The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THAT EVENING I went home in a funk. I felt powerless. We had no viable suspects in the series of murders that had begun with Lucinda Arceneaux; a deranged man like Smiley Wimple was making calls to me that I couldn’t trace; and outsiders and sybarites like Antoine Butterworth were wiping their feet on us.

  Alafair had already fixed supper and was putting it on the table when I walked into the kitchen. She was wearing a white dress and makeup.

  “Where are you going tonight?” I asked.

  “Lou and I are seeing Kiss of Death with Richard Widmark at UL.”

  “Wexler again?” I said.

  “Give it a break, Dave.”

  “I just think he’s too old for you.”

  Talk about feeding one to the batter.

  “Do you realize how absurd that sounds, coming from you?” she said.

  Rain was pelting the trees in the yard, the sky running with ink. I opened the screen door and let Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon inside, mud and all. “I majored in being ridiculous.”

  “I’m glad you’re going out with Bailey,” she said.

  That was my daughter.

  “You’re a good guy, Alf.”

  “Lou thinks Kiss of Death is too strong for me,” she said.

  “When Tommy Udo pushes the old woman in the wheelchair down the staircase?”

  “Lou didn’t know I came from El Salvador. When I told him what happened in my village, he got upset. He’s very protective.”

  “I might come in late tonight,” I said.

  “You’re seeing Bailey?”

  “No.”

  She waited for me to go on. But I didn’t. Her face clouded.

  “I’m putting in some overtime,” I said.

  “Are you and Clete up to something?”

  “This has nothing to do with Clete.”

  “That’s like one side of the coin saying it has nothing to do with the other side.”

  “Watch out for Tommy Udo,” I said.

  • • •

  I DROVE DOWN TO Cypremort Point. The sky was sealed with black clouds except for a band of cold light along the horizon. The tide was coming in, the waves dented with rain and thudding as heavy as lead against the shore. Up ahead, Desmond’s house glistened against the sky. I parked on the road and walked up the steps in the wind and rain. I had no plan in mind. I could not even say why I was there, except that Clete Purcel had planted the seeds of doubt in my mind about Desmond Cormier.

  In his work, Desmond was fascinated by light and shadow. But was that a result of his artistic compulsion or an externalization of a struggle within him? His physical energies and appetites were enormous, his latent anger sometimes flickering alight in the recesses of his eyes, as though the child in him would have its way. Even his goodness was like a child’s, brightening a room one moment, gone the next. His unknowability and mercurial behavior and insularity caused awe and fear in others. If he had an artistic antecedent, it was Leonardo, chipping away at a block of marble, releasing a statue that could be either a Madonna or a gargoyle.

  I walked onto the deck, more voyeur than visitor, but I no longer cared about protocol or decorum. I felt soul-sick at what had been done to Bella Delahoussaye. I remembered many years before when I saw Joan Baez perform “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” at Ole Miss, and the chill her words sent through me when she sang “Just take what you need and leave the rest / But they should never have taken the very best.”

  And that’s what Bella was—the very best.

  Through the sliding glass doors I could see the glittering beam of a movie projector and the images in a black-and-white film dancing on a screen pulled down from the ceiling. Desmond was lying on his side on the couch, his head propped on his elbow, wearing only slacks and sandals without socks, his torso as smooth and firm and flawless as water running over stone.

  Amid the sounds of the waves and wind I heard the sound track of the film, then saw the scene taking place on the screen. Henry Fonda and Ward Bond and Victor Mature were walking toward the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in the early-morning hours of October 26, 1881. In minutes, Doc Holliday, played by Mature, would be coughing a bloody spray into a handkerchief, and Wyatt would step into history, and he and Clementine Carter would stand inside a frame of film that would capture mortality more than any I had ever seen.

  I walked back to my truck and got inside but did not start the engine. It was hard for me to think of Desmond as a suspect in a chain of homicides. But I’ve interviewed men in lockdown units who look no different from you and me and make you feel that the system has made a terrible mistake. The worst of the worst often seem the most harmless. Most of them have the facial expressions you see in a bowl of oatmeal. In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution.

  The wind was buffeting my truck and straightening the palm fronds in Desmond’s yard and pushing waves onto the blocks of concrete that shored up the bank at the tip of the point. The waves were full of seaweed and ropy with froth, sucking the sand inch by inch from beneath the concrete blocks, undoing our best attempt at avoiding the inevitable. I thought about Lucinda Arceneaux and the white boat on which she may have been held captive before her death, and the person or persons who murdered her, and I wondered if human nature and our susceptibility to evil would ever change, or if we would continue in our war against the earth until we dissolved all our landmass and our structures and ourselves and returned the planet to the watery blue orb it once was.

  But I knew what was really on my mind. Desmond may not have been a killer, but he knew people who were. A participant in the massacre at Pinkville, a gunbull who put one of the bodies in the levee at Angola, a Mississippi nightclub owner who buried a civil rights worker alive—they’re always there, hovering on the edge of our vision. We just don’t admit it. Factor in the culture of New Jersey, Florida, southern Louisiana, and Hollywood. Smiley Wimple comes off looking good.

