A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  I walked down to the bank to a spot where I could see the drawbridge at Burke Street and the black people who fished under it with cane poles and cut liver. Another storm was rolling in from the Gulf, already chaining the water’s surface with rain rings. In one fashion or another, our history was written on Bayou Teche. Spanish and French explorers had used it to invade and steal the Indians’ land. Pirates like Jean Laffite had sold slaves from the West Indies on its banks in violation of Thomas Jefferson’s embargo of 1807. (One of Lafitte’s partners was James Bowie, who would later die in the Alamo.) In 1863 an entire Yankee flotilla came up the Teche loaded with soldiers who got deliberately turned loose on the civilian population, particularly on women of color, who were raped at random. Our history was not a benign one.

  But rather than dwelling on iniquitous deeds, I wanted to remember the Cajuns who lived on houseboats and went up and down the bayou in their pirogues back in the 1940s, and the paddle wheeler that one night a week came by at dusk, a sculpted replica of Charlie McCarthy on the prow, the decks as brightly lit as a wedding cake, a Dixieland band blaring on the fantail. Even today I sometimes see a pirogue in the fog, with my mother and father on board, beckoning at me, and the experience is not a bad one at all.

  The rain began clicking on my hat, and I went inside and ate a cold sandwich at the kitchen table, then fell asleep in a chair in the living room. When I woke, the rain was thundering on the roof, the trees thrashing outside in the darkness, sometimes flickering whitely as though a giant strobe had flashed from the clouds. The phone rang, but when I picked it up, I heard only static. The caller’s name was blocked. I replaced the receiver and went to bed. An hour later, the phone rang again. I looked at the caller ID. This time it was completely blank, something it had never done before. I picked up the receiver and placed it to my ear but said nothing.

  “You—” a voice rasped.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Need to pay.”

  “Pay what?”

  “Come outside,” the voice said. “It’s your time. Nothing you can do will change it.”

  “Time for what? Who is this?”

  “You have intervened in things that are not your concern. Now you must pay.”

  “I’m about to hang up. You’d better get yourself a better scriptwriter, bud.”

  “Walk to the water’s edge.”

  “What for?”

  I was in the kitchen and the lights were off; I believed I could not be seen. I could see the driveway and my pickup and the porte cochere and the backyard. I was convinced no one was there.

  “You and your friend are going on a journey from which you will not return,” the voice said.

  “Tell you what, podna. How’d you like to eat a bullet?”

  “Bravely said. But in each man is a child. They whimper like children. They beg and soil themselves.”

  “I’m going to hang up now,” I said.

  “I thought you were a more dignified and modest man.”

  “Say again?”

  “You’re dressed in your underwear. That’s both unclean and immodest.”

  High in the sky, lightning jumped between the clouds. There was no one in the yard. I could hear myself breathing. “Your first name is Gideon. Your last name is Richetti. You broke a pimp’s neck in the Quarter, and you gave a hooker thirty grand to start a new life. Who knows, maybe you’re not all bad. But how about losing the time-traveler charade? It’s a drag.”

  “You say time traveler?” the voice said, each word coated with phlegm. “Look out the back window again, my friend.”

  Then I saw the galleon slide into view in the middle of the Teche, its wood sides and oars glistening with rain, a muscular man in a brass helmet and leather vest and leather skirt beating cadence on a drum.

  “Do you deny what your eyes tell you?” the voice asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “Because you’re a fraud of some kind. Because maybe you’re—”

  “I’m what?”

  “Evil,” I said. “A magician of the mind, someone who knows how to use hallucinogens on others. But ultimately a hoaxer.”

  “You lie,” the voice said. “Never speak to me that way again.”

  I fumbled the phone onto its cradle, my hand shaking. Then the phone fell into the sink. I jerked the cord from the base unit. The phone was completely disconnected now. But the caller’s voice rose from it, disembodied, floating in the air around me, laughing.

