The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Fifteen

Clete was at my back screen early on Saturday, freshly showered, his hair wet-combed, his clothes pressed. But his ebullience and his attempt to blend with the coolness of the morning and the dew-drenched fragrance of the flower beds were a poor disguise for the guilt he always wore like a child would, at least when he thought he had wronged me, which he had never intentionally done.

Alafair was still asleep. I fixed biscuits and coffee and waited for Clete to get to whatever was bothering him. It took a while. Clete had a way of talking about every subject in the world until he casually mentioned a minor incident such as smashing an earth grader through the home of a mafioso on Lake Pontchartrain, blowing a greaseball with a fire hose into a urinal at the casino, or pouring sand into the fuel tank of a plane loaded with more greaseballs, all of whom ended up petroglyphs on a mountainside in western Montana.

“You let Hugo Tillinger slide because he saved the little girl?” I said.

“He’s not a killer.”

We were seated at the breakfast table. The window was open, the wind sweet through the screen, Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon sitting on Tripod’s hutch.

“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked.

“This conversation didn’t happen. We bury it right here. Got it?”

“You’re not upset?”

“I probably would have done the same thing. The guy got a bad deal in Texas.”

“You don’t think he could have done the baton job on Devereaux?”

“These murders are about money, Clete.”

“You lost me, big mon.”

“The tarot and the floating cross have private meaning to the killer, but the motivation is much larger. It’s not sex, it’s not power or control. That leaves money.”

“I think you’re taking too much for granted,” Clete said.

“The killer injected Arceneaux with a fatal dose of heroin. The others went out hard. Why would he make distinctions in the way he killed his victims? It’s because he’s created a grand scheme. Think about it. A serial killer wants to paint the walls and enjoy every minute of it. He’s driven by compulsion. Unless his motivation is misogynistic, his targets are random. Our guy has a plan. Tillinger is a simpleton who wants to be a celebrity. He’s not our guy.”

Clete had a biscuit in his jaw. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from his cup, his eyes not leaving mine. “Why only in our area?”

“That’s the big one,” I said. “He’s sending us a message.”

“Lucky us,” Clete said.

My speculations probably seemed grandiose. In reality, I wasn’t talking about our local homicides. I believed then, and I believe now, that our poor suffering state is part of a historical ebb tide that few recognize as such. Southern Louisiana, as late as the Great Depression, retained many of the characteristics of the antediluvian world, untouched by the Industrial Age. Our coast was defined by its pristine wetlands. They were emerald green and dotted with hummocks and flooded tupelo gums and cypress trees and serpentine rivers and bayous that turned yellow after the spring rains and lakes that were both clear and black because of the fine silt at the bottom, all of it blanketed with snowy egrets and blue herons and seagulls and brown pelicans.

We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year.

Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.

That afternoon Alafair asked if Clete and I wanted to take a trip to northern Arizona. Clete said he’d pass. I said, “Why not?”

I took four days’ vacation time and flew with her and Lou Wexler and Desmond Cormier in a Learjet to a tourist town on the edge of Monument Valley. Wexler slept, and Desmond was on his laptop most of the time, and Alafair and I played Monopoly. On several occasions, even when she was little, she and I had spent time in Hollywood with movie people we had met in Louisiana. We were always treated graciously, and I relearned an old lesson about judging. People in Hollywood are often egocentric, but nonetheless they dream and many of them are wedded to a perception of the world that they never share with others lest they be thought odd or eccentric or dishonest. Perhaps there’s a bit of the secular mystic in them. Not unlike Desmond’s.

I didn’t know how to read Lou Wexler. Certainly he was a fine-looking man, with his bronze skin and rugged profile and sun-bleached hair and wide shoulders that tapered to a twenty-eight-inch waist. Immediately upon arrival at our faux-Navajo hotel, he put on swim trunks and walked on his hands to the tip of the diving board, then did a somersault into the water. Although I suspected he was close to forty, there was hardly a blemish on his skin except for a ragged white scar where his kidney would have been. When others ordered drinks before supper on the terrace, he went behind the bar and fixed his own power shake and drank it foaming from the stainless steel container. I suspected he would be a formidable man in a confrontation, the kind of fellow who had fire in his belly.

He sat next to me at the table. People I didn’t know joined us. Several had obviously gotten an early start. North of us lay the vastness of the desert, the sky a seamless blue in the fading light, the sandstone buttes rising like castles from the mountain floor. Wexler glanced at my iced tea. “Looks like we’re two of a kind.”

“In what way?” I replied.

“Abstinence,” he said. “I can’t say it’s a virtue with me, though.”

“How’s that?”

“I never saw the attraction. More liability than asset. My father was on the grog all his life and asked for a bottle of porter on his deathbed.”

I didn’t reply.

“You’re a quiet one, sir,” he said.

Like most recovering drunks, I didn’t like to talk about alcohol or alcoholism with what we call earth people or flatlanders. “Call me Dave, please. What kind of movie are y’all making? How do you tie Arizona to Louisiana?”

“It’s an epic film about three generations in a legendary family,” he said. “Southerners who migrated to the frontier, then ruined the frontier the way they ruined everything else they got their hands on.”

“I take it you’re not a fan of manifest destiny.”

He loaded a taco chip with guacamole and put it into his mouth and studied Desmond at the end of the table, talking to two beautiful women. A silver bowl filled with water and floating tropical flowers was in front of Wexler. The crumbs from his taco chip fell into it.

“This film means a lot to Desmond,” he said. “In fact, it’s an obsession. He has seventy-five million dollars of other people’s money and thirty million of his own riding on it.”

“Who put up the seventy-five?” I asked.

“We used to soak the Japs until they figured out they were still paying for Pearl Harbor. The Arabs are a good source if you don’t think too hard about what they do in Saudi jails or to women who get out of line.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said.

