“You saw Smiley’s face, Miss Dora,” I said.
“If he was gonna hurt me, he would have already done it.”
“He’s not a predictable man.”
“You lying, you. You know it, too.” She rubbed at her nose with the back of her wrist.
“Stay with Detective Ribbons,” I said.
I walked to the sheriff, then returned to the cruiser. The sun was above the trees now. I could see a dredge boat chugging down a canal surrounded by a sea of grass that had turned brown from saline intrusion. I leaned down to Dora’s window. “How much money do you have?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t make the john pay up front?”
“Not wit’ them kind.”
I put a five-dollar bill into her shirt pocket. “You’re free to go. Get something to eat.”
“Ain’t I lucky?” she said, squeezing past me. Her body smelled of nicotine and rut and booze. She looked back at me, then took the bill from her pocket and scrunched it in her palm and threw it in the wind.
• • •
AT NOON, I went to Clete Purcel’s office on Main Street. The waiting room was empty, littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and orange rinds and a splayed sandwich with a half-moon bite taken out of it. Clete was sitting at the spool table under the beach umbrella on the concrete pad behind the office, reading the Advocate and drinking a bottle of Mexican beer and sucking on a salted lime. His green eyes were dulled over, as if smoke from a dirty fire were trapped inside them.
“Leaving the dock early?” I said.
“I thought about it.”
“Something happen?”
He flattened the wrinkles on the front page of the newspaper with his hand. “That little creep is killing people again.”
“The two guys who got it were probably hit men.”
“Hit men are sane. This shit-for-brains starts gunfights in crowded casinos.”
That was how Clete’s former girlfriend had died, although the round had not come from Smiley’s weapon.
“He could have taken out a witness,” I said. “He didn’t. She’s a hooker named Dora Thibodaux. Know her?”
“Works out of a dump south of Morgan City?”
“She laid one of the hit men. His name was Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete scraped up the newspaper and stuffed it into a trash can under the table. “Who cares?”
“The hooker seemed to think well of Wimple.”
“I bet he loved his mother, too. What was the name of the hit man again?”
“Jerry Gemoats.”
Clete straightened his back. “He was the go-to mechanic for any hits out of Miami. Somebody with serious money sent him here. Who was the other hitter?”
“We don’t know. The car they died in was registered to Gemoats.”
Clete went into his office and came back with a file folder. He dropped it onto the glass table and opened it. He tilted the beer to his mouth and chugged half the bottle, the foam sliding down the inside of the neck. I swallowed and tried to hide the knot in my throat, the sense of longing I could not get rid of. “You got a soda?”
“In the icebox.”
I went inside and came back out with a can of orange-tasting carbonated water I could barely drink. The sun was like an acetylene torch on the bayou. “What’s in the folder?”
“I checked with some shylocks in Vegas and Tampa. Except they don’t call themselves shylocks anymore. They’re ‘lending institutions.’ I’m not making this up. This fat fuck in Tampa probably has ten million on the street and went to the fifth grade. The vig is four points a week.”
“Can you get to the point?”
He gave me a look. “Everybody I talked to said Desmond Cormier is up to his eyes in debt. Kind of like Francis Ford Coppola when he made Apocalypse Now, except he didn’t borrow from people who do collections with chain saws. Maybe Wimple and Gemoats and the other gash hound were here to protect Cormier. The Mob can bleed Cormier for the rest of his life; plus, they love being around actors.”
“Wimple was supposed to take out Tillinger and didn’t, so somebody sicced the two hitters on him?”
“That’d be my bet,” Clete said.
But I was not thinking about Miami button men or Smiley Wimple or the daily immersion into a sewer that constituted my livelihood. Clete followed my gaze to the sweating green bottle of Mexican beer on the table.
“Can I make an observation?” he said.
“No.”
“You’re falling in love with a young woman, and you think it’s wrong. Stop pretending you’re a monk. It’s going to get you drunk again.”
“Butt out, Cletus.”
“I know your thoughts before you have them. You think you have to marry every woman you sleep with. Except this time she’s too young. So instead of being human, you’re going to do a number on your own head and get back on the dirty boogie. In the meantime, you don’t let the young woman have a vote. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Who died and made you God?” He drained the bottle, his throat working, and dropped it loudly into the trash can. “You’re peeling my face off.”
“I wonder why.”
“Search me. I think you’re too sensitive.”
• • •
I LEFT THE OFFICE early that afternoon and drove to Bella Delahoussaye’s house. Through the houses I could see Bayou Teche and the elephant ears that undulated in the current at high tide. I was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a music box with chocolates inside. Bella was wearing tight jeans and a pullover when she answered the door. She tilted her head. “Look at Santa Claus.”
I stepped inside and handed her the roses and set the music box on the couch. “ ‘Jolie Blon’ is on it.”
“You come to court me, baby?”
“You’re an extraordinary woman.”
“Come here.”
I stepped closer to her. She worked her sandals off by pushing one foot against the other. She stood on top of my shoes and put her arms around me and pressed the entirety of her body against mine, her face buried in my neck, her hair soft and freshly washed and air-blown and swelling against my cheek. I squeezed her in a way I had not squeezed a woman since the death of my wife.
