A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “New Orleans was the staging area for the hit on John Kennedy,” he said.

  “Old news,” I said. “No, not just old. Ancient.”

  “I knew one of the guys in on it. He was an enforcer for the Mob in Brooklyn. His street name was Chicken Cacciatore. I ain’t putting you on. He got mixed up with the CIA and some blackmail schemes in Miami.”

  I knew the name of the man he was talking about. He worked for the Miami Better Business Bureau and received paychecks from one of our national political parties as well. He also ran a car-theft ring. I knew that no one could have cared less.

  “You just gonna look at me like that?” he said.

  “I’ll see if I can help out with the interstate parole situation.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Why not? You said you’re going straight.”

  “Like maybe you can get me a job?”

  “Got any car wash experience?”

  He lowered his eyes. He shrugged. “I’m up for whatever it takes.”

  “That was a joke. You’d better not burn me, Marcel.”

  “You still tight with Clete Purcel?” he said.

  “He’s my best friend.”

  “That’s like saying clap is my favorite shade of pink.”

  I rattled the door again and this time called for the screw. “Don’t get your expectations up.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  There it was, the dictatorial command, the smugness and condescension that constitute the tone of every narcissist. I stepped toward him. “Change your tone,” I replied.

  “I tole you I had some information. I was working your crank. I cain’t do time no more. I got too many bad things in my head. Maybe I got to get something off my conscience.”

  I didn’t want to become his confessor. But neither was I an admirer of the Texas prison system. I propped my arms on the table, my back to the door, blocking the screw’s view of Marcel. His face was narrow and furrowed, his cheeks unshaved, dirty-looking, as though rubbed with soot.

  “I was the driver on a whack for the Balangie family,” he said. “The guy was a child molester. He’s in the swamp on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. There’s people in New Iberia who want to know where he’s at.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Are you serious?” he said.

  Like most recidivists, Marcel had spent much of his life inside the system, and his knowledge of the outside world was like a collection of old postcards someone had to explain to him.

  “Hey, you listening?” he said. “There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

  “Put it in your memoir,” I said.

  “Why’d you come here?”

  “I wondered if you were born without a conscience or if you made yourself that way.”

  “You cocksucker.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about the parole.”

  “I don’t want your help. Stay away from me. Don’t use my name.”

  “A deal is a deal,” I said. “You’re stuck with me, Marcel. Disrespect my mother again and I’ll break your jaw.”

  Ten minutes later, as I walked outside through the redbrick complex, I wondered which building had housed the electric chair, called Old Sparky by people who thought shaving the hair off a human being and strapping him to a chair and affixing a metal cap to his scalp and frying him alive was the stuff of humor. I also wondered again if the entirety of our species descended from the same antediluvian soup. My guess is that our origins are far more diverse; I also believe that the truth would terrify most of us. What if we had to accept the fact that we pass on the seed of the lizard in our most loving and romantic moments? That the scales of the serpent are at the corners of our eyes, that bloodlust can have its first awakening when the infant’s mouth finds the mother’s nipple?

  Chapter Three

  I RETURNED TO NEW Iberia and my shotgun house on East Main, not far from the famed antebellum home called the Shadows. I was living the life of a widower back then, in the days before 9/11, a recluse trying to hide from my most destructive addictions, Jack on the rocks with a beer back and my love affair with the state of Louisiana, also known as the Great Whore of Babylon. For me she has always been the embodiment of every vice on the menu, starting with racetracks and bourré tables and casinos and lakes of gin and vodka and sour mash and hookup joints with a honky-tonk special on every stool aching to get it on in four/four time.

  Think I’m giving you a shuck? People of color have a saying: If you’re black on Saturday night, you’ll never want to be white again. The same kind of thinking applies in Louisiana, but on a wider scale and not on a basis of race or the day of the week. The southern half of the state is the cultural equivalent of the Baths of Caracalla; the only difference is the coon-ass accents and the fact the slop chutes never close. I knew a famous country musician who moved to a farmhouse in Carencro to get sober, even surrendering his car keys to his wife. Yeah, I know, with the help of A.A, miracles happen and you can get sober anywhere. That’s what the musician’s wife thought until Mardi Gras kicked into gear and her husband drove the lawn mower eight miles down the highway to Lafayette so he could march in the parade and get soused out of his mind.

