The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “You don’t approve of my being with her?” I asked.

  “I don’t impose my way on others,” he said.

  “Right. That’s why you’re a film director,” I said.

  “Let’s have some breakfast. Or at least have coffee. I really admire and like you, Dave. Why won’t you accept that?”

  I guess his charm was another reason we envied Desmond. He wore the world like a loose cloak and could dine with paupers or kings and accept insult and acclaim with a diffidence that unsettled both his admirers and detractors. I never knew another man, either rich or poor, who achieved his degree of personal freedom.

  “How about it? Some eggs and bacon?” he said.

  “If you can answer a question or two,” I said.

  “I’ll give it my best.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. Butterworth was on the deck, performing some kind of ridiculous martial arts exercise.

  “Evidently you’re in serious debt,” I said.

  “Hollywood runs on other people’s money,” he replied.

  “You owe major amounts to some bad guys.”

  “Money is money. It’s not good or bad. The issue is how you use it.”

  “Your big creditors are out of Jersey and Florida.”

  “Walt Whitman is buried in one state and Marjorie Rawlins in the other.”

  “Pull your head out of your ass,” I said.

  “Would you like two strips of bacon or three?”

  I was determined not to let him shine me on. I went into his bathroom to wash my hands. There was a hypodermic in an open felt case on the lavatory. I went back into the kitchen. “I hope the needle belongs to Butterworth.”

  “It doesn’t belong to me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “A juju woman told me I was wearing a ball and chain. She’s probably right. But I think you’re in the same club, Des.”

  “You know your real problem, Dave? You smear your guilt on anyone you can.”

  Then I said something I had not intended to say. “Bailey and I interviewed your father.”

  His face tightened like the skin on a shrunken head. His knuckles were white on the handle of the spatula. “Say that again?”

  “His name is Ennis Patout. He owns a wrecker service outside Opelousas.”

  He resumed scraping eggs out of the skillet. “I never had a father. Someone may say he’s my father, but he’s not. Are we clear on that?”

  “He seemed to have remorse about your childhood. He said you were a good little boy.”

  “You’d better get out of my life, Dave.”

  “My father was a drunk and a barroom fighter and an adulterer. But he wasn’t capable of being anything else. Accept people for what they are.”

  Desmond turned off the stove, then pulled open the sliding doors that gave onto the deck. The wind was whistling, the waves bursting on the shoreline. “Come in, Antoine. Dave is heading back to New Iberia. Help me eat this lovely breakfast.”

  He was a foot from my face. I tried to hold his stare, but it was hard. His eyes seemed sightless, like none I had seen except in the faces of the dead. There was no twitch in his mouth or cheek or flutter in his throat or sign that he possessed any emotion other than hatred of the world and specifically me.

  “You scare me, Des.”

  “I’m glad. Now get out of my house.”

  • • •

  THAT EVENING, FALL was in the air, and I wanted to rid myself of stories about the evil that men do and the duplicitous enterprises that govern much of our daily lives. Piled leaves were burning in the gutters along East Main, the wind puffing them alight and scudding serpentine lines of fire along the asphalt. I could smell the cold autumnal odor of gas and pine needles and ponded water and lichen on stone and candles burning inside carved pumpkins. Alafair and Bailey and I ate a fine dinner on the redwood picnic table in the backyard, then went to a late movie and came home and ate bowls of ice cream and blackberries in the living room. I had almost forgotten how wonderful the life of family could be.

  After Bailey was gone, Alafair said, “You and Bailey seem to be hitting it off pretty well these days.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  She smiled with her eyes. I looked through the window at the sparks spiraling off the ashes of a leaf fire. “She’s a nice lady,” I added.

  “No one could argue with that,” she said. She punched me on the arm.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY was Friday. At 9:17 a.m. my desk phone rang. I don’t know how, but I knew who it was, in the same way you know when you’ve stepped on chewing gum or when it’s the knock of a paranoid neighbor who believes your cat is deliberately spraying his vegetable garden.

  “Robicheaux,” I answered.

  “Guess who,” the voice said.

  “You need to go somewhere else, Mr. Tillinger,” I said.

  “Thought you’d be glad to hear from me.”

  “Those two killers in Cameron Parish almost put you out of business. Maybe it’s a good time for you to visit Nebraska or Antarctica.”

  “If I read the newspaper right, they might be the two guys that got fried by a flamethrower. What’s that tell you?”

  “It doesn’t tell me anything,” I replied.

  “I got the Man Upstairs on my side.”

  “You know the will and mind of God?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “Why are you calling me?” I said.

  “Bet you’ve already forgotten Travis Lebeau.”

  “He was dragged to death on asphalt. That’s a hard image to forget.”

  “Lebeau was in the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Aryan Brotherhood was providing the skanks that dirty cop was pimping for. Those AB boys thought they were going to be players. Didn’t work out too good, did it? For the dirty cop, either.”

  “Axel Devereaux?”

  “The one who got a baton shoved down his windpipe.”

  “I’ve got a theory about you, Mr. Tillinger. You want to be in the movies, even if it costs you your life.”

