The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  I kept my face empty.

  “You got it on with her?” Bailey asked him.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “You know how it is out here in the provinces,” I said. “Family values, total abstinence, prayer meetings, Friday-night lights and such. We try to set the bar.”

  “I realized that the first time I went to a cockfight in Breaux Bridge,” he said.

  “Is there anything in your room you want to tell us about before we find it?” I said. “Hallucinogens, uppers, China white?”

  He twisted his neck, his skin pulling tight on his face like a turtle’s. “You’re behind the times. What was the name of the deputy who was killed?”

  “Axel Devereaux,” I said.

  Butterworth nodded. “He was mixed up with the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  “How do you know that?” Bailey said.

  “Some of them tried to get jobs as extras with us,” he replied. “Devereaux sent them. He had prostitutes working for him. Five hundred dollars a night. He thought he was going to be a friend to the stars.”

  “What was your connection to Devereaux?” I asked.

  “I didn’t have one,” he replied. “I wouldn’t let him on the set. Desmond banned him, and Lou Wexler walked him to his car. We had to do your job.”

  “Get started,” I said to Sean.

  I put my hand under Butterworth’s arm and walked him into the bedroom. I pulled up a chair for him to sit in while Sean began opening drawers and placing the contents on the bed.

  “You have a phone number for Bella Delahoussaye?” I asked.

  “You don’t?” he said.

  “Say again?”

  “Cut the charade, Detective,” he said. “You took her home.”

  Bailey looked at me.

  “That’s right, I did,” I said.

  “I suspect she was giving you a guitar lesson,” he said.

  “Y’all had better take a look at this,” Sean said.

  I didn’t know whether Sean had deliberately interrupted Butterworth. Butterworth had gotten the knife in. My face was burning, my wrists throbbing. I saw the shine of disappointment in Bailey’s eyes.

  “What do you have?” she asked Sean.

  He dumped a hatbox onto the bedspread. A pair of sheep-lined leather wrist cuffs fell out, along with a purple hood, a flagellum strung with felt thongs, a black leather vest, and women’s undergarments. A hypodermic kit and several bags of dried plants or herbs followed.

  “These are yours?” I said to Butterworth.

  “I’ve used a couple of items in intimate situations. Actually, they’re stage props.” He studied a spot six inches in front of his eyes.

  “How about the spike?” I said.

  “My medicines are homeopathic in nature. There’s nothing unlawful in that box.”

  “I think your sense of reality is from the other side of Mars,” I said.

  “You wear your hypocrisy nicely,” he said.

  “Let me clear up something for you,” I said. “I took Miss Bella home in an electric storm. I took her to her front door, and then I drove to my house. I have the feeling she told you that, but you used the information to embarrass me and to cast doubt on the integrity of this investigation.”

  “I couldn’t care less about your peccadilloes,” he said. “The issue is otherwise. You’re trying to degrade me while pretending you’re not.”

  “Did you put LSD in the food of a housemaid so you could film and ridicule her?”

  Then he surprised me. “Yes, it was unconscionable. I’ve done many things I regret.” His gaze fixed on me, then he looked away, detached, as though he had gone somewhere else.

  Sean removed stacks of books from a shelf and placed them on the bed, then began searching the closet. The books included titles by Lee Child, Frederick Forsyth, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and a history of the Crusades. But the one that caught my eye was an ostrich-skin-bound scrapbook stuffed with photographs and postcards and handwritten and typed letters, yellowed with age and pasted to the pages.

  “I would prefer that you not look at that,” Butterworth said. “Nothing in it is related to your investigation.”

  I began turning the pages. Each was as stiff as cardboard. The backdrop was obviously Africa: wild animals grazing on grasslands backdropped by mountains capped with snow, army six-bys loaded with black soldiers carrying AK-47s and Herstal assault rifles, arid villages where every child had the same bloated stomach and hollow eyes and skeletal face. I could almost hear the buzzing of the flies.

  “Which countries were these taken in?” I asked.

  “Many of these places don’t even have names,” he replied.

  “The guys in those trucks look like friends of Gaddafi and Castro,” I said.

  “They’re friends of whoever pays them,” he said.

  The next page I turned was pasted over with an eight-by-ten color photograph that slipped in and out of focus, as though the eye wanted to reject it. The huts on either side of a dirt road were burning. A column of troops was walking into a red sun, some of the men looking at bodies strewn along the roadside. A withered and toothless old man wearing only short pants and sandals was sitting with one leg bent under him, his arms outstretched, begging for mercy. The bodies of a woman and a child lay like broken dolls next to him. A soldier stood behind him, a machete hanging from a thong on his wrist.

  I held the page open in front of Butterworth. “You had a hand in this?”

  “Did I participate in it? No. Was I there? I took the photograph.”

  “Did you try to stop it?”

  “My head would have been used for a soccer ball.”

  “Who was the commanding officer?”

  “An African thug who was a friend of Idi Amin.”

  “What was your role?”

  “Adviser.”

  I closed the book and dropped it on the bed. “Get up.”

  “What for?”

  “You need to be in a different place.”

