The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Forty

We found Desmond Cormier in the late afternoon on the piece of hardscrabble land where his grandparents had run a general store; now the land was pocked with sinkholes and overgrown with persimmon trees and palmettos and swamp maples cobwebbed with air vines and storm trash blown out of the Atchafalaya Basin. Desmond was standing by a Humvee, staring at the shadows near an inlet that had turned red in the sunset. Behind us, I could see the glow of the casino in the distance.

I think the images he saw were not the ones I described. I believed he was looking into the past at the skinny twelve-year-old boy who roped cinder blocks to each end of a broomstick under a white sun and began creating a body that would put the fear of God into the bullies who tormented him on the school bus. I suspect he wondered about the fate of the bullies who taunted him and shoved him onto the gravel. Some were probably dead, some stacking time in Angola, some cleaning floors with mops and pails. If he ran into them, they probably would not connect him with the boy they had mocked. One thing I was sure of: If Desmond did meet them, he would treat them with kindness.

That’s why he angered me. He had the capacity to do enormous good in the world. But he handed out his gifts one coin at a time, and never with anonymity, unless you counted his payment for Lucinda Arceneaux’s crypt.

His talent had received global recognition, but his faith in his creativity was not enough to make him forswear the illegal money that powered his artistic enterprises. And enterprises they were. Without the sweaty multitudes and the satisfaction they demanded for the price of a theater ticket, Desmond probably would have been running an independent company filming lizards in the Texas Panhandle.

I parked on the faint outline of the dirt track that traversed the property, and asked Clete to stay in the truck.

“You got it,” he replied, and tilted his porkpie hat down on his eyes.

I walked up behind Desmond. He showed no awareness of my presence, even though I knew he heard me.

“What’s the haps?” I said.

He grinned in the same way he could light up a room when he was a kid. “How’s it going, Dave?”

“Hard to say, things have been moving so fast. It looks like Antoine Butterworth killed Smiley Wimple, then popped himself.”

“Whoa.”

“You haven’t heard?”

“What was that about Antoine popping himself?”

“He called me from your house, then parked one under his chin. That’s what it looks like.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“If it’s any consolation, he praised your name before he pulled the plug.”

Desmond was facing me now, his sleeves rolled, his forearms pumped and vascular. “Don’t be cynical, Dave. Antoine is my friend.”

“Your ‘friend’ may have arbitrarily murdered Smiley Wimple.”

“What do you mean, ‘arbitrarily’?”

“That’s what the only witness says. Wimple’s gun misfired, and Butterworth didn’t have to kill him, although a prosecutor would never be able to prove that.”

Desmond rubbed at his nose. “You’re not jerking me around? Antoine’s dead?”

“Unless he’s been resurrected.”

“Where is he?”

“Probably on a slab.”

“You’re a callous man.”

“He told me someday I would be able to read between the lines. Have any idea what he meant?”

“No.”

“Where does your money come from?” I asked.

“Half a dozen sources, all of them legitimate.”

“You might have a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle, but you’ll never be Geoffrey Chaucer’s good knight,” I said. “I don’t care how many showers you take, you’ve still got shit on your nose.”

He turned his face to the wind, his hair lifting, his wide-set eyes devoid of light, his expression as meaningless as a cake pan, his torso a piece of sculpted stone inside his shirt. Had he swung on me, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“He suffered?” he said.

“Butterworth? Maybe. He was listening to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert before he signed off.”

“That sounds like him. He loves Flip Phillips.”

“The man I talked to was sweating ball bearings.”

“He was an artist,” he said. “In his way, a dreamer.”

“When he wasn’t hanging up working girls on coat hooks. You’re going to Arizona tomorrow?”

“At sunrise.”

“Make all the pictures you want,” I said. “I’m going to get you.” I walked away.

“You think you can hurt me?” he called to my back. “After what’s happened here? That’s what you think?”

I got into the truck and started the engine. Clete had been drowsing. “Hey! What’s going on with Cormier?” he asked.

“He was shocked and indignant,” I replied.

We drove back to the two-lane and headed home, an orange sun dissolving into the wetlands, threaded with smoke from stubble fires.

Early Sunday morning, Cormac the coroner called me at home. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“I’ll probably have to declare Butterworth’s death a suicide, but it bothers me.”

