Clete got as far as Spartacus and Frederick Douglass.
“What’s that say?” the writer asked.
“I don’t know much about history?” Clete said.
“No man, it means there’s no history. Just humps in the ground wanting somebody to tell their story. Think I’m blowing gas?”
Bella finished her song and walked down the length of the bar. She drew a fingernail along the back of Clete’s neck. “Where’s your friend?”
“Dave?” he said.
“Who else? I ain’t seen him around. Tell him he hurt my feelings.”
“He’s been busy with a few things. People getting killed, stuff like that.”
“Don’t mean he cain’t drop by.” She winked. “Tell him he got the moves and I got the groove.”
“Show some respect for yourself,” Clete said.
“Talk like I want, baby.”
Clete looked down the bar. “There’s somebody sitting down there who shouldn’t be in here.”
Bella lifted her chin and gazed at a black woman ten stools down. The black woman was wearing a white dress and a necklace with red stones that hung between her breasts. “Hilary Bienville? I ain’t my sister’s keeper.”
“She might listen to you,” he said.
“That girl is looking for a box. She gonna find it, too.”
“She’s still messing around with some white guy?”
“She been on her knees since she was a li’l girl. You cain’t fix them kind. Messed-up girl becomes a messed-up woman.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“I ain’t axed. I get off at two. Give me a ride? I could sure use one.”
She walked away from Clete, looking back over her shoulder. He ordered a shot of Jack and dropped it into his beer, jigger and all. He drank the mug to the bottom, the jigger clinking against the glass. He looked down the bar and saw a sight that made him squint and rub his eyes and look again.
The man’s hair was steel-gray, cut tight, top combed straight back with gel, as though he wanted to look younger. He had grown a full beard and lost weight, but the profile was the same Clete had seen in the mug shots he had gotten off the Internet. The man was talking to Hilary Bienville and wore navy blue trousers and the kind of plain short-sleeve khaki shirt that a filling station mechanic might wear.
It can’t be him, Clete thought. Not a guy who escaped death row and should be looking for a cave in Afghanistan.
Clete got off the stool just as the front door opened and two carloads of revelers poured in. By the time Clete had worked his way through them, the man was gone.
Hilary stared blankly at Clete. She had a Collins glass in her hand. Her eyes were out of focus. “What you want?”
“Was that Hugo Tillinger?” he asked.
“I don’t know no Hugo Tillinger.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“I come in to see my friends. What it look like?”
“The last time I saw you, you were in meltdown. Where’s your baby?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong wit’ me being here. My baby doing fine.”
“Where is she?”
“At Iberia General. She got the croup.”
“Go home, Hilary. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“It’s my life. It ain’t yours. I got the gris-gris. I’m hell-bound. Ain’t nothing can he’p me.”
“Where’d the guy go?”
“I don’t know. You look like a cop. I t’ink he saw you.”
“He knows who I am?”
“I don’t know about none of this.”
“You wait here.”
“You like all the rest. ‘Shut your mout’.’ ‘Cook my food.’ ‘Suck my dick.’ Where you going?”
Clete looked in the men’s room. A man at the urinal grinned at him. Clete went out the back door just as an SUV motored slowly out of the parking lot, the headlights on, the driver silhouetted behind the wheel. The driver turned onto the asphalt. Clete couldn’t see the tag.
He got into his Caddy and followed. The SUV stopped at the four corners and crossed the drawbridge and headed for the four-lane, never exceeding the speed limit. The windows were down. The radio was playing. Clete thought he recognized “Rock of Ages.”
• • •
HE FOLLOWED THE SUV in and out of traffic all the way to Lafayette. Twice he got close enough to confirm that the driver was the same man he’d seen talking to Hilary Bienville. The driver gave no indication that he knew he was being followed. Just outside Lafayette, the man pulled into a truck stop and got out of his vehicle and began to gas up. Clete parked behind the building with a view of the fuel island and cut the engine. He took his binoculars from the glove box and adjusted the focus on the driver’s face. He had no doubt he was looking at Hugo Tillinger.
He put his sap and cuffs in his coat pocket and pulled the .25 semi-auto from the Velcro holster strapped on his ankle.
Sorry, Mac, he thought, getting out of the Caddy. If you got to ride the needle, it’s your misfortune and none of my own.
A lopsided gas-guzzler oozing oil smoke pulled up to the pumps. The driver was a tiny gray-haired black woman who wore a colorless shift and men’s tennis shoes. A girl of eight or nine years was in the back seat. A Mississippi tag hung from the bumper by a single screw. The woman got out and stuck a credit card in the pump and struggled to pull the hose from the hook. Suddenly, the child burst from the back door and ran for the restrooms, just as a pickup truck swerved off the highway and headed for a parking slot in front of the casino.
