The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Hilary had been savagely beaten, her blood slung all over the walls and furniture. The blows were of such force that her face was hardly recognizable, and I don’t mean in terms of personal identification. Her skull and facial construction no longer looked human. I went back outside. Bailey Ribbons was knocking on doors. Sean McClain had been the first at the scene. He was staring at the drawbridge and the immaculate white antebellum home couched among the live oaks on the far side of the bayou. His mouth was small and gray, his skin pale. There was blood on his trousers and the rims of his shoes. He saw me look at it.

  “It looked like somebody kicked over a bucket of paint,” he said. “I found her baby and took it to the grandmother’s.”

  “You got the 911?” I said.

  “The neighbor said he heard somebody busting up the trailer about five a.m. He thought it was a john. The baby kept crying, so he called it in at six-fifteen.”

  “He didn’t see a vehicle leave?”

  “He says he heard one but didn’t see it.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Let’s have a talk with him.”

  The 911 caller wore flip-flops and shapeless pants and a strap undershirt with holes in it. His jowls were spiked with whiskers, his race undeterminable, his eyes pools of suspicion. “I done tole you already. I didn’t see nothing and I don’t know nothing. She was always having johns in her place. I don’t get mixed up in dat.”

  “You weren’t curious enough to glance out the window?”

  “For what? You t’ink I don’t know what kind of dump this is?”

  Hard argument to contest.

  Sean and I went back inside Hilary Bienville’s trailer. Two plainclothes detectives from Jeanerette were there. The forensic team was already at work. Bailey followed us inside. The broken glass and kitchenware, the splintered furniture, and the dents in the walls were the marks of a killer whose rage was so great it was always on the edge of bursting through his skin; he was the kind of man who had a jitter in his eyes. The paramedics were waiting for Helen to tell them to remove the remains. I looked down at what used to be Hilary Bienville’s face. Her killer had stuck a sequined star on her forehead, like you’d mount atop a Christmas tree.

  “The Suit of Pentacles,” Bailey said.

  “What was that?” Helen said.

  “It’s our guy,” Bailey said. “Pentacles, or diamonds, represents prosperity and personal esteem. Or making things grow or increase in value.”

  “A hooker making things grow in value?” Helen said. She looked at me for reinforcement. I shook my head neutrally.

  “Our guy is enraged because she didn’t meet the standard,” Bailey said. “At least that’s my guess.”

  It was hot and quiet in the trailer, as though we were all caught inside a photograph none of us wanted to be in. In moments like these, you know Treblinka and Nanking and Hiroshima are not abstractions.

  “How about it, Sheriff?” one of the paramedics said.

  “Take her out,” Helen said.

  I went back outside. Most of the children who lived in the trailer park had left on the school bus. No adults came out of their trailers. A few looked through the windows. Cormac Watts, the coroner, was standing by his car, his foot on the bumper. He watched me walk toward him, his face empty.

  “Glad to see you back,” he said.

  “This is going to be a funny question.”

  “You want to know if she was unconscious when the perpetrator tore her up?” he said.

  I waited.

  “Massive internal bleeding,” he said. “I think he probably stomped and kicked her after she went down.”

  “How do you figure this guy?”

  “I can’t.”

  “We’ve got another player involved,” I said. “I think you should know.”

  “Who?”

  “Smiley. I saw him. I talked with him.”

  His eyes hazed over. “I’ll have something on your desk by tonight. Have a good one, Dave.”

  He got into his car and drove away.

  • • •

  SMILEY HAD BEEN raised in an orphanage in Mexico City. By all accounts, including his, he had been severely abused, both in the orphanage and on the streets of the city, where he was passed from hand to hand in alleys that specialized in child prostitution. Probably in his late teens, he found his way to southern Florida and discovered that he possessed an enormous talent—namely, an ability to float like a piece of ectoplasm among the criminal culture and be disregarded or dismissed up to the moment someone got it in the ear with a .22 auto or an ice pick in the brain.

