A Private Cathedral

Chapter Eighteen

At 4:23 A.M. I was admitted to Iberia General. The diagnosis was food poisoning. I have been wounded four times, twice in Vietnam (the second time by a Bouncing Betty) and twice on the job. I have never experienced any pain, however, as bad as that produced by the botulism that attacked my system that morning. It was the kind of pain that is so bad you cannot remember how bad it was.

By nine A.M. it was gone. My first visitor was Clete Purcel, whom I called as soon as I was able. The second person I called was Carroll LeBlanc, who said, “You didn’t shag that Italian broad again, did you? Hit it and git it, Robo.”

Clete pulled a chair up to the bed, his porkpie hat on his knee. Clete never wore a hat inside a building, never walked in front of a woman through a doorway, and never failed to rise from a chair when he shook hands or when a woman entered a room. “What did you eat?” he asked.

“That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“I thought I told you on the phone.”

“You didn’t tell me anything. You kept saying, ‘We can’t get the slick in. They’re coming through the wire.’ ”

“The guy who hung you up in the Keys called me,” I said. “I saw the galleon out on the bayou.”

Clete was waving off the image before I could finish. “Don’t tell me that.”

“Okay, maybe I was out of my head.”

Clete’s right leg was pumping up and down. “The guy who called, he told you he was Gideon Richetti?”

“I addressed him by that name. He didn’t correct me.”

“Dave, I can’t take this.”

“I hit the deck minutes after his call. My memory is suspect. Nothing I say is reliable. But I’m telling you what I think I heard and saw.”

Why burden an already burdened man? I asked myself. But in truth, I wanted a rational explanation for the phone call, for the voice that rose from the disconnected receiver, for the prison ship that had wended its way out of history and up Bayou Teche. The sound of Richetti’s voice was like spittle in my ear.

“What are we going to do, Streak?” Clete said.

“Take it to them with tongs.”

“You can’t cowboy a guy like Mark Shondell.”

“I didn’t say anything about Shondell.”

“Then who are you talking about?” Clete asked.

Anyone and everyone, I thought.

“What’d you say?” Clete asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Rhetoric is cheap. I don’t know where to start on this.”

“It’s got to be about money,” Clete said.

“Richetti gave thirty grand to a hooker.”

“Yeah, and it probably came from a robbery,” he said. “Maybe he’s trying to buy his way into heaven.”

That wasn’t a bad speculation.

I spent the rest of the day researching all disappearances and homicides in the greater New Orleans area from fifteen years before. I also talked with Dana Magelli at NOPD. The following day, Saturday, I found Marcel LaForchette in the same dump on the edge of St. Martinville’s black district where I’d found him before. He was at the end of the bar, eating fried crawfish and dirty rice with a spoon from a paper plate. A fat woman with gold hair and skin the color of paste was sitting next to him. I remembered her from somewhere. Maybe a motel raid, a drug bust, a domestic shooting, the kind of events that happen most often on the first weekend of the month. The red paint lacquered on the walls looked smoked, darker, as though it were being consumed by its own garishness.

“Lose your way to your A.A. meet again?” Marcel said.

“Your PO told me to check you out,” I replied.

“Funny man.”

“You don’t have a parole officer anymore?”

“Mr. Mark got me cut loose,” he said. “So if you’re here about him, I say beat feet, my man.”

The woman kept her face turned away from me. She was drinking from a soda can. Lipstick was smeared on the top. She stank of cigarette smoke.

“I need to talk to you,” I said to Marcel.

“Talk.”

I looked at the back of the woman’s head. She wore a frilly white blouse and a bra with black straps that showed through the fabric. Marcel stuck a tightly folded ten-dollar bill between her fingers. “Cloteel, can you get us somet’ing cold?”

“No,” she said.

“Somet’ing wrong?” Marcel said.

“If you wit’ him, you ain’t wit’ me,” she said.

She dropped the folded bill on the bar and walked to the women’s room. Her buttocks were massive, the backs of her thighs printed with the bar stool. Then I remembered her.

“She don’t mean anyt’ing by it,” Marcel said.

“Right,” I said. I leaned in close to him. “The whack you drove on? Was the hit a guy named Gerald Levine, middle name Shondell?”

“Maybe.”

“He was Mark Shondell’s cousin.”

Marcel stared at his food. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Father Julian. I’m staying off the juice and the spike and weed and everyt’ing else. The way I was before I got turned out.”

His Cajun accent had deepened, as though he wanted to regress into childhood. I wanted to be sympathetic to him. But I knew Marcel’s history, and I could only guess at the number of people he had killed.

