A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “What did the stamps look like?”

  “I saw some Latin or Italian words on them. One stamp was postmarked 1891.”

  The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes drained of color. “I didn’t bring any stamps into this club.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay, what?” he said.

  “I believe you. If the cops question you, tell them what you just said. Then say nothing else. If they press you, tell them you want a lawyer.”

  “I don’t need one,” he said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Why did you react when I mentioned the 1891 stamp?”

  He paused. “I have an 1891 Monaco stamp at home.”

  “Get in your car and drive back to New Iberia,” I said. “Don’t talk to anyone until I call you.”

  “What’s happening here, Dave?”

  “Everything will be fine,” I replied. “I promise.”

  Want to know what a pompous jerk sounds like? I had just outdone myself.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I TOLD THE BATON Rouge homicide detectives what I had seen but left out any mention of Julian. The next morning, which was Saturday, I drove to the hotel where Penelope was staying. I used the lobby phone and asked her to have breakfast with me in the dining room.

  “Your voice,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “You sound tense.”

  “It’s a lovely day,” I said. “Toggle on down.”

  “Toggle?” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later, she walked into the dining room. She had on a pink sundress and a broad straw hat, the kind Scarlett O’Hara might have worn. “Why the flowers?” she said.

  I handed her the bouquet of roses I had just bought at the florist not far from the Shadows. “Let’s order, then talk,” I said.

  The waitress came to our table and wrote down our order, then smiled at the roses and left.

  “So tell me,” Penelope said.

  “Would you like to get married?”

  “With whom?”

  I looked out the window at the cars entering and leaving the four-lane. “Take a guess.”

  “You?”

  “I’ve never had to seek humility,” I said. “It always finds me.”

  “You’re asking me to marry you?”

  I watched the waitress filling our coffeepot at the service counter. She had auburn hair and the strong young body of a working-class Cajun girl.

  “Unless you’re thinking of doing something this weekend,” I said.

  “Because your conscience bothers you?”

  “Good enough for a romance, good enough for a ring,” I said.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing, Dave, but we may not be right for each other.”

  “It was just a thought.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone like you.”

  “You’ve probably been lucky,” I replied. I put a twenty-dollar bill on the tablecloth.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yep, see you around.”

  I walked through the revolving glass door and out into the sunshine. But not fast enough.

  “You’re not going to just walk away from me like that,” she said at my back.

  “No offense intended,” I said.

  “No offense? You drop flowers in a woman’s face, then give her five seconds to decide if she wants to live a lifetime with you?”

  “Maybe I’ll have a short lifespan.”

  “You’re doing this to get rid of me, aren’t you?”

  “No, but I wonder why you’ve lived all these years with a Mafia gutter rat. An uptown one, but still a gutter rat.”

  “I’ve told you. Others are dependent upon our families.”

  “I think that’s pure rot. You’re a grand and charitable woman who befriended a man in a time of need. It was an honor to be part of your life.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “Got to do it. You deserve a better man than the likes of me.”

  But I couldn’t move, and I didn’t know why.

  “Second thoughts?”

  “You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I’d like to kill Adonis Balangie. Know why?”

  “No.”

  “I know he’s had you. I also know you’ve lied about it. It’s not the man, it’s the lie that killed us, Penelope.”

  I got in my truck and dropped the keys. I couldn’t put the key in the ignition. When I finally drove away, I looked in the rearview mirror. She was still standing in front of the hotel, the brim of her hat wilted on either side of her face. I don’t think I ever felt worse in my life.

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS CAME AND went. The days were warm and cool at the same time, and at night, electrified white clouds of smoke billowed from the stacks on the sugar mill. The weather seemed more a harbinger of spring than the real Louisiana winter that awaited us, one of dreary rain-darkened days that can seep into the soul.

  My adopted daughter, Alafair, came home from France, then returned early to her part-time job in the bookstore at Reed. Penelope did not call. I grieved that I’d hurt her. The breakup was about Adonis, not Pen. No matter what she claimed about her marital status, she had lived with him for years. Furthermore, he was a dangerous and, I think, jealous man, and if he thought another man was taking her away, I believed he might kill her.

  But my concerns with the Balangie family were about to fade quickly and be replaced by others. In mid-January, Father Julian called me at the office. “There’re two homicide detectives from Baton Rouge here. They say they have a search warrant.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s about my stamps.”

  “Put one of the detectives on.”

  The man who took the phone breathed heavily into the mouthpiece, like a heavy smoker or a consumptive. “Detective Niles,” he said. “What can I h’ep you with?”

  The accent was North Louisiana or perhaps Mississippi.

  “This is Detective Robicheaux,” I said. “Did you guys check in with us before you executed the search warrant?”

  “We’re not required to do that.”

  “Most law enforcement people consider it a professional courtesy.”

  “That’s why you blew the Firpo homicide scene before I could interview you?” he said.

  He had me. “I’m on my way, and I’ll be at your disposal.”

  “Noted,” he said. “And not needed.”

