The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “You were in a difficult situation,” I said. I rubbed my forehead and sat down in a chair. I knew where we were going, and I wanted to get out of it as fast as I could. I started to speak again but didn’t get the chance.

  “So the guy asks me where I knew Tillinger from. I told the guy I shot him.”

  “Listen to me, Sean—”

  “He didn’t say a word. He just stared at me with his eyes misting over. I never had anybody look at me like that.”

  “You’re an honorable man. That’s why you went to the funeral home. Nobody has the right to condemn you. That man wasn’t there when Tillinger pointed a Luger at us.”

  “I wanted to explain it to him.”

  “There’re situations for which no words are adequate. This was one of them. I’m sure that fellow respects you for coming to the funeral home.”

  I heard him take a breath. “I didn’t mean to pester you,” he said.

  Through the window I could see lightning flickering on the oak trees in the yard, the door on Tripod’s empty hutch swinging in the wind. “I’d better go now,” I said.

  “What I just told you ain’t the only reason I called. I could have dropped a guy tonight. I called you because I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not.”

  “Could have dropped whom?”

  “Somebody out by my barn. I called him out and he took off running.”

  “Clear this up for me, Sean, and get it right. You say you could have dropped him. You drew down on him, you had him in your sights, what?”

  “Lightning flashed and I saw somebody inside the barn. His skin looked real white. I think he had a rifle. I cain’t be sure. I had my piece out, but I didn’t raise it. He run out the back of the barn into the pecan trees.”

  “Did you call it in?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want people to think I’m losing it.”

  “Will you be there for the next fifteen minutes?”

  • • •

  SEAN RENTED A paintless termite-eaten farmhouse with a wide gallery and a peaked tin roof down by Avery Island. All the lights were on in the house when I pulled into his dirt yard and went up the steps with a raincoat over my head. He opened the door.

  “Hate to be an inconvenience and general pain in the butt,” he said. “Want some coffee? It’s already made.”

  “No, thanks.”

  He was wearing a white T-shirt and starched jeans and flip-flops. Leaning by the door was a scoped rifle with a sling. A holstered revolver and gun belt hung on the back of a chair in the dining room.

  “Miss Bailey get aholt of you?” he said.

  “No, I’ve been looking for her.”

  “That’s funny. She was just here.”

  “What for?”

  “She thought this Smiley guy might want to do me in ’cause of Tillinger being his friend or something.”

  “That’s a possibility. You think you saw Smiley Wimple?”

  “I ain’t sure.”

  “You weren’t in the service, were you?”

  “No, sir.” He waited. “How come you ask me that?”

  “You’ve got your whole environment lit up. You’d make a great silhouette on a window shade.”

  “I don’t study on things like that.”

  “On what things?”

  “Dying. I figure everybody has a time. Till it comes, I say don’t study on it.”

  “Let’s take a look at your barn.”

  He put on a raincoat with a hood, and we went out into the rain and walked under an oak tree and crossed a clear spot and entered the dry barn. He closed the door behind us and pulled the chain on a solitary lightbulb. Fresh shoe marks were stenciled in the dirt, though not to the extent that I could tell their size.

  “Were you in here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You stood outside?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the guy ran from here to that pecan grove?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Your clothes didn’t get wet?”

  “They was sopping. That’s why I put on dry ones.”

  “I was just wondering. I thought you might have secret powers.”

  “You did, huh?”

  It was too late to take back the wisecrack. “What else did Bailey have to say?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Sean—”

  “To heck with you, Dave. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  He pulled the chain on the light and walked back to his house, the rain glistening on his raincoat, his profile as sharp as snipped tin.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT night. Early Sunday morning I drove to Clete’s motor court and banged on his door. The rain was still falling, a thick white fog rolling on the bayou, the air cold, like snow on your skin. Clete answered the door in his pajamas. “Have you gone nuts?”

  “Thanks for the kind words,” I said, brushing past him.

  He shut the door. “You had trouble with Bailey Ribbons?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You’re a mess with women.”

  “I’m a mess?”

  “Yeah, without my guidance, you’d really be in trouble,” he said. “What’s the haps with Bailey?”

  “I’ve got to have your sacred oath.”

  At first he didn’t answer. He put on a bathrobe and fluffy blue slippers. Then he said, “Don’t be talking to me like that, big mon. You either trust me or you don’t.”

  I told him about the men who raped Bailey, and the fire she set under the propane tank on their trailer, and how all three men died, and the trouble she had in Holy Cross when she was thirteen. Then I told him about my visit the previous night to Sean McClain’s place.

  “McClain couldn’t recognize Smiley Wimple?” Clete said. “Wimple looks like an albino caterpillar that glows in the dark.”

  “Yeah, I wondered the same thing.”

  “Sean McClain bothers you for some reason?”

  “He’s been around too many murder scenes,” I said. “That’s what I keep thinking. Same with Bailey. I don’t know who she is.”

  Clete started a pot of coffee on his small gas stove. He opened his icebox and took out a box of glazed doughnuts and tossed it to me. “You know what you’re always telling me, right?”

