Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  She tapped on Hackberry’s door but opened it without waiting for him to answer. He was on the phone, his eyes drifting to hers. “Thanks for the alert, Ethan. We’ll get back to you if we hear anything,” he said into the receiver. He hung up and seemed to think about the conversation he’d just had, his gaze not actually taking her in. “What’s up?” he said.

  “Danny Boy Lorca just came in drunk. He says he saw a man killed.”

  “Where?”

  “I didn’t get that far. He’s in the shower.”

  Hackberry scratched at his cheek. Outside, the American flag was snapping on its pole against a gray sky, the fabric washed so thin that the light showed through the threads. “That was Ethan Riser at the FBI. They’re looking for a federal employee who might have been grabbed by some Mexican drug mules and taken to a prison across the border. An informant said the federal employee could have gotten loose and headed for home.”

  “I’ve heard Danny Boy has been digging up dinosaur eggs south of his property.”

  “I didn’t know there were any around here,” Hackberry said.

  “If they’re out there, he’d be the guy to find them.”

  “How’s that?” he said, although he wasn’t really listening.

  “A guy who believes he can see the navel of the world from his back window? He says all power comes out of this hole in the ground. Down inside the hole is another world. That’s where the rain and the corn gods live. Compared to a belief system like that, hunting for dinosaur eggs seems like bland stuff.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  She waited, as though examining his words. “Try this: He says the killing took fifteen minutes to transpire. He says he heard it all. You think this might be the guy the feds are looking for?”

  Hackberry bounced his knuckles lightly up and down on the desk blotter and stood up, straightening his back, trying to hide the pain that crept into his face, his outline massive against the window. “Bring your recorder and a pot of coffee, will you?” he said.

  THE REPORT DANNY Boy gave of the murder he had witnessed was not one that lent itself to credulity. “You were drinking before you went digging for dinosaur eggs?” Hackberry said.

  “No, sir, I hadn’t had a drop in two days.”

  “Two days?” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir, every bit of it. I got eighty-sixed. I didn’t have no more money, anyway.”

  “Well, you must have seen what you saw,” Hackberry said. “Want to take a ride?”

  Danny Boy didn’t answer. He was sitting on the iron bunk of his cell, wearing lace-up boots without socks and clean jailhouse jeans and a denim shirt, his hair wet from his shower and his skin as dark as smoke. His hands were folded in his lap, his shoulders slumped.

  “What’s the problem?” Hackberry said.

  “I’m ashamed of what I done.”

  “Not helping this guy out?”

  “Yes, sir. They was talking about La Magdalena.”

  “Who?”

  “A holy woman.”

  “Don’t feel so down about this, partner. They would have killed you, too. If they had, you wouldn’t be helping us in the investigation, would you?” Hackberry said.

  Danny Boy’s eyes were focused on a spot ten inches in front of him. “You didn’t see it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Hackberry replied. He started to say something about his own experience in No Name Valley many years ago but thought better of it. “Let’s get this behind us, partner.”

  Pam Tibbs drove the three of them down the main street of the town in the department’s Jeep Cherokee, the traffic light over the intersection bouncing on its cable in the wind. The newer buildings on the street were constructed of cinder blocks; some of the older ones were built out of fieldstones that had been cemented together and sheathed with plaster or stucco that had fallen off in chunks, leaving patterns that resembled a contagious skin disease. Pam followed a winding two-lane state highway southward through hills that looked like big brown ant piles or a sepia-tinted photograph taken on the surface of Mars. Then she drove across Danny Boy’s property, past his stucco house and his barn that was plated from the bottom to the eaves with hubcaps, onto the geological fault that bled into Old Mexico and a strip of terrain that always seemed to ring with distant bugles echoing off the hills. For Hackberry Holland, these were not the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.

  Pam shifted down and kept the Jeep on the high ground above the riverbed that Danny had walked the previous night, the hard-packed gravel vibrating through the frame. “There,” Danny said, pointing.

  “Under the buzzards?” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are your dinosaur eggs?”

  “At the house.”

  “You sure those aren’t rocks?” Hackberry said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

  But his attempt to relieve Danny Boy of depression and fear was to no avail. The guilt and sorrow Danny Boy had taken with him from the previous night would probably come aborning in his dreams for many years, and all the beer in all the beer joints in Texas would not make one dent in it, Hackberry thought. “Get upwind from it,” he said to Pam.

  She crossed a slough chained with red pools and layered with clusters of black butterflies sucking moisture from the sand, their wings shuddering as though they were ingesting toxin. She parked on the incline, above the collapsed rails of the corral that had been used by a one-eyed man who killed and sold mustangs for dog food. When Hackberry stepped out on the passenger side, his eyes roved over the tangles of tumbleweed and bleached wood and the remains of the man whose death may have been the most merciful moment in his life. “You ever see anything like this?” Pam said, her words clotting in her throat.

  “Not exactly. Maybe close, but not exactly,” Hackberry replied.

  “What are we dealing with?” she said.

  “Call the coroner’s office, then get Felix and R.C. down here. I want photos of this from every angle. String as much tape as you can around the crime scene. Make sure nobody disturbs those tracks going south.”