  I pulled my hat over my eyes and decided I would sit there until dawn if I had to. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I had questions about Desmond I didn’t wish to admit. He was obviously drawn to Bailey Ribbons, even obsessed with her, but he seemed to live a celibate life. I wondered if he was gay, or bisexual, or sexually involved with Antoine Butterworth, whom he constantly defended. Or if he was an intravenous addict. I had seen a syringe on his lavatory. I had also seen the tattoo of a Maltese cross on his ankle. I didn’t want to believe it, but Desmond was dirty, I just didn’t know to what degree.

  He came out the front door of his house, wearing a slicker and a slouch hat and western boots. I was no more than thirty yards away and was sure he saw me. But he didn’t seem to. He opened his garage door with a remote control and got into a metallic-green pickup with an extended cab and drove past me, his profile silhouetted by the dash light, his self-absorption of a kind I always associated with pathological behavior.

  As he drove away, his headlights tunneled through the rain. I waited until he was a quarter mile down the road, then followed him to a back-road cemetery outside New Iberia. I turned down a dirt road in the opposite direction, parked behind an empty shack, and cut my engine and lights and walked along a ditch strewn with litter. The rain had quit and the moon was up, and through a canebrake I could see Desmond among a cluster of crypts that were cracked and half sunk in the ground. The original occupants of the cemetery had been people of mixed blood who segregated themselves from both whites and full-blood African-Americans and, in death, perpetuated the system that had oppressed them. Fog as tangible as wet cotton was puffing out of the coulee and clinging to the ground and trees and a piked iron fence that had been knocked askew by farm machinery. I saw Desmond lay a long-stemmed rose on a crypt that was as dazzling and white and incongruous in the setting as a block of snow. I had no doubt who was inside it. I had seen a
photo in The Daily Iberian of the funeral service conducted for Lucinda Arceneaux.

  Then Desmond did something I didn’t expect, since, to my knowledge, he was not a religious man. He knelt on one knee, his head bowed, one hand on the crypt. The fact that he knelt was not what bothered me. It was the way he did it. He seemed to affect the ritual of the Templar knight acknowledging both his liege lord and his fanatical mission. When he rose, it was with the poise of a man at peace with an agenda that would soak Europe and the Holy Land with blood for three hundred years.

  He got into his truck and drove away. I followed him to the highway. I didn’t know where he was going, but the image of Doc Holliday and the Earp boys walking toward the O.K. Corral was hard to get out of my mind.

  • • •

  DESMOND DROVE STRAIGHT through New Iberia and up the old two-lane to the little settlement of Cade, where Lucinda Arceneaux’s father lived and maintained his small church and where, a short distance away, Frenchie Lautrec’s flat-topped home sat.

  Desmond cut his headlights and rolled slowly to a stop in front of Lautrec’s house. A streetlight burned on the power pole at the corner of the property. He got out of his truck and opened the door to the extended cab, then pulled a scoped rifle from the back seat and closed the door. He twisted the sling around his left forearm and cupped the stock with his right hand and went through Frenchie’s front door without ever slowing down, most of the jamb exploding into the living room.

  No sound came from inside the house. I removed my 1911-model army .45 from under the seat and slipped off the holster and took off my hat and hung my badge from my neck and jumped across a rain ditch and went through the yard and into the house, pulling back the slide of the .45, easing a round into the chamber. At almost the same moment, the lights went on at the back of the house.

  “Dave Robicheaux, Desmond!” I shouted. “Put your rifle on the floor.”

  No answer.

  “You’re my friend, Des! But drop your weapon or I’ll blow you out of your socks!”

  Then I smelled an odor that lived in my dreams, one that went back to a tropical country in the monsoon season when bodies floated loose from improvised graves and declared war on the living.

  Desmond came out of the kitchen, trying to clear his throat and doing a poor job of it, a handkerchief held to his mouth, his rifle pointed at the floor. I pulled the rifle from his hand and dropped it. “What’s back there?”

  He coughed and spat in a wastebasket. “See for yourself.”

  I went inside the bedroom. The body was hanging from an electrical cord tied to a ceiling beam that someone had exposed by ripping out the Sheetrock. The cord was probably taken from a ceramic lamp that had been smashed on the floor. The back of the victim was turned toward me, the wrists wrapped behind with electrical tape and the roll still hanging from the skin, the body stretched as lean as an exclamation mark. A chair lay on its side against one wall. One loafer was on the floor, one on a foot. I cupped my hand over my nose and mouth and walked to the other side of the body and looked up into the face of Frenchie Lautrec. A cloth canary protruded from his mouth.

  This was the same man I had detested, even the way his face looked, like a bleached football with a trimmed goatee and mustache glued on it. I had not only torn him apart with my bare hands, I had jammed the broken parts of his camera down his throat. He was a pimp, a predator, a misogynist, a degenerate, a sadist, and a cop on a pad, but no one could look at his face now and not feel sorry for him. His neck was not broken. He had gone out the hard way. His eyes were open and contained an expression like a lost child’s.