  I walked him through the living room and out on the deck, my fingers biting into his arm. I unlocked his cuffs and hooked him around the rail, the sun beating down on his face, his eyes still dilated and now watering. He was clearly trying not to blink. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I don’t like you. How often do you shoot up?”

  “Sorry, I won’t discuss my private life with you.”

  “Did you shoot up Lucinda Arceneaux?”

  “Alafair told me your friend Purcel fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador.”

  “What about it?”

  “He never told you what went on down there? The atrocities committed by the cretins your government trained at the School of the Americas?”

  “I’m going to leave you out here for a few minutes, and then we’ll be taking you to the jail. In the meantime I think it would be to your advantage if you shut your mouth.”

  “You don’t know why you hate and fear me, do you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I symbolize the ruinous consequence of America’s decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved. You see me and realize how much you have lost.”

  I wanted to believe he was mad, a sybaritic, narcotic-fueled cynic determined to transfer his pathogens to the rest of us. With his hands cuffed to the deck rail, the wind flattening his clothes against his body, he looked like the twisted figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

  “Tell me I’m mistaken,” he said.

  I went back into the bedroom.

  “What was that about?” Bailey said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Did you find anything else?”

  She shook her head.

  “Bag up the scrapbook and the stuff in the hatbox,” I said to Sean. “I’ll put Butterworth in the cruiser.”

  “This bust bothers me,” Bailey said. “We might have some legal problems. Like a liability suit.”

  “Not if Lucinda
Arceneaux’s DNA is on that needle,” I said.

  “But you know it’s not, don’t you?” she said. “Why do you have it in for this guy?”

  I didn’t answer. I collected Butterworth from the deck and hooked him to a D-ring in the back of the cruiser. Bailey and I got in the front and drove up the long narrow two-lane toward New Iberia, the palm fronds on the roadside rattling dryly in the wind, the waves chopping against the boats in their slips. She glanced sideways at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said, and winked. “I think you’re a nice guy. That’s all.”

  That was when I knew that the folly of age is a contagion that spares no man, not unless he is fortunate enough to die young.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WE BOOKED BUTTERWORTH and transferred him to the parish prison. That evening Desmond turned in to my driveway in a new Cherokee. He seemed to wear his contradictions as you would a suit of clothes. I had a bell, but he tapped lightly on the door. I had a sidewalk, but he walked on the lawn, even though it was damp from the sprinkler. The lightness of his touch on the door was not in sync with the intensity in his face and the corded veins in his forearms.

  I looked at him through the screen. “If this is about Butterworth, I’ll talk to you at the department during office hours.”

  “Antoine is my friend,” he said. “So are you. I’d like to speak with you in that spirit.”

  I stepped out on the gallery. The light had pooled high in the sky, like an inverted golden bowl; the oaks in the yard were deep in shadow, the trunks surrounded by red and yellow four-o’clocks that bloomed only in the shade.

  Desmond’s wide-set pale blue eyes were unblinking and yet simultaneously veiled; they had the vacuity you see in the eyes of sociopaths.

  “Let Butterworth take his own fall,” I said.

  “He hasn’t done anything.”

  “Have you seen the photos in his scrapbook?”

  “Maybe he does a different kind of penance than the rest of us. Hollywood is a place of second chances. More important, it’s a place where there are no victims. Everyone there knows the rules and the odds. Why beat up on Antoine?”

  “On the phone you said we’d strip-mine the Garden of Eden if the price was right. You grew up in Eden?”

  “What are you saying, Dave?”

  “You lived on a piece of reservation hardpan that was given to the Indians only because the whites didn’t want it.”

  “Better put, they wouldn’t spit on it,” he said. “What’s your point?”

  “The casino made life a little better for some of your people. You think that was a bad idea? Why don’t you cut the rest of us some slack? Most of us do the best we can.”

  “I thought I could reason with you,” he said. “That was a mistake. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret.”

  “Say it anyway.”

  “I see the way you look at Bailey Ribbons. I don’t blame you. For me, she’s Clementine Carter. She takes us into the past, into our first love, into America before the railroad guys and the industrialists got their hands on it. When you’re with her, every day is spring, and death holds no dominion in your life.”

  How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets? “I talked with Bella Delahoussaye this afternoon.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s Butterworth’s alibi. He told the truth about lending her his Subaru. There’s a problem, though.”

  “What?”

  “She said he also drives a dark-colored SUV. An SUV fled the Devereaux murder scene.”

  “I already explained that,” Desmond said. “We have several in the car pool. For God’s sake, get away from this obsession with Hollywood. You’re all alike. You can’t stand success. You can’t stand art or reason or anything that isn’t like your putrid way of life. All of you are searching for a house with no mirrors.”

  “Good try,” I said.

  He looked at the sweep of leaves on the street, the electric lamps burning inside the oak boughs, the dreamlike shade that was stealing across the lawns of homes that Jefferson Davis’s widow once visited. “I apologize. This is my birthplace, too. You have more claim on it, though. I’ve done wrong by all of you. I wish I could change that. But I probably never will.”

  There was nothing grandiose or thespian or saccharine in his voice or expression. He walked to his car, his physicality barely restrained by his thin slacks and wash-faded shirt.