“That’s because I don’t intend to.” He laughed.

“I saw your scar. You picked it up in Africa?”

“A fellow hooked me with a machete. I thought it was time to find a better line of work. So now I do this stuff. Desmond is a good one to work for. No nonsense. If you’re wired, you’re fired.”

“Why does he tolerate Antoine Butterworth?”

“He thinks Antoine’s an artist rather than a sadistic degenerate with his head up a woman’s dress.”

I looked around to see if anyone had heard him. If they had, they showed no sign. Wexler turned his face to a puff of cool air from the desert floor. “Tomorrow we’re shooting a remarkable scene. Probably few will take much heed of it, but if it works, it will be an extraordinary moment, the kind that brought to a close My Darling Clementine. It comes from the final scene of the novel that’s at the core of the script.”

It had been a while since I had read the book or books from which the film was adapted, so I had a hard time tracking his line of thought.

“Don’t pay attention to me, Mr. Robicheaux — I mean Dave,” he said. “I’m not a bad screenwriter, but I’m best at adapting the work of others. And like most producers, I’m great at calling up the caterer and taking wealthy bozos to lunch.”

He looked at the final rays of sun streaking across the desert floor, the pools of shadow at the base of the buttes, the dust rising like strings of smoke from the crests into the light. “It’s like staring into infinity, isn’t it? Desmond believes death lies on the other side of the horizon, where the earth drops off and the sky begins. I think he’s wrong. It’s not death that’s waiting out there. Not at all.”

The people who had gotten an early start were getting louder, their laughter cacophonous and disjointed. The evening air was suddenly cooler, the sandstone formations more lavender than red, more like tombstones than castles.

“If it’s not death, what is it?” I asked.

“Something unknowable.” His eyes were hollow, sightless, even though he was staring straight at me. “We drown in it. This is the omphalos, the center of it all. You were there, sir. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I was where?”

“You bloody well know what I mean. Where you see the realities and never tell anyone.”

I wondered if I was talking to a madman. Or someone who had been in the Garden. Or someone who shot up with hallucinogens.

“Sorry. After seven in the evening I develop logorrhea,” he said.

“You’re fine. I need to take a walk.”

“What about dinner?”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have sciatica trouble sometimes.”

“I’ll come along,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“I see you walk with a purpose,” he said. “I can always tell a military man. You ever count cadence? It puts your blood to pumping, by God. Orwell said it. Maybe there’s something beautiful about war after all.”

Wrong, I thought. But why argue with those who are proud of their membership in the Herd?

At five-thirty a.m., I went down to breakfast inside the hotel restaurant and thought I was seeing an apparition at a table by a big glass window that gave onto the desert. Clete was wearing his powder blue sport coat and gray slacks and shined oxblood loafers, his porkpie hat crown-down on the tablecloth. He was surrounded by a stack of pancakes inserted with sausage patties, scrambled eggs, hash browns, a bowl of milk gravy, toast, coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a glass of tomato juice with an orange slice notched on the rim.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Thought I’d get out of town in case Helen wanted to chat about Hugo Tillinger. Maybe I’ll hike in the hills. Lose a few pounds.”

I sat down. “Are you up to something?”

“No, you got my word.”

“I know you, Clete.”

“Bailey Ribbons is on her way. I heard Helen is beaucoup pissed.”

“Bailey is coming here?”

“Cormier is casting her. I didn’t know how you’d feel about that.”

“She can do whatever she wants. Stop trying to micromanage my life.”

“Want some pancakes?”

I went to Alafair’s room. She was just coming out the door. I told her what Clete had just told me.

“Clete is here?” she said.

“Helen isn’t in the best of moods.”

“And Bailey Ribbons is joining the cast?” Alafair said.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to say it again.

“She’s hanging it up with the department?” Alafair said.

“I don’t know. I don’t care, either.”

She pulled me inside the room and closed the door. “How do you want me to say it? You lost two of your wives to violence and one to lupus. You’ll never get over your loss. But you won’t cure the problem with Bailey.”

“We have four unsolved homicides on our desks,” I said. “That’s not an abstraction or part of a soap opera. I need her. I mean at the job.”

“The homicides are not the issue, so stop fooling yourself and stop acting like a twit.”

“Give it a rest, Alafair.”

Her face was pinched, her hands knotting. “Okay, I’m sorry. I get mad at Bailey.”

“Why?”

“She went to the head of the line. She’s attractive and intelligent and has charm and an innocent way that makes men want to protect her. Helen Soileau earned her job. Bailey didn’t. Now she hangs you out to dry and leaves you at war with yourself.”

“I’ll survive,” I replied, and tried to smile.

“Pardon me while I go to the bathroom and throw up,” she said.

I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mountain floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.

I heard Alafair return from the bathroom and felt her standing behind me. “What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Nothing. I bet Desmond casts Bailey as the IWW woman in the book. The one who was at the Ludlow Massacre.” Alafair was looking at me with an expression between pity and anger.

“Can I visit the set?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I’d like to wish her luck.”

“Better give your well wishes to Desmond. I think he might lose his shirt.”

“I thought he had the Midas touch.”

“He mortgaged his home and vineyard in Napa Valley. He reminds me of Captain Ahab taking on the white whale. He’s always talking about ‘the light.’ He says it’s a Plotinian emanation of the unseen world.”

My attention began to wander. “Clete’s probably still in the dining room. Let’s join him.”

“I have to confess something,” she said. “I think the killings in New Iberia are connected to us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked.

“Hollywood. The evil we can’t seem to get out of our lives. The legacy of slavery. Whatever.”

“Quit beating up on yourself. We pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago, Alf.”

“Yeah, that bad girl Eve. Save it, Dave.”