A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Then I saw Clete smoking a cigarette by the side of the club. He was grinning, his teeth as big as tombstones, his porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, the Clete Purcel of old—unafraid, irreverent, always slipping the punch and shining on the worst the world could throw at him.

  My cell phone throbbed in my pants pocket. I put it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

  Clete saw my expression when I heard the voice on the other end. The joy went out of his face as though someone had clicked off a light.

  * * *

  “DO YOU KNOW who this is?” the voice said.

  “Your voice is not one people forget,” I replied.

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “No, sir, I know better than that.”

  Clete flipped away his cigarette and began walking toward me. The front door of the bar was open, and I could hear Johnny and Isolde singing “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

  “Look, Mr. Richetti—” I began.

  “Be quiet,” he said. “I need to ask a favor of you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell the Jewish girl I’m sorry.”

  “Which Jewish girl?”

  “Her child is crippled.”

  “You’re sorry about what?”

  “She’ll know,” he said.

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

  “I’m ashamed. I would frighten her also.”

  “Buddy, you’re one for the books.”

  “You and your friend Mr. Purcel must leave the nightclub.”

  “Why?”

  “Evil men are there.”

  “You’re talking about evil? The guy who tried to light up my best friend?”

  Suddenly, the transmission was filled with static. “You’re breaking up,” I said.

  “Don’t underestimate what you’re dealing with, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “You mean you or these evil guys you’re talking about?”

  “It’s not my choice to be what I am,” he said.

  “That’s a hard sell. You have free will, right?” All I could hear was the wind in my other ear. “Still there?” I said.

  “Yes, I have free will, and I misused it.”

  “That takes us to the heart of the matter. What exactly are you, sir?”

  He cleared his throat with a sound like scrofulous matter breaking loose inside a clogged sewer pipe. Then Clete grabbed the cell phone out of my hand and put it to his ear. “If this is who I think it is, be advised that I’m going to kick a telephone pole up your ass.” Clete waited for a response, his eyes on mine. He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it. “He must have hung up.”

  “Do you realize what you just did?” I said.

  A vein was pulsing in his temple; his eyes were cups of sorrow. “I want to blow up somebody’s shit.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  WE WENT BACK inside and stood at the bar. Clete ordered a lemonade. Johnny and Isolde were singing “The Wild Side of Life.” It wasn’t Swamp Pop, but nonetheless it was the flagship of every honky-tonk ballad ever written.

  Clete drank half his lemonade in one long tilt of the glass. I had the feeling he had spiked it with his flask. “Sorry I blew it with Richetti,” he said.

  “He’ll be back.”

  “Think so?”

  “Unto the grave, if he has his way.”

  Clete gazed at the bandstand and the multicolored lights playing on Isolde’s sequined dress. “Jesus, I love that song. It’s like a hymn.”

  “It was. The melody is from ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’ ”

  He finished his drink and this time ordered a whiskey sour; he gazed across the dance floor. “Adonis is pinning us.”

  “Let him.”

  “I don’t know how I defended that guy,” Clete said. “Maybe because he was in the 173rd. How could he sell out his stepdaughter like that?”

  “A fraud is a fraud, a bum is a bum. There’s no mystery about human behavior.”

  “I’m going to have a talk with Adonis.”

  “I thought you wanted to leave him alone,” I said.

  “That was before Richetti called. Something’s about to go down. I think Adonis knows what it is. Otherwise he wouldn’t have those two button men with him.”

  “It’s your call,” I said.

  I followed him across the dance floor to Adonis’s table. Both his people had the dark, lean faces of men who work in extreme heat; neither one looked directly at us.

  “How’s it going, Adonis?” I said.

  His hands formed a pyramid; he tapped the ends of his fingers together. I realized his face was heavily made up. I knew that at some point I would pay a price for the beating I had given him.

  “Fine, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “And you? Seen my wife lately?”

