The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  • • •

  I WALKED HOME FOR lunch. A cherry-red Lamborghini was parked in the driveway. Alafair was eating at the kitchen table with a middle-aged man I had never seen. A plate of deviled eggs and two avocado-and-shrimp sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a glass of iced tea with mint leaves in it had obviously been set for me. But she had not waited upon my arrival before she and her friend started eating.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hey, Dave,” she said. “This is Lou Wexler. He has to get to the airport, so we started without you.”

  Wexler was a tall, thick-bodied man with a tan that went to the bone and blond hair sun-bleached on the tips. He was ruggedly handsome, with intelligent eyes and large hands and the kind of confidence that sometimes signals aggression. He wiped his fingers with a napkin before rising and shaking hands. “It’s an honor.”

  “How do you do, sir?” I said, sitting down, glancing out the window at the bayou. My manner was not gracious. But no father, no matter how charitable, trusts another man with his daughter upon first introduction. If he tells you he does, he is either lying or a worthless parent.

  “Lou is a screenwriter and producer,” Alafair said. “He works with Desmond.”

  “Actually, I don’t work with Desmond,” he said. “I help produce his films. Nobody ‘works’ with Desmond. He’s his own man. In the best way, of course.”

  “How about this fellow Butterworth?” I said.

  “You’ve met Antoine, have you?”

  “Twice.”

  Wexler’s eyes were sparkling. “And?”

  “An unusual fellow,” I said.

  “Don’t take him seriously,” Wexler said. “Nobody does. He’s a bean counter posing as an artist.”

  “I heard he was in a couple of wars,” I said.

  “He was best at scaring the natives in the bush, rattling around in a Land Rover, and showing up for photo ops. South Africa was full of them.”

  “That’s your home?” I asked.

  “For a while. I was born in New Orleans. I live in Los Angeles now.”

  If he’d grown up in New Orleans, he had acid-rinsed the city from his speech.

  “We pulled a body out of the salt just south of Desmond Cormier’s house,” I said. “The body was tied to a cross. I spotted the cross through a telescope. Our man Butterworth took a peep but couldn’t see a thing. Neither could Desmond, although this morning he told me he had bad eyesight. Butterworth didn’t seem bothered one way or another.”

  The room was silent. Alafair stared at me.

  “Can you run that by me again?” Wexler said.

  I repeated my statement.

  “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” Wexler said. “Sorry, I haven’t been watching the time. I have to get a new gym bag. Then I need to pick up some fellows in Lafayette. We’re searching out a couple of locations. Perhaps you can help us.”

  His level of self-involvement was hard to take.

  “I probably wouldn’t know what you’re looking for,” I said.

  He touched at his mouth with his napkin and set it aside. “It’s been grand meeting you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Likewise.”

  “Don’t get up.”

  I didn’t intend to. Alafair walked him to the door. Then she came back into the kitchen, her jaw clenched. “Why do you have to be so irritable?”

  “You’re a success on your own. You don’t need these phony bastards.”

  “You stigmatize an entire group because of this Butterworth character?”

  “They’re nihilists.”

  “Desmond’s not. He’s a great director. You know why? Because he paid his goddamn dues.”

  “How about it on the language, Alf?”

  “Sometimes you really disappoint me,” she said.

  I felt my face shrink. I took my plate outside and finished eating at the picnic table with Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. Then I went back inside. Alafair was brushing her hair in front of the mirror in the bedroom. She was five-ten and dark-skinned, with beautiful hair that fell to her shoulders. She had a black belt in karate and ran five miles every morning. Sometimes I couldn’t believe she was the same little El Salvadoran girl I’d pulled from a submerged airplane near Southwest Pass.

  “What was that guy doing here, anyway?” I said.

  “Inviting me out. For supper. This evening,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

  Chapter Four

  DURING THE NEXT three days I talked with Lucinda Arceneaux’s employer and fellow employees at the catering service in Los Angeles, and her former roommate, and a boy in Westwood who used to go to the public library with her. They all spoke of her good character and gentle disposition. None had an explanation for her disappearance.

  The Texas Department of Criminal Justice referred me to three correctional officers who had known Hugo Tillinger. Two had no opinion of him; the third, an old-time gunbull, said, “Tillinger? Yeah, I knew that lying son of a bitch. Turn your back on him and he’d gut you from your belly button to your chin. Anything else you want to know?”

  On Friday I went into Helen’s office and told her what I had.

  “What are your feelings about Tillinger?” she said.

  “I don’t see him as a viable suspect in the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux. An escaped convict in a prison uniform would have more on his mind than committing a ritualistic homicide with a cross and a hypodermic needle.”

  Helen looked at a legal pad on her desk. “There were break-ins at three fish camps not far from Cypremort Point. A white shirt with blue tabs on it was found half buried by a boathouse. He’s here. The question is why.”

  “He jumped on the first freight he could find going out of Texas.”

  “What if he had a partner?” she said.

  “We’re looking at the wrong guy, Helen.”

  “He burned his wife and daughter to death. Don’t tell me he’s the wrong guy.”