  “No.”

  “People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.”

  “That’s not reassuring. Bailey killed three people. That’s what she did. With fire.”

  “These guys were running a meth lab. They deserved what they got. Besides, she told you about it. Would she get on the square like that if she were jacking you around?”

  “Why is it that everything you say has something in it about genitalia?”

  He removed the coffeepot from the stove and set it and two cups on the table. “Dave, there’s an explanation for what you’re experiencing. The guy we’re after is waging war against this entire community. He wants us at each other’s throats. Don’t fall into his trap.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I don’t. It’s just a thought. But nothing else makes sense.”

  We were both quiet. I took a bite out of a doughnut.

  “I’ve got a worse scenario, one I can’t get out of my head sometimes,” Clete said. “I wake up with it in the middle of the night. Some mornings, too. That’s when it really gets bad.”

  “What does?”

  “The dream. I dream we’re all dead. We fucked up while we were alive and now we’re stacking time in a place where there’re no answers, only questions that drive you crazy. I went to a shrink about it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t give him a chance. He was one of the people in the dream. Enjoy the day we get, Streak. Being dead is a pile of shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THAT MORNING, I went to Mass at St. Edward
’s, and that evening I attended an AA meeting at the Solomon House, across the street from old New Iberia High. When I left the meeting, the stars were bright against a black sky, and a warm breeze was blowing through the live oaks in front of the old school building. It was a fine evening, the kind that assures you a better day is coming.

  Sean McClain was leaning against my pickup in uniform, his head on his chest, the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes.

  “What’s happenin’?” I said.

  “Didn’t mean to get in your face last night,” he replied.

  “You didn’t.”

  “I been studying on a few things. I don’t know if they’re he’pful or not.”

  “You figured out who was in your barn?”

  “Probably that little rodent nobody can catch.”

  “Wimple?”

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “Let me set your mind at ease on that,” I said. “If that were Smiley Wimple, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I’d be dead?”

  “Probably.”

  “I been thinking about various clues on these murders,” he said.

  “Clues?”

  “There haven’t been many. Not from the day we seen that poor lady floating on the cross.”

  “I’m not following you, Sean.”

  “The clue we didn’t give much mind to is that green tennis shoe me and you found on the beach. Size seven.”

  “It’s not much of a clue, Sean.”

  “Y’all run a DNA on it, though, right?”

  “Yeah, it belonged to Lucinda Arceneaux.”

  “If she was wearing one, she was wearing two.”

  “That’s right,” I said, my attention slipping away.

  “One of the people who called in the 911 said there was a scream from a lighted cabin cruiser.”

  “You got it.”

  “Why not search every cabin cruiser on Cypremort Point?” he said.

  “Search warrants aren’t that broad, Sean.”

  He picked up a pebble from the curb and flung it at the street. “Well, I was just trying to come up with something. Sorry I ain’t much he’p.”

  But Sean had opened a door in my head. A green tennis shoe with blue stripes. It didn’t go with the purple dress Lucinda Arceneaux had died in.

  “Why you got that look on your face?” Sean said.

  “Because I just realized how stupid I’ve been.”

  • • •

  I WOULDN’T CALL IT an epistemological breakthrough, but it was a beginning. Monday morning I went to our evidence locker and found Lucinda Arceneaux’s purple dress. I also retrieved the green tennis shoe with blue stripes that Sean and I had found. I signed for both the shoe and the dress, then drove to St. Martinville and got a plainclothes to let me in Bella Delahoussaye’s house. In her closet I found almost the same purple dress on a hanger, except it had been sprayed with sequins. She had been wearing it the first time I saw her at the blues club on the bayou.

  I drove to the little settlement of Cade and the trailer home of Arceneaux’s father, located on cinder blocks behind his clapboard church. The bottle tree next to the church tinkled in the wind. When the reverend opened the door, he looked ten years older than he had at the time of his daughter’s death. I was holding the dress and the tennis shoe inside a paper bag.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “I’m Dave Robicheaux, Reverend. I wondered if I could talk with you a few minutes.”

  “You’re who?”

  “Detective Robicheaux. I was assigned the investigation into your daughter’s death.”

  “Oh, yes, suh. I remember now,” he said, pushing open the door. His hand was quivering on his cane, his eyes jittering.

  I stepped inside. “I need you to look at this dress.” I pulled it from the bag. Sand and salt were still in the folds.

  “Why you want me to look at it?”

  “Lucinda was wearing this when she died. Have you seen it before?”

  “I don’t remember her wearing a dress like that. But I cain’t be sure, suh.”

  “I see.”

  “What else you got in there?”

  “A tennis shoe. Do you recognize it as hers?”

  He took it from my hand. The wet shine in his eyes was immediate.

  “She was wearing tennis shoes like these the last time you saw her?” I said.

  “Yes, suh. When she left for the airport.”

  “Sir, why don’t you sit down? Here, let me help you.”

