lose him in the system like you did Chula Ramos. You got a question about anything, call Mossbacher. Don’t do anything on your own. You got a problem, call us. That’s the key. We’re renting space in your gray-bar hotel. All you got to do is make sure the toilets flush.”
I saw the state trooper look at me from the corner of his eye.
“Tell you what, bub, we’ll arrest Otis for you and you can head back for Baton Rouge,” I said. “Or, if you like, you can stand around as though you’re part of the procedure, but you need to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way.”
“You like Lou’sana?” the trooper said to Tisdale, smiling broadly.
We busted Otis and took him out of his office in handcuffs, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling, his tie blowing in the wind, his big arms pulled tightly behind him.
For most middle-class people, the word “jail” suggests punishment by means of confinement. To a degree, they’re correct. Jails separate miscreants from the rest of us. But “confinement” doesn’t come close to the realities of life inside any kind of serious can. The word “violation” is much more accurate.
It starts in the booking room. Your fingertips are rolled on an ink pad by someone you never saw before. Then you are told to clean your skin with a petroleum gel that looks like a glandular excretion. You are placed against a wall and told to hold a brace of numbers against your chest while you’re photographed front and sideways. Then a polyethylene-gloved screw does a digital probe of your rectum and sprays you for crab lice. Your physical person belongs to people who do not want to know your name or make eye contact with you or have any level of communication with you. Most of them do not like what they do for a living and they do not like you.
You soon discover that jail is not a place but a condition. You defecate in full view of others. Your fellow inmates urinate all over the toilet seat you must use. The food you eat is prepared and served by people who wouldn’t wash their hands at gunpoint. You take showers with men whose eyes linger on your genitalia and others who will shank you from your liver to your lights and that night sleep without dreaming.
As the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter cautioned, you don’t study your “great long time.”
The recidivists of years ago have been replaced by a new breed of criminals, eighty-five percent of whom owe their lifestyle to narcotics, either the sale of it or the use of it or both. Some of them got their first hit of cocaine or morphine derivatives through the umbilical cord. Some of them were subjected to forms of child abuse that I will not discuss with anyone, not even fellow officers. Almost all of them will pay out their lives to the state on the installment system.
Otis Baylor thought he would call his lawyer or a bondsman and be back out on the street within a few hours. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he said to me in the booking room. “I get a phone call and then I post bond?”
“I don’t think you understand your situation,” I said. “You’re actually in federal custody, charged with a civil rights violation. In effect, we’re acting as friends of the federal court. That’s because the legal system in southern Louisiana has been in meltdown since Rita and Katrina. My guess is you’re going to be indicted by a state grand jury and prosecuted for murder. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere for a long time.”
“I’m not a flight risk. I own two houses here. I have a family. I’ve been with the same insurance company for over two decades.”
“You’ll be going to court eventually. Explain your situation to the judge.”
He still had cleansing cream on his hands and he didn’t want to touch his clothes with them. He began looking around for something to wipe his hands on.
“There’s a roll of paper towels on the shelf,” I said.
“I want my phone call,” he said.
“You’re going into a holding cell right now, Mr. Baylor. A deputy will escort you to a phone later,” I said.
He couldn’t seem to think. He squeezed at his temples and looked around the booking room, disoriented. “Where did you say the paper towels were?” he asked.
“Behind you, sir.”
But he forgot what he was looking for. “My daughter is home by herself. She meets me for coffee and a doughnut each morning. She shouldn’t be by herself for long periods of time,” he said.
I’ve had prouder moments in my career.
MOLLY WORKED FOR a Catholic mutual-help center on the bayou that assisted poor people in starting up businesses and building their own homes. The charity had been founded by a group of Catholic Worker nuns who had come to southern Louisiana in the 1970s to organize the sugarcane workers. You can take a wild guess as to how they were received. But since that time, they had earned the respect and even the affection of most people in the area. After the death of my wife Bootsie, I met Molly by chance at the center and a short while later we were married. We were an incongruous couple, an Irish-American blue-collar nun who demonstrated regularly at the School of the Americas and a sheriff’s detective with a history of violence and alcoholism. Friends who wanted to be kind wished us well, but I always saw the lights of pity and caution in their eyes.
But we surprised them. Sister Molly Boyle was my grail and I loved her in the same way I loved my church community.
On the Friday I busted Otis Baylor I called her at the center and asked her to meet me for lunch at the Patio Restaurant on Loreauville road. We sat under a fan, in a corner, away from the crowd near the buffet table. I could feel her eyes on my face. “Bad day at Black rock?” she said.
“I had to help the Feds serve an arrest warrant on Otis Baylor,” I said. “He just got moved to the parish prison.”
“Otis?”
“The FBI matched a bullet to a rifle in his house. The bullet has DNA on it from two gunshot victims.”
“That’s too bad. He’s a nice man. I don’t know how many people have told me he approved their insurance claims on the spot and put them up in motels. Some of these companies are sticking it to their clients with a cattle prod.”
“Otis may have killed a seventeen-year-old kid and turned another one into a quadriplegic.”
“I know,” she said.
“I tried to warn him about his legal jeopardy.”
She inched her hand forward and touched my fingertips. “I know that, Dave. This isn’t your fault. Don’t treat this personally.”
“You want to get the buffet?” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “Dave?”
“Yes?”
I could see the uncertainty in her face, like that of a person about to light a candle in a storage room that smells of gasoline. “Ronald Bledsoe came to the center this morning. He asked the receptionist if we were operating any shelters in St. Mary Parish. He said he was working for the state and looking for two black fugitives. He showed her photos of them.”
“What’d she tell him?”
“She lied. She actually had seen one of them. In a shelter in Morgan City. But she lied. I was standing right behind him. He turned around and asked me my name. Bledsoe is scary, Dave.”
THAT NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. I dreamed of Ronald Bledsoe and Father Jude LeBlanc and the confession of Bertrand Melancon. I dreamed of dark water closing over Jude’s head and I dreamed of people in an attic fitting their fingers through the ax gashes in the roof Jude had started when he had been attacked by Bertrand. I heard the people in the attic calling for help on their cell phones and I heard the sound of a motorboat disappearing in the distance, the Melancon brothers and the Rochons snugly on board.
I hated what they had done to Jude LeBlanc and his parishioners. Personally they filled me with disgust and loathing. But I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of hate. I couldn’t allow it as a lawman or as a recovering alcoholic. AA teaches that those who vex us most are sick, not totally unlike ourselves. Sometimes that’s a hard precept to buy into. Unfortunately, recovering drunks are not allowed latitude with their emotions. My favorite passage from ernest Hemingway will always remain his suggestion in Death in the Afternoon that the world’s ills could be corrected by a three-day open season on people. Less heartening is his addendum that the first group he would wipe out would be police officers everywhere.
