A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “What out of the way?” she said. “You went somewhere wit’ Beaumont?”

  “Sit down,” he said. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “Sarah.”

  “You’re pretty.”

  “Where you gone wit’ Beaumont?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You look frightened. Do I scare you?”

  Her face jerked. She fastened her gaze on the wall, the red and purple bedspread, an ancient suitcase on top of it, a belt holding the suitcase together. “What you wanna do?” she said.

  “Talk.”

  She closed her eyes and opened them again, as though the room were swaying. “What you did wit’ Beaumont?”

  “Are you a little obsessive?” he said. She didn’t answer. “He showed me a couple of historical buildings. He seems to know the Quarter.”

  “That don’t sound like him. What kind of game you playing?”

  “No game,” he said. “Sit down. Please.”

  Her brow furrowed. She sat down slowly at a small breakfast table. He removed a shoebox from the dresser and sat down across from her. “How long have you been in the life, Sarah?”

  “What you mean ‘the life’? I don’t know nothing about no life. I don’t like what’s going on here. You give Beaumont the seventy-five dol’ars?”

  “You have a child? I suspect you do.”

  She reached in her bag.

  “It’s not a good time to do that,” he said.

  “I’m calling Beaumont.”

  “I told him you’re in good hands. The most important moment in your life is taking place right now. You need to be aware of that.”

  “I ain’t up to this. Beaumont’s all right, ain’t he?”

  “A man like that is never all right.”

  Her gaze seemed to take apart his face, as though her fear had been replaced by curiosity. “You got freckles under your eyes.”

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “My li’l boy watches a cartoon about a friendly snake. It’s got freckles under its eyes, like yours.”

  “Sarah, you may have depths that have never been plumbed.”

  Her mouth formed a cone, but no words came out.

  “Forget it,” he said. He removed the lid from the shoebox and emptied the box. Bundles of fifty-dollar bills fell on the table. The bills were crisp and stiff, as though fresh from the mint. He thumbed their edges like decks of cards. “There’s thirty thousand dollars here,” he said. “It’s yours. But you have to change your ways.”

  “You’re setting me up for something,” she said. “Maybe a snuff film. I ain’t putting up wit’ it.”

  “It’s not a trick.” He was smiling now.

  “Why you wanna do this? You don’t know me.”

  “Maybe I can come see you sometime. Maybe we can be friends. Maybe I can help you get a job or go to school.”

  “If I take that money, I ain’t gonna be around here.”

  “Send me a postcard.”

  Her eyes swam with confusion.

  “That’s a joke. Go wherever you want.”

  She picked up one of the bundles, then set it down. “Beaumont’s gonna take over half of this.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Why ain’t he?” she said.

  “His circumstances have changed.”

  “What happened out there?”

  “You really want to know?”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “We talked a minute or two. That’s all,” he said.

  Her eyes dropped to the bundles of money. She touched one as though it were a forbidden object. “This ain’t counterfeit?”

  “Counterfeiters don’t give away the product of their labor. Show some trust in people, Sarah.”

  She let out her breath as though a long day had caught up with her. “People don’t never tell me the troot’, not about anything. Why should you be different?”

  “Because I’m a revelator.”

  “A what?”

  He put the bundles back in the box and replaced the top. He pushed the box toward her. “I’ll call a cab for you.”

  “I ain’t taking this money. I ain’t taking this box. I ain’t taking nothing out of this room.”

  “You have to take it.”

  “No.”

  He stood up, towering over her. He opened her purse and shook the bundles into it, then zipped it shut. The purse looked as big and round as a small watermelon. “Do as I say.” He raised a finger in her face when she tried to speak. “Don’t argue, and don’t disappoint me.”

  She seemed to shrink, like a flower exposed to intense heat. “I ain’t meant to argue or make you mad.”

  “Now go be a good girl.”

  “Beaumont tole you where I stay?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What you done to him?”

  He placed his hand on her head. His fingers resembled the tentacles of a small octopus threaded through her hair. “You’re a nice lady. The world has hurt you. I’ve tried to make up for that. It’s that simple.”

  She waited a long time before she spoke. “If I walk out of here, you ain’t gonna do nothing to me? You’re sure about that?”

  “You’ve done a good deed for me,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”

  She looked at him, her eyes out of focus. Then she picked up the purse and put it inside her pink jacket and opened the door and hurried through the courtyard, the soles of her shoes clattering on the sidewalk. The rainwater on her hair looked like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

  Down the street, two drunks stumbled from the topless bar. “Where you goin’, mama?” one yelled. “I got yo’ candy cane hangin’.”

  Both men laughed so hard they could hardly hold each other up, then they followed her, bumping into each other, rounding the corner behind her and disappearing into the dark.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, Tuesday, Carroll LeBlanc called me into his office. He was sitting in a swivel chair, dressed in a suit that was as bright as tin, his booted feet propped on the desk. The boots were Luccheses, the shafts hand-tooled with blue flower petals, the soles hardly scratched, the toes buffed. I had never seen him show any interest in horses or racetracks. A yellow legal pad covered with swirls of blue ballpoint ink and elaborate capital letters lay on his desk. He stared at me. “How’d your face get marked up?”

