“Miss Bailey, please take a look at the photos of Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs,” Desmond said, pulling back the sliding door that opened onto the living room. “You, too, Dave. I do want y’all to see the film. It would mean a great deal to me.”
Bailey looked truly out of her element. My cell phone throbbed in my pocket. I looked at the caller’s number. It was Helen Soileau. “Dave here.”
“Are you at Cypremort Point?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You get anywhere?”
“Negative,” I said.
“Wind it up,” she said. “We’ve got another one.”
Chapter Five
THE DUCK CAMP was an old one, a desiccated shack abandoned in a swampy area southwest of Avery Island, the gum and cypress and persimmon trees strung with dead vines. We parked the cruiser and waded through a bog that was iridescent with oil and gasoline. The paramedics, three uniformed deputies, and Helen and Cormac Watts were already there. Helen and Cormac were wearing rubber boots and latex gloves. A swamp maple that was dying of saline intrusion, its limbs scaled with lichen, stood on the far side of the shack, a huge teardrop-shaped object suspended from one of the thickest limbs. The droning sound in the air was as loud as a beehive.
The 911 had been called in by a fisherman who had run out of gas and pulled up onto the hummock, dumbfounded and sickened by what he saw.
The wind changed, and a smell like a bucket full of dead rats washed over us. I heard Bailey gag. I cleared my throat and spat and handed her a clean handkerchief. “Put it over your nose.”
“I’m all right,” she said.
“That’s a smell no one gets used to. Just do it, Miss Bailey.”
“Don’t call me ‘miss’ anymore, Dave.”
“You got it.”
A deputy was stringing crime-scene tape through the trees. Helen was standing on a high place by the front of the shack. The shack had no door and no glass in the windows. The floor was caked with dirt and the shells of dead beetles. Helen was breathing through her mouth, her chest rising and falling slowly.
“Before we get to that mess in the tree, I want you to see this,” she said. “It may be the only forensics we take out of here.”
Heavy boot prints led into the shack and out through a hole broken in the boards on the far side, still jagged and unweathered, as though recently splintered. There were drag marks across the floor and stains that red ants were feeding on.
The stench was overwhelming now. I tried to envision the man who wore the boots. They were probably steel-toed, the strings laced through brass eyelets, the leather stiff, even gnarled, from wear in a swamp or on the floor of an offshore drilling rig. Or maybe they were the boots of a man with dark jowls and swirls of body hair who deliberately did not wash or shave and wore his odor like a weapon. I could almost hear his feet on the floor as he dragged his victim outside, the stride measured, his hand hooked in the victim’s shirt, his weight coming down with a sound like a wooden clock striking the hour.
Our departmental photographer was clicking away, a scarf wrapped across the bottom half of his face. Then he vomited inside the scarf.
We walked on dry ground to the other side of the shack. The body of a slight man dressed in khaki work clothes hung upside down inside a fish net. His arms were bound behind him. One ankle was roped to his wrists so the calf was pulled tight against the inside of the knee. His facial features were in an advanced state of decomposition and had the squinted look of a newly born infant. Flies crawled over almost every inch of his skin. A knotted walking stick with a sharpened tip had been shoved through the chest and out the back.
“You ever see him before?” Helen said.
“It’s hard to say,” I replied.
“Why is his leg tied like that?” she said.
The image was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. I shook my head.
“It’s from the tarot,” Bailey said.
“The fortune-telling deck?” Helen said.
“It’s a compilation of medieval and Egyptian iconography,” Bailey said. “The gypsies carried it through the ancient world into modern times.”
“So?” Helen said.
“The victim is positioned to look like the Hanged Man,” Bailey said.
“What’s the Hanged Man?” Helen said.
“Some say Judas, others say Peter,” Bailey said. “Others say Sebastian, the Roman soldier martyred for his faith. In death he makes the sign of the cross. In the deck he’s generally associated with self-sacrifice.”
Helen stepped away from the tree and stared at the ground, her hands on her hips. “What’s your opinion, Dave?” she asked. “You still don’t think Hugo Tillinger is our guy?”
“Maybe Tillinger killed his family or maybe he didn’t,” I said. “But I doubt he’s a student of Western symbolism.”
“Who the hell is?” Helen said. “I don’t think this is about tarot cards. I think this is about a guy who likes to kill people and wants to scare the shit out of the entire community.”
I looked at Bailey. She was obviously struggling to hide her discomfort about the odor of the victim; also, I suspected she was wondering if her education and knowledge were about to make her a lonely and isolated member of our department.
“Nobody saw anything except the fisherman who found the body?” I said to Helen.
“No,” she said. “This place will be washed away in another year or so. Cormac says the body has probably been here a week.”
We went back to the other side of the shack. The sun was shining through the trees, the leaves moving in the wind. I could hear a buoy clanging on the bay.
“Maybe the way the leg is tied is coincidence,” I said. “But the walking stick through the chest doubles the coincidence.”
