The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  We crossed the St. Martinville city limits and rode through the black district, past Bella Delahoussaye’s cottage, and stopped in front of the sheriff’s department. Sean McClain was standing outside his cruiser, waiting for us.

  I parked and got out of the truck. “What do you have?”

  “Wexler’s address up the bayou,” he replied. “A deputy said he saw the Lamborghini go through the square early this morning. He remembered it because it was in his brother-in-law’s repair shop for a couple of days.”

  “That’s why Wexler was driving Butterworth’s Subaru in the park,” I said. “Is there a deputy sitting on Wexler’s place?”

  “I told them not to do nothing till you got here.”

  “Give me the address. Follow us but stay a block behind.”

  “What about the St. Martin deputies?” Sean said.

  I shook my head.

  “Is that smart?” he said.

  I looked at him without speaking.

  “It’s your show,” he said.

  • • •

  WE PULLED INTO a shady lot on the Teche, just outside the city limits. The house was a large, weathered gingerbread affair, the wide, railed gallery overgrown with banana fronds, the rain gutters full of leaves and moss, the tin roof streaked with rust. The chimney was cracked, a broken lightning rod hanging from the bricks. There were no vehicles in the yard or garage. I got out and banged on the door, then circled the house. My caution about the St. Martin Parish authorities was unnecessary; no one was home. I splintered the front door out the jamb and went inside.

  Every room was immaculate and squared away. I began pulling clothes off hangers and raking shelves onto the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Clete said.

  “Finding whatever I can.”

  “We don’t know that Wexler has Alafair. Cormier is out there somewhere.”

  “It’s Wexler. She was here. I can feel it.”

  Clete looked at me strangely.

  “It’s something a father knows,” I said.

  Sean McClain was still outside. Through the open front door, I saw Bailey Ribbons pull into the lot in a cruiser. She got out and walked into the living room. “Helen says we’ll have the whole department on this, Dave. What do you have so far?”

  “We found out from a St. Martin deputy that Wexler’s Lamborghini was in the shop. He’d probably borrowed Butterworth’s Subaru when Wimple accosted him.”

  “You dumped his closets and shelves?” she said.

  “I’m just getting started.”

  “Maybe dial it down a little bit? We don’t want to lose something in the shuffle.”

  She was right. I was in overdrive. “Check the kitchen. I’m going in the attic.”

  I pulled down the drop door in the bedroom ceiling and climbed up the steps. I shone a penlight around the attic walls. A heavy trunk, a wardrobe box, and a handwoven basket-like baby carriage were in one corner. The wardrobe box was stuffed with historical costumes that smelled of mothballs. The baby carriage was filled with bandanas, women’s shoes, empty purses and wallets, and old Polaroids of third-world women in bars and cafés. All the women were smiling. The trunk was unlocked. I lifted the top. It was packed with video games, the kind that award the shooters or drivers points for the victims they rack up.

  I dumped the trunk and wardrobe box, then the baby carriage. As the purses and wallets and women’s clothing and photos spilled

  on the floor, I saw the one object I did not want to find, one that sucked the air from my chest.

  I picked it out of the pile and went down the ladder and eased the drop door back into the ceiling, then went into the kitchen. Bailey was sitting at the table. “What is it?”

  I set the box on the table. “The tarot.”

  “Shit,” Clete said behind me.

  I sat down and put the deck in Bailey’s hand. “See if there’s anything significant about the deck. Missing cards or whatever.”

  She began separating the suits, then stopped and set one card aside. It was a card called the Empress. It was also disfigured. She resumed sorting the deck and put four other cards with the Empress. “The Queen of Cups, the Queen of Pentacles, the Hanged Man, the Ten of Wands, the Empress, the Ace of Wands, and the Fool all have X’s cut on them,” she said. “The Queen of Cups is Bella Delahoussaye. The Queen of Pentacles is Hilary Bienville. The Hanged Man and the Ten of Wands could be Joe Molinari. The Fool might be Antoine Butterworth. The Empress is Lucinda Arceneaux. The Ace of Swords is for sure Axel Devereaux.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Clete said.

