The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “Sorry, there,” Wexler said. “Must be some soap on the floor. Are you all right? You look like someone shoved a baton up your ass. Order up at the bar. I have a tab. The name is Wexler.”

  Then he continued on his way. Alafair’s face was burning.

  “The guy is from overseas,” Clete said to Ladrine. “I think he took a round in the head from ISIS or something.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ladrine said. His eyes were tiny coals.

  “The next time I see you at Bojangles’, the drinks are on me,” Clete said.

  Twenty minutes later, Clete and Alafair and Wexler met at the juice bar. Just as their drinks arrived, Ladrine walked by, unshowered, still wearing his jumpsuit, a gym bag hanging from his hand.

  “Excuse me a moment,” Wexler said. He caught up with Ladrine. “Apologies again, fellow. It’s chaps such as you who keep the darkies in their place. You’re a genuine testimony to the superiority of the white race.” He sank his fingers into Ladrine’s arm and slapped him three times between the shoulder blades, hard, putting his weight into it, leaving Ladrine stupified.

  Wexler came back to the bar and chugged half his tropical drink, blowing out his breath. “I wonder who he voted for.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Alafair said.

  “Just having a little fun,” Wexler said. “I’m sure he took it as such.” Clete had remained silent. Wexler caught it. “You want to say something to me?”

  “You’re quite a guy,” Clete said. “I thought his lungs were going to come out of his mouth.”

  “No, I’m not quite a guy,” Wexler said. “Desmond is the man, the champion of us all, and about to go to hell in a basket. He belongs at Roncevaux and yet won’t heed the call. I guess that’s why I love and pity him so.”

  Alafair looked at Wexler as though she had never seen him before.

  • • •

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, Clete called and asked me to meet him at Victor’s, where he ate almost every day.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I just want to have breakfast with you.”

  I knew better. Clete never did anything in a whimsical way or without a purpose.

  He was waiting for me at the door of the cafeteria, wearing a dark blue suit and a dark tie, his shoes shined. He wasn’t wearing his porkpie hat, which, by anyone’s standards, was a tacky anachronism. We got into the serving line, and he began stacking his tray with scrambled eggs, sausage patties, bacon, hash browns with a saucer of milk gravy on the side, toast dripping with butter, grits, orange juice, coffee and cream.

  “Sure you got enough?” I said.

  “I’ve been cutting back on sugar and the deep-fried stuff. Can you tell?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  We found a table in the corner and started eating. I wondered how long it would take for him to get to the subject at hand, whatever it was.

  “Why the suit?” I asked finally.

  “I’m going over to East Texas. There’s a service for Hugo Tillinger.” He stared innocuously at the door as though he had said nothing of consequence.

  “You don’t owe Tillinger anything, Clete.”

  “If I’d called in a 911 when he jumped off the top of that freight train, maybe a lot of this stuff wouldn’t have happened. Later I had a chance to bust him, and I didn’t do that either.”

  “He wasn’t a player. Lose the sackcloth and ashes. And leave those people in Texas alone.”

  “Think so?”

  Once again I had become his priest. “Yeah, over the gunnels with the doodah.” But I was bothered by Tillinger’s death, too. I thought he got a raw shake all the way around. I tried to change the subject. “Did you and Alafair have a good time at Red Lerille’s last night?”

  “She didn’t tell you about the run-in with Tee Boy Ladrine?”

  “The jail guard who got fired?”

  “Yeah, Lou Wexler deliberately plows into him, then apologizes by pounding on his back until the guy can’t breathe.”

  “Wexler has a beef with him or something?”

  “Something about civil rights and how the inmates got treated in the jail. He got a little sensitive with me.”

  “You?”

  “So I tell him he’s quite a guy, and he starts talking about Desmond Cormier and Roncevaux and how much he loves and pities Cormier.”

  “Alafair didn’t tell me any of this.”

  “Wexler’s gay?”

  “I don’t know. He seems attracted to Alafair.”