“Why?”

“The broken tooth your friend Purcel found in the door track. The bullet went in behind the jaw and traveled upward through the tongue and the palate in a clean line. It’s possible the bullet deflected off the tooth, except I don’t see the evidence.”

“Call it like you see it,” I said.

“Here’s my other problem: I talked to the prosecutor last night. I think everyone wants to shut the book on this one.”

“Wimple and Butterworth get bagged and tagged, and everyone goes home happy?”

“People are people,” he said. “What’s your opinion?”

“Desmond Cormier knows the truth, but he’s never going to tell us.”

“His half sister was murdered. What the hell is wrong with this guy?”

“Money and power,” I said. “You know a stronger drug?”

“How about getting up in the morning with a clear conscience?” he replied. “You talked with Butterworth before he went out. You believed he capped himself?”

“I think maybe someone was setting up Cormier, and I think he’s too dumb to know it.”

I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and milk and blackberries and ate it on the back steps. I also brought a bowl of cat food for Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. The trees were dripping with humidity, the bayou high and swollen with mud, the flooded elephant ears along the bank beaded with drops of water that slid like quicksilver off the surface. I heard a vehicle pull into the driveway, then footsteps coming around the side of the house.

“Hope I ain’t disturbing your Sunday morning,” Sean said. He was in uniform, his cheeks bright with aftershave, his gun belt polished, the creases in his trousers as sharp as knife blades.

“Get yourself a cup of coffee off the stove. Alafair is still asleep. Give me a refill, too.” I handed him my cup.

He went inside and came back out with a filled cup in each hand. He sat down beside me and looked at Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. He had a small mouth, like a girl’s, and eyes like a child’s. “I went out to the airport this morning.”

“What for?”

“To watch them movie people take off. They were happy, like all the things that happened here don’t mean anything.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I killed a man. I’ll have him in my dreams the rest of my life. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for these people.”

“Blame other people, and you’ll never have peace.”

“That’s what you told yourself in Vietnam?”

“I wasn’t that smart.”

“Dave, I’d give anything if I hadn’t shot Tillinger. It’s eating me up.”

“I don’t think Tillinger would hold it against you, Sean. He made a choice — the wrong one. Wherever he is, I think he knows that and forgives you for it.”

“You don’t dream about the men you killed?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do about it?”

“Not drink.”

He put down his coffee cup and rubbed one hand on top of the other. “I feel like I ain’t no better than them deputies that suffocated the deaf man at the jail.”

“You’re nothing like those deputies.”

“That’s a sad story, you know? I heard the deaf man was trying to make sign language when he died.”

I looked at my watch. “I’m going to Mass at St. Edward’s. Want to go?”

“Thanks for the coffee. I appreciate you listening to me.”

“Run that by me again about the deaf man and sign language?”

After he was gone, I went to St. Edward’s. When I returned, a note was on the refrigerator door. It said: Went to Café Sydnie Mae for brunch. See you this afternoon.

I looked out the side window. Alafair’s car was still in the porte cochere. I called her cell phone. The call went straight to voicemail. I called the Café Sydnie Mae in Breaux Bridge. She wasn’t there. It was 11:14 a.m.

I went to the office and opened my file drawer and took out every folder I had on the series of homicides that had begun with the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux. I also accessed every bit of electronic information I could find on Frank Dubois, the deaf man who had been suffocated in the Iberia Parish jail. He had one of those rap sheets that was full of contradictions, like a puzzle box shaken up and dropped on the floor. He grew up in New Orleans, on the edge of the Garden District, and attended Tulane University for three years in the 1960s, but was arrested twice for possession; then he cruised on out to sunny CA and got hooked up with the Mongols. He had half a dozen narcotics-related arrests in San Bernardino, Bakersfield, and Oakland, and ended up spending a year in Atascadero. A prison psychologist had noted in the margin of his sheet: I.Q. above 160, symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Antisocial, narcissistic, and fears isolation and physical restraint. Potentially dangerous.

I went through my notes on all the victims. Joe Molinari still perplexed me more than the others. Why did our killer want to murder such a harmless man? His jobs took him nowhere, and his employers were of no substance and rarely kept records. Except one: Molinari had been a janitor for two years at the Iberia Parish courthouse.