“I don’t understand,” Helen said.
“Our own deck of playing cards comes from the tarot,” I said. “The suit of clubs come from the Suit of Wands. The Suit of Wands upside down is associated with failure and dependency.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Helen said.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“Both of you are sure about this?” she said.
“As sure as you can get when you put yourself inside the mind of a lunatic,” I replied.
One deputy lifted another deputy so he could cut the rope that bound the net to the tree limb. Neither of them could avoid touching the body nor escape its full odor. The body thudded on the ground in a rush of flies, the jaw springing open, a carrion beetle popping from the mouth.
• • •
BY MONDAY THE victim had been identified through his prints as Joe Molinari, born on the margins of American society at Charity Hospital in Lafayette, the kind of innocent and faceless man who travels almost invisibly from birth to the grave with no paper trail except a few W-2 tax forms and an arrest for a thirty-dollar bad check. Let me take that one step further. Joe Molinari’s role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.
He’d lived in New Iberia all his life, smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and worked for a company that did asbestos teardowns and other jobs people do for minimum wage while they pretend they’re not destroying their organs. He’d had no immediate family, played dominoes in a game parlor by the bayou, and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never traveled farther than three parishes from his birthplace. He had gone missing seven days ago. Cormac Watts concluded Molinari had died from either blunt trauma or a load of opioids or both. The decomposition was too advanced to say.
The only asterisk to Molinari’s name was that he had been a janitor at the Iberia Parish courthouse for two years in the 1990s. Otherwise, he could have lived and died without anyone’s noticing.
Walking home after work, I saw Alafair and the screenwriter-producer Lou Wexl
er backing out of my driveway in his Lamborghini, the top down. Wexler braked and raised one hand high in the air. “Join us, sir.”
“For what?” I said.
“Dinner at the Yellow Bowl in Jeanerette,” he said.
“I left you a note,” Alafair said.
“Another time,” I said. “I may have to go back to the office tonight.”
“Roger that,” he said. He gave me a thumbs-up and drove away, his exhaust pipes throbbing on the asphalt. I saw Alafair try to turn around, her hair blowing. I didn’t have to go back to the office, and I felt guilty for having lied. I felt even worse for trying to make Alafair feel guilty.
I ate a cold supper on the back steps and watched the gloaming of the day, angry at myself for my inability to accept the times and the fact that Alafair had her own life to live and at some point I would have to let go of her and turn her over to the care of a man whom I might not like. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were sitting on our spool table, flipping their tails, checking out the breeze. The air was dense with the smell of the bayou, the way it smells after a heavy rain, and the light had become an inverted golden bowl in the sky, the cicadas droning in the trees. I heard someone walking through the leaves by the porte cochere.
“How’s it hanging, big mon?” Clete said.
There was no more welcome person in my life than Clete Purcel. He was the only violent, addicted, totally irresponsible human being I ever knew who carried his own brand of sunshine. “How you doin’, Cletus?”
“Is Alafair around?”
“She’s with some character named Lou Wexler.”
“I get the sense you don’t approve.”
“I don’t have a vote. What’s up?”
“I was researching these Hollywood guys. I don’t want to believe Tillinger is behind these killings.”
“These killings have nothing to do with you. Now give it a rest.”
“I should have called 911 when he bailed off that freight.”
“Enough.”
“All right,” he said. He sat down beside me and folded his hands. He looked at Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. “Something on your mind?”
“On my mind?”
“Yeah, something I can help with.”
How do you respond to a statement like that? “I spent the last two days talking to people who knew Joe Molinari.”
“The guy in the tree?”
“He probably weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and never hurt a soul in his life. Somebody drove a sharpened walking cane through his heart.”
“You’re getting the blue meanies.”
That was a term from the old days when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the French Quarter, and later, when we were partners in Homicide. “Blue meanies” was our term for depression, or living daily with human behavior at its worst. The blue meanies not only ate your lunch, they chewed you up and spat you out and ground you into the sidewalk.
“How do you read this stuff?” I said.
Clete thought for a moment. “The guy is posing his victims. He might be a photographer. He knows a lot about history and religion and symbolism. He’s full of rage, but he lets it out only in controlled situations. He’s the kind of white-collar schnook who lives alone and works eight to five in an office, then goes home and plays with a power saw in a basement that has blacked-out windows.”
Clete’s description made me shudder, not because of his detail but because he was seldom wrong when it came to a homicide investigation.
“That’s why Tillinger bothers me,” he said. “I found out he was in a drama club in high school. He was also an amateur photographer and dug David Koresh.”
“The cultist at Waco?” I said.
“Yeah. There’s one other factor. He messed around with acid in high school. In other words, he was into the same heavy-metal bands his daughter was. Later on he sees her as him, and burns down his house with her in it, and the mother for good measure.”
“You’re thinking too much,” I said.