Clete felt the wind go out of his chest. The scene freeze-framed in his head like a movie projector locking down. Within two or three seconds the girl would be impaled on the truck’s grille. The truck driver’s face was turned toward a woman in the passenger seat. The elderly black woman had dropped the hose on the concrete, spewing gasoline across her shoes. The little girl was skipping, one knee cocked, one barely touching the concrete, her mouth open, as though she were painted on air. Clete couldn’t bear to look.
Tillinger bolted from behind his vehicle and grabbed the girl under both arms and held her to his chest and leaped forward like a quarterback crashing over the line. He twisted his body so he landed on his side, taking the full hit on the concrete, never letting go of the girl.
He got to his feet and picked up the girl and handed her to the elderly woman. He smiled, brushing off her attempts to thank him, and headed for the driver of the truck. The driver turned off his lights, floored his vehicle, and roared into the darkness.
Tillinger went inside the convenience store and bought a package of Fritos and a quart of chocolate milk and ate and drank them at a small table. This was the guy Clete was going to send to the injection table?
Clete followed him to a motel rimmed with pink and green neon tubing north of Four Corners and watched him park in front of the last room in the row. Tillinger went inside and clicked on a lamp. Clete pulled his Caddy under a tree and waited five minutes. Then he got out with his .25 semi-auto and tapped lightly on the door.
“Who is it?” Tillinger said.
“Security. Someone may have tried to open your vehicle.”
Tillinger unhooked the chain and opened the door. He was barefoot and wearing boxer shorts and a clean white T-shirt. “I saw you in the club. What are you doing at my motel?”
Clete stepped inside and stiff-armed Tillinger in the chest, knocking him backward over a chair. He kicked the door shut behind him. “Don’t get up.”
“What the hell! Who are you?”
“A guy you caused a lot of grief.”
“Grief? I got no idea who you are.”
Clete picked up a pillow. “Look at the gun I’m holding. It’s a throw-down. No serial numbers, no history. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll pop you and in one minute be down the road and gone, and the cleaning lady will smell a strange odor in the morning and you’ll be bagged and tagged and in a meat locker. Diggez-vous, noble mon?”
“Noble wha
t?”
“You got loose from death row in Texas. I thought you had some smarts.”
“Tell me who are you, and maybe something you say will make sense.”
“I’m a guy who already cut you slack you didn’t deserve. I was fishing by the trestle over the Mermentau River when you bailed off the freight car. I should have dimed you, but I didn’t, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“You got the wrong room.”
Clete stuck the .25 semi-auto in the back of his belt and grabbed Tillinger by the T-shirt and swung him into the wall so hard the room shook. Tillinger fell to the floor. His expression looked like someone had crashed two cymbals on his ears.
“Next stop is the toilet bowl,” Clete said.
Tillinger pushed himself up on his arms. “Do your worst. Then put yourself on a diet. You got a serious weight as well as a thinking problem.”
“Why were you hitting on Hilary Bienville?”
“You a cop?”
“I used to be,” Clete said. “You been putting shit in Hilary’s head? It takes a special kind of white man to do that to a woman of color.”
“I was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux. Lucinda told me how some colored women were being used by some bad cops. You know who Travis Lebeau was, right?”
“He was in the Aryan Brotherhood,” Clete said. “He got dragged to death.”
“I’ve been trying to find out who killed Lucinda. It’s got something to do with prostitution.”
“Who shoved the baton down the throat of Axel Devereaux?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Can I get up?”
“An SUV like yours was seen hauling freight down the road right after Devereaux shuffled off.”
“I was there. But he was already dead. You got a beef because I messed up your fishing?”
“Where’d you get the wheels?”
“Boosted them.”
“Why’d you go to Devereaux’s house? You already creeped it once.”
“I was going to beat it out of him.”
“Beat what out of him?”
“The name of a movie guy Devereaux was scared of. That’s what a couple of stagehands said. Devereaux even got slapped around by this guy. The guy threw him off the set.”
“Because Devereaux was pimping?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I was going to find out. Miss Lucinda was tight with all those people. You ever see The Thin Blue Line? It saved an innocent man’s life. That could be my story.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes to get dressed and get out of here,” Clete said. “Then your ass is grass.”
Tillinger got to his feet cautiously, wobbling, pressing one hand against the wall. “You know what I was down for?”
“Killing your family.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My guess is you’re innocent. But you’re still an asshole,” Clete said. “You’ve used up one minute.”