  I went to the window. The galleon was gone. The room was tilting and spinning around as though I were caught in a vortex. I tried to walk into the bedroom, then stumbled and fell, taking a chair down with me. I woke at two in the morning, trembling as though the malaria that lived in my blood was giving me a free ride back to Vietnam, my ears filled with hissing sounds like automobile tires on a wet highway, like 105 artillery rounds arching out of their trajectory, like snakes writhing upon one another in a basket.

  Chapter Eighteen

  AT 4:23 A.M. I was admitted to Iberia General. The diagnosis was food poisoning. I have been wounded four times, twice in Vietnam (the second time by a Bouncing Betty) and twice on the job. I have never experienced any pain, however, as bad as that produced by the botulism that attacked my system that morning. It was the kind of pain that is so bad you cannot remember how bad it was.

  By nine A.M. it was gone. My first visitor was Clete Purcel, whom I called as soon as I was able. The second person I called was Carroll LeBlanc, who said, “You didn’t shag that Italian broad again, did you? Hit it and git it, Robo.”

  Clete pulled a chair up to the bed, his porkpie hat on his knee. Clete never wore a hat inside a building, never walked in front of a woman through a doorway, and never failed to rise from a chair when he shook hands or when a woman entered a room. “What did you eat?” he asked.

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Then what is?”

  “I thought I told you on the phone.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything. You kept saying, ‘We can’t get the slick in. They’re coming through the wire.’ ”

  “The guy who hung you up in the Keys called me,” I said. “I saw the galleon out on the bayou.”

  Clete was waving off the image before I could finish. “Don’t tell me that.”

  “Okay, maybe I was out of my head.”

  Clete’s right leg was pumping up and down. “The guy who called, he told you he was Gideon Richetti?”

  “I addressed him by that name. He didn’t correct me.”

  “Dave, I can’t take this.”

  “I hit the deck minutes after his call. My memory is suspect. Nothing I say is reliable. But I’m telling you what I think I heard and saw.”

  Why burden an already burdened man? I asked myself. But in truth, I wanted a rational explanation for the phone call, for the voice that rose from the disconnected receiver, for the prison ship that had wended its way out of history and up Bayou Teche. The sound of Richetti’s voice was like spittle in my ear.

  “What are we going to do, Streak?” Clete said.

  “Take it to them with tongs.”

  “You can’t cowboy a guy like Mark Shondell.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Shondell.”

  “Then who are you talking about?” Clete asked.

  Anyone and everyone, I thought.

  “What’d you say?” Clete asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Rhetoric is cheap. I don’t know where to start on this.”

  “It’s got to be about money,” Clete said.

  “Richetti gave thirty grand to a hooker.”

  “Yeah, and it probably came from a robbery,” he said. “Maybe he’s trying to buy his way into heaven.”

  That wasn’t a bad speculation.

  * * *

  I SPENT THE REST of the day researching all disappearances and homicides in the greater New Orleans area from fifteen years before. I also talked with
Dana Magelli at NOPD. The following day, Saturday, I found Marcel LaForchette in the same dump on the edge of St. Martinville’s black district where I’d found him before. He was at the end of the bar, eating fried crawfish and dirty rice with a spoon from a paper plate. A fat woman with gold hair and skin the color of paste was sitting next to him. I remembered her from somewhere. Maybe a motel raid, a drug bust, a domestic shooting, the kind of events that happen most often on the first weekend of the month. The red paint lacquered on the walls looked smoked, darker, as though it were being consumed by its own garishness.

  “Lose your way to your A.A. meet again?” Marcel said.

  “Your PO told me to check you out,” I replied.

  “Funny man.”

  “You don’t have a parole officer anymore?”

  “Mr. Mark got me cut loose,” he said. “So if you’re here about him, I say beat feet, my man.”

  The woman kept her face turned away from me. She was drinking from a soda can. Lipstick was smeared on the top. She stank of cigarette smoke.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said to Marcel.

