The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  • • •

  THE MEN TOOK him back to the Laundromat and folded his laundry for him and put it into a basket. Marco set the basket in the back of Smiley’s car and got in the front, and Jerry Gee followed them down the highway to the business district of a small town that had been killed by Walmart. The sun had just set. The buildings and streets were deserted, the store signs removed, the walls pocked with rusted spikes. The entire neighborhood seemed leached of color, even the sky, like a cardboard movie set. A few cars were parked behind an old two-story building that once was a dry goods store. Smiley and the men ascended wood stairs in back and went inside. There was a rumbling sound below.

  “You rent a room above a bowling alley?” Marco said.

  Smiley sat on the bed and stared into space. “I pretend they’re toy soldiers. They all fall down and get up again.”

  “You’re a special kind of guy, all right,” Jerry Gee said. “Where’s the recorder?”

  “I’ll get it.” Smiley reached toward the nightstand.

  “Whoa,” Marco said. He pulled out the drawer and removed the recorder. He clicked it on and listened. “That’s Tillinger?”

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Smiley said.

  “Yeah, you did,” Marco said. “You want an aspirin or something?”

  “You hurt me inside. You’re not my friend. Don’t pretend.”

  “We’re sorry,” Marco said. “You shouldn’t have jerked us around. We’re just taking orders here.”

  Jerry Gee took the recorder from Marco and held it to his ear and listened while he gazed down at the street. He clicked it off. “I’m taking this back to Miami.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Not anymore it isn’t. Answer me something, will you?”

  “What?” Smiley said.

  “They say you use deer urine. Like when you’re on the job. That’s for real?”

  “It hides the human smell,” Smiley said.

  “The people you’re about to clip aren’t deer or elks,” Jerry Gee said.

  “There’s no difference. We’re all animals.”

  “You know this area pretty good?” Jerry Gee said.

  Smiley was still on the bed, the Wonder Woman comic by his thigh. He didn’t answer.

  “Where do we go for a good pump?” Jerry Gee said.

  “You mean to do something with bad women?” Smiley said.

  “In this case, bad is good.”

  “Back in Morgan City.”

  “Will you take whatever you’re sucking on out of your mouth? Where in Morgan City?”

  “I’m not sucking on anything.” Smiley gave him the name of a bar and the name of the motel next door.

  “I’m not gonna get a nail there?” Jerry Gee asked.

  “A what?” Smiley said.

  Jerry Gee rubbed his hand on top of Smiley’s head, then patted it for extra measure. “You’re a cute little guy. Keep using that deer urine. The right broad is waiting for you out there.”

  • • •

  AFTER THEY WERE gone, Smiley bathed in a claw-footed tub down the hall and dressed in clean underwear and an unpressed khaki shirt and green cargo pants and pink tennis shoes with Mickey Mouse’s face embossed on the rubber toes. He snugged a baseball cap on his head and walked painfully down the stairs and got into his car and drove to the storage shed he rented on the edge of town. Inside were his survival gear, a box of passports and driver’s licenses, a suitcase filled with clothes, his stamp and coin collection, boxes of comics that he read over and over and did not think of as collectibles, a scoped 1903 Springfield, a Taser, half a dozen pistols, a Browning automatic rifle, an M107 sniper rifle, an AK-47, the classic British commando knife, flash grenades, and a box that contained a weapon he had tested but never used on the job.

  He unlocked the box and reached inside and hooked the thick straps of the unit in his hands and dragged it free. His face and hands were tingling like chimes blowing in a tree or the music of an ice cream truck. In minutes he was on his way to Morgan City, the night sky clearing, the stars shining as brightly as they did on Wonder Woman’s short pants.

  He passed a boatyard and a series of docks and a ramshackle nightclub. Next door was a motel that advertised porn and hourly rates. Smiley drove back and forth in the parking lot of the club, then circled the motel, but he saw no sign of the two men or their midnight-blue Buick. He drove to the motel entrance and went inside. A man about thirty, with a mustache and sideburns as shiny as black grease and pipe-cleaner stems for arms, wearing a vinyl vest with no shirt, sat behind the counter, working a crossword puzzle.

