The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  I felt dizzy. I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Let me explain something to you. You’re a hired assassin. I’m a sheriff’s detective. People like me put people like you in institutions. Sometimes we send them to the injection table. People like you don’t call up people like me to pass the time of day.”

  “You don’t have to get smart-alecky about it.”

  “Those two guys were hitters out of Florida, right?”

  “Now they’re not anything.”

  “Why’d you kill them?”

  “They did mean things to me.” I could hear his breath increasing. “One of them used a stick.”

  “That makes you a target now, doesn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “You fry two mobbed-up guys and you’re not a target?”

  “The bad people who come after me are the target. They need to be protected from me, Detective Robicheaux.”

  “You’re one in a million, Smiley.” I looked at my watch. Trying to trace his call was a waste of time. He used an ingenious relay system and seemed to know an enormous amount about technology. The same with ordnance and ballistics. “Why’d you call?”

  “Tell Mr. Purcel I’m sorry about the detective lady who died at the casino in New Or-yuns.”

  “She didn’t ‘die.’ She was killed.”

  “By somebody else’s bullet. It was not from my gun.”

  “You started a gun battle in a public place. Other people paid the price.”

  “You’re talking bad to me. You stop it.”

  “That’s because you’re starting to make me mad, Smiley.”

  “My tummy hurts. You’re upsetting me”

  “I don’t mean to. An evil man broke up my family when I was a kid. I went to Vietnam and got even. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “You killed people?”

  I felt my throat closing. “To be honest, I don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “They were soldiers?” he said.

  “Most of them. Maybe—”

  “Maybe what?” he said.

  “I killed people accidentally. Or I gave orders that led to the death of IPs.”

  “Death of what?”

  “Innocent People.”

  I could hear him breathing against the receiver. In my mind’s eye, I saw a face with tiny nostrils and eyes that were unreadable and a mouth searching for a teat.

  “You still with me?” I said.

  “Then you’re not much different from me.”

  “Wrong, Smiley.”

  “Are you saying I’m not your friend anymore?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t say that at all.”

  He was silent, as though sifting through his thoughts or rebuilding his fortifications. “I’ll be close by. Maybe we can work together.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Owie,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “A man just stepped on my foot. He mashed my toe. Hey, come here, you!”

  “No, Smiley. Don’t do that. Leave other people alone. Did you hear me? If you want to be my friend, you can’t hurt other people anymore.”

  “Fooled you,” he said. “Bye-bye. You’re a nice man.”

  I wanted to smash the phone.

  • • •

  I HOOKED MY BOAT trailer onto my truck and drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. An old problem had come back to me, one that I used to treat with four fingers of Jack and a beer back. I felt as though someone had extinguished a hot cigarette on my eyelids. It’s part of the pucker syndrome. Haven’t heard of it? It’s a level of anxiety you’d eat glass to get rid of. Think about a column of men going down a night trail, rain clicking on their steel pots. The trail is sown with 105 duds or toe poppers or bouncing Betties. You feel as though your skin is being peeled from the bone by a pair of pliers. You wait for the klatch under a man’s boot or the ping of a trip wire, and you fear your insides will turn to water and your sphincter to jelly. To up the ante, Sir Charles blindly fires a grenade with a captured blooker into the jungle, showering dirt and water on the canopy of trees. Your rectum has constricted to the size of a pencil head. That’s the pucker syndrome.

  Clete was washing his Caddy in front of his cottage. He squeezed out the sponge and dropped it into a bucket. “You look a little wired.”

  “You got a Dr Pepper?”

  “Inside.”

  I got one out of his icebox and came back out. I told him about Smiley’s call.

  “Blow it off,” he said. “Wimple is on third base and knows it.”

  “He doesn’t bother me. He only kills people from his own culture.”

  “So what’s the problem, noble mon?”

  “The guy who killed Lucinda Arceneaux will try to outdo himself.”

  “You got the blue meanies, big mon. They go away.”

  “With a fifth of vodka, they do.”

  He looked at my boat trailer. “Want to entertain the fish?”

  • • •

  WE PUT THE boat in at Henderson Levee and shoved off. It was sac-a-lait season, the weather cool and sunny, the sky the same hard blue you see in Montana that time of year. On one flooded island, the swamp maples had turned red and the leaves on the cypress looked exactly like green lace transforming into gold, all of it infused with a glow that seemed to radiate from inside the tree. I eased the anchor down into the silt and felt the stern swing us tight in the current, then hooked a shiner on the end of my line and lobbed the line and bobber and baited hook into a cove ringed with water hyacinths.

  Clete was chugging a bottle of Japanese beer, the sunlight dancing inside it.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “A Fujiyama mama I met in the Quarter. She told me she was here with a television crew, except she was staying in a dump off Airline Highway.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew more was coming.

  “I was in pretty bad shape when I left in the morning. She gave me a box of Japanese booze. I told her I’d pay her for it. She said, ‘You already pay.’ When I got home, I discovered my wallet was empty.”

  “When are you going to grow up?”

  “What’s the big deal? It’s all rock and roll.”

