A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

“Who is ‘they’?”

  “The cocksuckers I was just talking about.”

  A conversation with Clete could be the equivalent of driving a nail into your skull. “Where are you staying?”

  He gave me the name of a motel in a small settlement on the south end of Terrebonne Parish, almost to the salt water.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

  “It better not be about Lizard Man.”

  “He may be looking for you, Leslie Rosenberg says.”

  “If you see him before I do, tell him to get lost.”

  “Maybe he wants your forgiveness.”

  “Tell him I’ll meet him on Mars in about five hundred years or so. Dave, I still feel like we’re inside a nightmare of some kind.”

  “How’s your weather?” I said.

  “What’s the name of that song you like by John Fogerty?”

  “ ‘Bad Moon Rising’?”

  “That’s the weather in Terrebonne Parish.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST PERSON I saw the next morning at the department was Carroll LeBlanc. “Where you going in such a hurry, Robo?”

  “Taking a ride over to Terrebonne.”

  “Need some help?”

  I waited while two uniformed deputies walked past us, then said, “Mark Shondell is making a move.”

  “Yeah?” LeBlanc said.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “Clete Purcel told me.”

  “Purcel should know.”

  “Say again?”

  “He’s paid a lot of dues. He’s been around.”

  I started to walk away.

  “A move how?” Carroll said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I do something wrong?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Because you don’t sound eager to have me along.”

  “I’m going to talk to Helen right now. Why don’t you join us?”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Sorry again for yesterday. I mean that pity-pot stuff. You know how—”

  We were at the stairwell. “After you,” I said.

  We went into Helen’s office. She was looking out the window. The sky had turned yellow, and birds were rising from the trees in the park. I told her about Clete’s phone call and his belief that Mark Shondell might be holding Johnny and Isolde.

  “That’s for the FBI, Pops,” she said.

  “I bet they’d love getting in on this,” I replied. “Want me to tell them we’re dealing with a guy from the year 1600? Or the possibility that Mark Shondell is in league with evil forces?”

  “You lay off that voodoo dog shit, Dave,” she said.

  “Helen, we can’t rule anything out,” Carroll said. “There’s something weird going on. Look at the sky. It’s like hurricane season in August.”

  “End of discussion,” she said. “How long do you need to be in Terrebonne?”

  “Two or three days, maybe,” I said.

  “The media better not hear any of this,” she said. “You copy?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Yes, ma’am, we copy,” Carroll said.

  She waited for me to answer. “Dave?”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  She was fiddling with some papers on her desk, her head down. She looked up, obviously tired. “I get on your case because I can’t begin to guess what we’re dealing with. Don’t get mad at me. And don’t get hurt in Terrebonne.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  * * *

  I HAVE TO PAUSE at this juncture and say something of a personal nature. Death’s a motherfucker. We already know that. However, I was about to learn it comes in many forms, and that one’s own transition might not happen at a specific time but instead may take place at several different stops on one’s journey; in effect, there are no parallel lines, only the swirling vortex of which we’re a tiny part. I was also about to learn that time and historical sequence are relative, and that those who deny the existence of an aperture in the dimension are a fond and foolish group. Call it madness, but I believe the sulfurous sky we witnessed that day was the backdrop of a drama about good and evil, just as the wine-dark waves at the amusement pier in Texas were the same as those Homer described three thousand years ago.

  The rain began falling as I turned south at Houma and drove down to the salt. Carroll had dozed off, his head on his chest. He looked older, tired, the line of moles blacker under his left eye. His body shook suddenly, and he made a sound down in his throat but didn’t open his eyes. In my career I’ve known three cops who ate their gun. Others did it a day at a time with pills and booze. Carroll had all the signs of a cop about to burn his kite.

  We drove down a cracked stretch of asphalt road through miles of wetlands and sawgrass and palmettos and a swamp in which the algae was so thick it undulated with the tide like a milky-green blanket. In the distance I could see a crossroads and a small motel and a café and slips that had been cut for both sailboats and cabin cruisers, but much of the coastline had been eroded by saline intrusion, and the docks and shelters and wooden walks had been abandoned.

