A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “Solicitation is not illegal?”

  “I gave her money to be an escort. Her and maybe some of her friends. Both white and black ladies. It wasn’t a big deal. It’s part of the business. Where you been?”

  “That remark you made about my mother? I let it pass because you’re dealing with an individual who is a big deal. I think you know it, too.”

  “I got to piss. Get yourself a beer out of the refrigerator.”

  He went into a hallway bathroom and closed the door. I heard him flush the toilet but heard no water run from the faucet. He came back in the kitchen and upended his beer bottle, the foam bubbling inside the neck. I heard a metallic clanking sound out in the dark. He stared at the screen door. “What’s he doing out there?”

  I didn’t have a chance to reply. Clete came through the door with an aluminum boat paddle and slammed it across Bottoms’s head, knocking him sideways out of the chair.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Go see what’s in that barn,” Clete said. “There’s one dog dead in the straw. The others got sores all over them. The stink is awful. Get up, Jess.”

  “No,” Bottoms said, holding his face.

  Clete lifted Bottoms to his feet, then drove his head into the counter and beat it on the rim of the sink. Bottoms fell in a heap on the floor, his eyes crossed, his forehead laid open.

  “Ease up, Clete,” I said.

  “Stay out of it, Dave.”

  Clete picked up the beer bottle and shoved it in the garbage disposal and flipped on the switch. The glass clanked and splintered and screeched and rumbled through the drainpipe. Clete hauled up Bottoms by his belt and wrapped one of his suspender straps around the faucet, then shoved Bottoms’s right hand into the disposal unit and rested his thumb on the wall switch. “Try taking out your big boy without fingers, Jess. Where’d the marked money come from?”

  “A robbery,” Bottoms said, his face the color and texture of someone slipping into shock.

  “Not good enough, Jess,” Clete said.

  “The strap’s around my throat. I cain’t breathe.”

  “Try.”

  Bottoms was crying. I rested my hand on Clete’s shoulder. “It’s not worth it,” I said.

  “Back off, Streak.”

  “I will not,” I said, easing myself between him and Bottoms. I slipped the suspender strap from the faucet and lowered Bottoms to the floor.

  “Don’t mess this up,” Clete said.

  I squatted down next to Bottoms. “Jess is going to help us. We’re also going to have the Humane Society out here. Right, Jess? Are we on the same wavelength?”

  But he couldn’t answer. He had obviously suffered a concussion or maybe a skull fracture.

  “Take your time, partner,” I said. “Look on the bright side.”

  He coughed and spat in a handkerchief, then wiped his face with it. “The guy who did the robbery gave it to a whore. To give her a better life or some bullshit. I took it from the whore and gave some of it to Dautrieve. The guy came in my yard and said I either get every dollar back and give it to him or I’m going somewhere I cain’t imagine. But that bitch Dautrieve had already spent some of it.”

  “What did the guy look like?”

  “He was wearing a hood. I couldn’t see his face. Except for his eyes. They looked like slits.”

  I glanced at Clete. “Richetti,” he said.

  “Who’s Richetti?” Bottoms said.

  “A guy you want to run from,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “Don’t leave me screwed up in the head like this,” Bottoms said. “I got a weak heart. You got to tell me who this guy is. That money is from the Mob? The guy is an assassin? Why you looking at me like that?”

  “I hate people who hurt animals,” Clete said.

  “Pit bulls are made to fight,” Bottoms said. “An animal has to earn its keep. It’s the law of nature.”

  Clete slipped his .38 snub-nose from his shoulder holster, flipped out the cylinder, and dumped the rounds into his palm. I knew what he was going to do next. “Let it go, Cletus,” I said.

  “Wait in the Caddy.”

  “No.”

  “I mean it, Dave.”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “You’re making me angry, big mon.”

  I looked down at Bottoms. His face was white with blood loss. “What’s the last thing the guy in the hood said to you, Mr. Bottoms?”

