A Private Cathedral

Chapter Twenty

Clete had just gotten back from New Orleans and asked me to meet him on Sunday morning by the recreation building in City Park. I went to an early Mass at St. Edward’s, then drove across the drawbridge at Burke Street onto the oak-shaded serpentine lane that led to the playground and the swing sets and the jungle gyms in the park.

Clete was sitting at a picnic table, dressed as though for church, his porkpie hat crown down on the table, except he was not headed for church and was drinking from a long-neck, even though it was barely ten A.M. I sat down across from him. There were gin roses in his cheeks.

“Why’d you want to meet me here?” I asked.

“Somebody tried to creep my cottage and my office. I got to do a sweep.”

“Who’d want to bug your cottage and office?”

“For openers, that pus head Shondell.” His fingers were curled around the label on the beer bottle, his gaze unsteady, his knuckles as rough as barnacles.

“Hitting it pretty early today, aren’t you?” I said.

“It’s afternoon somewhere. I think you’re about to go in the skillet, Streak.”

“Not me.”

“Adonis Balangie came to my apartment in the Quarter last night. He had two of his gumballs with him. He said either you get your head on straight or you get disappeared, and disappeared will be the least of it.”

“Straight about what?”

“Getting into the wrong bread box. I’m not talking about Penelope Balangie, either.”

“So who are you talking about?” I said, trying not to clear my throat before speaking.

He took a piece of notepaper from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Leslie Rosenberg, who evidently is his regular punch. He says you not only got it on with her, but you told her to quit the job he gave her. You know this broad?”

“She’s not a broad.”

“Excuse me. Did you pork this lady who probably graduated from Sophie Newcomb?”

“I’m not going to talk to you on this level.”

“Answer my question, Dave.”

“I don’t know. I was at her house. It was raining. I had some kind of blackout.”

“That’s convenient. I got to try that the next time I get caught milking through the fence.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Got it on?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember the rain and a voice that said, ‘I’ve waited for you a long time. I was born to be with you.’ ”

“Don’t do this to me, Dave. One of us has got to stay sane.”

“Then the voice said, ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ ”

He looked at me, an alcoholic shine in his eyes. “You mean like—”

“Yeah, a climax.”

“I hope she took snapshots. You can send them to Adonis. You know how to do it, big mon.”

“I don’t care about any of this, Clete. I may have shot a child in Henderson Swamp.”

I told him everything. His face drained. His voice sounded like a bucket of rust. His eyes were damp. “That guy Richetti is real, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he is,” I said.

“I’m going to bring this shit to an end.”

“It’s not that easy. You know it, too,” I said.

“What if I just take Mark Shondell off at the neck? What if I put his head on a spike?”

“You’re serious?”

“You weren’t hung upside down from a wrecker hook,” he said. “I can’t get that out of my head.”

“We don’t know that Richetti is working for Shondell.”

“Mark Shondell is putting the blocks to a teenage girl everybody has deserted, including her mother and stepfather. I say we cap him. I also say we cap anybody who gets in our way, starting with Adonis Balangie. In the meantime, you stay away from his punch, what’s-her-name?”

“You shouldn’t drink for the rest of the day. Let’s hammer down some bacon and eggs.”

He threw me his cell phone. “Call Victor’s. They’ll deliver. I need something from the car.” He went to his Caddy and came back with another beer. He twisted off the cap and sat down. “You’re not going to say anything?” he said.

“It wouldn’t do any good.”

“Dave, something political is going on with Shondell and Bobby Earl. Like Father Julian said. Maybe it’s like Hitler going into the Rhineland in 1936. Nobody stood up to him, so he decided to take Czechoslovakia and then Poland.”

“This is New Iberia.”

“Tell Huey Long that. Do you realize you just told me that maybe you shot a little girl? That we’re sitting here talking about it? We should have already shoved a twelve-gauge up Shondell’s ass.”

“I’m with you in whatever you want to do,” I said.

“Talk to the Jewish broad. Find out what’s going on. And keep your flopper on lockdown.”

“You’re talking about Leslie Rosenberg?”

His eyes went out of focus. Or maybe he deliberately crossed them. “Duh! What did you tell her that made her quit her job with Adonis?”

“I told her she deserved a better life.”

“Then you got it on?”

“I don’t remember.”

“No clue, huh?” he said. “What was the status of your pole when you got home?”

“Will you—”

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

I waited for him to start taking me apart again. Instead he poured his beer on the grass and set the bottle on the picnic table and stared at it. “Dave, we’ve got to get to the bottom of the business at Henderson Swamp. This isn’t us. There’s got to be an explanation. I’m about to have an aneurism here.”

I walked away and got in my truck and drove home, the steel grid on the drawbridge rattling under my tires.

Monday afternoon Carroll Leblanc came into my office without knocking, a clipboard in one hand. “Reptile blood,” he said.

I stood up, a fishhook in my windpipe. “You got the lab report?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The tech wasn’t real happy. Something about giving lab priority to the death of a snake.”