She stepped back and touched my face. “But you ain’t here to win my heart away, are you?”
“I’d like to. But you’re right.”
“You got a comb?”
I removed it from my back pocket and handed it to her. As a beautician might, she stroked my hair back over my head, along the sides, and through the white patch I’d carried since childhood. “I knowed when I first met you, you had the blues. You ain’t got to explain anything. Sometime down the track, you need a place to park your hips, you know where I’m at.”
“That’s a line from Bessie Smith.”
“You was born for the blues, Dave. Take care of yourself out there.”
The Maltese cross glinted at her throat. She picked up my hand and kissed the back of it and pressed it on her breast, then released it and flattened her hand on my heart. Her eyes seemed to reach inside my mind. If I ever saw death in a woman’s eyes, it was at that moment. But I did not know if I was looking at my reflection or hers or that of someone else I knew. She opened the door and remained standing in it as I walked to my truck. It was Indian summer, the evening sky porcelain blue, the sunlight like a cool burn. When I looked back at her cottage, the door was shut, the curtains closed. Bella Delahoussaye was the personification of Old Louisiana. I felt as though an icicle had pierced my heart.
• • •
I DROVE TO BAILEY Ribbons’s home on Loreauville Road and parked in front and walked up on the gallery and tapped on the screen door. When she came to the door, she was wearing a bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve got two tickets to Marcia Ball’s performance at the Evangeline Theater tonight.”
“Do I have time to dress?”
“It doesn’
t start until eight.”
“Come in.”
She left me in the living room and went into the back of the house. I didn’t take a seat. I stared at nothing, the blood beating in my wrists. I could hear her opening and closing drawers. She came back in the hallway, still in her robe, her hair wet on her shoulders. “What’s the real reason you’re here, Dave?”
“I’ve never been good at self-inventory.”
“Let me give you mine. I went into law enforcement because I got fired from my teaching job.”
“For what?”
“I changed a black girl’s grade.”
“Why did you change her grade?”
“So she wouldn’t be expelled.”
“That sounds terrible,” I said.
She stared at me, her eyes round and unblinking, a flush on her throat. “Are we going to the concert?”
“Anyone who turns down tickets to a Marcia Ball performance has a serious spiritual disorder.”
“I’ll be just a minute,” she said.
• • •
THE CONCERT WAS wonderful. The buffet, the formal dress, the smell of the mixed drinks, the gaiety of small-town people who are overjoyed when a famous artist visits them, the location of the concert in the old Evangeline Theater, where I saw My Darling Clementine with my mother in 1946, seemed proof that the past is always with us, in the best way, if one will only reach out and dip his hand into it.
Afterward, I drove Bailey home in my truck. She seemed to sit closer to me than she usually did, but I couldn’t be sure. The light was burning on the gallery, the shadows of the camellias and hibiscus waving on the grass. I parked on the edge of the light and cut the engine. The magnolia tree on the far end of the gallery was in late bloom, the fragrance overwhelming. Bailey sat very still, looking straight ahead. I could hear the engine’s heat ticking under the hood.
“Dave?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you have regrets? Or rather, do you take them on easily?”
“There are several people I regret not killing.”
“You have a sensitive conscience and a tender heart. Those are not always virtues.”
“I’ll try to be as mean-spirited as I can.”
I saw a grin at the side of her mouth. “I’m weak.”
“About what?”
“Need. You’re a widower. You’re vulnerable.”
“Wrong.”
She turned toward me. The tips of her dark brown hair were aglow in the moonlight. Her mouth looked like a flower about to open.
“Oh, Dave,” she said.
“Oh, Dave what?”
“Just oh, Dave.”
I got out of the truck and walked around the front of it. I opened her door. When she stepped out, I pulled her against me and kissed her shoulder and neck and hair and eyes. Then we walked up the steps inside, closing the door behind us, going straight down the hallway into the bedroom, leaving the light off. It felt strange being in an intimate situation with a woman other than my wife. I turned my back while she undressed.
“Dave?” she said.
The back of my neck was burning. “You have to excuse me. I’m awkward about a lot of things.”
“Turn around,” she said.
The moonlight fell on her through the side window. Her body had the smoothness and radiance of a Renaissance painting. “Are you going to make me feel really dumb?”
“No,” I said. I took off my shirt, trousers, and socks, and we got into bed, each on a side and reaching for the other. Then I pressed her back on the pillow and kissed her on the mouth and on her eyes and on the tops of her breasts. I kissed her thighs and stomach and put her nipples into my mouth and felt her nails in my hair and her breath on my forehead and her legs widening to receive me, then I was deep inside her, the welcoming grace of her thighs embracing mine, her moans and the wet cadence of her body like the iambic beat of a rhyming couplet.
Behind the redness in my eyelids I saw a pink cave filled with gossamer fans, a wave rotating through it, sliding over heart-shaped coral covered with underwater moss that was as soft as felt, deeper and deeper, as though I were dropping through the center of the earth, then I felt my loins dissolve and the light go out of my eyes and my heart twist with such violence that I thought it would burst.