  I was convinced that, like Helen Soileau, many people lived inside Desmond’s skin, male and female, child and adult. He had never married, nor was he ever long in the company of one woman. For certain he was an egalitarian, an aesthete, an actor, and a painter. He had the flame of a mad artist, the voice of a singer, and the indifference to criticism that all great artists possess without being aware of it. I said earlier that he could light a room with his smile. It had been a long time since I had seen him do that. Were Clementine Carter and Bailey Ribbons his keys to resurrection, the rolling away of a rock that blocked out the sun and stole the air from his lungs?

  The next morning Antoine Butterworth bailed out of jail. There was no DNA of any kind on the hypodermic needle. His lawyer had our trumped-up charges dropped.

  • • •

  SIX WEEKS PASSED without significant incident, and we found ourselves in the softly murmuring heart of Indian summer and the drowsy days and cool nights that grant us a stay against winter and the failing of the light. I began to think that our investigation into the bizarre homicides of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari and Travis Lebeau and Axel Devereaux was overwrought and heavily influenced by speculation. I also wondered if Bailey and I had unknowingly superimposed symbols on each case in order to link them together. It happens. The best example is the murder of President Kennedy and the conspiratorial theories that are still with us. As the mind wearies, the temptation is to simplify and move on. The collective consciousness does not like detail and complexity. Besides, isn’t it better to let evil die inside its own flame?

  I wanted to slip away with the season and the smell of burning leaves and the vestiges of an innocent youth. In a moment of reverie, I would recall a college dance at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, the music provided by Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra, a fall crawfish boil under the oaks in the park next to the campus, the thrill of the kickoff at an LSU–Ole Miss football game, where every coed wore a corsage and ached to be kissed.

  I was not simply tired of the world’s iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man. The great gift of age is the realization that each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky. I made a habit of letting the world go on a daily basis, but unfortunately, it didn’t want to let go of me. The engines of commerce and acquisition operate seven days a week, around the clock, granting no mercy and allowing no tender moment for those who grind away their lives in sweaty service to them.

  I’m talking about the avarice at the heart of most human suffering. Yes, revenge is a player, and so are all the sexual manifestations that warp our vision, but none holds a candle to cupidity and the defenses we manufacture to protect it.

  Clete would not have used the same words, although he knew them and their meaning. But his thoughts were the same when he decided to drop by the blues club on the bayou and eat barbecued chicken and dirty rice and drink a frozen mug of beer like he had in his youth at Tracey’s Bar on Third and Magazine in the Irish Channel.

  Because it was Friday night, the bar and tables and the small dance floor were bursting at the gunwales. Bella Delahoussaye was singing “Got My Mojo Working” while a black man backed her up with a harmonica that moaned and whined like a train inside a church house. A bald man on the stool next to Clete leaned in to his face, yelling to be heard. His lips were sprinkled with spittle, his tie pulled loose, his stomach h
anging out of his suit coat. Clete wiped his own cheek with a paper napkin and tried to lean in the opposite direction.

  “Did you hear me?” the man shouted. “What do you think about the monuments thing?”

  “What monuments?”

  “They’re taking down the Confederate monuments in New Orleans. They just took down Robert E. Lee’s statue. What’s your opinion?”

  A piece of spittle hit Clete on the chin. “I think they’re idiots. They want to turn New Orleans into Omaha. They’re doing the same thing that the Taliban and ISIS do.”

  “Yes, but don’t you think it’s time to—”

  “Quit yelling in my face.”

  “You don’t have to get in a huff,” the man said, and swung his paunch off the stool.

  Clete tried to get back to his food but looked at it and thought about what had probably just happened to it and pushed it away and reordered.

  “It’s on the house, man,” the bartender said.

  “Thanks,” Clete said. He put a ten on the bar. “Give the fat guy whatever he’s having. Just don’t tell him where it’s from. Keep the change.”

  Bella went into “The House of the Rising Sun,” the song Eric Burdon and the Animals had turned into arguably the most haunting blues depiction of bordello life and spiritual despair ever sung. Though its message of utter hopelessness was like a dull nail driven into Clete’s heart, he had never known why. Sometimes he ascribed the feeling to the drowning of the city during Katrina, or the crack cocaine that had turned the city into the murder capital of America, or the T-shirt shops and the affectation of debauchery that impersonated the city’s earlier tradition of eccentricity and bohemian culture and Dixieland blowdowns.

  The song’s influence on him had nothing to do with any of these things, or even with New Orleans. The song was about exploitation and the anonymous fate that seemed the destiny of all those who are used for the convenience of others. The song had no author. The person narrating the tale could have been male or female but had no name. The rising sun did not dispel the night, serving only to illuminate the harshness of the morning, the broken glass in the gutters, a passed-out drunk in an alley.

  Clete looked up and down the bar and at the tables and at the dancers on the floor and wondered how many of them would leave the earth as ciphers, would even have a marker on a grave ten years after they were gone. His first night back in New Orleans from Vietnam, he got loaded in the Quarter and met a famous Beat writer who was feeding the pigeons on a bench in Jackson Square. The writer challenged him to name five slaves from the tens of millions who had lived and died in bondage.