  “No,” she replied. “That’s all guesswork.”

  “Why is Lucinda Arceneaux the Empress and not Hilary or Bella?” I said.

  “The Empress is the earth mother, the patroness of charity and kindness.”

  “Why are you so certain about the Ace of Swords for Axel Devereaux?” I said.

  “The Ace of Swords means raw power,” she said. “In reverse, it can mean loss and hatred and self-destruction. Devereaux had a baton shoved down his throat. The killer put a fool’s cap on him to ridicule him in death.”

  “Why two cards for Molinari?” I said.

  “Good question. My guess is Wexler thinks of him as both a sacrificial and a mediocre personality. Molinari was related to one of the guards in the jail?”

  “Yes,” I said. But she already knew that. She was holding something back; I was afraid to find out what.

  “The High Priestess is missing from the deck,” she said.

  “What’s the High Priestess?” I said.

  “She sits at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple. She holds the Book of Wisdom in her hand and is identified with purity and intellectualism.”

  I felt my heart slowing, as though it no longer had the power to pump blood. “You think the High Priestess is Alafair?”

  Bailey visibly tried not to swallow. “Who else would it be? Maybe he saved her out. There’s something else I want you to see.”

  I coughed into my hand. “What?”

  “This.” The letters B and S had been scratched into the table’s surface. “They’re fresh, maybe cut with a fork. They mean anything to you other than ‘bullshit’?”

  I was having trouble breathing. “They’re a message to me from Alafair. I think they stand for ‘Baby Squanto.’ ”

  I went outside and across the gallery and out into the yard. The sky was an unnatural blue, shiny, hard to look at. Bailey followed me. “Everything we’re doing now is based on speculation,” she said.

  “I think everything you said is correct,” I said. “Don’t try to put a good hat on it.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “The guy we’re dealing with is a ritualist. What looks crazy to us makes complete sense to him. He’s going to come back to the place he started. The challenge is to put yourself in the head of a lunatic.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Ritualists often seek symmetry. People with severe psychological disorders have trouble drawing a tree or making a circle. Our guy will try to come full circle.”

  “With the cross out on the water?” I said.

  “Or something like it.”

  “Do you have any idea how many square miles of water you’re talking about?” I said.

  “That’s about as good as it gets, Dave,” she replied. “I’m sorry to say all these things. Maybe I’m dead wrong.”

  I looked back at the house. The sun was higher in the sky. The shadows had dropped down into the trees. The house looked cold and empty and drab in the bright light.

  “It all seems too easy,” I said.

  “What does?” she said.

  “The baby carriage filled with trophies from his crimes. The boxed cards with X’s cut on them.”

  “He’s a trophy killer,” she said.

  Clete was talking to Sean by the gallery while Sean stared at his feet as though being berated. Clete walked toward me. “Can you give us a mi
nute, Miss Bailey?” he said.

  “No, I cannot,” she said. “Where do you get off with that attitude?”

  “I was just wondering about McClain,” he said.

  “What about him?” she said.

  “He told me he might be going out to Hollywood. That Cormier might be casting him.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “He’s a kid.”

  “I thought he was North Lousiana’s answer to the Lone Ranger,” Clete said.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “That he shouldn’t be palling around with a guy who might be aiding and abetting a murderer,” Clete said.

  I stared at Sean in the sunlight. He wore a department hat that made his face look gray and dusty under the brim, as if he had been working all day in a field. He tried to smile at me, but his lip seemed to catch on a bottom tooth.

  “You sure that kid’s not hinky?” Clete said.

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Lou Wexler.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “I’M GLAD I caught you,” he said.

  My hand was trembling on the phone. “Where are you, Mr. Wexler?”

  “Trying to find Alafair. Lose the formality. We’re on the same side.”