  “I want to talk to Desmond Cormier and Antoine Butterworth again.”

  “You’ve got a bias, Streak. You don’t like Hollywood people.”

  “That isn’t true. I don’t like anyone who thinks he’s entitled.”

  She twiddled her ballpoint on her desk blotter. “Okay. By the way, you have a new partner.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Her name is Bailey Ribbons.”

  “Who is Bailey Ribbons?”

  “I hired her two days ago. She’s twenty-eight years old. She was a middle school teacher in New Orleans and has a graduate degree in psychology. She was a dispatcher with NOPD for eighteen months.”

  “That’s her entire experience?”

  “What she doesn’t know, you’ll teach her.”

  “Is this an affirmative-action situation?” I said.

  “I hired her because of her intelligence. I’m going to get a lot of criticism for that. I don’t need it from you. Stay here.”

  She left the office and returned three minutes later with a woman who seemed to have walked out of a motion picture that had little connection to the present. She had dark brown hair and clear skin and eyes like light trapped in sherry, and she wore black shoes and a white blouse with a frilly collar buttoned at the throat and a skirt that hung well below the knees. What struck me most were her warm smile and her erect posture. I felt strange, even awkward and boyish, when I took her hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detective Robicheaux,” she said.

  “You, too, Miss Bailey,” I said. “Call me Dave.”

  “Hi, Dave.”

  I started to speak but couldn’t remember what I’d wanted to say.

  “Bring Bailey up to date on the Arceneaux investigation,” Helen said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Helen?”

  “What?”

  Again my head went blank. Bailey Ribbons was too young, too inexperienced, too likely to be resented by older members of the department.

  “I’ll check out a cruiser,” I said. “If Bailey is free, we
can head down to Cypremort Point.”

  “She’s free,” Helen said. “Bye, Dave.”

  I walked downstairs and out the door with Bailey Ribbons. She smelled like flowers. I felt my palms tingling and a fish bone in my throat.

  “Did I say something inappropriate?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am, it’s a pleasure to have you aboard.”

  “I appreciate your courtesy. I realize some might think I don’t have the qualifications for the job, but I’ll give it my best.”

  I looked at her profile, the radiance in her face, and felt my heart beating.

  God, don’t let me be an old fool, I prayed.

  • • •

  WE DROVE DOWN to the southern tip of Cypremort Point and walked along the bib of sand and salt grass and concrete blocks where I had found the tennis shoe. The wind was hot and scudding brown waves up on the sand.

  “We had three 911 calls about a woman screaming,” I said. “One caller thought the scream came from a lighted cabin cruiser. The cabin cruisers that are docked here were all accounted for.”

  Bailey looked across the long expanse of the water, the humps of greenery and sandspits that resembled swampland rather than a saltwater bay. “This is all disappearing, isn’t it?”

  “About sixteen square miles of it a year,” I replied.

  “Why are you bothered by the movie director and his friend?”

  “It’s the friend, Butterworth, who bothers me more. I think he’s a deviant and a closet sadist.”

  “Those aren’t terms you hear a lot anymore,” she said.

  “He’s the real deal.”

  “Introduce me.”

  Her hair was feathering on her cheek. My protective feelings toward her were the same as those I had for my daughter, I told myself. It was only natural for an older man to feel protective of a younger woman. There was nothing wrong with it. Absolutely. Only a closet Jansenist would see design in an inclination that’s inherent in the species.

  What a lie.

  • • •

  I HAD CALLED DESMOND and made an appointment. But that was not all I had done by way of preparation regarding Antoine Butterworth. I had talked with a friend who was captain of the West Hollywood Station of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Butterworth was almost mythic among the film industry’s subculture. He hired prostitutes he made degrade each other with sexual devices; he also hung them on hooks and beat them with his fists. He returned to Los Angeles from New Orleans in a rage and berated everyone in his office because he had to sleep with an ugly prostitute. He and a co-producer put LSD in the lunch of the co-producer’s Hispanic maid and videotaped her while she stumbled bewildered and frightened around the house; later, they showed the tape at their office. Butterworth lived in the Palisades in a $7 million white stucco home overlooking the ocean; he’d moved a junkie physician into the pool house so he could have a supply of clean dope. The physician had been found floating facedown among the hyacinths, dead from an overdose. Prior to his situation with Butterworth, the physician had been in a twelve-step program.

  If Butterworth had a bottom, no one knew what it was.

  Desmond opened the door. He took one look at Bailey Ribbons, and the breath left his chest. “Who are you?”

  She blushed. “Detective Ribbons.”

  “I can’t believe this,” he said.

  “I hope we haven’t upset you,” she said.

  “No, my heavens, come in,” he replied. He looked over his shoulder at the deck. “Can you give me a second?”

  “Is there a problem?” I said.

  “We were playing a couple of songs,” he said. “Antoine isn’t quite dressed. I got my times mixed up.”

  He went into the bedroom and got a robe and took it out on the deck. Through the glass doors I saw him and Butterworth arguing. Butterworth was wearing a yellow bikini, his tanned body glistening with oil; he put on the robe and cinched it tightly into his hips, then picked up a roach clip from an ashtray and took a hit and ate the roach.

