*** No One Left To Burn ***
Chapter 1
3
I leaned back into the cushion of the rear seat of the police car and tried to relax. It took awhile, but finally I was able to put my brief skirmish with Guidry out of my mind. I watched the remnants of the beaded raindrops that slid slowly down the car’s windshield. They very quickly changed from a liquid spherical shape, to a wet flat form and then just to a misty splatter. I thought how sudden it was all happening. Think about it and you’ll see what I mean. Having trouble? If you can’t visualize it happening then try to hear it. Listen. Pop! Splat! Pop! Splat! Pop! Splat! Nothing yet you say? I told you it was fast. I also thought about how other things in our daily spiritual, emotional and physical experiences could change suddenly. Some of the changes are for the good and, sadly, some of the changes are for the not so good. I focused my eyes past the slithering water trails on the glass and looked out into the silent darkness at nothing in particular.
My thoughts drifted back over some of the many events of the past
thirty-six hours and how they too, those many chance circumstances, had been the
cause or effect of sudden changes.
The morning I started work on the Burton caper began like another one of those beautiful August days in New Orleans. As I strode through the Central Business District, I felt the warm radiant rays of the early morning sun as it erased the remains of the previous night’s semi-liquid fog. The deep blue, unclouded sky was clear of smog and filled with an abundance of clean, fresh air. I must add that it was also filled with an abundance of pigeons. Swooping ,diving and gliding pigeons. These feathered critters can, in their own way, create quite a significant pollution problem. We who are earthbound must be alert and agile when strolling the sidewalks in the Central Business District. You must watch where you walk and where you stand if you pause to wait for a light or bus. What I’m talking about here is an abundance of bird shit. A fowl, nonchalantly roosting on the front ledge of a building, can literally scatter bomb the area with fecal matter.
It seemed to me however, that no one noticed the peril, except me that is, or cared about it for that matter. For in spite of the hazards, the sidewalks were elbow to elbow with an infinite number of high-stepping people.
Some were bright eyed and snappily dressed, and they looked like they might be young office employees scurrying on their way to their tenth floor offices to the jobs they liked so much. Some were not as bright-eyed and looked a lot less exuberant, more like they were on their way to jobs that they really thought should be taken and shoved somewhere. Others were shoppers with excitement glowing on their faces, showing the hope that what they wanted to buy was still in stock and that their size hadn’t been sold out. I saw shoppers who had lines of worry across their brows and a concerned look in their tired eyes. These are a special group of buyers who are bound by a common thread. One in particular caught my eye. As she trod past me I could see the despair in her face. I suspected she was wondering how she would fare the rest of the week after she spent her last twenty dollars at the Payless Shoe store on the small, unsuspecting but eager child she dragged along to ensure a good fit. Some I saw, but thank God far less in number, were the forlorn homeless who felt miserable and without hope but didn’t know for sure why or how it had come to happen. But they weren’t high stepping. They had very likely spent the entire morning leaning against the same building wall, their schedule for the day already set just like the day before, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Sad but true. And then there were those you wouldn’t ever want to find yourself alone with in a dark alley.
This conglomeration of humanity with its multifarious ideas and emotions and goals and values has, by necessity, learned to co-exist. Particular ideologies have been blended, stirred and steeped and when the percolation is complete, the product is, for the most part, a society of reasonably stable individuals with a common goal. That goal is to live a comfortable and satisfying way of life. Not an unobtainable objective by any means. Not all who try are victorious in their endeavor, but those who do succeed have done so because they mustered the fortitude and possessed the stick-to-itiveness to put up with the daily grind and hassle, and they, having set their sights on the center ring of their success target, have become willing participants in the hustle and bustle that are two of the necessary and accepted constituents of our cultural evolution.