  “Talk.”

  I looked at the back of the woman’s head. She wore a frilly white blouse and a bra with black straps that showed through the fabric. Marcel stuck a tightly folded ten-dollar bill between her fingers. “Cloteel, can you get us somet’ing cold?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Somet’ing wrong?” Marcel said.

  “If you wit’ him, you ain’t wit’ me,” she said.

  She dropped the folded bill on the bar and walked to the women’s room. Her buttocks were massive, the backs of her thighs printed with the bar stool. Then I remembered her.

  “She don’t mean anyt’ing by it,” Marcel said.

  “Right,” I said. I leaned in close to him. “The whack you drove on? Was the hit a guy named Gerald Levine, middle name Shondell?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He was Mark Shondell’s cousin.”

  Marcel stared at his food. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Father Julian. I’m staying off the juice and the spike and weed and everyt’ing else. The way I was before I got turned out.”

  His Cajun accent had deepened, as though he wanted to regress into childhood. I wanted to be sympathetic to him. But I knew Marcel’s history, and I could only guess at the number of people he had killed.

  “Is your lady friend part of your new life?”

  “I don’t judge.”

  “She sold her infant child for a few bags of brown skag. She cut the skag with insect poison and sold it to some teenagers.”

  “She’s clean now, so you can shut down the sermon.”

  He was right. My remarks about the woman were a cheap shot. It’s easy to be righteous about people at the bottom of the food chain until you spend one day in their shoes.

  “Come outside,” I said.

  “I ain’t lost nothing out there.”

  “Come outside or I’ll bust you right here.”

  “For what?”

  “Public stupidity.” I removed a pair of cuffs from my coat pocket and held them below the level of the bar where he could see them. I let my voice climb. “I’ll bust your friend, too.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re a hardnose, Dave. You gonna pay for that, you.”

  We walked through a narrow hall and a storage room full of keg and bottled beer and out into an alley lined with Dumpsters and garbage cans. Two people were copulating vertically behind a Dumpster. They took no notice of us. We walked down the alley to the side street. In the mist I could see the glow of spotlights in the town square. They stayed focused at night on the pillared courthouse and on the church that had been there since 1844 and on the Evangeline Oak and on the graveyard where I first kissed a girl named Bootsie Mouton who later became my wife.

  I looked back at the couple behind the Dumpster, then took off my hat and wiped the mist off my face with a handkerchief.

  “The fuck is with you, Dave?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You got a look like the whole world is ending.”

  “Shut up and listen, Marcel. You told me the Shondell vic went out hard. You said he was a marshmallow, that he made baby sounds.”

  “You get off on this?”

  “What’d y’all do to him?”

  “I ain’t saying. And it wasn’t me done it. I tole you I drove, nothing else.”

  “Clete Purcel said you were in on the Tommy Fig hit. Y’all freeze-wrapped his parts and tied them to the ceiling fan in his shop.”

  “I was sixteen years old.”

  “Who did the vic molest, Marcel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said y’all took Polaroids for Pietro Balangie?”

  “Yeah, he didn’t allow molesters in the city or jackrollers in the Quarter.”

  “I got that. But none of that was personal with Pietro. The whack on Gerald Shondell Levine and the photos were.”

  “I ain’t getting into this, man.”

  “Who was the molester’s victim, Marcel?”

  “It was hearsay.”

  I shoved him against a brick wall. He tried to slap my arm away. I grabbed him by the throat and pinned him hard against the bricks. His whiskers felt like wire. “Was it a child?”

  “Who you t’ink molesters molest?”

  “Lose the coon-ass pronunciations and theatrics.”

  “You already know,” he replied.

  I grabbed his lapels and banged him again and again into the wall. “I want to hear it from you. Say it!”