  “A household accident.”

  “Somebody close her legs?”

  “Why’d you call me into your office, Carroll?”

  “Got a call from NOPD this morning,” he said. He picked up the legal pad and stared at it, scratching the rim of a nostril with one fingernail. “Have a seat.”

  I sat down and didn’t reply. I knew that whatever he planned on saying would come a teaspoon at a time. With LeBlanc, the issue was always control.

  “A taxi driver was found in his cab with his neck broken,” he said. “The cab was parked in an alley in the Quarter one block from North Rampart.”

  I nodded.

  “Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “The cab was wedged in the alley. Whoever killed the driver couldn’t open the door and had to kick out the windshield.”

  “This was a robbery?” I said.

  “That’s what NOPD thought. Except the driver had over eight hundred dollars in his pocket.” LeBlanc looked down at his legal pad again. “A guy named Beaumont Melancon. Ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “He was a Murphy artist.”

  A Murphy artist is a pimp who lets his hooker set up the john, then bursts in on the tryst, claiming to be the outraged husband or boyfriend, thereby terrifying and subsequently extorting the john.

  “What does this have to do with us?” I said.

  “A little later the same night, two guys in the same general area claimed a guy with an ugly face beat the living shit out of them.”

  “Why’d the guy attack them?”

 
“They said they didn’t know. They said he just came out of nowhere and started ripping ass.”

  “What’s the rest of it, Carroll?”

  “A homicide cop started checking bars and guesthouses from Burgundy down to Jackson Square. The night clerk at one guesthouse said he saw a black woman leave one of the rooms and walk toward North Rampart. The two guys who got their asses kicked started making fun of her. Then a guy from the guesthouse came out of the same room the black woman did and followed her and the two white guys.”

  “The beating victims were white and baiting a black woman?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I replied. “Was the guy with the ugly face white or black?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “NOPD. Did you get drunk last night?”

  “I have no idea why you’re telling me all this,” I said.

  “I’m trying to give you a heads-up.”

  “I see. I appreciate that. But I’m going back to my office.”

  He swung his feet off the desk. “The night clerk at the guesthouse said the black broad was probably a hooker he’d seen around. She’d been in the room of a guest. He left the guesthouse at midnight; he was carrying a beat-up suitcase with a belt around it. The homicide cop found a piece of paper in the trash can with an address on it. Guess what? It’s on East Main in New Iberia.”

  LeBlanc read the address aloud. It was mine.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said. I got up to leave.

  “That’s it?”

  “What’s the name of the homicide cop at NOPD?”

  “Magelli.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve got more.”

  “I think I’ve got the big picture. One of these days we’ll have a talk after hours, Carroll.”

  “Feeling a little irritated, are we? If so, maybe you should go back to New Orleans and get your old job back. Oh, I forgot. You got fired twice there.”

  * * *

  I HAD KNOWN DANA MAGELLI at NOPD since Clete and I came back from Vietnam and walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter. The three of us had made detective grade at the same time and were close friends, although Dana was a family man and didn’t succumb to the occupational legacy of violence and wasted days and nights the way Clete and I did. Dana was also the bane of the Balangie family, whom he despised for the damage they did to the Italians who were decent and hardworking and paid the price for scum like Adonis.

  I called Dana Magelli from my office.

  “Hey, Dave, how you doin’?” he said. “Carroll LeBlanc gave you all the information on the taxi driver homicide?”

  “More or less,” I said. “You found my address in the wastebasket at the guesthouse?”

  “Yeah, but the guy at the guesthouse paid with cash and registered as G. Smith, and we got no idea who the black woman was or why somebody would break the cabbie’s neck, unless he tried to run a Murphy scam on the wrong guy.”

  “Murphy artists in the Quarter?”

  “No, Adonis Balangie runs New Orleans vice like his old man did. No jackrollers or Murphy scammers are allowed between Esplanade and Canal, Decatur and Rampart.”

  “Can you give me a detailed description of the man who tore up the drunks?”

  “The victims say he was big and had a head like a snake’s. That’s about all they’ll say. I think they’re afraid they’ll have to identify him.”

  “No mention of a harelip or a tiny nose?”

  “Negative. You know something about this guy?”

  “Clete had some trouble in the Keys.”

  “With a guy who looks like this?”

  “Clete got abducted. He woke up suspended from a wrecker hook. A guy with a harelip and a bump for a nose was going to light him up.”

  There was a long silence. “What are we dealing with here?”

  “I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I want to talk to Clete.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Look, I’m working on another lead. We’ve pulled a bunch of surveillance cameras that show our guy leaving the guesthouse in a hooded raincoat and walking with his suitcase up Pirate’s Alley and trying to get in the back door of the cathedral. Then he walks out of the Quarter and shows up on three cameras on St. Claude Avenue and disappears in the Ninth Ward. Get this. Somebody broke into a colored church down there and slept under the altar.”