  “Hi, hi. Can I have a room for thirty minutes?” Smiley said.

  “Thirty minutes?” the clerk said. He looked beyond Smiley out into the dark. “You with somebody?”

  “I have to poop.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “I have to go poop real bad.”

  “Go to the club next door.”

  “People wee-wee on the seat.”

  “You need to get out of here, man.”

  Smiley kept the back of his head to the surveillance camera on the wall. “You don’t have to get nasty.”

  The clerk set down his pencil. “Want me to walk you to your car?”

  “Have my friends Marco and Jerry Gee been here?”

  “We don’t give out the names of our guests. What does it take for you to get the message? Out!”

  “Maybe I’ll come back later. I like crossword puzzles.”

  “That’s it,” the clerk said, and got off his stool.

  “You are bad. You’ll see what happens to bad people,” Smiley said. The bell above the door tinkled as he went out.

  • • •

  HE PARKED BEHIND some Dumpsters, with a view of both the club and the motel. At 12:17 a.m. the Buick pulled into the parking lot, and Marco and Jerry Gee went inside the club, flipping away their cigarettes, Jerry Gee’s against the wall. At 1:48 they came out the front door with two women. One was thick-bodied and wearing a shiny black skirt. The other was a rail, dressed like a cowgirl, unsteady on her feet, her jeans hanging on her hips. The four of them got into the Buick and drove to the front of the motel. Marco went inside, then came back out and got behind the wheel and drove the four of them to the rear of the building. None of the nearby rooms were occupied. Jerry Gee and the woman in the black skirt went into one room, Marco and the cowgirl into the one next door.

  For the next twenty minutes Smiley sat motionlessly behind the wheel, his eyes half closed, his face as insentient as wax. He got out of the car and walked across the parking lot and squatted down by the back of the Buick and eased the tip of his stiletto into the air valve and watched the tire settle on the rim.

  At 3:18 a.m. Jerry Gee stepped out of his room, flexing his neck and shoulders, his coat on, the thick-bodied woman now wearing only panties and a bra behind him. She looked like she was cursing at him. Then she closed the door. A moment later Marco came out of the other room. The cowgirl looked at him briefly through the curtain, then closed it. While Smiley watched from his car, Marco and Jerry got into the Buick and started to back out. The steel rim of the flattened tire sliced through the rubber and crunched on the concrete.

  Smiley pulled a .22 semi-auto from under the seat and got out and circled around the far side of the motel. He entered the front door and came back out moments later, wiping something off his cheek with his shoulder. He circled back to the Dumpsters and unlocked his trunk and dropped the semi-auto on the mat and worked the straps of his newly acquired weapon over his arms and shoulders. The brace and propane tanks fitted comfortably against his back. The wand and igniter were simply designed and as weightless as aluminum; the hand-grip trigger was a pleasure to squeeze. He walked softly across the parking lot as Marco and Jerry Gee were spinning off the nuts on the tire.

  “Hi, hi,” Smiley said.

  Both of them were on their haunches. They looked at the object in Smiley’s hands and on his back, and th
eir faces drained.

  “Get in your car,” Smiley said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Marco said. He slipped sideways and had to right himself on the concrete.

  “You have made me very mad.”

  “Look, anything you want,” Jerry Gee said.

  “I want you in your car,” Smiley said, gritting his teeth.

  “We still got the broads inside,” Jerry Gee said. “We got liquor. You want a drink? We can talk this out.”

  Smiley lifted the tip of the wand.

  “Okay, you got it, man,” Jerry Gee said. “What we did earlier today was all business. We take orders just like you. It wasn’t personal. Okay, okay, okay. We’re getting in the car. We’ll drive somewhere. Right?”

  “Get in both on the same side, passenger door,” Smiley said.

  “Sure,” Marco said. “Remember what I told you? You’re a righteous dude. It was me said that.”

