladed fan. When I got up to fill the lemonade pitcher again, I looked at the flicker of the screen on Robin’s and Alafair’s and Batist’s faces and felt a strange sense of family belonging that I hadn’t felt since Annie’s death.

I went home for lunch the next day and was eating a ham-and-onion sandwich at the kitchen table when the phone rang. It was a beautiful, sunny day, the sky a clear blue above the trees, and through the back window I could see Alafair playing with one of my calico cats in the backyard. She wore her left and right pink tennis shoes, a pair of denim pedal pushers, and the yellow Donald Duck T-shirt that Annie had bought for her, and she swung a piece of kite twine back and forth in front of the cat’s churning paws. I chewed on the ham and bread in my mouth and placed the telephone receiver idly against my ear. I could hear the dull whirring of a long-distance connection, like wind blowing in a conch shell.

“Is this Robicheaux?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“The cop, right?” His voice sounded as if it were strained through wet sand.

“That’s right. You want to tell me who this is?”

“It’s Victor Romero. I got a lot of people on my case, and I’m hearing a lot of stuff I don’t like to hear. Most of it’s got your name in it.”

The piece of sandwich felt stiff and dead in my jaw. I pushed my plate away and felt myself sit up straight in my chair.

“You still there?” he said. I heard a peculiar thump, then a hissing sound in the background.

“Yes.”

“Everybody wants to cut a slice out of my ass, like I’m responsible for every crime in Louisiana. They got the word on the street that maybe I’m going away for thirty years. They’re talking that maybe I killed some people in a plane, that maybe they’ll turn me over to the locals and get me fried in Angola. So everybody in New Orleans hears the feds got a big hard-on for me, that don’t nobody touch me because I’m like the stink on shit and they better not get it on their hands, either. You listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“So I told them I’d deal. They want these big fuckers, and I get some slack. I tell them I’ll come in for three. No more than three, that’s it. Except what do I hear? This cat Robicheaux is a hardtail and he don’t play. So you’re fucking me, man.”

I could feel my heart beating, feel the blood in the back of my neck and in my temples.

“Do you want to meet somewhere and talk?” I said.

“You must be out of your goddamn mind.”

Then I heard the thump again, followed by the hissing sound.

“I want you to talk to those cocksuckers at the DEA,” he said. “I want you to tell them no charges because you thought somebody shot at you. You get the fuck off my back. I get that message from the right guy, and maybe I deliver something you want.”

“I don’t think you’ve got anything to bargain with, Romero. I think you’re a nickel-and-dime mule that everybody’s tired of. Why don’t you write all this bullshit on a postcard and I’ll read it when I don’t have anything else to do.”

“Yeah?”

I didn’t answer. He was quiet a moment, then he spoke again.

“You want to know who set up the whack on your wife?”

I was breathing deeply now, and wires were trembling inside my chest. I swallowed and kept my voice as flat as possible.

“All I hear from you is noise. You got something to trade, get it out of your mouth or stop bothering me,” I said.

“You think I’m talking noise, huh? Try this, motherfucker. You had a fan in your bedroom window. You had a telephone in your hall, except somebody tore it out of the wall for you. And while they did your old lady, you were hiding outside in the dark.”

I felt my hand slide up and down my flexed thigh. I had to wet my lips before I could speak again. I should have been silent, said nothing, but the control was now gone.

“I’ll find you,” I said hoarsely.

“Find me and you find nothing. I got all this from the boon. You want the rest of the story, you come up with a deal that don’t leave me in the barrel. You got a guilty conscience, man, and I ain’t taking your fall.”

“Listen—”

“No, I talk, you listen. You get together with that bunch of farts at the Federal Building and decide what you want to do. You come up with the right numbers—and I’m talking three years max, in a minimum-security joint—then you run an ad in the
Times-Picayune
that says, ‘Victor, your situation is approved.’ I see that ad, maybe a lawyer’s gonna call up the DEA and see about a meet.”

“Eddie Keats tried to dust you. They’re going to take you out just like they did the Haitian. You’re running out of ratholes.”

“Kiss my ass. I ate bugs and lizards for thirty-eight days and came back with eleven gook ears on a stick. I’m buying the paper Sunday morning. After that, forget it. Clean up your own shit.”

Before he hung up I thought I heard a streetcar bell clang.

The rest of the afternoon I tried to recreate his voice in my mind. Had I heard it once before, in a rumble of thunder, on my front porch? I couldn’t be sure. But the thought that I had held a conversation about plea-bargaining with one of Annie’s murderers worked and twisted in my brain like an obscene finger.

