A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Clete’s eyes were green marbles, devoid of expression, as though he had floated away into a serene environment no one else could see. He seemed to gaze out the window like a man about to fall asleep. He blinked and rested one hand on top of the bar. He picked up his cigarette lighter and dropped it into his pocket. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes had flattened and turned into tiny green threads, the skin white and as smooth as clay. He pursed his lips and breathed slowly through his nose, then smiled at the two men.

  The man named Klute seemed bewitched by Clete’s tranquility and appeared to have no idea what was occurring. Clete fitted his hand around the man’s neck and drove his face into the oak bib of the bar, smashing it again and again into the wood. Then he elbowed the other man in the face, kicked his feet out from under him, and proceeded to stomp both men into pulp, coating the brass rail, balancing himself with one hand, breaking bone or teeth or cartilage or anything he could find with the flat of his shoe.

  I grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to pull him back. I could smell the heat and funk and rage and trapped beer-sweat in his clothes, see the acne scars and flame on the back of his neck, the grease in his pores, the moisture glistening on the tips of his little-boy haircut, and I knew there was no way I could restrain him, any more than I could save a drowning man who would take down his rescuer if necessary.

  Then he went to one knee, fumbling his wallet from his back pocket, spilling the contents, digging out the photo of the Jewish woman and her three children on their way to the gas chamber, sticking it in the unrecognizable faces of the two mercenaries. “See that?” he said. “Look at it! That’s what you’re responsible for. I’d shove this down your mouths, but you’re not worthy to touch these people’s picture.”

  He stood up, steadying himself on the bar, and wiped the picture on his shirt and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket. A rivulet of blood slid from the bandaged knife wound in his left arm. The people in the room had become statues, unable to speak, avoiding eye contact with us or each other. Isolde held her hands over her mouth. The only person who reacted was Johnny Shondell. He laid his Gibson on a couch and picked up a bar towel and knelt by the two men on the floor, then looked up at Clete and me. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’d these guys do? Mr. Clete, this isn’t you.” He paused. “Is it?”

  I gathered up the contents of Clete’s wallet, and the two of us walked outside and left the door open behind us, the rain sweeping inside, the wind shredding the palm trees. In seconds our clothes were drenched, and Clete’s Panama hat was torn off his head and flying end over end down the beach, where it was sucked into the surf. Clete stared at it blankly, his swollen, blood-streaked fists hanging at his sides, seemingly bewildered by the storm taking place around him.

  Chapter Eight

  COPS FROM BOTH Mississippi and New Iberia were at my house the next day. I denied any knowledge of Clete’s whereabouts. I didn’t have to lie, either. I had told Clete to get lost and not tell me where. A Mississippi plainclothes told me the man who took the worst hits looked like a volleyball wrapped with barbed wire.

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “Does he have a sheet?”

  “He was up on a rape charge in the army. The nurse was afraid to testify.”

  “How about the other guy?”

  “Pretty much a wannabe. A couple of domestic-abuse charges. He went to a phony merc school in the Everglades.”

  We were standing in my front yard, the trees aglow with red and gold leaves. “Anything else?” I said.

  “I grew up in Mississippi. My father was in the Klan. He was uneducated and poor and thought they could offer him a better life.”

  I kept my face empty and gazed at some children riding their bicycles over the concrete sidewalk that was cracked and peaked by the huge oak roots in front of my house.

  “My father was at the liberation of Dachau,” the plainclothes said. “When he came back home, he burned his robes in the backyard. You know where I’d like to be in weather like this?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Palm Beach. I hear the kingfish are running night and day. A couple of weeks in a place like that and a man could forget all his troubles.”

  Four days later, Clete called me on my cell phone. “Where are you?” I said.

  “Down by Cocodrie. Anybody been around?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How bad is it going to be?”

  “Just stay off the radar awhile,” I said.

  “I checked out the guy with the house in Bay St. Louis. His name is Eddy Firpo. He screws every musician he gets his hands on.”

  “Forget about Eddy Firpo. Just stay out of town. Here as well as New Orleans.”

  “What’s going on with the Balangie girl?” Clete asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “That’s where all this stuff started.”

  “It started because you sent four people to the hospital,” I said, and immediately regretted my words.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “No, I’m not. I should have stayed away from Marcel LaForchette. I should have forgotten my conversation on the pier with Isolde Balangie and never made contact with her family or Mark Shondell.”

  “You’re a cop, Dave. Whether you’ve got your shield or not. What were we supposed to do? Leave a seventeen-year-old girl on the auction block? I feel like we’re in the Middle Ages.”

  “There was a detective here from Bay St. Louis. He said the kingfish were running in Palm Beach and that’s where he’d be for a couple of weeks if he had his druthers. I think he was telling me to tell you to cool it and you’ll be all right.”

  “They’re going to cold-case it?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  He was silent. I thought I had lost the connection. “You there?” I said.

  “Don’t get mad at me, but I got to say this: You’re not having the wrong kind of thoughts, are you?”