  “You told me to act like a man. I don’t look like a man?”

  “You’re a good guy,” Marco said. “I was telling Jerry that. I was telling the girls. Come on, you can meet them. They’re good girls.”

  “Get in the car and leave the doors open. Then start the engine.”

  “Sure,” Marco said. “Don’t point that thing. This isn’t happening here. You’re having some fun. I can understand that. Take it easy.”

  “I’ll count backward from three,” Smiley said.

  “Okay, we’re on it,” Marco said. “We all work for the same guys. We got to keep that in mind.”

  “Three,” Smiley said.

  “I hear you,” Marco said. He worked his way across the seat, followed by Jerry Gee. Both of them stared at Smiley, waiting for approval, unable to look directly at the wand of the flamethrower.

  “Roll down the windows,” Smiley said.

  “All four? What are we doing here?”

  Smiley didn’t reply.

  “Okay, we’re on it,” Jerry Gee said, fumbling at a window button. “You want your recorder back? It’s in the glove box.”

  The faces of the men looked like colorless prunes twisted out of shape. Their eyes were filled with a level of helplessness they probably had never experienced.

  “Close the doors. Don’t touch the gearshift,” Smiley said.

  The men eased the doors shut. Jerry Gee lifted his eyes to Smiley. “Please, man. I got a family. I ain’t a bad—”

  Smiley stepped backward into the darkness, ten feet, twenty feet, almost thirty feet. The wind was cool, out of the south, smelling of salt and rain. He tightened his finger inside the trigger guard. The stream of flame arced through the Buick’s window and turned the interior into a firestorm, curling over the roof, blowing the windshield onto the hood. When he released the trigger, the dashboard was bubbling, and Marco and Jerry Gee sat amid the receding flames like shriveled mannequins powdered with white ash.

  The thick-bodied woman opened the door of her room and stared in disbelief.

  “Run,” Smiley said.

  “Sir?”

  “It might explode. Get the other bad woman and run. You have been very bad. Don’t do these kinds of things anymore.”

  “I won’t.”

  “My friends call me Smiley. You can call me Smiley, too. What’s your name?”

  “Dora.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Dora. Tell the other lady what I said. You should not keep company with bad men or go to bad places.”

  “You’re not going to come back and hurt me, are you?”

  “I don’t hurt good people. I’m sure inside you are a very nice person.”

  She eased the door shut and gently set the bolt. Smiley walked to his vehicle, placed the flamethrower into the trunk, and drove away. The neon sign in front said VACANCY. The office light was on. No one seemed to be at the desk. The motel and its semi-tropical ambiance had become a still life—orderly, tranquil, each thing in its proper place, washed clean as though a mystical rain had fallen.

  In less than forty-five minutes, Smiley was back in his rented room, sound asleep, his comic on the pillow next to him, the cover tilted so Wonder Woman could watch over him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I GOT THE CALL from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at four-fifteen a.m. “We got two guys fried outside a hot-pillow joint,” he said. “I think it’s your boy, that crazy pissant who was killing people about eighteen months back.”

  “Wimple?”

  “A security camera in the parking lot of a nightclub caught him. About five-three, propane tanks on his back, looks like he fell in a bag of flour? How many people match that description?”

  “He had a flamethrower?”

  “Come down if you want. I got to get on it. We cain’t find the night clerk.”

  I called Bailey Ribbons and picked her up fifteen minutes later.

  • • •

  MORE THAN A dozen squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were parked at the crime scene, flashers ripping or blinking in the sunrise. The ground and asphalt and motel and nightclub were damp with humidity and partially in shadow, the air the color of a bruise, an odor like old fruit wafting on the breeze. The two victims were in the front seat of a Buick pockmarked with paint blisters, heads on their chests as though they had tired of the show and gone to sleep.

  “The drip line from the flamethrower doesn’t go back much more than twenty-five feet,” the sheriff said. He was a huge man, about six and a half feet, over fifty, his stomach still flat. He was originally from Amarillo and once was a Texas Ranger. “If the gas tank had blown, it might have taken that little asswipe with it.”