  I fished in the evening with a cane pole among people of color, and watched the August light drain out of the sky and gather inside the oaks and disappear on the bayou’s surface in a long brassy band that, as a child, I believed was a conduit to infinity. It was a strange way to be, I guess. I had been suspended or fired from three law enforcement agencies, and even though I was relatively young, I felt the tug of the earth at eveningtide and a gnawing hole in my stomach that told me the great mysteries would always remain the great mysteries, and that the war between good and evil was so vast and unknowable in nature and origin that my ephemeral efforts meant absolutely nothing.

  The weeks passed without any contact from Marcel LaForchette. Then on a Sunday afternoon, when I was walking in City Park, I saw two men in a purple Oldsmobile pull onto the grass and park under the oaks and get out and remove a golf bag from the trunk. They were stout men in their prime, tanned perhaps as much by chemicals as sun, dressed in sport clothes, the kind of men who probably played college football one or two semesters and later sold debit insurance, ex-jocks you felt sorry for.

  Until you looked at the scar tissue in the hairline, or the big hands with too many rings on them, or the white teeth that were too wet, the smile like that of a hungry man staring at a roast.

  They teed up on the grass and whocked two balls down the bayou, watching them arch and splash in the distance.

  “Excuse me,” I said behind them.

  They turned around, resting their clubs, their faces full of sunshine.

  “This isn’t a driving range,” I said.

  “Didn’t think anyone would mind,” the shorter man said. He had thick lips and hair that was long and hung in ringlets and was as bright as gold, like a professional wrestler’s, his biceps as solid as croquet balls. “Did you think anyone would mind, Timmy?”

  “Not unless we hit a fish in the head,” Timmy said.

  “A lot of people seem to think Louisiana is a garbage dump,” I said. “We’ve got trash all over the state.”

  “Yeah,” the shorter man said. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  “He’s talking about us,” Timmy said. “Right? You’re saying we’re trash?” His brown hair was soft-looking and dry and cut in a 1950s flattop and looked like an upturned shoe brush. His smile never left his face.

  “I’m a police officer,” I said. “I’d appreciate y’all not using the bayou as a golf course. That’s all.”

  “We’re not troublemakers,” Timmy said. “The opposite. We’re problem solvers.”

  The man with gold hair that hung in ringlets licked his lip. “That’s right. We wouldn’t jump you over the hurdles, sir.”

  “I look like an old man?” I said.

  “A show of respect,” he said.

 
“You guys like zoos?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Timmy said. “You got one here?”

  “No, but there’s a nice one in Houston,” I said. “In Hermann Park, off South Main.”

  “Without much work, this town could be a zoo,” the shorter man said. “Circle it with some chicken wire, then charge people admission.”

  “Yeah, our man here could probably run it,” Timmy said. “What do you say about that, slick?”

  The oak tree above us swelled with wind. A white speedboat sliced down the middle of the bayou, its wake washing organic detritus over the cypress knees and bamboo roots that grew like half-buried knuckles along the mudflats. “I think you boys passed me on the highway when I was driving up to Huntsville,” I said. “Tarantulas were crossing the road, hundreds of them. It’s quite a phenomenon to witness.”

  The speedboat engine whined in the distance like a Skilsaw cutting through a nail.

  “We passed you?” Timmy said. “I think you got us mixed up with somebody else.”

  “I’m not real popular these days,” I said. “Why do you want to bird-dog a guy like me?”

  “Because Marcel LaForchette is a button man for the Jersey Mob,” said the man with the gold hair. “Because he made the street four days ago. Because you had something to do with getting him out.”

  “I don’t have that kind of juice,” I said.

