The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Eleven

I parked my pickup under the oaks by Burke-Hawthorne Hall and walked to the library. The advantage of having a little knowledge about the classical world is that few other people do. The second advantage is your awareness that every problem facing us today has already occurred many times previously, and the behavior of the players is always predictable and the consequences are always the same. It’s a bit like going to the track with the names of the winners and losers in your pocket.

Every literary plot is either in the Bible, Greek mythology, or Elizabethan theater. Hemingway said it was all right for an author to steal as long as he improved the material. I felt the same way about a homicide investigation. The externals were cosmetic. The motivations were not a mystery. Avarice, fear, sexual passion, revenge, a desire for power, rage that produced a chemical assault on the brain, this was the detritus floating in the gene pool. Read Charles Dickens’s journalistic account of a public execution in London. It will make you want to flee humanity.

I put my notebook and a yellow legal pad on a big table in the archive reading room and tried to give a degree of coherence to the events that had occurred since I first saw the body of Lucinda Arceneaux bobbing in Weeks Bay. The apparent ritualistic hanging of Joe Molinari’s fly-infested corpse in a shrimp net, a walking cane plunged through his chest, made no sense unless you linked his death to Arceneaux’s. In the meantime, Hugo Tillinger had become a serious presence in our midst. He now had weapons and money courtesy of Axel Devereaux, and a cause to go with them, one involving prostitution.

Hilary Bienville had tied a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle with a piece of red twine, then claimed — facetiously, I’m sure — that she had gotten it from a bubblegum machine. When I’d pressed her about it, she had said, “Mine to know,” in a prideful fashion. In the library I found seven books that dealt specifically with Crusader knights. The Maltese cross was supposedly the sign of a late-sixteenth-century group, although it may have had earlier origins. No matter. It symbolized the ethos of the knight errant who, with body armor and chainmail and spiked mace and broadsword, managed to synthesize the noblest aspects of Christianity with bloodlust.

I stayed in the library until closing time, my eyes burning. At a certain time in your life, you accept the fact that lunacy comes in many forms. Is there a more disturbing sound than hobnailed boots striking a cobblestoned street in unison? Or our penchant for using ritual and procedure to give plausibility to the unthinkable? Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps. If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

I thanked the reference librarian for her help and walked back to my pickup. The campus was dark, the sky sprinkled with stars. When I reached my truck, I saw that a sheet of spiral notebook paper had been placed under my windshield wiper. The message was printed in ballpoint, each letter a composite of slashes:

I folded the note and placed it in my shirt pocket. I had a feeling Tillinger was watching me, but I gave him no indication. The moon was up, the shadows of flooded trees moving on the water of Cypress Lake by the old student center. I slipped my snub-nose .38 special from my snap-on belt holster and held it behind my hip. I walked down to the edge of the water. “You out there, Hugo?”

There was no response.

“You shouldn’t be bird-dogging me, partner,” I said.

I heard a splash. It could have been either a frog or someone throwing a dirt clod into the lake.

“Maybe we’ve got the same goal,” I said. “Nobody is worried about you creeping Axel Devereaux’s house. The firearms are another matter. Maybe you’ll beat death row in Texas. Don’t blow it by getting into an assault beef in Louisiana.”

I thought I saw a silhouette merge with the corner of the student center, but I couldn’t be sure. No sound came from the lakeside or the walkways. I got into my truck and started the engine. Then the words from the Book of Psalms came back to me, and I squeezed my eyes shut at their implication.

I went into Helen’s office early the next morning.

“The note is from Hugo Tillinger?” she said.

“Who else?”

“Look, I’m not exactly a biblical scholar. Run that quotation by me again.”

“It refers to Jehovah breaking the teeth of the wicked.”

Her eyes were fastened on mine. “Travis Lebeau,” she said. “His teeth were pulled out.”

“Yep.”

“Lebeau was Tillinger’s friend.”

“Maybe the quotation is coincidence. Or maybe Tillinger is a real nightmare.”