  “What’s this stuff about Roncevaux?”

  “It’s high up in the Pyrenees. A battle took place there in the eighth century. The Song of Roland is a celebration of it.”

  “So what do medieval guys clanking around like bags of beer cans have to do with Hollywood?”

  “It’s a little more complex than that.”

  “Speak slowly and I’ll try to catch on. Use flash cards if you have to.”

  “Clete, I was trying to—”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “There are people who believe that the legends of King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail and the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux make it all worthwhile.”

  “Make what worthwhile?”

  “Being born. Dying. That kind of thing.”

  Clete pointed a finger at me. “I don’t want to hear that again. I’ve got enough crazy people in my life already.”

  Other diners were starting to look at us. Clete bent in to his food. Then he wiped his mouth and said, “This stuff is sick, Dave. The deaths of the women, the subhuman cruelty. I can’t sleep. It’s like coming back from Nam. It’s like I’ve got tiger shit in my brain.”

  “We’ll catch whoever is responsible, Clete. It’s a matter of time.”

  “What about Alafair?” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “Somebody was stalking us with a scoped rifle at Henderson Swamp. Maybe the same guy was at Sean McClain’s house. If he can’t clip one of us, maybe he’ll find another target, one whose loss you’ll never survive.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said, my face flushing.

  “You know the future?”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Our guy won’t stop until we tear up his ticket. I’m going to do it, Streak. I’m going to paint the landscape with that cocksucker.”

  The tables around us had gone quiet. I stared at my plate, my ears ringing, wondering where Alafair was at the moment.

  • • •

  WHEN I GOT back on the sidewalk, I called her on my cell. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “I’m just checking in on you, Baby Squanto.”

  That was her nickname when she was little. She had a whole collection of Baby Squanto Indian books. “I’m at the set, down by Morgan City. We’re shooting some of the last scenes.”

  “What time will you be home?”

  “Probably by seven. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Clete told me about Lou Wexler getting into it with the guy at Red’s.”

  “Lou doesn’t like white men who knock women or minority people around.”

  “A man who cares for a woman doesn’t get into a confrontation in front of her,” I said.

  “Lou is a good person, Dave. How about laying off the people I work with? Just for one day.”

  “I didn’t know I was that bad.”

  “I’m going to give you a recorder for your birthday.”

  “See you this evening.”

  I closed my phone. Clete came out of the cafeteria and crossed the street and got into his Caddy in the alley, where it was parked. He drove away without waving. I wanted to believe he hadn’t seen me. I watched the taillights of the Caddy disappear in the traffic, headed west, toward Lafayette and I-10. I felt even older than my years but did not know why.

  • • •

  CLETE DROVE FOR three hours to a brick church in the piney woods of East Texas. B
ehind it, headstones trailed like scattered teeth down a slope to a lake spiked with dead trees, the banks churned with the hoof prints of Angus that had the red scours. The foundation in the church was cracked, the broken panes in the stained glass replaced with cardboard. Clete parked his Caddy and got out. The trees in the distance were bright green, the light harsh. There was a rawness in the wind that chilled his bones.

  The post-burial service, which Clete had indicated he would not attend, had just started. He knew none of the people there. They seemed to be simple people, out of yesteryear, with work-worn hands and faces, the kind of people who didn’t quarrel with their lot and accepted death as they would a shadow moving across a meadow, subsuming whatever was in its path. There was an innocence and shyness about them, like that of children, and he wanted to tell them that but didn’t know how.

  The grave had been filled in, the humped dirt partly covered by a roll of artificial grass. A tall man in black, his hair hanging over his ears, read from the Book of Psalms. Then the service was over, and the mourners drifted off to a table loaded with food in the shade of the church. Clete’s head was cold, and he wished he had brought his hat. He caught up with the man in black. “Sir?”

  The man kept walking. On the far side of the lake, Clete thought he saw a white boxlike truck pull into a grove of pine trees.