  I had given up trying to argue with Clete. He was unteachable and incapable of change, and probably the only man I ever knew whose innate goodness was so intense, he could walk through evil and not be blighted by it.

  “Dave, here’s the long and short of it,” he said. He flung a Rapala in a high arc and watched it splash, then began retrieving it past the tip of the island, the lure swimming like a wounded minnow. “We’re different in a way you won’t admit. I grew up in a rathole in the Irish Channel. I joined the Crotch to get out of New Orleans. You grew up in a world of sugarcane fields and thousands of ducks flying over and people going to the fais do-do. That world has pretty much slid down the pipe.”

  “I think I figured that out, Clete.”

  “You still don’t get it. You see the oak trees getting cut down, the marsh disappearing, the trash in the water and the ditches, the politicians chugging pud for anybody with a checkbook, the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude. But you keep waiting on something to happen that will be so bad, people will see the error of their ways and start doing things differently. Like a big AA meeting. You said it yourself: The Great Whore of Babylon doesn’t go to meetings.”

  “You’re saying I want the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb to be dropped on the state I love?”

  “That comes close.”

  “Thanks for the insight.”

  “No problemo, big mon.”

  I could have gone on and quietly mocked his logic, but I was the one who had spoken disingenuously. I knew the real reason Clete had ended up in the sack with an Asian woman. The love of his life was a beautiful Vietnamese girl who lived on a sampan at the edge of the South China Sea. She was murdered by the Vietcong because she slept with a good-hearted jarhead whose father had beaten him almost
every day of his life with a razor strop.

  “What are you thinking about?” Clete said.

  “Nothing.”

  “I didn’t mean all that stuff about everything ending. It’s never the last waltz. Not unless you want it to be.”

  I wasn’t listening. Through the flooded trees, I saw a glint like a reflection off a telescope or maybe a scoped rifle. Then it was gone.

  “You see something?” Clete asked.

  “Yeah. You got your binoculars?”

  “My opera glasses.” He took them out of his tackle box and handed them to me. “What is it?”

  I focused the glasses and moved them back and forth across the willows and tupelos and gum trees. “Maybe a guy.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  Through a clear spot I could see a rotting oil platform, egrets, and a stray pelican flying low across the water, then a man standing in an outboard in the shallows, wearing a windbreaker and a slouch hat, his face shadowed. He had the butt of a rifle propped on his hip. The rifle was scoped.

  I started the engine. “Pull the anchor. There’s a guy inside the trees with a scoped bolt-action.”

  “Isn’t it deer season?”

  “Not with regular firearms.”

  Clete pulled the anchor and clunked it into the bow. We headed around the island. The outboard was gone, but we could hear its drone across the water, perhaps from a channel that led into another bay. I cut our engine. Now the only sound was the chop against the hull.

  “You see his face?” Clete said.

  “No.”

  “Is it still alligator season?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “So don’t worry about it,” Clete said. “Right?”

  “This is a fishing area, not a target range.”

  “So it was a jerkoff who has his gun mixed up with his dork.”

  But we both knew better. Nobody hunts gators with scoped rifles, and no person of goodwill looks through the scope at another individual. I restarted the engine and we headed home, the wind in our faces, ten degrees colder now, like a slow burn on the skin.

  • • •

  I SHOWERED AND WENT to Bailey’s house, hoping we could have a late dinner. She had gone shopping in Lafayette and told me she expected to be home by eight.

  It was almost nine. I called her cell phone twice and went directly to voicemail. I sat on the gallery and waited. Then I began to go places in my head I probably shouldn’t have. Or at least that’s what I felt at the time.

  I could not explain away the presence of the man with the bolt-action rifle on the flooded island. Clete and I had enemies. Every cop does. But few of them seek revenge. I witnessed the electrocution of two murderers I helped convict, partly out of duty, partly at their request. Neither of them bore me enmity. None of my past experience as a detective in New Orleans or New Iberia had been any help in solving the series of murders connected with the tarot or the Maltese cross. What was the motivation? That was the big one. The old saw money wasn’t working.

  How about someone who had declared war on something much larger than he was, a misanthrope with the vision of Captain Ahab in his pursuit of the white whale? The kind of man who wanted to destroy beauty and goodness whenever he found it? That brought to mind the image of a man firing out of a resort window in Las Vegas.

  Or maybe he was the kind of man who hated others so much he would kill their friends or loved ones so the real target would suffer daily for the rest of his or her life. I thought again of the damage done to the body of Hilary Bienville.

  I called Bailey a third time. No answer. I called Alafair at the house.

  “Hi, Dave,” she said.

  “You okay, Alfie?”

  “Don’t call me that dumb name.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. What’s going on?”

  “I’m just checking.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In front of Bailey’s house. I don’t know where she is. She said she would be back from Lafayette by eight.”

  “You know how the traffic is.”

  “What did you do today?”

  “We quit the shoot early and I played tennis with Des at Red’s.”

  “When did you start hanging out with Desmond?”

