The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Twelve

On Sunday, Alafair called me from the airport in Dallas. She had taken a commercial flight and was on her way back home.

“You quit?” I said.

“No, Desmond and Lou had to take care of some union trouble in Los Angeles and New Orleans. I wasn’t getting anything done, so I decided to work from home.”

“Was that all right with them?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

I picked her up in Lafayette. We had slipped into Indian summer without being aware of it. The sky was as hard and blue as porcelain, the oak leaves red and gold and clicking like crickets when they rolled across the lawn in the wind. I knew somehow that better days lay ahead.

I fixed dinner for us when we got home, and later, we fed Snuggs on the kitchen floor and Mon Tee Coon and his girlfriend on top of Tripod’s hutch. That night we slept with the windows open, and I could smell the camellias and the dense lemony fragrance of our late-blooming magnolia in the side yard. As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to capture and protect each spoonful of sunshine allotted me for the rest of my life, and not go with the season or lend myself to doomed causes.

I woke at six-fifteen to the sounds of rain and the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and went into the kitchen so as not to awake Alafair. It was Sean McClain. “I’m in front of Axel Devereaux’s place by the drawbridge on Loreauville Road. I need a witness here.”

“What for?”

“There’s something wrong in that house. People know I don’t get along with Devereaux or his buddies. I don’t want to be busting in on my own.”

“What happened?”

“I was passing his house a half hour ago. All the lights were on and the shades down. A black SUV was in the yard. I saw a woman come running out the back door and thought I heard glass breaking.”

“Go on.”

“I slowed down but didn’t stop.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to mix in his personal business.”

He had already made two mistakes: He had ignored a battery situation in progress, and he hadn’t called it in. I didn’t want to think about what was coming next.

“What made you change your mind?” I said.

“I go off at oh-seven-hundred. I thought I’d make one more pass. The SUV was bagging down the road. I didn’t get a tag. The lights were off in the house, and a front window was broken and the shade and screen hanging outside. Devereaux’s truck was in the shed. This time I knocked on the door. No answer.”

“Where are you now?”

“In the front yard.”

“Try again.”

“I pert’ near shook it off the blocks already.”

“You tried the back?”

“Yes, sir. I hit on the bedroom wall.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and took a small bottle of orange juice and a cinnamon roll out of the icebox and headed up Loreauville Road. The rain had quit and the sky was an ink wash, as though the sun had refused to rise. A blanket of white fog was rolling off the bayou when I turned onto Axel Devereaux’s property. Sean was waiting on the gallery. An empty whiskey bottle wet with dew glittered in the yard. I walked up the steps.

“You know Axel’s a juicer, don’t you?” I said.

“If that’s the problem, he must have tied on a whammeroo.”

I pounded with the flat of my fist on the door. “It’s Dave Robicheaux and Sean McClain! Open up, Devereaux!”

I took out a handkerchief and twisted the knob. It was locked tight. I stepped back and balanced myself with the screen and kicked the wood door with the bottom of my shoe. The second time it splintered off the jamb. Axel seemed to have cleaned up the damage done to his living room by Hugo Tillinger. Through the hallway I could barely make out a figure sitting motionlessly at the breakfast table, his back to us. Then I realized he was wearing a peaked hat, dripping with bells like ornaments on a small Christmas tree.

I walked through the hallway with Sean behind me. He looked over my shoulder. “Oh, man.”

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Get Bailey and Helen on the horn. Don’t let a photographer get near this.”

“They say they got a right.”

“Devereaux wasn’t worth the spit on the sidewalk. But we don’t punish the family.”

I believed a fight or an attempt to flee the house had begun in the living room and ended in the kitchen. Dishes and glassware were broken. Cutlery from a wooden knife block was splayed on the floor. The icebox door was open, a carton of milk on its side, leaking into the vegetable tray. The air-conditioning units were turned on full blast, the back door key-locked, the key gone.