  I went over a rise in the road and hit a pothole. Carroll’s head jerked up. “We there?”

  “This is it,” I said.

  He rubbed his face. “I had a dream. Did I say something?”

  “No.”

  “I was climbing this ladder up to a real high place. I had my daughter with me and a dog I had when I was a kid. I had to drop one of them.”

  “Your daughter is going to be okay, Carroll.”

  “She never had a mother. That’s the problem.”

  “There’s Clete’s motel,” I said.

  “He’s quite a guy, huh? The Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam?”

  “Something like that. He doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Be honest with me on something. Were you or Purcel ever tempted to take juice at NOPD?”

  “I’m going to let that one slide, Carroll.”

  “I didn’t mean to rumple your threads. Geez.”

  I could see a few houses on stilts out on the bay. Waves full of sand were sliding into the sawgrass. In a few years most of this area would be washed away.

  “When we get back to New Iberia, you and I need to have a talk,” I said.

  I pulled up to the motel just as Clete stepped out of a room, his Caddy parked by the door. He was wearing a suit and tie and his porkpie hat. “Big mon,” he said.

  * * *

  THE THREE OF us sat in an isolated booth at the back of the motel café. Clete and I ordered coffee. Carroll ordered a beer. Clete’s eyes met mine, then he looked out the window at four brown pelicans flying in formation just above the surf.

  “Here’s what I got,” Clete said. “Shondell has a fuck pad on stilts about a mile down the levee. A pontoon plane has been there a couple of times. Shondell has some muscle on a tugboat close by. My insider guy thinks he saw Johnny Shondell.”

  “Who’s your insider guy?” I asked.

  Clete glanced at Carroll. “A guy who owes me some favors.”

  Carroll caught it. “You don’t trust me?” he said, trying to smile.

  “A guy who does airboat rides,” Clete said.

  “You saw Adonis and Penelope in a restaurant in Houma?” I said.

  “They ignored me. Maybe they didn’t even notice me,” Clete said. He scratched his forehead and looked around. “I mentioned the muscle on the tugboat. I had my binoculars on it. I saw a couple of women. I also saw a guy who worked with Delmer Pickins. The guy’s a sadist. Maybe that fuck pad is more than just a fuck pad.”

  “Maybe your imagination is running away with you,” Carroll said.

  Clete’s eyes locked on Carroll’s. “Could be.”

  “You think Isolde is in there?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Clete said.

  “How long you been scoping the place?” Carroll said. He took a sip from his beer.

>   “What difference does it make?” Clete said.

  “I was just asking,” Carroll said.

  “I got to take a drain,” Clete said. He looked at me. “See you outside, Dave.”

  * * *

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, I asked Carroll to take our unmarked car up the road, where he could get cell phone service, and check in with Helen. “Sure,” he said. “Sorry about ordering that beer. It helps calm my stomach.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “You’re stand-up, Robo.”

  No, just dumb, I thought.

  Carroll drove away. Clete and I walked along a partially destroyed levee. The sawgrass was flattening in the wind, the sky yellow, the air filled with salt spray. “LeBlanc’s dirty,” Clete said.

  “His daughter is messed up. He’s going through a bad time.”

  “Quit looking for good in people when it’s not there, Dave.”

  Maybe he was right. Anyway, I knew better than to argue with Clete. We walked in silence until the levee made a bend and we could see a large house on stilts out in deep water. A tug and a pontoon plane were anchored by the pilings. Clete looked through his binoculars. “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Shondell is on the deck with Adonis and Penelope Balangie. They’ve been jerking us around from the jump.”

  “Maybe they’re negotiating.”

  “They’re scum, Dave, including Penelope Balangie. She’s taken you over the hurdles six ways from breakfast.”

  “You shot at Shondell and the El Salvadoran, didn’t you?” I said.