  “You get any prints at the church?”

  “Yeah, same as inside the cab, so many we might as well be doing the Superdome. I haven’t slept in over thirty hours.”

  “You’re a good cop, Dana.”

  “Tell Clete he can get in touch with me or see how he likes one of our new holding cells. I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your colleague LeBlanc says Penelope Balangie came to your department looking for you. He also says she was seen at your house. Please tell me it’s not what I think.”

  * * *

  DANA HAD BROUGHT up a major problem of conscience for me. Celibacy and I had never been very compatible. I tried, certainly, but at best usually ended up with a C-minus. Through my encounter with Penelope Balangie, I had managed to involve myself with people whose thinking powers were probably locked inside the sixteenth century. On top of it, I had trouble keeping her out of my thoughts.

  Also, I was worried about Clete Purcel, and the innocence and naïveté and false optimism that often blinded him to the pernicious nature of the people with whom he surrounded himself. And if that sounds like an indictment of myself as well, you’re right.

  What are your choices in a situation such as this? What would a great philosopher of ethics such as Jeremy Bentham probably say? I suspect something like “Search me, pal.”

  Anyway, I knew where to find Adonis Balangie on midweek nights and Sunday mornings. I checked an unmarked car out of the department Wednesday afternoon and headed for New Orleans.

  * * *

  HIS TENNIS CLUB had the best clay courts in the city. At sunset the lights clicked on with a loud swatch, glowing with humidity against a sky that was the color of torn plums, tall palm trees with slender trunks creating an additional ambiance that could have come from The Arabian Nights.

  I parked my car in the shadows and wandered over to a court where Adonis was playing doubles with three women, the metal eyelets on the nylon screens clinking softly in the breeze. A woman at the net swung her backhand four feet from his face and almost took off his head. Gentleman that he was, Adonis grinned and said, “Fine shot, Leslie. My God, you could rip off a man’s head.”

  She seemed to beam in response, although I wasn’t altogether convinced of her sincerity. I watched them walk off the court and sit at a table under the palms. In the center of the table, a magnum of champagne was nestled in an ice bucket sweating with frost. I knew Adonis had seen me approach, but he gave no sign, instead listening keenly to one of the women. It was hard to tell them apart. They seemed designed the way a brand-name product was, each with coarse bleached yellow hair pulled straight back, each suntanned, each with a lean and hungry look. I walked into the light.

  “What’s the haps, Adonis?” I said.

  “Didn’t know you were a member, Detective Robicheaux,” he replied, his gaze resting playfully on the three women as though I were part of a humorous script.

  “Can we take a walk?” I asked.

  “I think not,” he said. He removed the foil from the champagne bottle and twisted the key on the wire cage and dropped it on the table, then gripped the cork and twisted the bottle from it without spilling a drop. “Like to join us? Here, I’ll pour you a glass.”

  I pulled up an iron chair and sat down. I was pretty sure Adonis knew I was in the program, and I believed he was taunting me. My feelings were strange, though. I wasn’t angry with him; I felt disappointed.

  Then I saw a thought swim into his eyes. He tapped himself o
n the forehead. “Sorry, Dave. I forgot you have a problem with sugar or something. You want some hot tea?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “How are you ladies tonight?”

  They smiled but didn’t speak. Their eyes didn’t seem to match their faces, as though each was wearing tinted contact lenses.

  “Y’all don’t mind giving me five minutes, do you?” Adonis said.

  As the women walked toward the clubhouse, the one named Leslie turned and looked at me and put one finger in her mouth and sucked it while crossing her eyes. There was a scar on her cheek she had covered with makeup. I had seen her before, but I couldn’t remember where. Adonis followed my line of sight. “Leslie has a rough edge or two, but live and let live, right?” he said. “What brings you to my club?”

  “Know a guy with a harelip and no nose who likes to hurt people?”

  “Haven’t had the pleasure.” He poured into a champagne glass and drank from it. The tips of his hair were sun-bleached and glistening with moisture. “He’s somebody I should be concerned about?”

  “You tell me. I hear Johnny Shondell is in a treatment center in Baton Rouge.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “How about your stepdaughter? Where is she?”

  “With Mark Shondell.”

  “That’s a fucking disgrace,” I said.

  I had taken it to the edge. It wasn’t wise. His eyes drifted onto my face. “This is my club. We don’t use that kind of language here. We don’t speak about family matters, either.”

  “I don’t get you,” I said. “You were in the airborne. You’re educated and smart. Cops may not like you, but they respect you.”

  “So?”

  “You’re playing tennis while your stepdaughter is in the hands of a molester.”

  He watched the shadows of the palm trees swaying on the clay courts, which were a soft pink and seemed to have absorbed the afterglow of the sun. “You know who Bill Tilden was?”

  “A national tennis champion during the twenties?”