The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Thirteen

I called my friend the captain of the West Hollywood Station of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and asked more specifically about Butterworth’s record. Butterworth’s reputation for deviancy was ubiquitous. But legend and legal reality don’t always coincide. Prostitutes told outrageous stories about him. One claimed he hung her from a hook and beat her bloody, but she had been in Camarillo twice and hadn’t filed charges. As gross as his behavior was, most of it seemed thespian, more adolescent and obscene than criminal.

“He’s never had to register as a sex offender?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago he got nailed on a statutory,” my friend said. “She was sixteen, although she looked twenty-five. The DA was going to put him away, but the girl got a big role in a South American film and left town.”

“Butterworth got her the role?”

“That’s how it usually works.”

“What’s the status on the charge now?”

“It doesn’t have one. The case died in the file drawer.”

“That’s all I need,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”

“I don’t see how I helped.”

“This is Louisiana, Cap. The language in our sex offender registry laws would give you an aneurism.”

By noon the next day I had a warrant for Butterworth’s arrest and a warrant to search Desmond’s house. I dialed Desmond’s unlisted number, hoping he would be there. Unfortunately, Butterworth answered.

“Is Desmond there?” I said. “This is Dave Robicheaux.”

“Oh, my favorite detective,” he replied.

“I need to speak to him, please.”

“He’s taking a break today and sailing. The light is all wrong for the scene we’re shooting, anyway. Could I be of assistance?”

“I have to take some photos from your deck. I’m putting together a report on the discovery of the Arceneaux body.”

“This isn’t about the telescope again, is it?”

“No, it has to do with tidal drift. Will you be there for the next hour?”

“I’ll make a point of it,” he said. “Ta-ta, cute boy.”

Bailey and I checked out a cruiser and headed for Cypremort Point, with me driving and Sean McClain following in a second vehicle. There was a heavy chop on the bay, the moss straightening in the trees and boats rocking in their slips like beer cans in a wave.

“I’m not sure what we’re doing, Dave,” Bailey said.

“We’re on shaky ground, but Butterworth doesn’t know it.”

She looked straight ahead, thoughtful. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”

“You ever hear of a rich man going to the chair or gas chamber or the injection room?” I said.

“I guess that doesn’t happen often.”

“It doesn’t happen at all.”

I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. “We cut the bad guys off at the knees, Bailey.”

“What we do is punish the people who are available,” she said.

I looked at her profile. She was one of those people whose composure and self-assurance gave no hint of arrogance or elitism. But I couldn’t forget that Ambrose Bierce, a war veteran, once defined a pacifist as a dead Quaker, and that Bailey was young for the job and I was old for it, and old for her, and on top of it I wondered if she didn’t belong in the public defender’s office.

“You’re a good fellow, Dave.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m a good judge of people.”

All my thought processes went down the drain.

As we neared the tip of the peninsula, I saw a solitary figure on the deck of Desmond’s house, the wind flattening his slacks and Hawaiian shirt against his body. He was playing his saxophone, obviously indifferent to the sounds of the surf and the wind and seagulls, the gold bell of the sax as bright as a heliograph in the sunlight.

“Why does that guy remind me of an upended lizard?” I said.

“Because he looks like one,” she replied.

I rang the chimes. When Butterworth answered, I stepped inside without being asked and held up both warrants. Bailey and Sean followed me. “You’re under arrest for failing to register as a sex offender, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “Please turn around and place your hands behind you.”

Without pause I cuffed him and began reading him his rights.

“I’m not a sex offender,” he said. “Where do you come off with that?”

“I’m going to walk you to the couch and sit you down,” I said. “Which bedroom is yours?”

“At the end of the hall. Why are you interested in my bedroom?”

“Our search warrant is limited to part of the house,” I said.

“Did you hear what I said? I’m not a sex offender. I have never been charged with a sexual offense.”

I eased him down on the leather couch. He was barefoot. The tops of his feet were laced with green veins.

“Under Louisiana law, a sex offender in another state has to register here as soon as he takes up residence, even though the charge in the other state has fallen into limbo,” I said. “The statutory beef you skated on in California would be considered a ‘deferred’ charge in Louisiana. Deferred offenders have to register. You pissed on your shoes, Mr. Butterworth.”

“I want to call my attorney,” he said.

“You can call from lockup,” I said.

“Mr. Butterworth?” Bailey said.

He looked up. His forehead and pate were tan and greasy, the pupils of his eyes like black marbles.

“Are you high?” she said.

“Me?” he replied. “Who cares? I have prescriptions for mood modifiers.”

“You’re an intelligent man,” she said. “You know we’re not here about that statutory business of twelve years ago.”

“Then why say you are?” he asked.

“Our problem is the young woman on the cross, and an indigent man hanged like a piece of rotted meat in a shrimp net, and a deputy sheriff who had his esophagus and larynx and lungs slowly punctured and ripped apart with a baton,” she said. “Your history indicates that you have sadistic inclinations. If you were in our position, whom would you be talking to now?”