“Is your lady friend part of your new life?”

“I don’t judge.”

“She sold her infant child for a few bags of brown skag. She cut the skag with insect poison and sold it to some teenagers.”

“She’s clean now, so you can shut down the sermon.”

He was right. My remarks about the woman were a cheap shot. It’s easy to be righteous about people at the bottom of the food chain until you spend one day in their shoes.

“Come outside,” I said.

“I ain’t lost nothing out there.”

“Come outside or I’ll bust you right here.”

“For what?”

“Public stupidity.” I removed a pair of cuffs from my coat pocket and held them below the level of the bar where he could see them. I let my voice climb. “I’ll bust your friend, too.”

“Okay,” he said. “You’re a hardnose, Dave. You gonna pay for that, you.”

We walked through a narrow hall and a storage room full of keg and bottled beer and out into an alley lined with Dumpsters and garbage cans. Two people were copulating vertically behind a Dumpster. They took no notice of us. We walked down the alley to the side street. In the mist I could see the glow of spotlights in the town square. They stayed focused at night on the pillared courthouse and on the church that had been there since 1844 and on the Evangeline Oak and on the graveyard where I first kissed a girl named Bootsie Mouton who later became my wife.

I looked back at the couple behind the Dumpster, then took off my hat and wiped the mist off my face with a handkerchief.

“The fuck is with you, Dave?”

“Nothing.”

“You got a look like the whole world is ending.”

“Shut up and listen, Marcel. You told me the Shondell vic went out hard. You said he was a marshmallow, that he made baby sounds.”

“You get off on this?”

“What’d y’all do to him?”

“I ain’t saying. And it wasn’t me done it. I tole you I drove, nothing else.”

“Clete Purcel said you were in on the Tommy Fig hit. Y’all freeze-wrapped his parts and tied them to the ceiling fan in his shop.”

“I was sixteen years old.”

“Who did the vic molest, Marcel?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said y’all took Polaroids for Pietro Balangie?”

“Yeah, he didn’t allow molesters in the city or jackrollers in the Quarter.”

“I got that. But none of that was personal with Pietro. The whack on Gerald Shondell Levine and the photos were.”

“I ain’t getting into this, man.”

“Who was the molester’s victim, Marcel?”

“It was hearsay.”

I shoved him against a brick wall. He tried to slap my arm away. I grabbed him by the throat and pinned him hard against the bricks. His whiskers felt like wire. “Was it a child?”

“Who you t’ink molesters molest?”

“Lose the coon-ass pronunciations and theatrics.”

“You already know,” he replied.

I grabbed his lapels and banged him again and again into the wall. “I want to hear it from you. Say it!”

“The two other guys are dead. That leaves me as probably the only guy who knows who the perv put his hands and mout’ on. That’s why I’m not a reg’lar visitor to New Orleans. That’s why I went nort’ and did some work in Camden and Brooklyn. That’s why I don’t go down Memory Lane with Adonis Balangie. The painter sodomized him for five years. Use my name to Adonis and I’ll punch your whole ticket. Now get your fucking hands off me before I forget we go back.”

I began to walk away, then stopped. “Where’d y’all dump the body?”

“We put acid on it. It ain’t a body no more,” Marcel said.

“Where’d you put it?”

“I already tole you. On the nort’ side of Pontchartrain Lake.”

“The exact spot, Marcel.”

“T’ink I’m gonna tell you that?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just tell Mark Shondell you helped kill his cousin.”

“You’re a bum, Dave.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Two minutes later, I walked down the alley in the mist, alongside a rivulet of black rainwater, past the two people who had finished their coupling and were now sharing a bottle of synthetic wine. “What’s happenin’?” I said.

They looked at me fearfully.

We’re supposed to protect and serve. But sometimes we exploit and screw the most helpless of the helpless; in this instance I had used Marcel LaForchette. With no other place to put my anger, I picked up a rock and flung it against a Dumpster. I saw the couple flinch and instinctively grab each other.

I banged on Clete’s door early the next morning, the air cold and the rain dripping audibly out of the trees where the Teche had overrun its banks. He answered the door in his skivvies. “Why not wake up the whole motor court?” he said.

I stepped inside without being asked. “Get dressed.”

“For what?”

“We’re going to New Orleans. You need some rubber boots.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Remember those stories about a place where Pietro Balangie buried his bodies?”