  “Reverend?” Clete said.

  The man in black turned around. His face was chiseled, shrunken in the coldness of the wind. One wing of his starched collar was bent up in a point, like a shark’s tooth. “People here’bouts call me Preacher.”

  “My name is Clete Purcel. I’d like to ask you a question about Mr. Tillinger. I’m a private investigator. My question is rather direct and maybe offensive.”

  “Go ahead and ask it.”

  “Did Mr. Tillinger kill his wife and daughter?”

  “No, I do not think that. Hugo would never harm his family. But he had associates who are another matter. Men who do the devil’s work.”

  “Sir?” Clete said.

  “They sell arms in Africa. I visited Hugo before his escape. He wanted to come clean on his life and get shut of the wrongful things he did.”

  “Do you know the names of these guys selling weapons?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Would anybody else here know?”

  “We have nothing to do with those kinds of people. Would you like to have something to eat with us?”

  “Yes, I would,” Clete replied. “Thank you.”

  He walked with Preacher to the picnic tables in the shade. The white truck was still parked among the pines on the far side of the lake; the folding door on the passenger side was open. Clete thought he saw the sun glint on a pair of binoculars. A jolly fat woman handed him a ham-and-onion sandwich. “You look like you’re fixing to fall down, you poor little thing. You better eat up.”

  “Y’all have ice cream trucks hereabouts?” he asked.

  “Like anywhere else, I guess,” she said “You don’t want my sandwich?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I want it,” he said, biting into the bread.

  “Hang around. I got more,” she said. She smiled broadly.

  “Got to go to work.”

  “I bet you were a deep-sea diver in the service,” she said, still beaming.

  He tried to smile at her with his eyes and say nothing, but his energies were used up. “I always liked ham-and-onion sandwiches. Dinner on the ground and that sort of thing.”

  The woman continued to smile at him. She looked massive, her skin windburned, her eyes playful. He gazed at the white truck. It couldn’t be Wimple, could it? Was he losing it? The woman was laughing at a joke someone had told, then looking at Clete. She squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t be so solemn. We all get to the same place. I call it the Gingerbread House.”

  Had she just said that? Her mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out. The preacher was looking at him, too, his hand like a claw around his Bible. Clete left the table and walked toward his Caddy. It seemed too early for the sun to be setting, as though nature had conspired to steal part of the day from him. The white truck was still in the trees. He found a musty sweater in the Caddy’s trunk and put it on under his suit coat; his skin felt dry and cold and raw when he touched it. He drove away from the graveyard, the mourners shrinking inside his rearview mirror.

  • • •

  HE TURNED ONTO a dirt road and tried to access the far side of the lake but ended up on a cattle guard in front of a locked gate. He got out on the shoulder and scanned the trees with his binoculars. The truck was nowhere in sight. He threw his binoculars onto the passenger seat and drove five miles on a county road, then turned east on the interstate. Just as he crossed the Louisiana line, he thought he saw the white truck behind him.

  The heater in the Caddy wasn’t working. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so cold or when his hands had felt so dry and chapped on the wheel. He pulled into a truck stop and had a waitress fill his thermos with black coffee.

  “You got some aspirin?” he said.

  She glanced at the counters that were stocked with snacks and over-the-counter curatives. “Right behind you.”

  “I think I’m about to fall down.”

  “Stay here.”

  She left the counter, then returned with two aspirins on a napkin. She was tall and dark-haired and middle-aged and seemed out of place and too old for her job. A globe and anchor were tattooed on the inside of her forearm. “You don’t look too good, gunny.”

  “How’d you know I was in the Crotch?” he asked.

  “I can tell.”

  “Can you do something else for me?” he said.

  “Depends.”

  “Would you look over my shoulder at the gas pumps and tell me if you see an ice cream truck out there?”

  “One isn’t there now.”

  “Now?”

  “I saw an ice cream truck after you came in. It left.”

