The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Thirty

Thursday had been a long day for Clete. He had to pry a bail skip out of a chimney in Abbeville. The skip’s hysterical girlfriend tore Clete’s new sport coat with a butcher knife. A disbarred lawyer stuck him with a bad check for a two-month investigation, and his Caddy got towed from a yellow zone. That evening he ate downtown and took a walk onto the drawbridge by Burke Street. He leaned on the rail and looked down at the long bronze ribbon of Bayou Teche unspooling beneath his feet, its banks lined with live oaks and lily pads. It seemed to dip off the edge of the earth.

He could see the fireflies in the trees and smell gas on the wind, and he felt a sense of mortality that was as cold and damp as the grave. The light was shrinking on the horizon, and an island of dead leaves was floating under the bridge, undulating with the current. He had a package of cigarettes in his pocket and wanted to light one up. He tore up the package and dropped the pieces down a sewer drain.

It was almost dark when he got back to the motor court. He parked the Caddy in the cul-de-sac and went inside his cottage and turned on the television, not caring which channel came on. He cracked a Budweiser and was tempted to pour a shot in it but instead sat down in his stuffed chair and tried to concentrate on the television and forget the morbid sensations that had flooded him on the drawbridge. Then he realized he was watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

He turned off the set, returned his unfinished beer to the refrigerator, chain-locked the door, showered, and put on his pajamas. The time was 9:17. The rest of the world might have its troubles, but Clete Purcel was going to bed early, safe and sound in his cottage that was always squared away and meticulously clean. If he was lucky, he would sleep through the night without dreaming and rise to a better day, one in which he did not feel the pull of the earth.

An hour later, deep inside his sleep, he felt a squeeze on his wrist. He opened his eyes in the blackness. His right hand jerked tight against a handcuff that was hooked to the bed frame. Four feet away, a diminutive man with the complexion and muscle tone of liquid soap was seated in a chair, illuminated by the glow of the bathroom night-light.

“Hi, hi,” the man said. “Guess who came to see you.”

Clete pinched his eyes and waited for them to adjust. “How’d you get in?”

“The cleaning lady left the door open,” the man said. “I’ve been under your bed since this afternoon. Your carpet is smelly.”

The man wore pink tennis shoes and tight shorts and a boxlike white hat with a starched brim and had a smile that made Clete think of red licorice. A small semi-automatic rested on his thigh.

“You hooked me up with my own cuffs,” Clete said. “Pretty impressive.”

“I could have done something else to you. I have the chemicals to do it.”

“Listen, Wimple—”

“No! No! No! It is rude to call people by their last names. Do. Not. Do. That.”

“Sorry,” Clete said. “Let me start over. Listen. Guy. Who. Burns. People. Alive. With. A. Flamethrower, what the fuck are you doing in my cottage?”

“The people I used to work for are after me.”

“Just because you lit up a couple of their guys? I’m shocked.”

“They violated me. With a tree branch.”

“How about unhooking me and we’ll talk about it? You want some ice cream? That’s a big favorite of yours, right?”

“Don’t try to trick me.”

“You know my daughter is Gretchen Horowitz, don’t you?”

“She kills for hire.”

“That’s what she did, past tense. She’s a documentary filmmaker now. But don’t get her pissed off, know what I mean?”

“You mean, don’t hurt you?”

“What I’m saying to you is don’t fuck with the wrong people, Smiley whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is.”

“I didn’t give you permission to call me Smiley.”

“Then shove it up your ass.”

“The deputy who shot my friend Hugo Tillinger is named Sean McClain.”

“Tillinger is your friend?”

“Why did the deputy kill him?”

“Tillinger pointed a Luger at McClain. At Dave Robicheaux, too. Dave’s on the square. You know that. I’m going to turn on my side, okay?”

“I took the gun from under your mattress.”

“I’m still going to turn on my side. Look, you got a rotten deal as a child. I can relate to that. But you’re coming down on the wrong people. Diggez-vous on that, noble mon?”

“Dig what?”

“Sean McClain is a good kid. He’s going through a bad time over what happened. Like you said, the Mob is your problem. They’re assholes, not interesting guys who look like Marlon Brando and James Caan. What do you know about the Jersey crowd?”

“They lent a lot of money to a movie company here.”

“You hear anything about Russians?”

“They’re building atomic reactors. They launder money in a place called Malta.”

“How do you know this shit?”

