The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Twenty-Three

I got the call from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at four-fifteen a.m. “We got two guys fried outside a hot-pillow joint,” he said. “I think it’s your boy, that crazy pissant who was killing people about eighteen months back.”

“Wimple?”

“A security camera in the parking lot of a nightclub caught him. About five-three, propane tanks on his back, looks like he fell in a bag of flour? How many people match that description?”

“He had a flamethrower?”

“Come down if you want. I got to get on it. We cain’t find the night clerk.”

I called Bailey Ribbons and picked her up fifteen minutes later.

More than a dozen squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were parked at the crime scene, flashers ripping or blinking in the sunrise. The ground and asphalt and motel and nightclub were damp with humidity and partially in shadow, the air the color of a bruise, an odor like old fruit wafting on the breeze. The two victims were in the front seat of a Buick pockmarked with paint blisters, heads on their chests as though they had tired of the show and gone to sleep.

“The drip line from the flamethrower doesn’t go back much more than twenty-five feet,” the sheriff said. He was a huge man, about six and a half feet, over fifty, his stomach still flat. He was originally from Amarillo and once was a Texas Ranger. “If the gas tank had blown, it might have taken that little asswipe with it.”

“I think Smiley Wimple would have liked that,” I said.

“Say again?”

“He would have made a great pilot in the Japanese air force,” I replied.

The sheriff looked into space. He was from another generation. “We found the clerk.”

We followed him to the office. There was a doorway behind the counter. I looked up at the surveillance camera.

“Somebody already dumped it,” the sheriff said. He went through the doorway, then looked back at me. “You coming?”

The living area had a small kitchen and a table and one chair and a small bed. A harsh lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Porn magazines were on the table and stacked on a wall shelf. Both doors of a cabinet under the sink were open. A bare-chested thin man wearing a vinyl vest was inside the cabinet, so packed under the pipes that he was almost a ball. As far as I could tell, there were three entry wounds in his face and one in the throat and one in the mouth. No visible exit wounds.

“The shooter picked up his brass, but I figure it was a twenty-two, maybe hollow points,” the sheriff said. “You reckon this kid was trying to hide?”

Bailey touched a can of Ajax on the floor with her shoe. “No, he was put in there. Wimple wanted to humiliate him. He was probably locked in a small space when he was a child, so he visits the same fear on anyone who mocks him.”

“I’ve got a hooker in the back of my cruiser,” the sheriff said. “Her name is Dora Thibodaux. The Buick was parked right in front of her room. The room was rented by a guy named Jerry Gemoats, the same man the Buick is registered to.”

“Can we talk to the woman?” I said.

He handed me a key. “I put her on a D-ring. I don’t think you’ll get anything. Her teeth are rattling.”

Bailey and I walked to the sheriff’s cruiser. The windows were down. Dora Thibodaux was handcuffed by one wrist to a steel ring on the floor of the back seat, her shoulder at an awkward angle. Her eyeliner had run and her hair was a tangle of snakes. Two Band-Aids were affixed end to end along a vein inside her left forearm. Her face was out of round from either hangover or withdrawal.

I gave Bailey the handcuff key. She got in the other side and unlocked the woman’s wrist. “I’m Detective Ribbons, Ms. Thibodaux. This is Detective Robicheaux. We’re homicide detectives in Iberia Parish. We’re investigating the deaths of the two men in the Buick, nothing else. Understand?”

“I didn’t see nothing,” Thibodaux replied.

I leaned down to the window. “We’re not asking you to describe what you didn’t see, Miss Dora. We already know who killed the two men. His name is Chester Wimple. Sometimes he calls himself Smiley.” I saw the recognition in her eyes. “He told you his nickname?”

“I ain’t saying nothing, me.”

“Smiley doesn’t give everyone permission to use his nickname,” I said. “It’s a compliment.”

She raised her face, her eyes on mine.

“You think Smiley might hurt you?” I said.

“No.”

“A guy who hosed down two people with a flamethrower wouldn’t do that?”

