The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Fourteen

We booked Butterworth and transferred him to the parish prison. That evening Desmond turned in to my driveway in a new Cherokee. He seemed to wear his contradictions as you would a suit of clothes. I had a bell, but he tapped lightly on the door. I had a sidewalk, but he walked on the lawn, even though it was damp from the sprinkler. The lightness of his touch on the door was not in sync with the intensity in his face and the corded veins in his forearms.

I looked at him through the screen. “If this is about Butterworth, I’ll talk to you at the department during office hours.”

“Antoine is my friend,” he said. “So are you. I’d like to speak with you in that spirit.”

I stepped out on the gallery. The light had pooled high in the sky, like an inverted golden bowl; the oaks in the yard were deep in shadow, the trunks surrounded by red and yellow four-o’clocks that bloomed only in the shade.

Desmond’s wide-set pale blue eyes were unblinking and yet simultaneously veiled; they had the vacuity you see in the eyes of sociopaths.

“Let Butterworth take his own fall,” I said.

“He hasn’t done anything.”

“Have you seen the photos in his scrapbook?”

“Maybe he does a different kind of penance than the rest of us. Hollywood is a place of second chances. More important, it’s a place where there are no victims. Everyone there knows the rules and the odds. Why beat up on Antoine?”

“On the phone you said we’d strip-mine the Garden of Eden if the price was right. You grew up in Eden?”

“What are you saying, Dave?”

“You lived on a piece of reservation hardpan that was given to the Indians only because the whites didn’t want it.”

“Better put, they wouldn’t spit on it,” he said. “What’s your point?”

“The casino made life a little better for some of your people. You think that was a bad idea? Why don’t you cut the rest of us some slack? Most of us do the best we can.”

“I thought I could reason with you,” he said. “That was a mistake. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I see the way you look at Bailey Ribbons. I don’t blame you. For me, she’s Clementine Carter. She takes us into the past, into our first love, into America before the railroad guys and the industrialists got their hands on it. When you’re with her, every day is spring, and death holds no dominion in your life.”

How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets? “I talked with Bella Delahoussaye this afternoon.”

“Who?”

“She’s Butterworth’s alibi. He told the truth about lending her his Subaru. There’s a problem, though.”

“What?”

“She said he also drives a dark-colored SUV. An SUV fled the Devereaux murder scene.”

“I already explained that,” Desmond said. “We have several in the car pool. For God’s sake, get away from this obsession with Hollywood. You’re all alike. You can’t stand success. You can’t stand art or reason or anything that isn’t like your putrid way of life. All of you are searching for a house with no mirrors.”

“Good try,” I said.

He looked at the sweep of leaves on the street, the electric lamps burning inside the oak boughs, the dreamlike shade that was stealing across the lawns of homes that Jefferson Davis’s widow once visited. “I apologize. This is my birthplace, too. You have more claim on it, though. I’ve done wrong by all of you. I wish I could change that. But I probably never will.”

There was nothing grandiose or thespian or saccharine in his voice or expression. He walked to his car, his physicality barely restrained by his thin slacks and wash-faded shirt.

I was convinced that, like Helen Soileau, many people lived inside Desmond’s skin, male and female, child and adult. He had never married, nor was he ever long in the company of one woman. For certain he was an egalitarian, an aesthete, an actor, and a painter. He had the flame of a mad artist, the voice of a singer, and the indifference to criticism that all great artists possess without being aware of it. I said earlier that he could light a room with his smile. It had been a long time since I had seen him do that. Were Clementine Carter and Bailey Ribbons his keys to resurrection, the rolling away of a rock that blocked out the sun and stole the air from his lungs?

The next morning Antoine Butterworth bailed out of jail. There was no DNA of any kind on the hypodermic needle. His lawyer had our trumped-up charges dropped.

Six weeks passed without significant incident, and we found ourselves in the softly murmuring heart of Indian summer and the drowsy days and cool nights that grant us a stay against winter and the failing of the light. I began to think that our investigation into the bizarre homicides of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari and Travis Lebeau and Axel Devereaux was overwrought and heavily influenced by speculation. I also wondered if Bailey and I had unknowingly superimposed symbols on each case in order to link them together. It happens. The best example is the murder of President Kennedy and the conspiratorial theories that are still with us. As the mind wearies, the temptation is to simplify and move on. The collective consciousness does not like detail and complexity. Besides, isn’t it better to let evil die inside its own flame?