  “Miss Lucinda knew something that got her killed, Mr. Robicheaux.” His voice had changed, like that of a man who had spent a lifetime hiding who he really was. “I talked with Desmond Cormier’s father.”

  “You did what?”

  “I followed you and the woman to Ennis Patout’s wrecker service in Opelousas.”

  “You’ve been following Detective Ribbons and me?”

  “Free country.”

  “Not for you it isn’t,” I said.

  “You want to hear what Patout told me?”

  I could hear my breath against the phone receiver. I wanted to hang up on him but knew I couldn’t. “Yes.”

  “He didn’t say anything except to threaten me.”

  “I think you have some kind of cerebral damage, partner.”

  “Try this. I checked birth records in the courthouses hereabouts. Patout had a daughter twenty-five years ago.”

  “You said ‘had.’ ”

  “That old boy didn’t let race get in his way, either,” Tillinger said. “Starting to put it together? See you around.”

  • • •

  THE BLOOD VEINS in my head were dilating. I went down to Bailey’s office. She was out of the building. I checked out a cruiser and headed for Opelousas. I tried to piece together all the random bits of information that showed a possible motive or pattern in the murders of Lucinda Arceneaux, Joe Molinari, Travis Lebeau, Axel Devereaux, and Hilary Bienville. Each was, in some fashion, ritualistic. Perhaps the tarot and the Maltese cross were involved. So were cruelty and rage. But as soon as I linked one homicide to a second or third, my logic would fall apart.

  Lucinda Arceneaux had been injected and perhaps died without knowing she was being murdered. Yet the killer, if he was the same man, had beaten Hilary Bienville without mercy. Why her? She was a harmless uneducated woman trying to raise a child by herself

  and each night allowing her body to be pe
netrated and degraded and smeared with the fluids of unshaved men who stank of alcohol and dried sweat and filling station grease. Don’t let anyone tell you prostitution is a victimless crime. The men who strike women are moral and physical cowards. Every street cop, every detective, sees violence against women with regularity, more today than in past decades. For the misogynist, women like Hilary Bienville are plump fruit waiting to be picked. My mother was the victim of men like the killer of Hilary Bienville. They appear in my dreams, their bodies naked and sweaty, their hands like the claws on crabs.

  What’s the point? Hilary Bienville had gone to Clete for help. She told him she was involved with a white man who had gotten inside her head and seemed to have total power over her. But she had also said something that didn’t fit with the details of the homicide. Just outside Opelousas, I hit the speed dial on my cell phone.

  Clete answered on the first ring. “Talk to me, big mon.”

  “Remember when you told me about Hilary Bienville visiting you at the motor court?”

  “Yeah, she said she had a john who liked her to massage his back while he messed with her head. A white guy.”

  “But he told her something about herself. Something that got her even more confused.”

  Up ahead I saw the city limits sign and a deep-green grove of slash pines on the swale.

  “He called her the Queen of Cups,” Clete said. “He also called her a chalice. He said she was chosen.”

  “But the guy who killed her stuck a Christmas-tree star on her forehead.”

  “I’m not getting the connection.”

  “The Suit of Cups in the tarot represents love,” I said. “The chalice can also mean fertility and rebirth. Bailey thinks the star represents the Suit of Pentacles.”

  “I still don’t get it,” he said.

  “Pentacles has to do with prosperity. The killer was showing contempt. Hilary was a prostitute. She didn’t measure up.”

  “I think you’re getting too deep into this guy’s head. You did that with the BTK guy. Bad mistake.”

  “How else do you explain the symbols our guy is obviously using?”

  “The day you figure out these guys is the day you eat your gun.”

  “Quit it.”

  “I have a funny feeling sometimes,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “That we’re all dead and don’t know it.”

  I took the cell phone from my ear and looked at it and then put it back.

  “My exit is just ahead,” I said. “Catch you down the track.”

  I folded the phone and dropped it on the seat before he could say anything else.

  • • •

  AS I GOT out of the cruiser at Ennis Patout’s wrecker service, I could see him playing checkers with his mechanic on top of an oil can inside the bay. He was eating a sandwich with one hand, his gaze fixed on the game, dirty fingers pressed deep into the bread. The black man looked directly at me and shook his head in a cautionary fashion.

  “Hello, Mr. Patout,” I said. “I’ll make it quick.”

  Patout moved a checker with one finger. “Not quick enough.”

  “Hugo Tillinger came to see you?”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  “What’d he have to say?”

  “Nothing. I run him off.”

  “Did you have a daughter, Mr. Patout?”

  He put down his sandwich, his eyes still on the checkerboard. His neck was as corded as a cypress stump. “You stay out of my life.”

  “The mother of your daughter was not the mother of Desmond Cormier?” I said.

  “Louis, call up the chief of police and tell him to send an officer out here.”

  “Yes, suh,” the black man said. He rose from his chair and went inside the office.

  “You fathered a daughter with a woman of color?” I said.

  Patout’s eyes had the lopsided look of two egg yolks in a skillet. “What if I did?”

  “I’m not judging you, sir. I need your help.”