“I know somet’ing about men. He said I was a nice person.”

“Your friend in the next room, she took off on you?”

“She ain’t no good. Ain’t no loss.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“Seymour knows me.”

“Who’s Seymour?”

“The night clerk. He would have given y’all my name and I’d be in worse trouble than I am. Where’s he at?”

“We’re interested in the two guys in the Buick,” I said. “Did they tell you their names?”

She shook her head.

“They used their first names to each other,” I said. “Don’t lie to us, Miss Dora.”

“They’re dagos out of Miami. You know what that means.”

“You’re not afraid of Smiley, but you’re afraid of the two dead guys?” I said.

“Their kind ain’t ever dead.”

“Others like them are coming?”

“Sure, what you t’ink? They work for the Mob. They said they was gonna pop a guy. They said they was gonna do it for the state of Texas. I tole them they was full of it.”

“Because you didn’t want to believe they would do that?” I said.

“I ain’t t’ought it t’rew.”

“You want something to eat?”

“No,” she replied. “I’m starting to get sick.”

“You saw Smiley’s face, Miss Dora,” I said.

“If he was gonna hurt me, he would have already done it.”

“He’s not a predictable man.”

“You lying, you. You know it, too.” She rubbed at her nose with the back of her wrist.

“Stay with Detective Ribbons,” I said.

I walked to the sheriff, then returned to the cruiser. The sun was above the trees now. I could see a dredge boat chugging down a canal surrounded by a sea of grass that had turned brown from saline intrusion. I leaned down to Dora’s window. “How much money do you have?”

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t make the john pay up front?”

“Not wit’ them kind.”

I put a five-dollar bill into her shirt pocket. “You’re free to go. Get something to eat.”

“Ain’t I lucky?” she said, squeezing past me. Her body smelled of nicotine and rut and booze. She looked back at me, then took the bill from her pocket and scrunched it in her palm and threw it in the wind.

At noon, I went to Clete Purcel’s office on Main Street. The waiting room was empty, littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and orange rinds and a splayed sandwich with a half-moon bite taken out of it. Clete was sitting at the spool table under the beach umbrella on the concrete pad behind the office, reading the Advocate and drinking a bottle of Mexican beer and sucking on a salted lime. His green eyes were dulled over, as if smoke from a dirty fire were trapped inside them.

“Leaving the dock early?” I said.

“I thought about it.”

“Something happen?”

He flattened the wrinkles on the front page of the newspaper with his hand. “That little creep is killing people again.”

“The two guys who got it were probably hit men.”

“Hit men are sane. This shit-for-brains starts gunfights in crowded casinos.”

That was how Clete’s former girlfriend had died, although the round had not come from Smiley’s weapon.

“He could have taken out a witness,” I said. “He didn’t. She’s a hooker named Dora Thibodaux. Know her?”

“Works out of a dump south of Morgan City?”

“She laid one of the hit men. His name was Jerry Gemoats.”

Clete scraped up the newspaper and stuffed it into a trash can under the table. “Who cares?”

“The hooker seemed to think well of Wimple.”

“I bet he loved his mother, too. What was the name of the hit man again?”

“Jerry Gemoats.”

Clete straightened his back. “He was the go-to mechanic for any hits out of Miami. Somebody with serious money sent him here. Who was the other hitter?”

“We don’t know. The car they died in was registered to Gemoats.”

Clete went into his office and came back with a file folder. He dropped it onto the glass table and opened it. He tilted the beer to his mouth and chugged half the bottle, the foam sliding down the inside of the neck. I swallowed and tried to hide the knot in my throat, the sense of longing I could not get rid of. “You got a soda?”

“In the icebox.”

I went inside and came back out with a can of orange-tasting carbonated water I could barely drink. The sun was like an acetylene torch on the bayou. “What’s in the folder?”

“I checked with some shylocks in Vegas and Tampa. Except they don’t call themselves shylocks anymore. They’re ‘lending institutions.’ I’m not making this up. This fat fuck in Tampa probably has ten million on the street and went to the fifth grade. The vig is four points a week.”

