The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Thirty-Two

That morning, I went to Mass at St. Edward’s, and that evening I attended an AA meeting at the Solomon House, across the street from old New Iberia High. When I left the meeting, the stars were bright against a black sky, and a warm breeze was blowing through the live oaks in front of the old school building. It was a fine evening, the kind that assures you a better day is coming.

Sean McClain was leaning against my pickup in uniform, his head on his chest, the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes.

“What’s happenin’?” I said.

“Didn’t mean to get in your face last night,” he replied.

“You didn’t.”

“I been studying on a few things. I don’t know if they’re he’pful or not.”

“You figured out who was in your barn?”

“Probably that little rodent nobody can catch.”

“Wimple?”

“Whatever,” he said.

“Let me set your mind at ease on that,” I said. “If that were Smiley Wimple, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I’d be dead?”

“Probably.”

“I been thinking about various clues on these murders,” he said.

“Clues?”

“There haven’t been many. Not from the day we seen that poor lady floating on the cross.”

“I’m not following you, Sean.”

“The clue we didn’t give much mind to is that green tennis shoe me and you found on the beach. Size seven.”

“It’s not much of a clue, Sean.”

“Y’all run a DNA on it, though, right?”

“Yeah, it belonged to Lucinda Arceneaux.”

“If she was wearing one, she was wearing two.”

“That’s right,” I said, my attention slipping away.

“One of the people who called in the 911 said there was a scream from a lighted cabin cruiser.”

“You got it.”

“Why not search every cabin cruiser on Cypremort Point?” he said.

“Search warrants aren’t that broad, Sean.”

He picked up a pebble from the curb and flung it at the street. “Well, I was just trying to come up with something. Sorry I ain’t much he’p.”

But Sean had opened a door in my head. A green tennis shoe with blue stripes. It didn’t go with the purple dress Lucinda Arceneaux had died in.

“Why you got that look on your face?” Sean said.

“Because I just realized how stupid I’ve been.”

I wouldn’t call it an epistemological breakthrough, but it was a beginning. Monday morning I went to our evidence locker and found Lucinda Arceneaux’s purple dress. I also retrieved the green tennis shoe with blue stripes that Sean and I had found. I signed for both the shoe and the dress, then drove to St. Martinville and got a plainclothes to let me in Bella Delahoussaye’s house. In her closet I found almost the same purple dress on a hanger, except it had been sprayed with sequins. She had been wearing it the first time I saw her at the blues club on the bayou.

I drove to the little settlement of Cade and the trailer home of Arceneaux’s father, located on cinder blocks behind his clapboard church. The bottle tree next to the church tinkled in the wind. When the reverend opened the door, he looked ten years older than he had at the time of his daughter’s death. I was holding the dress and the tennis shoe inside a paper bag.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, Reverend. I wondered if I could talk with you a few minutes.”

“You’re who?”

“Detective Robicheaux. I was assigned the investigation into your daughter’s death.”

“Oh, yes, suh. I remember now,” he said, pushing open the door. His hand was quivering on his cane, his eyes jittering.

I stepped inside. “I need you to look at this dress.” I pulled it from the bag. Sand and salt were still in the folds.

“Why you want me to look at it?”

“Lucinda was wearing this when she died. Have you seen it before?”

“I don’t remember her wearing a dress like that. But I cain’t be sure, suh.”

“I see.”

“What else you got in there?”

“A tennis shoe. Do you recognize it as hers?”

He took it from my hand. The wet shine in his eyes was immediate.

“She was wearing tennis shoes like these the last time you saw her?” I said.

“Yes, suh. When she left for the airport.”

“Sir, why don’t you sit down? Here, let me help you.”

“No, I’m all right. Can I have her shoe?”

“We have to keep it a while. I’ll make sure it’s returned to you.”

“That dress couldn’t be hers,” he said.

“Why not?”

“She always called her green and blue shoes her ‘little girl’ shoes. She wore them with jeans. She always dressed tasteful.”

“What do you know about Desmond Cormier?”

“He paid for her burial. He’s a nice man.”

“You ever hear of a man named Antoine Butterworth?”

“No, suh.”

“Did Lucinda talk about Mr. Cormier?”

“I never axed her much about those Hollywood people. She said most of them were no different from anybody else. How’d she get that dress on? They took her clothes off when she was dead? Who would want to degrade her like that? I don’t understand. How come this was done to her?”