  He put a ten-dollar bill on the counter and checked into the motel behind the truck stop. As he walked toward his room, he felt as though his feet were stepping into holes in the floor. He chain-locked the door and fell onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his head. Behind his eyelids he saw artillery rounds mushrooming in a rain forest, scribbling trails of smoke on the night sky like giant spider legs. A navy corpsman was holding a thumb on Clete’s carotid, his hand shiny with gore, struggling to get a compress on it with the other. The corpsman’s face looked made of bone under his steel pot.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  SMILEY DID NOT measure time in terms of clocks or calendars. Time was a series of sensations, like bubbles rising from a caldron, without meaning or predictability. A therapist had told him he’d been raised in an environment where cruelty was masked as love, and the consequence would remain with him like a stone bruise on the soul for the rest of his life.

  He associated sleep with a brief respite from the world, followed by a wet bed in the morning and a belt across his buttocks. Breakfast was a bowl of porridge and a glass of cold milk unless he was assigned to the punishment chair. As a runaway, he learned that the streets of Mexico City were shady and cool in the day and cold at night, and the male and female prostitutes in front of the cantinas were not his friends. He also learned that the hands and lips and genitalia that moved over his body were a testimony to his status in the world—namely, that Smiley Wimple was food, and the scabs and rags and stench on his body and the lice nits in his hair would never be a deterrent to the class of men who preyed upon him.

  Two nights ago he had boosted an ice cream truck from inside the corporate creamery in Lafayette, and yesterday he had driven it to a playground in the little town of Sunset and handed out boxes of Popsicles and Eskimo Pies and ice cream sandwiches to a throng of black children. He did the same in back-of-town Lake Charles and a poor neighborhood in Baton Rouge. He changed license plates twice, although there was apparently no need. A sheriff’s deputy in West Baton Rouge Parish bought a f
rozen sundae from him.

  Early this morning he had driven to New Iberia to try to get rid of his growing obsession with Clete Purcel. Why did this man bother him? Smiley wasn’t sure. Smiley trusted children and some people of color but few white adults, including himself, the latter in large part because he had been taught he was worthless.

  So he kept his contact with others minimal. When he had a problem, he did what addicts and alcoholics call a geographic: He went somewhere else. That was why he liked airplanes. An airplane was an armored womb that not only protected him but was detached from the earth and all its troubles.

  Regarding his line of work, he had no illusions. The people he worked for paid well and gave him Disney World tickets but laughed at him behind his back, at least until someone told them of his capabilities. In fact, Smiley had made a mental note long ago to get to know some of them better after he retired and could afford to do a freebie or two.

  Then why the obsession with the man named Purcel?

  The answer lay in the man’s eyes. There was a calmness in them, a lack of either fear or hostility, a green glow that was unreadable but seemed to absorb everything and nothing. The pale smoothness around the sockets was like a baby’s. Most of the people Smiley knew had scales around their eyes.

  Maybe he needed to prove himself wrong about Clete Purcel. The people he had trusted usually turned out to be traitors, which meant they had to be punished. This man was different. He was a violent man capable of great kindness, a protector not only of abused children and women but people who had no voice or power and were used and discarded. He could have been the male companion of Wonder Woman. The two of them could have married and been Smiley’s parents. That thought filled him with a sensation like sinking in a bathtub of warm water.

  He had followed the Caddy into East Texas and watched the graveyard service through the binoculars, then followed the Caddy back into Louisiana, even into the truck stop, where the man named Purcel had bought a thermos of coffee.

  That was when Smiley, in his preoccupation with Purcel, got careless and picked up a tail of his own.

  He recognized the vehicle from Miami’s Little Havana, a silver Camaro with oversize rear tires and a grille shaped like the mouth of a sea creature and mufflers that throbbed on the asphalt. The owner was Jaime O’Banion, a psychotic button man from New Orleans whom Tony Nemo used to call “half-spick, half-Mick, and half-anything-else-that-don’t-use-rubbers.”