  “Call me Ray,” the man with gold hair said. He twisted one of his ringlets around his finger. His eyes were out of alignment, one deeper and higher than the other. “We’re private investigators. LaForchette is an animal. Our client is a man who has reason to worry about a guy who worked with Jimmy the Gent. You know who that is, right?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy Burke,” I said. “He’s doing life in New York.”

  “He was doing life,” Timmy said. “Now he’s sleeping with the worms. But LaForchette is still around. So why don’t you tell us what you had to say to him in Huntsville?”

  “You didn’t start your surveillance of me at Hermann Park Zoo,” I said. “You were at the amusement pier the night before.”

  “You think you saw us on an amusement pier?” Ray said.

  “Maybe you were looking at me through binoculars. But you saw me talking to Isolde Balangie. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  Ray brushed at his nose and huffed through one nostril. “Sometimes it’s not smart to show you’re smart.”

  “I never claimed to be smart,” I said.

  “You lose your badge for drinking or being on a pad?” Ray said.

  “Call it a sabbatical,” I said.

  “So you won’t mind?” he said.

  “Mind what?”

  “This.” He slid a driver from the golf bag and dropped three balls on the grass. He whocked the balls one after another, then watched the last one splash in the bayou and offered me the club. “I got some more balls in the car. Smack a few. We don’t mean to offend. A young girl is missing. If she isn’t found, some people are gonna be swinging by their colons.”

  The only sound was the wind in the trees. Timmy’s eyes lit up as they settled on mine. He nodded as though confirming his friend’s statement, one finger bouncing in the air. “I’ve seen it. Meat hooks. Fucking A, man.”

  “Y’all know where I live?” I said.

  “Right across the bayou,” Ray said. “A shotgun house. You got four-o’clocks and caladiums around the trees in your yard.”

  “Don’t come around,” I said.

  “Hold still,” Timmy said. He popped a leaf off my hair with his fingers. “I hear you got a daughter. One in college. I got one, too.”

  I stepped back from him. I could feel my hands opening and closing at my sides. “I’m going to walk away now.”

  “He’s walking away,” Timmy said.

  “Yeah, that’s the way they do it here,” Ray said. “They walk away. They don’t want trouble in Dog Fuck. So they walk away.”

  I cut through the shadows of the trees, light-headed, my ears ringing, and walked down the single-lane road that wound through the park. I heard their engine start behind me, then the Oldsmobile inching by, the gravel in the tire treads clicking on the asphalt. Ray was humped behind the wheel, his hands tapping a beat to the music on the radio, and Timmy was in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette with lavender paper and a gold filter tip, blowing smoke rings like a man at peace with the world.

  The Oldsmobile passed a group of black children kicking a big blue rubber ball on the grass. Autumn was just around the corner. The strips of orange fire in the clouds and the shadows in the live oaks and the coolness of the wind and the tannic odor of blackened leaves comprised a perfect ending to the day or, better yet, a perfect entryway into Indian summer and a stay against the coming of winter.

  But if the evening was so grand and the riparian scene so tranquil, and the presence of the children such an obvious testimony to the goodness and innocence of man, and if I were indeed above the taunts of misanthropes, why was my thirst as big as the Sahara and my heart wrapped with thorns?

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY at a New Orleans saloon on Magazine, I gave Clete Purcel a short version of the events on the pier and at the prison and on Bayou Teche. Magazine was where Clete had grown up. The saloon had a stamped-tin ceiling and a grainy wood floor and a long bar with a brass rail, and the owner kept the beer mugs refrigerated so they were sheathed with ice when he filled them, and for all those reasons Clete used the saloon as his office away from his office.

  He listened while I spoke, his quiet green eyes staring at nothing, then chalked his cue and split a nine-ball rack and gazed at a solitary ball dropping into a pocket. It was dark and raining outside, and the shadows of the rain running down the window made his face look like he was crying.

  “When the two guys drove past the black kids, you thought they might be planning to hurt them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I thought,” I said. “Sometimes I think too much.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He shook off the question. “Marcel LaForchette was sprung five days ago and is in New Iberia?”