  He had to think. He looked up at me. “ ‘No matter what you do, you’ll eventually be mine.’ What’s that mean?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Clete said.

  He snicked the cylinder back inside the frame of his pistol, then replaced the pistol in his shoulder holster and dropped the loose rounds in his coat pocket. He took out his cell phone and dialed 911 as we went out the door.

  “You need to get the Humane Society out to the home of Jess Bottoms in Sunset,” he said. “I’m going to call the Associated Press in New Orleans about what I saw here. My name is Clete Purcel. Bring an ambulance for Mr. Bottoms. Out.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  FRIDAY EVENING CLETE and I headed to Baton Rouge to hear Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie play and sing at a club by the LSU campus. The drive on the elevated highway across the Atchafalaya Basin is spectacular, particularly when a yellow moon is rising above the miles of black-water bays and flooded trees draped with Spanish moss. But I could not clear my head of the moral conflict I had brought into my life, namely my relationships with Leslie Rosenberg and Penelope Balangie. I was also worried about the degree of damage Clete had done to Jess Bottoms. Felony assault was felony assault.

  “You think Bottoms will file charges?” I said.

  “No, he’d have to explain too many things. Prostitutes, money laundering, illegal gambling. Plus, he’s afraid of Gideon. You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dave.”

  “From forcing him to play Russian roulette?”

  “You turned soft on me. You do that with these guys.”

  “You don’t see it, Clete,” I said. “We’re becoming somebody else. It’s like catching a disease.”

  He swerved in the middle of the causeway to miss a possum. “Wrong. We’ll never be like these guys. The Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Ted Bundy, that’s the kind of people you’re putting on the same level as us?”

  “No,” I said, too tired to argue.

  “Look at the books on the backseat I got from the library on the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. I just figured out something.”

  He had changed the subject, as he always did when he felt he had hurt me. “Figured out what?”

  “Nothing has changed since back then,” he said. “Rich families still use their children to forge alliances. How about the Kennedys auctioning off Jackie to that Greek, the one without a neck. He looked like a frog wearing sunglasses. I heard when he died, it took two months to bury his dong.” He took a hit from his flask, then another. “Dave, I’ve been thinking. As far as Richetti is concerned, I think he’s a defective. What’s the population of any prison like? Most of the inmates were probably beat on with an ugly stick when they were children.”

  “Who were the two black kids with blue eyes that I saw with him in Henderson Swamp?”

  Clete took another hit from the flask, the cap tinkling against the side. “He probably gave them five bucks to jerk your chain.”

  The late sun had turned the trees red in the bays. Herons were standing in the shallows, their long legs as slender as soda straws. Clete was driving with one hand, the whiskey having its way, his face warm and serene in the dashboard’s glow.

  “You still here?” he said.

  “The blue in their eyes was just like the blue in the eyes of Leslie Rosenberg’s invalid daughter,” I said.

  “See? There you go. You let your imagination loose. That’s what these guys want us to do.”

  “Which guys?”

  “Mark Shondell and the people he’s a hump for. A guy like
that doesn’t have the smarts to amass all that money on his own. I bet that money with the dye on it was his.”

  “I saw Richetti in a newsreel with Benito Mussolini.”

  “You saw a guy who looked like him. Here’s a more serious subject. What about the Balangie woman? You got feelings for her? You had a weak moment and wanted to get your ashes hauled? What are we talking about here?”

  “Guess.”

  “Okay, so you were on the square. But it’s got to end, noble mon. If she’s done it with you, she’s done it with others. I got a feeling those ‘others’ are in a landfill or a swamp courtesy of her husband. Sorry, I forgot. He’s not her husband.”

  I stared out the passenger window at the miles of wetlands slipping past us into the darkness, a solitary ember of sunlight dying on the horizon.

  “Come in, Earth,” he said.

  “Leslie has dreams about flames crawling on her skin.”