  She went to the Jeep and made the calls, then walked back down the incline, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, her upper arms ridging with muscle. Danny Boy remained in the vehicle, his head lowered. “What did he say the leader’s name was? Krill?” she said to Hackberry.

  “I think that was it.”

  “I’ve heard that before. It’s Spanish?”

  “It’s a shrimplike creature that whales eat.”

  “Funny name for a killer with an M16 strapped on his back.” When he didn’t answer, she looked at him. “You okay, boss?”

  He nodded at the slope above where the victim had died.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “He was scalped, too.”

  Then the wind changed, and a sickening gray odor blew into their faces. It was like fish roe that had dried on warm stone and the putrescence of offal and the liquid wastes poured from a bucket into a ditch behind a brothel on a Saturday night, and it made Pam Tibbs hold her wrist to her mouth and walk back up the incline, fighting to hold back the bilious surge in her stomach.

  Hackberry stepped back from the site and repositioned himself so he was upwind again. But that did not change the nature of the scene or its significance. Often he wondered, as an anthropologist might, what the historical environment of the human race actually was. It wasn’t a subdivision of sprinkled lawns and three-bedroom houses inside of which the television set had become the cool fire of modern man. Could it be a vast sunbaked plain broken by mesas and parched riverbeds where the simian and the mud-slathered and the unredeemed hunted one another with sharpened sticks, where the only mercy meted out was the kind that came as a result of satiation and exhaustion?

  The compulsion to kill was in the gene pool, he thought. Those who denied it were the same ones who killed through proxy. Every professional executioner, every professional soldier, knew that one of his chief duties was to
protect those he served from knowledge about themselves. Or at least those were the perceptions that governed Hackberry’s judgments about societal behavior, even though he shared them with no one.

  He looked to the south. Dust or rain had smudged out the mountains, and the plain seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, the way a snowfield could extend itself into the bottom of a blue winter sky, dipping over the edge of the earth into nothingness. Hackberry found himself swallowing, a nameless fear clutching at his viscera.

  The coroner was Darl Wingate, an enigmatic single man who had been a forensic pathologist with the United States Army and CID before he retired back to the place of his birth. He was laconic, with sunken cheeks and a pencil mustache, and he often had liquor on his breath by ten A.M. He also had degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford. No one had ever been quite sure why he chose to spend his twilight years in a desolate place on the edge of the Great American Desert. It was certainly not because he was filled with compassion for the poor and the oppressed, although he was not a callous man. Hackberry believed that Darl Wingate was simply a pragmatist who saw no separation or difference between the various categories of the human family. In Darl’s mind, they all belonged to one long daisy chain: They were creatures who came out of the womb’s darkness and briefly saw light before their mouths were stopped with dust and their eyes sealed six feet down. As a consequence of his beliefs, he remained a witness and not a participant.

  Darl placed a breath mint on his tongue and put on latex gloves and a surgeon’s mask before he approached the remains of the dead man. The day had grown warmer, the sky more gray, like the color of greasewood smoke, and gnats were rising from the sand.

  “What do you think?” Hackberry asked.

  “About what?” Darl said.

  “What you’re looking at,” Hackberry replied, trying to repress his impatience.

  “The fingers scattered up on the slope went one at a time. The toes were next. My guess is he died from shock. He was probably dead when he was scalped and taken apart, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “You ever work one like this?”

  “On a couple of backstreets in Bangkok. The guy who did it was a church missionary.”

  “So the human race is rotten?”

  “Say again?” Darl said.

  “You’re not giving me a lot of help.”

  “What else can I provide you with?”

  “Anything of specific value. I don’t need the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”

  “From the appearance of the victim—his nails, his emaciated condition, the infection on his manacled wrist, the scabs on his knees, and the lice eggs in the remnant of his hair—I’d say he was held prisoner in primitive and abusive conditions for at least several weeks. The scarring on his face and neck suggests smallpox, which tells me he’s probably Mexican, not American. What doesn’t fit is his dental care.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It’s first-rate.”

  “How would you explain the discrepancy?”

  “My guess is he came from humble origins but did something good with his life,” Darl said.

  “Successful criminals don’t see dentists?”

  “Only when the pain makes it imperative. The rest of the time they’re getting laid or huffing flake up their nose. I think this guy took care of himself. So far, I see no tattoos, no signs of intravenous use, no scars on his hands. I think we might be looking at the remains of a cop.”

  “Not bad.”

  “What happened here says more about the killer than the victim,” Darl said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Whatever information he had, he shouted it to the heavens early on. But his tormentor took it to the finish line anyway. You got any idea what he wanted?”

  “You ever hear of somebody called La Magdalena?” Hackberry asked.

  Darl nodded. “Superstitious wets call her that.”

  “Darl, would you please just spit it out?”

  The coroner screwed a cigarette into his cigarette holder and put it between his teeth. “Sometimes they call her la china. Her real name is Anton Ling. She’s Indo-Chinese or French-Chinese. She looks like an actress in a Graham Greene film. Ring any bells?”

  Hackberry blinked.