Chapter Fifteen
CLETE WAS AT my back screen early on Saturday, freshly showered, his hair wet-combed, his clothes pressed. But his ebullience and his attempt to blend with the coolness of the morning and the dew-drenched fragrance of the flower beds were a poor disguise for the guilt he always wore like a child would, at least when he thought he had wronged me, which he had never intentionally done.
Alafair was still asleep. I fixed biscuits and coffee and waited for Clete to get to whatever was bothering him. It took a while. Clete had a way of talking about every subject in the world until he casually mentioned a minor incident such as smashing an earth grader through the home of a mafioso on Lake Pontchartrain, blowing a greaseball with a fire hose into a urinal at the casino, or pouring sand into the fuel tank of a plane loaded with more greaseballs, all of whom ended up petroglyphs on a mountainside in western Montana.
“You let Hugo Tillinger slide because he saved the little girl?” I said.
“He’s not a killer.”
We were seated at the breakfast table. The window was open, the wind sweet through the screen, Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon sitting on Tripod’s hutch.
“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked.
“This conversation didn’t happen. We bury it right here. Got it?”
“You’re not upset?”
“I probably would have done the same thing. The guy got a bad deal in Texas.”
“You don’t think he could have done the baton job on Devereaux?”
“These murders are about money, Clete.”
“You lost me, big mon.”
“The tarot and the floating cross have private meaning to the killer, but the motivation is much larger. It’s not sex, it’s not power or control. That leaves money.”
“I think you’re taking too much for granted,” Clete said.
“The killer injected Arceneaux with a fatal dose of heroin. The others went out hard. Why would he make distinctions in the way he killed his victims? It’s because he’s created a grand scheme. Think about it. A serial killer wants to paint the walls and enjoy every minute of it. He’s driven by compulsion. Unless his motivation is misogynistic, his targets are random. Our guy has a plan. Tillinger is a simpleton who wants to be a celebrity. He’s not our guy.”
Clete had a biscuit in his jaw. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from his cup, his eyes not leaving mine. “Why only in our area?”
“That’s the big one,” I said. “He’s sending us a message.”
“Lucky us,” Clete said.
• • •
MY SPECULATIONS PROBABLY seemed grandiose. In reality, I wasn’t talking about our local homicides. I believed then, and I believe now, that our poor suffering state is part of a historical ebb tide that few recognize as such. Southern Louisiana, as late as the Great Depression, retained many of the characteristics of the antediluvian world, untouched by the Industrial Age. Our coast was defined by its pristine wetlands. They were emerald green and dotted with hummocks and flooded tupelo gums and cypress trees and serpentine rivers and bayous that turned yellow after the spring rains and lakes that were both clear and black because of the fine silt at the bottom, all of it blanketed with snowy egrets and blue herons and seagulls and brown pelicans.
We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year.
Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.
That afternoon Alafair asked if Clete and I wanted to take a trip to northern Arizona. Clete said he’d pass. I said, “Why not?”
&nb
sp; • • •
I TOOK FOUR DAYS’ vacation time and flew with her and Lou Wexler and Desmond Cormier in a Learjet to a tourist town on the edge of Monument Valley. Wexler slept, and Desmond was on his laptop most of the time, and Alafair and I played Monopoly. On several occasions, even when she was little, she and I had spent time in Hollywood with movie people we had met in Louisiana. We were always treated graciously, and I relearned an old lesson about judging. People in Hollywood are often egocentric, but nonetheless they dream and many of them are wedded to a perception of the world that they never share with others lest they be thought odd or eccentric or dishonest. Perhaps there’s a bit of the secular mystic in them. Not unlike Desmond’s.
I didn’t know how to read Lou Wexler. Certainly he was a fine-looking man, with his bronze skin and rugged profile and sun-bleached hair and wide shoulders that tapered to a twenty-eight-inch waist. Immediately upon arrival at our faux-Navajo hotel, he put on swim trunks and walked on his hands to the tip of the diving board, then did a somersault into the water. Although I suspected he was close to forty, there was hardly a blemish on his skin except for a ragged white scar where his kidney would have been. When others ordered drinks before supper on the terrace, he went behind the bar and fixed his own power shake and drank it foaming from the stainless steel container. I suspected he would be a formidable man in a confrontation, the kind of fellow who had fire in his belly.
He sat next to me at the table. People I didn’t know joined us. Several had obviously gotten an early start. North of us lay the vastness of the desert, the sky a seamless blue in the fading light, the sandstone buttes rising like castles from the mountain floor. Wexler glanced at my iced tea. “Looks like we’re two of a kind.”
“In what way?” I replied.
The New Iberia Blues Page 14