Then I was standing in a place I had seen at a distance but never stood upon. I was at the entrance of a canyon that had turned pink and then magenta, streaked with shadows as the evening sun moved across it. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, as though I were standing on the lip of Creation or its terminus. A woman was standing next to me. She stepped closer and enveloped me in her cloak and lay back on a bare rug atop a pine bough, and I laid my head on her breast and the two of us rose into the sun, and I closed my eyes and felt my seed go deep inside her, and I put my face between her breasts and kissed the salt on her skin and heard her heart pumping as though it were about to break.
I rose sweaty and hot from Bailey, already longing to enter her again, and for the first time in my life saw what it all meant and realized that I would never allow death to hold claim on me again, and that Bailey Ribbons had perhaps saved me from myself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I WENT HOME THAT night and left at sunrise and drove down to Cypremort Point, where Desmond Cormier maintained his beautiful home on the tip of the peninsula, where all of this started with the body of Lucinda Arceneaux floating on a wood cross, the chop sliding across her sightless blue eyes.
Why dwell upon the image? Answer: Any homicide cop can deal with sadism or bestiality or wholesale murder when the victims are part of the culture that took their lives. But when the victims are female teenage hitchhikers on their way to New Orleans to see a concert, a young couple forced into the trunk of their own car that was set on fire by two Oklahoma psychopaths, a little boy who was anally raped before he was killed, a mother with her two daughters who trusted a boatman on vacation and were raped and tied to cinder blocks and dropped one at a time into the ocean with their mouths taped, each having to watch the fate of the other, when you see these things up close and personal, you never free yourself from them, and that’s why cops pop pills and spend a lot of time at the watercooler in the morning.
These things are not generic in nature or manufactured incidents found in lurid crime novels. They all happened, and they were all the work of evil men. You can drink, smoke weed, melt your brains with downers or whites on the half-shell, or transfer to vice and become a sex addict and flush your self-respect down the drain. None of it helps. You’re stuck unto the grave, in your sleep and during the waking day. And that’s when you start having thoughts about summary justice—more specifically, thoughts about loading up with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks and painting the walls.
The wind was blowing hard, straightening the palm fronds on the sides of the road, driving the waves against the blocks of broken concrete that had been dropped into the shallows to prevent the erosion of the bank. Up ahead I saw Antoine Butterworth jogging along the road in a sweatshirt and orange running shorts, his skin the metallic tone of a new penny. A cabin cruiser close in to the shore seemed to be pacing him. A man in shades and the blue coat and white trousers and white hat of a yachtsman was standing on the bow. He yelled something to Butterworth through his cupped hands, then waved goodbye.
The cabin cruiser motored away, twin exhaust pipes gurgling. I pulled abreast of Butterworth and rolled down the passenger window. “Want a lift?”
“I’m pretty sweaty,” he replied, not slowing.
“Suit yourself.”
I drove on to Desmond’s place and parked by his porte cochere and got out. My coat was whipping in the wind, sand and seaweed rilling in waves that burst against the shore and filled the air with spray and the smell of salt. Butterworth ran up the drive and picked up a towel that hung on an outdoor shower, then wiped his armpits and the insides of his thighs. “Where’s your lovely lass?”
�
�I didn’t get that,” I said. “Must be the wind.”
“I said ‘lass.’ Detective Ribbons.”
“I’ll tell her you asked about her.”
“I hope you’re not here for me.”
“Is Desmond home?”
“Fixing breakfast. Will you join us?”
“Who was the guy on the boat?”
“A tarpon fisherman out of Tampa. Why?”
“No reason. A fine-looking boat.”
“You’re always a man of mystery,” he said.
I wondered how he had lived as long as he had. I went up the wooden steps and knocked on the front door. Desmond answered shirtless and in a pair of cargo pants, staring expectantly over my shoulder. “Hi, Dave. Bailey’s not with you?”
• • •
THIS STORY STARTED with Desmond, and as I stood in his living room, I believed it would end with Desmond. I must make a confession here. Like many, I was drawn to Desmond for reasons hard to admit. He was one of us, born poor, hardly able to speak English the first day he got on the school bus, rejected for either his race or his heritage or his culture, forbidden to speak French on the school grounds. But unlike the rest of us, he had a vision, one greater than he or the world in which he was born, and he painted it as big as a sunset on the Mojave Desert.
When Ben Jonson said Shakespeare belonged to the ages, I think he was also talking about people like Desmond. Des was staring at me with a spatula in his hand, quizzical, the framed still shots from My Darling Clementine behind him. “You’re looking at me in a peculiar fashion, Dave.”
“Didn’t mean to. I need to talk to you about a few things. Finances, mostly.”
“No more gloom and doom. It’s too fine a day. Say, how did you like the concert last night?”
“I didn’t see you there,” I said.
“I was in the back. Saw you with Bailey. You two aren’t an item, are you?”
“How about minding your own business?”
“Sorry. I have the highest respect for you both.”
Desmond was a good director but not a good actor. He was breathing through his mouth, his jaw hooked, his profile like a Roman gladiator’s, his eyes pieces of stone.
The New Iberia Blues Page 24