This may sound strange to an outsider, but the patronage culture in Louisiana is systemic, from the most humble kind of work to the governor’s office. Procedure, honorable conduct, attention to the rules, acuity, experience, and skill have secondary value at best. You cannot get a state job cleaning a toilet unless you know someone. For a man like Molinari — who did asbestos teardowns — a steady paycheck, decent hours, health insurance, social security, and unemployment coverage were a gift from God.

So who got him the job? I called Helen and asked.

“I remember him working at the courthouse,” she said. “He kept to himself.”

“No friends?”

“He used to eat lunch with a deputy by the cemetery.”

“Which deputy?”

There was a long silence.

“Helen?”

“One of the guys who suffocated the inmate at the jail. Son of a bitch.”

I could hear the receiver humming in my ear. “You can’t be expected to remember information from twenty-five years ago.”

“No, no, I screwed up. The deputy was his cousin. He probably put in a word for Molinari and got him the job. Maybe Molinari’s death is connected to the scandal at the jail.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Dave, I had my head up my ass. I pulled your badge when I should have pulled my own. The deaf man, what was his name?”

“Frank Dubois,” I said.

“Where was he from?”

“New Orleans. He went to Tulane. A former AB kid named Spider Dupree said that Dubois had a coat of arms tattooed on his back and spoke Latin or Greek.”

“Dave, I need to apologize to you. I acted like a real bitch.”

“You may be lots of things, but that’s not one of them,” I said.

“That’s why I love you, Pops.”

I called Bailey and told her what I’d learned.

“You think Molinari was payback for the suffocation death?” she said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“So who’s the tie-in with Molinari?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one of our movie friends.”

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “Desmond called me last night.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Bailey.”

“He asked me to go to Arizona with him. I told him no.”

“Bailey—”

“I don’t know if it’s over between us or not,” she said.

“It was wrong from the jump. Not on your part. Mine. I took advantage of the situation.”

“I’m a victim?” she said. “I’m too young and inexperienced to know what I’m doing?”

“Got to go, Bailey.”

“Every time we talk, I feel like someone extracted my heart.”

I eased the phone down in the cradle and stood at the window, looking down at the Teche and the sunlight flashing as brightly as daggers on the current.

I called Desmond Cormier’s home number. There was no answer. I called Sean McClain on his cell phone. “This morning at the airport, who’d you see get on the plane?”

“There was two planes,” Sean said.

“Okay, who’d you see get on?”

“I don’t know their names.”

“You saw Desmond Cormier?”

“No, sir.”

“How about Lou Wexler?”

“I don’t know who that is. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know where Alafair is.”

“You think—”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think, and it scares the hell out of me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go back to the airport and find out who was on those planes.”

“Maybe Alafair will show up, Dave. Don’t get too worried.”

“Do you remember what Hilary Bienville’s body looked like?” I asked.

I went from house to house up and down East Main, asking my neighbors if they had seen Alafair leave our simple shotgun home. I mention its simplicity at this point in my story to indicate the contrast I felt between the loveliness of the morning, the leaves blowing along the sidewalks, the flowers blooming in the gardens, the massive live oaks spangled with light and shadow, all of these gifts set in juxtaposition to the violence and cruelty that had fallen upon us like a scourge and now seemed to have cast their net over my daughter.

I walked past the Steamboat House, which sat like a dry-docked ornate paddle wheeler in an ambience of Victorian and antebellum splendor that often belied the realities of slavery and, later, the terrorism of the White League during Reconstruction. Farther down the street, an elderly lady was on her hands and knees, weeding the garden in the old Burke home, a pair of steel-frame spectacles on her nose. She looked up at me and smiled. “How do you do, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“Just fine,” I said. “Alafair went somewhere with a friend while I was at Mass. I wondered if you might have seen her.”

“I didn’t see her, but I did see an unusual car stop in front of your home,” she replied, still on her hands and knees. “I’ve seen it before.”

“Unusual in what way?”

“I think the name is Italian.”

“A Lamborghini?”

“I’m not much on the names of cars.”

“What color was it?”

“Definitely cherry-red. No question about that.”

Wexler.

“Have I upset you?” she asked.

“You’ve been very helpful,” I said, the backs of my legs shaking. “Thank you.”

I hurried away, my stomach sick.