He sighed. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”

I told him everything Marcel had said. When I finished, Clete was sitting on the side of the bed, still undressed, a coffee mug imprinted with the marine globe and anchor balanced on his thigh. “Have you told Dana Magelli about this?”

“No.”

“You’re protecting LaForchette?”

“He cooperated. He’s trying to go straight. Why jam the guy?”

“I think something else is going on here, Dave. You keep putting your necktie in the garbage grinder, starting with the Balangie woman. Now we’re about to dig up Adonis’s childhood. I think you’re on a dry drunk.”

“Not true, Cletus.”

“You’ve lost two wives. Either go to more meetings or buy a bottle of Jack. But stop messing with the Balangies.”

“Are you in or out?”

He set down his coffee cup on the nightstand and cupped his hands on his knees. “I had a dream last night.”

“Forget dreams. That’s all they are.”

“We were sliding off the edge of the earth, you and me,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re into. I’ve never felt like this in my life.”

Clete and I got in my truck and, four hours later, found the spot Marcel had described. The lake was to the south, capping in the wind, the willows bending in the inlets. To the north were warehouses, rusted oil tanks, and an obsolete sewage plant. The sky was gray, the smell of burning garbage in the wind. We stood in a sump that was like a mixture of glue and quicksand and wet cement, and began shoveling and raking and probing for a bottom with a long iron bar that once was part of a school flagpole. We did this for two hours. Our lack of procedure and legality probably seems strange. But anyone who buys in to the average television portrayal of law enforcement deserves any misfortune that happens to him. Most of us give it our best, but a lot don’t. So how do we sometimes put away the worst members of the human race? Answer: We salt the mine shaft, lie on the witness stand, conceal exculpatory evidence, and cut deals with jailhouse snitches. We also dig big holes and find nothing and bury something for our colleagues to find two days after we’re gone.

We found part of a shoe and pieces of bone that could have belonged to seagulls or small four-footed animals. Maybe some of the bone fragments could have belonged to people, but I doubted it, and the shoe could have washed ashore and been buried by a storm. In effect, the sump seemed bottomless; it would require a large forensic team and many days of labor and a huge amount of tax money to produce anything of evidentiary value.

Clete leaned on his shovel. His clothes and boots were flecked with mud and wet sand. A blister had formed on his right hand. He had not uttered a word of complaint.

“Let’s pack it up,” I said. “Sorry to get you out for this.”

“At least we know LaForchette is probably telling the truth about the hit on the perv. Maybe one day somebody will dig him up. You know anything about him?”

“I heard he was eccentric and moved to New Orleans. That’s it.”

“There’s something I don’t get. LaForchette said the perv molested Adonis for five years?”

“Right,” I said.

“And in all that time Adonis didn’t say anything to his father, or his father didn’t know something was going on?”

“Molestation victims blame themselves. Maybe Adonis was afraid of his father.”

“There’s another possibility,” Clete said.

“Don’t start thinking too deep on this,” I said.

“Fathers rape their daughters, and the daughters are so confused they think they enjoy it. They think it’s a natural expression of their father’s love. Then when they realize it’s not, they get fucked up in the head and feel double the guilt. It’s the ultimate mind-fuck.”

I looked at the sky. The stench of the burned garbage seemed worse. The clouds over the lake looked like they were weeping. “There’s something cursed about this place. Let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“A diner. Shoot me the next time I drag you out of the sack on a Sunday.”

“You got to keep a bright outlook,” he said. “Like when my ex dumped me for that phony Buddhist priest in Colorado who made his flock take off their clothes. I told her no hard feelings and gave the two of them my favorite toothbrush. You got to stay on the sunny side, noble mon.”

We ate hamburgers at a truck stop outside LaPlace, where Kid Ory was born on Christmas Day in 1886. Why did I mention that fact? Because as Mr. Faulkner famously said, the past is always with us, and we can no more deny its presence than we can deny the dead who lie buried under our cane fields and golf courses and interstate highways, their mouths and eye sockets stopped with dirt, their identities and final words still hanging on the wind if we would only hear them.

But Kid Ory was not on my mind. Clete was doing something at our table that I didn’t understand; simultaneously, he was receding to a place inside himself that had no sunny side. He had taken from his wallet the photo of the Jewish mother and her children who were walking to a gas chamber at Auschwitz, their shoulders hunched in the cold.

I touched his forearm. “Maybe not dwell on that today, huh?”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t change it.”

“What kind of people would put children in a gas chamber?”