  “Yeah, that one,” Darl said. He lit his cigarette and breathed a stream of smoke into the air. “I remember something you once said. It was ‘Wars of enormous importance are fought in places nobody cares about.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “Deal me out of this one,” Darl said. “It stinks from the jump. I think you’re going to be splashing through pig flop up to your ankles.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SIX HOURS LATER, Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland drove down a long dirt track, twenty miles southwest of the county seat, to a paintless gingerbread house that had a wide gallery with a swing on it and baskets of petunias and impatiens hung from the eaves. The landscape looked particularly strange in the sunset, like terrain that might have been used in a 1940s movie, hard-packed and rolling and biscuit-colored and notched with ravines, marbled by thunderheads and the reddening of the sky and dissected by lines of cedar fence posts that had no wire on them.

  Lightning rods flanged each end of the house’s roof, and a windmill in back was ginning furiously, pumping a jet of water into an aluminum tank where three spavined horses were drinking. A white-over brick wall surrounded the house a hundred feet out, like the walls at the Alamo, the top festooned with razor wire and spiked with broken glass. The wood gates on three of the walls had been removed and pulled apart and the planks used to frame up two big vegetable gardens humped with compost, creating the effect of a legionnaire’s outpost whose defense system had been rendered worthless.

  “What’s the deal with this place?” Pam asked.

  “Miss Anton bought the house from a secessionist who took over the courthouse about twenty years ago. After she moved in, I think the Rangers were sorry they locked up the secessionist.”

  “Miss?” Pam said.

  Hackberry was sitting in the passenger seat, his Stetson over his eyes. “It’s a courtesy,” he said.

  They parked the Jeep outside the wall, and got out and studied the southern horizon through a pair of binoculars. “Take a look at this,” she said.

  Hackberry rolled a folder filled with eight-by-ten photos into a cone and stuck it in the side pocket of his trousers, then focused the binoculars on a rocky flume rimmed by mesquite and scrub oak and willow trees. The sky above the hills looked like green gas, the air glistening with heat and humidity, the shell of an automobile half buried in the bleached-out earth, the metal wind-polished as bright as foil. But the contemporary story of this particular place was written across the bottom of the flume. It was layered with moldy clothes, scraps of plastic tarp, tennis shoes split at the seams, smeared toilet paper, spoiled food, empty water bottles, discarded sanitary napkins, and plastic diapers slathered with feces. A circle of turkey buzzards floated just above the hills, the edges of their wings feathering in the wind.

  “She used to be part of that Underground Railroad or whatever?” Pam said.

  “Up in Kansas, I think,” Hackberry said. “But I wouldn’t put it in the past tense.”

  “You call the feds yet?”

  “I haven’t gotten to it.”

  He could feel her staring at the side of his face.

  “If I can make a suggestion—” she began.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “You were a lawyer for the ACLU. That name has the status of whale shit around here. Why add to your problems?”

  “Can you stop using that language on the job? I think both you and Maydeen have an incurable speech defect.”

  He had stepped into it again, allying his dispatcher Maydeen Stoltz with Pam; they were undefeatable when they joined forces against him, to the extent that he sometimes had to lock his office door and pretend he was gone from the building.

  “You don�
��t know how to cover your ass,” Pam said. “So others have to do it for you. Ask anybody in the department. Your constituency might tell you they love Jesus, but the truth is, they want you to grease the bad guys and not bother them with details.”

  “I can’t believe I’m the sheriff of this county and I have to listen to this. And I mean listen to it every day.”

  “That’s the problem. Your heart is too big. You need to be more assertive. Ask Maydeen.” Pam took the binoculars from his hand and replaced them in the leather case and dropped the case on the driver’s seat. “I say too much?”

  “No, why would you possibly think that?” he replied.

  But Pam’s hands were on her hips, and she was obviously thinking about something else. “This woman is supposed to perform miracles? She’s Our Lady of Lourdes out on the plains?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I mean I don’t know. I can’t keep up with your conversation. I can’t track your thoughts, Pam. You’re impossible to talk with.”

  “What you’re not hearing is that other people know your weak spot. Don’t let this Chinese broad jerk you around. Too many people around here already hate your guts. Wake up. You’re kind to the wrong people.”

  “I don’t see it that way. Not at all.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Hackberry fitted on his Stetson and widened his eyes, letting the moment pass, his face tight in the wind. “When we talk with this lady, we remember who we are. We treat people with respect, particularly when they’ve paid their share of dues.”

  “People with causes have a way of letting others do their time on the cross. Tell me I’m full of shit. I double-dare you.”

  Hackberry felt as if someone had set a small nail between his eyes and slowly tapped it into his head with a tack hammer.

  It was hard to estimate the age of the Asian woman who came to the door. She had a compact figure, and wore dark glasses and a white dress with black ribbon threaded through the top of the bodice, and looked no older than a woman in her early forties. But Darl Wingate, the coroner, had told Hackberry that she had lived through Japanese incendiary raids and the massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, and perhaps had worked for Claire Chennault’s Civil Air Transport. The latter had overtones Hackberry didn’t want to think about.