“I hope he’s our guy,” she said. “I’d like to put all this craziness on one guy and shut him down.”

“Except it’s a whole lot more complicated, isn’t it?”

“To say the least,” she replied. “Just before you came in, I got a call from Desmond Cormier. He said he wants to cast Bailey Ribbons in his movie, but he doesn’t want to cause her conflict.”

“Then why does he create conflict?”

“I said something similar. How’s Bailey working out?”

“Good. The best,” I said.

“Really?”

“Is that supposed to have a second meaning?” I said.

“Nope. Just asking.” She leaned back in her swivel chair, her eyes unfocused, her face wan. “Some fun, huh, bwana?”

While in New Iberia, Clete Purcel lived on East Main at the Teche Motel, a 1940s motor court with cottages on either side of a narrow strip of tree-shaded asphalt that dead-ended in an oak grove on the bayou. Two or three evenings a week he cooked a pork roast or a chicken on a grill under the oaks, and shared it with anyone who wanted to sit down with him. Late Wednesday afternoon a smoking gas-guzzler gnarled with dents made its way down to the last cottage on the asphalt. Hilary Bienville got out and knocked on the cottage door.

“I’m over here,” Clete said.

She twitched at the sound of his voice. “Can I talk wit’ you?”

“Yeah. Who told you where I live?”

She walked toward him. She wore jeans and sandals and a man’s khaki shirt tied at the waist. “The bartender at the club.”

“What happened to your face?”

“Tripped on the stairs.”

“You live in a trailer.”

“Tripped somewhere else.”

“Who did that to you?” he said.

“Ain’t important.”

“You went to the hospital?”

“I don’t mess with them emergency room people.”

“Axel Devereaux beat you up?”

“I’m scared, Mr. Clete.”

“I’m not a ‘mister.’ Answer me.”

“I don’t care about Axel. I’m here about somebody else. What he’s doing to me.” She pointed at her head. “Inside here.”

Clete opened the top on his grill and let a cloud of white smoke rise into the trees. He pulled a longneck from a tub full of half-melted ice and twisted the cap off and set it on the picnic table. “Sit down. I’m going to fix you a sandwich. Dave Robicheaux told me he went to see you. Why don’t you talk to him?”

“He’s a policeman.”

“Axel Devereaux beat you up?”

“You ain’t hearing me.” She sat at the table and put her hands over her face. “Don’t nobody hear me. Don’t nobody know what it’s like when you’re on your own against the world.”

Clete picked up the longneck and touched her arm with it. “Drink it.”

Her hand was shaking when she lifted the bottle; the beer spilled out of her mouth. He handed her a paper towel. “Who’s this guy getting in your head?”

She wiped her chin. “I only went to the ninth grade.”

“So?”

“I know what I’m t’inking is the troot, except I cain’t find the right words for it. When I’m wit’ him, I got no power. I get weak all over. The way he touches me and talks in my ear and looks in my eyes like no man done before. It’s like he’s putting pictures in my head that ain’t supposed to be there, and it makes me scared. I cain’t sleep, no.”

“Is this a white or a black man?”

“A black man might hit you, but he don’t mess up your head.”

“He’s not a pimp?”

“No, he ain’t nothing like that.”

Clete sliced the roast and layered two pieces of French bread on a paper plate with meat and sauce and tomatoes and lettuce and onions and set it in front of her.

“I ain’t hungry,” she said.

“Eat it anyway.”

“You ain’t gonna he’p, are you.”

“Tell me the guy’s name, and we might get somewhere.”

“He tole me I ain’t supposed to do that. He held my chin wit’ his fingers and looked into my eyes when he said it.”

“This guy sounds like a real piece of shit. Tell me who he is and I’ll dial him up.”

“He said I’m a chalice. I got to be pure ’cause I’m chosen. Chosen for what?”

“Did you ask him that?”

“I was afraid.”

“Listen to me, Miss Hilary. You’re giving me half the story and not trusting me with the other half.”