I wanted to slip away with the season and the smell of burning leaves and the vestiges of an innocent youth. In a moment of reverie, I would recall a college dance at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, the music provided by Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra, a fall crawfish boil under the oaks in the park next to the campus, the thrill of the kickoff at an LSU — Ole Miss football game, where every coed wore a corsage and ached to be kissed.

I was not simply tired of the world’s iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man. The great gift of age is the realization that each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky. I made a habit of letting the world go on a daily basis, but unfortunately, it didn’t want to let go of me. The engines of commerce and acquisition operate seven days a week, around the clock, granting no mercy and allowing no tender moment for those who grind away their lives in sweaty service to them.

I’m talking about the avarice at the heart of most human suffering. Yes, revenge is a player, and so are all the sexual manifestations that warp our vision, but none holds a candle to cupidity and the defenses we manufacture to protect it.

Clete would not have used the same words, although he knew them and their meaning. But his thoughts were the same when he decided to drop by the blues club on the bayou and eat barbecued chicken and dirty rice and drink a frozen mug of beer like he had in his youth at Tracey’s Bar on Third and Magazine in the Irish Channel.

Because it was Friday night, the bar and tables and the small dance floor were bursting at the gunwales. Bella Delahoussaye was singing “Got My Mojo Working” while a black man backed her up with a harmonica that moaned and whined like a train inside a church house. A bald man on the stool next to Clete leaned in to his face, yelling to be heard. His lips were sprinkled with spittle, his tie pulled loose, his stomach hanging out of his suit coat. Clete wiped his own cheek with a paper napkin and tried to lean in the opposite direction.

“Did you hear me?” the man shouted. “What do you think about the monuments thing?”

“What monuments?”

“They’re taking down the Confederate monuments in New Orleans. They just took down Robert E. Lee’s statue. What’s your opinion?”

A piece of spittle hit Clete on the chin. “I think they’re idiots. They want to turn New Orleans into Omaha. They’re doing the same thing that the Taliban and ISIS do.”

“Yes, but don’t you think it’s time to—”

“Quit yelling in my face.”

“You don’t have to get in a huff,” the man said, and swung his paunch off the stool.

Clete tried to get back to his food but looked at it and thought about what had probably just happened to it and pushed it away and reordered.

“It’s on the house, man,” the bartender said.

“Thanks,” Clete said. He put a ten on the bar. “Give the fat guy whatever he’s having. Just don’t tell him where it’s from. Keep the change.”

Bella went into “The House of the Rising Sun,” the song Eric Burdon and the Animals had turned into arguably the most haunting blues depiction of bordello life and spiritual despair ever sung. Though its message of utter hopelessness was like a dull nail driven into Clete’s heart, he had never known why. Sometimes he ascribed the feeling to the drowning of the city during Katrina, or the crack cocaine that had turned the city into the murder capital of America, or the T-shirt shops and the affectation of debauchery that impersonated the city’s earlier tradition of eccentricity and bohemian culture and Dixieland blowdowns.

The song’s influence on him had nothing to do with any of these things, or even with New Orleans. The song was about exploitation and the anonymous fate that seemed the destiny of all those who are used for the convenience of others. The song had no author. The person narrating the tale could have been male or female but had no name. The rising sun did not dispel the night, serving only to illuminate the harshness of the morning, the broken glass in the gutters, a passed-out drunk in an alley.

Clete looked up and down the bar and at the tables and at the dancers on the floor and wondered how many of them would leave the earth as ciphers, would even have a marker on a grave ten years after they were gone. His first night back in New Orleans from Vietnam, he got loaded in the Quarter and met a famous Beat writer who was feeding the pigeons on a bench in Jackson Square. The writer challenged him to name five slaves from the tens of millions who had lived and died in bondage.

Clete got as far as Spartacus and Frederick Douglass.

“What’s that say?” the writer asked.

“I don’t know much about history?” Clete said.

“No man, it means there’s no history. Just humps in the ground wanting somebody to tell their story. Think I’m blowing gas?”

Bella finished her song and walked down the length of the bar. She drew a fingernail along the back of Clete’s neck. “Where’s your friend?”

“Dave?” he said.

“Who else? I ain’t seen him around. Tell him he hurt my feelings.”

“He’s been busy with a few things. People getting killed, stuff like that.”