  “Alafair is not with you?”

  “Desmond has her. Stop listening to that man’s lies.”

  “We’re at your house in St. Martinville. I saw the tarot. I saw your trophies in the attic.”

  “What trophies?”

  “The wallets and purses and shoes and bandanas.”

  “Those are props from a film we made about a serial killer.” He gave me the title and named the actors and the directors. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t process his words.

  “I don’t know anything about a tarot,” he went on. “If you found it in my house, Des put it there. He’s been salting the mineshaft. Isn’t that the term for it?”

  “How do you account for the shooting in City Park?”

  “You’ve got me on that one. My Lamborghini was in the shop, so I borrowed Antoine’s Subaru. I was having a go of it with a local lady when this nasty little sod walked up on me and tried to put out my wick. So I clicked off his switch. I shouldn’t have run. I was going to turn myself in today. I have an attorney. You can check out my story.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “I’m not quite sure about my safety at this point.”

  “You think we’re going to kill you in custody?”

  “I’ve seen the way you and your Falstaffian friend do business, sir. The other problem is I don’t think you have a bloody clue what’s been going on in your own life.”

  “Repeat that?”

  “I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but your homicide partner is not what she seems. She set fire to a school as a child, and she fried some fellows at a fairgrounds up in Montana.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I knew her in New Orleans. I was sticking it to her long before you did. Sorry to tell you, she’s not Clementine Carter, as Des is always saying. What a fucking joke. I’ll be back with you later. Or maybe not.”

  He broke the connection. I folded the phone in my hand and tried to keep my face empty.

  “That was Wexler?” Bailey said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “What did he say?”

  “That except for shooting Wimple, he’s an innocent man.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Did you know him in New Orleans?”

  “No.”

  “Never saw him before you came to the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”

  “No. Is that what he told you?”

  “We need to get a net over Desmond Cormier,” I said.

  “Cormier has Alafair?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.”

  She looked at me in dismay. I walked toward my truck. I have long had problems with vertigo, the kind caused by a tightening of blood vessels in the brain. I could feel the ground caving under my feet. Then I felt Clete fitting his hand inside my upper arm. He opened the driver’s door and steadied me so I could step inside.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “What did that cocksucker say?”

  “He knows things about Bailey that would be impossible for him to know, unless he’d had a relationship with her. He says the stuff from the attic are movie props. He knows nothing about a tarot deck.”

  “What else?”

  “Alafair may already be dead. Or maybe Cormier has her. I just don’t know.”

  “Don’t say that about her being dead. You hear me, Streak? Don’t even think it. I’m going to get these guys. I promise you.”

  He looked like he was drowning.

  • • •

  BAILEY AND OUR departmental pilot and I took the pontoon plane over the wetlands south of New Iberia. It might have seemed a waste of time to others, but we had nothing else to go on. I had no idea where Desmond Cormier might be. Wexler knew Bailey’s history, which gave plausibility to the other things he’d said. Possibly he had worked as a companion killer with Desmond. That I’ve spoken of Desmond’s physiognomy several times probably says more about me than Desmond. The prenatal alcoholic influence stamped on his features was undeniable, the inner reality one I had never wanted to accept.

  As the plane dipped and turned and glided over the swamps and marshlands that were shrinking daily, I wondered what to look for. Maybe a white cabin cruiser couched in a green harbor. A cherry-red Lamborghini. A houseboat or a duck camp where Alafair had set a fire as a mayday signal. These thoughts were the product of desperation, and they led me to worse thoughts, namely, that I might see Alafair costumed and floating out to sea, closing the circle for the killer, as Bailey had predicted.

  I had thought my days in the Garden of Gethsemane were over and my ticket had been punched, and that I belonged to the club of those who were inured to the worst the world could offer. But as I looked at the miles and miles of salt grass and flooded gum trees and milky-green curtains of algae that floated atop the bays, I knew that I was powerless over my situation, and the last remnant of my family had perhaps been subsumed by the evil forces I have fought against all my life, most of it in vain.

