“Not yet.”
“Give it a try. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can. What did your daughter do to this guy?”
“Busted his nose and lips and knocked out one of his teeth.”
“He’s pissed over that?”
But jokes about Ronald Bledsoe weren’t funny.
THREE DAYS EARLIER a Guatemalan illegal had been stripping cypress planks off a wall inside the entranceway of a historic New Orleans home. The workman made eight dollars an hour and feared civil authority in this country and his own. But he feared losing his job even more. The contractor who had hired him specialized in the restoration of historical properties. The contractor also made a sizable income by salvaging colonial-era brick, heart-pine floors, brass hinges and door knockers, square-head nails, milk-glass doorknobs, claw-foot bathtubs, iron wall hooks for cook pots, and grapeshot and.58-caliber minie balls embedded in housefronts during the White League takeover of New Orleans in 1874. Every item with possible resale value at a teardown or refurbish job went into a pile.
The workman from Guatemala sank his crowbar into a strip of rotten cypress and peeled it and a shower of Formosa termites onto the floor. Amid the sawdust and insects and spongelike wood he saw a blunted and bent metal-jacketed bullet, no bigger than half the size of his little finger. He blew the dust off it and examined its torn surfaces. “Hey, boss, what you wanta do wit’ dis?” he asked.
HELEN CALLED ME into her office just before quitting time. Raindrops had started to fall on her window and I could see trees bending in the wind by the cemetery. She was leaning forward on her desk, her chin propped on her fist. It was the kind of body English and opaque manner she used when she was preparing to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
“I just got off the phone with Betsy Mossbacher. She’ll be here in an hour and a half,” she said. “She has a federal warrant on Otis Baylor’s house.”
“I talked to her this morning. She didn’t say anything about coming to New Iberia.”
“She just got the warrant. Last week some repairmen working across the street from Baylor’s house in New Orleans dug a rifle slug out of a wall. The contractor had heard about the Melancon-Rochon shooting and called NOPD. They passed it on to the FBI. The round is a thirty-aught-six. It came through a ventilated shutter and a glass pane behind it and embedded between two planks. She says it’s in real good shape, considering the fact it may have gone through two people. Anyway, the Feds are jumping on it before word gets back to Baylor.”
“So?”
“You need to be there when they serve the warrant.”
“They don’t need me to serve a search warrant.”
“This is our parish. We cooperate with outside agencies, but we don’t abandon our own jurisdiction to them. Get with the program, Streak.”
I ATE A SANDWICH in my office and met Betsy and another agent in the parking lot at 7:00 p.m. The sky was bright with rain in the west, the live oaks along Main a dark green as we drove out of town toward Jeanerette. I was sitting in the back of their vehicle, feeling like a hangnail, a perfunctory witness to the scapegoating of a man who had been caught up in events that were either beyond his control or his ability to bear them.
Betsy was quiet most of the way. I had the feeling she was not comfortable with her assignment that evening, either. Betsy was always the odd piece in the puzzle box, a straight arrow whose clumsiness and cowgirl manners gave her an unjustified reputation as an eccentric. As in the case of Helen Soileau, her male colleagues often made jokes about her behind her back. The truth was most of them weren’t worth the parings of her fingernails.
“You say he’s still got the Springfield?” the man behind the wheel said.
“That was the last indication he gave me,” I replied.
The agent driving wore his hair boxed on his neck. He kept his hands in the ten-two position on the wheel, his eyes always on the road, never glancing in the rearview mirror when he spoke to me.
“Why wouldn’t he dump the Springfield?” he said.
“Because he knows that’s the first thing a guilty man would do.”
“You’re saying he’s dirty for this?”
“No, I’m saying Otis is smart. I’m also saying he’s probably taking somebody else’s weight,” I replied.
“Oh yeah? How did you arrive at that?” he asked.
“Hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans residents drowned who didn’t have to. I suspect that’s because some of the guys in Washington you work for couldn’t care less. So a guy who sells insurance gets a chain saw up his ass. That’s the way it shakes out sometimes.”
This time his eyes shifted into the rearview mirror. “You guys down here have issues about something?”
“Not us. We’re happy as clams,” I replied.
Betsy gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.
The grounds and trees outside Otis’s house were dark with shadow when we arrived, the inside brightly lit, the air cool and filled with a fragrance of flowers and freshly baked bread in the kitchen and rainwater leaching out of the oaks into the leaves. His home was the picture of a family at peace with the world. But nothing could have been further from the truth, particularly after our arrival.
Betsy walked up on the screened-in gallery and knocked hard on the door, her mouth crimped, her ID in her hand. In the gloaming of the day, her hair had the bright yellow color of straw. She glanced at her watch and hit on the door again, this time harder, with the flat of her fist.
Otis answered, wearing a white shirt and tie, a piece of fried chicken in his hand.
“Are you Mr. Baylor?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, his eyes going from Betsy to me, as though somehow I were his betrayer.
“I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. We have a warrant to search your house. I want you and your family to sit in the living room while we do. Where is your rifle, Mr. Baylor?”
“I’ll get it for you,” Otis replied.
“No, you won’t. You and your wife and daughter and anyone else who is in the house will sit down in the living room, then you’ll tell me where it is,” she said.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
“Do what she says, Mr. Baylor,” I told him.
He went back in the kitchen and returned with Thelma and Mrs. Baylor. After they sat down, the three of them looked up at us expectantly, as children might, caught between their inveterate American desire to obey the law and the fact that strangers who were basically no different or more powerful than themselves could walk into their home, during dinner, and treat them like livestock.
“The rifle is in the closet of the master bedroom,” Otis said. “A box of shells is on the shelf. That’s the only firearm in the house.”
“Why are you doing this now? I thought all this was settled,” Mrs. Baylor said. She had brought her drink from the table. It was tea-colored but had no ice in it. She was trying to appear poised, her back straight, her drink resting on her knee, but somehow she made me think of a china plate threaded with hairline cracks. “Is this being given to the media? Do you know what that will do to my husband’s business?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t report to the media,” Betsy said. “We try to treat you in a respectful fashion. We try to be as unobtrusive as possible.”
“Then why do you keep bothering us? This is where our tax money goes? For God’s sakes, Otis, say something.”
“The men who were shot in front of your house were shot in cold blood, Ms. Baylor. By anyone’s definition, that’s capital murder,” Betsy said. “The seventeen-year-old had no criminal record and lost his life for committing a burglary. Vigilantes were hunting people of color in uptown New Orleans. My boss isn’t going to let that stand.”
“I’d like to contact my attorney. At this point I don’t think we should have any further conversation with you,” Otis said.
“That’s your right, sir. But we’re not your enemies,” Betsy said.