  I went outside and punched in a 911 on my cell. Desmond was standing a few feet away on the lawn, like a casual spectator. “What’s the cloth canary mean?”

  “It’s Sicilian for ‘Death to snitches.’ ”

  “The Mob got him?”

  “The canary was in an ornamental birdcage in the living room. I saw it when I was here before. The Mob didn’t do this, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said.

  “Why did you come here, Des?”

  “I heard he might know something about Lucinda Arceneaux’s death.”

  “Lucinda was your half sister, you lying son of a bitch. I followed you to her grave. Less than an hour ago.”

  His face drained. “You have no right.”

  “I thought you were stand-up, but you’re a bum,” I said. “Somebody you know killed her, and one way or another, you’ve been covering for him. I think it’s because you didn’t want to interrupt the flow of money into your picture.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Go sit in your truck until the meat wagon gets here. I don’t want to be around you.”

  I don’t think I ever saw greater shame in a man’s face. I knew I would later regret the harshness of my words, but at the moment I did not, I suspect because I still wanted to believe George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are.

  • • •

  AFTER THE PARAMEDICS and three cruisers and a fire truck and Bailey and Cormac Watts had arrived, I told Desmond to get out of his pickup and lean against the fender.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll let you know.” I ran my hands under his armpits and down his sides and inside his legs and over his ankles. Then I hooked him up and led him to the back of a cruiser.

  “This is bogus,” he said. “Quit acting like a jerk. I can sue you for this.”

  “You’ve been gone from Louisiana too long,” I replied.

  I put him in the cruiser and shut the door. I looked back at Lautrec’s house. All the lights were on. Through a side window I could see Cormac walking around Lautrec’s body, studying it.

  I followed the cruiser to the parish prison and locked Desmond in a part of the jail that was particularly spartan and depressing—in fact, it was little more than a narrow corridor between two rows of barred cells that resembled zoo cages, all of them empty.

  “Why are you taking out your anger on me?” he said.

  When you place someone in custody, you don’t answer questions, nor do you negotiate. If you do it right, the routine is a bit like the army: You speak in terms of rank and principle and always in the third person, never the second. I scratched at my face as though I had not heard the question. “A bondsman will be available in the morning. Any inmate at the jail is entitled to at least one phone call.”

  “Come on, Dave,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  I threw the protocol away. “You knelt at your sister’s crypt.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Your posture made me think of a Crusader knight.”

  “My posture?” he said. “You talk like you’re out of your mind.”

  “You’ve got a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle.”

  “From my biker days.”

  “My ass.”

  He leaned his forehead between two bars, his eyes downcast. I could hear a toilet flushing in another part of the building. “Those things you said back there?”

  “What about them?” I said.

  “You meant them? I’m a bum?”

  “I think you don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing.”

  “You don’t understand, Dave. Production money comes from all kinds of places. The studio doesn’t back up an armored truck on your lawn and dump it on the grass. Some of it is casino money out of Jersey. Some of it is from a group building nuclear reactors. There might be a little Russian or Saudi money involved. It’s a consortium.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know how all these killings happened. The Jersey guys were worried about their investment. Maybe they’re involved.”

  “The Mob is a bunch of tarot fans? When did you discover Lucinda Arceneaux was your half sister?”

  “Just a little w
hile back,” he replied, his eyes on mine.

  “How far back?”

  “A few weeks, maybe.”

  “Who told you?”

  “My old man. Ennis Patout.”

  “A few weeks, huh?”

  “Yes,” he said. He blinked and let out his breath without seeming to, his expression benign.

  “Lesson in lying, Des,” I said. “Don’t try to control your mannerisms. People who tell the truth are bored by what they’re saying and show it.”

  “You know why it’s so hard to talk to you, Dave? It’s because you cloak yourself in AA bromides and try to pass them off as the wisdom of the ages.”

  “Who paid for your half sister’s crypt? Her father is a preacher with a few dozen poor people in his congregation. I bet you spent five grand on the crypt and at least half that on the coffin.”

  “All right, I paid for it,” he said. “I didn’t want to acknowledge my father or the world in which I grew up. I hate my father, and I hate what he did to my mother.”

  “Your mother dumped you, bub. Get your facts straight.”

  “If these bars weren’t between us, I’d break your jaw, old man or not.”

  “You looked the other way when your sister was murdered,” I said. “Who’s got the problem?”

  He tried to grab my shirt. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps ringing like hammers inside a submarine.

  • • •

  IT WAS ALMOST three in the morning as I drove down East Main. My eyes felt seared, like there was sand in them, as though I had looked into the pure white fire of an arc welder’s rod touching metal. My throat was dry, a pressure band forming on the right side of my head, my heart constricting whenever I took a deep breath.

  Why the agitation? Why my unrelieved anger toward Desmond? I was entering a dry drunk. But this one was different. I had taken a hit of Jack at the blues club, and booze stays in the metabolism for as long as thirty days. For an alcoholic, having thirty days of the enemy at work in the heart and blood and brain while not being allowed to drink could probably be compared with practicing celibacy for the same amount of time in a harem.