I must tell you that I thoroughly enjoy my current life style. Yes, I know, there are some areas that I would agree have some room for improvement. But who among us could honestly say otherwise. But if I had to rate it on a scale from one to ten, it would come in as a strong eight. Therefore, my involvement in winning that elusive and often seemingly futile contest to achieve the idyllic utopia is this: the hustle I occasionally have, but the bustle, well, that I merely look at.
I approached my office, which is a one-man operation located on the second floor of the Spenser Building, at the corner of Baronne and Gravier streets, and as I did, I looked up at the frosted glass panel of the heavy oak door. Across the panel in two inch, bold, black script was painted, “R. Stevens, Private Investigations.” The R, which you already know stands for Rick, is what my friends call me. People who are not my friends, and that number seems to increase daily at an astonishing rate, call me various other names. Monikers like prick, asshole, fuck head, et cetera. Some of the etceteras are really so crass that I’d rather not even mention them in this penning.
Although being a private eye has sometimes had its bad moments, and sometimes its bad days and sometimes its bad weeks, the past five years that I have been at this job have reinforced my convictions of a couple of things. First of all, it beats the hell out of working the Special Intelligence Detachment for the military police, which I did for three years while I was in Uncle Sam’s Army. Secondly, but with a few exceptions that are, namely, fame, fortune, and an almost never ending source of chicks, I enjoy private investigations work almost as much as I enjoyed my four years with the Dallas Cowboys. Well, maybe I don’t really enjoy P-eyeing more. Maybe its just that back then, when I was with the Cowboys, what I didn’t enjoy at all was dragging my weary ass out of bed on Monday mornings after a game on Sunday. You talk about hurting. Shit. I used to ache so bad I swear I could feel my hair growing. Like microscopic drills they were, as each little strand of bristle augured its way up through my skin. And each week it seemed, as the season progressed, it got harder to get up on Monday morning than it had been the previous week. Finally, the coup d’etat! It got to the point toward the end of the season where nothing would get up. I know if you think about that you’ll know what I mean. Nothing would get up. To say that this physical malady played havoc with my social affairs would be the understatement of the year.
Perchance you’ve never taken much time to think about it, but as you will notice, there is a vast difference in the meaning of a statement just by the way you arrange the same five words.
For example, let us say that you have a problem if it’s hard to get up. But believe me bucko you have no idea what real problems are until you’ve experienced a situation when you are with a beautiful, sexual woman, in the proper setting with candle light and champagne and you fail to get it up hard. Like I said before, you’ve probably not given it too much thought. And now that I have, I guess I’d have to agree with your time management technique.
Pro football is definitely a rough, bruising, cod-jarring sport. Well, no shit. Just pause for a moment and consider all the safety equipment that is necessary to play for Chrissake. First of all there is the scientifically engineered plastic helmet that is constructed of a molded chemical compound strong enough that almost allows it to stop the slug from a thirty ought six. It has a steel grid like apparatus mounted across the face area to prevent the old schnoz from getting whacked. Looking out from the inside of it is like looking out through jail cell bars. And that, if the truth were known, is what a lot of the players should be doing.
The helmet is obviously a piece of gear that is worn to protect your head and also any brains you might have inside - although there couldn’t be too many in there, because if there were, you wouldn’t be out on the field in the first place. You would be up in the stands drinking a beer and watching the game.
A form fitting plastic mouthpiece must be inserted to prevent irrevocable damage to the lips, teeth and tongue. If forgotten for only one play it is quite possible that the girls you date might find your kissing technique to be a real turn off.
Shoulder pads are strapped on that cause the wearer to instantly bulk up to gargantuan proportions. Then there are the hip pads and the thigh pads that protect the tender areas of bone and muscle that are the points of contact when the body is flung at another player with relentless, careless abandon. We must not forget the metal knee braces that some wear to prevent the hinged limb from bending in the wrong direction and which work as designed most of the time, but not always. Oh yeah, let’s not forget to remember the jock strap and the very crucial nut cup.