“Can you get to the point?”

He gave me a look. “Everybody I talked to said Desmond Cormier is up to his eyes in debt. Kind of like Francis Ford Coppola when he made Apocalypse Now, except he didn’t borrow from people who do collections with chain saws. Maybe Wimple and Gemoats and the other gash hound were here to protect Cormier. The Mob can bleed Cormier for the rest of his life; plus, they love being around actors.”

“Wimple was supposed to take out Tillinger and didn’t, so somebody sicced the two hitters on him?”

“That’d be my bet,” Clete said.

But I was not thinking about Miami button men or Smiley Wimple or the daily immersion into a sewer that constituted my livelihood. Clete followed my gaze to the sweating green bottle of Mexican beer on the table.

“Can I make an observation?” he said.

“No.”

“You’re falling in love with a young woman, and you think it’s wrong. Stop pretending you’re a monk. It’s going to get you drunk again.”

“Butt out, Cletus.”

“I know your thoughts before you have them. You think you have to marry every woman you sleep with. Except this time she’s too young. So instead of being human, you’re going to do a number on your own head and get back on the dirty boogie. In the meantime, you don’t let the young woman have a vote. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Who died and made you God?” He drained the bottle, his throat working, and dropped it loudly into the trash can. “You’re peeling my face off.”

“I wonder why.”

“Search me. I think you’re too sensitive.”

I left the office early that afternoon and drove to Bella Delahoussaye’s house. Through the houses I could see Bayou Teche and the elephant ears that undulated in the current at high tide. I was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a music box with chocolates inside. Bella was wearing tight jeans and a pullover when she answered the door. She tilted her head. “Look at Santa Claus.”

I stepped inside and handed her the roses and set the music box on the couch. “ ‘Jolie Blon’ is on it.”

“You come to court me, baby?”

“You’re an extraordinary woman.”

“Come here.”

I stepped closer to her. She worked her sandals off by pushing one foot against the other. She stood on top of my shoes and put her arms around me and pressed the entirety of her body against mine, her face buried in my neck, her hair soft and freshly washed and air-blown and swelling against my cheek. I squeezed her in a way I had not squeezed a woman since the death of my wife.

She stepped back and touched my face. “But you ain’t here to win my heart away, are you?”

“I’d like to. But you’re right.”

“You got a comb?”

I removed it from my back pocket and handed it to her. As a beautician might, she stroked my hair back over my head, along the sides, and through the white patch I’d carried since childhood. “I knowed when I first met you, you had the blues. You ain’t got to explain anything. Sometime down the track, you need a place to park your hips, you know where I’m at.”

“That’s a line from Bessie Smith.”

“You was born for the blues, Dave. Take care of yourself out there.”

The Maltese cross glinted at her throat. She picked up my hand and kissed the back of it and pressed it on her breast, then released it and flattened her hand on my heart. Her eyes seemed to reach inside my mind. If I ever saw death in a woman’s eyes, it was at that moment. But I did not know if I was looking at my reflection or hers or that of someone else I knew. She opened the door and remained standing in it as I walked to my truck. It was Indian summer, the evening sky porcelain blue, the sunlight like a cool burn. When I looked back at her cottage, the door was shut, the curtains closed. Bella Delahoussaye was the personification of Old Louisiana. I felt as though an icicle had pierced my heart.

I drove to Bailey Ribbons’s home on Loreauville Road and parked in front and walked up on the gallery and tapped on the screen door. When she came to the door, she was wearing a bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve got two tickets to Marcia Ball’s performance at the Evangeline Theater tonight.”

“Do I have time to dress?”

“It doesn’t start until eight.”

“Come in.”

She left me in the living room and went into the back of the house. I didn’t take a seat. I stared at nothing, the blood beating in my wrists. I could hear her opening and closing drawers. She came back in the hallway, still in her robe, her hair wet on her shoulders. “What’s the real reason you’re here, Dave?”