“I hear people in Miami and New Or-yuns talk.”

“Unhook me. I’ll give you a free pass. You got my word.”

“Do you want to be my friend?”

“I think you’re a righteous dude. Everybody has a few character defects.”

“You know what I’ll do if you lie, don’t you?”

“I got a sense of your potential when you poured Drano down Tony Nemo’s throat.”

Smiley got up and stuck the semi-auto into his pants pocket. His stomach was pouched over his waistband. He leaned down, pausing long enough to search Clete’s eyes. He popped the manacle with Clete’s key and stepped back.

Clete pushed himself up in bed, his hands in full view. “What’d you do with my piece?”

“Your thirty-eight?”

“Yeah, my thirty-eight.”

“You’ll find it when you go wee-wee.”

“You dropped my thirty-eight in the bowl?”

“I flushed first.”

“Can I dress?”

“No.”

“This is getting to be a drag. Will you tell me what you want and get out of my life?”

“I want to hire you to cover my back. I’ll be your friend.”

“I appreciate the compliment, but you’ve killed too many people. I think you enjoy it. That’s not a good sign.”

“The people I killed hurt children.”

“I don’t think that one will wash, Wimple. Sorry. Smiley.”

“If they didn’t hurt children, they protected people who did. Are you calling me a liar?”

“Look, you did me a solid once. You took out a former gunbull who was two seconds from snuffing my wick. But you started a gunfight that killed a female detective. She was my lady for a while. That one won’t go away.”

“It was an accident.”

“Tell her that.”

Smiley’s teeth looked like rows of tiny white pearls, the gums barely holding them in place. His nostrils were slits. “In or out?”

“Out,” Clete replied, his eyes flat. He waited, his mouth dry.

“You’re making me mad,” Smiley said.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Smiley stood up from the chair. “Sometimes I do bad things when I get mad.”

“Really?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I didn’t. You took on the Mob. Nobody has ever done that. You’ve probably got them dumping in their drawers. But don’t let them take you alive. You copy on that? Go out smoking.”

A gust of rain and wind swept across the roof; lightning that made no sound bloomed around the edges of the curtains.

“Will you try to follow me?” Smiley said.

“No.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” Clete said.

“We’re alike.”

“Time to beat feet, podjo.”

“We’re two of a kind. I like you. I want you to be my friend.”

“You’re getting weird on me, little mon. Are you hearing me? Hello, Mars.”

“Little mon?”

“Take it as a compliment.”

“I’ll be in touch. So will she.”

“Who is ‘she’?”

“Wonder Woman. She looks over me.”

Clete sat on the edge of the bed, his hands cupped on his knees. He stared at the floor. “I’ve really enjoyed this. But I’m going in the bathroom now.”

“You took care of an orphan boy.”

“You can’t win on the game you pitched last week,” Clete said.

Clete continued to gaze at the floor, his head bowed. He heard the door open and felt the rain rush inside, then heard the door close. He got up from the bed and looked through the curtains. The driveway was black and shiny and empty. He went into the bathroom and retrieved his snub-nose from the toilet bowl and washed it, then dried it and oiled it and put it into its holster and lay back down and stared at the ceiling and listened to rain pattering on the roof, his eyelids stitched to his forehead.

He was at my back door early the next morning. Alafair and I were at the breakfast table. This was an old routine with Clete. At sunset he would begin deconstructing the world and himself, then at sunrise be at my door, forlorn and stinking of rut and weed and beer sweat and in need of my absolution, as though I had any such power.

I pushed open the screen. “I don’t hear any sirens.”

He brushed past me. “That’s not funny. Hi, Alafair.”

“Hi, yourself, big guy,” she replied.

“About to take off for the set?”

“Not for a while,” she said.

Clete’s eyes were wandering all over the kitchen. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were eating out of their bowls on top of a newspaper, their muddy tracks strung behind them. “I was just passing by,” he said.

I grinned at him. “Tell me what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s why your BP is about two hundred or so,” I said.

“Can I be honest here?” he said, glancing at Alafair.

“Get the marbles out of your mouth, will you, Clete?” I said.

“It’s what I didn’t do. Wimple was in my cottage last night. He was not only in it last night, he waited for me under the bed all afternoon.”

For some reason Snuggs stopped eating and looked up at him.

“He hooked you up or something?” I said.

“How’d you know?”

“Because it’s the kind of stuff Smiley does. Did you call it in?”

