A Private Cathedral

Chapter Twenty-four

The coroner, paramedics, uniformed deputies, and Carroll LeBlanc and another detective did not finish their work until almost two A.M. Most of the time I sat in the kitchen, watching each person methodically do his job so there would be no doubt about the integrity of the investigation. The blood on my hair and face was photographed before I was allowed to wash it off. I also had to give up my shirt in case it contained powder burns. I knew the questions that would be asked of me, but I did not fear them. The questions I had to ask myself were another matter.

Could I have twisted the pistol from Marcel’s hand when he pressed the muzzle under his chin? Maybe. What if I had distracted him and lied and told him my father had spoken fondly of him? What if I had told him I had some juice in Baton Rouge and could get him a pardon so he could work as a PI?

But the greater concern I had, the one that left me feeling empty and weak at heart and unable to think, was my attitude when I’d visited Marcel in Huntsville Prison. I’d treated him as I would have a gerbil, a genetic accident, a slug lifted from under a rock, at best a spiritually impaired man whose soul had been stolen at age seventeen. I’d treated him with the dignity I would have shown a germ.

How is it I never thought he could be my half brother? Did I deliberately ignore the possibility because I didn’t want to share my father, who was the only person in my life after my mother deserted us? The answer was probably yes.

“We’re pretty much done here,” LeBlanc said. He was wearing a sport coat and slacks and a tie. He screwed a filter-tip cigarette in his mouth. “Mind if I light up?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“No problem.” He dropped his cigarette back in the pack, then scratched his cheek. “LaForchette had his piece inside the raincoat?”

“Yep.”

“You thought he was gonna smoke you?”

“For a moment or two.”

“What’d he say before he went out?”

“He said ‘I ain’t.’ ”

“I ain’t what?”

“When I visited him in Huntsville, he said he’d like to be a PI in New Iberia. I made a joke about him working at a car wash. Then I told him I was only kidding. So now he was proving he didn’t kid. Big triumph, huh?”

“Then he shot himself? For no reason you know about?”

“The guy had a miserable life.”

LeBlanc wrote in his notepad. “Took his secrets to the grave?” he said, not looking up. “Why is it I don’t believe you, Robo?”

“He said there was an open hit on him.”

“Ordered by who?”

“Probably Mark Shondell or Adonis Balangie or both of them,” I said.

“You have evidence of that?”

“No.”

LeBlanc huffed something out of his nose, his eyes receded deep inside the thickness of his skin as though he lived inside a husk. “You keep giving me about half the story, Robo. I can’t say as I like it.”

“The man came here and killed himself in my living room. I’ll live with this the rest of my life. Now get off my back, Carroll.”

“Has this got something to do with the voodoo guy or whatever he is at Henderson Swamp?”

“Could be.”

He closed his notebook. “I was afraid you’d say that. Here’s what’s going in my report: LaForchette was born to lose and wanted an audience when he shuffled off to wherever guys like him go. Merry Christmas.”

“He thought I was his half brother and I got all the breaks.”

“Is that true?”

“Probably.”

“Go take a shower. You look like you just got out of Auschwitz.”

“Why do you use that as a comparison?” I said.

“What, that’s not politically correct?”

“Just don’t do it.”

“Got to tell you this, Dave,” he said, “you’re one crazy son of a bitch. Whatever you suffer from, I hope it’s not contagious.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use profanity in my house.”

I went deeper into my funk and knew I would not sleep until the next night, and until then I would have no rest, no peace, no respite from the voices and people and sometimes monstrous shapes that dwelled inside my head.

How do depression and obsession work? I’ll try to explain. The rain made me think of knives in the glow of the streetlamps along East Main. But the rain or my associating it with knives was not the problem. It was the key that opened the lockbox on places I didn’t want to revisit: a nineteen-year-old kid mowing down a birthday party with Ma Deuce in a free-fire zone; digging up bodies buried by a serial killer who kept human trophies; opening the back of a moving van stuffed with illegals in hundred-degree heat; swimming across a bayou at night, trying to get to my house and stop a man who murdered my wife, Annie, with a shotgun while I watched.

This is not a complaint. It’s just the way it is, and to pretend otherwise only intensifies the neurosis. The daylight is not necessarily a cure, either. The same images can hit you at a traffic light, or at your workplace, or when you’re making love, or when you’re getting swacked out of your head in a bar that has no clocks.

Call it PTSD or agitated depression or psychoneurotic anxiety or all three in one package. The unconscious or the memory bank finds images that fit the emotion, and all of them are obscene or depraved or unbearably cruel. If you have a history as a juicer or as a user of army-hospital dope or as a romancer of barmaids who look like Elizabeth Taylor under the glow of a Dos Equis sign, you can find yourself not only back on the full-tilt boogie but inside a straitjacket, maybe sedated into the fourth dimension, no extra charge.

If you are very unlucky and talk to untrained or inexperienced people about this syndrome, people who perhaps mean well but tell you to toughen up or to control your thoughts, you will probably enter a place that is the psychological equivalent of the Iron Maiden. In other words, as a black kid who’d had both arms blown off said to me on a hospital ship, “Welcome to Shitsville, Loot. Come on in, the water is fine. Just a little dirty.”

I felt overcome with sorrow about Marcel’s death. I had thought him a psychopath and hence someone who, of his own volition, had murdered the light in his soul. But he had tried to go straight, had sought out Father Julian’s help, and had trusted me with many of his private thoughts, admitting in the last moments of his life his envy of me.

I had identified him with the forces of cruelty, but in reality he was more a victim than a perpetrator, and my experience in the world, for what it was worth, had brought me no closer to an understanding of man’s predilection for inhumanity. No matter the society or the historical era, the succubus and the incubus seemed to work their way into our midst, or were latent or embryonic in us from the jump.

Both Catholics and Protestants burned tens of thousands of women as witches. When the Puritans finished exterminating the Indians, they turned their talents on their neighbors and hanged nineteen of them and took three days in pressing one to death. In Europe, drawing and quartering, mass hangings, public emboweling, and death by fire — including the burning of Joan of Arc at age nineteen — were the message of the elite to those who had no power. Serfs impaled noblemen and raped their wives in front of them; they skinned bishops as well. Martin Luther despised Jews and was often quoted by the Nazis in their defense of the Final Solution. Hiroshima, Nanking, My Lai, their legacy is always there, their exponents and justifiers at the ready, the banner of heaven or nation flapping above their heads.

By five A.M. I was shaking and wanted desperately to talk to Clete Purcel. But my calls went straight to voicemail. I also wanted to drive to St. Martinville and start drinking at sunrise in a dark brass-railed saloon with slow-moving ceiling fans not far from the Evangeline Oak where I had first kissed my wife, Bootsie. No, I didn’t want to simply drink. I wanted to swallow pitchers of Jack Daniel’s and soda and shaved ice and bruised mint, and chase them with frosted-mug beer and keep the snakes under control with vodka and Collins mix and cherries and orange slices, until my rockets had a three-day supply of fuel and I was on the far side of the moon.

But I was about to learn that I didn’t need to drive to St. Martinville to blow out my doors. My deliverer from the sauce pulled into my driveway just as the rain stopped and the stars and moon went out of the sky and a fog bank forty feet high and as white and dense as cotton rolled off the bayou and swallowed my house. Talk about frying your own grits. I was just getting started.