  “No, I’m all right. Can I have her shoe?”

  “We have to keep it a while. I’ll make sure it’s returned to you.”

  “That dress couldn’t be hers,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “She always called her green and blue shoes her ‘little girl’ shoes. She wore them with jeans. She always dressed tasteful.”

  “What do you know about Desmond Cormier?”

  “He paid for her burial. He’s a nice man.”

  “You ever hear of a man named Antoine Butterworth?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Did Lucinda talk about Mr. Cormier?”

  “I never axed her much about those Hollywood people. She said most of them were no different from anybody else. How’d she get that dress on? They took her clothes off when she was dead? Who would want to degrade her like that? I don’t understand. How come this was done to her?”

  His voice broke. He couldn’t finish.

  I silently made a vow that one day I would have an answer to that question, and I would put a mark on the perpetrator that he would carry to the grave, if not beyond.

  • • •

  TUESDAY MORNING, WE got a search warrant on the entirety of Desmond’s house at Cypremort Point. It was a hard sell. Previously, we had been granted a search warrant on the part of the house considered the living area of Antoine Butterworth. The district attorney had to convince the judge that Desmond was a viable suspect in the death of Lucinda Arceneaux. The truth was otherwise. Desmond was a walking contradiction: a Leonardo, a humanist, a man who had the body of a Greek god, a man who would hang from the skid of a helicopter and then bully one of his subordinates. The DA got lost in his own vagueness and asked the judge if I could speak.

  “Since you don’t seem to be informed about your own investigation, I would be happy to hear from Detective Robicheaux,” the judge said. He was a Medal of Honor recipient and had thick snow-white hair and was probably too old for the bench, but his patrician manners and soft plantation dialect were such a fond reminder of an earlier, more genteel culture that we didn’t want to lose him. “Good morning, Detective Robicheaux. What is it you have to say, suh?”

  “Desmond Cormier has been elusive and uncooperative since the beginning of our investigation, Your Honor,” I said. “Through a telescope on Mr. Cormier’s deck, I saw the deceased, Lucinda Arceneaux, tied to a cross floating in Weeks Bay. I asked Mr. Cormier to look through the telescope and tell me what he saw. He denied seeing anything. The deputy with me, Sean McClain, looked through the telescope and saw the same thing I had.”

  “The body?” the judge said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I don’t know if that’s enough to grant you a warrant, Detective.”

  “Mr. Cormier also broke in to the home of Deputy Frenchie Lautrec after Lautrec took his life or was killed by others. Lautrec had a tattoo of a Maltese cross on one leg. Desmond Cormier has one, too. I’ve seen it. We have reason to believe that Lautrec may have been involved both with prostitution and the series of the murders in our area. I believe Mr. Cormier may have been an associate of Deputy Lautrec.”

  I had overreached the boundaries of probability and even the boundaries of truth, but by this time, I didn’t care about either.

  “I am deeply disturbed by the implications in this investigation and the paucity of evidence it has produced,” the judge said. I absolutely loved his diction. “Your warrant i
s granted. I recommend you conduct your search in such a way that there will be no evidentiary problems when the person or persons who committed these crimes is brought into court. We are all sickened and saddened by what has occurred in our community. Good luck to you, gentlemen.”

  One hour later, Sean McClain, Bailey, and I began ripping apart Desmond’s house.

  • • •

  DESMOND WAS FURIOUS. He paced up and down in his living room. He was wearing cargo pants and sandals and an LSU football jersey cut off at the armpits. He watched us dump his shelves, lift armfuls of clothes from his closets, shake drawers upside down on the beds, clean out the kitchen cabinets, tip over furniture, and pull the trays out of the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. His pale blue eyes looked psychotic, as though they had been clipped from a magazine and pasted on his face.

  I think Desmond was bothered most by Bailey’s coldness as he watched her casually destroying the symmetry and order of his household. But the worst had yet to come. She took down the framed still shots excerpted from My Darling Clementine. She lifted each of them off its wall hook and pulled the cardboard backing loose from the steel frame, then dropped each onto the couch as she might a bit of trash.

  “What are you looking for?” he said. “How could my framed pictures have anything to do with a murder investigation? You of all people, Bailey, you know better. Damn you, woman.”

  “Please address me as Detective Ribbons. In answer to your question, we’ll look at whatever we need to.”

  He started to pick up the frames and photos and squares of cardboard.

  “Leave those where they are,” she said.

  “A pox on all of you, Dave,” he said. “You motherfucker.”

  “You jerked us around, Des,” I said. “You brought this on yourself.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re involved with a cult or a fetish or some kind of medieval romance that only lunatics could have invented,” I said. “You’ve been covering your ass or somebody else’s from the jump. Maybe if you stopped lying to people who are on your side, we wouldn’t have to tear your house apart.”

  “Why don’t you start arresting Freemasons? Or guys with Gothic tats? You’re a fraud, Dave. You settled for mediocrity in your own life, and you resent anyone who went away and succeeded and then returned home and reminded you of your failure.”