  His activities seemed to be a labor of love. His hits were contracted and paid for at drop boxes, his weapons provided by UPS. He bought children ice cream wherever he went, and on one occasion he hijacked a truckload of it and passed it out to black children in a park down by Bayou Lafourche while a bound and gagged man he planned to dispose of later struggled impotently inside the refrigerator.

  He also tried to kill a local politician whose antecedents were Huey Long and George Wallace. Secretly, I always thought Smiley had his moments.

  But Smiley was also responsible for the death of a female detective who paid her dues in Afghanistan. For a short time she was the lover of Clete Purcel. I really didn’t want to tell him about Smiley’s visit. Nor did I wish to contemplate the results if Clete got his hands on him. But at five that afternoon I drove to Clete’s motor court on East Main. He was sitting in a deck chair down by the bayou, a quart of stoppered beer in a bucket by his side. He was reading a novel by Michael Connelly.

  “How you doing, Cletus?” I said.

  He looked at me over his reading glasses. “Whenever I hear that tone of voice, I know I’d rather be somewhere else.”

  “I’m back on the job. I also had a visit from Smiley.”

  “Tell me you’ve been drinking.”

  “He’s back and ready to rock.”

  “Why is he back?”

  “He says he wants to be our friend.”

  Clete stood up slowly and set his book on the chair. He removed his glasses and put them away. The warmth of the sunlight on the side of his face contradicted the coldness in his eyes. He stared at the cattails bending in the breeze, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin. “Where do you think I might find him?”

  “No idea.”

  He put a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. The worst part of my visit had not begun. Obviously, he had been out of town during the day or he had not listened to the news or seen a local newspaper.

  “Hilary Bienville is dead, Clete.”

  He turned around and removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Say again?”

  “Early this morning. She was beaten to death in her trailer. Her killer pressed a Christmas-tree star on her forehead.”

  His face seemed poached, the color fading, his teeth showing behind his lips. His eyes were green marbles. “Same guy who did Lucinda Arceneaux?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “What about her kid?”

  “The kid is all right. Sean McClain took her to the grandmother’s place.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “None we could find.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “As bad as it gets.”

  He folded his deck chair and picked up his book and cradled his ice bucket with one arm. “I want to see the crime scene.”

  “You know the rules.”

  “Forget I asked,” he said. “I’ll handle it by myself.”

  • • •

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at the trailer park, the sun was low on the horizon, orange and dust-veiled. There were no children at play. I took down the crime scene tape on the small gallery and opened the door to Hilary Bienville’s trailer with a key Helen had given me. Clete and I stepped inside, both of us with latex on. Clete shone his flashlight on the broken glass, the smears and splatter on the walls, the broken tab
le and chairs. “Who was the responder?”

  “Sean McClain.”

  “Wasn’t he the responder on the Devereaux homicide?”

  “More or less.”

  “No tie there?”

  “No.”

  “The door was key-locked?” he asked.

  “Right.”

  “So it wasn’t a barroom john? It was somebody she trusted?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “The baby must have been crying when he left, but he locked up the place anyway?”

  “What are you thinking?” I said.

  “The guy didn’t want Hilary found right away, but he didn’t care if the baby sweltered to death or choked on her vomit.”

  “The guy who killed Hilary doesn’t care about anything or anyone,” I said.

  Clete clicked off his flashlight. “I’ve seen enough.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “He had some kind of working relationship with her. But something set him off. She was in pajamas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he wanted to get it on and she told him to fuck off. Violence like this is almost always sexual. There was no sign of rape or biting or any of that crap?”

  “Not according to the coroner.”

  Clete stared at the sun and the Greek revival home in the trees across the bayou. “Why does this place make me think of a killing ground on the Cambodian border?”

  “Because this was a slave cemetery,” I said. “They’re under your feet.”

  “Christ,” he said, his face twitching.