I saw the waiter glance at us, then look away. I put down my hamburger and pretended I needed to use the restroom. When I returned to the counter, Clete had refolded the photo and placed it inside its pouch. But the pouch still lay on the counter next to his wallet.

“You know some of Kid Ory’s recordings are on the jukebox here?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at nothing.

“What’s wrong, Cletus?”

“Sometimes I think Nazis like Goebbels and Mengele are still out there, waiting for their time to come around again. I got this voice in my head that wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not just a bad dream?”

“It tells me we’re supposed to stop something that’s about go down,” he said.

“I think you’re flirting with depression,” I said. “It peels off a piece of your brain and gets inside you. You got to get outside of yourself, Clete. And don’t be telling anybody about voices in your head.”

“Why?”

“It’s a symptom of schizophrenia,” I said.

“I’ve always had voices in my head,” he said.

“So have I. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. It can get you locked up.”

He pushed away his plate. “I got to get some air.”

“Finish your hamburger. We’ll listen to a couple of Kid Ory numbers.”

“I feel like the earth is dying,” he said. “What’s wrong with me, Dave?”

He told me to drop him off at the apartment and office he owned in the Quarter. I tried to argue with him, but he said he had work to do for New Orleans’s most famous bondsmen, Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and he would see me in New Iberia during the week.

“What about your Caddy?” I said. It was still in New Iberia.

“I’ll get a rental.”

Clete’s Cadillac convertible and his building in the Quarter were the only two indispensable material possessions in his life; along with his porkpie hat, his personae was incomplete without them. This was the first time I was truly worried about his state of mind.

It was dusk when I drove away from his apartment. In the rearview mirror, I saw him struggling with the lock on the gate of his courtyard. I braked to the curb and started to back up. He must have seen my brake lights, because he waved me on, almost angrily, then raked the gate loose from the jamb and disappeared inside the shadows.

I drove around the block. By the time I was in front of his building again, the lights were on upstairs. Nonetheless, I pulled to the curb. He opened the French doors onto the balcony and stepped outside. The sky was a deep purple, the Spanish ironwork on his balcony draped with bougainvillea and bugle vine.

“What are you doing, Dave?” he called.

“I’m starting a second career as a voyeur,” I replied.

He shut the French doors and turned off the lights. I drove away, my heart sick.

I thought about going to a meeting of the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group, but the problem on my mind was not booze or dry-drunking; it was Clete Purcel and the wheels that turned inside him.

I had never worried about Clete going up against the Mob or corrupt cops or homicidal meltdowns who sang on their way to the injection table. (Do you know John Wayne Gacy’s last words to his executioners? “Kiss my ass.”) The real enemy in Clete’s life was Clete; his self-destructive powers were far greater than the ones he unleashed on his adversaries.

Someone had figured out a way to get to him. The man in the cowl who had hung him from the wrecker had taken on mythic dimensions. Was he a religious fanatic? A common Sicilian gun-for-hire? Or a man whose progenitor had a triangular-shaped head and could have slithered from a tree in a Mesopotamian garden?

I had no answer. Not about the man in the cowl, not about Clete, not about myself. The loss of a spouse, the depression that follows, the loneliness inside one’s home are not easy to bear. Fidelity to the dead is not only onerous; at four in the morning, it can be a bed of iron spikes.

What am I saying? Every cop, either in plainclothes or in uniform, knows that eventually he will meet a vulnerable woman, perhaps a rape victim, a battered wife at a shelter, a survivor of a family catastrophe, a junkie hanging by a thread at the methadone clinic. Maybe the cop is well intentioned and tries to assure himself that he will not cross the line and violate his role as the knight errant in blue. But maybe the woman or girl is too helpless, too warm inside his arms, her face too beautiful to get out of his mind.

I started to take I-10 through Baton Rouge to New Iberia, then swung off the exit into Metairie. A rainstorm had blown in from the Gulf, covering the moon and stars and sprinkling the asphalt with hailstones. By the time I reached Leslie Rosenberg’s house, the streets and rain ditches had begun to flood. I parked and ran for her porch, rain blinding me. When she opened the door, her face looked like it was caught in a strobe, bladed and unsure, as though she were entering a crossroads that had no traffic signals.

“What’s the haps?” I said.

Leslie was wearing white shorts and sandals and an olive-green T-shirt and had been doing exercises in front of the television when I rang the bell. Shane was playing on the television. I had not realized how tan and long Leslie’s legs were. They looked like they never ended.

“I don’t want to ask,” she said.

“Ask what?” I said.

“Why you’re here.”

“You told me to drop by sometime. Have you ever been a CI?”

