The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “Not drink.”

  He put down his coffee cup and rubbed one hand on top of the other. “I feel like I ain’t no better than them deputies that suffocated the deaf man at the jail.”

  “You’re nothing like those deputies.”

  “That’s a sad story, you know? I heard the deaf man was trying to make sign language when he died.”

  I looked at my watch. “I’m going to Mass at St. Edward’s. Want to go?”

  “Thanks for the coffee. I appreciate you listening to me.”

  “Run that by me again about the deaf man and sign language?”

  • • •

  AFTER HE WAS gone, I went to St. Edward’s. When I returned, a note was on the refrigerator door. It said: Went to Café Sydnie Mae for brunch. See you this afternoon.

  I looked out the side window. Alafair’s car was still in the porte cochere. I called her cell phone. The call went straight to voicemail. I called the Café Sydnie Mae in Breaux Bridge. She wasn’t there. It was 11:14 a.m.

  I went to the office and opened my file drawer and took out every folder I had on the series of homicides that had begun with the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux. I also accessed every bit of electronic information I could find on Frank Dubois, the deaf man who had been suffocated in the Iberia Parish jail. He had one of those rap sheets that was full of contradictions, like a puzzle box shaken up and dropped on the floor. He grew up in New Orleans, on the edge of the Garden District, and attended Tulane University for three years in the 1960s, but was arrested twice for possession; then he cruised on out to sunny CA and got hooked up with the Mongols. He had half a dozen narcotics-related arrests in San Bernardino, Bakersfield, and Oakland, and ended up spending a year in Atascadero. A prison psychologist had noted in the margin of his sheet: I.Q. above 160, symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Antisocial, narcissistic, and fears isolation and physical restraint. Potentially dangerous.

  I went through my notes on all the victims. Joe Molinari still perplexed me more than the others. Why did our killer want to murder such a harmless man? His jobs took him nowhere, and his employers were of no substance and rarely kept records. Except one: Molinari had been a janitor for two years at the Iberia Parish courthouse.

  This may sound strange to an outsider, but the patronage culture in Louisiana is systemic, from the most humble kind of work to the governor’s office. Procedure, honorable conduct, attention to the rules, acuity, experience, and skill have secondary value at best. You cannot get a state job cleaning a toilet unless you know someone. For a man like Molinari—who did asbestos teardowns—a steady paycheck, decent hours, health insurance, social security, and unemployment coverage were a gift from God.

  So who got him the job? I called Helen and asked.

  “I remember him working at the courthouse,” she said. “He kept to himself.”

  “No friends?”

  “He used to eat lunch with a deputy by the cemetery.”

  “Which deputy?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Helen?”

  “One of the guys who suffocated the inmate at the jail. Son of a bitch.”

  I could hear the receiver humming in my ear. “You can’t be expected to remember information from twenty-five years ago.”

  “No, no, I screwed up. The deputy was his cousin. He probably put in a word for Molinari and got him the job. Maybe Molinari’s death is connected to the scandal at the jail.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Dave, I had my head up my ass. I pulled your badge when I should have pulled my own. The deaf man, what was his name?”

  “Frank Dubois,” I said.

  “Where was he from?”

  “New Orleans. He went to Tulane. A former AB kid named Spider Dupree said that Dubois had a coat of arms tattooed on his back and spoke Latin or Greek.”

  “Dave, I need to apologize to you. I acted like a real bitch.”

  “You may be lots of things, but that’s not one of them,” I said.

  “That’s why I love you, Pops.”

  I called Bailey and told her what I’d learned.

  “You think Molinari was payback for the suffocation death?” she said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “So who’s the tie-in with Molinari?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe one of our movie friends.”

  “I need to tell you something,” she said. “Desmond called me last night.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, Bailey.”

  “He asked me to go to Arizona with him. I told him no.”

  “Bailey—”

  “I don’t know if it’s over between us or not,” she said.

  “It was wrong from the jump. Not on your part. Mine. I took advantage of the situation.”

  “I’m a victim?” she said. “I’m too young and inexperienced to know what I’m doing?”

  “Got to go, Bailey.”

  “Every time we talk, I feel like someone extracted my heart.”

  I eased the phone down in the cradle and stood at the window, looking down at the Teche and the sunlight flashing as brightly as daggers on the current.

  • • •

  I CALLED DESMOND CORMIER’S home number. There was no answer. I called Sean McClain on his cell phone. “This morning at the airport, who’d you see get on the plane?”

  “There was two planes,” Sean said.

  “Okay, who’d you see get on?”

  “I don’t know their names.”

  “You saw Desmond Cormier?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How about Lou Wexler?”

  “I don’t know who that is. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know where Alafair is.”

  “You think—”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think, and it scares the hell out of me.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Go back to the airport and find out who was on those planes.”

  “Maybe Alafair will show up, Dave. Don’t get too worried.”

  “Do you remember what Hilary Bienville’s body looked like?” I asked.