His voice broke. He couldn’t finish.

I silently made a vow that one day I would have an answer to that question, and I would put a mark on the perpetrator that he would carry to the grave, if not beyond.

Tuesday morning, we got a search warrant on the entirety of Desmond’s house at Cypremort Point. It was a hard sell. Previously, we had been granted a search warrant on the part of the house considered the living area of Antoine Butterworth. The district attorney had to convince the judge that Desmond was a viable suspect in the death of Lucinda Arceneaux. The truth was otherwise. Desmond was a walking contradiction: a Leonardo, a humanist, a man who had the body of a Greek god, a man who would hang from the skid of a helicopter and then bully one of his subordinates. The DA got lost in his own vagueness and asked the judge if I could speak.

“Since you don’t seem to be informed about your own investigation, I would be happy to hear from Detective Robicheaux,” the judge said. He was a Medal of Honor recipient and had thick snow-white hair and was probably too old for the bench, but his patrician manners and soft plantation dialect were such a fond reminder of an earlier, more genteel culture that we didn’t want to lose him. “Good morning, Detective Robicheaux. What is it you have to say, suh?”

“Desmond Cormier has been elusive and uncooperative since the beginning of our investigation, Your Honor,” I said. “Through a telescope on Mr. Cormier’s deck, I saw the deceased, Lucinda Arceneaux, tied to a cross floating in Weeks Bay. I asked Mr. Cormier to look through the telescope and tell me what he saw. He denied seeing anything. The deputy with me, Sean McClain, looked through the telescope and saw the same thing I had.”

“The body?” the judge said.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I don’t know if that’s enough to grant you a warrant, Detective.”

“Mr. Cormier also broke in to the home of Deputy Frenchie Lautrec after Lautrec took his life or was killed by others. Lautrec had a tattoo of a Maltese cross on one leg. Desmond Cormier has one, too. I’ve seen it. We have reason to believe that Lautrec may have been involved both with prostitution and the series of the murders in our area. I believe Mr. Cormier may have been an associate of Deputy Lautrec.”

I had overreached the boundaries of probability and even the boundaries of truth, but by this time, I didn’t care about either.

“I am deeply disturbed by the implications in this investigation and the paucity of evidence it has produced,” the judge said. I absolutely loved his diction. “Your warrant is granted. I recommend you conduct your search in such a way that there will be no evidentiary problems when the person or persons who committed these crimes is brought into court. We are all sickened and saddened by what has occurred in our community. Good luck to you, gentlemen.”

One hour later, Sean McClain, Bailey, and I began ripping apart Desmond’s house.

Desmond was furious. He paced up and down in his living room. He was wearing cargo pants and sandals and an LSU football jersey cut off at the armpits. He watched us dump his shelves, lift armfuls of clothes from his closets, shake drawers upside down on the beds, clean out the kitchen cabinets, tip over furniture, and pull the trays out of the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. His pale blue eyes looked psychotic, as though they had been clipped from a magazine and pasted on his face.

I think Desmond was bothered most by Bailey’s coldness as he watched her casually destroying the symmetry and order of his household. But the worst had yet to come. She took down the framed still shots excerpted from My Darling Clementine. She lifted each of them off its wall hook and pulled the cardboard backing loose from the steel frame, then dropped each onto the couch as she might a bit of trash.

“What are you looking for?” he said. “How could my framed pictures have anything to do with a murder investigation? You of all people, Bailey, you know better. Damn you, woman.”

“Please address me as Detective Ribbons. In answer to your question, we’ll look at whatever we need to.”

He started to pick up the frames and photos and squares of cardboard.

“Leave those where they are,” she said.

“A pox on all of you, Dave,” he said. “You motherfucker.”

“You jerked us around, Des,” I said. “You brought this on yourself.”

“How so?”

“You’re involved with a cult or a fetish or some kind of medieval romance that only lunatics could have invented,” I said. “You’ve been covering your ass or somebody else’s from the jump. Maybe if you stopped lying to people who are on your side, we wouldn’t have to tear your house apart.”

“Why don’t you start arresting Freemasons? Or guys with Gothic tats? You’re a fraud, Dave. You settled for mediocrity in your own life, and you resent anyone who went away and succeeded and then returned home and reminded you of your failure.”