“Don’t mean he cain’t drop by.” She winked. “Tell him he got the moves and I got the groove.”

“Show some respect for yourself,” Clete said.

“Talk like I want, baby.”

Clete looked down the bar. “There’s somebody sitting down there who shouldn’t be in here.”

Bella lifted her chin and gazed at a black woman ten stools down. The black woman was wearing a white dress and a necklace with red stones that hung between her breasts. “Hilary Bienville? I ain’t my sister’s keeper.”

“She might listen to you,” he said.

“That girl is looking for a box. She gonna find it, too.”

“She’s still messing around with some white guy?”

“She been on her knees since she was a li’l girl. You cain’t fix them kind. Messed-up girl becomes a messed-up woman.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“I ain’t axed. I get off at two. Give me a ride? I could sure use one.”

She walked away from Clete, looking back over her shoulder. He ordered a shot of Jack and dropped it into his beer, jigger and all. He drank the mug to the bottom, the jigger clinking against the glass. He looked down the bar and saw a sight that made him squint and rub his eyes and look again.

The man’s hair was steel-gray, cut tight, top combed straight back with gel, as though he wanted to look younger. He had grown a full beard and lost weight, but the profile was the same Clete had seen in the mug shots he had gotten off the Internet. The man was talking to Hilary Bienville and wore navy blue trousers and the kind of plain short-sleeve khaki shirt that a filling station mechanic might wear.

It can’t be him, Clete thought. Not a guy who escaped death row and should be looking for a cave in Afghanistan.

Clete got off the stool just as the front door opened and two carloads of revelers poured in. By the time Clete had worked his way through them, the man was gone.

Hilary stared blankly at Clete. She had a Collins glass in her hand. Her eyes were out of focus. “What you want?”

“Was that Hugo Tillinger?” he asked.

“I don’t know no Hugo Tillinger.”

“What are you doing in here?”

“I come in to see my friends. What it look like?”

“The last time I saw you, you were in meltdown. Where’s your baby?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong wit’ me being here. My baby doing fine.”

“Where is she?”

“At Iberia General. She got the croup.”

“Go home, Hilary. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“It’s my life. It ain’t yours. I got the gris-gris. I’m hell-bound. Ain’t nothing can he’p me.”

“Where’d the guy go?”

“I don’t know. You look like a cop. I t’ink he saw you.”

“He knows who I am?”

“I don’t know about none of this.”

“You wait here.”

“You like all the rest. ‘Shut your mout’.’ ‘Cook my food.’ ‘Suck my dick.’ Where you going?”

Clete looked in the men’s room. A man at the urinal grinned at him. Clete went out the back door just as an SUV motored slowly out of the parking lot, the headlights on, the driver silhouetted behind the wheel. The driver turned onto the asphalt. Clete couldn’t see the tag.

He got into his Caddy and followed. The SUV stopped at the four corners and crossed the drawbridge and headed for the four-lane, never exceeding the speed limit. The windows were down. The radio was playing. Clete thought he recognized “Rock of Ages.”

He followed the suv in and out of traffic all the way to Lafayette. Twice he got close enough to confirm that the driver was the same man he’d seen talking to Hilary Bienville. The driver gave no indication that he knew he was being followed. Just outside Lafayette, the man pulled into a truck stop and got out of his vehicle and began to gas up. Clete parked behind the building with a view of the fuel island and cut the engine. He took his binoculars from the glove box and adjusted the focus on the driver’s face. He had no doubt he was looking at Hugo Tillinger.

He put his sap and cuffs in his coat pocket and pulled the .25 semi-auto from the Velcro holster strapped on his ankle.

Sorry, Mac, he thought, getting out of the Caddy. If you got to ride the needle, it’s your misfortune and none of my own.

A lopsided gas-guzzler oozing oil smoke pulled up to the pumps. The driver was a tiny gray-haired black woman who wore a colorless shift and men’s tennis shoes. A girl of eight or nine years was in the back seat. A Mississippi tag hung from the bumper by a single screw. The woman got out and stuck a credit card in the pump and struggled to pull the hose from the hook. Suddenly, the child burst from the back door and ran for the restrooms, just as a pickup truck swerved off the highway and headed for a parking slot in front of the casino.

