Troy was spread out on his bed in the intensive-care unit like a pregnant whale that had been dropped from a high altitude, his blond hair still cut in a 1950s flattop, now stiff with burn ointment. What his wife had referred to as his life-support system was a tangle of translucent tubes, oxygen bottles, IV sacs, a catheter, and electronic monitors that, upon first glance, made me think that perhaps technology might give Troy another season to run.
Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.
He had vomited into his oxygen mask, and a nurse was wiping off his face and throat. He wrapped a meaty hand around mine, squeezing with a power and strength I didn’t think him capable of.
“Sir, you’ll need to lean down to hear your friend,” the nurse said.
I put my ear close to Troy’s mouth. His breath rose against my skin like a puff of gas from a sewer grate. “’Member that colored…that black kid, the one we played the joke on with the laxative?” he whispered.
“I do,” I said, although the word “we” had not been part of what happened.
“I feel bad about that. But that’s the way it was back then, huh? You reckon he knows I’m sorry?”
“Sure he does,” I replied.
I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.
“Years ago, you knew a girl who was a whore,” he said. “They snatched her up. My uncle was a cop in Galveston. He was one of the guys who snatched her. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she was in.”
I looked down at him. His eyes were wide-set, round, his youthful haircut and porcine face like a grotesque caricature of the decade he never allowed himself to grow out of. “What was the name of the girl?” I said.
He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. “I don’t know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up.”
I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. “Your uncle and who?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up.”
“Did they kill her?”
“I don’t know. I saw blood on a chair. I was just a kid. Just like you and Jimmie. What’s a kid s’pposed to do? I took off. My uncle’s dead now. Nobody probably even remembers that girl now ’cept me.”
He was the saddest-looking human being I think I had ever seen. His eyes were liquid, receded in his face. His body was encased in beer fat that seemed to be squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He let go of my shirt and waited for me to speak, as though my words could exorcise the succubus that had probably fed at his heart all his life.
“That’s right, we were all just kids back then, Troy,” I said, and winked at him.
He tried to smile, his skin puckering around his mouth. Without his consent, the nurse fitted the oxygen mask back on his face. Through the window I saw a TV news van in the parking lot, with the call letters and logo of an aggressive Shreveport television station painted on the side. But if the news crew was there to cover some element in the passing of Troy Bordelon, it was of little import to Troy. He looked out the window at the sun’s last red ember on the horizon. A flock of crows rose from the limbs of cypress trees in a lake, lifting into the sky like ashes off a dead fire. The look in his eyes made me think of a drowning man whose voice cannot reach a would-be rescuer.
OUTSIDE, I walked toward my truck, my head filled with nightmarish images about what may have been Ida Durbin’s last moments. How had Troy put it? He had seen “blood on a chair.”
“Hold on there, Robo,” a voice called out behind me.
Robo?
There were two of them, angular in build, squared away, military in bearing, their uniforms starched and creased, wearing shades, even though it was almost dark, their gold badges and name tags buffed, their shoes spit-shined into mirrors. I had seen them at various times at law enforcement gatherings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn’t remember their names, but I remembered their manner. It was of a kind every career lawman or military officer recognizes. These were men you never place in situations where they have unsupervised authority over others.
I nodded hello but didn’t speak.
“On the job?” one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. He tilted his head slightly with his question.
“Not me. I hung it up,” I replied.
“I saw you go into Troy Bordelon’s room. You guys were buds?” he said.
“I went to school with him,” I said.
The second deputy was grinning from behind his shades, as though the three of us were in a private club and the inappropriateness of his expression was acceptable. The name engraved on his tag was Pitts, B. J. “Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn’t he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Ole Troy didn’t want to unburden his sins?” the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.
Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend’s revelation of their shared agenda.
“Nice seeing you guys,” I said.
Neither one of them said good-bye as I walked away. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were still standing in the parking lot, wondering, I suspect, if they had said too much or too little.
I decided I needed to talk to Troy again, when the two sheriff’s deputies were not around. I checked into a motel in the next town, then returned to the hospital at sunrise, but Troy had died during the night.
IWAS A WIDOWER and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.
After I returned from my visit to Troy’s bedside, I could not get Ida Durbin out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate was neither my doing nor Jimmie’s.
But over the years I had seen the file drawer slammed on too many unsolved disappearances. These cases almost always involved people who had no voice and whose families had no power. Sometimes a determined cop would try to keep the investigation alive, revisiting his files and chasing leads on his own time, but ultimately he, too, would make his separate peace and try not to think, as I was now, about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.
I had no demonstrable evidence that a crime had actually been committed, nothing except the statement of a guilt-driven man who said he had seen blood on a chair decades ago. Even if I wanted to initiate an investigation, where would I start? In a Texas coastal town where most of the players were probably dead?
I had another problem, too. For a recovering alcoholic, introspection and solitude are the perfect combination for a dry drunk, a condition that for me was like putting a nail gun in the center of my forehead and pulling the trigger.
I mowed the grass in the front yard and began raking up layers of blackened leaves on the shady side of the house, burning them in a rusty oil barrel under the oak trees down by the bayou. A speedboat went by with water-skiers in tow, churning a frothy yellow trough down the center of the bayou. On the far bank, in City Park, the camellias were in bloom, kids were playing baseball, and families were fixing lunch in the picnic shelters. But I couldn’t shake the gloom that had clung to me like cobwebs since I had listened to Troy Bordelon’s deathbed statement.
I went back in the house and read the newspape
r. The lead story was not a happy one. Thirty miles from New Iberia, the body of a young black woman, bound at the wrists and ankles, had been found in a cane field, not far from the convent in Grand Coteau. Her car was discovered only two miles away, at a rural cemetery where she had been visiting her brother’s grave site, the driver’s door ajar, the engine still idling.