“Travis Lebeau was in my office this afternoon. He says he saw Tillinger in Walmart.”
“Stop letting this guy jerk you around. And stop building a case against yourself.”
Clete rested his arm across my shoulders. It felt like a pressurized fire hose. “I worry about you. Guys like me can live alone. Guys like you shouldn’t. One day Alafair is going to leave for California or New York and not come back.”
“Say anything more and I’m going to hit you.”
“You got another problem,” he said. “You take the weight for others and won’t admit it. Just like me.”
“I mean it, Clete. Knock it off.”
“How’s your new partner working out?”
“Fine.”
“I saw her in front of city hall today,” he said.
I waited.
“She’s not your ordinary female plainclothes,” he said.
“And?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering how she’s working out.”
He made a study of Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, his loafers tapping up and down on the step.
• • •
AT 3:17 P.M. on Tuesday, Bailey Ribbons tapped lightly on my office door. She and Helen had spent most of the day at a seminar with an FBI agent in Lafayette.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said.
“Not at all.”
I got up and closed the door behind her.
“Desmond Cormier has called me twice,” she said. “The first time to invite me to dinner. The second time to apologize for the first time. There’s a message on my machine I haven’t listened to.”
She was standing less than two feet from me, her face lifted to mine, her hands on her purse.
“I’ll talk with him,” I said.
“He didn’t say anything rude.”
“He knows he’s compromising your situation.”
“You won’t be too hard on him, will you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You think his friend Butterworth is mixed up with Lucinda Arceneaux’s death?”
“There’s no evidence of that, except he denied seeing her body through the telescope. But he’s one of those guys.”
“Which guys?”
“There’s a malevolent joy in their eyes. They feed off Kryptonite. They love evil for its own sake.”
“That’s pretty strong.”
“If you underestimate a guy like that, you usually pay the price for the rest of your life.”
“Why would Desmond Cormier associate with him?”
“The same reason everyone else does. Money.”
She looked at her watch. “I’ve taken too much of your time.”
“I was going over to Victor’s for coffee and a piece of pie,” I said. “Doing anything right now?”
“I’d love that,” she said.
Three uniformed deputies passed us as we walked down the hallway to the stairs. I heard one of them say something under his breath to the others. One of the words began with the letter C.
“Wait for a minute,” I said to Bailey.
I caught up with the three deputies. One of them was short and muscular and had a face that reminded me of a hard-boiled egg with a smile painted on it. His name was Axel Devereaux. He had been charged with abuse of prisoners during the previous administration but had been found not guilty.
“You didn’t make a reference to my partner, did you, Axel?” I said.
“Not me,” he replied. The other deputies looked away.
“So who were you talking about?” I asked.
“Search me. My memory is awful.”
“Let’s don’t have this conversation again, okay?”
His teeth were the size of Chiclets when he grinned. “You’re full of shit, Robicheaux.”
“Probably,” I said. “Want to talk later? After hours?”
“Fuck off,” he said.
I rejoined Bailey at the top of t
he stairs, and the two of us walked down to the first floor and out the door into the sunshine. The wind was blowing in the live oaks by the grotto, the bamboo swaying, the air sprinkled with the smell of rain. We went to Victor’s and had coffee and pie. I believed people were staring at us. Under the circumstances and at my age, that’s a strange and degrading feeling.
“Are you uncomfortable about something, Dave?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Let’s take a ride.”
“Where?”
“I know where our Hollywood friends are shooting today.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“The movie people are involved in Lucinda Arceneaux’s death. I can’t prove it, but I know it.”
“How?”
“Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue.”
She held her eyes on mine, her mouth parting silently. I wanted to take out my vocal cords.
Chapter Six
THE HELICOPTER, A vintage Huey that had no external armament—what we called a “slick” in Vietnam—came in low over the water, yawing, smoke twisting from the airframe, the Plexiglas pocked from automatic-weapons fire, a bloody bandage taped over one eye of the kid on the joystick.
An actor dressed like a third-world peasant clung to one of the skids. The helicopter roared over our heads, flattening the sawgrass around the levee where we stood. The moment sent me back to the sights and sounds and collective madness of an Eden-like Asian country gone wrong, a place I had consigned to my dreams and hoped I’d never see again.
In the dreams I heard the metallic klatch on the night trail but not the explosion. Instead I was painted with light, my body auraed with cascading leaves and air vines and dirt that had a fecund odor, like that of a freshly dug grave. I watched my steel pot roll silently down the trail. To no avail, I opened and closed my mouth to force the deafness out of my ears. Inside the great green darkness of the trail, I could see the silhouettes of my patrol against the muzzle flashes of their weapons and also the weapons of the tiny men in pajamas who lived on one rice ball a day and wore sandals made from rubber tires and drank mosquito-infested water hand-cupped from a stream. The flashes resembled electricity leaping inside a cloud of dust and smoke that blotted out the stars.
The New Iberia Blues Page 5