  “So what?”

  “I didn’t get on your case, did I?”

  “Of course you did. You’re always on my case.”

  “Clete, no one is ever going to believe the events you and I have been privy to except Father Julian and Leslie Rosenberg. We can’t be fighting with each other.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No, you’re not hearing me. Maybe it’s all going to end here.”

  His green eyes looked as hard as glass, unblinking even in the wind. “What do you mean ‘it’s all going to end’?”

  “I think we’re outside of time now. I think the big secrets aren’t secrets at all. We turn them into secrets by denying their reality. Shondell is one of those guys who will destroy the earth. He’s the essence of evil. I wish you had smoked both him and the general.”

  “This isn’t like you, noble mon.”

  “Explain Gideon to me.”

  “I think LSD is involved,” he said.

  “You’re taking yourself over the hurdles, Clete.”

  He put the binoculars in my hands. “You call the play. I say bust ’em or dust ’em.”

  “There is no busting Mark Shondell.”

  “Maybe you’re finally seeing the light.”

  “No cowboy stuff. Got it?”

  Clete began tapping the air. “I’m the one got hung upside down over a fire at Shondell’s orders. That guy is going to have dinner with the crabs.”

  I looked through the binoculars. Penelope and Adonis and Shondell were talking on the deck. Penelope’s expression had the melancholy solemnity of the women in Botticelli’s paintings. I wanted to travel across the water and put my mouth on hers. I wanted to touch her breasts and hair and put myself inside her. Clete was right. Her presence in my life wasn’t nearly over.

  I handed Clete the binoculars. “Carroll and I will knock on the door of the stilt house tonight.”

  “Y’all will knock on the door?”

  “We have to do it by the numbers, Clete. We don’t have a warrant or probable cause.”

  “Why at night?”

  “Some of his men will be high. They’ll also feel safe.”

  “At night they feel safe?” he said.

  “They go back to the womb.”

  “No matter what you say, this is about Penelope Balangie,” Clete said. “You think you still have a chance with her.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

  He walked toward the motel, his coat blowing, one hand clamped on his porkpie hat. I had treated him in a moralistic fashion and had indicated that his lack of a policeman’s badge made him secondary to a deeply flawed lawman like Carroll LeBlanc. But Clete was wired and determined to have justice for the psychological damage done to him in the Keys; he was also extremely dangerous when he took revenge on misogynists and child abusers. Plus, we didn’t know where Johnny and Isolde were, and bullets don’t care about the targets they find.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  BY MID-AFTERNOON CLETE was out of his funk and concentrated on our objective. He called the airboat pilot who had given him information about Shondell and asked him to meet us in a café ten miles up the road. I told Carroll to keep his eyes on Shondell’s stilt house. The airboat pilot was a Cajun from Houma who had lost a leg in the propeller of his father’s airboat when he was twelve. He had intense brown eyes and a narrow unshaved face that made me think of an unhusked coconut. His name was Dallas Landry. He said he had seen no sign of a young couple matching the description of Johnny and Isolde.

  “How about the guys on the tug?” I said. “You talk to them at all?”

  “They ain’t the kind of guys you talk to,” he said.

  “How many guys are there?” Clete asked.

  “Four or five. Lots of ink on both arms. They got women wit’ ’em, too.”

  “Hookers?” Clete said.

  “They ain’t from the convent.”

  “You’ve been very helpful, Dallas,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

  “Mr. Mark had a guy there a couple of times. A lawyer, maybe. They was laughing about Adonis Balangie. They said they was gonna take everyt’ing he’s got. I pretended I didn’t hear nothing. He’s got a five-hundred-foot yacht about two miles out in the Gulf. He’s got sailboats on it.”

  There was another question I wanted to ask him. He wasn’t the kind of man we euphemistically call a “confidential informant,” many of whom are motivated by aggrandizement or fear or a desire to be accepted or to feel important. He was taking considerable risk, the least of which was loss of his job.

  “Why’d you come forward, Dallas?” I said.