In the last six months two women had been abducted in Baton Rouge and their bodies dumped in wetlands areas. The murder of the black woman in Grand Coteau bore similarities to the homicides in Baton Rouge, except this was the first time the killer, if indeed the same perpetrator murdered all three women, had struck in the area we call Acadiana.
A one-paragraph addendum to the wire-service story mentioned that over thirty women in the Baton Rouge area had been murdered by unknown perpetrators in the last decade.
Clete Purcel, my old friend from NOPD, had opened a branch of his P.I. business in New Iberia, and was now dividing his time between here and his office on St. Ann in New Orleans. He claimed he was simply expanding his business parameters, but in truth Clete’s shaky legal status and his penchant for creating chaos and mayhem wherever he went made instant mobility an imperative in his day-today existence.
How many cops have longer rap sheets than most of the criminals they put in the can? Over the years, some of Clete’s antics have included the following: forcing an entire dispenser of liquid hand soap down a button man’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot; leaving a drunk U.S. congressman handcuffed to a fire hydrant on St. Charles Avenue; filling a gangster’s convertible with cement; dangling a gang-banger by his ankles off a fire escape five stories above the street; driving an earthmover back and forth through Max Calveci’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain; stuffing a billiard ball inside the mouth of a child molester; parking a nine-Mike round in the brainpan of a federal snitch; and, top this, possibly pouring sand in the fuel tank of an airplane, causing the deaths of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio and a few of his hired gumballs.
More unbelievably, Clete did all these things, and many others, in a blithe, carefree spirit, like a unicorn on purple acid crashing good-naturedly through a clock shop. He was out of sync with the world, filled with self-destructive energies, addicted to every vice, still ridden with dreams from Vietnam, incredibly brave, generous, and decent, the most loyal man I ever knew, and ultimately the most tragic.
What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn’t do to him, or the Mob or his enemies inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on the half shell, and calamitous affairs with strippers, junkies, and women who seemed to glow with both rut and neurosis. Sometimes I believed his dreams were not about Vietnam but about his father, a milkman in the Garden District who thought parental love and discipline, the latter administrated with a whistling razor strop, were one and the same. But no amount of pain, either inflicted by himself or others, ever stole his grin or robbed him of his spirit. For Clete, life was an ongoing party, and if you wanted to be a participant, you wore your scars like crimson beads at Mardi Gras.
Clete lived on Main, too, farther down the bayou, in a stucco, 1940s motor court, set back from the street in deep shade. Because it was Sunday, I found him at home, reading in a deck chair, his glasses perched on his nose, his leviathan body glistening with suntan oil. An iced tomato drink with a stick of celery floating in it rested on the gravel by his chair. “What’s the haps, noble mon?” he said.
I told him about my visit to Troy’s bedside and how Jimmie and I met Ida Durbin in Galveston on the Fourth of July in 1958. I told him about the beating Jimmie gave the pimp, Lou Kale, and how Ida disappeared as though she had been sucked through a hole in the dimension.
Clete was a good investigator because he was a good listener. While others spoke, his face seldom showed expression. His eyes, which were smoky green, always remained respectful, neutral, occasionally shifting sideways in a reflective way. After I had finished, he ticked a fingernail at a scar that ran diagonally through his left eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose. “This guy Troy was working with pimps?” he said.
“The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong,” I said.
“But he believed they killed the girl?”
“He didn’t say that,” I replied.
“House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don’t kill them.”
But Clete knew better. He raised his eyebrows. “Dave, a thousand things could have happened. Why think the worst? Besides, if there’s any blame, it’s on your half-crazy brother. Remodeling a pimp’s face on behalf of a whore probably isn’t the best way to do P.R. for her.”
He laughed, then looked at my expression. “Okay, mon,” he said. “If you want to scope it out, I’d start with Bordelon’s ties to other people. Run that by me again about the two sheriff’s deputies.”
“They braced me in the hospital parking lot.”
“They thought Bordelon gave up somebody?”
“That was my impression.”
“So Troy Bordelon’s family is—”
“They do scut work for the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.”
Clete removed the celery stalk from his drink and took a long swallow from the glass. His hair was sandy, with strands of white in it, cut like a little boy’s. When the vodka and tomato juice hit his stomach, the color seemed to bloom in his face. He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight.
“I have crazy thoughts about going back to ’Nam sometimes, finding the family of a mamasan I killed, apologizing, giving them money, somehow making it right,” he said. He looked emptily out into the sunlight.
“What are you saying?”
“I’d let sleeping dogs lie. But you won’t do that. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Not ole Streak,” he replied, pressing the bottom of his glass hard into the moist gravel.
CLETE WAS WRONG. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete’s advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.
But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communiqué; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.
It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. “Hello?” I said.
“Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?” the voice said.
“Who’s this?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I’d really appreciate your help on this.”
“I’m pretty jammed up, partner.”
“It’ll take ten minutes. We’re at the public library, a half block down the street. What’s to lose?”
I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ’s mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff’s deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.
“Can we go somewhere?” Shockly said, extending his hand. “You r
emember Billy Joe Pitts.”
So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.
“That’s quite a grip you’ve got,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor’s?”
I shook my head.
“Here’s what it is,” Shockly said. “The sheriff sent me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy’s hospital room with you is the sheriff’s cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you’re working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner’s family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?”
“No, not at all,” I replied.
Shockly’s hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. “Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he’s not going to skate, either. So how about it?”
“How about what?” I said.
“You working for the defense or not?” Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.
“I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we’re done here,” I said.
Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. “Enough said, then.” He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat.
When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.
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