“I’ve never been good at self-inventory.”

“Let me give you mine. I went into law enforcement because I got fired from my teaching job.”

“For what?”

“I changed a black girl’s grade.”

“Why did you change her grade?”

“So she wouldn’t be expelled.”

“That sounds terrible,” I said.

She stared at me, her eyes round and unblinking, a flush on her throat. “Are we going to the concert?”

“Anyone who turns down tickets to a Marcia Ball performance has a serious spiritual disorder.”

“I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

The concert was wonderful. The buffet, the formal dress, the smell of the mixed drinks, the gaiety of small-town people who are overjoyed when a famous artist visits them, the location of the concert in the old Evangeline Theater, where I saw My Darling Clementine with my mother in 1946, seemed proof that the past is always with us, in the best way, if one will only reach out and dip his hand into it.

Afterward, I drove Bailey home in my truck. She seemed to sit closer to me than she usually did, but I couldn’t be sure. The light was burning on the gallery, the shadows of the camellias and hibiscus waving on the grass. I parked on the edge of the light and cut the engine. The magnolia tree on the far end of the gallery was in late bloom, the fragrance overwhelming. Bailey sat very still, looking straight ahead. I could hear the engine’s heat ticking under the hood.

“Dave?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Do you have regrets? Or rather, do you take them on easily?”

“There are several people I regret not killing.”

“You have a sensitive conscience and a tender heart. Those are not always virtues.”

“I’ll try to be as mean-spirited as I can.”

I saw a grin at the side of her mouth. “I’m weak.”

“About what?”

“Need. You’re a widower. You’re vulnerable.”

“Wrong.”

She turned toward me. The tips of her dark brown hair were aglow in the moonlight. Her mouth looked like a flower about to open.

“Oh, Dave,” she said.

“Oh, Dave what?”

“Just oh, Dave.”

I got out of the truck and walked around the front of it. I opened her door. When she stepped out, I pulled her against me and kissed her shoulder and neck and hair and eyes. Then we walked up the steps inside, closing the door behind us, going straight down the hallway into the bedroom, leaving the light off. It felt strange being in an intimate situation with a woman other than my wife. I turned my back while she undressed.

“Dave?” she said.

The back of my neck was burning. “You have to excuse me. I’m awkward about a lot of things.”

“Turn around,” she said.

The moonlight fell on her through the side window. Her body had the smoothness and radiance of a Renaissance painting. “Are you going to make me feel really dumb?”

“No,” I said. I took off my shirt, trousers, and socks, and we got into bed, each on a side and reaching for the other. Then I pressed her back on the pillow and kissed her on the mouth and on her eyes and on the tops of her breasts. I kissed her thighs and stomach and put her nipples into my mouth and felt her nails in my hair and her breath on my forehead and her legs widening to receive me, then I was deep inside her, the welcoming grace of her thighs embracing mine, her moans and the wet cadence of her body like the iambic beat of a rhyming couplet.

Behind the redness in my eyelids I saw a pink cave filled with gossamer fans, a wave rotating through it, sliding over heart-shaped coral covered with underwater moss that was as soft as felt, deeper and deeper, as though I were dropping through the center of the earth, then I felt my loins dissolve and the light go out of my eyes and my heart twist with such violence that I thought it would burst.

Then I was standing in a place I had seen at a distance but never stood upon. I was at the entrance of a canyon that had turned pink and then magenta, streaked with shadows as the evening sun moved across it. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, as though I were standing on the lip of Creation or its terminus. A woman was standing next to me. She stepped closer and enveloped me in her cloak and lay back on a bare rug atop a pine bough, and I laid my head on her breast and the two of us rose into the sun, and I closed my eyes and felt my seed go deep inside her, and I put my face between her breasts and kissed the salt on her skin and heard her heart pumping as though it were about to break.

I rose sweaty and hot from Bailey, already longing to enter her again, and for the first time in my life saw what it all meant and realized that I would never allow death to hold claim on me again, and that Bailey Ribbons had perhaps saved me from myself.