  He broke the connection.

  I checked out a cruiser and was at Julian’s house in fifteen minutes. The screen door hung open. I stepped up on the gallery. The living room was a wreck. Through the hallway, I saw a big man in a brown suit leaning into the refrigerator, rattling things inside. His head looked as hard and large as a bowling ball. He held his fedora in one hand. His partner was flipping the mattress off Julian’s bed. Julian was watching both detectives at the same time, his face tight with anger.

  “What’s with you guys?” I said to the detective in the brown suit.

  He turned around, holding a saucer with four sugar cubes on it. “What’s this look like?” he said.

  “Sugar cubes?” I replied.

  He tilted them off the saucer into a Ziploc. “We’ll take them to the lab.”

  “You’re talking about acid? In the refrigerator of a priest?”

  “I know your reputation, Robicheaux,” he said. “I used to have a drinking problem myself. I know you just got reinstated. Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”

  “Why the search warrant on Father Julian?” I asked, hoping they had nothing of evidentiary consequence.

  “There were some postage stamps stuck on Firpo’s shoe,” he said. “The stamps had the good father’s prints on them. His prints were also on file with the NCIC. Two federal busts for trespassing at the School of the Americas.”

  Julian took a step toward the detective. “Those stamps were stolen from my house. Those sugar cubes aren’t mine, either.”
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  “You’re sure, Julian?” I said.

  “I saw the other detective open the refrigerator earlier,” he said. “It looked like he put something inside.”

  “How about it?” I said to Niles.

  “Maybe the maid left the cubes in there,” Niles said. “But tell me this: Why didn’t the good father report the theft of the stamps?”

  Julian started to speak, but I lifted my hand. “Father Julian gives odd jobs to people who have been in the system. He figures they’ve got enough grief without his adding to it.”

  Niles didn’t answer. He was a hard man to read. Were he and his partner on a pad? Or was he just a burnt-out old-time flatfoot who had smoked too many cigarettes?

  “What’s your opinion, Detective Niles?” I said.

  “Firpo was mixed up with child porn,” he said. “Maybe Father Hebert did everybody a good deed. Maybe he’s like us. He’s tired of the degenerates running society. Maybe he decided to put his thumb on the scale.”

  I glanced through the front door. An Iberia Parish cruiser was pulling onto the grass. Two people were in front, one a blond woman. She got out of the cruiser and stretched her arms. She was wearing navy blue slacks and a starched white shirt; her gold badge hung from a lanyard on her chest. I stepped out on the gallery.

  Carroll LeBlanc, the pro tem sheriff, got out from behind the wheel and gazed at me over the top of the cruiser.

  “Why the grin?” I said.

  “Guess who your new boss is,” he replied.

  Helen Soileau, my old Homicide partner, walked up the steps. She opened the screen and let it slam behind her. “What’s this crap about two Baton Rouge homicide roaches who didn’t check in?” she said.

  “Long time no see, Soileau,” Niles said.

  “Not long enough,” she replied. “And it’s Sheriff Soileau to you.”

  Niles’s partner came out of the bedroom. He had a hooked nose and a head that looked like it had been squeezed inside a waffle iron. “I’ll be,” he said.

  “Pardon?” she said.

  “Weren’t you a meter maid at NOPD?” he said.

  She looked at the disarray in the living room, then at Niles. “Y’all want to explain this?”

  “Nothing to explain,” Niles said. “Father Hebert fled a homicide scene in Baton Rouge. Some collectible stamps belonging to him were on the vic’s body.”

  “So you came down here and tore up his house?”

  “No, we searched it,” Niles said. He held up the Ziploc. “This was in the refrigerator. There’s discoloration in each cube.”

  “Get out of here,” she said. “Take your shit with you.”

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. As I answered, Helen went to her cruiser, slid her baton from the front seat, and smashed out a side window in the unmarked car driven by the two detectives.

  Niles stared through the screen door. “Are you drunk?” he said.

  She walked back inside and tapped him with the baton in the middle of his forehead, hard enough to leave a white spot. “File a complaint with the DA. I’ll give you his private number.”

  But I was no longer paying attention to Helen and her behavior. I had seen her take down too many bad guys, some of them cops, some of then psychotic, and I knew how it would end. I was listening to Leslie Rosenberg on my cell phone.

  “I had a nightmare and was burning to death,” she said. “When I woke up, there was ash in my hair. A green man was in the yard.”

  “Start over,” I said.

  “I’m not crazy. I could smell smoke in my clothes. I know him. From long ago.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my cottage.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said.

  “I didn’t tell you the rest of it. I confronted him. He tried to touch me.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Looking at me. Through the screen.”

  I took the cell phone from my ear. “Helen, I want you to listen to this.”

  “I’m a little busy right now.”

  I walked down on the grass and shoved the detective named Niles. “Do what you’re told and haul your worthless ass out of here,” I said. Then I gave Helen my cell phone. “Now listen.”