  “The two other guys are dead. That leaves me as probably the only guy who knows who the perv put his hands and mout’ on. That’s why I’m not a reg’lar visitor to New Orleans. That’s why I went nort’ and did some work in Camden and Brooklyn. That’s why I don’t go down Memory Lane with Adonis Balangie. The painter sodomized him for five years. Use my name to Adonis and I’ll punch your whole ticket. Now get your fucking hands off me before I forget we go back.”

  I began to walk away, then stopped. “Where’d y’all dump the body?”

  “We put acid on it. It ain’t a body no more,” Marcel said.

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “I already tole you. On the nort’ side of Pontchartrain Lake.”

  “The exact spot, Marcel.”

  “T’ink I’m gonna tell you that?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just tell Mark Shondell you helped kill his cousin.”

  “You’re a bum, Dave.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Two minutes later, I walked down the alley in the mist, alongside a rivulet of black rainwater, past the two people who had finished their coupling and were now sharing a bottle of synthetic wine. “What’s happenin’?” I said.

  They looked at me fearfully.

  We’re supposed to protect and serve. But sometimes we exploit and screw the most helpless of the helpless; in this instance I had used Marcel LaForchette. With no other place to put my anger, I picked up a rock and flung it against a Dumpster. I saw the couple flinch and instinctively grab each other.

  * * *

  I BANGED ON CLETE’S door early the next morning, the air cold and the rain dripping audibly out of the trees where the Teche had overrun its banks. He answered the door in his skivvies. “Why not wake up the whole motor court?” he said.

  I stepped inside without being asked. “Get dressed.”

  “For what?”

  “We’re going to New Orleans. You need some rubber boots.”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Remember those stories about a place where Pietro Balangie buried his bodies?”

  He sighed. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”

  I told him everything Marcel had said. When I finished, Clete was sitting on the side of the bed, still undressed, a coffee mug imprinted with the marine globe and anchor balanced on his thigh. “Have you told Dana Magelli about this?”

  “No.”


  “You’re protecting LaForchette?”

  “He cooperated. He’s trying to go straight. Why jam the guy?”

  “I think something else is going on here, Dave. You keep putting your necktie in the garbage grinder, starting with the Balangie woman. Now we’re about to dig up Adonis’s childhood. I think you’re on a dry drunk.”

  “Not true, Cletus.”

  “You’ve lost two wives. Either go to more meetings or buy a bottle of Jack. But stop messing with the Balangies.”

  “Are you in or out?”

  He set down his coffee cup on the nightstand and cupped his hands on his knees. “I had a dream last night.”

  “Forget dreams. That’s all they are.”

  “We were sliding off the edge of the earth, you and me,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re into. I’ve never felt like this in my life.”

  * * *

  CLETE AND I got in my truck and, four hours later, found the spot Marcel had described. The lake was to the south, capping in the wind, the willows bending in the inlets. To the north were warehouses, rusted oil tanks, and an obsolete sewage plant. The sky was gray, the smell of burning garbage in the wind. We stood in a sump that was like a mixture of glue and quicksand and wet cement, and began shoveling and raking and probing for a bottom with a long iron bar that once was part of a school flagpole. We did this for two hours. Our lack of procedure and legality probably seems strange. But anyone who buys in to the average television portrayal of law enforcement deserves any misfortune that happens to him. Most of us give it our best, but a lot don’t. So how do we sometimes put away the worst members of the human race? Answer: We salt the mine shaft, lie on the witness stand, conceal exculpatory evidence, and cut deals with jailhouse snitches. We also dig big holes and find nothing and bury something for our colleagues to find two days after we’re gone.

  We found part of a shoe and pieces of bone that could have belonged to seagulls or small four-footed animals. Maybe some of the bone fragments could have belonged to people, but I doubted it, and the shoe could have washed ashore and been buried by a storm. In effect, the sump seemed bottomless; it would require a large forensic team and many days of labor and a huge amount of tax money to produce anything of evidentiary value.