Sometime after midnight, I woke with a thick, numb feeling in my head, the kind you have after you’ve been out in a cold wind a long time by yourself. I sat quietly on the edge of the couch, my bare feet resting in a square of moonlight on the floor, and opened and closed my hands as though I were seeing them for the first time. Then I unlocked Annie’s and my bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.

The bloody sheets and bedspread had been carried off in a vinyl evidence bag, but the mattress and the wooden bedstead were filled with holes that I could fit my fingers into as though I were probing the wounds in Our Lord’s hands. The brown patterns all over the bedstead and the flowered wallpaper could have been slung there by a paintbrush. I rubbed my hand across the wall and felt the stiff, torn edges of the paper where the buckshot and deer slugs had torn through the wood. The moon shone through the pecan tree outside and made an oval of light in my lap. I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver cloud floating by against a dark sky.

I thought about my father and wished he were there with me. He couldn’t read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey. He drank too much and he’d fistfight two or three men in a bar at the same time, with the enthusiasm of a boy hitting baseballs, but inside he had a gentle heart, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tragic sense about the cruelty and violence that the world sometimes imposes upon the innocent.

He told me a story once about a killing that he’d seen as a young man. In my father’s mind, the victim’s death was emblematic of all the unjust and brutal behavior that people are capable of in groups, although in reality the victim was not an innocent man. It was the winter of 1935, and a criminal who had robbed banks with John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter had been flushed out of Margaret’s whorehouse in Opelousas, a brothel that had been operating since the War Between the States. Cops chased him all the way to Iberia Parish, and when his car slid into a ditch, he struck out across a frozen field of sugarcane stubble. My father and a Negro were pulling stumps with a mule and trace chains and burning them in big heaps when the robber ran past them toward the old barn by our windmill. My father said he wore a white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie, with no coat, and he gripped a straw boater in his hand as though it were his last possession on earth.

A cop fired a rifle from the road, and one of the robber’s legs collapsed and he went down in the middle of the stubble.

The cops all wore suits and fedoras, and they walked in a line across the field as though they were flushing quail. They formed a half-circle around the wounded man, while he sat with his legs straight out before him and begged for his life. My father said that when they started shooting with their revolvers and automatic pistols, the man’s shirt exploded with crimson flowers.

With crimson flowers that turned brown, that can be bruised into the grain of wood, that flake and shale away under the touch of my fingers. Because they impaled her upon this bedstead and this wall, drove her screams and her fear and her agony deep into this wood, translated these cypress boards, hewn by my father, into her crucifix.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stared up at Robin, whose face and body looked strangely pale in the moonlight that fell through the pecan tree into the room. She slipped her hand under my arm and pulled me up gently from the edge of the bed.

“It’s no good for you in here, Streak,” she said quietly. “I’ll fix us warm milk in the kitchen.”

“Sure. Is the phone still ringing?”

“What?”

“The phone. I heard it ringing.”

“No. It didn’t ri—Dave, come on out of here.”

“It didn’t ring, huh? When I used to have the DTs, dead people would call me up on the phone. It was a crazy way to be back then.”

That morning I drove back to New Orleans to look for Victor Romero. As I said before, his sheet wasn’t much help, and I knew that undoubtedly he was a more intelligent and far more dangerous man that it indicated. However, it was also obvious from his record that he had the same vices and sordid preoccupations and worm’s-eye view of the world as did most of his kind. I talked with street people in the Quarter, bartenders, some strippers who hooked on the side, late-hour cabdrivers who pimped for the strippers, a couple of black Murphy artists, door spielers on Bourbon, a fence in Algiers, a terminal junkie who was down to shooting into his wasted thighs with an eye-dropper insulated with the white edge of a one-dollar bill. If they admitted having known Romero, they said they thought he was dead, out of the country, or in federal custody. In each instance, I might as well have held a conversation with a vacant lot.

But sometimes what you don’t hear is a statement in itself. I was convinced he was still in New Orleans—I had heard the streetcar bell in the background when he called—and if he was in town, somebody was probably hiding or supporting him, because he wasn’t pimping or dealing. I went down to First District headquarters on the edge of the Quarter and talked to two detectives in vice. They said they had already tried to find Romero through his relatives, and there weren’t any. His father had been a fruit picker who disappeared in Florida in the 1960s, and the mother had died in the state mental hospital at Mandeville. There were no brothers or sisters.