  * * *

  I HEADED UP OLD Jeanerette Road to the self-help center run by the activist nuns and the cottage where Leslie and her daughter were now living. Leslie was on the gallery when I arrived. The tide was in, and the bayou was high and dark and running through the canebrakes on the bank. I wondered if Gideon had hidden somewhere along the bank or escaped in a boat. That he had appeared at the cottage in broad daylight indicated that he had become bolder and perhaps more dangerous.

  I got out of the cruiser. “Is your daughter all right?”

  “She’s sleeping,” Leslie said. “The man just left.” She looked at her watch. “He said he’ll call you on my phone in approximately seven minutes. He said you left your cell phone with the sheriff. How could he know that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Who is he, Dave?”

  “Gideon Richetti.”

  “I don’t mean his name. Who is he? What is he?”

  “He didn’t try to explain himself?”

  “He cried.”

  “Cried? With tears?”

  “He said he could never make up for what he did to me. That was when he reached out his hand. It looked like a claw. It had scales on it. The nails were pointed. I could smell him. The odor was like mold.”

  “Did anyone else see him?”

  “No one. You don’t believe me?”

  “You bet I do.”

  “He said something that’s really crazy—that I’m already part of his world. He said I leave my body in the dark hours, but I have no memory of the deeds I do. He said eventually, my body will go with my spirit, and then I’ll be gone entirely.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I can’t leave. That I have Elizabeth to take care of. That’s when I called you.”

  Her cell phone chimed inside her wash-faded jeans. She worked it out of her pocket and opened it. “You want to take it or not?” she said.

  * * *

  I WALKED DOWN TO the water with the phone to my ear. “Is that you, Mr. Robicheaux?” Gideon said.

  “You’re scaring the hell out of a nice lady, bud.”

  “That’s not my intention.”

  “My friend Clete Purcel may be in a lot of trouble for busting up a guy you dragged into our lives.”

  “Mr. Bottoms?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “He’s no longer a problem for either you or Mr. Purcel.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “He’s not your business any longer. The Jewish woman is. She’s halfway between my world and yours. It was she who saved Mr. Purcel’s life.”

  “You cut this stuff out. I don’t want to hear it anymore. Father Julian may have had LSD in his icebox. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “I’m his friend.”

  “I don’t think he would see it that way.”

  “The problem you have, Mr. Robicheaux, is your lack of belief. You do not trust your eyes or ears. That’s going to change.”

  “How?” I said.

  “I will prove to you how all this is real. On Bayou Teche there is a special place where an event occurred with your father and you many years ago. You have never told anyone else about either the place or the event, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Go there at eleven o’clock tonight.”

  “Hold on.”

  “What is it?”

  “Are you from hell?”

  “Those definitions are relative.”

  “How so?”

  “In Vietnam, after you called upon Puff the Magic Dragon, did you feel pride as flames leaped from the straw homes of peasants who harvested rice with their hands? Did their screams fill you with glee? Did you smile upon your work to see?”

>   I dropped the phone and lost my balance and fell on one knee when I tried to pick it up.

  Chapter Thirty

  AT ELEVEN THAT night I walked along the edge of the Teche to a live oak that was over two hundred years old, not far from the old Burke home. It was here, on V-J Day in 1945, that I first fished with my father. He was a huge, illiterate man who fought in saloons for fun and racked pipe on the monkey board high above a drilling rig on the Gulf of Mexico, under the stars, the wind in his face, the waves crashing below, fearless unto the day the drill punched into an early pay sand and the casing blew out of the hole and Big Aldous Robicheaux clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and leaped into the dark, never to be seen again.

  But I no longer dwelled on the tragedy of my father and mother, and the deprivation and violence and loneliness that defined their lives. Rather than thinking of Big Aldous’s last moments sliding down the guy wire as the rig melted and toppled with him, I thought of this spot on the bayou where he taught me how to fish. He had bought me a cane pole and a balsa-wood bobber and a weight fashioned out of a perforated .36-caliber lead ball he bought from a colored man for twenty cents. It was a fine gift to receive, but I could catch no fish with it, although I baited the hook first with crickets, then night crawlers, and finally red wigglers.

  In my disgust, I swung the weight, the hook, and the bobber out in the center of the lily pads and fouled the hook in the roots below. I was ready to throw my pole in the water. Big Aldous was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, blowing the smoke into the wind. He flicked the cigarette in the bayou. “Don’t be getting mad, no,” he said. “You got to outt’ink the fish, you.”

  I was lost.

  “See, you done put your hands on the bait, Davie,” he said. “The fish can smell you. So you got to change the smell.”

  “How do I do that?” I said.

  “Spit on your bait. What you t’ink?”

  I lifted the poor drowned worm on my hook from the water and spat on it, then swung over the current. The bobber floated downstream about one foot and plunged out of sight. I pulled up the cane pole with such violence that I broke it in half and flung a goggle-eye perch into a limb above my head. My father had to borrow a rake from the Burke home and comb the fish out of the tree.