I was in the midst of pulling the stuffing out of his couch. I straightened up and got rid of a crick in my back. “I’ve got news for you, Des. Some of us stayed here and fought the good fight while others left and joined the snobs who think their shit doesn’t stink.”

His left eye shrank into a pool of vitriol, one so intense that I wondered if I knew the real Desmond Cormier.

We went downstairs under the house where he parked his vehicles. He stayed right behind us, his hands knotting and unknotting. There was a huge pile of junk in one corner. It started at the floor and climbed to the ceiling and looked water-stained and moldy at the base.

“What’s that?” I said.

“The detritus of Hurricane Rita when my house was flooded. The trash my guests leave behind.”

Three more deputies in uniform pulled in. “Just in time,” I said to them. “Get your latex on, fellows.”

“You enjoying this, Dave?” Desmond said.

“No, I’m not. I always thought you represented everything that’s good in us. I thought you were a great artist and director, one for the ages.”

He looked like someone had struck a kitchen match on his stomach lining. Behind him, Sean McClain pulled a black gym bag from the pile and shook out a towel, a Ziploc bag with a bar of soap in it, a sweatshirt, a spray can of men’s deodorant, a pair of Levi’s, and a flowery blouse. Then he shook the bag again. A tennis shoe fell out.

“Better take a look at this, Dave,” Sean said.

“What do you have?”

Sean hooked his finger inside the shoe and lifted it from the pile. The shoe was lime green with blue stripes. “Size seven. Just like the one we found in the surf.”

I looked at Desmond. “What do you have to say?”

“I don’t know whose bag that is, and I never saw that shoe. Lucinda Arceneaux wore one like it?”

“Sell your doodah to somebody else,” I said.

“Am I under arrest?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t plan any trips.”

“So you’re finished here?” he said.

Bailey stepped close to him, her eyes burning into his face. “Do yourself a favor. Stop acting like a twit and own up. You’re an embarrassment.”

His face twitched at the insult. I didn’t know Des was still that vulnerable.

“Let’s get back to work,” I said. “Lay everything out on the lawn.”

That afternoon, Lucinda Arceneaux’s father identified the flowery blouse as his daughter’s. He was unsure about the Levi’s, but the size matched the clothes still hanging in her closet. There was no doubt the tennis shoe was hers. At four that afternoon I told Helen about everything I had.

“Okay, I’ll talk to the DA’s office in the morning,” she said.

“Why not get an arrest warrant today? Don’t give Desmond a chance to blow Dodge.”

“We’ll see what the prosecutor says. I don’t think the clothes and shoe will be enough. The gym bag could belong to Butterworth.”

“Butterworth is not our guy. Or at least not our primary guy.”

“Why?”

“He wears his vices too openly. He’s a showboat.”

“Why your certainty about Desmond Cormier?”

“The killer is an iconoclast.”

“A what?”

“A breaker of images and totems. But our guy is also infatuated with them.”

“Sorry, that sounds like the kind of stuff Bailey comes up with.”

“What does it take?” I asked. “Desmond has been playing us from the day we pulled Lucinda Arceneaux out of the water.”

“But playing us about what? Most of his denial has to do with the source of his money. That doesn’t make him a killer. Besides, Lucinda Arceneaux was his half sister, for God’s sake.”

“The issues are one and the same. The homicide is connected to money.”

“We don’t know that,” she said.

“Speak for yourself.”

“Cool out, Pops. We’re going to nail him, but right now I’m not sure for what.”

“Great choice of a verb.”

“I love you, bwana, but sometimes I think I committed an unpardonable sin in a former life, and you were put here to give me a second chance.”

“What if Desmond is our guy and he does it again?”

“I have a hard time thinking of him as a serial killer.”

“Our guy is not a serial killer. There’s a method to his madness.”

She didn’t answer; she obviously had given up the argument.

“What if he’s protecting the murderer and the murderer kills someone else?” I said. “Maybe another young woman like Lucinda Arceneaux?”

“You just made sure I won’t sleep tonight,” she replied.

The next day, we went to work on the origins of the bag. It had come from an online vendor in California that had gone out of business five years ago. There were latents on the deodorant can, but they weren’t in the system. Bailey came into my office. “I just got a call from Butterworth.”

“He called you? You didn’t call him first?”

“He said he wants to come in.”

“With an attorney?”

“No. He said he wants to clear the air.”