  • • •

  I WENT FROM HOUSE to house up and down East Main, asking my neighbors if they had seen Alafair leave our simple shotgun home. I mention its simplicity at this point in my story to indicate the contrast I felt between the loveliness of the morning, the leaves blowing along the sidewalks, the flowers blooming in the gardens, the massive live oaks spangled with light and shadow, all of these gifts set in juxtaposition to the violence and cruelty that had fallen upon us like a scourge and now seemed to have cast their net over my daughter.

  I walked past the Steamboat House, which sat like a dry-docked ornate paddle wheeler in an ambience of Victorian and antebellum splendor that often belied the realities of slavery and, later, the terrorism of the White League during Reconstruction. Farther down the street, an elderly lady was on her hands and knees, weeding the garden in the old Burke home, a pair of steel-frame spectacles on her nose. She looked up at me and smiled. “How do you do, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Just fine,” I said. “Alafair went somewhere with a friend while I was at Mass. I wondered if you might have seen her.”

  “I didn’t see her, but I did see an unusual car stop in front of your home,” she replied, still on her hands and knees. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “Unusual in what way?”

  “I think the name is Italian.”

  “A Lamborghini?”

  “I’m not much on the names of cars.”

  “What color was it?”

  “Definitely cherry-red. No question about that.”

  Wexler.

  “Have I upset you?” she asked.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” I said, the backs of my legs shaking. “Thank you.”

  I hurried away, my stomach sick.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I CALLED ALAFAIR’S CELL phone again, and again it went straight to voicemail
. I called Sean.

  “Yo, Dave,” he said.

  “What’s your twenty?”

  “Just coming back from the airport. Couldn’t find anybody who knew anything positive. One guy said he thought he saw Cormier get on a private plane, but he wasn’t sure.”

  “Lou Wexler rents a place in St. Martinville, but I don’t know where. He drives a cherry-red Lamborghini. Go to the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department and find out. We ROA there.”

  “You can probably beat me there.”

  “I’m picking up Clete Purcel.”

  “What’s the deal on Wexler?”

  “I don’t know. I missed something on him. Something Clete told me. Or maybe Alafair told me. I can’t remember.”

  “Copy that,” he said. “Out.”

  I got into my truck and drove past the Shadows, then swung over to St. Peter’s Street and headed for Clete’s motor court. On Sundays, Clete usually washed or waxed his convertible and barbecued a pork roast or a chicken on the grill under the oaks by the bayou. If the weather was warm, he wore his knee-length Everlast boxing trunks and LSU or Tulane or Raging Cajuns sweatshirt, his upper arms the circumference of a fully pressurized fire hose. With luck, his metabolism would be free of the toxins that had impaired much of his life.

  This morning, however, none of the foresaid applied. He was walking up and down in front of his cottage, cell phone to his ear, wearing a Hawaiian shirt outside his slacks; his shoes were shined, his hair wet-combed. He looked thinner, twenty years younger, wired to the eyes. I stopped the truck and got out, the engine still running. “What’s going on?”

  “I was just calling you. Where’s Alafair?”

  “Maybe with Lou Wexler.”

  He looked into space, then back at me. “Wexler?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought maybe—”

  “What?”

  “I’m confused. I saw Cormier drive by early this morning.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “How many guys around here have an expression like a skillet and look carved out of rock? I thought maybe he went to your house.”

  I rarely saw fear in the face of Clete Purcel. He pinched his mouth.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I just got a call from Alafair.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “No. There was just a little hiccup of a voice, like she’d butt-dialed and was talking to somebody else and clicked off again. At least, that’s what I thought I was hearing.”

  “You’re not making sense, Cletus.”

  “I think maybe she was saying ‘Help.’ ”

  I felt a hole open in the bottom of my stomach. “Was Desmond driving a Lamborghini?”

  “No, he was in a Humvee, same one he was driving at the res.”

  “The lady who lives in the old Burke home saw a cherry-red Lamborghini stop at my house.”

  “It was Wexler?”

  “There’s no other Lamborghini around here. Just a minute.” I called Helen at home. No one answered. I called Bailey Ribbons. “I think either Lou Wexler or Desmond Cormier has got his hands on Alafair,” I said.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “Des is probably in Arizona now.”

  “He’s not. Clete saw him a short while ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “It’s not difficult. Desmond Cormier is a liar.”

  “You don’t have to talk that way,” she said.

  I hung up.

  “What do you want to do?” Clete said.

  “We’re supposed to ROA with Sean McClain in St. Martinville.”

  “I need my piece.”

  “Get it,” I said.

  “What have you got in the truck?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  • • •

  WE DROVE UP the two-lane toward St. Martinville, through the tunnel of oaks on the north side of New Iberia. Perhaps it was the season or perhaps not, but the light was wrong. It was brittle, flickering, harsh on the eyes, suggestive of a cruel presence in the natural world. We passed the two-story frame house with a faux-pillared gallery that had been built by a free man of color before the War Between the States. According to legend, he had worn elegant clothes and spoken Parisian French and had his land and wealth stolen from him by carpetbaggers after the war. To this day, no one has ever succeeded in painting the building a brilliant white: within a short time, the paint is quickly dulled by dust from the cane fields or smoke from stubble fires, as though the structure itself bears the legacy of a man who betrayed his race and sought to become what he was not at the expense of his brethren and ultimately himself.