So those who say pro football is a tough way to make a buck are right on. The game can and often does result in fractured fibulae or cracked clavicles or any one of the many other physical and muscular mutilations that are possible when the human body is subjected to such a violent recreational pastime. Although the traumas inflicted are generally temporary, I still categorize them as major league pain bearers.
As a result of undergoing more than one session with the knee surgeon, I
gave some not quite serious consideration to moving on to a somewhat less
brutalizing profession. That had happened a couple of times during
convalescence, but in each case, by the time the knee was healed the notion had
passed. However, with the
onset of my then current wretched misfortune, my heedfulness to the idea of
moving on became much more serious and I really started thinking about hanging
up the old cleats. You might say
that destiny gave me a shove, although you know that wasn’t his real name.
The time and place were in the final game of the l993 season against the Redskins at R.F.K. Stadium. I can remember it like it was only yesterday, at most, perhaps maybe only last week. We had been working out of the split-T most of the day and again the quarterback called blue thirty-three right. That was a play that the coach had obviously sent in far too often.
Anyway, this play called for a straight pitch-out to me. I took the ball and started my sweep around the right end. The play was developing nicely and it looked like it was going to work for plenty of yardage. At least that’s what I thought. I broke two tackles and spun back to my left, back towards the center of the field. I saw a lane start to open up for me and it looked like a touchdown was a definite possibility.
Suddenly, I was aghast. Two hundred eighty pounds of discouragement loomed up in front of me. It was a two hundred eighty pound tackle who was dirty, mean and vulgar-looking. He had already knocked the piss out of me three times in the first half, and so I knew exactly what his technique was. He was going to knock the piss out of me once more. I also knew I’d need one more break to make it all the way to the end zone. He came at me low and slightly to my right. I deftly false-stepped to the left and then cut back toward the right sideline. He must have read my mind though, because he wasn’t even slightly fooled. Not one damn bit. He hit me right where he had been aiming all the time. His technique had worked again.
I did, however, manage to maintain my balance long enough to twist sharply to my right for the last break that I needed. I got it. By God did I ever get it! “Your left leg is broken just below the knee,” the doctor had said. “But, hey. You’ll be good as new by next season.”
“Fuck it,” I said. “I quit. Hair that hurts while it’s growing until Wednesday is one thing, and perhaps you have to expect knee surgery as a possibility if you’re going to play this game. And I know this cast will only be a temporary social inconvenience. But like I said, Doc, fuck it - I quit! That bastard who laid the tackle on me and broke this leg was actually grabbing for my balls.”
After I hobbled out of the Cowboy’s camp, I spent the next seven months
on the sunny Gulf Coast of Florida. Seven
months of just lying around on the beaches and soaking up the rays while trying
to decide what new and exciting adventures I could devise.
For a while it seemed like a pretty relaxing way to spend my days
recuperating and, at the same time, get my head screwed on right.
It seemed like a good way to get anything screwed right, so I did that
too, with three stewardesses from Continental Airlines.
Sad to say, it eventually got to the point where I was spending more time
keeping the airline schedules straight than I was spending time flushing out my
mind. You know, getting my shit
together. I again decided that it
was time for me to pack up and move on.
For some time, that is in those fleeting moments between Continental flights 133 and 142, and 108, I had been giving a lot of thought to putting my military training to use and opening a Private Investigation Agency in the New Orleans area. An untimely airline strike suddenly left me with all flights in town at the same time, along with three not too happy stews. Again this guy, destiny, got me off dead center and I made the move to Louisiana. None too soon at that, I might add.
So now, here I was, standing in the empty hall staring at the inanimate frosted glass panel of my office door. I went through the routine, which had almost become a daily one, of mentally reminding myself to have the badly faded lettering repainted. From the other side of the wall I could hear the clanging ring of the telephone. I slipped the key into the lock and twisted. I swung the door open and heard the sound of yesterday’s mail as it scooted across the carpet in front of the door. I stepped in and scooped up the handful of letters. With four long strides I crossed the room and dropped my 220 lb. frame into the swivel chair behind my desk. I tossed my number twelve shoes, feet enclosed therein, toward the shiny mahogany finish of the desk. They crossed in mid-air and I allowed them to land gently so as not to mar the desk’s glossy surface. Actually, I allowed them to land gently because the desk was really a little dusty, and I didn’t want to start something I’d have to finish. I grunted forward, snatched the phone from its cradle, and said, “Stevens speaking.”