Clete felt the wind go out of his chest. The scene freeze-framed in his head like a movie projector locking down. Within two or three seconds the girl would be impaled on the truck’s grille. The truck driver’s face was turned toward a woman in the passenger seat. The elderly black woman had dropped the hose on the concrete, spewing gasoline across her shoes. The little girl was skipping, one knee cocked, one barely touching the concrete, her mouth open, as though she were painted on air. Clete couldn’t bear to look.

Tillinger bolted from behind his vehicle and grabbed the girl under both arms and held her to his chest and leaped forward like a quarterback crashing over the line. He twisted his body so he landed on his side, taking the full hit on the concrete, never letting go of the girl.

He got to his feet and picked up the girl and handed her to the elderly woman. He smiled, brushing off her attempts to thank him, and headed for the driver of the truck. The driver turned off his lights, floored his vehicle, and roared into the darkness.

Tillinger went inside the convenience store and bought a package of Fritos and a quart of chocolate milk and ate and drank them at a small table. This was the guy Clete was going to send to the injection table?

Clete followed him to a motel rimmed with pink and green neon tubing north of Four Corners and watched him park in front of the last room in the row. Tillinger went inside and clicked on a lamp. Clete pulled his Caddy under a tree and waited five minutes. Then he got out with his .25 semi-auto and tapped lightly on the door.

“Who is it?” Tillinger said.

“Security. Someone may have tried to open your vehicle.”

Tillinger unhooked the chain and opened the door. He was barefoot and wearing boxer shorts and a clean white T-shirt. “I saw you in the club. What are you doing at my motel?”

Clete stepped inside and stiff-armed Tillinger in the chest, knocking him backward over a chair. He kicked the door shut behind him. “Don’t get up.”

“What the hell! Who are you?”

“A guy you caused a lot of grief.”

“Grief? I got no idea who you are.”

Clete picked up a pillow. “Look at the gun I’m holding. It’s a throw-down. No serial numbers, no history. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll pop you and in one minute be down the road and gone, and the cleaning lady will smell a strange odor in the morning and you’ll be bagged and tagged and in a meat locker. Diggez-vous, noble mon?”

“Noble what?”

“You got loose from death row in Texas. I thought you had some smarts.”

“Tell me who are you, and maybe something you say will make sense.”

“I’m a guy who already cut you slack you didn’t deserve. I was fishing by the trestle over the Mermentau River when you bailed off the freight car. I should have dimed you, but I didn’t, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

“You got the wrong room.”

Clete stuck the .25 semi-auto in the back of his belt and grabbed Tillinger by the T-shirt and swung him into the wall so hard the room shook. Tillinger fell to the floor. His expression looked like someone had crashed two cymbals on his ears.

“Next stop is the toilet bowl,” Clete said.

Tillinger pushed himself up on his arms. “Do your worst. Then put yourself on a diet. You got a serious weight as well as a thinking problem.”

“Why were you hitting on Hilary Bienville?”

“You a cop?”

“I used to be,” Clete said. “You been putting shit in Hilary’s head? It takes a special kind of white man to do that to a woman of color.”

“I was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux. Lucinda told me how some colored women were being used by some bad cops. You know who Travis Lebeau was, right?”

“He was in the Aryan Brotherhood,” Clete said. “He got dragged to death.”

“I’ve been trying to find out who killed Lucinda. It’s got something to do with prostitution.”

“Who shoved the baton down the throat of Axel Devereaux?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Can I get up?”

“An SUV like yours was seen hauling freight down the road right after Devereaux shuffled off.”

“I was there. But he was already dead. You got a beef because I messed up your fishing?”

“Where’d you get the wheels?”

“Boosted them.”

“Why’d you go to Devereaux’s house? You already creeped it once.”

“I was going to beat it out of him.”

“Beat what out of him?”

“The name of a movie guy Devereaux was scared of. That’s what a couple of stagehands said. Devereaux even got slapped around by this guy. The guy threw him off the set.”

“Because Devereaux was pimping?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I was going to find out. Miss Lucinda was tight with all those people. You ever see The Thin Blue Line? It saved an innocent man’s life. That could be my story.”

“I’m going to give you five minutes to get dressed and get out of here,” Clete said. “Then your ass is grass.”

Tillinger got to his feet cautiously, wobbling, pressing one hand against the wall. “You know what I was down for?”

“Killing your family.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My guess is you’re innocent. But you’re still an asshole,” Clete said. “You’ve used up one minute.”