I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of milk in the dark. The oak trees were black-green in the moonlight, the bayou swollen and yellow from the massive amounts of rain in the last few weeks. I tried to sort out all the images from my dreams, to somehow compartmentalize and rid myself of them, but one element in them would not go away: Bertrand Melancon not only kept calling me, trying to justify or expiate his sins, but he had not fled the area. The last part didn’t make sense.
The Kovick score had been the realization of the house creep’s wet dream. Was he so attached to his brother Eddy that he would run from shelter to shelter or rat hole to rat hole in the vain hope that he could spirit Eddy away from the hospital and take over his personal care, a man whose brain for all practical purposes was now as lifeless as his body?
Why not just disappear into the urban vastness of Los Angeles and start over? People did it every day. Bertrand could fence the blood stones there and wash the queer in Vegas and Reno. Unless he wasn’t actually in possession of either one of them.
Clete and his girlfriend had found over seventeen grand of counterfeit that had probably floated out of a garage in the alley. The rest of it may have gone down storm drains or been picked up from hedges and flower beds by neighbors who didn’t bother to report the find to NOPD. But how about the blood stones? Their worth was incalculable. Bertrand could unload one or two of them, buy a storm-damaged or hot car for chump change, and catch a flight out of Dallas or Jackson. Why didn’t he do that?
Because he’s a thief, I thought, and like all thieves he decided at one point that he deserved more than his fellow house creeps. He hid the stones and he hasn’t been able to get back to them.
Where?
I tried to reconstruct his flight from Sidney ’s house after he and Eddy and the Rochons had torn it apart. What if he had found the stones while looting the house and had decided not to tell the others? What if he had decided, while stealing gasoline from Otis’s garage, to hide the stones rather than risk having them discovered by Eddy and the Rochons? He realized he was probably in possession of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in hot jewels. It was the score of a lifetime. Why let his lamebrain companions screw it up?
But ultimately Bertrand had screwed himself. He had stashed the stones a few houses down the street from the most dangerous gangster in New Orleans, a man whose house they had not only robbed but systematically demolished, even ripping the chandeliers from the ceiling with an iron garden rake and urinating on the stove and in the seasoning drawers and the icebox.
I went back to bed and lay on top of the sheet, my arm across my eyes. I could hear the easy sweep of the trees across our tin roof and occasionally the ping of a pecan striking the metal. I said a silent prayer for Father Jude LeBlanc, and when I fell asleep I thought I heard his voice rise inside a bubble and burst on the surface of a black lake that was splintered with light.
I LIKE TO REMEMBER the era in which I grew up as one of duck-hunting dawns and summer-afternoon crab boils in a shady pavilion and college dances on Spanish Lake under oak trees that were strung with Japanese lanterns. The springtime of our lives seemed eternal, the coming of fall a mild interlude before flowers bloomed again. But there was a harsh side to the Louisiana of my youth, too, one that isn’t always convenient to remember. The majority of people were poor, and for generations the oligarchy that ruled the state exerted every effort in its power to ensure they stayed that way. The Negro was the scapegoat for our problems, the trade unions the agents of northern troublemakers. With the coming of integration, every demagogue in the state could not wait to stoke up the fires of racial fear and hatred. Many of their constituents rose to the occasion.
Nigger-knocking became a Saturday-night sport that local police departments generally ignored. White high school kids shot people of color with BB guns and threw firecrackers at them at bus stops. Most of the kids who did this came from homes where the morning sunlight filtered through the dust like the ugly stain of failure. One of those kids was my college roommate at Southwestern Louisiana institute, James Boyd “Bo Diddley” Wiggins.
His father had been a deputy sheriff in a North Louisiana parish and was forced to resign after he was arrested in a prostitution sting in New Orleans. The father died in penury, and his wife and children moved onto a corporate plantation, where they picked cotton and broke corn alongside people of color. But Bo Diddley possessed a talent his siblings did not. High school football may have been a sport to others; for Bo it was a magic doorway that opened onto a world his family would never enter.
He attended SLI on an athletic scholarship, tore holes in the opposing team’s defensive line with a ferocity that bothered even his coach, and refused to sit near Negro students in his classes. He got into serious barroom fights out on the highway and would come back to the dorm stinking of whiskey and cigarettes, his clothes torn, his mowed head lacerated with broken glass, his nostrils clotted with blood. I genuinely believed Bo was at peace only when he inflicted so much pain on himself he could not hear his own thoughts.
He was expelled from college and given a BCD from the army for busting up a couple of MPs in Honolulu. But the army had done something for Bo Diddley no one else had-they taught him arc welding and gave him a trade. He burned stringer-bead rods on pipelines all over Louisiana and Texas, then opened his own welding shop in Lake Charles and within five years was operating a dozen more in three states.
But Bo was just getting started. He entered the twenty-first century as the owner of six shipyards located along the southern rim of the United States. He also managed to reinvent himself. He got reborn at the Assembly of God Church and posed for Christmas card photographs with evangelical television preachers in front of Third World orphanages. Immediately following 9/11, he was among a Louisiana political delegation that flew to New York City to attend a memorial ceremony at the Twin Towers with the president of the United States. He was still jug-eared and flat-topped, with recessed buckshot eyes and half-moon scars on his knuckles and a voice that sounded like he had swallowed a clot of Red Man, but he and his bovine wife appeared regularly in the society pages of the Baton Rouge and Lafayette newspapers and each year hosted a charity golf tournament and entertained aging television celebrities.
For reasons I never quite understood, he had kept in touch with me over the years. Maybe, like me, Bo Diddley heard time’s winged chariot at his door. Maybe he wanted to revise his youth and pretend that he, too, had been part of the innocence that seemed to have characterized our era. I couldn’t say. Bo Diddley had paid hard dues. His tragedy, I think, lay in the fact he had learned nothing from them.
He was waiting by my office door when I came to work Monday morning, his rough hand extended, the square tautness of his face glowing with aftershave. “I know you’re busy. I won’t take up your time,” he said. “I got a lot of resources, Dave. I think I can hep you with a case you’re on.”
My intake basket was overflowing, my caseload more than I could handle, my own troubles with Ronald Bledsoe without apparent solution. It was not a good time to deal with someone who believes his destiny is to meddle in police business. He followed me into my office.
“Is that fat boy in the dispatcher’s cage your local funny man?” he said.
“Wally?”
“He asked me if I bought my cigar in a tire factory. He said he wanted to get some that smelled just like it.”
I glanced at my watch and tried to shine him on. “I have a meeting with the sheriff in a few minutes. You mentioned something about a case I’m working on.”
“About a priest who went missing in the Lower Ninth Ward, a guy from New Iberia.”
“That’s Jude LeBlanc. How’d you know I was looking for him?”
“My wife and I been doing some volunteer work in the shelters. We met this El Salvadoran woman, Natalia something-or-other. I guess she was getting it on with this priest just before New Orleans went into the shitter.”
Bo may have acquired the trappings of a reborn and successful businessman, but his language and his mind- set still bore the sharp edges of the boy I had known years ago. For Bo, nuance did not exist. The world and the people in it were one-dimensional. Imposing complexity on them was the pastime of a group he called “pointy- headed professors.”
“You know something about Father Jude’s fate, Bo?”
“I’ve got a clean-up contract for the Lower Nine. I’m also setting up FEMA trailer villages anywhere we can house these poor devils. But I tell you, the real challenge is making these sonsofbitches go to work.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
The grin died on his mouth. “Don’t turn serious on me, son. A lot of those boys would choke to death on their