“I let him slide.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I gave him my word.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Until you get a shiv between your shoulder blades.”

“Wimple finds people we can’t get close to,” he said. “There’s nothing about the Mob he doesn’t know. He’s like a worm inside a corpse.”

Alafair put down the toast she was eating. “Thanks, Clete.”

“Can I have a cup of coffee?” he said. “I got the shakes. Wimple creeped me out. It’s like talking to a giant slug.”

“You know I have to report this to Helen.”

“Do anything you want. What’s better, getting to the bottom of Lucinda Arceneaux’s death or putting a guy in a cage who’s got a triple-A battery for a brain?”

“Helen might have you picked up, Clete.”

“For what, not getting myself killed? Wimple said there’s Jersey and Russian money going to a movie company hereabouts. He said the money gets laundered in Malta.”

“Malta as in Maltese cross?” I said.

“Yeah, the kind that’s been showing up on dead people.”

“How does a piece of stamped metal or a tattoo on a dead person connect with money laundering?” I asked.

“Let me turn it around on you. If the Maltese cross isn’t a signal about money, then what does it represent? Some guy’s fascination with the prizes in a box of Cracker Jack?”

I picked up Snuggs and cuddled him in my arm. I wiped his feet with a paper towel.

“Did you hear me, Dave?” Clete said.

“Yeah, I did. I’ve got no answers. But if Smiley caps somebody else — maybe Sean McClain — you’ll never forgive yourself.”

He looked like I’d punched him in the stomach.

Helen was furious when I told her of Clete’s contact with Smiley.

“What was he supposed to do?” I said. “Run outside and catch one in the face?”

“Clete didn’t call it in.”

“What good would that have done? Smiley has never been in custody anywhere. Plus, I think the department discounts anything Clete says.”

Her fists were knotted on her desk pad. I thought I had her.

“Hugo Tillinger died at seven-thirty this morning,” she said.

I felt my heart drop.

“Iberia General called a half hour ago,” she said. “You know what this means for Sean McClain?”

I went back to my office and dipped into my file cabinet and laid out all my notes and manila folders and photographs and medical reports and printouts from the state police and FBI on the series of homicides that had begun with the death of Lucinda Arceneaux. I was convinced the killer was insane, obsessed, imperious, and wired in to a frame of reference no one else would comprehend. But others were involved, if only tangentially. Corrupt or sadistic personnel in the department were players, and members of the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Mob, and film people who weren’t bothered by blood money, and Russian or Saudi wheeler-dealers, and possibly a bank that laundered money in Malta.

Maybe such an aggregate of causality seems improbable for a series of crimes in a disappearing wetlands area on the southern rim of our country. But the truth always lies in the microcosm. Wars of enormous importance and consequence are usually fought in places no one cares about. The faces of the players change, but not the issue. You go to the center of the vortex and soon discover you have already been there. It’s a matter of seeing the details.

In this instance the key had to be in the tarot. Lucinda Arceneaux was the crucified Christ. The walking cane through the heart of Joe Molinari represented the Suit of Wands; the net in which he was suspended suggested the Hanged Man. The sequined star pasted on the forehead of Hilary Bienville was the Suit of Pentacles. The chalice the killer had fitted into the dead hand of Bella Delahoussaye was symbolic of the Suit of Cups.

What was not in the photographs?

Answer: The Suit of Swords. But what if there were bodies out there we hadn’t found? I couldn’t think my way through the material I was looking at.

The term “conspiracy theory” has become a term of contempt, I suspect because many of the electorate cannot accept that sometimes more evil exists at the top of society than at the bottom. One by one I looked at the photographs of the victims. It was a somber moment. That the photographs had been taken at all seemed heartless, an invasion of the victim’s suffering and despair and vulnerability. They were the kind of photographs that defense lawyers never want a jury to see. The image that hurt me most was of Bella Delahoussaye.

I wanted to believe Bella spat in her tormentor’s face. I wanted to believe she humiliated him for the worm he was. But I knew Bella was better than that. She probably treated him with pity, which drove him into an even greater rage.

I closed her folder and propped my elbows on my desk blotter and lowered my forehead on my hands and asked my Higher Power to go back in time and be with Bella in her last minutes. Then I felt a level of anger that was so great and violent and dangerous in its intensity that it caused half of my face to go dead. I hoped no one passing in the hallway looked through my window.