  He stared at his coffee cup. “Mr. Mark bothers me.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “I ain’t got a way of putting it. It’s the way he looks at them young girls. I ain’t seen him put a hand on them. But I seen the way he looks. Somet’ing else, too.” He knotted his fingers.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “He got somet’ing dark in him, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  Just then Carroll LeBlanc came through the café entrance. “What’s going on with you guys?” he said.

  “You’re supposed to be watching the stilt house,” Clete said.

  “I didn’t know where y’all were,” Carroll said. He glanced at Dallas Landry. “Who are you?”

  “I run an airboat service,” Dallas said.

  “Oh yeah, Clete told me.”

  “Walk outside with me,” Clete said to Carroll.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Carroll said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Clete went outside by himself and got in his Caddy.

  “See you around, Mr. Robicheaux,” Dallas said.

  “You, too,” I said.

  Carroll sat down at the table. I wanted to take him apart.

  “I saw Johnny Shondell, so cool your jets, Dave,” he said. “I couldn’t get cell service, so I motored on up the road.”

  “You’re sure it was Johnny?”

  “He was standing on Shondell’s deck, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked pretty relaxed.”

  “You’ve got beer on your breath,” I said.

  “You want me to bag ass, I’ll understand.”

  “Get your act together, Carroll,” I said. “I’ll see you at the motel.”

  “You trying to hurt me?” he said.
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  I went outside and got in the Caddy. The top was up, the hand-waxed pink paint job sprinkled with leaves from the oak tree overhead.

  “You don’t look too hot,” Clete said.

  “You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, Clete,” I replied.

  He started the engine, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. “Sometimes you truly perplex me, noble mon.”

  * * *

  THERE ARE EPIPHANIES most of us do not share with others. Among them is the hour when you make your peace with death. You don’t plan the moment; you do not acquire it by study. Most likely, you stumble upon it. It’s a revelatory moment, a recognition that death is simply another player in our midst, a fellow actor on Shakespeare’s grand stage, perhaps one even more vulnerable than we are, one who is unloved, excoriated, condemned to the shadows, and denied either rest or joy. John Donne went so far as to refer to this sad figure as “Poor Death.”

  That evening I saw a transformation in the heavens that to this day I cannot explain. As I stood on a sand spit and watched the lights come on in the Shondell stilt house, the tide washing through miles of sawgrass, I realized the sky had turned a gaseous green, and the air had become as heavy and dense as a barrel of wet salt, the sun buried in a solitary cloud on the horizon, blood-red and flaming orange, like the inside of a torn peach.

  As if on a panoramic movie screen, I saw Vikings slaying villagers with their axes, Richard the Lionheart’s Crusaders beheading Muslims on their knees, Buonaparte setting fire to a Russian village in the snow, the boys in butternut dropping like wheat on Cemetery Ridge, Comanche Indians dragging children with ropes through cactus, British tanks crashing down on a German trench at the Somme.

  I saw the slaughter of the innocents at Nanking, Ernest Hemingway blown to shit in an Italian field hospital, Audie Murphy firing a fifty-caliber on top of a tank that was burning, James Bowie tossed on bayonets in the chapel at the Alamo, a navy corpsman pulling Clete down a napalm-scorched hillside on a poncho liner, and I saw myself calling in Puff the Magic Dragon on an Asian village, and maybe for the first time in my life, I realized the insignificance of my own death.

  I also realized that the re-creation of my generation and era in the form of Isolde Balangie and Johnny Shondell was an innocent fantasy and a fitting tribute to the New Orleans Sound. The piano keys tinkling with a fragility like crystal, the throaty resonance of the saxophone, the muffled rolling of the drums, the coon-ass and Irish Channel accents of the vocalists, all of it echoing as though recorded in an empty college gym, all of it leading one day into Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—this was the era that I always believed was the best in our history. But it was gone, and to mourn its passing was to demean it. The ethereal moment lives on in the heart, so what is there to fear?