“Nice try, love,” he said.

“Don’t speak to me in that fashion,” she said. “Where were you in the early a.m. on Monday?”

“Asleep. In my bedroom. Desmond will confirm that. Was that when the deputy consummated his appointment in Samarra?”

“Stay with him,” I said to Bailey.

I stepped out on the deck and called Desmond’s cell phone. The wind was hot and full of spray and the smell of salt and seaweed. Desmond picked up on the first ring.

“This is Dave,” I said. “We’re serving two warrants at your house. One on Butterworth’s living area and one on Butterworth.”

“You’re kidding,” Desmond said.

“He says he was asleep in his bedroom in the early morning yesterday. Is he lying?” There was no answer. I put the phone to my other ear. “Did you hear me?”

“He went to bed early Sunday night. His door was closed when I got up in the morning.”

“Did you see him?”

“I had to meet some guys with the rain tower in Lafayette. I left at about six-thirty.”

“So you don’t know if he was in the bedroom or not?”

“Not for certain.”

But there was something he was not telling me.

“Where was his Subaru when you left?”

“I didn’t see it. That doesn’t mean anything, though.”

“Does he drive a black SUV sometimes?”

“He has access to them. We rent a number of them. Look, maybe he was out. He’s got a girlfriend or two. Locals. Sometimes they drop him off and he lets them tool around in his convertible. He lives a bachelor’s life.”

“He’s hunting on the game farm?” I said.

“No. This is harassment, Dave. You’ve got the wrong guy. You may not like to hear this, but Antoine is not the evil bastard he pretends he is.”

“He fooled me.”

“He majored in sackcloth and ashes.”

“Sell it to someone else, Des.”

“This is why I don’t live here anymore. You taint every beautiful thing in your lives and put it on outsiders. Y’all would strip-mine Eden if the price was right.”

“Then why make your films here?” I said, my heart thudding.

“Louisiana is anybody’s blow job,” he replied. “You can buy it for chump change.”

I closed the phone and looked across Weeks Bay to where I had first seen the body of Lucinda Arceneaux floating with her arms spread on the cross, her hair undulating like serpents around her throat. Then I went back inside, the wind whistling in my ears.

“You’re out of luck, partner,” I said to Butterworth. “Desmond doesn’t back you up. Your bedroom door was closed when he left yesterday morning, but your car was gone.”

“Because I gave it to a lady friend to use,” he said.

“Des mentioned that as a possibility,” I said. “Who is she?”

“A lady who works in a blues joint.”

“A singer?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Bella Delahoussaye.”

I kept my face empty.

“You got it on with her?” Bailey asked him.

“What is this?” he said.

“You know how it is out here in the provinces,” I said. “Family values, total abstinence, prayer meetings, Friday-night lights and such. We try to set the bar.”

“I realized that the first time I went to a cockfight in Breaux Bridge,” he said.

“Is there anything in your room you want to tell us about before we find it?” I said. “Hallucinogens, uppers, China white?”

He twisted his neck, his skin pulling tight on his face like a turtle’s. “You’re behind the times. What was the name of the deputy who was killed?”

“Axel Devereaux,” I said.

Butterworth nodded. “He was mixed up with the Aryan Brotherhood.”

“How do you know that?” Bailey said.

“Some of them tried to get jobs as extras with us,” he replied. “Devereaux sent them. He had prostitutes working for him. Five hundred dollars a night. He thought he was going to be a friend to the stars.”

“What was your connection to Devereaux?” I asked.

“I didn’t have one,” he replied. “I wouldn’t let him on the set. Desmond banned him, and Lou Wexler walked him to his car. We had to do your job.”

“Get started,” I said to Sean.

I put my hand under Butterworth’s arm and walked him into the bedroom. I pulled up a chair for him to sit in while Sean began opening drawers and placing the contents on the bed.

“You have a phone number for Bella Delahoussaye?” I asked.

“You don’t?” he said.

“Say again?”

“Cut the charade, Detective,” he said. “You took her home.”

Bailey looked at me.

“That’s right, I did,” I said.

“I suspect she was giving you a guitar lesson,” he said.

“Y’all had better take a look at this,” Sean said.

I didn’t know whether Sean had deliberately interrupted Butterworth. Butterworth had gotten the knife in. My face was burning, my wrists throbbing. I saw the shine of disappointment in Bailey’s eyes.

“What do you have?” she asked Sean.

He dumped a hatbox onto the bedspread. A pair of sheep-lined leather wrist cuffs fell out, along with a purple hood, a flagellum strung with felt thongs, a black leather vest, and women’s undergarments. A hypodermic kit and several bags of dried plants or herbs followed.

“These are yours?” I said to Butterworth.