  “Cut the cutesy routine, Adonis,” Clete said. “We just had Gideon Richetti on the phone. I think you and him and Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo are all hooked up. I also think Richetti is just a guy, a world-class creep but flesh and blood, not some evil spirit delivering telegrams from a pizza parlor run by Leonardo da Vinci or whoever.”

  The eyes of the two bodyguards took on a muddy, troubled look, as though an element had entered the situation that they were not prepared to deal with. “How about it, fellas?” Clete said. “You capisci who Gideon Richetti is?”

  Both men looked at Adonis like sentinels waiting for the go-ahead.

  “My employees aren’t part of this, Mr. Purcel,” Adonis said.

  “You pimped out your stepdaughter,” Clete said. “Do these guys know that? How do you say ‘pimp’ in greaseball?”

  “Time for you to leave our table, sir,” Adonis said.

  “You tell Eddy Firpo I’ll be dialing him up,” Clete said.

  “I have nothing to do with Firpo, and neither do Isolde and Johnny Shondell,” Adonis said. “They got out of their contract with him.”

  “So that puts you in control?” I said.

  “I own restaurants and fisheries and an olive oil company in Italy,” Adonis said. “Ta-ta, gentlemen.” He jiggled his fingers at us.

  I cupped my hand around Clete’s bicep. It felt like concrete. “I talked with Richetti tonight, Adonis,” I said. “He showed concern for our safety. That means his alliances have changed. I don’t know if that’s of interest to you or not.”

  A single strand of oily mahogany-dark hair hung on his forehead. He touched a place on his cheekbone where I had kicked him. “Would you repeat that, please?”

  “I like your threads,” I said. “Keep fighting the good fight.” I gave him a thumbs-up and went back to the bar.

  Clete joined me seconds later. He was wheezing with laughter. “You pissed in his brain. The guy won’t sleep for a week.” He kept laughing and snorting at the same time.

  “You want some gumbo?” I said.

  “These guys got gumbo?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Maybe there’s some sunshine in all this.”

  That was Clete.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Clete finished his gumbo and washed it down with a Bud and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Do you know Louisiana has the highest rate of heart and vascular disease in the country?”

  “You’re carrying on the tradition?”

  “It beats a bowl of cornflakes in North Dakota.”

  Isolde and Johnny invited people from the dance floor and tables to come up on the bandstand and join them in singing Danny & the Juniors’ signature song, “Rock ’n Roll Is Here to Stay.” Isolde danced with a former governor. A black man with taps on his shoes walked on his hands across the bandstand. Someone in back climbed on a table and let go with his own tenor sax. The entire building was shaking. But inside all the celebration and the innocence and happiness of the crowd, I saw the players in our medieval tale moving about like characters marked for death, distracted by a tolling of bells that only they heard.

  I saw Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo go to the men’s room; Fath
er Julian disappeared in back also; then Adonis’s two men left their table and walked through the crowd as though searching for someone.

  “I got to hit the head,” Clete said.

  “I just saw Firpo and Mark Shondell go in there.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with my kidneys,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Give it a few minutes, Clete. Don’t crowd the batter on this one.”

  “You worry too much. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are back in town. Wish I was thirty years younger. Look at the women in this place.” He pulled on his dong. “Go, Tigers.”

  Then he was gone. I looked at my watch. It was 10:17. I saw Gideon Richetti standing to the left of the bandstand, and at first I thought I was having a hallucination. But he had the same height and athletic physique as Gideon and was wearing a hooded Tulane jacket and tight leather gloves, the kind a race-car driver or a speed-bag boxer might wear, his head and face buried inside the bowl of shadow created by his hood.

  I headed for him, knocking through a couple of tables. People in silvery conical hats were forming a bunny-hop line. The man with the tenor sax had climbed up on the bandstand and was blasting out Harry James’s “Back Beat Boogie,” the drummer tearing the seams in the shoulders of his jacket, his drumsticks a blur.