“A what?”

“A confidential informant.”

“Maybe my morals are tattered, but I’m not a rat, thank you very much.”

Good for you, I thought. I looked at the television. “I love that film. The screenplay was written by A. B. Guthrie. He wrote The Big Sky. I met him in Montana.”

“Go back to that CI stuff. You thought I’d sell out Adonis?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

She stepped closer to me. “Don’t lie.”

“I’ve seen the devotion you have toward your child. You think that’s lost on me?”

She seemed to take my measure. “You’re a funny guy for a homicide roach.”

“Who told you I worked homicide?”

“I asked around.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“I don’t let everybody in my house. Want to watch Shane?”

“Sure,” I said.

We sat on the couch. Her daughter was asleep in her bedroom. The rain was thudding on the roof and the windows. The intensity of Shane is like no other western I have ever seen, including My Darling Clementine. In the last scene, set at dusk, the little boy Joey, played by the child actor Brandon deWilde, runs after Shane, calling his name plaintively. But Shane disappears into the shadows of the Grand Tetons, into an obscurity that makes you want to weep.

“Wow,” Leslie said.

“Yeah, there’s no film like it,” I said. “The story’s only historical equivalent is the biblical account of Eden. The sodbuster family builds a log house and a farm in a place that’s like the first day of creation. Good vanquishes evil, but you know that valley at the base of the Tetons will never be the same again.”

She was looking at me with a strange expression.

“I say something weird?” I asked.

“I don’t get you.”

“What’s to get?”

“You show up in lightning and hail storms, then disappear. I don’t know what you want, but it’s something. You don’t want to get into my bread?”

“Where did you get your vocabulary?”

“At the convent. You got something bothering you?”

“I lost my wife a while back.”

“How far back?”

“One day or one thousand. There’s no difference.”

“I’m sorry. How’d she die?”

“Lupus. I lost my previous wife to a pair of killers who used shotguns.”

Leslie was quiet a long time. The rain was whipping across the windows. The image made me think of the scene in Shane when Alan Ladd is accused of cowardice at a meeting of sodbusters and he goes outside without replying and stands in the rain by himself, but only the little boy sees him.

Leslie got up from the couch and turned off the television. She looked at me with one hand propped on her hip. “You think I’m coarse? Vulgar? Whatever?”

“I think you’re admirable and brave. I think Adonis Balangie is a bum and has no business being around you. I’d better go. I’ve got to be at the department at oh-eight-hundred.”

She seemed to study her hands. “You meant that about admirable and brave?”

“You sell yourself short. It’d be an honor to be the lover of a woman like you.”

“Say again?”

“You heard me,” I said, getting up from the couch. “I’ve got to boogie.”

“Stay for some ice cream.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“You called Adonis a bum. I know what Adonis is. The problem is me. I’m his whore.”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

She stepped closer to me, breathing hard. I could feel her breath on my face. “I don’t have a way out.”

“Just tell him to beat feet.”

“And roll the dice with my daughter?” she said.

“Don’t give up, Leslie. You’re one of the good guys. Do the short version of the Serenity Prayer: Fuck it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She sank her nails in the back of my neck and pulled my face to hers. But she kissed me only on the cheek, then walked into the kitchen and left me in a male condition I certainly didn’t need.

“You coming?” she said from the doorway.

I waited a few moments, then went into the kitchen and sat at the table while she filled two bowls of ice cream and sprinkled cinnamon on them.

“I have a DVD of The Green Mile,” she said.

“That’s a good one,” I said.

“Let’s go back in the living room.”

I cannot be sure of the events that followed. I remember her inserting the DVD into the player, and I remember eating the ice cream, then setting down the dish on the coffee table, the spoon clinking. I felt my head sink on my chest and heard the voices of the actors who played the guards at a Louisiana penitentiary. I heard the voice of the condemned Cajun about to be executed in the electric chair. I felt myself lean over sideways into a pillow, and then I felt Leslie’s fingers in my hair and on my neck and brow.

But I was no longer in Louisiana. A dream, a door into a separate reality, or perhaps simply the exhaustion of the day had taken me back to the last scene in Shane, except I was the little boy running through the dusk calling Shane’s name. The mountaintops were purple, glistening with snow, and made me think of a woman’s breasts, and I found myself mounted on a horse that surged rhythmically under me, then a woman’s voice whispered wetly in my ear, her tongue touching the skin, I’ve waited for you a long time. I was born to be with you. Oh, oh, oh.

I woke trembling, unsure of where and who I was.