He waited for her to speak. She took a small bite from her sandwich and chewed as though it were cardboard. Then she took the food out of her mouth and put it on the plate. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Is he a client?”

“Not in a reg’lar way.”

“You don’t get it on with him?”

“He gives me money and t’ings. Once he axed me to rub his back.”

“Where did you meet this guy?”

“At the Winn-Dixie. His basket crashed into mine. He said, ‘Sorry, pretty lady.’ ”

Clete closed the top of the grill and sat down across from her. “Did you know Lucinda Arceneaux?”

“I don’t know nobody named Lucinda.”

“Her body was found floating on a wood cross in Weeks Bay.”

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“You don’t read the newspaper or watch the news?”

“It don’t have nothing to do wit’ me.”

Clete shut and opened his eyes. “Describe the pictures that the man without a name puts in your head.”

“Horses galloping, people burning up in their shacks, children screaming. If I don’t do what he say, t’ings like that are gonna be my fault. He says we’re all part of a big plan.”

“Are we talking about a guy named Hugo Tillinger?”

“No.”

“This guy is not only a bad guy, he’s a fake. The only power he has is the power you give him.”

She stared at Clete as though he were an apparition and the man who had poisoned her mind were real. Her skin was like dark chocolate, pitted in one cheek, a scar like a piece of white string at the corner of one eye. There was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Clete wondered whom she had been with before she had come to his cottage. He wondered how many times she had been used as a child and sworn to secrecy by her molester.

“What was Nine/eleven, Hilary?”

“What was what?”

“Nine/eleven.”

“You mean the convenience store?”

He wrote his cell number on the back of his business card and gave it to her. “When you’re ready to give up your guy, let me know.”

“I remember what he said now. I’m the Queen of Cups. What’s that?”

“Some kind of bullshit he uses to scare people,” Clete said. He pulled another longneck from the cooler and screwed off the cap and drank from the bottle. “Is your baby okay?”

“Yes, suh.”

“You need any money?”

“What you t’ink?”

He removed two twenties from his wallet and put them in her hand. “Stay out of bars and away from the wrong people for a few days. Call me if Axel Devereaux comes around.”

She looked at the money. “You don’t want me to do nothing for you?”

“One look at me in the nude and women run for the convent.”

He thought she might smile, but she didn’t. She walked away without saying thanks or goodbye. He watched her get into her car and drive off, the muffler clanking. He hit the speed dial on his cell phone and got into his Caddy, talking on the phone, then drove down East Main to my house.

We sat on the front steps while he told me everything Hilary Bienville had said. The sun was almost down, and through the trees I could see clouds that were crimson and yellow and half filled with rain in the afterglow.

“You have any idea who this guy could be?” he said.

“The same one who gave her the Maltese cross she tied on her daughter’s ankle.”

“Yeah, but who’s the guy?”

“Anybody can buy tarot cards in the Quarter or on the Internet.”

Clete kept fiddling with his hands, running his fingers over his knuckles. They were the size of quarters. “What’s he after? It’s not sex.”

“Maybe she’ll get hurt again and tell us.”

“So just leave her alone?”

“It’s her choice,” I said.

“What about this guy Butterworth? Your cop friend in West Hollywood says he’s a bucket of vomit.”

“He’s hard to read. He spends a lot of time hanging out his signs.”

Clete stood up. “I got to go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Not sure. Did Mon Tee Coon come back?”

“No.”

“I’m going to have a chat with Axel Devereaux.”

“Bad idea.”

“The guy beats up on women. He’s about to stop. Same with hurting people’s pets.”

I was sitting in his shadow now, the tree limbs above us clicking with hail, the last of the sunset shrinking inside clouds that were dark and swollen with rain and quivering with thunder. “What I say won’t make any difference, will it.”

“You can’t always wait out the batter, Dave. Sometimes you have to take it to him. Devereaux is overdue.” Clete’s porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, and an unlit cigarette hung from his mouth.

“The key is the tarot,” I said. “Devereaux is an asshole and a distraction.”

“Not if you’re a woman and he’s pounding your face into marmalade.”