  Desmond came back into the living room. “Do you know who you look like?” he asked Bailey.

  “My parents, I suspect,” she replied.

  “Cathy Downs. The actress who co-starred with Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine.”

  “I’m not familiar with that film,” she said.

  “We’ll have a showing here. Whenever you like,” he said.

  “Need to talk to your man out there, Desmond,” I said.

  He scratched at his eyebrow. “That stuff again?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘that stuff,’ ” I said. “This is a homicide investigation.”

  “Antoine had some addictions in the past. You should be able to understand that.”

  “I just watched him eat a roach.”

  “He has a prescription for medical marijuana. I won’t let him smoke it here again. You have my word.”

  “Do you play all those instruments?” Bailey asked.

  “The saxophone is Antoine’s,” Desmond replied.

  “What songs were you playing?” she asked.

  “Some of the Flip Phillips arrangements. You know who Flip Phillips was?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “This isn’t a social call,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said to me. “What a hothead you are, Dave. No, I take that back. You’re a Puritan at heart. You need buckle shoes and one of those tall hats.”

  I slid back the glass door and waited for Bailey. “Coming?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling.

  Desmond’s eyes never left the back of her head.

  Butterworth was lying on a recliner under a beach umbrella inset in a glass table. “Oh me, oh my, what do we have here?” he said.

  His robe had fallen open. The outline of his phallus was stenciled as tautly as a banana against his bikini. He blew me a kiss.

  • • •

  DESMOND WAS RIGHT. My feelings about Butterworth were not objective. An open cooler humped with crushed ice and imported bottles of beer rested on a redwood table. I pulled a bottle of Tuborg from the ice. “Catch.”

  Butterworth blinked but caught it with his left hand as deftly as a frog tonguing an insect out of the air. “Flinging things around, are we?”

  “Your eyesight seems pretty good,” I said. “Too bad it seems to fail you when you look through a telescope.”

  “Aren’t we the clever one.”

  “I recommend you not speak to me in the first-person plural again,” I said.

  “Bad boy. That excites me,” he said.

  “I don’t think you get it, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “Louisiana is America’s answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How’d you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?”

  “Some big black husky fellows will be visiting me after lights-out?”

  As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.

  “Would you stand up a minute?” I said.

  “Are we going to get rough now?” he said.

  “No, your robe is open and I don’t like looking at you,” I said. “I also don’t like your general disrespect.”

  He flipped his robe over his nether regions but didn’t move from the recliner. “I told Desmond we made a mistake coming here.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “We’re shooting a film in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. I told him we’d have trouble here.”

  “You’re filming in Louisiana because the state will subsidize up to twenty-five percent of your costs,” I said. I removed an envelope from my pocket and handed it to him. “Take a look at this.”

  Butterworth slipped a photo out of the envelope and studied it. His eyebrows were beaded with sweat. “This was taken in a morgue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is the woman who was on the cross?”
<
br />   The photo showed the body of Lucinda Arceneaux on the autopsy tray, a sheet pulled to her chin. Butterworth replaced the photo in the envelope and returned it to me, his face solemn.

  “Look again,” I said. “She worked for a catering service that supplies film companies on the set.”

  “I don’t need to. I’ve never seen this person.”

  “Look again, Mr. Butterworth.”

  “I told you the truth. I think you gave me that envelope to get my fingerprints on it.”

  I could smell the sweat and grease and weed on his skin. “You like to beat up hookers?”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “An administrator at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department told me you make them strap on dildos and degrade each other, and then you hang them up on hooks or straps and beat the hell out of them.”

  “I’m done with this,” he said.

  “Yeah, how about it, Dave?” Desmond said behind me.

  “It takes a special kind of guy to use up the life of an innocent young woman in order to re-create the Crucifixion,” I said. “We never had anything like this around here. At least not till you brought Mr. Butterworth to town.”

  “In Rwanda I saw bodies stacked as high as this house and set on fire,” Butterworth said. “Some of them were still alive. If you weren’t a police officer, I’d break your fucking jaw.”

  “Why is it I believe nothing you say?” I asked.

  “Because you’re an incompetent idiot with a crime on your hands that you don’t have the training or experience to deal with,” he replied. “Please excuse my candor, but I’m bloody tired of your arrogance and insults.”

  The umbrella was flapping, the air bright with humidity, the deck blistering hot. He was either the best actor I had ever seen or a man who had a cache of dignity that I wouldn’t have thought him capable of.

  “I’d like you to look at the body,” I said.

  “You’re unrelenting, aren’t you,” he said.

  “That’s fair to say.”

  “Then get a warrant,” he said.

  He stood up from the recliner. Our faces were six inches apart, a feral light in his eyes. I felt my right hand tighten and close and open again. My mouth was dry, a sound like wind blowing inside my head. I knew the signs all too well. It was the precursor that had come to me many times when I’d superimposed the face of a man named Mack on the faces of Asian men who had done me no harm. Bailey and Desmond were staring at us like witnesses to a car wreck in the making.