  “In all probability.”

  “Stay clear of this, Streak. Starting with LaForchette. He was the iceman for the Balangie family.”

  “He admits to being the driver on a hit they ordered.”

  “Driver, my ass. He was one of the guys who sawed up Tommy Fig and froze the parts and strung them from a ceiling fan. You got the tag on the Olds?”

  “I couldn’t get a good look at it.”

  “Who’s the missing girl?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  He was bareheaded and wearing a Confederate-gray suit and a Hawaiian shirt and oxblood loafers. His blond hair was cut short and neatly wet-combed, his cheeks freshly shaved. A scar like a flat pink worm ran through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose. He picked up a longneck and tilted it against the light, drinking the bottle empty, the foam sliding into his mouth. “You want a soda with lime and cherries?”

  “I’ll let you know when I do.”

  “I was being courteous. You’re getting played by LaForchette. Why’d you visit a geek like that, anyway?”

  “He got a bad break as a kid.”

  “So did Thomas Edison. A train conductor slapped him upside the head and broke his eardrum. He invented the lightbulb instead of killing people.”

  “Edison provided the electricity for the original electric chair. He did it to drive his competitor out of business.”

  “Only you would know something like that, Dave.”

  “Why would the two guys in the Olds follow me to the joint? Why are they interested in me at all?”

  “Back it up. They saw you talking to the Balangie girl on the pier. Right?”

  “That’s my guess. Why else would they be bird-dogging me?”

  “Who knows? They sound like ex-cops with bubble gum for brains,” he said.

 
“The Balangie girl said she was being delivered.”

  “You mean like white slavery?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “This has the smell of greaseballs all over it. Don’t go near it. Don’t give me that look, either. ‘Greaseball’ is not a racial slur. It’s a state of mind. The only guy who ever got the upper hand on the Balangie family was Mussolini. He tore their fingernails out.”

  I went to the bar and ordered a po’boy sandwich loaded with fried catfish. I got an extra paper plate and cut the sandwich in half and went back to the pool table. I put Clete’s plate on the chair next to his empty beer bottle. “You want a refill?”

  “Why do you always make me feel guilty, Dave?”

  “It’s a talent I have.”

  “You want me to see what I can find out?”

  Clete knew almost every street dip, hooker, Murphy artist, button man, crack dealer, low-rent PI, car booster, and dirty vice detective or cop on a pad in Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

  “No,” I said. “You’re right. It’s not worth fooling with.”

  He racked his cue on the wall, picked up the po’boy, took a big bite, and chewed slowly, gazing through the front windows at the rain and the headlights on the asphalt and the fog puffing out of an alleyway. “I don’t like those two pricks in the Oldsmobile bracing you.”

  “They didn’t brace me,” I said.

  “Call it what you want. The lowlifes aren’t allowed to disrespect the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. I’ll show restraint. I’m completely copacetic and mellow these days, and think only about serene subjects. It’s part of a yogi program I’m in.”

  “Clete—”

  “Did I ever tell you I once played nine-ball with Jackie Gleason? Minnesota Fats and Paul Newman were there. So was Jake LaMotta. Rack ’em up, big mon. We don’t care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay.”

  Chapter Four

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, Clete pulled up in front of a line of cottages outside Broussard, midway between Lafayette and New Iberia. Most of the cottages were unoccupied. Fireflies flickered among the live oaks, then disappeared like pieces of burnt string. Balls of electricity rolled through the clouds and burst silently over the Gulf. He could smell rain blowing across the wetlands, like the smell of broken watermelons or freshly mowed hay. It was part of the Louisiana he loved, a hallowed memory he’d taken with him to Vietnam and into which he’d crawled when the rain clicked on his poncho and steel pot at the bottom of a hole or when an offshore battery lit the sky like heat lightning and the shells arched overhead and exploded with a dull thump in the jungle, the air suddenly bright with the smell of wet dirt and leaves and water that had been full of amphibian life.