  “Gideon!” I yelled above the heads of the dancers.

  He turned his back and began working his way to the fire exit. He was no doubt a powerful man, one that made you think of a primitive creature lifting stones into place on a medieval structure.

  “Richetti! It’s Dave Robicheaux!” I shouted. “I just want to talk.”

  I almost knocked a young woman to the floor and had to grab her and apologize to both her and her boyfriend. They were kind and full of smiles, and I felt like a fool. Gideon was almost to the fire exit. I had a .22 auto Velcro-wrapped to my right ankle. If I got a clear shot in the parking lot, I was going to drop him and worry about legalities later. Not rational? Neither were any of the things that had happened to Clete Purcel, Marcel LaForchette, and me.

  Gideon crashed out the door. I followed him into an alley that stank of garbage and out to the parking lot of a loan company. I stopped long enough to pull my .22 auto from my ankle holster. He ran under a streetlamp and looked over his shoulder. This time there was no mistaking his identity. I could even make out his bump of a nose and eyes that were like watermelon seeds.

  I could have fired justifiably somewhere below his waist. It would have not been legally justified, but morally, I thought I had the right. We needed Richetti strapped in custody. Or strapped to a table in a medical lab. If I missed, the round would probably hit concrete and ricochet against the front of a building. However, here’s the problem in that kind of situation: You have somewhere between one and two seconds to make a judgment. The wrong choice can kill an innocent person. The wrong choice can also ruin your life. Ask a cop who has stacked time in a mainline joint. You do not have to die to go to hell.

  I aimed the .22 auto at his buttocks, then lowered it and let it hang from my hand. Gideon Richetti disappeared into the darkness. I put away the .22 and walked back to the fire exit, which was still open, then heard a woman scream inside. The music stopped, and the entire building became quiet. Coincidentally, the woman I had almost knocked down was the first out of the exit, her face dilated, her hands waving meaninglessly at the air as though she couldn’t breathe. Her mouth was an oval, but no sound came out.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “That poor man,” she said, a tear slipping from each eye. She tried to speak again but began hiccupping and couldn’t stop.

  * * *

  I TOOK OUT MY badge and held it over my head and worked my way through the huge half-circle of people around the entrance to the men’s room. Eddy Firpo had made it out of the toilet stall and fallen through the doorway onto the floor, where he now lay on his back, his trousers and belt and jockey shorts around his ankles, his shirtfront soaked in blood. The wound across his throat was the kind usually inflicted by an instrument such as a box cutter or a barber’s razor. A rubber tourniquet was tied on his upper left arm. The syringe was still in the vein, gray sediment and backed-up blood inside the barrel.

  I asked everyone to move back, then knelt by the body. There were no defensive wounds that I could see. His pigtail had been sawed from his scalp and stuffed in his mouth; his gold cross and chain were gone. Three vintage postage stamps inside a mashed cellophane container were pasted to the sole of one shoe. I knew nothing about stamp collecting, but these stamps were crisp and delicate and lovely in design and must have been expensive. What were the odds of their ending up next to a public toilet bowl where Firpo happened to step on them?

  Two cops, a medic, and a fireman were trying to get through the crowd as gently as they could. Father Julian, Clete, and Adonis and his button men were nowhere in sight. Mark Shondell was comforting a woman who had almost been knocked down by Firpo when he burst out the door.

  Somebody dropped a raincoat on Firpo’s body. Shondell patted the young woman’s back. He had become the protector, the man above the fray, the man of all seasons. Her hair was inches from his face. I saw his nostrils swell, his lips press together. Then he twisted his wrist so he could see the time on his watch. I wondered how one man could fool so many people for so many years.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THERE WERE NO witnesses to the murder. Firpo must have been seated in a stall shooting up when his executioner entered the room. What happened after that was a matter of speculation. The stall door was neither locked nor broken. Would Firpo sit on a commode and shoot up without sliding the bolt? That made no sense. Which meant he probably knew the killer and opened the door of his own volition.