  “Thoughts about what?” I asked.

  “I saw the look on your face when Penelope Balangie came out of the chapel with a rosary in her hand.”

  “We’ve already been through this, Clete. Give it a rest.”

  “You saw a woman with a rainbow around her. Get real, Streak. She’s Adonis’s wife. She knows Adonis has ordered people killed or done it himself, but she probably gets it on with him every other night anyway. Look at that image in your head and tell me you want to get mixed up with a broad like that.”

  “You’re all wrong,” I said.

  “Do you know why we drink? So we can do the things our conscience won’t let us do when we’re sober.”

  If you’re a souse, try to refute a statement like that.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, in the late afternoon, I saw a restored 1956 Bel Air parked under a live oak in front of Veazey’s ice-cream store on West Main. The trunk of the tree was painted white up to the fork, and in the fork was a loudspeaker blaring out a song by the Chordettes. I parked and went inside and saw Johnny Shondell seated on a stool, wearing gray drapes and a sky-blue cowboy shirt sewn with roses and tasseled loafers hooked on the rungs, his knees so elevated they were higher than his waist. The Wurlitzer against the wall was loaded with Swamp Pop and 1950s rock, the plastic casing swimming with liquid balls of color. Johnny’s mouth was bent to the straw in a chrome milk-shake container. His face lifted to mine. “Hey, Mr. Dave. What’s shaking?”

  “No haps,” I said, and sat down next to him. “You doing all right?”

  “Right as rain,” he said, his eyes drifting away, as though he were trying to wish himself out the door.

  “Sorry we messed up your gig.”

  “Yeah, I’d rather forget about that, Mr. Dave.”

  “I know what you mean. But something was going on there that really bothers me. Stuff you and Isolde don’t need in your lives.”

  “You’re thinking about some of the drugstore products that were floating aroun
d?”

  “Blow and weed aren’t drugstore products.”

  “Yeah, I dig what you’re saying, Mr. Dave,” he said, looking out the window where an orange sun glowed behind the trees. “Why’d your friend bust up those guys?”

  “Those ‘guys’ are Nazis. A better question is why are you hanging with a fraud like Eddy Firpo?”

  “Eddy’s not a bad guy.”

  “So why would he have Nazis around?”

  “Takes all kinds?”

  “You’re a good kid, Johnny. Don’t degrade yourself.”

  “That hurts my feelings, Mr. Dave.”

  A shaft of sunlight shone on one side of his face; the other side was buried in shadow.

  “How’s Isolde?” I asked.

  “All right.” He set down the chrome container and looked at the marks his fingers had left on the coldness of its surface. “I mean I’m guessing she’s all right.”

  “She’s back in New Orleans?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So where is she?”

  “Can I order you an ice cream soda or a malt?”

  “Did you take her to your uncle’s house?” I said.

  “Ask Uncle Mark.”

  “I don’t get along with him. So I’m asking you.”

  Three teenage girls came in, the bell ringing above their heads. They began giggling as soon as they saw Johnny. He folded his hands tightly and put them between his legs. “There’s lots of secrets in my family, Mr. Dave. Maybe our ways are strange to others, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Whoever taught you that is an idiot, Johnny. Where’s Isolde?”

  “I’m staying at the house alone. My uncle Mark is gone. That’s all I can tell you.” Half his face remained in shadow.

  “You’ll have to do better than that. Look at me.”

  “No.”

  “Who hit you?”

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  “Your uncle struck your face? For what? You sassed him?”

  “A little more serious than that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No adult of conscience would strike a young person in the face.”

  “A guy gave me some purple acid. I’d never done it before. I took some and gave the rest to Isolde.”

  “You gave her LSD?”

  His face reddened, causing the welt on his cheek to stand out like a piece of white bone. “I didn’t think.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. Dave.”

  “You want me to ask your uncle?”

  “I ran away with her. I wanted her for myself. She wanted me, too. It was like that for five days, in a motel on the beach in Biloxi. But not because of the acid. It was like she was my sister and my girlfriend and my lover and my wife and the person I never wanted to let go of.”

  “It’s called falling in love.”

  “It was wrong. I owe my uncle.”

  “Get this in your head,” I said. “You and Isolde aren’t the problem. The problem is your uncle and the fact that nobody has shoved a gun in his mouth and put his brains on the wall.”

  The three teenage girls were in a corner booth. One of them caught my tone or saw my face and looked away, the blood draining from around her mouth.

  “Uncle Mark agreed to be her guardian and godfather,” Johnny said. “It’s a tradition that goes way back in our families.”

  “White slavery isn’t a tradition,” I said. “You heard about the two guys who got stuffed in a barrel piece by piece?”

  “Down by Vermilion Bay?”

  “They worked for your uncle.”

  “A lot of people do.”

  “Wake up,” I said.

  “I’m leaving my uncle’s house. I’m leaving Louisiana.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Florida.”

  “Fort Lauderdale?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “That’s where Eddy Firpo has his studio. He’s a bucket of shit, Johnny. He’ll ruin your career, then your life.”