  “That’s what nightmares are,” he said. “Falling from cliffs, mountains crashing on our head, getting buried alive, stuff that early man was afraid of.”

  “You saw Richetti, Clete. He hung you upside down. That wasn’t a dream. Stop lying to yourself.”

  He put both hands on the wheel. I could see him breathing, his knuckles ridging.

  “What are you hiding?” I said.

  “One of those books talks about an infamous executioner in the sixteenth century. He burned a lot of Jews. His name was used to scare children. It was Gideon Richetti.”

  * * *

  THE CLUB WAS overflowing, strung with Christmas lights, the dance floor packed with young people. Johnny and Isolde were on the stage and having a love affair with the crowd. She looked like a mermaid in her white strapless dress plated with sequins, a nimbus surrounding her hair, her mouth small and red, her tattooed bouquet dry and cool and pale on her shoulder. Johnny was equally radiant, without a line in his face. Who would believe he had recently been in rehab, doubling over with cramps during withdrawal and thinking of life in terms of one minute at a time?

  Clete and I had to stand against the back wall. He went to the bar and brought back a whiskey sour for himself and a Dr Pepper with cherries and ice for me. “Do I feel old,” he said.

  “That’s because we’re old,” I said.

  He sipped from his drink, his brow furrowed, and I knew something other than our age was on his mind.

  “Guess who’s over there in the corner,” he said.

  I looked through the crowd but couldn’t see anyone I knew.

  “Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo,” Clete said. “I need to get Firpo alone.”

  “Bad idea.”

  “Firpo set me up with Richetti in Key West,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for Johnny, I would have died in a fire an inch at a time. I still have nightmares.”

  “What’s Firpo going to tell you?”

  “Maybe we’ll get the gen on Richetti,” he said.

  “I think you know what Richetti is. You just won’t accept what your mind tells you.”

  “So what is he?” Clete said.

  “Maybe he’s like a hologram. Maybe all of us are.”

  “Dave, that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”

  He was probably right. But I could already see the lights of regret and pity in his eyes. “Hey, what do I know?” he said. “That’s why I don’t argue. Remember what Dale Carnegie said? The only argument you win is the one you don’t have.”

  “You know who else said that?”

  “No.”

  “Charlie Manson.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It was one of his come-on lines.”

  “There goes my whole evening,” he said.

  I took a drink from my Dr Pepper. It felt cold and bright inside my mouth, the cherries sliding sweet down my throat. But the fact that it tasted good wasn’t enough. I could smell the alcohol in the drinks of other people, and feel it reach out and lay its old claim on my soul, as though all the pain I had gone through and all the meetings I had attended meant nothing. But the mysterious and glorious elixir-like smell of alcohol, and the transformative effect it had on my nervous system, and the near-erotic relationship I had with it, were not my only problems. Three men had just come in the side door and taken a table in back. Two of them were not taller than five-six and had the determined, vaguely irritable faces of South European peasants and wore suits that had a shine like Vaseline. I was surprised at how good the third man looked in spite of the beating I had given him in his home theater. He was dressed in a tailored gray suit with thin stripes and a crimson handkerchief folded in the breast pocket and an open-necked purple shirt. He looked straight at me as though I were the only person in the club. I felt my heart drop. It was not out of fear. My guilt about Penelope was like a hot coal in my stomach.

  “You sick?” Clete said.

  “You and I weren’t meant for this kind of life,” I said.

  “When did you decide that?” he said.

  “Just now.”

  He followed my eyes. “Is that Adonis?” he said.

  “In the flesh. Who are the guys with him?”

  “I don’t know. He imports his hitters. I think we ought to leave.”

  “No.”

  “Are you trying to commit suicide?”

  “I have to get on the square about this stuff,” I said.

  “And tell him you bagged his old lady?”

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” I said.

  “You know what I’d do if I got hooked up with a woman that beautiful and with that amount of class?”

  “No, what?”

  “I don’t know. I never had the chance.”