  • • •

  LATER THAT EVENING I sat down in the living room with Alafair. The windows were open, the streetlights on. I could see leaves smoldering like red coals in a rain gutter, and smell impending rain and the heavy odor of the bayou. I did not want to think any more about Hilary Bienville or the evil that humans do. I once had a friend who worked with the criminally insane in Norwalk, California. He was a Quaker and a humanist and seemed to be unscathed by his experience with patients who had committed crimes that were unthinkable. I asked him what his secret was.

  “I conceded,” he answered.

  “Conceded what?” I said.

  “There are people who are at peace with malevolence. It’s in their eyes. It keeps them warm. That’s the way they come out of the womb.”

  There was a reading lamp above Alafair’s head. She kept looking at me in a peculiar way. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m a little tired. I brought a dessert home.”

  I went into the kitchen and cut a wet slice of chocolate cake for each of us, then put them on plates and brought them back into the living room. She had been on location in Morgan City all day and had not heard about Hilary Bienville. So I told her, then I told her about Smiley. The room was quiet.

  “You don’t believe me about Smiley?” I said.

  “I’m not sure, you see things other people don’t. You haven’t said anything about the Bienville crime scene.”

  “It’s better not to talk about it.”

  “Who’s doing this, Dave?”

  “I have no idea. There’s no single thread that runs through all the cases. We don’t know if we’re dealing with one killer or more than one.”

  But her mind seemed somewhere else. “There’s something wrong with Desmond.”

  “Like what?”

  “Today somebody said something about the Lucinda Arceneaux homicide, like working the floating cross with the body on it into the movie. Desmond snapped the guy’s head off.”

  “Maybe he was just out of sorts,” I said.

  “There’s something else bothering me. Des got wet today and was changing his socks. There’s a Maltese cross tattooed on his ankle. Didn’t you say Bienville tied a charm shaped like a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle?”

  “I did.”

  “Just coincidence?” she said.

  “That’s a word liars use often,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty

  EARLY THE NEXT morning I drove to the location outside Morgan City that Desmond had turned into a replica of an early 1950s prison farm. Mounted gunbulls in gray uniforms and shades, their skin as dark as saddle leather, were silhouetted against the sunrise atop the levee, while down below, men in prison stripes and straw hats that had been painted red were pulling stumps with mules and chains.

  Part of the set included a two-story barracks with barred windows, constructed in the distance, and two upended cast-iron sweatboxes set in concrete. Alafair had left the house before I had and was sitting behind a camera with a clipboard on her knee. Desmond had interrupted a scene and was telling an actor to start over again. The actor was young and handsome and did not look like a convict who would have been on the Red Hat gang at Angola Farm many decades ago.

  “You’re putting me to sleep, Zeb,” Desmond said. “This is a hara-kiri moment. When you get in the hack’s face, you know you’re headed for the sweatbox. We’re talking about hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, a shit bucket between your ankles, a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, your butt and knees frying against hot metal. But you hate the captain so much you’ll accept all that pain in order to keep your self-respect. So far you’re not showing either me or the audience the brave man you’re supposed to be.”

  “I’ll try to do better,” the actor said.

  “ ‘Try’ is the wrong word,” Des said, his pale blue eyes widening.

  “Yes, sir,” the actor said.

  Desmond stepped behind the camera. “Start,” he said.

  The captain sat astride a horse that must have been seventeen hands. He wore a long-sleeve crimson shirt and a Stetson and shades. Unlike the other personnel, he was not armed. A quirt was stuck in his boot. Farther down the levee, three women were picking buttercups and placing them in a straw basket. The captain’s shadow fell across the young actor named Zeb.

  “Was you eyeballing them ladies?” the captain asked.

  “No, sir,” Zeb said.

  “I think you was. One of them is the warden’s wife, son.”

  “I ain’t eyeballed no free people, boss,” Zeb said.

  “Calling me a liar?”

  Zeb shook his head.

  “I didn’t hear you,” the captain said.

  “No, sir, I ain’t said that.”