I sat back down and lowered my head into my hands, breathing slowly through my mouth. “Thanks, Carroll.”

“No problem. You all right?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t look like it.”

I sat up straight, dizzy, spots before my eyes. “Tell the lab I owe them one.”

“The less said about this stuff, the better.”

“I saw what I saw out there.”

“No, you didn’t. Nothing happened.”

I opened my desk drawer and took out the three slave marbles I’d found behind the shack. I rolled them on my blotter. “I don’t think finding these was a coincidence.”

“Don’t get back in your spaceship, Robo.”

“Can you call me Dave, please?”

“I’ll call you crazy if I hear any more of this.”

I looked through the glass in my door. A patrolman had hooked up a man with thick salt-and-pepper hair and was walking him down the hall. LeBlanc followed my eyes. “What?”

“That’s Marcel LaForchette.”

“Yeah, he pulled a knife on a guy in Clementine’s.”

“What’s Marcel doing at Clementine’s?” I said.

“Upgrading his lifestyle. How would I know? Stay out of it.”

“Nobody was hurt?”

“Ask the chamber of commerce guy he threatened. He dumped in his pants — literally, on his shoes.” LeBlanc’s eyes lingered on my face. “Why the look?”

“I don’t buy it.”

“What’s with you and LaForchette?”

“I could have been him.”

“I know where this is going,” LeBlanc said.

“Then you know more than I do.”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Robo. I mean Dave.”

I found Marcel Laforchette and the patrolman and a detective in an interview room at the end of the hallway. I talked with the detective outside, then asked if I could have a few minutes with Marcel. After the patrolman and detective were gone, I sat down across from Marcel at a steel table that was bolted to the floor. He was wearing a navy blue sport coat and pressed gray slacks and a red silk shirt and polished needle-nosed Tony Lama boots. His wrists were cuffed behind him, the ratchets hooked too tight, biting into the veins.

“You could be charged with aggravated battery, Marcel,” I said.

“Yeah, I deserve it. I don’t know what made me do that.”

“Neither does anyone else. The detective said you asked for segregation.”

“Yeah, I don’t like being around amateurs. I need to relax a bit, too, get some shut-eye, watch a little TV.”

“I got good news for you,” I said.

“Yeah?” He shifted in his chair, a flicker of pain in his face.

“The guy you threatened is a good guy. He figures you were just drunk, which you and I know was not the case.”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“The guy says no harm, no foul.”

Marcel’s eyes searched in space, then came back to mine. “You getting off on this?”

“We don’t like people wasting our time. You want wit pro, talk to the feds.”

“Wit pro is for snitches.”

“It beats the boneyard.”

I got up from my chair and used my handcuff key to unlock the bracelet on his left wrist, then locked it on a table leg.

“What are you trying to do to me?” he said.

“You’re afraid of Mark Shondell. The question is why.”

“I tried to tell you once before.”

“You saw lights flashing in his face during an electrical storm. That doesn’t mean he has supernatural powers.”

“Two days ago I was working in the garden and he was on the patio when he got a call from Eddy Firpo. Firpo’s a lawyer and a music promoter or some shit. Maybe he’s mixed up with Nazis, too.”

“I know who Firpo is. What about him?”

“He must have told Shondell his nephew and Isolde Balangie are releasing a music album. Shondell went nuts. The girl ain’t supposed to get near Johnny. Now they got an album out.”

“What does any of this have to do with you?”

“When he got off the phone, he knew I’d heard everyt’ing.”

“Heard what? Say it. Specifically.”

“He said to Firpo, ‘This is on you. I’m sending Gideon.’ ”

My mouth went dry.

“I’ve seen this guy. He doesn’t look human,” Marcel said. He began jerking the bracelet against the table leg. “Put me in lockdown or let me go. You hear me, Dave?”

“You saw Gideon Richetti?”

“I don’t know about his last name. But a guy named Gideon was in Shondell’s backyard. His skin was green. His neck looked like it was dripping scales into his shirt. I t’ought it was because of the light in the trees. Then I saw his fingers. I never seen fingers that long.”

“I’m going to get us a couple of cold drinks from the machine,” I said. “I think you need to talk to Father Julian.”

“How’s Father Julian gonna get rid of a guy like that?” he said. “Dave, I was in lockdown wit’ the worst people in the world. What we’re looking at now is different. You got to believe me.” Both his hands were shaking, the bracelet rattling against the table leg. “I heard somet’ing that don’t make sense. About a Jewish woman. Shondell said to the guy on the phone, ‘Drown her. Or gut her and weigh her with stones.’ ”

“I take back what I said about your alcohol content,” I said. “I think you left the dock too early today, partner.”

But in truth I was unnerved, and my show of incredulity was hypocritical. “What was the woman’s name, Marcel?”

“I can’t t’ink.”

“How do you know she’s Jewish?”

He stared as though seeing an image inside his head. “The name was Rosenberg. Leticia Rosenberg.”

“Go on,” I said.

He blinked. “I take that back. The first name was Leslie. Yeah, that’s it. Ever hear of somebody named Leslie Rosenberg?”