In any investigation a cop looks for what we call “the weak sister.” I believed we had just found ours. “Call him back. Tell him we’ll meet him in City Park at noon.”

“Not here?”

“We want him to feel comfortable, as though he’s among friends.”

“Sounds a little deceitful.”

“These guys invented deceit.”

“Okay,” she said. “Want to get together this evening?”

“Sure.”

“Because that’s not the impression I’ve been having.”

“You shouldn’t think that way, Bailey.”

“You don’t think less of me because of what I told you about my past?”

“No,” I replied, trying to keep my face empty.

“See you at six?”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

After she was gone, I could feel my heart racing, but I didn’t know why.

We met Butterworth with a box of fried chicken and crawfish at one of the picnic shelters in the park. He parked his Subaru under an oak and got out. He wore white slacks and a lavender long-sleeve silk shirt that twisted with light on his spare frame; his tan was even deeper than when I had seen him last. He put a Nicorette on his tongue.

“Sit down,” I said. “Have some of Louisiana’s best fried food. It has enough cholesterol to clog a sewer drain.”

“Very good of you. Thank you.”

“What did you want to tell us, Mr. Butterworth?” Bailey said.

“Of a concern or two I have. Our enterprise — or rather, the film culture — is a diverse one. Our common denominator is a desire for money and power and celebrity. I suspect you have determined that by now.”

“The same could apply to many groups of people,” Bailey said.

“Our production company is independent of the studios, which stay alive only through the computerized adaptation of comic books. In other words, we find production money in unlikely sources.”

His faux accent and manner were already starting to wear. “We’re conscious of that, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “What’s the point, sir?”

“We take money from Hong Kong, Russians, Saudis, and some people in New Jersey.”

“And you launder money for some of them?” Bailey said.

I tried to give her a cautionary look.

“Use any term for it you wish,” Butterworth said. He fished in his shirt pocket as though looking for a cigarette. “I want you to understand my position. I don’t kill people. I saw enough of that in Africa.”

“You make and sell war games for teenagers,” Bailey said.

“I can’t deny that,” he said. “I also buy Treasury bonds, and if you haven’t noticed, the United States government is the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world.”

“Come on, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “Let’s get to it.”

“A number of people from the Mafia have shown up in our lives. Why is that? They want an immediate return on their money. Second, a nasty little worm of a man with a ridiculous name evidently roasted a couple of their lads.”

“Smiley Wimple?” I said.

“Yes, that naughty boy.”

“You called him a worm of a man,” I said. “You’ve seen him?”

“He was on the bloody set, eating an Eskimo Pie.”

“How’d you know the guy was Wimple?” I said.

“I’ve seen him before. He was killing people here three years ago. He seems to have a fondness for the area.”

I didn’t know if I believed him or not, and frankly, I didn’t care. Butterworth had a circuitous way of spreading confusion without offering any information of value.

“Here’s what I think, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “You plan to give us nothing. In the meantime you’re strapping on a parachute so you can bail out of the plane before it crashes.”

“Desmond’s film will be one of the greatest ever put on the American screen,” he said. “I’ve led a rather worthless life, but I take great satisfaction in the knowledge that I had something to do with a creation of that magnitude. Des has only a short run ahead of him. I hope he can finish his film.”

“Say again?” I replied.

“He’s on the spike. Don’t ask me what goes into his veins, because I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s a cocktail from hell.”

Our table was spangled with sunshine, the moss waving overhead, the wind cool off Bayou Teche. The petals of the camellia bushes were scattered on the grass like drops of blood. As a cop, you hear everything that human beings are capable of doing. That doesn’t mean you get used to it. Evil has a smell like copper coins on a hot stove, like offal burning on a winter day, like a gangrenous-soaked bandage at a battalion aid station in a tropical country. It violates your glands and your senses. Its odor stays in your dreams, and you never fail to recognize it in your waking day. I swore I smelled it on Butterworth’s skin.

“No comment?” Butterworth said.

“You’re diming your friend and doing it without shame,” I said. “It’s a bit embarrassing to witness.”

He looked at Bailey. “He’s obsessed with you.”

“Who is?” she said.

“Desmond,” Butterworth said. “Be careful. A great artist is just this side of mad. If you doubt me, thumb through the bios of those who torment themselves for months trying to paint a starry night or the likeness of God. Desmond uses chemicals not to escape reality but to find it. How insane can one man be?”