“Mr. Stevens, this is John Burton. I must talk with you right away. I’m afraid I need your help. If I’ve caught you at a bad time, uh, the phone rang so many times - well, if you’re busy I can call you later. Or you can call me. But it’s imperative that I speak with you as soon as possible.” His tone was steady and persistent as he spoke, but occasionally rising and lowering in pitch a little like he couldn’t decide which part of the scale he wanted to use.
There was some ambivalence in the urgency of his need to discuss whatever it was with me. “I must talk with you - but if you’re busy; it’s imperative - but I can call you back.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Burton, but do I know you?”
His voice had a touch of nervousness to it when he replied, “oh, no, Mr. Stevens. We’ve never met but I must speak with you as soon as possible.” He was being persistent again.
I was absentmindedly flipping through the stack of yesterday’s mail when I asked, “Mr. Burton. If we’ve never met how is it that you know who I am? And how did you get my phone number?” Now really when you think about it, that was a pretty stupid question. There was silence on the other end for a moment, and then he continued,
“Well… uh, that’s a rather odd question, Mr. Stevens.
Out of the phone book of course.”
On a normal day, I get out of bed around eight o’clock and if the coffee is hot enough and black enough and I drink enough, I generally become fully awake, alert, and sharp witted around nine.
But this hadn’t been a normal day. It had started off differently from others when I woke up and found my stockbroker lying next to me in the midst of the rumpled bed covers. My head hurt like hell and it felt like my skull had been cracked open. I instinctively moved my hand up to my temple, I guess to see if anything warm, wet and sticky was oozing out. It was dry, but the throbbing from within continued.
The cause of my splitting headache started with the phone call I’d gotten yesterday from my Merrill Lynch account manager. It came just two hours before the market closed. I didn’t get the call because I was out of the office, but I got the message later on my answering machine.
“Rick, this is Alex. Pick up if you’re there. We need to gab regarding your bond funds. I think it’s time to sell. You’ll make a killing if we do it now. Call me.”
I returned to close up shop an hour later. I was listening to my messages, but when I heard Alex’s I shut off the machine and returned the call. We sold the bonds and sure enough I made one hell of a killing. Two hours after the market closed Alex and I were in Pat O’Brien’s. We were celebrating up a storm, drinking the notorious tall pink hurricanes. Get it? Celebrating up a storm - drinking hurricanes?
Our occasion of hoopla lasted the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening. We finally dragged ourselves away from the piano bar and staggered and weaved somewhat when we walked to a little Japanese steak house on Bourbon Street for dinner. Later we wound up taking a cab to my place and continued making a wild night of it. But by then the reason for our joy and frolicking had long been forgotten.
It was no wonder my head felt battered. I looked over at Alex and wondered how this stockbroker’s head was going to feel once awake. I started to reach for the covers to pull them up over her bare breasts when she began to stir and her big blue eyes opened.
She smiled at me but her pleasant look turned into a wrinkled frown when she saw the pain that I was obviously in. “Poor baby,” she purred. “Do we have a little headache?”
I could have just as easily said yes I do. But no. Instead I said, “Alex, I have a headache that only sex will cure.”
“Come here,” she said, tossing the covers aside and reaching toward me with open arms. “Maybe I can nurse you back to health.” And she did.
So you see, my day started off differently than most other normal days, and I was running quite a bit behind schedule. The time now was just 10:45am, and I hadn’t yet had any coffee at all and was, therefore, a bit slow-witted. I decided to drop that line of profitless questioning and get right to the point. I changed the subject.