  “I think Smiley Wimple would have liked that,” I said.

  “Say again?”

  “He would have made a great pilot in the Japanese air force,” I replied.

  The sheriff looked into space. He was from another generation. “We found the clerk.”

  We followed him to the office. There was a doorway behind the counter. I looked up at the surveillance camera.

  “Somebody already dumped it,” the sheriff said. He went through the doorway, then looked back at me. “You coming?”

  The living area had a small kitchen and a table and one chair and a small bed. A harsh lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Porn magazines were on the table and stacked on a wall shelf. Both doors of a cabinet under the sink were open. A bare-chested thin man wearing a vinyl vest was inside the cabinet, so packed under the pipes that he was almost a ball. As far as I could tell, there were three entry wounds in his face and one in the throat and one in the mouth. No visible exit wounds.

  “The shooter picked up his brass, but I figure it was a twenty-two, maybe hollow points,” the sheriff said. “You reckon this kid was trying to hide?”

  Bailey touched a can of Ajax on the floor with her shoe. “No, he was put in there. Wimple wanted to humiliate him. He was probably locked in a small space when he was a child, so he visits the same fear on anyone who mocks him.”

  “I’ve got a hooker in the back of my cruiser,” the sheriff said. “Her name is Dora Thibodaux. The Buick was parked right in front of her room. The room was rented by a guy named Jerry Gemoats, the same man the Buick is registered to.”

  “Can we talk to the woman?” I said.

  He handed me a key. “I put her on a D-ring. I don’t think you’ll get anything. Her teeth are rattling.”

  Bailey and I walked to the sheriff’s cruiser. The windows were down. Dora Thibodaux was handcuffed by one wrist to a steel ring on the floor of the back seat, her shoulder at an awkward angle. Her eyeliner had run and her hair was a tangle of snakes. Two Band-Aids were affixed end to end along a vein inside her left forearm. Her face was out of round from either hangover or withdrawal.

  I gave Bailey the handcuff key. She got in the other side and unlocked the woman’s wrist. “I’m Detective Ribbons, Ms. Thibodaux. This is Detective Robicheaux. We’re homicide detectives in Iberia Parish. We’re investigating the deaths of the two men in the Buick, n
othing else. Understand?”

  “I didn’t see nothing,” Thibodaux replied.

  I leaned down to the window. “We’re not asking you to describe what you didn’t see, Miss Dora. We already know who killed the two men. His name is Chester Wimple. Sometimes he calls himself Smiley.” I saw the recognition in her eyes. “He told you his nickname?”

  “I ain’t saying nothing, me.”

  “Smiley doesn’t give everyone permission to use his nickname,” I said. “It’s a compliment.”

  She raised her face, her eyes on mine.

  “You think Smiley might hurt you?” I said.

  “No.”

  “A guy who hosed down two people with a flamethrower wouldn’t do that?”

  “I know somet’ing about men. He said I was a nice person.”

  “Your friend in the next room, she took off on you?”

  “She ain’t no good. Ain’t no loss.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “Seymour knows me.”

  “Who’s Seymour?”

  “The night clerk. He would have given y’all my name and I’d be in worse trouble than I am. Where’s he at?”

  “We’re interested in the two guys in the Buick,” I said. “Did they tell you their names?”

  She shook her head.

  “They used their first names to each other,” I said. “Don’t lie to us, Miss Dora.”

  “They’re dagos out of Miami. You know what that means.”

  “You’re not afraid of Smiley, but you’re afraid of the two dead guys?” I said.

  “Their kind ain’t ever dead.”

  “Others like them are coming?”

  “Sure, what you t’ink? They work for the Mob. They said they was gonna pop a guy. They said they was gonna do it for the state of Texas. I tole them they was full of it.”

  “Because you didn’t want to believe they would do that?” I said.

  “I ain’t t’ought it t’rew.”

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No,” she replied. “I’m starting to get sick.”