After Clete backed into the street and drove away, the hail stopped and the rain began, big drops flattening on the heat trapped in the sidewalk and the street, filling the air with a sweetness like the summers of our youth. I got up and went inside and turned off the air-conditioning units and opened the windows, letting the house swell with wind. Then a strange sensation overtook me, in the same fashion it had on the evening I’d walked without purpose to the home of Bailey Ribbons and could give no explanation for my behavior other than the fact that I seemed to have stepped into a vacuum in which the only sounds I heard were inside my head.

The rain fell like drops of lead on the tin roof and the bayou. From the hall closet, I removed an old sweat-stained Stetson that had belonged to my father. I put it on and walked down to the bayou, the brim wilting with rain.

I told myself I didn’t know why I was standing on the bank of a tidal stream in rain that was coming down harder by the second. That wasn’t true. For me, the rain has always been the conduit between the visible and the unseen worlds. Years ago my murdered wife, Annie, spoke to me in the rain, and dead members of my platoon called me on the phone during electrical storms, their voices hardly audible in the static, and my father who died in an offshore blowout appeared in the surf during a squall, still wearing his hard hat and strap overalls and steel-toed boots, giving me a thumbs-up while the waves slid across his knees, the oil rig that killed him stenciled against the sky.

The rain was about death. It defined it. It was an old friend, and I welcomed its presence. I knew its smell when I walked past a storm drain in cold weather, or sat down to rest in an Oregon rain forest filled with lichen-covered boulders that never saw sunlight, or saw a spectral figure on the St. Charles streetcar, his head hooded, his face like gray rubber, his lips curled whimsically in a lopsided figure eight, as though he were saying Whenever you’re ready, sport.

I heard leaves thrashing and looked upward into the live oak. Mon Tee Coon had just slipped on a branch and crashed on top of the limb below. Looking down at him was a smaller raccoon, her tail hanging off the branch.

“Comment la vie?” I said. “Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.”

Both of them stared down at me, their coats slick with rain.

“How about a celebratory can of sardines?” I said.

They looked at each other, then at me.

“C’est ce que je pensais,” I said. “Allons-allez.”

I walked back to the house, opened the can over the sink, and emptied it on the steps. Mon Tee Coon and his lady came running.

I thought about calling Clete and telling him that Mon Tee Coon had come home. But I didn’t. Clete was Clete, and no power on earth would ever change his mind about anything. I was also tired of trying to protect people like Axel Devereaux. Or maybe I was just tired of everything. Acceptance of death, or at least its presence, is that way sometimes and not the canker on the soul it’s made out to be.

I had never worn my father’s battered Stetson, and it felt strange. The rain had turned to mist and was blowing through the screens. For some reason, in my mind’s eye, I saw a mesa that resembled a tombstone, one that had been placed in the foreground of a wasteland that seemed to dip into infinity.

The phone rang on the kitchen counter. I looked at the caller ID and picked up. “What’s goin’ on, Baby Squanto?”

“Don’t call me those stupid names,” Alafair said. “Is everything all right there?”

“Of course.”

“It’s raining here. It never rains so hard this time of year. I’m looking out at the desert and thinking of you. I don’t know why.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I have this terrible feeling.”

“You shouldn’t. Mon Tee Coon just came home.”

“That’s wonderful. But don’t come here.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Through my window, I can see a huge mesa in the rain. For some reason I felt you were coming here. Maybe because you worry about me.”

“Wrong.”

“I have to go. Flowerpots and earthen jars are breaking on the patio.”

“I’ll talk with you later, kid.”

“Dave, I have an awful feeling. It’s about death. I don’t know why I feel this way.”

“It’ll pass.”

“What will?”

“Fear of death.”

“My thoughts are about you. Not me.”

“I understand. But your worries are misplaced. Hello?”

The line had gone dead.

I sat down and stared through the window at the rain. A bolt of lightning split the gray sky and trembled on the iron flagpole in City Park, like an aberration in the elements that refused to die.