Even in death, Axel’s face resembled a boiled egg, the eyes open wide, disbelieving. His wrists were fastened behind the chair with plastic ligatures. A short baton had been shoved down the throat and into the chest, prizing up the chin. But I doubted that was the cause of his death. A leather loop, one with three knots tied in it, had been flipped over his neck. The burns went a quarter inch into the tissue. A Lincoln-green felt cap hung with tiny chrome bells had been snugged on his head.

The medics and the ambulance were the first to arrive, then Helen and Bailey and Cormac Watts. Through the front window I saw a television truck and the automobile of a Daily Iberian reporter coming up the road. Sean was in the backyard. He was wearing latex gloves. He bent over and picked up a key and used it to open the back door. “Why would the killer want to lock up a corpse?”

“To give himself as much time as possible to get out of town.”

“You suspect he cranked up the air conditioners?”

“That’s the way I’d read it.”

“Damn, I wish I’d pulled in when I saw that woman run out the back door.”

“Axel dealt the hand a long time ago, Sean. He was a cruel, evil man, and he died the death of one.”

“Ain’t nobody deserves going out like this,” he said. “Look at the butt end of the baton.”

“What about it?”

Sean nudged a claw hammer on the linoleum with the tip of his shoe. “Whoever done it went at it like he was driving a tent peg.”

Helen and Bailey came through the hallway. Both of them stared silently at Devereaux’s profile. Neither showed any expression.

“The back door was locked from the outside,” I said. “Sean found the key in the backyard.”

“You saw somebody leave in a black SUV?” Helen said to Sean.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Hauling ass.”

“You didn’t get a number?”

“No, ma’am, the headlights was off.”

“You didn’t go after it or call it in?” she said.

“I didn’t have no reason to at that point.” He lowered his head, his cheeks coloring.

“What’d you think the hat is about?” Helen said.

“He’s the Fool in the tarot,” Bailey said.

“The tarot again?” Helen said.

“Bailey is right,” I said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” Helen replied. “But what the hell does Devereaux have to do with fortune-telling cards?”

“The Fool represents pride, arrogance, and presumption,” I said. “He’s portrayed whistling as he’s about to step off a cliff. He has a staff over his shoulder. Joe Molinari had a walking cane plunged through his chest.”

“I have a hard time buying in to this symbolism crap, Dave,” she said.

“Know a better explanation?” I said.

She stared at nothing. “Do the knots mean anything?”

“Our killer probably had commando training of some kind,” I said. “The knots are to break the larynx and silence the victim.”

“Or maybe he’s just a sadist,” Bailey said. “The Internet is full of information that Jack the Ripper couldn’t have thought up.”

Cormac Watts had been standing in the background. “Can I have a look?” he asked.

“Sorry,” I said, and stepped aside.

He leaned down and studied Axel’s face and the garrote and the baton. He straightened his back and looked at us.

“What is it?” I said.

“The garrote is cosmetic,” he said. “It’s there to mislead us.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Look at the discharge on the shank of the baton,” he said. “Devereaux was alive when it went down his throat. He looked straight into the eyes of the guy who did this to him. There’s a tear sealed in one eye. The killer isn’t just a ritualist. He enjoyed this one.”

A fly was buzzing on the ceiling. Helen turned to Sean. “You saw a woman run outside?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“White or black, fat or thin, what?” she said.

“I couldn’t make her out, Miss Helen.”

“That’s great,” she said.

“Pardon?” he said.

“We look like the dumbest fucks on the planet,” she said. “We can’t even protect our own.”

Sean’s face seemed to shrink and the blood to go out of his cheeks.

“Devereaux wasn’t one of our own,” I said.

I felt her eyes on the side of my face. I walked out to the front yard. The medics were wheeling in the gurney, a body bag folded on top. Helen followed me. “Don’t ever correct me in front of others again, Pops.”

“You were too hard on Sean,” I said.

Her head seemed to wobble like a balloon on a string, her eyes blazing. “He blew it. He has to man up and take his medicine.”

“You’re putting this in his jacket?”

“He should have called it in. We could have had this lunatic in custody.”

“We should have flushed Devereaux from the department years ago. The onus is on us.”