  • • •

  WHAT DOES THE expression “hell on earth” mean? In my experience, it usually has to do with our own handiwork. Freight cars clicking down the tracks on their way to Buchenwald. A nineteen-year-old peasant girl set alight while tied to a stake in Rouen, France. The slaughter of fifty million buffalo to starve the American Indian into submission.

  Or a child who survived a massacre in an El Salvadoran village and grew into an attorney and a novelist, only to be kidnapped by a fellow countryman and perhaps locked in a car trunk, hog-tied, eyes and mouth wrapped with tape. That image lived like a scream inside my head.

  • • •

  WE LANDED OFF Cypremort Point and taxied across the water to a dock where Clete Purcel was waiting for us. He was wearing a windbreaker and khakis and lace-up canvas-and-rubber hunting boots, his hair blowing in the wind. He looked at Bailey, then back at me. “I got a tip.”

  I waited, the wind cupping in my ears.

  “From the black gal who was chugging pole for Wexler when he popped Wimple in City Park,” he said.

  “We don’t need the detail,” Bailey said.

  “Do you want to hear me out or not?” he replied.

  “What did she say?” Bailey asked.

  “She turns tricks out of a couple of motels in Lafayette,” he said. “She does specialties for geeks. She says Wexler is a regular. She had dinner one time with Cormier.”

  “Dinner?” I said.

  “Yeah, she knows him pretty good. She says he’s weird.”

  “What does she know about Alafair?” I said.

  “I’m trying to get to that,” he said. “She says Wexler and Cormier brought her to a duck camp. Cormier went off on his own while she took care o
f Wexler. She says Wexler told her there were drowned Nazi sailors about half a mile from shore. She thought he was making fun of her.” He kept his eyes on me.

  “You know a place like that?” Bailey said.

  “I’m not sure,” Clete replied.

  I knew exactly where the place was, and so did Clete. In the early days of World War II, German U-boats lay in wait for the oil tankers that sailed from the refineries in Baton Rouge. In New Iberia, we could see the glow of the tankers burning at night, just beyond the southern horizon. In the fall of ’42, a German sub had been depth-charged from the air and sunk in sixty feet of water. All these years it had been sailing, as far out as the edge of the continental shelf, but it always came back to the place where it had been sunk.

  “Where’s the black woman now?” Bailey said.

  “I talked to her on her cell,” Clete said. “She’s not going to come anywhere near us.”

  Bailey had come to the dock in a police cruiser, and I had my truck. Clete’s Caddy was parked by a boat ramp.

  “I’m going to head back to town,” I said to Bailey. “I’ll call you from my house.”

  “We need the black woman,” she said. “What’s her name?”

  “I can’t give it to you,” Clete said.

  “You’re about to get yourself in some serious trouble,” she said.

  “What’s new?” he replied.

  She walked away, her back stiff with anger, the wind blowing hard enough to show her scalp. I didn’t like deceiving Bailey, but I no longer trusted her, or Sean McClain, or several other colleagues who had ties to Axel Devereaux.

  “I brought my AR-15,” Clete said.

  “You’re sure the hooker isn’t jacking us?”

  “I’m like you,” he said. “Not sure of anything. Let’s rock.”

  • • •

  IT WAS ALMOST dusk when we arrived at the southern end of Terrebonne Parish and parked on the levee. We walked down the slope into water over our ankles. I had put on a canvas coat and a hat to keep the tree limbs out of my eyes, and had stuffed one pocket with double-aught bucks and pumpkin rounds, and slung my cut-down pump from my shoulder. I had a flashlight in my other coat pocket, and a spare magazine for Clete’s AR-15. He had taken it off a drug mule he’d busted as a bail skip on Interstate 10. It was outfitted with a bump-fire stock and fired as fast as a machine gun.