  “I don’t care about my career anymore. I lost Isolde. I’ll never get her back. I want to do something awful.”

  He was nineteen. I remembered the degree of judgment I had at that age and shuddered.

  * * *

  IT WAS TIME to up the ante. Marcel LaForchette, the button man I visited in Huntsville, had been getting a free pass, largely because he was one of those undefined and marginal creatures who lived in the murk at the bottom of the aquarium, then one day you discovered he’d eaten everything in the tank.

  Marcel hung in places that weren’t good for me. I wasn’t simply an alcoholic; I was a drunkard. What’s the difference? An alcoholic has a deep-seated, armor-plated neurosis buried in the unconscious that keeps him constantly at war with himself. The drunkard cuts to the chase. A chemical form of sackcloth and ashes becomes his coat of arms. He drinks until he passes out, gets up and pours down another fifth, chases it with a case of Tuborg or a half-gallon of dago red and repeats the process until he enters what is called alcoholic psychosis and slides the muzzle of a double-barrel twelve-gauge over his teeth, the way Ernest Hemingway did it, and lets his family clean up the room.

  My wife Annie was murdered and my wife Bootsie died of lupus, and my daughter, Alafair, was a student on an academic scholarship at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t handle solitude or mortality well. I don’t guess anyone does. Here’s the strange thing about death. At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about. That’s why most drunks become believers, no matter how long they’ve been atheists or agnostics, and often preface the Lord’s Prayer with the rhetorical question “Who made the stars and keeps us out of bars?”

  But on that particular night I went to a low-rent pickup dive on the edge of the black district nine miles up the bayou in St. Martinville. The walls were bright red, the pool table unbalanced, the felt faded and patched with tape, the race of the customers hardly definable, most of the women unhinged and often dangerous. Marcel was by himself at a table in back, playing solitaire, a Coca-Cola bottle by his elbow. The restrooms were ten feet away, hung with red-bead curtains, the light golden behind them, the ammonia smell of urinated beer blowing in the breeze from the electric fans.

  He had obviously seen me when I came in, but he kept his gaze on his cards. When my shadow broke across his face, he said, “Doing research on the other half?”

  “Just you,” I said, sitting down without being asked. “Your PO doesn’t mind you coming here?”

  “Long as I drink Coca-Cola.”

  The bottle was half empty. The liquid at the top was diluted, brownish. “I got a beef with you, podna.”

  His pupils were as small as match heads. “What’d I ever do to you, Dave?”

  “Waltz me around, jerk my chain, try to fuck me over?”

  He looked at the bar. Several women, their arms heavy with fat, were drinking there, standing up, talking to each other. “You use that kind of language because of the environment you’re in? Like it’s something to wipe yourself with?”

  “I agreed to help you with your parole transfer. But you cut a deal with Mark Shondell.”

  “He gave me an apartment over his carriage house. He gave me a good salary. You were gonna do that?”

  “Stop lying. You gave him information about the Balangie family.”

  “What, that the Balangies are gangsters?”

  “You said you were the driver on a whack that would interest some people in New Iberia.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was a little too forthcoming on that.”

  “Who was the whack?”

  “Long time ago, Dave.”

  “You said he was a child molester.”

>   “ ‘Pitiful’ is a better word.”

  “About fifteen years ago a member of the Shondell family disappeared,” I said. “He was a sidewalk painter in Jackson Square.”

  “Here’s what I remember. The guy was a serial offender. He was on the floor of the backseat. He was crying and begging and shit.” He glanced at the bar. “Pardon my language, ladies.”

  I leaned forward. “Cut the act. Who was the hit?”

  “It came down from Pietro Balangie, the old man. He didn’t allow jackrollers in the Quarter, he didn’t allow child molesters anywhere.”

  “You’re testing my patience, Marcel.”

  “That’s your problem,” he replied. “I thought they were gonna knock him around and run him out of town. That’s not what happened. After we got back from the lake, I shot up in my apartment. China white with a half teaspoon of Jack. I couldn’t get the screams out of my head.”

  I didn’t know if I bought his story or not. Or better put, I didn’t know if I bought his tale about his suddenly acquired abhorrence of human cruelty. I kept my eyes on his.

  “They took Polaroids for the old man,” he said. “Not the kind of stuff a guy like you wants to see, Dave.”

  “Save the dog shit. What was his name?”

  “One of the guys said something about him being an artist. He looked like a marshmallow. He started making baby sounds when he knew what was gonna happen.”

  “So you told Mark Shondell you were part of the hit team that killed one of his relatives? For that, he helped you with a parole transfer and gave you a job and an apartment?”

  “I didn’t say nothing about the hit.” He scratched an eyebrow and looked at the bar, where two black women were talking loudly; their mouths were full of gold teeth.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Mr. Mark talked about me changing my life. The only other person who ever talked to me like that was you.”

  “Mark Shondell is the soul of goodness?”

  “What do I know? I went to the nint’ grade.” He took a drink from his Coke and set it down. “Want one?”