  “He’s in the dumps. They’re going broke. Lou is and so is Antoine. They borrowed against their homes and their video business. Dave, I know you’re not sympathetic, but how many people would risk everything they own to create an epic film that will probably bomb?”

  “I saw a guy with a scoped rifle at Henderson Swamp. I think he was looking at me and Clete through the scope.”

  “Why didn’t you say that?”

  “I don’t know who it was. Maybe it was just a guy.”

  “Maybe it was Smiley Wimple,” she said.

  “Smiley doesn’t have a beef with either Clete or me. So that means for now we don’t trust anyone. Got it?”

  “That’s a little broad.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Copy that. Where are you going now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  But I was lying.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  THE BLUES CLUB on the bayou was packed, bodies pressed one against the other, people shouting in order to hold an ordinary conversation, the band blowing the joint down with Clifton Chenier’s “Ay-Te Te Fee.” I squeezed my way to the bar. Lloyd, the indignant black bartender with the small head, waited silently for me to order.

  “Bella Delahoussaye!” I shouted.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  “Where’s Bella?”

  He looked at the bandstand. “She ain’t here!”

  “Where is she?”

  “Running late! Like always!” he shouted. “What you want, man?”

  “Half a barbecue chicken, double dirty rice, and a diet Dr Pepper!”

  Ten minutes passed. Still no Bella. The bartender brought my food on a paper plate with a napkin and a plastic fork and knife. The noise was getting louder. My head was coming off.

  “Where’s the Dr Pepper?” I shouted.

  “I tole you, this ain’t a soda fountain!” the bartender replied. He walked away. A big man who looked familiar sat down next to me.

  “Watch my food, will you?” I said.

  I worked my way outside and checked the parking lot. I didn’t have Bella’s phone number and had no way to contact her except to call the city police in St. Martinville and ask the dispatcher to send a car to her cottage. I didn’t think Bella would appreciate the gesture. I went back inside and sat down. I could see Sean McClain sitting at a table below the bandstand. He was with several other young people and drinking a beer from a bottle.

  “Find what you were looking for?” the man next to me said.

  I looked at him. His face was as generic and uninteresting as a shingle. “I know you?”

  “You came into my former place of employment in St. Martinville.”

  I had to think. “Harvey?”

  “You got a good memory.”

  “You never heard of Evangeline. You called me ‘asshole’ and ‘fuckball.’ ”

  “I was having an off night. You were acting weird on top of it. Sorry about the asshole and fuckball references. You come here often?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m waiting on Bella Delahoussaye.”

  “The black gal with the magical fingers?”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “The way she plays guitar. She’s got magic.”

  I started eating. I tried to catch the bartender’s eye.

  “What’d you think I meant?” Harvey asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  He saw me trying to get the bartender’s attention. “What do you need?”

  “My drink.”

  “The bartender here’s got an attitude.” He tapped his knuckles on the bar.

  “He’s all right,” I said. “Let him alone.”

  The front d
oor opened and a clutch of people came in. In the center was a slender ebony-skinned woman wearing an African head wrap and a sleeveless turquoise and gold dashiki, her body clicking with beads and chains and bracelets. I got up and clamped my hand onto Harvey’s shoulder. “You’re on guard duty again.”

  The woman was not Bella. I stopped by Sean McClain’s table. He stood up to shake hands. His friends smiled. “I didn’t know you hung out here, Dave.”

  “Not really. Just tonight,” I said.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Want to join us?” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Nice seeing y’all.”

  I went back to the bar. A soda cup filled to the brim had been placed next to my plate. “Where’d that come from?”

  “I told him to get on it. He said he didn’t have Dr Pepper. I asked him if he had Coca-Cola. Between you and me, I think the guy’s got a racial problem. Better eat up.”

  “You paid for the Coke?”

  “Big deal.”

  I looked at the doorway. No Bella. I could feel a sensation like a guitar string tightening around my head. I filled a fork with chicken and dirty rice. It was cold and tasted like confetti. I lifted the cup to my lips and tilted back my head. I felt the Coca-Cola and crushed ice slide over my tongue and down my throat. But something else was in the cup. What had I done? Did I not recognize the smell, the golden glow inside the barrel the whiskey was aged in, the cool fire that lit my loins and caused me to close my eyes with release and surrender, as though a treacherous lover had returned from long ago for another go-round between the sheets?

  I set the cup down on the bar, harder than I should have, perhaps more in pretense than in alarm.

  “You dig Jack, right?” Harvey said. “He didn’t have Dr Pepper. So I told the guy to give you Coke and Jack. What’s with you?”

  “Everything.”

  “Tell you what, I’m outta here. Keep a good thought. Buy yourself a condo in Crazy Town. I also take back my apology for calling you asshole and fuckball.”

  He spun off the stool and walked away in the crowd. My left hand was on the cup. I felt its coldness seeping into my fingers. For a drunk, a moment like this produces the same sensation as coitus interruptus. I raised the cup, then put it down again. I had never wanted to drink so badly in my life, even when I was on the grog full-time and would wake with a thirst so great I would have committed a serious crime to quench it.