“I can’t help what happened ‘years ago.’ The guy who killed Devereaux is going to kill again, and we could have had him, but now we have nothing. Excuse me if I’m not as charitable as you. You not only piss me off, Dave, you disappoint me.”

“Sean went back after he passed the house,” I said. “Had he gone in earlier, thinking Devereaux was involved in a domestic argument, he’d probably be dead, too.”

Her face was pinched, her fists balled on her hips. “All right.”

“All right, what?” I said.

“I’ll talk with Sean. No paperwork.”

The forensic team was dusting the house, the medics bagging up Devereaux, the fog breaking up on the bayou. It was a new day for everyone except Devereaux. I almost felt sorry for him. But I suspected his own victims were many and that most of them would never tell others of the degradation he had put them through. Anyway, have a good trip to the other side, I thought, and walked to my truck.

“Where you going?” Helen said.

“To work,” I replied.

I wasn’t surprised by Hugo Tillinger’s phone call to my office later that day. There is a subculture in this country that seems to have no antecedent — a conflation of reality television, National Enquirer journalism, fundamentalist religion, militarism, and professional football. At the center is an adoration of celebrity, no matter how it is acquired or in what form it comes. Women line up to marry Richard Ramirez and the Menendez brothers; the Jerry Springer clientele will degrade themselves and their families and destroy any modicum of dignity in their lives for ten minutes in front of the camera. Tillinger had probably stumbled into his role as the innocent man on death row, then decided after a few headlines that a frolic in the limelight might be worth the grief. Check out the story of Caryl Chessman.

“What do you want this time?” I asked him.

“Y’all gonna try to put the Devereaux job on me?”

“You’d be a logical candidate.”

“On what grounds?”

“You already burglarized his house?”

“I did that for Miss Lucinda.”

“Maybe you shoved a baton down his throat for the same reason.”

“That’s how he went out?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Did you mutilate Travis Lebeau before he was dragged?”

“Where in the hell did you get that?”

“You used a quote from the book of Psalms about Jehovah breaking the teeth of His enemies.”

“That doesn’t mean I go around mutilating people.”

“You’re a nuisance, Mr. Tillinger. I wish you would go away.”

“The AB probably killed Travis. But I think the order came from Devereaux.”

“Devereaux was hooked up with the AB?”

“They kept his whores in line. How come you don’t know this?”

“I’m not that smart,” I said. I looked at the second hand on my watch. Eight seconds passed before he spoke again.

“I don’t want to go back to Texas, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s not an unreasonable attitude.”

“Every night I dream about being injected.”

“I don’t have the power to influence your situation, sir.”

“You could get me to the right people. Actors, celebrities, hereabouts. People are making films all over the state these days.”

“A bartender in Lafayette told me you already knew those kinds of people.”

“Miss Lucinda knew them,” he said.

My attention was starting to fade.

“She was working on her genealogy,” he said. “She was an orphan. Her foster daddy is a preacher.”

“So?”

“She thought maybe she was related to a famous guy in Hollywood. She didn’t say who.”

“When you find out, tell me, will you?” I said. “I’m done here.”

“You’re a hard-nosed bastard.”

“Just self-destructive. You stole firearms out of Devereaux’s house. What do you plan to do with them?”

“Cancel the ticket of anyone who tries to take me back to Texas.”

Spoken like a real idiot, I thought. “Don’t call here again unless you have some useful information.”

I hung up. This time he didn’t call back. Helen opened my door. “The prints from the Devereaux crime scene are no help. The door key was clean. The killer was probably wearing gloves when he went inside. Anything on your end?”

“Tillinger called. He was on a cell phone. He’s not our guy.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He’s a five-star peckerwood. What you see is what you get.”

“You don’t believe he burned his family to death?”

“If I’d been on the jury, I’d have reasonable doubt.”

“So we’ve got nothing.”

“There’s Antoine Butterworth,” I said.

“Why Butterworth?”

“His soul probably resembles the La Brea Tar Pits.”

“What are you going to bring him in on?”

“He’s a long way from his usual resources,” I replied. “Let’s see how he likes being one of the little people.”