“I’ve used a couple of items in intimate situations. Actually, they’re stage props.” He studied a spot six inches in front of his eyes.

“How about the spike?” I said.

“My medicines are homeopathic in nature. There’s nothing unlawful in that box.”

“I think your sense of reality is from the other side of Mars,” I said.

“You wear your hypocrisy nicely,” he said.

“Let me clear up something for you,” I said. “I took Miss Bella home in an electric storm. I took her to her front door, and then I drove to my house. I have the feeling she told you that, but you used the information to embarrass me and to cast doubt on the integrity of this investigation.”

“I couldn’t care less about your peccadilloes,” he said. “The issue is otherwise. You’re trying to degrade me while pretending you’re not.”

“Did you put LSD in the food of a housemaid so you could film and ridicule her?”

Then he surprised me. “Yes, it was unconscionable. I’ve done many things I regret.” His gaze fixed on me, then he looked away, detached, as though he had gone somewhere else.

Sean removed stacks of books from a shelf and placed them on the bed, then began searching the closet. The books included titles by Lee Child, Frederick Forsyth, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and a history of the Crusades. But the one that caught my eye was an ostrich-skin-bound scrapbook stuffed with photographs and postcards and handwritten and typed letters, yellowed with age and pasted to the pages.

“I would prefer that you not look at that,” Butterworth said. “Nothing in it is related to your investigation.”

I began turning the pages. Each was as stiff as cardboard. The backdrop was obviously Africa: wild animals grazing on grasslands backdropped by mountains capped with snow, army six-bys loaded with black soldiers carrying AK-47s and Herstal assault rifles, arid villages where every child had the same bloated stomach and hollow eyes and skeletal face. I could almost hear the buzzing of the flies.

“Which countries were these taken in?” I asked.

“Many of these places don’t even have names,” he replied.

“The guys in those trucks look like friends of Gaddafi and Castro,” I said.

“They’re friends of whoever pays them,” he said.

The next page I turned was pasted over with an eight-by-ten color photograph that slipped in and out of focus, as though the eye wanted to reject it. The huts on either side of a dirt road were burning. A column of troops was walking into a red sun, some of the men looking at bodies strewn along the roadside. A withered and toothless old man wearing only short pants and sandals was sitting with one leg bent under him, his arms outstretched, begging for mercy. The bodies of a woman and a child lay like broken dolls next to him. A soldier stood behind him, a machete hanging from a thong on his wrist.

I held the page open in front of Butterworth. “You had a hand in this?”

“Did I participate in it? No. Was I there? I took the photograph.”

“Did you try to stop it?”

“My head would have been used for a soccer ball.”

“Who was the commanding officer?”

“An African thug who was a friend of Idi Amin.”

“What was your role?”

“Adviser.”

I closed the book and dropped it on the bed. “Get up.”

“What for?”

“You need to be in a different place.”

I walked him through the living room and out on the deck, my fingers biting into his arm. I unlocked his cuffs and hooked him around the rail, the sun beating down on his face, his eyes still dilated and now watering. He was clearly trying not to blink. “Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t like you. How often do you shoot up?”

“Sorry, I won’t discuss my private life with you.”

“Did you shoot up Lucinda Arceneaux?”

“Alafair told me your friend Purcel fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador.”

“What about it?”

“He never told you what went on down there? The atrocities committed by the cretins your government trained at the School of the Americas?”

“I’m going to leave you out here for a few minutes, and then we’ll be taking you to the jail. In the meantime I think it would be to your advantage if you shut your mouth.”

“You don’t know why you hate and fear me, do you?” he asked.

“What?”

“I symbolize the ruinous consequence of America’s decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved. You see me and realize how much you have lost.”

I wanted to believe he was mad, a sybaritic, narcotic-fueled cynic determined to transfer his pathogens to the rest of us. With his hands cuffed to the deck rail, the wind flattening his clothes against his body, he looked like the twisted figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

“Tell me I’m mistaken,” he said.

I went back into the bedroom.

“What was that about?” Bailey said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Did you find anything else?”

She shook her head.

“Bag up the scrapbook and the stuff in the hatbox,” I said to Sean. “I’ll put Butterworth in the cruiser.”

“This bust bothers me,” Bailey said. “We might have some legal problems. Like a liability suit.”

“Not if Lucinda Arceneaux’s DNA is on that needle,” I said.

“But you know it’s not, don’t you?” she said. “Why do you have it in for this guy?”

I didn’t answer. I collected Butterworth from the deck and hooked him to a D-ring in the back of the cruiser. Bailey and I got in the front and drove up the long narrow two-lane toward New Iberia, the palm fronds on the roadside rattling dryly in the wind, the waves chopping against the boats in their slips. She glanced sideways at me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, and winked. “I think you’re a nice guy. That’s all.”

That was when I knew that the folly of age is a contagion that spares no man, not unless he is fortunate enough to die young.