  “Captain LeBlanc says you was talking during bell count.”

  “Wasn’t me, Cap.”

  “You’ve seen me make a Christian out of a nigger. I can do it to you, too.”

  “Wasn’t eyeballing. Wasn’t talking at morning count. Wasn’t doing nothing but my fucking time, boss man.”

  “Cut,” Desmond said.

  Zeb waited expectantly.

  “I could get more vitality out of an electrified corpse,” Desmond said. He walked to the captain’s horse. “Give me your quirt.”

  The actor playing the captain slipped the quirt from his boot and handed it to Desmond. The handle was knurled; a leather tassel hung from the tip. Desmond stuck the quirt in Zeb’s hand. “Hit me.”

  “Pardon?” Zeb replied, half smiling.

  “Hit me! In the face! Hard!”

  “I cain’t do that.”

  Desmond clenched Zeb’s fingers into the handle of the quirt. “You think this is funny?”

  “No, sir.”

  Desmond released Zeb’s hand and popped him in the face. “Now hit me with the quirt.”

  “No.”

  Desmond popped him again. The crew and the other actors stared at the ground. “Either hit me or say your lines like you’re supposed to,” he said. “You’ve got booze on your breath, Zeb. Don’t show up wired again.”

  There were tears in the actor’s eyes. Alafair laid her clipboard on her chair and walked past me, away from the set.

  They recommenced the scene. It was powerful and real and visceral and painful to watch. Zeb virtually spat in the captain’s face, then the other gunbulls beat him senseless and carried him on his
knees to the sweatbox and flung him inside and slammed the iron door as though they had just hung a hog in a smokehouse.

  Desmond yelled, “Cut,” and everyone applauded. My stomach felt sick. I walked up behind Des and tapped him on the shoulder. He was grinning when he turned around.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “I’m a little busy right now,” he replied.

  “Yeah, I saw you in action.”

  “You think I’m too rough?”

  “That was chickenshit.”

  “I don’t see Zeb complaining.”

  I looked away, as you do when you can’t hide your disgust for someone’s behavior. “I’d appreciate your walking over here with me.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

  We went into the shade of a tarp stretched on four poles. The canvas was popping in the wind, the fall weather both cool and warm at the same time. The cast and crew were drinking coffee and eating beignets at the commissary window.

  “We’ve got another homicide on our hands,” I said.

  “I heard.”

  “Her name was Hilary Bienville. She hung out in the same blues joint Butterworth does.”

  “So talk to him.”

  “Waste of time. He’s a pathological liar and a wiseass on top. I understand you have a Maltese cross on your ankle.”

  “Would you like to see it?”

  “I wondered if you were in the Knights Templar. Or the Nazi Party.”

  “Maybe I rode with a biker group.”

  “The Hells Angels?”

  “I said maybe. Get off my back, Dave.”

  “You’re lying, Des.”

  “I don’t let people talk to me like that.”

  “How about the way you just talked to that kid?”

  “Titty babies don’t make it in the movie industry.”

  “And bullies thrive?”

  “Fuck you, Dave.”

  “Next time you say that to me, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

  I walked to my truck. I saw Alafair watching me by the commissary trailer. She mouthed the Clete Purcel mantra Take names and stomp ass, big mon.

  • • •

  LATE SATURDAY NIGHT Smiley turned his rental car in to a lonely motel on a two-lane asphalt road that dead-ended in a bog far south of Lake Charles. The moon was up, the Gulf the color of pewter, the waves sliding through sand dunes and salt grass and a shrimp dock that had been wrecked by Hurricane Rita. The motel sign was off, the office dark; a panel truck was parked midway down the line of rooms. Smiley cut his headlights and engine and got out of his car with a black physician’s bag and stepped up on the concrete walkway, his skin marbled with the orange and yellow neon that circumscribed the motel. The window and the red metal door of his target were pasted with insects. He slipped a screwdriver into the doorjamb and wedged the lock loose, then eased back the door and stepped inside.