“Well, now, Mr. Burton,” I inquired. “In what way can I help you?”
More silence and then," I must see you right away. It’s most urgent. If you could, and I do hope you can, I need to see you this morning.” His somewhat wavering voice had finally picked a pitch and for the moment seemed to stay with it.
“Where are you now, Mr. Burton? Perhaps you could come to my office. We could....”
“I’m at my home,” he said, “and I’d rather not come to your
office to see you, Mr. Stevens. I’d
prefer to have you come here to my house.
I’ll be waiting for you. My
address is....”
“Whoa!” I almost yelled into the mouthpiece. “You’ve got to tell me what in the hell is so important that you have to see me right away. I’d like to know what’s on your mind, Mr. Burton. You know, a few more details like who, what, why, when, and where. Perhaps I’m not the man you want at all.”
He gave no reply.
“Well? Who...? What...?”
“Mr. Stevens, I’d rather not talk about this over the phone. But, if you insist on knowing something about this before you’ll agree to come here...you see it’s one of my daughters. Lila’s her name. She’s missing.”
“How old is your daughter, Lila, Mr. Burton?”
“She just turned twenty-one.”
There’s the who and the what right off the bat, I thought. And at the same time we eliminated the possibility of a kidnapped child.
“How long has she been missing?”
“About five days. Yes, five days exactly,” he replied. “I remember that I waited up quite late Sunday night for her to come home. I didn’t go to bed until around one o’clock and she hadn’t come in yet. She never came home at all that night and she hasn’t been home since.”
The when came as easily as the who and the what. At the rate the conversation was going the case would soon be solved, if there even were a case. I’d call it the great Alexander Graham Bell Rip-off.
“Mr. Stevens, you’ve just got to help me find her. I’m sure if we don’t find my daughter soon something dreadful is going to happen to her, if it hasn’t already.”
“You seem pretty convinced that your daughter is in some kind of trouble. Now she may or may not be, I don’t know. You haven’t given me a hell of a lot of information to go on. However, I can tell you this. Through the past several years I’ve received many more than just a few calls from distraught parents. The vast majority of times when young girls have, as you put it, disappeared, it’s because they slipped off for a weekend fling with their also young and very prurient boyfriends. Now I’m not implying that...”
“My God, Stevens! I hope you’re not thinking that...”
“I’m not thinking anything, Mr. Burton,” I retreated. “It’s just that those things have been known to happen.” I suddenly found myself in want of an instant cure for foot-in-mouth disease. My Sagittarius instincts again, I suspect. “Okay, Mr. Burton,” I conceded. “Let’s say that your daughter has disappeared. Do you have any idea what might have happened to her?”
There was a pause and in the background I could hear the tinkling of ice
in a glass. A little early, I
thought. John Burton soon came back
on the line and had calmed down. He
had found a cure for his nerves, a bottle perhaps. Whatever.
“No,” he answered. “But it’s just not like her to go away for any length of time and not let me know where she is. Believe me, Mr. Stevens, I know my daughter. I have this horrible feeling that she’s in some kind of trouble.”
We talked a few more minutes about where she might have gone, but being the skeptical type, I still suspected a shack job. I finally let him beat me down and agreed to go see him. “What’s your address, Mr. Burton?”
“Number Two Bayou Drive, Pont-Rouge,”
Pont-Rouge! For Chrissake! This time I did yell. “That’s a hundred miles from here and you want to see me this morning?”
“Yes, I want to see you this morning, Mr. Stevens. I’m not an extremely wealthy man, but you can be sure that I’ll make it well worth your while.” He paused, then added, “well worth your while.”
“Yeah, sure. Well, all right. I’ll do my best,” I said. But I knew it would be later in the afternoon by the time I got there.
“Very well. I’ll be
expecting you. Goodbye, Mr.
Stevens.” Then the phone went dead
in my ear.
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