  As I stared through the windshield, the two-lane unspooling before me, I knew something was terribly wrong in the external structure of the day, in the rules that supposedly govern mortality and the laws of physics. Dust devils were churning inside the uncut cane, troweling rooster tails seventy feet into the air, although the temperature was dropping and the wind was cold enough to dry and crack the skin. By the side of the road was a watermelon and strawberry stand with wooden tables under a live oak hung with Spanish moss. There had not been a fruit stand on that road for decades; plus, we never saw melons and strawberries after August, unless they were imported and on sale at an expensive grocery in Lafayette.

  Then I saw two middle-aged people holding hands by the roadside. The man was huge and wore strap overalls and a tin hard hat slanted on his head. He grinned and gave me the thumbs-up sign. The woman wore a wash-faded print dress and a red hibiscus flower in her hair; she was also smiling, like someone welcoming a visitor at an entryway.

  The man and woman were my mother and father. Behind them, I saw Smiley Wimple with two little girls dressed in white and hung with chains of flowers. The wound in Smiley’s side glowed with an eye-watering radiance.

  My truck shot past them, blowing newspaper and dust all over the road.

  “Watch where you’re going!” Clete said.

  “You saw that?” I said.

  “Saw what?”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. The newspaper had settled on the asphalt. There was nothing on either side of the highway except pastureland and cane fields. “Did you see those people?”

  “What people?”

  “Don’t shine me on,” I said.

  “I didn’t see anything. What the hell are you talking about?”

  I stared at him, then had to correct the wheel to keep from going off the shoulder. “I’m not going to jack you around. I just saw my parents. I saw Smiley, too. With two little girls.”

  “Pull over.”

  “No.”

  “This isn’t Nam, Streak. You roger that, noble mon? We got no medevac. In the next fifteen minutes we may have to kick some serious ass. You stop talking bullshit.”

  “I know what I saw. Don’t give me a bad time about it either.”

  “Okay,” he replied. “Okay. We can’t blow it. These guys are going to kill Alafair.”

  “Guys?”

  “The sick fucks are working together.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “It’s about the jail. It’s a war on this whole fucking area.” He looked straight ahead, rigid in the seat, his fists clenched like small hams on his knees, his face as tight as latex stretched on his skull, his chest rising and falling.

  “You’re losing it, Clete.”

  “This from the guy who just saw his dead parents?”

  His right hand was twitching on his thigh.

  • • •

  YOU KNOW HOW death is. It can be a strange companion. Its smell is like no other in the world. I remember an ARVN graves unit digging up the bodies of villagers who had been buried alive along a streambed deep in the heart of Indian country. The stench broke through the soil and reminded me of the whores pouring their waste buckets into the privies behind the cribs on Railroad Avenue, back when I threw the newspaper in New Iberia’s old red-light district. The putresc
ence of the odor, however, doesn’t compare to the image of the flesh when it’s exposed by a shovel. It’s marbled with whitish-yellow boils and fissures in the skin that look like centipedes, and the eyes resemble fish scale and are either half-lidded or as bulging and black and white as an eight ball.

  If a person is interested in the kind of war scene my patrol stumbled upon, I can add a few details to satisfy his curiosity. If our hypothetical observer had been there, he would have seen the bodies being rolled into tarps, and the hands of the dead that were little more than bones held together by a hank of skin; he would have also noticed that the fingernails were broken and impacted with dirt; that night our observer would have had a very stiff drink and tried to convince himself that Dachau and Nanking were a historical perversion and not a manifestation of the worm that lives in the human unconscious.

  These are certainly not good images to reflect upon, but I like to offer them for the purview of those who love wars as long as they don’t have to participate in one. That said, the ubiquity of the worm does not manifest itself only on battlefields. It can take on an invisibility that is more insidious than the footage I can never rinse from my dreams. You don’t smell it or see it, but in your sleep, you see it grow in size and nestle on your chest and squeeze the air from your lungs. You spend the rest of the night with the light on or a drink in your hand or your hand clasped on a holy medal, and you pray on your knees for the dawn to come. After the sun breaks on the horizon, you may see figures standing in the shade of a building, or in an alleyway, or among wind-thrashed trees, and you’ll quickly realize the bell you hear tolling in the distance is one that no one else can either hear or see.

  That’s when you know you’ve taken up residence in a very special place you cannot tell others about, lest you frighten them or embarrass yourself. You’ve seen the great reality and have accepted it for what it is, and in so doing, you have been set free. But by anyone’s measure, the dues you pay are not for everyone. Psychiatrists call it a Garden of Gethsemane experience. It’s a motherfucker, and you never want to have it twice.

  I’m saying I no longer worry about death, at least my own. But the thought of losing my daughter was more than I could bear. There is no human experience worse than losing one’s child, and to lose a child at the hands of evil men causes a level of emotional pain that has no peer. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. That is why I never argue with those who want to see the murderers of their children receive the ultimate penalty, although I do not believe in capital punishment.