  Several people in the nightclub had motivation to punch Firpo’s ticket. Maybe financial need had forced Adonis Balangie to pimp out his stepdaughter to Firpo and Mark Shondell, and Adonis had sent one of his Sicilian gumballs into the stall to even the score. The vicious nature of the killing, the sawed-off pigtail stuffed in the mouth, had the ritualistic overtones of the traditional Black Hand—also known as the Mafia—which had been in New Orleans since 1890, the year they murdered the police commissioner.

  Mark Shondell was another candidate. Firpo was a hype. Shondell probably blamed him for getting Johnny on the spike and for Johnny running off with Isolde. Also, Shondell was probably Firpo’s silent business partner, and perhaps Firpo’s company assets would transfer automatically to Shondell, who would have no trouble finding a psychopath with a box cutter.

  Then there was Gideon Richetti. There seemed to be no end to his potential. Unfortunately, we had no idea who or even what he was. I wanted to dismiss him as a meltdown. But like all categorizations, that didn’t slide down the pipe. Truth be known, I wondered if I was having a nervous collapse.

  As I sorted through all the people who might want to take Firpo off the board, I couldn’t exclude Clete. There had been slips in Clete’s life. He had taken ten grand from the Mob and killed a federal witness, although the shooting was an accident. More significantly, he experienced psychotic episodes that could visit unimaginable levels of rage on a misogynist or predator or an abuser of the elderly or someone who was cruel to animals. Plus, he daily nursed his hatred of neo-Nazis and was convinced they were going to have at one least one more historical grab at the brass ring.

  Earlier in the evening he’d said he wanted to blow up someone’s shit. His favorite banzai cocktail was a jigger of Jack lowered into a mug of cold beer. I could imagine Clete throwing a couple in the tank and going after the man who had arranged for him to be tortured to death by Gideon. In fact, I wondered why he hadn’t already done it.

  The last name on the list was the one I hated to think about, not because I believed he was guilty but because he was too honest, the kind of man the system can grind into pulp.

  Look, this is how the system works. Or, rather, how it doesn’t work. The law is usually enforce
d only upon the people who are available. The members of the Pool are always close by. The Pool consists of recidivists and dysfunctional people who skipped toilet training and couldn’t discuss the recipe for ice water. The recidivists think their rap sheets have the historical importance of the Magna Carta; their jailhouse tats are the equivalent of military citations. They take pride in their first-name relationship with cops. If they aren’t guests of the gray-bar hotel chain or at the least don’t have a sheet, no one would know they ever existed.

  What’s the point? The system was created to handle only certain kinds of people. If you are on the square and wander into it, chances are it will cannibalize you.

  Excuse my digression. My real problem was the postage stamps on Firpo’s shoe. I would have to show them to the locals. I would also have to tell them where I thought they came from.

  Just as the first homicide detective arrived, I saw Father Julian standing by the front entrance and walked over to him. “Let’s go outside,” I said.

  “Why?” he said, looking at the paramedics bringing in the gurney.

  “It’s important.”

  “Who was hurt?”

  “Eddy Firpo. He wasn’t hurt. He was murdered.”

  “The lawyer with Mark Shondell?”

  “Come outside. Don’t argue. We don’t have much time.”

  Naturally, he resisted. I took him by the arm and walked him through the door. The wind was cold and damp and smelled of the chain of lakes north of the campus. “Were you carrying some collectible postage stamps tonight?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t buy some in Baton Rouge for your collection?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “There were three stamps stuck to Firpo’s shoe.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “How many people in Baton Rouge bring valuable historical postage stamps into a nightclub?”

  “Are you saying I’m involved with this man’s death?”

  “My opinion is irrelevant,” I said. “It’s those cops in there we need to worry about. If there’s anything you need to tell me, now’s the time.”