Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

driving Corvettes.”
    “Come in and let’s talk about it. Hell, you’re quite a guy.”
    “What is this bullshit, Mr. Dautrieve?”
    The receiver went dead in my hand.
    I went out on the dock where Batist was cleaning a string of mudcat in a pan of water. Each morning he ran a trotline in his pirogue, then brought his fish back to the dock, gutted them with a double-edged knife he had made from a file, ripped the skin and spiked fins from their flesh with a pair of pliers, and washed the fillets clean in the pan of red water. He was fifty, as hairless as a cannonball, coal black, and looked as though he’d been hammered together out of angle iron. When I looked at him with his shirt off and the sweat streaming off his bald head and enormous black shoulders, the flecks of blood and membrane on his arms, his knife slicing through vertebrae and lopping the heads of catfish into the water like wood blocks, I wondered how southern whites had ever been able to keep his kind in bondage. Our only problem with Batist was that Annie often could not understand what he was saying. Once when she had gone with him to feed the livestock in a pasture I rented, he had told her, “ Mais t’row them t’ree cow over the fence some hay, you.”
    “I have to go to Lafayette for a couple of hours,” I said. “I want you to watch for a couple of men in a Corvette. If they come around here, call the sheriff’s department. Then go up to the house and stay with Annie.”
    ” Qui c’est une Corvette , Dave?” he said, his eyes squinting at me in the sun.
    “It’s a sports car, a white one.”
    “What they do, them?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
    “What you want I do to them, me?”
    “You do nothing to them. You understand that? You call the sheriff and then you stay with Annie.”
    ” Qui c’est ti vas faire si le sheriff pas vient pour un neg , Dave. Dites Batist fait plus rien ?” He laughed loudly at his own joke: “What are you going to do if the sheriff doesn’t come for a Negro, Dave? Tell Batist to do more nothing?”
    “I’m serious. Don’t mess with them.”
    He grinned at me again and went back to cleaning his fish.
     
    I told Annie where I was going, and a half-hour later I parked in front of the federal building in downtown Lafayette where the DEA kept its office. It was a big, modern building, constructed during the Kennedy-Johnson era, filled with big glass doors and tinted windows and marble floors; but right down the street was the old Lafayette police station and jail, a squat, gray cement building with barred windows on the second floor, an ugly sentinel out of the past, a reminder that yesterday was only a flick of the eye away from the seeming tranquillity of the present. My point is that I remember an execution that took place in the jail in the early 1950s. The electric chair was brought in from Angola; two big generators on a flatbed truck hummed on a side street behind the building; thick, black cables ran from the generators through a barred window on the second story. At nine o’clock on a balmy summer night, people in the restaurant across the street heard a man scream once just before an arc light seemed to jump off the bars of the window. Later, townspeople did not like to talk about it. Eventually that part of the jail was closed off and was used to house a civil defense siren. Finally, few people even remembered that an execution had taken place there.
    But on this hazy May afternoon that smelled of flowers and rain, I was looking up at an open window on the second story of the federal building, through which flew a paper airplane. It slid in a long glide across the street and bounced off the windshield of a moving car. I had a strong feeling about where it had come from.
    Sure enough, when I walked through the open door of Minos P. Dautrieve’s office I saw a tall, crewcut man tilted back in his chair, his knit tie pulled loose, his collar unbuttoned, one foot on the desk, the