“I got the message. How about giving me credit for having more than two brain cells?”
The years have not brought me much in the way of wisdom. But I have learned that the father of a young woman has to remember only two lessons in caring for his daughter: He must be by her side unreservedly when she needs him, and he must disengage when she doesn’t. The latter, at least for me, has been more difficult than the former.
“You have more than two brain cells?” I said.
“Have you ever been hit in the head with a basketful of manuscript paper?” she said.
I WENT BACK to the department at 1:00 p.m. Wally, our hypertensive, elephantine dispatcher and full-time departmental comedian, stopped me on the way to my office. “I was just about to put these messages in your box,” he said.
“Thanks, Wally,” I said, taking three pink memo slips from his hand.
“His first name is Bertrand. He don’t like to give his last name. He also don’t have any manners.”
“Was this a black kid?”
“Hard to tell. When a guy says, ‘Pull the Q-tips out of your nose ’cause I cain’t understand what you saying, you honky motherfucker,’ does that mean the guy’s got racial issues?”
“Could be. Thanks for taking the message, Wally.”
“Glad to help out. I love this job. T’anks for introducing me to your friends.”
I went to my office and punched in the cell number that Wally had written down on all three message slips. “Bertrand?” I said.
“Is that you, Mr. Dave?” a voice said.
Mr. Dave?
“Yeah, it is, Bertrand. What’s up?”
“There’s something weird going on. Somebody’s handing out free cell phones to people that’s in the life. Even people in the shelters, anybody who might know something about them stones. A phone number comes wit’ the cell. I seen Andre wit’ one. They come from Wal-Mart. Andre’s attitude ain’t making me feel real comfortable.”
“What do you want from me?”
“What you said about me being a rapist was the troot’. I done it wit’ Eddy and Andre-twice. We done it to a young girl in the Lower Nine. I been all over down there looking for her. I been in the shelters, too. Maybe she died in the storm.”
I didn’t want to be his confessor. In fact, my stomach turned at the image of three grown men sexually assaulting a helpless fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the bad luck to walk home from a street fair by herself.
“You still there?” Bertrand asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. You did the crime, stack the time.”
But he wasn’t listening. “The other girl was sitting in a car that was broke down by the Desire. She was white. She said she’d been at a high school prom. Eddy got pissed off at her and burned her with his cigarette. He burned her on her breasts.”
“If you’re looking for Valium for your sins, you called up the wrong guy.”
“Who else I’m gonna tell, man? People all over the city got cell phones waiting to dime me. They say you call this certain number and a guy wit’ this cracker voice tells them he gonna make them rich if they give me up. I walked past a guy in the shelter yesterday and he made these sounds like a chain saw starting up. Everybody t’ought it was funny.”
“What happened to Father Jude LeBlanc?”
He paused, then I heard him take a breath. “We’d been at my auntie’s house. A wave smashed right t’rou the picture window and washed us out the back. We swam up on this trash pile, but it was full of them brown recluse spiders, the kind that eat into your tissue and mess you up later. A woman was in the water wit’ them brown spiders all over her face and in her hair. They was biting her and she was screaming and swatting at them and swallowing water at the same time. That’s when we seen the priest pull his boat up to the church roof and start chopping a hole in it wit’ an ax. That’s when Eddy said, ‘it’s that motherfucker or us.’ We all went in the water and headed for him, wit’ them spiders still in our clothes.
“I was the first one on the roof. I said, ‘We need the boat. There’s four of us and ain’t but one of you. You can come wit’ us, maybe, but we taking the boat.’
“He stops chopping and says, ‘The attic is full of people. They gonna drown. You guys got to help me.’
“Help him? How I’m gonna help him, wit’ Eddy and Andre and Kevin all looking at me to do something, like it’s on me, like ain’t nobody shooting off their mouth now, like I gotta do something, Eddy ain’t such big shit no more? So I grabbed the ax. What was I suppose to do? Maybe he was gonna hit me wit’ it. I seen a man shove a boy off an air mattress, just stuck his hand out and shoved him in the face, a boy wasn’t more than ten years old. That’s what it was like down there, man. You wasn’t there.”
“What did you do to Father LeBlanc?” I said, my heart beating, my palm clammy on the phone receiver.
“He wouldn’t give up the ax. He was standing between me and the boat, on the edge of the roof. I went toward him and he just stood there and wouldn’t get out of the way. I say, ‘Man, we gonna get that boat one way or the other. Don’t get fucked up for something you cain’t change.’
“He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ What’d he mean by that? I knowed what I was doing. I was saving my life. I was saving Eddy and Kevin and Andre’s life. I knowed what I was doing. I ain’t had no choice. How come he said that to me?”
“What did you do, Bertrand?”
“He started fighting wit’ me. He wasn’t strong at all. His arms was like sticks. He had tracks on them. I couldn’t believe it, man, he was a priest and he was a junkie. I could see his teet’ and smell his breath and he was clawing at my eyes. That’s when I hit him, man, hard, wit’ my fist, right in the face. He went over backward in the water and I heard Eddy say, ‘Hit that motherfucker wit’ the ax. Don’t let him get into the boat.’
“But I ain’t seen him again. The water was dark and it was like he went straight down the wall of the church into the darkness, like a stone statue sinking. How come he said them words to me? I knowed what I was doing, man. I was saving lives in my own way.”
“Are you that stupid? Most of the people in that church attic died because of you. What do you think he meant?” I said.
Bertrand Melancon began to weep, uncontrollably. “I’m going to hell, ain’t i?”
You’re wrong, kid. You’re already there, I thought to myself.
Chapter 18
THE ARREST WARRANT with Otis Baylor’s name on it was federal, but eventually the storm-impaired processes of the Orleans Parish DA’s office would kick into gear and state charges would be filed against him as well. Ironically, the Feds were busting Otis under a Reconstruction statute that defined murder as a deprivation of a person’s civil rights by the taking of his life, the same kind of orwellian application of law that had been used to prosecute the Klansmen who lynched three civil rights workers in neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. Otis had caught his necktie in the garbage grinder. I suspected that when the judicial system was finished with him, he would have to be washed off the grinder with a hose.
On Friday morning I accompanied Betsy Mossbacher’s male colleague and a uniformed state trooper to Otis’s temporary office on Main Street to serve the warrant. The FBI agent was the same agent who had retrieved the Springfield rifle from Otis’s closet. His name was Tisdale and he was all business. We had parked our vehicles by the bayou, directly opposite Victor’s Cafeteria, and were walking down Main under a colonnade when he said, “I’ve got to be back in Baton Rouge in less than ninety minutes. We’ve done all the paperwork on our end. All you’ve got to do is print him and get him into a cell. The transfer of custody will take place in two or three weeks. Don’t fuck it up.”
“Say that last part again?” I said.
“He’s getting warehoused. It’s not nuclear science. Feed him, give him a shower every three days, and don’t