  He propped his big hands on his knees and stared at a wall hung with old tires and fan belts and drop cloths and a child’s bicycle that was rusted and missing one wheel. “It was twenty-five years back. The colored girl didn’t want a white man’s baby. At least she sure as hell didn’t want mine. I went to Corina.”

  “Corina is Desmond’s mother?”

  “She said, ‘Milk through the wrong fence, carry the pail home by your own self.’ She was drunk and throwing things. Maybe clap got to her brain.”

  “If she didn’t want Desmond, why would she want to raise another woman’s child?”

  “I thought maybe we could get back together. Shows you the kind of fool I was.” He pointed at the bicycle on the wall. “I bought that for Desmond and tried to give it to his grandparents. They told me to begone. Anyone ever say that to you?”

  “No, sir,” I replied. “Mr. Patout, there’s something missing from your account. Why did Desmond’s mother bear you such hostility? Why would the grandparents be angry with you when you were trying to do the right thing? The same with the black woman who had your child.”

  “You got to ask them.”

  “Did you force yourself on the black woman?”

  He folded his hands, then squeezed one hand with the other. “A man has needs.”

  “You raped her?”

  “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “And you did the same with Desmond’s mother?”

  “That’s what she told others. But it was a goddamn lie.” He took a blue bandana out of his overalls and blew his nose on it. “I don’t want to talk no more.”

  “What happened to your little girl?”

  “Church people took her.”

  “What happened to the mother?”

  “Killed herself.”

  He stared at his steel-toed shoes, his fingers spread like banana peels on his thighs. I pulled the mechanic’s chair close to him and sat down. “You owned up. Over the years you did what you could. Tell the Man on High you’re sorry, then fuck the rest of it.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave,” he said, the words deep in his throat.

  “Who are the church people, Mr. Patout?”

  “I heard she ended up with a colored preacher and his wife in Cade, just outside New Iberia.”

  “What’s the name of the preacher?”

  “I never got his name.”

  “You’ve been forthcoming. Don’t ruin it by lying.”

  “Arceneaux. Her name was Lucinda Arceneaux.”

  He raised his eyes to mine. If there’s a hell, I believe I could have reached out and touched its heat on his cheek.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE NEXT DAY was Saturday. I woke in the blueness of the dawn to a sound that I thought came from a dream. In the dream, Negro convicts of years ago were laying track on a railroad line outside Angola Farm. They were wearing ankle chains and driving steel spikes through the rails into the railroad bed, their hammers ringing in three-four time.

  I sat up and looked out the back window. Lou Wexler, stripped to the waist, his shirt hanging on a camellia bush, was tossing horseshoes at a steel spike he had obviously driven into the ground without asking. I put on my khakis and a sweatshirt and went outside. “Do you invite yourself into everyone’s backyard at six in the morning, or are we just lucky?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m supposed to pick up Alafair at six-fifteen and I arrived a little early. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “We’re having breakfast at Victor’s.”

  “What does that have to do with waking up other people? I don’t want a horseshoe pit in my yard, either.”

  “Felicitously noted, sir.”

  “Felicitously?”

  He turned his head sideways, grinning. “We’re filming a plane crash at Lake Martin later in the day. Exciting stuff. Why not come out?”

  “Thank you. All booked up.”

  “At heart I th
ink you’re one of us.”

  “Say again?”

  He offered me a stick of gum. I shook my head. He stuck one into his mouth as though we had all the time in the world. He seemed to wear sensuality like a uniform. His body had the same smooth tone and flat stomach and small nipples as Desmond’s; his armpits were shaved, his upper arms swollen like those of a gymnast. Mon Tee Coon and Snuggs stared down at us from an oak limb overhead.

  “You said I’m like one of you.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You obviously love movies. The same with Mr. Purcel. We’re not a bad lot. Give us a chance. We’re making this area rich.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “We blew the budget out the window. One hundred and twenty million dollars, and the meter is still running. Desmond is broke. By the way, on the subject of Des, you sure got to him.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “Something to do with his background, I guess. Des is full of secrets. I don’t probe them.”

  “Any discussion I had with him was about a series of homicides. Nothing else.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case, Mr. Robicheaux. Sir, it’s not my intention to offend. The culture I live in is garish and abrasive by nature. We spend our time diddling each other to keep our minds off other things.”

  “What would those others things be?”

  “Growing old. Watching our looks dissolve. Pretending we can reclaim our youth. Is there any fool like an old fool, sir?” he said.

  “Who are you talking about, podna?”

  “Me. Who else?” He picked up a horseshoe and flipped it thirty feet onto the steel pin, his movements as fluid as water. “Bingo! Is Alafair up?”

  • • •

  THIRTY MINUTES AFTER they were gone, the phone rang on the kitchen counter. I looked at the caller ID. The caller’s number was blocked, but I answered anyway. “Dave Robicheaux. Who is this?”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” a mewing voice said.

  “Smiley?”

  “I’m glad you called me that. Because that’s what all my friends call me.”

  “I saw what you did to those guys in Morgan City. You’re a piece of work.”

  “I watched you.”

  “Say again?”

  “I watched you through binoculars. You and the pretty lady you work with. I can read lips. Y’all were very nice to the lady who sells herself.”