  Which wasn’t true. But Clete was Clete, always humble, always protecting my feelings. He took another sip from his whiskey sour, holding it in his mouth so he could savor the taste and let it slide slowly down his throat. I could smell the lemon juice and Jack Daniel’s and syrup and maraschino cherry and orange slices on his breath, like a warm gift from the heavens. I felt I was two seconds from ordering one. I coughed slightly and cleared my throat. Before I could speak, Clete said, “Check it out.”

  Father Julian Hebert was in the midst of the line dancers, his arms spread on the shoulders of two fat women. But I could not keep my eyes off the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar.

  “You got that look, Dave,” Clete said.

  “What look?”

  “The one that means you should go to a meeting. I’ll go with you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He looked at the remainder of his whiskey sour and called the bartender over. “I’m done with this. Give me a glass of milk, will you? My ulcers are on fire.”

  * * *

  THE BAND TOOK a break, and I caught Father Julian at the bar. “What are you doing here, partner?” I said.

  “What I always do,” he said. “Dance.”

  “Have you seen a few people we’ve crossed paths with?”

  A bartender squirted Coca-Cola in a cup full of ice and handed it to him. Julian waited until the bartender was gone. “You mean Mark Shondell?”

  “Yeah. And Adonis Balangie. With his hired help.”

  “I didn’t see Adonis. Is Penelope with him?”

  “She’s staying at a hotel in New Iberia, out by the four-lane,” I said. I felt my heart swelling, my collar shrinking on my throat. “I’ve gotten involved with her.”

  Julian looked out at the dance floor, his egg-shaped face composed, every hair on his head in place. He was wearing jeans and loafers and a long-sleeve workout shirt. I tried not to think about the loneliness and the longings that must live inside him.

  “Marcel LaForchette took his life in your living room,” he said. “I know the kind of man you are, Dave. You blame yourself for what others do. But this time maybe you reached out to the wrong party.”

  “You said Penelope was a good woman.”

  “Some historians say Lucrezia B
orgia was charitable to a fault.”

  “That just sent a shudder through me,” I said.

  But I had lost his attention. He was staring at Mark Shondell’s table.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Shondell bothers me. The people he brings to New Iberia bother me. What he has probably done bothers me.” His face looked as though the oxygen and the netlike reflections of the disco ball had been sucked from the room.

  “What has Shondell done?” I asked.

  His jaw flexed. “I don’t have the evidence. It involves the very innocent. I’ve already said more than I should. I don’t have my glasses. Who’s that man with him?”

  “Eddy Firpo. He’s Johnny Shondell’s manager.”

  “He’s a lawyer?’

  “How’d you know?” I said.

  “I’ve seen him in New Orleans. He’s an anti-Semite. He also represents child porn vendors.”

  “Mark Shondell is a child molester?”

  “I don’t know what he is. I’d hate to find out.”

  “I need your help, Julian. Everybody in Iberia Parish is afraid of Mark Shondell, no matter what they pretend. Tell me what you know.”

  The expression on his mouth was bitter. “Get away from the Balangie family. Spend time with your daughter. Isn’t she coming home for Christmas?”

  “She’s on a school trip to Paris.”

  “Join her,” he said.

  Johnny and Isolde had gone back onstage. Julian was staring across the dance floor at Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo’s table, his eyelids fluttering.

  “What are you thinking?” I said.

  “I’d like to tear them both apart. Limb and joint.” He walked away from the bar, swaying slightly, as though his gyroscope had stopped working.

  Isolde and Johnny went into Dale and Grace’s version of “I’m Leaving It All Up to You.” When they finished, the crowd went wild.

  I couldn’t find Clete. I looked in the restroom and checked the Caddy. It was parked just where we had left it. My mouth was dry, my hands stiff when I tried to close them, my heart racing for no reason; a pressure band was tightening around the right side of my head, a prelude to hitting the deck, getting sloshed, or bursting a vessel in the brain.